by Perrin Briar
“If there’s a human survivor Scorpio names them champion and then everyone leaves, yes.”
Chris ran the information through his head a moment, thinking it through.
“If we can survive this, and get you on the outside, would you be able to lead us out of here?” he said.
“Sure,” Zora said. “But it’s impossible to get out of here with everyone watching.”
Just as Chris began to ponder this, there was a murmur of excitement and-
AWOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooo!
The old couples whimpered at the blast of the horn. The crazy woman squealed with delight. The murmur of voices above them grew into a great roar.
“That can’t be good,” Chris said.
“It’s the horn,” Zora said. “The game is about to begin.”
There was a cranking, whirring sound like a cog being turned, and the cage door where the crazy woman stood began to open. The roars from the crowd became loud and deafening, and daylight spilled into the cage, bathing the inmates in its warm inviting glow.
“Here we go,” Zora said through gritted teeth, ducking under the cage door and out onto the field.
Z-MINUS: 5 HOURS 8 MINUTES
The old praying couple said, “Amen,” and crossed themselves. The young man in the wheelchair whimpered and wet himself, the water dripping down the side of the wheelchair and puddling on the floor. Maisie gripped Chris’s hand tight. The crazy woman, with a big grin on her face, ducked under the door and ran forward with her arms outstretched and looked up into the cloudy sky. She spun in a circle as if enjoying a day in the country.
“No!” the fat one-armed man on the ground said, getting to his feet and pressing himself against the wire fence. “Let me in! Please! I’m still of use! I still have purpose!”
Half a dozen spears poked through the links in the fence and pushed him back, making small puncture holes in his chest. He gripped hold of the link fence, not letting go. More poles appeared, smacking him hard on the head. Finally he lost his grip and stumbled back, out of the cage and onto the grass on the other side. The cage door slammed shut. The man returned to it, beating on it with his fists.
“Please!” he said. “There’s been a misunderstanding! I can work with one arm!”
Chris looked up and around at the thousands of angry jeering faces wrapped around them. They threw empty bottles and rotten food down at them.
“Release the zombies!” a voice over a loudspeaker above them said.
A huge metal door on the opposite side of the pitch creaked as it was pulled up on squeaky hinges. The groan of a hundred indeterminate voices echoed up like hell’s choir, sending a shiver riding up Chris’s spine. Loping figures emerged out of the darkness like a nightmare. Some of the zombies turned and reached up for the spectators above, who threw empty cups and rotten food down below.
“Dragon Lady! Dragon Lady! Dragon Lady!” the spectators chanted.
“Why are they chanting that?” Chris said to Zora.
“It’s what they call me.”
“Why?”
Zora shrugged.
“I survived seven times,” she said. “Come on! We have to get to the weapons before the zombies do!”
Zora burst forward, running as fast as her legs could carry her, toward the centre of the field. Chris took Maisie’s hand and began to run. George came up behind them.
The man in the wheelchair turned and rolled himself toward a building structure in the corner. Chris looked over his shoulder and saw the man in the wheelchair pull up close to the shack, find a handhold – a pipe that jutted out from the side – and grip it with both hands.
Chris pulled up to the centre of the field where there was a large pile of weapons. Zora grabbed a sword that had been stabbed into the earth point-first. She felt the weight in her hand, bent down and picked up a small shield and two large knives that she tucked into the back of her trousers. George reached for a chainsaw.
“That’s what we need!” he said, testing its weight in a single hand.
“Put that back,” Zora said. “It’ll do more harm than good.”
“That’s what we want, isn’t it? Plenty of harm, no good?”
“When the teeth tear into the zombies their blood will spray all over you. Game over. When it runs out of fuel, and believe me, it will, game over. Put it back.”
With curled lips George put the chainsaw down and picked up a fierce-looking scimitar.
“Better?” he said, raising it for Zora to see.
“Much,” she said.
The expensively-dressed non-religious old couple joined them. The old man picked up the chainsaw and tested the weight in his hands.
“I wouldn’t use that if I were you,” Chris said.
“Well, you’re not me, are you?” the old man bit back, and he turned and took his wife, who looked disdainfully at the other weapons, by the hand and led her toward a shack.
“It appears the zombies are about to meet their first sacrifice!” the voice over the loudspeaker said.
Chris and the others turned to see the crazy woman heading directly for the zombies, her arms open wide, face looking up at the sky. She came to a stop, stood still, and waited for the zombies to approach her.
“Don’t!” Chris shouted to the crazy woman. “They’re going to kill you!”
“They’re going to redeem my soul!” the crazy woman said, not turning to look at him.
“Let her go,” Zora said, resting her hand on Chris’s shoulder. “She’s not worth saving. At least she’ll buy us a few seconds of extra time.”
“Look away, Maisie,” Chris said.
But she couldn’t keep her eyes off the horrific scene before her. Chris covered her eyes with his hands.
The zombies converged on the crazy woman, opening their jaws wide and biting her on the neck, the shoulder, the arms, the legs, on every available piece of bare flesh they could get their teeth into. Blood oozed from each of the bites, the zombies’ eyes rolling back into their heads until the blood vessels around the eyes became clear. The woman screamed, a mixture of pain and ecstasy. The combined zombie weight knocked her to the ground.
The crazy woman rubbed at the undead on top of her like an amorous lover. The audience cheered as each bite crunched home. The woman’s screams were muffled by a zombie that gripped her larynx tight in its jaws, and there was a wheeze as oxygen struggled to squeeze into her lungs, and then a wet snapping sound as the zombie ripped the crazy woman’s throat out. She gargled blood and, after a moment, her limbs dropped to the ground, lifeless. The zombies crowded around like lions at a felled beast, feeding on their prize, snapping at each other in their frenzy. What disturbed Chris most was the jerking movements her body made as the zombies tore into her, her eyes wide open, looking up at the lifeless sky. Chris felt sick.
“What kind of people like watching this?” Chris said to Zora.
“Desperate people. Those who don’t cheer are considered dissidents and put in here. Quick. Let’s kill a few of the zombies while they’re distracted. The sooner we can get onto the scoreboard, the better.”
“What scoreboard?” Chris said.
Zora nodded toward a large display above them. It had a column on the left with ‘Sacrifice’ written across it and one to ten under it. ‘Number of kills’ was written above the right-hand column. Currently all said zero, meaning no one had yet scored a kill. The number 7 – the crazy woman’s number – was removed from the scoreboard. An empty space where a human had once been.
“Maisie, stay back,” Chris said.
A couple of the zombies stumbled past the crazy woman’s corpse and, arms outstretched, stumbled toward Chris and the others. Zora drew her sword, spun, and lopped off a zombie’s head all in one smooth movement. The body dropped to the ground like a sack full of cloth. Then she pressed the tip of her sword into the eye socket of a zombie in a suit with a decisive thrust. Chris brought his bludgeon down onto the bald domed head of a grizzled old zombie, caving his
skull in, shards of bone poking out of his head.
George, lacking Zora’s skill and grace, brought his sword down onto the frontal lobe of a zombie, splitting his head in two, just down the middle. Chris fell upon the zombies feasting on the crazy woman’s corpse, beating at rotten skulls with a bludgeon. George joined him, his weapon’s sharp edge blunted within seconds but just as effective as a bludgeoning device.
Zora worked around the zombie group, flanking them, her sword a blazing blur of silver. But then Zora began to step back, slipping on the bloodied muddied ground as the number of zombies began to swell and push forward.
The zombies, faces smeared with the crazy woman’s blood, got to their feet and ambled after Chris and the others.
“We need to pull back!” Zora said. “There are too many of them! This way!”
She turned and led them toward the closest shack. The zombies staggered after them, snatching with their claw-like hands. But as they got closer to the shack Chris spotted a pair of figures standing upon it.
“Stay back!” a voice shouted from the roof. “I’m warning you!”
It was the well-dressed old man with the chainsaw. He hadn’t yet turned it on. He waved it threateningly at them.
“We’ve got a little girl with us!” George said. “Let us get on and together we’ll fight these things.”
“I don’t care!” the old man said. “We’ve got this shack, not you! Go away!”
“I think we’d best listen to him,” Zora said. “We’ll find another spot.”
Zora led them away, toward the next shack, and the contingent of zombies began to follow them. The shack had been hastily-built with five rectangular sheets of corrugated iron, a door-shaped hole cut into one of them.
The old man on the shack stepped back, eyes wide as saucers at seeing the mass of undead moving in his general direction. He pulled the cord on the chainsaw. It chortled and then cut out. He pulled it again with the same result. He succeeded the third time and revved the chainsaw hard and loud.
“Get out of here!” the old man screamed, revving the chainsaw. “Go away!”
The zombies turned their heads in the direction of the revving engine, and then began to stumble after it. The old man’s eyes grew wider, and as the first row of zombies came at him he drew the chainsaw across and decapitated and mutilated half a dozen zombies. Their thick, almost black blood splattered over the shack roof, over his clothes, and the old man’s face. He dropped the chainsaw, the engine still running, and clawed at his face, at the globules of blood he found there.
“No!” he screamed. “No! No!”
He clutched at his blood-stained clothes and spat a thick red membrane out of his mouth.
“Adam…” the well-dressed old woman standing behind him said. “Adam… No…”
The zombies scratched and clawed at the corrugated iron shack walls, sounding like rain during monsoon season. The chainsaw sat precarious on the edge of the roof, the engine still chugging. The old man held his wife tight in his arms. The audience was going wild, roaring like a coursing river. The shack shook and the old couple stumbled. The old man detached himself from his wife and picked up the chainsaw.
“I love you too much to let you fall prey to these monsters, Agatha,” he said. “I suppose you’ll just have to settle for this monster instead.”
His wife raised her chin up, and nodded to him. He brought the chainsaw down and was splattered by his wife’s own lifeblood.
Z-MINUS: 4 HOURS 53 MINUTES
The revving of the chainsaw engine died, and there was a loud crash as the shack the old couple had been standing on collapsed under the weight of the pressing zombies.
“Well, it certainly appears modern technology didn’t help them out much there!” the loudspeaker voice said. “Such a shame!”
Zora turned to George and smiled.
“See?” she said. “I told you it would do more harm than good.”
George grumbled under his breath.
“You’re welcome,” she said.
There was a scream from the collapsed shack.
“Somebody help me!” the old man screamed. “Somebody help me, please!”
Chris took a step forward, but Zora blocked him.
“He’s gone,” she said.
“No!” the old man yelled, the anger in his voice doubted by fear. “Stay away! Stay away!”
The old man screamed and finally went silent. Chris and the others ran the remaining distance to the shack.
“Climb up,” Zora said. “We’ll attack them from the roof.”
Chris climbed up onto the roof first and reached down as George handed Maisie up to him. The whole building shook slightly beneath their feet. Zora joined him and together they pulled George up. Every footstep was loud and jarring, making the shack shake.
“It’s not going to last long,” Chris said.
“It’s built that way,” Zora said, “so the zombies have a better chance of knocking it down.”
“Wonderful. Is anywhere here safe?”
She looked at him with her big round eyes.
“Nowhere here is safe,” she said. “Not until we kill them all.”
“But even if we do kill them all they won’t let us go.”
“No. I’ve won seven of these things, and they’re never going to let me go. One of these days I’m going to slip or fall or get ill or injured and I won’t react fast enough, and that’ll be it. That’ll be my freedom. I’ll be one of those things out there. And it’ll all be over. There’s no way out of here.”
“No,” Chris said. “There must be a way. There’s always a way.”
The first wave of zombies reached their shack, arms up, hands gripping at the overhanging corrugated iron roof. Their fingertips grazed the edge and reached for their shoes, but they were just out of reach.
Zora swung her sword as if she were cutting through a dense jungle, high to low, lopping off heads in single well-placed strokes. Chris and the others did likewise, hacking and chopping at the rotten skulls below like firewood. Maisie stood in the middle of them, hands over her ears. She rocked back and forth, humming a tune to herself.
But as fast as the group hacked at the zombies, they kept coming, and they pressed their weight against the shack and it began to lean over to one side, creaking with the strain. Maisie let out a scream and braced herself with her hands on the roof.
The bodies fell, and as they piled up, the zombies, with their staggering gait, tripped on their fallen comrades, and then began to crawl on their hands and knees, up the undead staircase. A zombie gripped Chris’s ankle and bared its jaws to bite. A sword slammed into the zombie’s temple and it became still. Chris shook the zombie’s hand off and nodded his thanks to Zora.
Maisie screamed. Chris turned to find a zombie, hissing through her broken teeth, reaching for Maisie with black broken nails. The whites of her eyes loomed big and wide at him, and her mouth, torn and bloody, jeered at him like a petulant teenager.
Chris grabbed the zombie by the hair and pulled, but the hair tore free with the scalp, and the zombie hit the floor, now in reach of Maisie’s foot. Chris clenched up his fist and drew it back to strike the zombie in the face… But once again he hesitated. A moment earlier, Chris’s muscles ached and burned, but, charged with renewed purpose, he swung his bludgeon, snapping the zombie’s aim off so cleanly it flew over the zombie crowd. It was all he could do to keep swinging his arm.
Then he heard the audience roar and cheer in the farthest corner. The men in charge of the scoreboard were suddenly alive with purpose. They rubbed out two more numbers – 1 and 2 – that Chris remembered were the religious old couple, and then another cheer went up and another number was removed. The pleading fat man.
“They’re dropping like flies,” Zora said.
They continued to hack at the zombie horde. The shack leaned over at thirty degrees.
Then Chris heard shouting from high up on the stadium walls, barely audible over the cheering
crowd. Shadowed silhouettes on the ramparts approached a large gun-like device that turned and aimed at a shack in the opposite corner – the one Chris remembered the wheelchair-bound man had climbed onto.
“What’s going on?” Chris said.
“That means Scorpio is getting bored,” Zora said. “She’s going to force us to do something. Whoever is lowest on the scoreboard with fewest kills is the one who will be forced to fight.”
“Number Six,” the loudspeaker voice said. “You have killed no zombies and have been deemed dull. You will now be forced to compete.”
The men on the stadium roof stood back, and in a single THROM! a large crossbow bolt, five feet long, the arrowhead half a foot wide, shot out from the weapon and struck the shack, followed by a loud Tang! The bolt did not pierce the wall, but knocked the wall back, so it began to lean over, and then fell over completely. There was a scream and yelling, audible even over the cheering crowd. The zombies nearest him converged on the unfortunate soul and the screams died, slow and painfully.
Part of the zombie horde surrounding their own shack was momentarily distracted and turned to look at the weapon on the roof, and the destroyed shack across the way. They raised their noses into the air as if they could smell fresh blood on the other side of the stadium.
“We have to get out of here!” Zora said, kicking a zombie in the face and then launching herself off the shack.
Chris took hold of Maisie and threw her bodily over the zombies, whose hands rose up to grab her, but she was just out of reach. Zora caught Maisie and lowered her gently to the ground. She took Maisie’s hand and began to lead her diagonally across the field toward the sole remaining shack.
“What about Dad and George?” Maisie said.
“They’ll catch up,” Zora said without a backward glance.
Chris and George leapt off the shack and rolled on the ground, rising up into standing positions. George was disorientated. Chris helped him to his feet.
“Let’s hold off the zombies for as long as we can,” Chris said. “Give Maisie and Zora as much time as they need.”