A World of Ash: The Territory 3 (9 page)

The three ghouls covered the ground quickly, gaining on the prisoner as he tried to run – not that there was anywhere for him to run to. Both gates had now closed and the rock walls that surrounded the empty red dirt of the arena had been polished smooth, making them all but impossible to climb.

The prisoner turned at the last moment before the ghouls reached him. He shoved at the first one as it tried to launch itself at him. The prisoner desperately held back its bony decayed jaw as it snapped at his face, but this left him open to attack from the second and third ghouls. They flung themselves upon him, pushing him down into the dirt. The prisoner’s legs kicked frantically from beneath the ghouls as they sucked his life away.

Just like that it was over. It had lasted less than a minute. The crowd roared and cheered in seemingly equal parts approval and disappointment. Squid stared down at the three ghouls in the arena, which were still drinking from the now motionless body. How were you supposed to fight ghouls without a weapon? He didn’t think anyone could decapitate a ghoul with their bare hands – apart from Mr. Stownes, maybe, but not everyone was a walking mountain of violence. This wasn’t meant to be a fair fight. It was just a theatrical public execution.

Then the left gate opened again and a team of clergymen moved hastily toward the feeding ghouls. There were ten of them. Four dragged a heavy net of thick rope, blood stained, dirty and reinforced with wrappings of wire. These four wore thick padded armor on their arms and legs, giving their limbs the appearance of being entirely too muscular for their bodies. The other six moved beside the net-carriers, three on each side, with swords in their hands.

The noise of the crowd increased as the Holy Order men approached the ghouls. Perhaps sensing this new source of moisture, one of the ghouls jerked its head up from the body of the prisoner and looked toward the clergymen. Then it leaped toward them with whip-crack speed. The clergymen engaged it quickly, the nearest one batting it aside and two others hacking at it with their swords until its head rolled away on the ground. Even as these members of the clergy were fighting off that ghoul the net-bearers were tossing the heavy net over the remaining two and the body of the prisoner, who himself would be a ghoul soon enough.

As the heavy net dropped down over them the ghouls began jerking from side to side, rocking, thrashing their arms haphazardly in an attempt to free themselves, but in the end just entangling themselves further. Two of the clergymen who had thrown the net moved to collect the far corners. They kept low to the ground as they dragged the net back, sliding it beneath the two thrashing ghouls and the corpse of the prisoner. Squid realized then why they wore the thick padding on their arms and legs as the ghouls pushed their faces out through the openings in the net, snapping at them, trying to bite. One clergyman gave the female ghoul a swift punch in the face and it retreated for a moment before trying to reach him again.

They worked swiftly, and as they reached the other clergymen all four pulled the corners of the net together, where they secured a thick lock through the metal rings in each of the corners. As all this was happening another red-cloak was running across the arena dragging a chain that was unspooling from somewhere in the darkness beyond the right-hand gate. On reaching the net he hooked the chain through the lock and yelled back toward the gate. The clergymen stood aside as the chain began to retract, and the net, along with the corpse and the two flailing ghouls, left a long dragging line through the red sand as it was pulled back through the arched doorway.

The clergymen, wiping dust and sweat from their brows, followed the net out of the arena as Priestess Regina, flanked by those two red-cloaks, re-emerged on the platform above. She stepped up to the microphone again amid the cheers and shouts of the prisoners.

“It is with a heavy heart I announce the next soul to be tried in the arena.” Priestess Regina’s voice spread, amplified, to fill the colosseum. “She committed the greatest betrayal by allowing those who had been brought here to escape into the madness of the badlands. She betrayed her order and she betrayed her God.”

Squid felt bile rise into his throat. Nausea flooded him. He was aware that Priestess Regina continued orating to the masses but he could not hear her. It was as if his ears had suddenly filled with water. He knew who he would see entering the arena even before she was forced from the darkness of the archway. Sister Constance, Squid’s mother, stumbled out onto the red sand and dropped to her knees. Her black dress was already damaged, torn from the low hem right up to her waist. Her face was white with horror and her eyes red from desperate tears. The crowd erupted. The noise all but shook the great indoor amphitheatre. Squid knew that to these prisoners the spectacle of a Black Sister in the arena must have been tantalizing and exhilarating. To Squid it was heartbreaking and terrifying.

As Priestess Regina finished speaking Sister Constance looked up and reached toward her. She called out something Squid couldn’t hear but he could see the pleading in her eyes. Priestess Regina looked down at the disgraced Sister, her response evident in the snarling curl of her lips, and without the slightest trace of pity or remorse she turned and walked back through the archway. Constance’s arms fell limply to her sides. She slumped as Priestess Regina disappeared from view. The gate finished lowering with a clunk, leaving Squid’s mother alone in the perfect prison of the arena.

Squid stared into the arena in disbelief. Even through the noise of the crowd he could hear the rhythmic clunking of chain running past cog as the second gate began to rise. Once again the sound of the ghouls preceded their arrival into the light of the arena. And just like before, they came loping in their staccato way from beneath the still-opening gate. Three of them again, new ghouls this time, freshly fed replacements moving with pent-up strength and ferocious speed. They were moving quickly, but then so was Squid.

He was out of his seat and over the railing before he’d even realized he was moving. Some instinct had driven him, but now that his mind had caught up he knew he wasn’t going to stop. That was his mother down there and he wouldn’t let those dry, decaying creatures of death touch her. He hung from the top of the wall and then dropped the rest of the way into the arena.

“Squid!”

Squid looked up to see Nim leaning over the edge. Squid made eye contact with his friend and then turned and ran for his mother. Behind him he heard the soft landing of feet and knew that Nim had joined him. The ghouls were close to Sister Constance, who had stood and was backing away but only with the slow steps of a futile retreat.

“Hey!” Squid called as he ran. His legs still felt like jelly beneath him. The Holy Order had given them food and water while they had ridden in the bio-truck and that had gone some way to replenishing his energy, but the ghouls had sucked so much from him that he still felt dizzy and barely in control of his body as he moved. He wouldn’t let that stop him though. “Hey!” he called again, waving his arms and trying to lure the ghouls away from his mother. “Over here!”

The ghouls flicked their heads to look at him, slowing their progress toward Sister Constance as they examined this new moisture source. For a moment they stopped entirely, still moving their heads in those sudden spasmodic flicks.

“Yeah!” Squid screamed at them, his throat ripping raw from the force of it. “Come on!”

“Squid, no!” Sister Constance cried. “What are you doing?!”

But Squid knew what he was doing and he was pleased to see that after his wild screaming the ghouls had turned their stop-start sprint toward him instead. He heard the crowd all around him, an endless clamoring of voices, the volume of it growing louder as the ghouls came to attack him. He must have looked like a madman jumping to his death in the arena. Well, they were about to see entertainment, the drama of life and death.

Squid didn’t slow even as he collided with the first ghoul, a young male whose strength easily knocked Squid off his feet, sending him sliding on his back in the dirt. The ghoul pounced on him, its pale face mere inches from Squid’s own. Then it opened its dislocated jaw and hissed and screeched and moaned in a seemingly impossible, all-encompassing sound. Squid felt the dryness of its breath and smelled the ashy stench of burning decay, as the red and gray dust it exhaled peppered his face. But where once Squid would have been paralyzed with fear there was now only an immense force building within him, a dust storm raging inside his body and mind, and he no longer needed to keep it contained. Squid snarled.

“Do it!” he shouted as he held his forearm, bare and ready, in front of the ghoul’s open mouth. The horrific thing didn’t need another invitation. Squid felt its teeth break his skin, but even with the pain he smiled, and as the creature instantly pulled off, yelping and shaking its face like a dog stung by a bee, he shouted again, “How does that taste?” He watched the creature fall and writhe on the ground as he stood. “How does that taste, huh?”

Squid landed one kick in the ghoul’s side as it disintegrated into ash, his boot sending a spray of the fine particles into the air almost as though he had kicked it into non-existence.

Another of the ghouls pounced on Squid from behind. He felt its teeth on the back of his neck, but within moments the weight of the creature was gone and it was nothing but another cloud of dusty gray cinders that floated down to cover his back. Squid looked around for the third ghoul and spotted it just as Nim shoved his arm into its jaws. The creature had once been an elderly woman who wore the blue of a prisoner, probably a victim of the colosseum herself. Almost immediately she dropped into a colorless pile on the ground.

Squid looked at his mother a short distance away. She was kneeling on the ground, staring at him, unmoving. Tears had filled her eyes and she was shaking her head. He moved to her, feeling blood from the punctures on the back of his neck run down the line of his spine in a warm rivulet.

“It’s all right,” he said as he reached her. He dropped to the ground and pulled her into a hug. “It’s all right, Mum. I won’t turn. Those things can’t hurt me anymore.”

Sister Constance pulled away from Squid’s embrace. Recognition dawned across her face. “You found it,” she said. “You found it, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

She smiled and pulled him back into a hug.

Squid noticed the chanting and bellowing of the crowd had faded into nothing. He looked up at the stands. Everywhere around him, in all the seats in the entire colosseum, the crowd of prisoners had gone silent. Squid knew that never before would they have seen someone defeat the ghouls, or at least not in the way he and Nim had done, not by letting them bite, encouraging them to bite, and watching as the ghouls disintegrated into dusty ashes.

Squid turned to look at the gateway through which the prisoners had been forced. It remained firmly closed and there was no sign of Priestess Regina on the platform above. He sensed she and the Holy Order were watching but perhaps didn’t want to enter yet, afraid that he and Nim might still turn just as everyone they had ever seen bitten by a ghoul had turned. He and Nim were perhaps the only people in all the world immune to the bites of ghouls. They had changed the rules, but no one knew that yet.

Squid rose to his feet. As he stood he felt the eyes of the crowd on him. He turned a half-circle, looking up into the faces that looked down at him. He had the attention of all those the Church had locked away here. He had a chance to speak to them.

“My name is Squid Blanchflower.” He spoke as loudly as his voice would allow. “I was sent on a quest to find a weapon that would destroy the ghouls. My friends and I have been to Big Smoke and we have found this weapon. We found the vaccine.” Squid held his arm up high above his head so that all could see the fresh bite and the streaks of blood that it had left. “This vaccine made our bodies the weapon against the ghouls. No ghoul can bite us and survive, and their bites don’t turn us into one of them.”

The silence of the crowd was broken by murmuring, the low rumbling of disbelief mixed with hopeful excitement. Squid knew he had something he’d never had before. He had something the Church of Glorious God the Redeemer never thought he’d have, or perhaps hoped he never would; he had a sort of power over these people. Not power in the way the Administrator or the High Priestess had power. They had the power to lock people up, to confine them, to control them. He knew he had something different. He had the power to set people free.

“They don’t want you to know this exists,” Squid yelled into the crowd. “The Church of Glorious God the Redeemer doesn’t want you to know that it’s possible to destroy the ghouls forever. They took the vaccine away from us and locked us in here so that people would never know. If they had it their way you would never know that you, too, could be made immune to the ghouls. Alice is going to be destroyed – all those who live outside the walls, all the Outsiders in the Territory will be left to die. This vaccine is the only hope we have of saving those people, and the Sisters and the Holy Order are keeping it from them.”

The murmurs of the crowd increased into loud talking, passionate arguing, and yelling. Squid could feel the energy of the place. They had started shouting down to him. Questions. Comments. Fears. Outcry. It was like the circle of people who had surrounded himself and Lynn in the slums. They had been desperate to hear that perhaps some help was on the way, desperate for any information Squid could give them. They had been clearly growing more resentful of their situation by the second. Squid had been afraid then, in the slums; he had tried to calm them down. But this time, in the prison of Pitt, Squid decided that he would help tip them the other way, to fuel their anger until it became action.

Hearing a grinding from the rear wall of the arena Squid turned to see the heavy gate over the left archway rising. The Holy Order were coming out in force. Thirty or more men marched in formation with weapons drawn.

“I don’t think we should let them get away with this,” Squid called to the crowd. He spoke more quickly now as more clergymen hurried out from under the still-rising gate. “We can save everyone. Not just ourselves but everyone in the entire world.”

The clergymen were coming across the arena toward them now. People in the crowd were standing and yelling. The red-cloaks guarding them were moving among them, trying to quell the growing unrest, but they were so far outnumbered they had little chance of doing so. Squid could feel the crowd’s willingness to act, and yet the prisoners remained in the stands. The red-cloaks approached with their weapons raised, apparently still wary of Squid and Nim. There was nothing they could do as the clergymen grabbed them. It was a shame, Squid thought, that their newly acquired ability to turn ghouls to ash gave them no power over other humans.

The Holy Order restrained Squid, Nim, and Sister Constance and started leading them toward the gate. Squid had rescued his mother, at least temporarily, but it would come to nothing if they couldn’t get out of there. He had come so close to inspiring the prisoners to join the fight, but even showing them the proof of what he and Nim had found hadn’t been enough.

As they drew near to the jagged fangs of the open portcullis Nim yelled back to the crowd. “They want your families to die!”

And then, all around them the blue uniforms of the prisoners of Pitt began to move. They started shoving their way along the rows of seats. They started hurrying toward the exits at the top of the colosseum. They started dropping over the walls and into the arena. The clergymen in the stands vanished among the swarm of blue uniforms. Squid felt a spark of hope ignite inside him. Nim had given them the push they needed. Nim understood them because he’d found the common ground on which they all stood: they would fight for their families. Nim’s mob was what he cared most about in the world, was what he had been fighting for this whole time. Squid knew he sometimes had difficulty understanding people, their emotions and their motivations, but he understood something more about them in that moment: they needed something they could relate to, something within their grasp, to drive them. Here was Squid, fighting for the entirety of the world, and that was too much for people. What they needed was something more tangible, someone specific to fight for, and Nim had known what they would value most: their friends, their families, those they loved. Just as Squid had been willing to jump the wall for his mother, they too would jump the wall for their families.

The red-cloaks hesitated for a moment before one of them began barking orders.

“The warden wants them in the slot. Your team take them down there. The rest of us will contain this.”

Six of the clergymen kept moving, herding Squid, Nim, and Sister Constance along with them. The others prepared to fight the prisoners spilling over the walls. Squid heard cracks of gunfire as he was pulled away into the tunnels.

Despite being in the custody of the clergymen and despite the knowledge that prisoners were being shot in the arena, something swelled within Squid. For so long he had felt alone in this. Even with Lynn, Nim, Mr. Stix, and Mr. Stownes at his side, it had still just been their small group against the world. Now, though, he didn’t feel alone anymore. All those who had cascaded over the walls and onto the red dirt of the arena were with him. All those who’d charged up the stands to the exits were with him. He may not have known them. They may not have known him. But by being willing to stand up to the Holy Order they were with him. As shouting and screams and gunfire echoed down the tunnel behind him Squid hoped they really were ready and willing for the fight that would come.