"He’s down! Ladies and gentlemen, Cleese is down!"
The crowd, of course, went hysterical. Their excited cries rose into the air like signal flares. It almost sounded as if they were happy to see him fall.
Ungrateful bastards.
From the ground, he threw a couple of quick Savate kicks at Four’s geriatric bridgework, sending pieces of it out of her mouth. Her head whipped around and her body collapsed back onto the sand. The move appeared to have bought him some time in which to deal with One and the still-wedged spike. With no small amount of effort, he pulled himself across the sand on his back, dragging One’s inert body along with him.
Abruptly, he felt his shoulder press up against one of the pit’s cold, Plexiglas sides. He looked around to get his bearings and found himself right where he wanted to be—next to one of the walls, near a turnstile. The glass felt cool, almost refreshing, against the back of his neck. As he pulled One the rest of the way to the wall, he kept a vigilant eye on Four, who was still drunkenly trying to regain her footing.
Once he’d managed to prop the dead girl’s body against the wall, he pressed the arch of his foot unceremoniously against the side of her face. Her features contorted into a Picasso painting against the glass. With a grunt, he used his leg muscles to help push her off of the metal. He felt the spike come loose and slide from her skull with the sound of a creaking door. Her head finally came free and it fell back to the sand with a wet
sh-lup
.
Casting a quick glance backward, he looked through the glass and saw a cameraman on the other side giving him a thumbs-up motion, as if the images he was capturing in his lens were good ones. If the situation had not been so dire, he might have laughed, but all things considered, there was still too much for him to do for any of that.
With his arm now free, he retracted the spike and spun himself up into a fighting crouch. Almost immediately, Four, having now pulled herself more or less upright, pounced on him. She pushed her snarling face toward him. Somehow, he managed to get his hands around the soft tissue of her throat without getting his fingers bitten.
The old woman let loose a strangled scream and pressed her gnashing mouth down in an attempt to get at the pliant skin at Cleese’s wrist. Pushing her away with the strength of his upper body, he twisted at the waist, dragging her with him. She pitched over his hip and landed on her ass in the sand. Her momentum carried her backward and, in a vain attempt to save herself, she twisted as if she were trying to roll up onto all fours. Instead, her face slammed against the clear wall leaving an oily Shroud of Turin-like smear across the glass.
Cleese immediately saw this situation for what it was: a major league fuck-up. He was on the ground, his pistol was empty, a snarling UD was all over him, and the beginning of the next round was surely not that far away.
He wasn’t exactly sure how he would get out of this, but he knew however he managed it, it was going to require some good, old-fashioned dumb luck.
Using some Greco-Roman wrestling moves he remembered from a lifetime ago in high school, Cleese gradually managed to gain control over the old bitch. He straddled her doggy-style and, chicken-winged both of her arms behind her back. Using his hips, he drove her—hard—face first into the seam where the wall and the turnstile met. He shoved her again and again, slamming her face against the wall, repeatedly ramming her mug into the glass. For a moment, he imagined the television audience being treated to a sight not unlike him bangin’ this old broad from behind. This time, he couldn’t help himself but to chuckle at the image it must’ve presented. He even went so far as to make a couple of quick "fuck me" faces before he rammed her face even harder against the glass.
Take
this
, Gramma!
Cleese’s run of bad luck abruptly changed for the better with the unlikeliest of sounds.
The buzzer went off, signaling the next round.
The turnstile spun and as the two metal surfaces came together he pushed one more time. The spindle caught the top of Four’s head between its metal edge and the wall’s framework and pinched it off. A wash of blood and brains splashed Cleese across the chest as her head collapsed like an over-ripe watermelon.
Not a pretty kill, but Four was now officially out of the running.
Now though, with the spinning of the turnstiles, a whole new set of problems hit the table—a new round was beginning. His problems were mounting and they were painting a rather dismal picture. His gun was empty. He was physically tired and mentally exhausted and hadn’t had any time to rest.
He was pretty fucked from the looks of things.
Cleese frantically crawled away from the woman’s decapitated corpse and scrambled to his feet. He quickly assessed his newly released opposition: Positions Two, Five, Seven and Eight held UDs.
Not exactly what I needed to see…
As his momma used to say though, "every dark cloud has its silver lining" and this one was no exception. For sitting there, in the turnstile of Position Three, not more than a half dozen feet away and purring like a contented kitten, sat an idling McCullough chainsaw.
Groovy!!!
Cleese ran over and scooped up the weapon. He grinned broadly as he hefted the chainsaw’s weight and turned back toward the center of the pit. He looked at the oncoming UDs, revved the McCullough’s motor, and then revved it again. As he strode toward the group of oncoming UDs, he continued his list of all the things he was going to do the next time he found himself in the same room as Monroe. And as the mental images mounted, he grinned malevolently and raised the McCullough over his head for the first strike.
The Blood of Eden
The light of the moon shone down silvery and bright as it poured like mercury through the blinds covering the window of Cleese’s crib. The air outside the window was cool, but not cold, the heat of the day having not yet fully dissipated over the open fields which surrounded the compound. Striated clouds hung like lace across the perpetually surprised lunar face. Only the mournful call of a Red Throated Loon broke the silence of the night.
Cleese sat on the edge of his bed, quietly contemplating the day and its painful lessons. It had been a long, hard day of training and he felt exhausted to his core. He knew he’d pushed it a little too hard today. His muscles still felt raw and sore, but his mood remained light. After all, he’d passed a milestone today—well, tonight, really—and he was still trying to figure out what
that
all meant and, more importantly, what it would mean for his future.
He sighed and looked over his shoulder as the milestone stirred slightly in his bed.
Chikara lay face across the sheets; her ass the only thing covered by the sweat and lust stained sheet. Her hair swirled about her head like an onyx halo. Even though she wore it short, it still managed to hide the majority of her face. From this angle, he could only make out her cheek and a portion of her full lower lip.
Cleese took a long, slow look over her. His eyes wandered over the contours of her form like a canoe lazily drifting upriver, bound for nowhere and going there in no particular hurry. As he gazed at her, he felt his heart pulse deep within his chest. The longer he stared at her, the more he was aware of it. In the moonlight, she looked beautiful; much more so than he’d ever seen her look. Her skin blushed with the slowly disappearing flush of afterglow.
Tonight, he’d finally gotten a good look at her in all her glory and she was something. Powerfully built and beautiful, every contour of her body was a treasure trove of wonders. And each of those wonders came finely documented by their own map—her tattoo. It was just as much a thing of beauty as was its owner, truly a marvel to behold. The artwork itself was that of a dragon, but it was so much more. The tail began just above her left ankle and it swirled around her calf, continuing on up around her thigh. The main body of the beast wrapped itself like a lover around her waist and up around her lower rib cage, circling up her back and over her left shoulder where the neck and head came over her trapezius muscle and down the front of her chest. The head was a horrible thing to see; its face set in a malicious frown with deeply set, cruel eyes. Its mouth was thrown wide; drawn as if the beast were just about to bite down on the nipple of her breast. Just under the swell of her lower breast, the monster’s hand came up from under her arm, gently cupping her. The artistry was amazing.
She’d felt compelled to explain the tattoo early on in the evening, just before she disrobed and climbed into his bed. The image was commonly referred to as a "focus image" and it was mostly for distraction purposes. In the early days of martial conflict, it was noted that an opponent’s attention could be drawn away by the sight of an unexpected image in an unexpected place. It was the main reason a lot of fighters got tattoos in the first place. In the first few days of the dead coming back, Chikara had noticed that the reanimated corpses—despite their limited intellect, and sometimes because of it—would respond in the same way, particularly when there were flashes of color. It was a discovery that, up until now, she’d kept to herself, but she’d gotten the tattoo immediately after joining the League. Her thought was that if a little color could distract a UD, then a whole lot just might give her the edge she’d need to stay alive. She’d asked the tattoo artist to simply draw the most fearsome thing he could think of. From its effect on both UD and Man alike, she guessed that it worked.
And then, there were her piercings.
These took a little more explanation. She’d told him how she wore seven closed rings of varying size on her body. She said they were done in atonement for the fabled seven deadly sins. The three large rings in her left ear, she said, symbolized Gluttony, Sloth, and Greed. They were three rings of slightly decreasing size as they arched up her earlobe. The largest if them was about the size of a nickel. Her right ear held two hoops that represented Wrath and Envy. None of the hoops closed all the way and thus the circle was incomplete. Her reasoning was that all of the emotions were empty ones and therefore pointless. The ring in her left nipple was just over the heart for it was in the heart that Pride dwelt. It twinkled softly deep within the dragon’s jaws. The last of them signified Lust and that she wore through the hood of her clitoris.
It was, she said, a ring that few men had seen.
Cleese looked her over again, for what must have been the thousandth time tonight. He used all of the self control he could muster to sip at her image as if it were a fine brandy. Small pools of perspiration beaded up across her back and were set like small oases dribbled sporadically across a desert of bone and muscle. The subtle changes in light and shadow caused by the moonlight played across her musculature and created a landscape of what could only be described as paradise.
She’s
so
beautiful.
"You’re staring again."
He nearly jumped out of his skin when she spoke, he’d been so lost in the sight of her.
"Sorry. Just thinking," he said.
She stirred and turned languorously onto her back. She smiled and reached out for him to join her on the bed. He laid back and fell into her arms.
It felt like drowning—only more sublime.
"You do that, don’t you? What were you thinking about?"
"This place. The League. You. Me. Us. Pick one."
He gently kissed her, tasting himself on her lips.
"Want to talk about it?" she asked as she brushed some of his hair away from his eyes.
He sighed heavily. He wasn’t sure what he was feeling could be put into words, the fear, the despair, the unavoidable feeling that he was about to be fucked.
And not in the pleasurable way he’d just been.
Abruptly, and for reasons he wasn’t too sure of, he decided to try.
"I don’t know much, Chikara," he whispered, "but, I do know that this place… This place isn’t good for me… for us… for
anyone
. It’s poison. It’s like the decay and infection of The Dead has touched everything here and soured it."
He felt her reassuring hand on his arm.
"It’s a dead thing—cancerous—and its sole purpose is to leech the Life off of anything and everything it comes in contact with. And once it’s taken all it can while its host still lives, it doesn’t stop. It changes its agenda and begins to take all it can from its dead."
He smiled at her and almost stopped talking, but what he had to say refused to stay bottled up inside of him.
"The only thing it wants is to sour each and every one of us and it will succeed if we aren’t careful. The place is filled with a sickness that we can’t survive if we’re ever infected and I’m not talking here about being bit by a UD.
If
we play by League’s rules, they’ll use us up and spit us out. I understand that now. Do you?"
"Yes," she whispered and looked away into the darkness.
He turned in her arms and looked toward the ceiling for a second, trying to decide whether to tell her the rest of it. Slowly, he looked back and stared deeply into her eyes. Then, he decided that she, of all people, deserved to know the truth.
"I didn’t tell you before—shit, I haven’t told anyone—but… during my last match, when the spindles turned… The clip they gave me was loaded with blanks."
Chikara leaned up on one elbow and look at him.
"What?" Her expression deflated like a soufflé.
He nodded and pulled her back down to him. Right now, as he told her this, he needed to feel her body close to his. For some reason, being near her made it all not seem as bad.
"I can only figure that it was someone with enough juice to pull it off—my guess is either Masterson or Monroe. With the exception of the armorers, who let’s face it, don’t have the brains let alone the malevolent nature to pull something like that off, they were the only ones who could make the substitution—swap blanks for the live rounds."
"Why? How would they stand to benefit?"