Little Dead Monsters (19 page)

Chapter Forty-Six.

She roamed the empty hallways like a ghost in a forgotten ruin. The last of the gunfire had subsided minutes ago, and now, there was nothing but silence.

It was unsettling.

Only moments ago, Allegra had watched as one of the older boys unlock the codes to the mechanical doors—using a key card stolen from the body of a dead guard— that held them all prisoners. When it opened, a light flooded the place, chasing away the shadows that were once so prevalent. Allegra watched with a smile as the slaves made their exodus through the doorway and into the bright light — their future. She waved goodbye one last time to everyone, and watched as the doors closed again, engulfing her in the darkness once more.

Her solitary footsteps echoed through the hallways and she felt uneasy. Something wasn’t right.

“You’re here, aren’t you?” she spoke to the shadows. “I can feel you everywhere.”

She needed to find Tiberius. Allegra prayed that he was still alive.

As she drew near the double doors that led to the guard’s common area and the viewing room, she noticed the blood seeping through the bottom of the doorway.

She entered. All the years of violence could not have prepared Allegra for what she saw.

The blood in the common room was everywhere: smeared on the walls, pooled on the ground, and splattered onto the ceiling. The bodies of the guards were strewn about, like scattered dolls in a child’s playroom. Some had their limbs torn off while others were mangled beyond recognition.

Not a single one of them died from a gunshot wound, though bullet holes did fill the walls.

“Don’t be afraid,” she whispered to herself.

Allegra walked through the dark red pools. The hemline of the long black dress she wore, the one Ryker had given her, soaked up the blood on the ground and left a red trail, like a paint brush, as she moved across the concrete floor.

She tried to ignore the corpses strewn along the tunnels, but it was difficult. She remembered most of their faces, especially the ones that mocked her and treated her like dirt. Now, they were dead and the wounds that killed them were brutal ones. It was as if a monster had stalked these tunnels, tearing apart anyone in its path with its bare hands.

Finally she reached the viewing room, where she had last left Tiberius and Ryker.

There had been a vicious gunfight outside the room and the bodies of Ryker’s men, the Americans, and the Yakuza littered the ground. Empty casings were scattered all across the floor like rocks in the dirt.

She stepped over one of the Yakuza members and slowly pushed open the door of the viewing room.

Everyone inside was butchered. The blood oozing down the walls made Allegra wonder if the room itself was bleeding.

Allegra walked past the severed head of the American, Overbrook, and advanced deeper into the room. The most predominant thing she saw was the thin Yakuza boss. His upper torso was displayed at the centre of the room, arms widespread, while the other half was draped over one of the leather chairs.

Ryker lay on the ground behind him, his head crushed into a pulp. She looked at it for a while, and then shut her eyes, turned away and gagged. When she opened them again, the eyes of the scarred Romanian twin looked back at her. She wondered if even the dead were able to scream because certainly, that was what his corpse was doing. Both of his arms looked to have been dislocated and his head had been twisted one-hundred and eighty degrees.

Suddenly she heard the raspy sounds of a staggered breathing.

It was coming from behind the control panel. Allegra walked over with caution, her heart pulsating within her chest.

The other twin lay there, broken in multiple places. He was still alive though. Allegra knelt down and spoke to him.

“What happened?”

The twin traced her with his eyes and sputtered. “Monstru.”

“What?”

“El este un monstru,” he gasped in his native tongue, his eyes looking past her. And then he was dead.

She stood up and found that tears were stinging her eyes. Allegra had no love for these people, but this horror, this brutal violence was more than she could handle. She headed for the door and pushed it open.

Tiberius stood outside the door in his massive frame. It looked as if he came from a slaughterhouse. Most of the blood wasn’t his, that she knew.

“Ty,” she cried.

He made no reply. Instead he waited like a blood-soaked behemoth.

Each breath he took sounded animal-like, as if he were sucking in all the air around him and exhaling every ounce of it through clenched teeth.

“Ty?” she called out to him again. He looked at her with hate-filled eyes. She shivered.

“What did you do?” she asked. She pointed to the horrific mess inside the viewing room. “What did you do?”

Tiberius snarled and flared his nostrils, like a bull ready to attack. She was afraid of him. Tiberius was no longer the good-natured man who had protected her from Ryker’s assaults. He was something different now.

“Are you hurt?”

He answered with his heavy breaths, his shoulders rising and falling with each one he took. She wouldn’t give up. She needed to get a hold of him, bring him back to her. She took one step forward and reached for his hands slowly. His eyes followed her every movement.

She felt the warm stickiness of his hand. “Tiberius, it’s me, Allegra. Please, let me clean the blood off of you. I can heal any of your wounds.”

Her touch seemed to have an effect on him. He spoke, though with a voice no longer recognizable.

“No.”

“Ty, let me help you,” she pleaded. “This isn’t you.”

He shook his head slowly. “This has always been me,” he said gesturing towards the destruction around him. “It never left me.”

“Come with me. Please.”

“No,” Tiberius said. “There is no time. I must find her.”

“Your sister?”

“If she’s dead, I will tear him apart with my bare hands. I swear it on my father’s soul.”

He turned away from her and she watched helplessly as he walked into the shadows, disappearing into its cover like a creature into a black mist. She made no effort to stop him. There was nothing more she could do for him.

He too had been reborn. Tiberius was on his own journey now and he no longer had a place for her.

This world had no place for her.

Chapter Forty-Seven.

The pit. How many times had she walked down the damp passageways while dreading the sight of another mangled victim from the fights? Her footsteps were always heavy during these walks, but today, she treaded with lightness to her step. There would be no more fights here ever again.

“Ryker is dead,” she said. The words danced on her tongue and she almost smiled, but the horrors around her prevented Allegra from taking in any joy in her victory.

Did it make her inhuman to take such delight in someone’s gruesome demise? Was her soul evolving into something different? She thought of Tiberius and the monster he had become; the same monster that Dog was so afraid of becoming.

Allegra said a quick prayer for Tiberius, and one for herself, perhaps her last prayer ever. “God, I don’t have much of a soul left but whatever does remain is yours.”

She pushed open the gates to the pit and walked onto the battlegrounds to meet the only other breathing entity present in this forsaken place.

The tiger rested on the sand, stretching out its full frame. It noticed Allegra immediately.

She spoke to it, recalling the poem that she loved so much. “Tyger, tyger burning bright, in the forests of the night. What immortal hand or eye can frame thy fearful symmetry?”

The tiger watched cautiously but made no effort to move as she drew closer.

“You're as broken as I am,” she said. “Two souls with no one left and nowhere to go.”

Allegra dropped to her knees several feet away from the tiger and took in its entire form. Despite the wounds, it was still magnificent to look at.

“Dog told me once that with every boy he killed, their ghosts haunted him,” she said to it. “Does he haunt you too? Is his ghost with you?”

The tiger slowly rose from his resting spot and walked towards her, every step laboured from its broken front leg. Finally it stopped in front of Allegra. It was close enough that she could feel its hot breath on her body. She stared into its dark-orange eyes.

“Ever since his death, I couldn’t stop feeling this black void take control of my heart,” she said. “It made me realize that love is something that’s now hopeless for me so I ended up doing this to my face. I didn’t need it anyway. My looks always got me into trouble.”

The tiger watched her as she slowly reached out a hand towards it.

“If Dog is there with you, I want him to hear this,” Allegra said. “Everything was so much brighter when he was around. My mother never told me about that one, and I wish she did.”

Allegra closed her eyes and smiled as she began to cry, perhaps for the last time for a while. “I think I loved him.”

And just before the tiger let out an ear-shattering roar, she reached out and touched it.

“I’m ready,” she said.

Chapter Forty-Eight.

Jacob set down the newspaper, an American publication. He had read the front-page article almost four times over and it was difficult for him to hide his emotions at that moment. But he did.

He loved this coffee shop. The freshly baked croissants and its rich, muddy coffee were heavenly. He feared that if he began to cry, they would think him odd and unstable.

He stared at the headline one more time: “A picture of innocence: more discoveries from the arena.”

Everyone was shocked with the discovery of the Arena’s existence inside Bimini. All it took were his hand-drawn pictures of the boys that he accumulated over the years (all thousands of them), the GPS coordinates with all the mines, and a map of Bimini with a circle around Union station to get the ball rolling. Jacob had dropped off the entire package anonymously to the editorial office of Baroque city’s newspaper and waited. It didn’t take long for someone working there to recognize a few faces of the missing children from past stories.

The police had been called in and they uncovered the whole mess: the dungeons, the armoury, unsanitary living quarters, the dead bodies, but most of all the pit itself. The story had become news headlines everywhere. People around the globe were bewildered by the happenings of this place. 

It’s been two weeks since the story broke. Jacob was already in Paris at the time when the story first reached his ears. It was a tale filled with too much drama and tragedy for the world to ignore and it became an international spectacle.

Ryker’s empire was reduced to ash. Dog was the fuel that sparked its demise, Allegra was the inferno that tore through the Arena, and Jacob…Jacob made sure everyone knew about it. Most important, however, was that the children—all those nameless faces he drew—were never forgotten. The second day the story became news, media outlets around the world broadcasted every one of Jacob’s pictures in hopes of discovering the identities of the children.

Two weeks later, the Arena and Bimini was still on the tips of everyone’s tongues.
Time
magazine dedicated an entire issue to Bimini’s tragic past along with the Arena and child cruelty in society. It was difficult for Jacob to read through it, but he read every single word with reverence.

With the Arena in the spotlight, the government decided to take action and announced that they were looking into several criminal organizations linked to the fighting pits. Apparently Ryker was sloppy at keeping his network anonymous. Names of every slaver, weapons dealer, staff on payroll, and even ticket buyers were stored in his computer. If they had set foot in the Arena, their identities were in that bright, shiny, invasive disk drive of his.

The only names that were missing were the slaves. He never bothered to keep track of their real names. After all, they were nothing more than inventory. A butcher store didn’t name every piece of meat they sold, so why should Ryker?

The very thought of Ryker and his sniveling face stirred Jacob up into a frenzy. “Rot in hell you bastard!” he shouted out loud. He quickly realized that he was still in public and he covered his mouth with embarrassment.

“Pardon?” one of the waiters asked him.

“Désolé,” Jacob said. “Sorry.”

The waiter nodded and continued on his way.

The story in the paper today was the one that really hit him hard. A lump formed in his throat, but he resisted the urge to cry. They had discovered something in the pit.

The photo on the front page showed this: lying in the sand was the picture of the moon that Jacob had drawn for Dog. It still looked to be in good condition, with the exception of the cross shaped crease from being folded.

How it ended up in the pit, Jacob couldn’t explain, but it haunted him.

He checked his watch and quickly folded up the newspaper, carefully slipping it into his inner jacket pocket. He was running behind schedule.

It was cold out in Paris today and the grey clouds overhead threatened for rain, but that was okay. Jacob loved the rain. It had been so long since he felt it on his cheeks. The first day he arrived, it poured and poured, and he stood outside basking in every raindrop like some lunatic. He nearly caught pneumonia.

Jacob quickened his pace. He refused to be late, just incase today was the day which he was waiting for.

The Louvre was more glorious than he had ever imagined. It was a wonderland of artistic expression. It was his sanctuary. On his first visit, he was there from open to close, exploring every inch of it with childlike wonderment. Despite seeing only a quarter of the museum, he saw enough enchantment and magic to inspire him to draw throughout the night after Paris had shut down. Jacob sat in his tiny one-bedroom apartment (courtesy of the sack of money Jacob whisked away from one of the gambling booths) and he drew until dawn’s light. He still found it difficult to sleep these days. The dreams were always terrible, but he was slowly easing himself back into sleeping with small naps here and there. Every day, the dreams seemed to get better, though sometimes he still woke up screaming.

Jacob flashed the Louvre’s seasons pass to the ticket lady, just in time for the opening. He dashed to the place he sat each and every morning until noon — the wooden bench in front of the Winged Victory. It gave Jacob the perfect viewpoint of everyone that walked by him.

It was there he waited patiently for Allegra to come. She hadn’t yet, but Jacob wouldn’t give up hope.