Authors: Jonathan Maberry
“Have you seen other prisoners?” asked Tom.
Chong shook his head. “No, but I heard people talking about them. There’s supposed to be a bunch of other kids here. In the hotel, I think.”
“Then that’s where Benny and Nix will be. Preacher Jack took them.”
Chong touched Tom’s arm. “There are things you need to know. While I was still in the pit, I heard White Bear talking to someone. I’m pretty sure it was Preacher Jack. White Bear is Charlie’s brother and he … he called Preacher Jack ‘Dad.’”
Tom grabbed Chong’s wrist. “Preacher Jack is Charlie Pink-eye’s father?”
“I know … it’s scary, but it makes sense.”
“Only to madmen, kiddo.”
Chong looked away to the west. “Tom, where’s Lilah?”
Tom shook his head. “I … don’t know where she is. She could be with Benny and Nix, or she could be out there somewhere.”
“Out there” was a vast and featureless black nothing.
Chong licked his lips. “What … what do we do now?”
Tom handed him a knife. “We go find Benny and Nix,” he said.
B
ENNY AND
N
IX FELL INTO DARKNESS.
N
EITHER OF THEM SCREAMED.
Benny was too furious, and Nix … well, Benny didn’t know what Nix was feeling. He thought he heard her laugh as the darkness of the pit swallowed them. Benny waited for the crushing impact at the bottom of a long fall, but his feet struck something soft and yielded. He hit and bounced and spun, and only then did he crash to the dirt. Behind him he heard Nix rebound and then thud down.
There was enough light to see, and as Benny sat up painfully he saw that just below the hole was a sloppy stack of old mattresses, positioned to catch their fall and keep them from shattering their legs.
“Very considerate of them,” Nix muttered.
“I don’t think they care much about us.”
“No, really?” replied Nix sarcastically.
“I mean,” said Benny, “that it’s probably not as much fun to watch cripples fighting zoms.”
“Again … really?”
They got to their feet and looked around. No zoms and not much light. The pit wasn’t circular, and they could make out tunnels leading off in six separate directions.
White Bear squatted on the edge of the pit, grinning in
a way that made his burned face look like a monster out of a nightmare. “Here are the rules,” he growled. “If you’re paying attention, you might already have guessed that this ain’t a straight pit-fight. There are tunnels and side passages and a few surprises cut every which way. Some of them are dead ends, and I do mean ‘dead.’”
“Ha, ha,” said Benny.
“You might also have guessed that you ain’t alone down there.”
Benny expected Nix to say “No, really?” again, but she held her tongue, so Benny supplied the sarcasm. “Well, we figured that … these being zom pits and all.”
“Watch your mouth, boy,” snapped White Bear.
“Really?” he said, and liked how it sounded. “What are you going to do? Beat us up and throw us in a pit full of the living dead?”
White Bear seemed to chew on that and apparently decided that Benny had a point.
“You were starting to tell us about rules,” prompted Nix.
“Yes indeed, little cutie. My dad placed a church bell down there. It ain’t easy to find, but it’s there. Find it and ring it and you get a free ticket out of there.”
“Until when?” demanded Nix. “Until tomorrow’s games? And then the next day and the next until we’re dead?”
“Nope. This is a real deal, straight up and hand to God. You ring that bell and we pull you out of there and put you on the road. No weapons or rations or none of that stuff, but you walk free.”
That seemed to catch Nix off guard, and she turned sharply to Benny. “Is he telling the truth?”
“I … think so,” Benny said quietly. “What’s he got to lose? If we die, then Preacher Jack proves to the crowd that we’re sinners. If we make it out and they let us go, Preacher Jack and White Bear prove that their word is good. Either way they win.”
Nix chewed her lip. He stepped closer and touched her cheek.
“Hey … are you okay? No, wait—that is the stupidest question ever asked. What I mean is—”
Nix blinked and smiled, and for a moment she was back. The old Nix. Strong and smart and sane. She grabbed Benny and gave him a fierce hug, and in a tiny whisper filled with enormous emotion said, “I don’t want to die down here, Benny.”
“Hey!” yelled White Bear. “When you two lovebirds are done making out, can we get a move on? Lot of people paid good money for this.”
Benny and Nix made the same obscene gesture at exactly the same moment. White Bear laughed out loud, and the audience applauded.
Before Benny released Nix he whispered, “We can do this. Find the bell, get out.”
“Warrior smart,” she said.
“Warrior smart,” he agreed.
“Hey!” yelled Nix. “Aren’t we supposed to have weapons or something?”
Preacher Jack leaned out over the edge. “The Children of Lazarus carry no weapons, and yet they strike with the power of the righteous. How would it be fair to arm you against them?”
“Okay,” said Benny, “then are we going to face two zom—I mean two Children—who are the same size and weight and age as us?”
The smile on Preacher Jack’s face was truly vile. It was filled with everything polluted and corrupt and unnatural that could show through smiling lips and twinkling blue eyes.
“Prayer and true repentance are your true weapons,” he said.
He stepped back, and other faces began filling the edge of the pit. Torches were placed in stands mounted on the rim, and their light turned the maze into a dim eternity of dirty yellow shadows.
Nix suddenly grabbed Benny’s arm, and he turned to see that the shadows were not empty. Things moved down the twisted tunnels. Stiff figures shuffled toward them through the gloom, and then they heard the low, hungry moan of the living dead.
C
HONG STOOD IN THE SHADOWS AND WATCHED
T
OM
I
MURA WALK UP
onto the hotel porch. There were two guards there, both of them armed with shotguns. They stiffened as Tom mounted the steps. One guard gestured for him to stop on the top step.
“If you’re here for the games,” he began, “you need to go around—”
Those were his last words. Chong never saw Tom’s hand move. All he saw was a flash of bright steel that seemed to whip one way and then the other, and suddenly both men were falling away from Tom. Blood painted the wall and door of the old hotel.
It was the fastest thing Chong had ever witnessed, and on a deep gut level he knew that it was necessary, but it was also wrong. These men were part of Gameland, they were forcing kids to fight in zombie pits, and yet their lives had ended in the blink of an eye. They were discarded. Tom used
chiburi
—a
kenjutsu
wrist-flick technique that whipped all the blood off his sword blade. The sword gleamed as if it had not just been used to take two human lives.
Tom turned as Chong crept up the porch steps. He looked sad. “Sorry you had to see this, Chong.”
“Me too,” said Chong sadly. “Guess we had no choice.”
“Not if we want to save Benny and Nix.”
“This is war,” said Chong. “And these people are monsters.”
Tom put his hand on Chong’s uninjured shoulder. “Listen to me. There are good people too. No matter how bad this gets, kiddo, never forget that. There are more good people than bad.”
Chong said nothing. He absently touched the bite on his other shoulder. “Aren’t you going to quiet them?” he asked.
“No. We need all the help we can get. Let them wander around and confuse things. I’ll take care of them later if there’s time. Right now we have to find Benny, Nix, and Lilah.”
Chong said, “I hope she’s okay.” He was aware that he’d said “she” rather than “them,” but Tom didn’t seem to mind.
“Sorry things didn’t work out with you two,” Tom said. “For what’s it worth … she couldn’t do any better.”
Chong didn’t reply.
Tom quietly opened the front door and stepped inside. And stopped dead. His eyes went wide, and when Chong followed him in, he also stared. On one side of the room, weapons, ammunition, and explosives were stacked from floor to ceiling; on the other were hundreds of smaller, more well-used guns and rifles, each of them hanging on a nail driven into the wall. Small paper tags hung from each trigger guard.
“What is all this?” asked Chong in a hushed voice.
Tom listened for sounds of other people, heard nothing. Then he touched the barrel of one of the new rifles. “Probably scavenged a military base.”
Chong pointed to the older weapons. “And these?”
“They probably collect firearms from everyone who comes to Gameland. They did that before. Keeps people from shooting each other over bets.” He bent and read several of the small tags. “Damn.”
“What’s wrong?”
Tom held out one of the pistols. “Read the tag.”
“Lucille Flax.” Chong looked up, confused. “I don’t understand. Mrs. Flax is my—”
“—math teacher. I know. There’s a shotgun here with Adrian Flax’s name on it. That’s her husband.”
“Wait,” said Chong, “are you trying to say that they’re here? That my math teacher and her husband come to Gameland?”
“How else would you read it?”
“It doesn’t make sense! They’re regular people… . Mrs. Flax doesn’t come to places like this. She can’t!”
“Why not? Chong … no matter how often you see someone, you can’t ever say that you really know them. Everyone has secrets, everyone has parts of themselves that they hide from the world.”
“But … Mrs. Flax? She’s so … ordinary.”
“Well, kiddo, it’s not like people walk around with signs saying, ‘Hey, I’m actually a creep!’”
Chong kept shaking his head. “And I was running home to people like that?”
“Remember what I said. There are more good people than bad. Even so … you always have to pay attention.”
Chong sighed. “I guess this shouldn’t hit me so hard. After all Benny, Morgie, and I used to hang around Charlie and the Hammer all the time. We thought they were—”
“—cool. Yep, I know.”
“Still. My math teacher? Jeez … so much for civilized behavior.”
“Walls, towns, rules, and day-to-day life doesn’t make us civilized, Chong. That’s organization and ritual. Civilization lives in our hearts and heads or it doesn’t exist at all.”
Then Chong spotted something that made him yelp. He ran across the room to a big urn in which long-handled weapons stood like a bouquet of militant flowers. He slid two items from the urn: a pair of wooden swords.
Tom took the bokkens from him. “Son of a—”
They both froze as they heard a sound from somewhere else in the hotel. A sharp cry. A child’s yelp of pain.
Tom turned and looked at the broad staircase.
“That’s not Benny or Nix. Too young,” gasped Chong in a horrified voice.
“I know,” Tom said bitterly, and headed up the stairs. “Stay behind me and let me handle things.”
They moved up the stairs as quickly as they could, but the building was old and the stairs creaked. Luckily, the laughter from outside was so loud that most of the noise was hidden. However, when they were near the top step, one board creaked louder than all the others. The hallway was empty and poorly lit by lanterns set on shelves along the walls, with doors leading to rooms on both sides. One door stood ajar, and from that there was a sharp call.
“I’ll be right back,” said a man as he stepped into the hall. Chong estimated that he was at least twenty feet from where Tom crouched on the top step. It seemed like a mile. The man
looked up and down the hall and was starting to turn back to the room when he saw the figures crouched in the shadows of the stairway.
“Hey,” he said, his voice rising an octave in alarm. It was the last thing he said. Tom surged forward, racing at full speed toward the man. His rush was so sudden that the twenty feet melted into nothing. Steel flashed and red sprayed and then the man was falling. Without a second’s pause, Tom kicked open the door and leaped into the room.
Chong was running now.
There were screams and the rasp of knives being drawn, then a single muffled gunshot. The bullet punched through the plaster wall a foot behind Chong, making him jump. He crouched low and peered inside the room. The sight was one that he knew he would never forget.
It was a big room, a suite. Along the far wall was an old iron radiator, and through its metal structure the guards had run three lines of chains. The chains were connected to iron rings that were bolted and locked around the necks of at least forty children. The oldest was Chong’s age, an Indian girl with one eye puffed shut and a split lip. The youngest was no older than six. All of the kids were bruised, and each one looked absolutely terrified. A smoking pistol lay on the floor with a man’s severed hand still attached to it.
The rest of the room was a slaughterhouse. Five men lay on the floor, or sprawled over furniture, or in a heap on the bed. Three men were still on their feet. Tom was one; the other two were guards. One of the guards was wandering away from the fight, hands clamped to a ruined throat, eyes already fading into emptiness. The remaining guard held a
machete in his hands but he, too, was backing away from this man, this thing that had burst into the room in a storm of death. The machete dropped to the floor as he brought his hands up in total surrender.
The entire fight was over already.
Chong stared at Tom. Benny’s brother looked as cold and calm as if he was watering his rosebushes or cutting a slice of pie, even though his face was splashed with fresh blood.
“Is the hallway clear?” Tom asked in a disturbingly serene voice.
Chong stammered an affirmative.
Tom nodded. He extended his sword toward the remaining guard. “Are there any other guards on this floor?”
“N-n-no! Two on the porch and us … I mean me. God … don’t kill me, please … I got kids of my own.”
Tom stepped forward and touched the bloody sword tip to the guard’s cheek. “Do your kids have to fight in the pits?” The curl of his lip was the only clue to the emotion he was keeping in check behind his bland face.