The Hollow World: (Pangea, Book 1)

by Michael Beckum

  A GOOD DEATH

  * * *

  WE REACHED THE main floor and headed immediately out into the street where an enormous crowd of slaves was being forced toward the amphitheater that adjoined the building where I’d met with Kiga. As the Angara shoved me down the steps and into the flow of the nervous throng I saw Milton, Elia, and Bruk far to my left shuffling along with the chaotic crowd. They couldn’t see me.

  “MILTON!” I yelled, trying to be heard above the noise of mob chatter. “MILTON! BRUK!”

  An Angara took exception to my shouts, and slammed me in the back of the head. But before I was bent forward I caught a glimpse of Bruk looking my way. By the time I’d recovered from the shot I’d taken to my skull, we were at street level with the others and I could no longer see my friends.

  As we trudged forward, a rumor began to filter back through the mass of captives that there had been another pair of returned escapees—a man and a woman—apparently the woman had killed an Angara who’d been trying to retake her, and so we were on our way to witness her punishment, and probable execution.

  My heart stopped beating. It had to be Nova.

  Lost in my own head, and deeply distressed, I finally noticed someone on the periphery of my vision trying to get my attention. It was Bruk and Milton and by their faces I could see that the two of them were thinking the same thing I was.

  “Is it Nova?” Bruk asked.

  “No idea,” I said looking straight ahead. “Don’t look right at me. Pretend you don’t even see me. They’re looking for you.”

  “Because of that book?”

  “Don’t even think about it. They can get inside your head.”

  We walked a bit, pretending to ignore one another.

  “What can we do?” I asked Bruk. “How can we save Nova, if it is her?”

  “We can’t,” he replied, looking around at the Angara on all sides, heavily armed and already enraged at the murder of one of their own. “Unless we’re in the pits with them.”

  “Well, then maybe I’ll have a chance to help her.”

  “What do you mean? They’re taking you to the arena?”

  “Listen, Bruk,” I said, ignoring his question. “Two doors down and to the left from where we were, there’s a storage room…”

  My Angara guard finally caught on that I was speaking and clubbed me again in the back of the head. I nearly fell over, but caught myself. I was going to be lucky if I didn’t pass out from a concussion.

  “Two doors down, Bruk,” I continued, “and…” BAM! I literally saw stars.

  I fell to my knees, momentarily unaware of where I was. When I shook it off it surprised me to see a seven-foot tall panther man standing over me holding a mace that had a clump of my blood and hair on it.

  “Keep it up,” I told my guard with a smile, “and there won’t be anything left for the arena.”

  He booted me in the face, and I slammed over backward onto the dirty ground.

  “Like I care,” he said, snatching my cuffed hands, and yanking me back to my feet.

  Mercilessly, he shoved me toward the arena away from Bruk, slamming into a few people, which knocked them aside. The other slaves looked momentarily angered, then saw my chains, and my escort, and backed away quickly and nervously. Word spread rapidly, and as if I were Moses parting the water the crowd opened up before me until I had a clear path into the arena. My tormentors jabbed me with their spears and batted back the others with the flats of their axes for any reason and no reason.

  It was a miserable journey until I was finally forced through a low, dank entrance into a huge building that turned out to contain a rather surprisingly expansive recessed stage. The crowd around me drifted out and around into the rows and rows of wooden benches set along three sides of the open space, and quickly sat facing the opposite wall and piles of immense, rounded boulders rising in uneven tiers nearly to the ceiling.

  Grigori luxury boxes.

  I was shoved and jabbed toward a thick, stone pylon in the center of the arena that had heavy bolts and anchors set deeply into its four sides; enough to hold as many as a dozen captives. My chains were attached to one of the anchor clamps and my Angara tormenter gave me one last, joyful smile before tousling my hair and walking away with his companions.

  I tested my shackles and found them as secure as I’d expected. Dejected, knowing this would be my end, I turned to face the crowd with a confident smile. As I stood there, tall, defiant, patient, I scanned the crowd for my friends, but there were too many faces, and Bruk really did look like every other caveman in the place.

  Once the wooden benches before me had been fairly well filled with slaves and Angara, our winged masters slowly descended into the enclosure, to take their seats at varying intervals along the fourth wall.

  I imagined that the rough, gray rocks were as plush to them as cushions and upholstery would be to us. They lolled, and hunched, blinking their hideous eyes, probably chatting idly with one another in their sixth-sense-telepathic-fourth-dimensional-bullshit language.

  Then the queen—that arrogant, heartless bitch, so much larger than the rest, and I could see now textured all over with a subtly different coloration—strode with superior confidence through a special door followed closely by two pet pterosaurs, and a guard of more Angara than I’d ever seen together in one place. She waddled up to a central area before the stone benches, and with a quick leap, and tiny flick of her massive wings, launched herself over the heads of the others to drop gently and precisely onto a high, central stone set slightly forward from the others. Her little, lizard-like flying rats followed, taking up deferential positions beside her, waiting impatiently for little treats an Angara guardsman quickly and nervously provided.

  And then the ‘band’ began to ‘play’.

  Since Grigori cannot hear, whatever they call musical entertainment is something completely beyond us, and weird beyond words. The ‘band’ consisted of more than a dozen Grigori that filed out into the center of the arena where they crawled up on a small island of rocks not far from me, and after a moment of silent immobility—queuing up the orchestra, I suppose—they began to bob and weave, their mouths opening and closing in unison like mutes pretending to sing.

  “What…” I said, “the fuck?”

  The entire group twisted and gyrated like that, ‘performing’ for a good fifteen to twenty minutes. I just laughed my ass off.

  Their entire technique consisted of waving their tails and moving their heads in a regular succession of measured movements that created a kind of cadence which—I don’t know—maybe pleased the eye of the audience of Grigori the way ‘music’ would please our ears. Sometimes the band took precise steps in unison to one side or the other, or backward and forward again like some lizard-bird Motown group—it all seemed very silly and bizarre to me.

  At the end of the first piece the gathered Grigori on the rocks showed their enthusiasm by rising up on their hind quarters, slapping their chests, beating their wings and opening and closing their mouths in a kind of appreciation that was almost as silent as the performance had been. They flapped their huge arms up and down, and smacked their rocky perches until the ground fairly shook. Then the band began another piece, the audience settled, and the arena became once again as silent as a grave.

  The best thing about Grigori music? If you didn’t like it, all you had to do was close your eyes.

  When the band had exhausted its play-list it took wing and settled on various rocks above and behind the queen. And so, the business of the day was begun; I being the business of the day.

  An Angara guard came through a door to my left, and limped my way. I recognized him almost instantly as Kiga. He closed the distance between us, the silence becoming more deafening. No one in the crowd had made a sound since shortly before the Grigori had begun ‘performing’, and now they were on the edge of their seats as the announcement approached for exactly what this was all about.

  Kiga reached me, and stood qu
ietly, studying my face. Then he shook his head.

  “I knew you weren’t very smart,” he said, grinning, and lowering his eyes, slightly.

  “Smart enough to have just killed the entire Grigori race,” I said, with a shit-eating smile that would have made Hajah proud.

  He gave no indication that he’d even heard me. His face didn’t move, and his eyes never left mine. I think he was wondering if I was crazy. After a minute he looked around at the crowd, the amphitheater, and the attendant Grigori. Something in his mind seemed to be grinding into place about the lengths to which the Grigori had gone to execute one slave, and how there might be some very serious reason behind it.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked, finally, cocking his head, and becoming intrigued.

  “Grigori are all females,” I said, simply. “And I took the book that helps them make babies.”

  “You can’t have babies with a book,” he said, not having grasped the rest of my sentence.

  “You can. The book doesn’t make the babies, but it tells you how—tells the Grigori how to make them—without males. And I stole their book.”

  “So… no more baby Grigori,” he said, simply.

  “No more baby Grigori.”

  “And when the adults die…”

  “No more Grigori, ever again.”

  He considered those words, and smiled very slightly.

  “And if someone kills all the adults…” he said, tasting it and liking it.

  “We can fight over who will be the dominant race of Pangea, Angara or human,” I finished for him.

  “Or not fight,” he said.

  I shrugged.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Brandon Mack.”

  “I will tell my children, Brandon the Mack, of how you liberated Pangea before you died.”

  “I… wait. What?”

  “I cannot help you, Brandon the Mack. I will need time to convince the others, and that will be difficult. But if what you say is true, you have earned the respect and admiration of your people, and mine, and will long be remembered.”

  “Yeah, that’s not very comforting,” I said. “I was hoping to not die, and then spend a long life savoring all that respect and admiration.”

  “We all die, Brandon the Mack. Some die better than others. You are about to die greater than most.”

  I stared at him disbelieving.

  “Thanks,” I said finally, sarcastically.

  He nodded once, not getting my sarcasm, and with that he turned to the crowd, raising his arms.

  “This man took something that belongs to the Grigori!” he shouted to the crowd. “Another took it from him! It must be returned, or you will ALL be put to death! Once this man has been killed, the Grigori will bring down another slave and stake them here until THEY die, and then another, and another until the item is returned, or you are all DEAD!”

  A nervous murmur ran through the crowd. I finally spotted Bruk and saw him giving the worst acting performance I’ve ever seen, this world or mine. No one was talking to him, but he was speaking to the air, pretending he didn’t know who had it, he wasn’t the one who took it, he didn’t even know what the damn thing was!

  I just shook my head and was glad no Grigori or Angara was looking at him.

  “Oh, and there are two escaped slaves who killed an Angara, and they will be sacrificed here, as well!” Kiga concluded.

  * * *

  INSANITY

  AND

  OPPORTUNITY

  * * *

  DONE PLAYING EMCEE, KIGA turned, stared at me a moment, reached out and took my hands briefly in his, then dipped his eyes in gratitude before hobbling slowly back toward the door. He was barely inside before a pair of Angara guardsmen shoved a man and woman violently into the arena.

  I leaned forward and pulled on my chains to better see the girl—hoping against all possible hope that she would be someone other than my Nova. Her bare back was toward me, the man blocking my view, with only a pile of raven black hair, really, to judge her by. But my heart began to beat faster with the fear that it could be her. Goosebumps exploded onto my skin, and my heart and breathing both raced out of control.

  Suddenly a door on the far side of the arena slammed aside, and a T-Rex looking thing leapt out into the arena, its back and haunches porcupined with spears in an obvious and successful attempt to enrage the monstrous beast. I’m sure Milton could have given the technical name for it, but all that mattered to me was that it was huge, and had razor sharp teeth—big ones and lots of them.

  It was closer to the pair of captives than me, so they kept their faces to it, obviously, so all I could still see was the raven hair of a naked girl, my view of her mostly blocked. Even without seeing her face I thought because of her build that this probably wasn’t Nova. She was slightly heavier, and seemed shorter, but it had been so long, and maybe she’d been eating more while in hiding. There was enough uncertainty that my heart stopped racing and stood still in horrified misery as the dinosaur moved slowly toward her.

  I couldn’t take the doubt or the fear any more. I reached up to yank on my chains in what I knew would be a futile attempt to rip myself free, and felt a small something bounce against the back of my hand.

  Looking down I saw a leather cord wrapped around my wrist. It had a key attached.

  “What the…” I said, confused as hell.

  Suddenly it dawned on me that Kiga had taken my hands before he had left. He must have placed the leather cord, and key around my wrists, and I hadn’t noticed because of my shackles.

  Working furiously I grabbed the key and twisted my hands around so I could slip it into the lock, but my hands were so bound up it was difficult to get the length of it into the hole. Terrified beyond reason that the girl might be Nova and about to be eaten, I risked a glance her way, and the key fell from my fingertips into the dirt at my feet.

  “NO!”

  On the opposite side of the theater the other two had bigger problems. With the entrance of the dinosaur a pair of spears had been tossed into the arena at their feet, but they seemed more for drawing out the inevitable than to actually give the intended victims any kind of realistic chance. The man snagged the spears, handing one of them to the woman, and they both began to back away, keeping the points between them and the slowly approaching dinosaur. I shook my head. A water pistol would have been more use.

  The prehistoric predator stalked towards the pair, slowly picking up speed until it was charging full on, howling and thundering across the ground with the sound and power of a goddam elephant. Without warning a second door slammed up, and the most horrific roar I’ve ever heard in my life exploded from within. I couldn’t see what made the noise but it spun the two victims around with a start, and finally separated them a bit, and that’s when I saw the girl’s face…

  It wasn’t Nova! God, I could have cried!

  But now, as the two stood frozen in absolute horror, the thing that had roared so incredibly strode confidently out of the tunnel from beneath the slave seating and revealed itself—a massive sabertooth tiger—an enormous monster of a beast easily as tall as a horse. The color and markings were similar to any tiger you’ve ever seen; but its size was colossal in comparison.

  The sabertooth moved slowly out of the shadows and into the diffuse light—open mouth growling, Pavlovian fangs dripping—advancing not only on the frightened couple, but also on the dinosaur, which had stopped its own attack to reassess the situation.

  At the approach of the confident tiger the dinosaur began hissing in a frenzy of rage and noise. Never in my life had I heard such a horrible set of sounds as those two monsters made, all ironically lost on the main audience, the Grigori behind me.

  More than ever I had to get free. Moving quickly I bent to the ground and found—to my horror—that my chains kept me from reaching the key! As the circling creatures spat terrifying sounds at one another, I panicked and tried to get my foot under the narrow, lea
ther strap, hoping I could kick the thing up into my hand. I got a toe under it, and flicked, but only managed to kick the damn thing further away.

  “Mother fucking son of a…”

  Glancing over at the warm-up act, I watched for a moment as the T-Rex thing circled the couple, keeping them between it and the sabertooth. The monstrous tiger, for its part, decided it was done waiting and suddenly charged at the man and woman. Not wanting to lose out on a meal, the dinosaur raced in from the opposite side. The puny people standing terrified between them already seemed lost, but at the instant the beasts came together the man shoved the woman aside and the ferocious creatures slammed into him like colliding trains. Blood exploded in all directions, body parts flew, and what remained together was quickly ripped apart by the frenzied beasts.

  The woman, terrified, having dropped her spear, ran directly at me, screaming. As she got nearer I could see an all consuming fear in her eyes before, in an instant, she was past me, apparently believing the pylon I was chained to would provide her with a shield if she could manage to keep it between her and the things devouring the man who’d just saved her life.

  I looked back at the mess not far enough away from me, and saw that the creatures were going to be done with their little morsel pretty quickly. I returned my attention to the key, extending my leg as far as it would go, and being much more careful this time, managed to wriggle my toes more fully under the leather strap.

  Needing just another inch or two, I pulled my hands desperately through the chains, and felt blood trickle down my forearms from wounds I was apparently inflicting on my wrists. The additional cuts from my life-and-death battle with the Grigori in the lab had left my torso in ribbons, and those injuries had finally managed to stop bleeding. But now I was reopening them again in my agonizing stretch for that damned, tiny, too far away key.

  I took a safety check of my surroundings and saw that the predators had finally finished off their victim’s remains, and were now heading my way. The T-Rex thing tossed a last bit of arm into the air so it would fall into its mouth and down its gullet, then lowered its gaze directly onto me.