This Rotten World (Book 2): We All Fall Down (18 page)

Private Hugh Bryant sat in the
security room of the Coliseum, pouring through the footage from the previous
night. It was a chore because the security system didn't come with an
instruction manual. He was working feverishly, checking each feed, rewinding,
fast-forwarding, rewinding again. There was just so much coverage. With the
exception of the locker rooms and the bathrooms, it seemed as if every inch of
the Coliseum had a camera covering it.

Major Miller was a tough man, and
he didn't want to let him down. The consequences for disappointing the Major
were always harsh and more often than not mean-spirited. Many of the men hated
him, his round, ruddy face always barking out orders amidst a stream of
profanity. But he wasn't all bad. When you did a good job, he let you know it,
and Bryant had done enough good jobs for the Major over the last five years to
feel like the man wasn't a complete asshole. He wasn't about to let him down
now.

Bryant moved his hand across the
security console, moving the trackball in his hand back and forth. That wasn't
the right camera either. He punched up another camera, one of about a hundred
as far as he could tell. This one gave a God's eye view of the concourse. He
rewound the footage to two in the morning and then skimmed through it. His
breath caught in his throat as he saw Private Estep walking into a bathroom. He
rewound the footage, just to be sure. Yep, that was him.

Private Estep was one of those
guys that should have probably been in prison, but who had found a home in the
military where his depravity was largely a benefit... when he was on foreign
soil. Most of the men had no love for the man, but he was one of their own, and
the prevailing sentiment was that whoever had murdered him had to pay.

Private Bryant rewound the
footage and watched as a pretty woman waved at the soldier and then entered the
bathroom. His stomach turned as he watched Private Estep look up and down the
concourse as if he were going to cross a street. Seeing no prying eyes, he then
headed into the bathroom after the girl, hiking his pants up and smiling like a
goon.

He leaned back in his chair and
wiped the sweat from his brow. He had found it. The footage rolled on, and then
he saw a beautiful blonde woman enter the bathroom. He double-timed the footage
and watched as the two girls came out of the bathroom, a swollen jaw, a
disheveled look, and one girl clutching the other one. He didn't need to see
into the bathroom to  know what had happened, and he sat back in his chair to 
think about what he was going to do about it.

On one hand, perhaps Private
Estep had gotten what he deserved. It didn't matter to Bryant that Estep was a
"brother-in-arms"; no true brother of his would ever attack a woman.
Private Bryant knew that there was no way that the now-deceased soldier was
going in there just to take a leak. He was going in there to do some foul
business and had gotten what he deserved. But Major Miller wouldn't see it that
way. All Miller would see was a dead soldier. Dead soldiers meant retribution.
Retribution meant those girls would have to pay for defending themselves from
being raped.

Jesus,
he thought. He
leaned back in his chair and prayed for an answer, hands clasped together under
his chin, head bowed forward. He had decided what to do when there was a knock
on the door. He quickly switched the monitor to another channel and then hopped
up out of the rolling chair that he had been sitting in. He walked over to the office
door, turned the knob, and fell flat on his back as the door was slammed
backwards.

A man stood above him, business
in his eyes. He was a thick man, built for trouble, and black stubble framed
his square jaw. The man picked him up off the ground by his shirt, his teeth
clenched in a menacing fashion. Private Bryant didn't see the first punch; he
didn't see the second punch either.

When he woke up, his head was
spinning and he was bound and gagged, silver duct tape sealing his mouth. All
of the monitors had been smashed, and the DVD's that stored all of the footage
were broken into pieces. Three men and two women were gathered in a circle,
speaking in hushed tones.

The blonde girl, the one from
the video looked over at him, a suspicious look on her face. "He's
awake."

The tall white man looked at him
and then spoke to the bald black man, "C'mon, man. You know what we gotta
do."

The black man had his back to Private
Bryant, and he said, "No. I know this man. He's a good man."

"You're out of your
mind," the tall white man said. "We let this guy walk, and we're
dead. He's going to go straight to that colonel, and it's not just going to be
them, it's going to be us too."

The fat man whined, "I
don't want to die, but I don't want to kill anyone either."

"No one cares what you
want. It's not like you'd be the one killing him anyway," the blonde girl
spat at him.

Bryant grasped the situation,
but there was nothing he could do. They were deciding his fate right in front
of him. Underneath the duct tape, he tried to make words, but nothing he tried
was intelligible.

"This is the same guy that
showed us where the weapons were locked up," the black man said. Now
Bryant recognized him. The unwieldy, khaki boots. The bald head. The black man
was his only chance. "We can't just kill him," he continued.

"Showing us where weapons
are and covering our ass for a murder are two entirely different things,"
the blonde said.

"She's right," the
other girl said.

The black man shook his head and
then sighed. He looked at Private Bryant as if to say he was sorry.

"It's decided," the
tall white man said. He pulled a knife from his belt and advanced on the man.

Private Bryant shook his head
from side to side and tried as hard as he could to speak.

The white man squatted down and
sat in front of him. There was no joy on his face, just a cold efficiency that
scared the daylights out of Private Bryant. He couldn't believe that this was
how it was going to end, killed by the very people he was sworn to protect.

Private Bryant flinched when the
man raised his hand to his face. He squeezed his eyes shut as he felt the first
bit of pain, and then it was over. The man had pulled the duct tape off of his
face with a loud rip.

"I'm sorry about this. Any
last words?" the man said. Private Bryant hesitated. The man pulled his
knife hand back, ready to plunge it into his body.

"Wait!" He didn't
scream the word so much as he projected it, making it as commanding as
possible. The man had an army bearing about him that he recognized, and the
tone of voice worked.

"What?" the man asked.

"You're not out of the
woods yet," Private Bryant said.

"What are you talking
about?"

Private Bryant looked around the
room, making eye contact with everyone he could. "The DVD's are only half
of it. You also need to destroy the hard drives. The discs only record the last
24 hours, the hard drive saves everything, and I'm not the only soldier here
who can access the security cameras."

The white man looked over his
shoulders and waved the others over to the monitors. "Find that hard drive."

The group moved over to the
desk, and began looking at the smashed up console. Private Bryant felt relief.
They had no idea what they were doing.

The young girl spoke to the fat
man, "Can't you find them, Rudy? Aren't you some sort of computer expert?"

Rudy threw his hands up in the
air. "I'm not that much of a geek. My only real experience with this type
of stuff is video games."

The black man kicked at the
console, trying to break things.

The blonde girl and the brunette
squatted down and took turns yanking on parts of the console to no avail.

The man with the knife sighed.
"We don't have time for this." Without warning, he jerked Private
Bryant to his feet, the knife held to his throat. "What do we do?"

Private Bryant was calm.
"Free my hands, and I'll show you."

The man with the knife hesitated
for a brief second, but then he sawed the duct tape off of Bryant's wrists with
the knife. Private Bryant sank to his knees, and slid the entire console out
from the wall. He worked fast, sweat springing to his brow. He popped the
console open neatly after removing a handful of screws with his ever-present
screwdriver. He reached into the back of the console, and pulled out a metal
box, and held it up the way a doctor holds up a newborn baby for the mother to
see.

The man with the knife snatched
it out of his hand. "Nice work, Private."

The man examined the device,
threw it on the ground and crushed it. It came open a bit and was dented, but
Private Bryant knew that his boys could still get the information off of it.
"Here, let me."

He held out his hand for the
knife. The man looked at him like he was crazy, and then he took a leap of
faith and handed the knife to Private Bryant. His heart jumped in his chest.
Bryant knelt down and cracked open the hard drive's case, pulling the disks
free. Then he handed the silver disks to the big white man and said, "This
is what you need. Mess those up, and they'll never know."

The man crushed them in his
hands, grabbed the knife from Private Bryant, and drew deep furrows all over
the disks. Then he slid the knife into his belt and turned to Private Bryant.
"Thanks for your help. The way I see it, you just saved our lives and your
own. You helped us, so now you're in it with us. Do you agree?"

Private Bryant shook his head.

"Good." The man held
out his hand. "The name is Zeke."

Private Bryant shook the man's
hand in a firm handshake.

"This is going to sting a
bit," he said.

"Huh?"

Bryant blinked his eyes, waiting
for them to clear, then he heard the sound of duct tape and felt the man
wrapping his wrists. When his vision finally cleared, the man stood over him
with the tape in his hand. "Sorry about the punch, but I figured you might
want to mess that face up a little more before you went to that Colonel and told
him you got overrun in the booth."

"It's alright. I was kind
of expecting it."

"What are you going to tell
them when they find you?" Zeke asked.

"Men in masks came, jumped
me, and destroyed all of the evidence."

"Good. We'll see you
around..."

Zeke left the words hanging
there, so he filled them in, "Private Hugh Bryant."

The man smiled. "We'll see
you around, Hugh."

The group filed out of the room.
The black man nodded at him, and gave him a salute. Hugh Bryant closed his eyes
and took a nap.

****

When he awoke, the Colonel was there,
squatting over him. The Colonel's jaw muscles pulsed with fury as Hugh told his
story. He was furious, and for his negligence, Hugh Bryant pulled extra duty on
the fences. He didn't complain. Lives were saved, including his own. Sometimes
the army had to protect itself from itself, and Hugh figured that's what he had
done.

The refugees of the Coliseum
were issued bayonets. They were not issued the rifles to attach them to. The
Major made sure of that. When the sun came up, the refugees lined up outside,
dry-heaving amid the stench. Rudy was in the first batch of refugees to take a
shift. With the handle of the bayonet in his soft paw, he was marched out to
the fence and was ordered to dispatch the enemy.

"What do you mean?" he
asked.

The soldier that he was talking
to was mean-looking, and the last thing he wanted to do was piss the man off.
He had suffered enough embarrassment in the last few days, but his cooperation
didn't matter because this soldier in particular seemed to be taking the death
of another soldier as a personal affront to his honor. He stepped up to Rudy,
towering half a foot over him. With Rudy's face in his chest, the soldier
leered down at him and said, "Are you fucking retarded? Kill the
motherfuckers. Take that fucking knife, and stab it into their heads. A little
exercise might do a lump of shit like you some good."

The soldier shoved him and
pushed him toward the fences, where the stench of rot was even riper. He didn't
want to do it, but he gagged and then threw up on the ground. He heard the
soldiers and some of the refugees laughing behind him. In the morning sun, he
straightened his back and slowly drew his eyes up from the puddle of vomit
between his shoes to see the dead on the other side of the fence. He had seen
them before, but now he was inches from them, and the decaying process had
progressed quickly in the hot sun. He locked eyes with the dead woman across
from him. Her hair was long, black, and crusted with dry blood. Her eyes were
cloudy, and her skin had turned a sickly gray shade. The skin of her fingertips
was gone, and all that was left was the bones, sharp and white. Her fingers
protruded through the chain link fence, and Rudy stepped closer to her.

Behind him, the soldier urged
him on like some sort of deranged cheerleader. "Go on, boy. Kill that
Annie."

Annies. The name made his skin
crawl. Rudy reached back and plunged the knife at the creatures head, putting
all of his weight behind it. The bayonet glanced off of the creature's
forehead, skittering sideways, and a flap of filleted forehead flopped over the
creature's eyes. It pawed at the air blindly.

The soldier behind him laughed.
"Don't blind them, fat boy. Kill 'em!" More soldiers joined in. They
were sitting in the sun, cleaning their weapons and smoking cigarettes, while
the refugees of the Coliseum sat behind them in rows, waiting for their shift
at the fence.

Rudy took a few shallow breaths
and pumped himself up to try again. This time he aimed for the creature's eyes.
He plunged the bayonet into the lady's eyes, and a cloudy liquid erupted from
it. He drove the knife deeper until he hit something hard. He put his weight
behind it, and the bone behind the woman's eye broke, the knife plunging into
something softer. The creature twitched, then dropped, falling off the end of
the bayonet. Another creature took its place. Behind him, he heard applause.

He knew it was mocking, but
inside, Rudy was thinking,
Hell yeah. I can kill these things!
He killed
another, and then another. By the fourth one his exuberance was gone, his arms
were tired, and sweat was running down his pink face. Killing people was a lot
more work than it was in Call of Duty, that was for sure.

After his fifth kill, Rudy
stepped back and looked at his handiwork. The fence ran for a good two hundred
yards. It was level thanks to the concrete apron that ran around the courtyard
of the Coliseum. The dead still lined the fence, eagerly stepping into the
spots that were vacated by the dead that Rudy and the other refugees had
killed. Beneath their mechanical movements, the truly dead were now being
trampled into jelly and bone dust. On the ground, blood and pus were beginning
to leak under the fence. They had no such concept as respect for the dead.

"What's the hold-up, darlin'?"
the asshole soldier said behind him.

Rudy killed his sixth creature.

****

Amanda watched Rudy for an hour.
When the hour was up, the soldiers called time, and the forty refugees that had
been sent to the fence, dropped their arms wearily to their side. They handed
over their bayonets, and then the soldiers picked out forty more lucky
volunteers. She had just enough time to look at Rudy's blistered hands before
the soldier that had been heckling Rudy for the last hour plopped a bayonet in
her hands and told her to get to work. Chloe was up on the line with her, and
they set about the work of dispatching the dead.

For Amanda, the experience was
terrifying. She couldn't see through the mass of dead before her. For every one
that dropped, another appeared, and still there was no glimpse of daylight on
the other side of the fence. Amanda was too short to reach some of the taller
creatures, so she picked and chose which ones she would kill until a tiny creature
showed up. It used to be a little girl. Now it was a snarling abomination,
shoving its diminutive fingers through the fence to try and reach Amanda.

She hesitated, and then her arm
dropped to her side. "What the fuck are we doing?"

"You say something,
sweetheart?" a soldier asked behind her.

Amanda did not reply. She just
stared at the faded eyes of the creature in front of her and kept the bayonet
at her side.

She heard the boots of the
soldier walking briskly over to her. "Go on, girl. Kill it. If that thing
was on this side of the fence, it would sure as hell try to kill you."

She said nothing.

Her silence infuriated the
soldier. She could sense that. From her left, Chloe spoke calmly to her,
"Just do it, Amanda."

Amanda's voice caught in her
throat, and she could barely get the words out. "It's wrong."

The soldier spun her around
roughly and looked her in the eyes. "It's wrong?" he asked in a
mocking voice. "Girl, I'll tell you what's wrong. What's wrong is having
to guard a bunch of spoiled civilians who don't give two shits about you while
your family is on the other side of the continent. Shit, I bet on the East
Coast, there's an asshole just like me yelling at an asshole just like you
right now. You know what I'd want him to say?"

Amanda looked at the ground.

"I'd want him to say 'Kill
that son of a bitch, before it kills someone else.' That someone else could be
my kids, my wife. And this little shit in front of us, well, you kill it and
maybe you help out one of my brothers, keep their kids safe... keep their wives
safe."

Amanda said nothing.

"You don't care about my
wife? My kids?" the soldier asked, his hands on his knees, bent over to
look her in the face.

"You can do it, Amanda.
Just pretend it's him," Chloe said.

The soldier laughed and looked
up at Chloe. "Barbie doll, you best mind your own damn business."

Amanda spun and drove the
bayonet home. The ex-little girl shuddered and fell, and then Amanda did the
same, screaming at the top of her lungs. The mass of the dead became excited,
drawn by her rage.

Chloe smiled. "Atta girl,
Amanda. You can do it."

Time disappeared, and when the
soldier called in the next shift, Amanda fell to the ground, the bayonet
sliding out of her hand and clattering on the concrete. Chloe and Rudy lifted
her up by her shoulders, and took her away from the fence.

****

Brian left his kids with Zeke
and stumbled to the fence with a bayonet in hand. His mind was clouded with
grief. Sadness seemed to be a part of him, every bit as important as his hand
or his wife or his children.

Thoughts of Sarah clouded his
mind as he felt the rough rubber handle of the bayonet in his hand. He could
see her in her dress, her brown eyes shining in the sunlight. They had been
married for ten years, ten great fucking years. The number loomed large in his
mind as he stepped up to the fence.

He turned and looked over his
shoulder to see his babies with their backs to him. Zeke was drawing their
attention away from the proceedings at the fence. They had seen too much already.
Zeke nodded at him, reassuring Brian that everything would be alright. Zeke was
a blessing.

Brian felt guilty for being as
useless as he had been. The father part of his heart struggled with the broken
part, battling back and forth. He knew he needed to step it up, reassert
himself as a normal, chipper presence in the girls' lives, but knowing and
actually being able to pull it off were two different things. It was as if he
were a drowning swimmer, stuck underneath the weight of an ocean whose waters
were composed of his own sadness. He could see the sun shining down through
that ocean, but he couldn't get there. It would just take time.

In front of him, a dead man
smashed its face against the fence. Brian hefted the bayonet in his hand, and
then drove it into the creature's head, content that his babies weren't
watching. The blade sunk into the soft flesh of the dead man's eyes. The
creature stiffened and jittered around, and the sensation of the bayonet
stabbing through flesh and bone left Brian repulsed. He wondered what Sarah
would have said.

They had always been pacifists.
Their children weren't allowed to watch any movies with guns or extreme
violence. They had never raised a hand to their children, though their friends
always insisted that discipline was the way to raise responsible, well-adjusted
children. Sarah always countered these arguments with, "Violence is a path
that leads to dehumanization." And their approach to child-rearing had
been acceptable in a world where the government kept them relatively safe...
but now, in this world, Brian wondered if they had made a mistake.

Brian watched as the dead man
fell to the ground, the knife dripping gore onto the concrete. His shoes stuck
momentarily in the blood that had begun to seep under the fence guarding the
Coliseum. He stepped up to the next dead person and delivered a blow that
jarred his elbow and shoulder with the force.

It felt good, this violence.
With every blow that he struck, he could feel the ocean of sadness around him
shrinking. Killing, it was like therapy. He took his emotions, bundled them
into a little ball and shot them down his arm and into the blade in his hand.
Then he took the blade and deposited those emotions into the brains of the
living dead. The sun was closer now; he could see the surface through the murky
water.

Dozens of the creatures died at
his hand, and he kept working, slaying with no care for time or his own energy.
Brian disappeared, replaced by a being of pure emotion, sweat running down its
face, its hands sticky with blood, its mind locked away in the task of killing.
On the fence, Brian grew to knew the joys of violence, the pleasure of killing
and taking on problems with a physical approach. He was reborn... and then he
died.

The soldiers called an end to
the shift, yelling and signaling for everyone to stop, but Brian didn't want to
stop. Brian turned around to look at the soldier behind him, and for the first
time since Sarah had been murdered, because that's what he thought of her death
as, he smiled. Then he spun on his heel, eager to remove one last member of the
dead army from the face of the planet. He plunged the knife into the eye of a
man in a leather jacket. The force of the blow caused the man's eye to erupt,
spraying cloudy liquid into Brian's own eye.

Brian stepped back, rubbing at
his eye, trying to get the liquid out. It was a reflex reaction, and in his
haste, he forgot that his own hands were covered in the blood of the dead and
with a single swipe of his face, he ensured that he would never reach the top
of that ocean of sadness. In fact, he was down deeper than ever.

****

The day continued, refugees
taking their turn at the fence, hour after hour. Still the dead congregated,
and a new problem arose. The fence was tall, but not tall enough. As the bodies
piled, up the dead continued to climb them, trampling over the corpses beneath
them. And it wasn't long before the tallest of the dead, could reach over the
top of the fences.

Major Miller appeared from
inside the arena, short, with a bulbous red face. If he grew a beard, he would
look like an alcoholic Santa Claus, but his face was clean-shaven. He took a
look at the situation and called a halt to the proceedings. To dispatch any
more of the dead would allow them to crest the fence. Everyone saw it, as did
the Major.

The refugees knelt and sat on
the concrete apron that was the Coliseum's courtyard. The Major pulled a
bullhorn out and flicked it on, holding it up to his thick pink lips. "You
did a good job today. There will be food; you will eat. But know this. If
another one of my soldiers is hurt, I will return the favor to you. We are here
to protect you, but if we must protect ourselves from you, then we will do what
we have to."

The refugees filed into the
arena, silent and worried. The lights on the concourse flickered.