by A. P. Fuchs
“Don’t get close. Don’t get close,” she told herself. Getting close will kill you.
One foot . . . two. She was free.
She ran to the other side of the cage, bounced off the chain-link, and charged straight at the zombie just as he was standing up. She leaped into the air and sent both feet into the dead man’s chest. The creature slammed back against the cage on the other side. Shanna landed on her back.
A sudden woosh of dizziness overtook her and black fuzz lined her vision. A moment later and a searing pain ignited at the back of her head. It took a moment, but the two words “head” and “impact” bounced around inside her skull. Ears buzzing, she caught sight of something big and gray lumbering toward her.
A man.
A dead man.
A zombie!
Shanna rolled over to the side, face down. For a second she forgot what she was trying to do and her heart sped up in panic. Meaty hands grabbed her waist and yanked her to her feet.
Her head lolled back, then she quickly jerked it forward just as a set of yellow teeth snapped at her cheek.
Screeching, the crowd roaring for blood, pain already lighting up the back of her skull, she tossed her head back in one swift jerk and head butted the zombie, somewhere hopefully between the eyes, enough to daze him for a second.
She pressed down on the zombie’s hands, releasing his hold on her.
Giving in to the whirlwind of instinct flooding through her, she stepped forward, grabbed the zombie by the neck, and forced him to bend at the waist. Then she wrapped her arms under him, jerked the dead man’s body and legs up so he was inverted, pulled him up even higher . . .
. . . and let that pusbag have a Power Bomb, sending him crashing to the floor with all her might.
She stomped forward and slammed her foot down on the back of the zombie’s head.
The skull cracked beneath her foot and brain oozed out like rotten banana from its peel.
27
Option Four
“I’m a genius,” Mick said quietly. Thank you very much, I’m almost out. It took everything he had to keep a smile from forming on his face.
Okay, just breathe. Brreeeaaatthhe. He let out a slow exhale.
In his peripheral, he caught Jack shifting uncomfortably in his seat.
That last one mustn’t have gone so well for him, he thought. He pretended he hadn’t noticed.
“I really need to go to the can,” Mick said.
“Again?”
“That last visit was to wash the puke off. Besides, I got a bladder like an infant.”
“Hmph. Come to think of it, actually, I gotta tinkle, too.”
Mick chuckled, trying to convince any secret onlookers he was settling back in instead of wondering where the heck Anna was. He had to find her.
Jack got up. “You coming?”
“In a sec.”
Jack left.
Mick needed to find his wife.
Option One: try and make a break for it past the security guard. Naw. Wouldn’t work. Another would catch up to him right away and clobber him.
Option Two: try to sneak away and get back in time for the next fight and hope no one notices. But he wasn’t a ninja, so that one was out as well.
Option Three: hire a ninja?
Mick shook his head, wondering where that last thought came from.
Option Four:
Mick bent at the waist and untied his boot. He flipped it over and inspected the sole. Clumps of dirt from Blood Bay’s floor and a chunky sheen of puke from the incident earlier coated the bottom of his boot.
As discreetly as he could, he took a whiff of the sole. The sharp stench pierced his nostrils, the fumes enough to prime his gag reflex. Then with as wide a mouth as he could manage, he stuck out his tongue and ran it up and down the length of his boot, licking off as much of the funky gooey slop as he could. The spongy, mud-like mixture sat in a ball on his tongue. He rolled it around in his mouth a couple of times before swallowing.
Instantly, his stomach revolted and a stream of puke launched out of his mouth. Mick made sure to shake his head a little as the stuff came out so as to get it everywhere and cause an even bigger scene.
However, the old guy sitting next to him didn’t seem to notice.
Mick stood hunched over, retching, when a pair of hands grabbed him by the collar and dragged him out into the aisle.
“I oughtta beat you down to a pulp, you know that?” a voice said.
Mick glanced up through watery eyes to a meaty security guard, this one not the guy standing by the door to the hallway.
The big man grabbed him under his arm and dragged him up the steps to the door, Mick’s insides still convulsing all the way.
At least I’m on my way out, Mick thought. “Bathroom . . .”
“Not this time,” the guard said.
Just as they passed through the door, Mick bumped into Jack.
“Hey, man, what gives?” Jack said, arms outstretched.
Mick didn’t have a chance to reply as he was taken down the hallway to a metal door at the far end, up six flights of concrete steps, and was brought into another hallway, the walls lined with yellow bricks.
His stomach muscles were still contracting and little chunks were coming up again. He could barely keep his feet under him.
The guard hauled him to the room at the far end, shoved him inside the dark room, then closed the door behind them, keeping a firm hand on Mick’s shoulder. A moment later, the light went on.
“Why are you doing this, Mick?” Sterpanko moved from the far side of the plainly-furnished room. There was a large window behind him overlooking the cage below. A row of four black leather chairs were positioned in front of the window. That was it. Nothing else other than gray carpeting and charcoal black-painted walls.
“Doing what?” Mick said.
“You come here, screw me over, and I by my good graces decide to give you a chance to get out of this mess and all you do is lose money, cause a scene” —he snapped up the first two fingers of his right hand— “twice yack all over the place—SENSELESS! You really do live like a man with nothing to lose, don’t you?”
Mick swallowed, winced, and cleared his throat.
“Want to say something?” Sterpanko said.
“No. Just a cough.”
“You’ve done enough of that already, don’t you think?”
Mick didn’t answer.
“I asked you a question.”
The guard tightened his grip on Mick’s shoulder, digging his thumb deep into the flesh.
“Yes,” Mick said. “Sorry.”
“You should be. And now here we are.” Sterpanko pulled a cigar out of his breast pocket, stuck it in his mouth, lit it, then put the lighter back in his pocket. He exhaled a thick plume of smoke. “I’ve already given you the speech about what will happen if you don’t perform today, so I’ll spare saying it again.”
Sterpanko walked over to the large window, looked down and didn’t say anything. A moment later, he reached inside his coat pocket and pulled out a cordless Controller.
The guard walked Mick over to him. Sterpanko handed him the device.
Mick just held it.
“Are you going to place a bet?” Sterpanko asked.
“Do I have a choice?”
“No.”
Sighing, Mick registered himself with the machine and flipped through the screens to see what the next fight held. He made his selection and handed the Controller back. “There.”
Sterpanko put the device back in his pocket. “Let’s see what happens.”
28
Bigfoot vs ZombieS
Bet: $369,000
Owing: $369,000
The flashes came only once and a while now. There used to be a time when they came quite regularly, shots of a world from long ago from a time that was no more.
The Bigfoot’s mind wasn’t as underdeveloped as most people thought. His name was Stalla. Though not his pack’s Alpha Male, he most d
efinitely was one of the fiercest. He knew that much. Reason and process-of-thought wasn’t beyond him either. He prided himself on that and reflected on it often. Sometimes, for amusement, he’d pretend he didn’t understand what Steer-payn-koh and those with him were saying, or would feign just enough understanding to comply with what they wanted but only half-heartedly. It seemed to appease them enough.
Those flashes. Bright images of hairy beasts, large hands, pushed-in noses and glorious fangs. His people. His kind.
Of which he was the last.
The muptigs, as his people referred to them, had caused so much trouble before, building cities out of the fruits of the woods, killing trees just to harvest their strong interiors beneath the bark. The muptigs were what forced Stalla and his family to retreat further into the trees. It was a tradition—though Stalla had trouble recalling from where—for one to retreat deeper into the forest at the first sign of a muptig. He only knew two things in regards to those smaller and balder versions of themselves: retreat into the forest; cover your head while doing so. The stories passed down from his grandfather said that the muptig were able to shoot hard things from their hands, so fast and with so much force that those hard things would penetrate your skull if you weren’t careful. They were even strong enough to make your blood run freely on the ground and end your life.
It was the muptigs’ ability to shoot hard things from their hands that created the fear inside the world of the Bigfoots. It was the only thing they feared.
Until that day when the muptigs came, this time appearing differently than before. Their skin was lighter, wounded, and their foul smell was even worse than their original scent. These muptigs—thwellers, as they became known amongst the Bigfoot—did not shoot hard things from their hands. To a degree, they were like the Bigfoot and devoured their prey with their teeth, sometimes using their claws to reel their meals in.
Stalla always believed in the idea that muptigs would be afraid of his kind if they were presented to them. Everyone in his tribe thought he was crazy. But he was right because one night—before the thwellers arrived—a muptig was moving through the woods, appearing to be searching for something. Stalla had stepped out from behind a tree and startled the muptig. The muptig screamed and on wobbly legs tried to run away only to trip and fall to the forest floor. Stalla had braced himself for the impact of a hard thing from the muptig’s hands, only to find that nothing came from the muptig’s hands at all. Stalla left that muptig there in the dark and returned to his tribe with the news of what he’d done. No one believed him, except one—the tribe’s leader and Alpha Male, Yugta.
To show the leader that muptigs were actually harmless, the two set out the next night in search of one. The night went on and no muptigs were found. However, after wandering through the forest all night and just before the sun came up, Stalla saw one and called Yugta over. He told Yugta to stay behind the bush and watch him go up to the muptig and scare it. Being the Alpha Male of the group, that didn’t sit well with Yugta and he instead pushed past Stalla and strode into the path of the muptig. The muptig didn’t scream, as Stalla expected. Instead, it merely looked quizzically at Yugta, as if trying to process that which was before it. Then, with a quick jerk of its body, it jumped onto Yugta and sunk its teeth into his neck. Dark streams of blood arced from the wound and stained the green and brown of the forest trees and bushes. Yugta fell and the muptig kept eating.
Stalla watched from behind the trees. He so desperately wanted to howl over losing his friend, but instead found himself pinned with fear and unable to move. This wasn’t a muptig like the other night. This thing eating his friend was something else. Some kind of . . . thweller, an “eater.”
When he returned to his tribe, they were already under attack, thwellers everywhere, chasing and eating and cutting open all those he loved.
Stalla ran.
Now, in the dark of the arena, a flash of blood-coated hair danced before his eyes.
A sound droned overhead. The lights went on.
Blue light lit a circle on the floor and a thweller began to rise.
This thweller had eyes like blood, pale skin, and pure hate upon its face.
The joyous screams of muptigs filled Stalla’s ears.
A loud noise droned again and that which bound the thweller fell to the floor.
The thweller moved instantly, charging straight toward him.
Stalla took a giant step to the side, hoping the thweller would run on past him and he could attack the creature from behind. Instead, the thweller matched his movement and went to the left with him, plowing mouth first into Stalla’s big and hairy chest. The monster’s mouth tried to work its way through the mats of hair, searching for flesh. He grabbed the thweller on either side of the head and yanked the creature off, the thweller bringing a mouthful of thick brown hair between its teeth along with it.
This was going to be easy.
The thweller grumbled and groaned as Stalla held either side of its head, keeping the creature’s body from touching the ground. Then, using his chest and shoulder muscles, Stalla squeezed his hands together. There was a split second of resistance, then the thweller’s head burst open at the top, brain and blood shooting out of it like a jam-packed pumpkin. Its mouth slowly moved up and down, as if it realized that its life had just ended, yet even then it still yearned for one last taste of solid meat.
Stalla dropped the body at his feet then stepped on it toward the creature’s legs, his massive weight pulverizing the corpse like he did that coyote that one time, leaving only a sack of skin filled with mushed meat behind.
Stalla raised his massive hands and arms skyward, howling at the audience as they cheered. Others in the crowd made a different sound, one low and long: “Booooo.” Stalla growled.
Soon the droning hisses and low booing from the crowd blended with wild cheering and, eventually, was replaced. Stalla searched the cage for the source of their amusement. Rising out of the iron ring stood three more thwellers, two males and one female. Each had a head of brown hair. One of the thwellers had hair on its face, the other two did not. Blood coated their torn clothes, all of them wearing white. Stalla was amazed that the blood remained splotched clearly in its place, bringing a sharp contrast to the white of their clothing. It was almost beautiful.
This was a new trick. So far in his career battling in the cage, the enemy had only been offered to him one at a time, and each of the thwellers that stood before him were the aggressive sort, the ones that ran instead of walked. The ones that charged instead of wobbled toward you like some kind of half-asleep beast.
The moment the three thwellers rose so their feet were level with the cage floor the chains were released and all of them made a mad dash for Stalla. He threw out his big hairy arms to either side and ran at them, slamming his biceps into two of their necks, forcing them to fall backward to the floor. The third—the female—just simply rushed past. Stalla kept her in his peripheral and spun around on his leathery-soled feet and met her head-on as she sped toward him, growling and shrieking like an eagle in the night.
Stalla slammed his palms down on the cage floor and used them as leverage and vaulted himself into the air, coming at her feet-first. The sharp claws at the end of his toes connected squarely with her face, two of his toes lodging themselves deep in her eyes. He jerked his legs back, ripping her eyes from their sockets, doing so accidentally shoving his heel into her mouth. Her teeth clamped down. Stalla howled, then yelped when she tore the bottom of his foot away as he fell to the floor.
Ignoring the pain, he stood up and met the two males that had now gotten to their feet. In an instant he swiped a gigantic paw at them and cleaved off one of the thweller’s faces. He then leaped away from the second as it came at him, jaws snapping, and finished the female off by digging his claws into her skull, then peeling the bone back like de-boning a fish. Brain and blood glopped out of her cranium and she hit the floor.
A male thweller latched onto Stalla’s
back and bit hard and deep to where his neck met his shoulder. The sharp sting of his hair being torn from his skin was quickly masked when the flesh beneath the hair gave way and blood and meat started to splash out.
He reached over his shoulder, grabbed the thweller just underneath its jaw with both hands, and flipped the creature over his shoulder. The thweller hit the concrete floor with such force that its skull cracked on impact, blood immediately beginning to pool around it. Stalla bent down and opened his mouth wide and bit off the thweller’s face, opening its skull, then stood and spat the bloody skin and flesh and shards of bone toward the audience. Most of them cheered. A few hissed.
Stalla didn’t care.
The zombie didn’t move.
Suddenly the pain in his heel ignited as if he had been bitten afresh and he had no choice but to not step on it otherwise his leg would surely fold beneath him.
The faceless zombie tugged on his hand as if trying to free a stray branch from a rushing stream. Stalla jerked his fist toward himself, bringing the thweller along with it. The thweller had its mouth open and when its head connected with Stalla’s, it took a bite out of the Bigfoot’s lip. Blood sprayed on both of them. Stalla growled and dug his claws deep into the thweller’s chest and pulled out anything that would quickly give: bone, meat, veins, heart—glory.
The thweller didn’t seem to mind and kept snapping its jaws.
Blood continued to gush from Stalla’s wounds and his vision began to go blurry. The only thing he was certain of at the moment was the pain and the snapping jaws in front of him.
He fell to his knees, dragging down the thweller with him. His vision grew darker around the edges and the inside of his head felt lighter and lighter, as if something was removing the bones from beneath his skin. He didn’t know what to call the sensation but wanted more than anything to just sleep.
Snapping jaws.
Stalla couldn’t let it win.
He reached into the creature’s mouth. The thweller’s teeth bit through his paw. He didn’t care. He teetered backward, fell over, the thweller now resting on top of him, its blood cool and soaking through the hair on his chest and stomach.