Soldiers Field: Prequel to the Octagon Series

by JK Ellem

  “The mark you found on the girl is not a tattoo,” he said. “It’s a brand, burnt into her flesh.”

  “What do you mean?” Kobe asked in disbelief.

  “Like cattle being branded by their rightful owner,” Winston continued. “She was the property of someone, like a slave. The term ‘Ludus’ means school of training in the ancient language of the day.” Winston explained how in ancient Rome, there were gladiatorial schools where men, usually slaves, were trained to eventually fight in the arena one day.

  “But it doesn’t make sense,” Kobe insisted. “That was centuries ago. How could this happen today? People don’t go around owning slaves and branding them like animals.”

  “My young friend,” Winston said, his face turning grave and his mood darkening. “I can’t explain. But the girl you found had the brand from an ancient gladiatorial school that took its name from the word meaning Hell. Things like this died out hundreds of years ago.”

  Kobe sat bewildered. How was he going to explain this to De Soto? She would think that her friend Winston, after years of being cloistered away underground with his dusty books and scrolls, had finally gone insane. Salves didn’t exist anymore. Gladiators didn’t exist anymore, and they certainly didn’t make a public spectacle of watching people get killed for sport or entertainment. The whole idea made Kobe feel sick. How low and depraved humanity had once been.

  The room had become stifling and Kobe had to get out and back into the open air and sunshine. He looked at his PDA. Whilst listening to Winston, he had sent several messages to De Soto, asking for an update, but had had no response. Usually, she was prompt. Using his PDA, he quickly took a picture of both illustrations in the book and sent them to De Soto. Maybe she could make sense of it. He thanked Winston and made for the exit.

  “Kobe,” Winston called after him.

  Kobe paused in the doorway, turned back and saw Winston’s somber face. His gaze was serious and cold. “There is a veneer to this world we live in. A kind of covering, like a mask. If you start to peel back the layers, you will see things that you may not want to see,” he said, his voice ominous.

  Kobe frowned. These were just mutterings of an old man. But as Kobe stood in the doorway, letting Winston’s words sink in, he felt a slight chill drag up the back of his neck.

  5

  Pausing at the top of the Library steps and glad to be outside once again, Kobe took a moment to breathe in the fresh air. He watched people below stroll past, some holding hands or laughing. He saw smiling, content faces. He felt the breeze laced with the fragrances of pine and wood. He heard the calming sounds of water from the nearby fountains. Everywhere he looked, he saw nothing hideous or frightening.

  He checked his PDA again. Strange. Still no reply from De Soto. Where was she? Kobe considered whether he should go to the Bureau of Public Order and find her or return to the Medical Labs and take another look at the branding that was on the girl’s arm. Maybe he’d missed something? Maybe Winston’s words had spooked him and he was imagining things that weren’t actually there.

  He took in his surroundings again. It was only then that he saw the Enforcer to his left, standing at the entrance of a shopping mall. The hulking figure stood perfectly still in the shadow of the building’s awning, its head pivoted in his direction. Was it looking at him? Kobe couldn’t tell. He suddenly felt uneasy. He scanned again around him.

  People laughing, eating, interacting in a harmless, safe and serene world. Too serene? Too safe? Too perfect? This is how we see the world. This is how we have always seen the world.

  Where was the frayed edge? Where in this scene was the edge that Winston had referred to? Where could he pull back the feel of the warm breeze, the view of the tall trees, the wintergreen foliage, the edge of his vision? Peel it away like a laminate to reveal the true, rotten, cockroach-ridden, murderous reality underneath?

  Maybe I spent too long in that underground dusty vault, Kobe thought.

  Kobe checked his PDA again.

  Still no notifications, no reply from De Soto. Concern started to creep around the edges of frustration in Kobe’s mind. Walking away from the Library, clutching his PDA, he felt the comforting weight of his sidearm on his right hip as he moved past the Enforcer. He could feel its eyes on him, watching him, following him as he walked. Kobe’s unease began to flourish.

  Slowly, a pattern started to form in Kobe’s mind, an unsettling shape built around a collage of images and words: a tortured girl, her wrists and ankles red-raw. Angry crimson welts on young skin. Circular burn marks along adolescent inner thighs. Glowing shock batons. Enforcers. Magnus Krell. The Bureau of Public Order. Branded flesh. Hell. Infernum.

  Hours seemed to pass as Kobe made his way through the streets, trying to untangle the web of information that had woven itself inside his head.

  Where was De Soto? He stopped suddenly and then realized how stupid he was.

  Every law enforcement officer had a tracker embedded just under their skin. About the size of a grain of sand, it would transmit their location. It was a safety precaution for obvious reasons, just in case they were unconscious and needed help or worse still, were injured or incapacitated.

  Kobe flipped open his PDA again and scrolled through screens until the location marker function came up. He could only trace his assigned partner’s tracker and no one else’s, unless he was tasked with another officer’s tracker code. Then he could just enter it and automatically his PDA would display their exact location and status. But his PDA was paired already with De Soto’s tracker, so finding her should be relatively simple. He brought up her tracker ID and then pressed “locate” on the touch screen.

  Instantly, the map on the screen moved eastwards then eventually stopped when it located De Soto’s tracker signal, a small green pulsating blip in the middle of lines of streets and boundaries.

  Kobe frowned, looking at the location. “What the hell are you doing all the way over there?” he muttered.

  6

  It felt like he had died a thousand times. Each time they killed him, then brought him back to life, just to kill him again, time after time. He could see his father, just a shape, blurred in a memory that was fraying at the edges. He knew it was him. He could sense it. Then another shape loomed into the background. Multiple shapes now, hulking and pressing into his mind, shutting out the light. His mouth tasted of dust with a metallic tinge that edged his tongue. He was flat or felt flat, like his chest was being crushed under an enormous smothering weight. Lead was in his lungs, squeezing and constricting the air.

  Air. That’s what he craved. What he needed.

  He was in a vacuum and all the air had been sucked from his body. He struggled to breathe through gritted teeth, opening his numb lips to reach more air.

  Rough hands now dragged him through the sea of dust. He could feel each joint, each bone, each nerve ending, like he was being stretched as they dragged him. It was an exquisite pain, like a raw and exposed sensation. He knew his jaw was now open. He could feel his saliva mixed with dust dribble in viscous strands from the corner of his mouth, but he couldn’t do anything about it. He face was numb and it felt featureless, melted smooth like candle wax.

  Then the light again, filtering through the narrow oval aperture of each eye, blurred by tears, too painful to open fully. A dull throbbing behind his eyes, like they were being squeezed through a hole in the back of his skull.

  The menacing shapes retreated, but they were still there. He could feel them, in his periphery, always present, displacing the air, occupying the space where nothing else dared occupy.

  Slowly, very slowly, sensation began to seep back into his body, almost one fiber at a time. Had he fallen, stumbled off the edge of a cliff or a building rooftop? That’s what it felt like. The numbness was leaving his body, but was being replaced by a feeling like no other, like every muscle had been beaten, battered like meat to tenderize it, make it soft, more malleable. Maybe he had fallen off a building and somehow
, he had survived.

  Kobe lay on his back in a shaft of late afternoon light, staring up through the carcass of a warehouse roof high above. The metal sheeting was gone, sheared away through decades of wind and rain or rusted through, leaving gaping rectangles of vaulted sky above. High above, he could hear the skeletal beat of winged creatures amongst a lattice of rafters and roof trusses. With every muscle screaming in pain, he rolled his head to one side and vomited onto the old timber flooring where he lay. Yellow bile seeped out of the side of his mouth and onto the ground that was already heavily soiled with bird droppings, feathers and animal stains that had built up over a lifetime of exposure to the elements and feral occupants.

  The light above dimmed as a blurred outline stood over him. He couldn’t make out the features, but it had a bodily shape. Then it swooped closer, as the figure squatted over him. Again, rough powerful hands lifted him, carried him upright and pushed him into a chair in the middle of the room. His head lolled forward like he had no control over his neck muscles. He was struggling to maintain consciousness.

  His surroundings slowly came into focus, like the lens of a camera being twisted into place. Memories began to form and a slow realization came back to him, like pieces of a fragmented puzzle scattered on the dusty floor under him, pivoting and locking back into place. The pieces of his memory, scene by scene, began to replay in his head, but in reverse.

  He saw himself arrive at the old abandoned warehouse. He had followed De Soto’s tracker signal to this location at the outer city limits. Kobe had to convince himself to follow the signal. He had no idea why De Soto was here. It made no sense. She went to the Bureau of Public Order to see Magnus Krell to get the file of Grace Maleny unlocked. Why was her tracker now saying she was on the other side of the city, in some rundown industrial estate?

  In next frame of the film playing in his head, he saw himself climbing rough concrete stairs, inside the building, PDA in hand, following her signal. Now he was standing on the vacant top floor in a vast expanse of empty space. The signal was getting stronger now, up here.

  As he walked, glass crunched under his rubber soles and he passed derelict old machinery that sat hunkered and silent like dead beasts, stained with grease and oil, their innards seized and fused, long since used.

  There were piles of rubbish. Rods of bent metal, spools of rusted wire, shards of glass, twisted piping and an assortment of cogs, bolts and spare parts were scattered as far as the eye could see as the cavernous industrial interior stretched away from him.

  More pieces of his memory were coming together.

  As he walked further on, Kobe saw where entire sections of the upper floor had given way, collapsing inwards. He remembered leaning out and peering down one gaping hole, and he could see clear through to the ground floor many levels below. It was like the guts of the building had been torn apart, its innards exposed, layer by layer. He thought back to the holographic autopsy of the girl, her battered face, a virtual incision made in her chest cavity, her digitized insides opened up, looking in, everything laid bare.

  The collapsed section of the top floor, in a domino effect, had landed on the floor below, and with the combined weight, momentum and gravity, it kept crashing through all the floors beneath until it hit the bottom. Huge chunks of concrete, timber and steel, piled one on top of another, far below. As he looked down into the abyss, steel reinforcement rods jutted upwards from the pile, pointing back at Kobe, rusted fingers of blame, as though it was his fault.

  The words of Winston, coming back to Kobe. If you start to peel back the layers, you will see things that you may not want to see.

  He was close now. The next frame in his memory played out.

  The tracker signal said that she was in the room, just a few feet away. She should be here now. Kobe was confused. There was nothing here. He saw the afternoon sun slanting rays of gold and orange through a high bank of shattered windows to his right. A chair, upright, in the middle of the cavernous space, placed in the middle. Right in the middle. Too perfectly placed, neatness and order amongst the mayhem and mess that surrounded him. A tiny capsule in the middle of the seat, placed there.

  Looking again at his PDA screen again, he saw that the calibrated distance to the tracker signal had decreased to zero.

  But no De Soto. Just the vacant chair with the tracker placed on it.

  He remembered staring at the tiny transmitter.

  Traces of blood on it. Some skin as well?

  Kobe paused. The tracker. Her tracker.

  Suddenly, Kobe’s survival instincts went insane, off the charts. Like a wild animal, in the forest, following the scent of food, being led to this exact spot. Ignoring the neatly laid out path through the forest. Ignoring the deliberate clearing of leaves and undergrowth to make his journey easier. Ignoring the fact that the morsel of food had been placed in the exact center of the clearing and was in fact a piece of bait. Not seeing the thin thread of line on the ground, the snare encircling the bait, placed exactly where a paw or hind leg would step. So engrossed he was in following the tracker signal. Tunnel vision. Blindly stumbling in without thinking. Falling victim to his own inexperience and immaturity. Focusing too hard on the screen of his PDA, like the people on the travelator, oblivious to where the path was taking them. Not paying attention. Too self-absorbed. The little green blip, ironically, was a big red warning sign, luring him in.

  And he had taken the bait...

  Too late.

  A slight, familiar sound from behind. Something being expelled. A shot.

  Too late to turn, to run, to take cover, to avoid.

  Then instant, total, spine-crushing pain in his back.

  Then the feeling of falling face forward. His body rigid, not collapsing. Hitting the floor hard. Then the sudden feeling of everything in his body, not shattering, but compacting, condensing. Every muscle, every cell, blood vessel, nerve ending, being fused together, imploding not exploding. Life was being crushed out of him, molecule by molecule, from the outside in.

  The peeling away had begun.

  NOW CONSCIOUS AND slumped in the chair, both his feet and his hands were restrained, he knew. In front of him, four shapes came into focus: a smiling Magnus Krell and three Enforcers. There was no De Soto. The Enforcers had their weapons pointed directly at Kobe, a more powerful assault rifle variant of Kobe’s Coded Side Arm. They had lured him into the trap then shot him in the back with some form of shock weapon.

  Krell held up the tracker implant between his thumb and forefinger. In the other hand, he held a PDA. De Soto’s PDA.

  “I expected more from you, Officer Kobe,” he said, clicking his tongue in disappointment. “Don’t worry, the effects of the shock weapon will wear off.”

  “Where is De Soto?” Kobe croaked, still groggy, the sour taste of bile on his lips.

  With a slight gesture of Krell’s hand, two more Enforcers appeared, dragging something between them. They reached Kobe and let go of the lifeless body of De Soto at his feet. It collapsed in a heap, like a carcass, dead weight, lifeless.

  “She put up one hell of a fight, mind you,” said Krell as he moved closer, shaking his head in mock pity. “Such a shame,” he continued, regarding the body of De Soto, “I could have had some fun with her.”

  It began as the size of a pinprick, at the base of Kobe’s neck, then grew millimeter by millimeter as it clawed its way up the back of his skull, building in size and intensity. It reached his forehead, then split into two separate lines just below the skin’s surface. Then it travelled across each temple then down each side of his face, across the line of his jaw and then settled deep within his clenched teeth, forming a snarl of pure hatred at Magnus Krell.

  “Good,” Krell said, “I like your anger, keep feeding it. You will need it.” Krell gestured to one of the Enforcers. They shouldered their rifles and unclipped their shock batons. They buzzed to life, glowing with intensity, and they approached Kobe.

  “What are you going to do wit
h me?” Kobe snarled at Krell, his eyes fixed on the advancing Enforcer, shock baton held out in front, now only inches from Kobe’s face. “You can’t kill me. People will know. They will find out.” He could feel the waves of electricity rippling and arcing close to his skin. The air crackling and distorting with the charge.

  “Oh no. I’m not going to kill you,” Krell mused. “That would be too easy.”

  Kobe turned his face away from the baton as it was brought closer, almost touching his face. He strained against his restraints, trying to lean away from the danger, but his hands and feet were clamped tight by another Enforcer from behind, holding the chair tightly in place.

  “You want to know how the girl died, don’t you? The girl you found in the alleyway. I’m going to show you the path that she took. Where she came from,” Krell continued, leaning in closer to Kobe’s face, enjoying his fear. “I am going to grant you your wish, Officer Kobe,” Krell said.

  Nearly all of Kobe’s vision was blinded by the searing light of the shock baton, so close to his face. But his eyes fixed on Krell’s face, distorted in the white glow, memorizing every feature, burning it into his memory, so he would never forget as he made a silent vow to kill him.

  “I’m going to send you to hell,” Krell whispered.

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