Again, he looked off into the distance and breathed in deeply.
"Anyway, I was working on the docks during days and picking up overnight watchman shifts for BP at their Cherry Point Refinery every now and then. So, one night, I’m at the refinery and an alarm goes off. Work shuts down immediately so they can investigate. Long story short, it turns out that all hell’s broken loose back in the world and that hell had come calling at the front gate. Soon, it was every man for himself."
"There was a lot of that going on…" Cleese said quietly to the wind.
"Yeah, no shit. Anyway, I say ‘Fuck it!’ and hop in my ride and hightail it the fuck outta there. I head back to where I was staying and did my best, trying to lock it all up tight. I did ok considering I ain’t much of a carpenter. Later that night, I’m laying in the dark and hearing almost continuous gunshots and screaming. Now, I’m no dummy—despite what you’ve heard to the contrary from the idiots here—and I knew, from what I’d seen for myself firsthand and from what was coming through on the television, that every one of those gunshots and every one of those screams had a story behind them. And none of those stories was having a happy fuckin’ ending."
"Yeah, no shit."
"So, I did what a lot of people should have done and that was grab what I could in the way of supplies and head for the goddamn hills. That part of the country, it’s pretty easy to do that."
Cleese nodded and rubbed at his eyes. Monk had, up until now, been pretty tight-lipped regarding his past. He was not going to ruin this opportunity to learn a little something about him by interrupting him now that he was on a roll.
"I manage to find this empty cabin up near the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. The place was this nice "A" frame timeshare or some shit; loaded to the gills with food, water, and was as remote as hell. I didn’t encounter too much in the way of UDs up there, but believe it or not, I had my share. I ended up staying there until I finally ran out of food."
Monk paused and seemed lost in the memory.
"Y’know… I could have lived like that forever. Isolated. Nobody to give me shit. Hell, man, it was as near to fuckin’ bliss as I’ve ever experienced."
Cleese smiled again, knowing the place where that feeling from came all too well.
"Anyway, I finally come back down to civilization and the worst of it is pretty much over. The Army is mopping shit up and, by this time, they’d already dropped the hammer on places like New York and L.A. But now… But now, both the docks and the refinery are locked up tight and it’s not looking like they’re opening back up any time soon. So, I’m pretty shit outta luck job-wise and, you know, Daddy’s gotta eat. I bounce around for a while doing what I can to make ends meet, but it’s all goin’ nowhere fast."
"I hear ya, Buddy," Cleese responded knowingly.
"A short time later, I’m in a bar in Southern California near Camp Pendleton and I hear these jarheads—real Marine-type badasses—talking about this League forming. They’re saying how it’s cake money, but the risks are inordinately high. I eavesdrop a little and, after buying them a few rounds, I find out where this shit’s all getting organized. So, I went out there and met up with Weber and his crew and the rest, as they say, is history."
Monk turned, looked at Cleese and said, "I guess you could say that I—much like you—had an aptitude for this shit."
"Which brings us to the now. So, what brought this all on?" Cleese asked as he looked at the bottle of alcohol and raised his eyebrows.
"This?" Monk said while he feigned indignation. "Oh, we’re having ourselves a li’l sell-ee-bray-shun."
"And me without my party hat. What is it that we’re celebrating, if I might ask?"
"Well, with Lenik and Cartwright now on the D.L.—The Dead List—management has decided to move up our time table."
"Oh?" Cleese leaned forward, his interest now piqued.
"Ay-yup. Looks like you’re gonna see rotation sooner than any of us thought."
"When, pray tell?"
"Two weeks."
"Two weeks!?!" Cleese exclaimed, now more than slightly annoyed. "Am I the only one who remembers the Cherry who’s trained with unharnessed UDs but once?"
"Oh, they remember all right. In fact, they consider it to be a little bit of a perk. Corporate’s been watching your training tapes and they think that you’re ready. They’re already running ads for the event everywhere: television, radio, even the Internet. Breaking Cherry has always been a fan favorite, you know that."
Cleese leaned back against the short wall. His brain now spun from a combination of the alcohol and the knowledge of what lay ahead.
"What about you?" Cleese asked.
"Me? I’m being cut… Well, ‘retired,’ actually."
Monk grabbed the bottle from Cleese’s hand and drank deeply.
"No fuckin’ way." Cleese said astonished. Monk was the best there was. Why would they want to retire him? It just didn’t make any sense.
"Ay-yup. First, I’ll do a short hitch in the UFL, but you know as well as I do that that league is strictly ‘bush.’ It’s just a convenient way for them to ease me out of the public’s eye. It lets me pass from ‘Hey, there’s Monk!’ straight to ‘Whatever happened to that one fella… That whaziz name?’ in a matter of a few, short months."
Monk snapped his fingers loudly and took another long pull on the bottle.
"It’s not like I didn’t know though," he continued, almost to himself, "I’d agreed to it before you even got picked up. You were to be my last recruit. My legacy." He raised the bottle as if in toast.
Cleese stared at his mentor for a long time as they sat together in the moonlight. Secretly, he was damn disappointed. He’d always known that Monk would someday move on. He just didn’t think it would be this soon.
"Besides, I’m getting too old for this shit. And what with Cartwright buying it today…"
Monk wiped at his nose with the back of his wrist.
"Fuck, man. Cartwright and I signed on at about the same time, Cleese. The man had family."
Cleese stared at the toes of his boots and said nothing.
"You heard about Michaels, yes?"
"No, but I know I haven’t seen him around lately."
"Well, after that little dance you two did in the gym, they’d almost let him go, but then thought better of it," Monk said and scratched at his thigh.
"And…"
"As it turned out, your thumpin’ must’ve fucked with his confidence a bit because people say he went at his training even harder than before; taking stupid risks."
Cleese looked Monk in the eye.
"Aaaand…"
"Well, he went and got himself bit during training shortly thereafter."
"No shit," Cleese said as he leaned back to sigh. It sucked that the guy got himself hosed like that, but getting bitten was a risk they’d all assumed from the get-go. The fact that that fat fuck had pushed the wrong set of buttons and gotten himself knocked around a little and then not been able to handle the ass-whuppin’ was not something Cleese felt he should take responsibility for. It’s just how things went sometimes.
Monk stared off into space for a moment and went back to what he was saying; Michaels’ death serving as only an unfortunate blip on his personal radar.
"It’s better that I go, anyhow. I need to learn what it means to live again. I need to surround myself with a bit of Life while I still have some of it left in me."
He looked off into the night, not wanting Cleese to see his eyes as they glassed over with moisture.
"I’ve been around Death for far too long," he continued after a moment, "I’ll do my hitch in the UFL and then I’m fuckin’ out, Baby. I just want to spend the last years of my life in some place normal, where dead is dead."
He paused, as if deep in thought.
"The dead should stay dead, doncha think?" he whispered to the night.
Cleese nodded silently in the darkness.
Monk lay back, relaxing, and continued to stare up into the stars. After a moment, he looked over at Cleese and smiled. "Did I ever tell you that I got me a little girl?"
"No, you didn’t."
"Aileen is her name, only she’s not such a little girl anymore."
His eyes took on a far-off, dreamy aspect that could be seen despite the gloom.
"She has this nice, little farm back in Iowa with her husband. At least I think it’s Iowa… maybe it’s Ohio or Idaho… Damn places all sound the same. Anyway, I’ve never seen the grandkids and she says that I should come visit… maybe think about coming to live."
"Shit…" Cleese said, took the bottle back, and tipped it up. "You? A goddamn farmer?"
Both men laughed out loud. The sound of their laughter was healing and, given the gravity of the past conversation, much needed by them both.
"Closest you ever gotten to farming, Old Man, is the produce section of the grocery store and you know it."
"Hey, I could learn. Watch this," he said and raised his head slightly. ‘E-I-E-I-O, motherfucker.’"
Cleese took back the bottle and chuckled into it. As he did so, he looked up. The stars above twinkled in the night’s sky with their eternal indifference. He drank languorously, the liquor burning its way down his throat in a good way. His stomach groaned briefly and then battened down its hatches for what was sure to be stormy weather ahead.
As he set the bottle down, he noticed Monk had drifted off to sleep; a deep rumbling came from his chest as he began to snore. Cleese quietly looked over at two of the few men on the planet that he’d ever considered to be his friends and smiled. Weaver and Monk lay drunk and slumbering on the roof of their place and Cleese decided that, for now, that was just fine. He’d watch over them, finish what was left of this bottle, and keep them both safe from harm up here in this spot that somehow seemed above all the stench, away from all the blood—and all that death seemed like nothing more than a story they’d all heard one time long ago.
He settled in, got himself comfortable, and lifted the bottle for another drink.
"A farmer…" Cleese said, the words sounding hollow within the emptiness of the bottle. "Shee-it."
Consanguinity
The ground burned hot beneath Cleese’s boots. The sand had soaked up enough heat from the overhead lights to make the Pit’s floor a griddle. Humidity drenched everything in a thin layer of moisture and it pulled what little oxygen there was from the air and made it difficult to breathe. Cleese stood—baking beneath the scorching lights—and watched as the UD before him aimlessly wandered around the vastness of the pit.
The thing hadn’t caught his scent as of yet, but it would and when it did, it would come clawing its way after him with teeth grinding and eyes bugging out maniacally. Infectious saliva would be slithering down its chin in long, ropey loops like malignant taffy.
This one had been a woman once; kind of short and matronly. Her back was stooped and her gait was doddering, but her eyes dripped murder and her teeth gnashed together in long, expectant strokes. She walked, swaying, past Cleese and he denied the impulse to reach out and touch her. He wanted to extend this moment, to savor it.
Momentarily, he thought this was what a predator felt like as it eyed unsuspecting prey.
The woman swung around slowly, her arms swaying like a chimp. As she stumbled past, she caught a hint of Cleese’s scent on the wind. Her nose managed to snag just a ribbon of his odor and her senses honed in on him like a viper. She turned and stared darkly across the sand. Shadows hung over her sallow face, obscuring any facial features, however, her eyes burned from behind her messy, oily hair.
"HAAA-aaa…" she hissed, her breath poisoning the air as soon as it touched it. She reached out for him, slowly, as if the act caused her great pain. Her hands opened and closed, wanting to touch, wanting to hold, wanting to tear. She’d locked onto his scent now and was coming; coming fast. Her feet were tripped up sporadically by the unleveled surface of the sand, but her speed steadily increased as she lurched wildly across the pit.
Cleese dropped down into a Muay Thai crouch; chin down against his chest, hands open and loose. He rose up onto the balls of his feet and bobbed toward her. His mind instinctively clicked over to pure instinct, and having done so, it never once looked back. A right side kick knocked the dead air from the woman’s lifeless lungs. A left upward hook yielded some broken ribs. The spinning right back fist loosened her jaw. An overhand left elbow erased her nose. The woman dropped to her knees and vomited blood and spoiled meat onto the sand.
Sh-tinkt!
The spike was out before he even realized; the metal shimmering in the floodlights. The weapon glowed brightly as if it possessed great power within its metal. Telepathically, the gauntlet sang to him its songs of glory, of fortune, of fame. It was an oracle that radiated Truth and offered up glorious images of his future. It was, it seemed, the very Hand of God. An instrument of great wrath, it was Excalibur in the hands of a vengeful psychopath.
He reached out and twisted his fingers into the woman’s graying hair and roughly cranked her head back. She looked up at him, her eyes sinister and brimming with a foul corruption. Her mouth drew open and a blackened tongue emerged over the fencing of her ruined bridgework. Cleese slid the point of the spike into the opening of the woman’s ear and steadily pushed.
An inch.
The sound of the crowd above The Pit pounded deep within his chest.
Two.
The woman stiffened against his legs, briefly grabbing a fistful of his pant leg and squeezing. Her back arched and contorted, then went slack. Her features slowly collapsed into an almost peaceful repose.
Three inches.
Four.
The UD’s eyes suddenly slid open, like dingy yellow roll-up shades. As her after-life winked out into an unending emptiness, her gaze tore through Cleese’s murderous rage. It was like an arrow shot through a rice paper screen. He locked his eyes onto hers and slowly—painfully—he recognized certain contours of her face: her soft eyes, her slightly upturned nose, her kind lips. As she lay there on her knees in the sand, she slowly returned to being just an old woman; hair twisted back, brain now impaled. Recognition took hold and Cleese’s mind made its own horrifying connections.