by James Jaros
They lay in silence for several seconds before M-girl whispered, “What’s diabetes?”
“Don’t believe him.” Lowering her voice even more, Ananda said, “He’s just another killer. What does he know? He fed that girl to a monster.” She wanted to spare M-girl her own fears.
“But something’s wrong with you. You’re weak. You know you are. You shake a lot, and those burns aren’t healing. My scabs are almost gone.”
“He’s . . . a . . . liar. Have you ever heard of diabetes?” M-girl shook her head. “Me, neither. He’s crazy. You know he is. So don’t listen to him.”
She wasn’t trying to spare just M-girl’s feelings anymore, she was trying to ease her own anguish. And she did feel better. Much better. Diabetes sounded like one of those silly things people worried about in the long ago, like zits or fat or catching a sniffle. That’s what it was, a little problem. And you’ve got big problems, like getting out of here.
She couldn’t fathom how. The glow of the torch vanished, throwing a blanket of darkness over the room.
“I love you,” whispered M-girl. “I’ll always love you.”
“Don’t say it like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like ‘I’ll always love you’ because I’ll be gone. I won’t be gone.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
Yes, you did. But then Ananda realized that M-girl might have been trying to convince herself that she hadn’t meant what she’d really said. “Listen to me, girlfriend: I’m not going anywhere. And I love you, too. I’ll always love you,” she added impishly, tapping her forehead gently against M-girl’s.
They kissed deeply till weariness made them stop. Ananda wanted so much to wrap her arms around M-girl and hold her close, but all she could do was rest her forehead back against her girlfriend’s, sharing the air they breathed as exhaustion finally stilled them both.
And the bed started spinning.
Bliss hung from the manacles, awakening in starts throughout the evening. The rusty metal cut her skin, and the pressure on her arms sent sharp pains through her shoulders. Tired, she tried to stand, but her shin throbbed where the black guard had struck her with his truncheon. She worried he might have done more damage to her leg than she’d thought, and her mouth still ached from his vicious elbow jab. But at least she could move it. A broken jaw could have been fatal without straws or blended food. She hadn’t known any relief from the burning pain of her scalp; and from the excited remarks of men staring at her nakedness, she knew more blood had trickled onto her face.
Dozens of guards and gunmen had passed through the modestly sized amphitheater. To avoid their stares, she closed her eyes long before she tried to sleep. Even now they gathered near the small stage, only feet away, lathered with lust, mouths agape, fevered hands on themselves and one another.
The morbid sexual spectacle made Bliss dread what would happen if the guards left her alone. Two of them collected weapons at the door, and three more kept the gapers from climbing on the stage. Without the guards, she thought she would have been raped to death hours ago. But she knew the real reason for the armed presence wasn’t to shield her—it was to protect the men from acting on impulses likely fatal to them.
A wiry Asian did make it partway onto the stage, just long enough to grab her pile of torn clothes. The guards laughed and let him keep them. They might have grabbed them back—if they’d known his plans. The Asian ripped apart her pants and shirt, sharing his bounty until the last shred was taken. A dozen or so men sniffed the rags like animals, violated them freely, and became the first group to actually storm the stage. The guards bellowed warnings and threats, and pushed them back. But no one was struck, and she closed her eyes on spasms and groans and the twisted, contorted faces that held no feeling for the object of their desire.
When the melee ended, Bliss heard someone in heavy boots walking toward her. “Look at me,” he growled. His familiar, demanding voice reached only dimly through her fatigue and simmering fear. He repeated himself even more harshly.
With her head hanging down, she opened her eyes on the stage floor, a patchwork of peeling plywood and grayed planking. His shadow fell across thin vomit, and she recalled pain building convulsively in her gut from the black guard’s punch. She thought she’d passed out—and maybe she had—but not before she sickened.
She also spotted the shadow of a knife coming closer. A second later, alert at last to the threat, she raised her head. The white guard who’d ripped out clumps of her hair—and stripped her naked—stood only feet away.
“Don’t ever make me tell you something twice. I say, ‘Look at me,’ you look at me,” he shouted. He crossed his arms, as if to hold himself back, and stared at her body. “You’re putting on a helluva show. You think you’re pretty fucking hot, don’t you? Got all the guys dying for you.” He glanced at the men behind him. She avoided their jumpy eyes. “Sure you do,” he went on, arms still crossed, only now he was also appreciating his knife in the torchlight, angling the blade from side to side. He caught her staring at it and smiled. “You think nothing can touch you, not even this.” He waved the blade in her face. Bliss forced the back of her head against the brick wall. She would have smashed her skull through it, if she could have.
He went on: “You’re wrong. We can touch you. It’s all in how and when we do it. You know why? ’Cause you’re a porn queen. We’ve seen tons of them. You’re just another skuzzy one. You’d give us the disease, if we gave you half a chance. You’d torture us to death with it.” He waved the knife in her face again. “Wouldn’t you?”
“No,” she gasped. Her throat was so dry she could hardly speak.
“Uh-uh.” He grabbed her jaw where his partner smashed her. She screeched from the pain. “Wrong answer,” he laughed, pressing the flat of the blade against her cheek. “Say, ‘Yes, I’m a porn queen,’ and make me believe you or I’m going to start cutting.”
Despite his grip and the blade, she managed to parrot him. He let go of her face.
“Glad to see your mouth is still working. That’s important. Now I’ll tell you what I’m going to do ’cause I’m a good guy. I’m going to get you some water. But you pee it out and you’re going to clean it up.” He glanced down. “Looks like you’ve got lots of scrubbing to do.”
He walked to the edge of the stage, returning with a dented metal cup. He let her empty it.
“Just remember, we don’t ever clean up after porn queens, and you’re not getting out of these things,” he shook a wrist manacle, “till Friday night.”
“When’s Friday?” She had to know. The manacles were unbearable.
“You should have asked that before you drank all the water. That’s two whole days from now. Then guess what?”
She shook her head. She was too frightened to offer the guesses that came immediately to mind.
“Uh-uh. You did it again. Stupid porn queen.” He jerked her arm down so hard Bliss’s shoulder felt sundered. She screamed, and more blood ran from her wrist. “What do you do when I ask a question?” he said with exaggerated patience.
“Answer,” she cried.
“You got it,” he said cheerfully. He released her arm. Pain grilled the length of her limb. “We’ll let you go Friday night. That’s Fight Night. After it’s over, when we’re all warmed up,” he moved his fists like a boxer, “we’ll be playing a game we all really like. Want to know what it is?”
“Yes.” She spoke mechanically now, without feeling or regard for meaning.
“ ‘Catch the Queen.’ Isn’t that cool? I’ll be in charge, so don’t you worry, I’ll make sure to give you a head start. I always give the pretty ones a head start. Makes it more fun. And the rules are real simple: we catch you, and then we kill you, starting with all the porn parts. What’s the porn queen then?”
She’d figured that out hours ago, and almost nodded before catching herself. “The reward.”
“That’s right.” He flipped the knife, caug
ht it smartly, and pointed the gleaming tip at her face. “Section R.”
Chunga roared through much of the night. An hour might pass in silence, and then the dragon would wake Jessie again. His bellow, so sudden and sharp, brought back the ships’ foghorns from her childhood, when she played on the sandy shores of Cape Hatteras and saw freighters and warships and oil tankers—and the bejeweled yachts they bought—fighting wind and chop and the treacherous currents that surged from the north and south and collided beneath their barnacled hulls. Mariners had called Hatteras the “Graveyard of the Atlantic,” and standing knee-deep in its Gulf-warmed waters, undertow tugging at her feet, it had been easy for a scared but astute twelve-year-old to imagine the whitecaps as the burgeoning tombstones of an imploding planet, the endless mournful waves the aggrieved survivors trying to hurl themselves back to land, to the ever-eroding promise of life.
Jessie nodded off, only to be startled awake when the Komodo smashed the wooden gate, rousing her from a vivid dream. Again he roared, as if tortured by Burned Fingers’s knife attack on its tongue. Or because he’s starving, she thought. Clamoring to eat them.
She’d been dreaming of Eden and their long trek to the dry reservoir bed, when Bliss was a toddler and she was pregnant with Ananda. The dream was strangely silent, like a film in the old days with the sound turned off. Her husband was the focus, armed as he always had been with his rifle and bandoliers. She watched him cast them aside, as he never had in real life. They fell to a fully muffled earth, raising a squall of dust. He walked away in the eerie hush, never turning back.
Jessie sat in the darkness believing the dream meant she’d broken a promise to him, and so he was done with her, now and forever. But what promise? They’d never had time for promises on that grueling trip south, only survival.
Burned Fingers stirred a few feet away. They had settled about halfway between the two gates, trying to get as far as possible from the stench of those dragon dens.
“You awake?” she asked quietly, though they’d detected no guards or anyone else the night long.
“Most of the time.”
“It sounds like that beast is trying to break out. Remember him saying he did that once before?”
“Nothing’s broken yet. I’ve been listening. A couple of hours ago the one that ate the girl got back. I heard them getting it out of the wagon. There must be a tunnel they back that thing into. His name’s Tonga.”
“Tonga? Tonga and Chunga?” She rolled her eyes in the darkness. “The Friday night fight?”
“ ‘Tonga the Terrible,’ to be precise. That’s what some joker called it, and it wasn’t our smooth-talking Carib.”
She shuddered thinking of the woman, and the man who’d put her to death. We’re dead, too. To have brought their daughters on such a harrowing journey now seemed unforgivably wrong.
That’s the promise you broke. She was thinking of her dream again. The one to keep surviving. She’d violated the heart of every decision she and Eden ever made: to protect their daughters. Though Jessie didn’t know where the girls were or what was happening to them at this moment, she knew all the younger ones like Ananda were now imperiled by the most depraved men she’d ever met—those who had taken them to the City of Shade, and those who would turn them into child brides at the Alliance. Even if the girls were not harmed tonight or tomorrow or the next day, it was only because they were seen as the most valuable commodity on earth.
And what of Bliss and Teresa and Bessie, unprotected by the spare immunity of age and innocence? And the boys? A man had already tried to rape Jaya.
She’d failed all the children. And the loss of their exclamations and awe—even their soft breaths and sudden stillness—left only echoes of silence, in dreams as in life.
Even after reviewing the pressing reasons they’d fled the drought-whipped reservoir, she came up with nothing that could justify dying in the mouth of a beast, or leaving children to the horrors hiding in the City of Shade. The caravaners wanted more from life, but that had always been the fatal fallacy of humans. She blamed herself because she, of all people, should have known better. She’d seen millions of species fall prey to the planet’s most ruthless horde. To think that more of anything but agony could ever be claimed without a staggering price was the most murderous conceit ever embraced by—
“Tonga’s a little more laid back than Chunga,” Burned Fingers said.
Tonga? Jessie was so consumed by worry and guilt and regret that it took her a moment to remember the second dragon. “He’s digesting,” she replied at last, the image so ghastly she despaired of saying so.
“That makes sense. I wonder how long he’ll stay satisfied. Be nice to think we’d have only the one to deal with.”
“It’s still two. They’ll kill anything that looks edible, including each other, and eat it later.” She could scarcely believe he’d found encouragement of any kind in going up against a Komodo dragon so hungry or wounded that it was still hurtling itself against the gate that kept it from a meal, or revenge, or whatever drove its instincts.
“They can get by on a dozen meals a year,” she said, recalling the detail from a graduate level herpetology course, “although judging by the one we saw, they’ve been eating a lot more than that for a long time.” More facts came back to her: “And they digest something like ninety percent of what they eat. The rest—the hair, horns, claws—they cough up in a disgusting ball. It’s supposed to really stink.”
“That’s just what this fragrance counter needs,” Burned Fingers said, spurring faint memories of wondrous scents she hadn’t actually smelled in decades, and which otherwise would have been unimaginable to her. He said something else she didn’t catch, lost as she was in the pleasant realm of the distant past.
“I’m sorry, can your repeat that?”
“I was just wondering if there’s any way we can kill them?”
“With a rocket launcher.” She wasn’t entirely kidding.
“How about with a damn sword?” he asked. The weapon the Mayor had promised them.
“Let me think.” It was hard to reconcile fighting a pair of Komodo dragons with an ancient weapon. Like St. Michael and the dragon. Except that was myth, no matter what some people believed. Even thinking of taking on those beasts felt like nine parts resignation and one part resistance. But she was impressed that Burned Fingers could even strategize, and it sparked a dim hope in her.
“If they let both of them in the pit at the same time, it’s possible—not likely but possible—they’ll rip into each other for the right to eat us. That could buy us a little time. And if one of them gets torn up so bad it can’t come after us, we might have a chance to fight the other one. But I just don’t see the Mayor letting his two big attractions tear the crap out of each other. Which is why I think he’s going to be really pissed when he sees what you did to his pet.”
“What’s the worst he can do to me, Jess? Throw me in a pit with a disgusting beast from the back of the evolutionary bus? He’s already done that. I may lose some sleep down here, but it won’t be over slicing and dicing some goddamn Komodo’s tongue.”
She couldn’t argue with that. “Our only hope is stabbing them in the heart with a sword or spear, something sharp enough to cut through their hide and sturdy enough that we can really drive it deep into their chests. But that’s got to happen fast because if we get bitten, it won’t be long before that venom basically paralyzes us.”
Chunga roared and smashed the gate again. It creaked loudly, like it might shatter. The ground shook.
“This could be over awfully fast,” Burned Fingers said.
“If we’re lucky.”
“But if we’re still here come Friday, the Mayor’s going to make us wait before he brings the dragons out. I’ll bet you anything he’s planning on us being the big finale. He’ll have us up there in chains watching all the hors d’oeuvres getting snapped up by God knows what.”
Now Chunga roared, like he was in pain, and they h
eard a ghastly, guttural noise. Within seconds the worst odor yet wafted over them.
“Tonga just coughed it up,” Jessie said, hand over her mouth and nose.
“The fur ball?” Burned Fingers sounded like he was also covering his face. “Makes me want to scream, too.”
“It’s called a gastric pellet, but ‘fur ball’ will do.” It was so malodorous the frickin’ beasts were known to rub their faces in dirt to try to get rid of the stink. Tonga was already banging around back there.
“That’s the single worst thing I’ve ever smelled,” Burned Fingers said, “and that’s saying a lot.”
Jessie agreed, but at least she could catch a full breath now. “What did you mean about him making us wait on Friday night?”
“I just think he’ll have all sorts of fights lined up with all kinds of creatures. They’ll be the undercard; we’ll be the main event. Just like in the old days.”
“You mean boxing?” she asked. “Hardly.”
“No,” he said, “I mean the fights to the death.”
“Organized ones?”
He grunted.
“I never heard of them.”
“I guess not, because you sure wouldn’t have forgotten,” he said.
“By the time I was old enough to notice anything, there wasn’t even Internet. But you do have a few years on me.”
“Yeah, I guess I do. Well, they’d get poor fuckers from Africa or Asia, South America, sometimes from the developed world, including this country when people got desperate enough, and you could vote from home on the kind of weapons they’d use—chains, pipes, clubs, crowbars, stuff like that. Hammers, anything you could bludgeon with. No guns or knives—they didn’t want the fights ending fast. Then they’d dangle a big bucket of food and it would be a fight to the death. Their families had to agree to be right by the cage, so you’d see starving, pathetic kids screaming at their fathers at the top of their lungs, ‘Kill him, kill him.’ Didn’t matter what the language was, you knew what they were saying. It was the highest rated show on the old Execution Channel.”