Blood Games (11 page)

“
ZERO!
”

The screams were deafening.
The gates had closed and the lights encircling the ring went out. Now the only light came from the sky. That wasn’t enough to quell them, not nearly enough.

Sixty zombies
woke up from their daze, noticed one another, and it began.

Chapter Four: Battle of the Zombies

It devolved into an immediate fracas, fists swinging, teeth snapping, legs kicking, and blood flying. Cantine’s Poseidon dove at a zombie and ripped at his upper arm with his bare teeth. Of the sixty down there, Ink was familiar with three-quarters of them. The others were newbies. He would check the program for who they were and to whom they belonged later.

One of the giants by Thor hadn’t had a chance to take so much as a menacing step when Thor head-butted him to the
ground and roared. Ink stared in amazement at his zombie. That was what he’d brag about after Thor died, how he head-butted a guy twice his size and knocked him onto his ass. Then Thor gave him a little more to brag about. The blow had been so hard, and the guy so ludicrously huge, that he didn’t get up in time to avoid Thor’s kick. His face practically exploded, nose pushed back into his skull and blood spurting out as he tumbled onto his back.

“Go, Thor!” Ink shouted. Everyone was cheering and screaming so loudly that he couldn’t hear his own voice leave his throat.

Dozens of battles were going on all at once in the ring. They were punching and stomping, tearing fabric and skin and barreling each other over. Hades was a powerhouse as always, catching two of the newbies’ heads and smashing them together in a blow that proved fatal to both of them. The jumbo screens changed to DEATH KISS and showed a slow-motion replay that almost no one was watching. There was already plenty to see below!

The melee would end once
the sixty zombies killed or maimed their brethren down to twenty. Ten seconds into the fight, three were down and out. No, four. Ink couldn’t catch all of the action happening simultaneously, so he’d have to see the replays on his cell phone afterwards. The announcer’s voice came in fits and spurts through the roar of the audience. “Poseidon beats Spruce Zeus . . . wow, what a move . . . Hades lands Vulcan Green and Anubis in one blow! And look . . . someone took out Ptah!”

That could only be the one that Thor had taken down
, since that was the last fallen body. The announcer had missed Thor doing it, which was irritating. That head-butt, that kick, the way he’d jumped on the guy so fast . . . thank God for the blind kid’s zombie! Ink had been spared the embarrassment of having no fighter at all. Also, it was always shaming to be the manager of the first one to fall in a melee, and Ink had been spared that, too. There wasn’t shame in fifth or tenth or even second, but first . . . you didn’t want to be first. People remembered the first.

Now Thor
had another one in a lock and was bringing up his knee to smash the dude’s face in. If gory names had still been popular, Ink would have renamed him Face Smasher in a heartbeat. His inner teenaged boy thrilled at the name and Ink laughed internally at him.

The cries from the audience were more savage than the cries from the ring.
People stood and shouted at the blood and bodies, the pummeling fists and hulking male forms. Clothes were ripped off and they screamed at the nudity, a woman howling in the row below Ink at how well one of the zombies was hung. More women laughed and catcalled him. “Where have you been hiding all my life?” “Bring that over here!”

There were no rules in a zombie match.
No propriety. No holding back at a kick to the genitals or the tearing off of a nipple. It was utter brutality. A quarter of a million people screamed in rage and adoration and jealousy at the strictures undone and nature unleashed. Spittle flew from their lips and Ink’s voice was lifted among them. He loved matches for this reason, the utter freedom, and a melee was infinite matches happening at the same time. If he had become a zombie despite the vaccine, he would have wanted to experience this total independence from the world. He envied them that, the rings that weren’t shackled around their fingers, their minds that found no importance in money or position, not even sex. Those things didn’t even exist in their heads! There was only bloodlust.

A fragment of the announcer’s voice punched through.
“ . . .
Poseidon down
. . .
dead . . .
” Ink sought through the thrashing mob in astonishment. It was
true
. Cantine’s Poseidon was down! A fantastic career ended in a melee and how horrible for the old man that a tattooed newbie had brought down his best fighter!

Tearing his eyes away from the
ring, Ink skimmed down the competitors on his phone. The newbie was Zeus of the Hill. He looked back at the zombie stalking away from Poseidon’s still body and realized it wasn’t. The one in the picture had fewer tattoos and less musculature, and this man was smothered in tattoos and was just as muscled as Samson had been. He was wearing a ton of facial pieces. Just as Ink was about to skim again for his name, hating to miss even a second, the announcer said, “Nemesis lands Poseidon! Incredible!” Another one named Nemesis! There had been a Nemesis fighting in the ring a year ago, but he had been black. Picking through his mental store of fighters, Ink found a few more zombies with that name.

In reflex,
he twisted in his seat to look up at the clubroom. The blonde had removed her arms from Cantine’s shoulders. He was staring open-mouthed down to the ring at this surprising turn of events. One of his other women put her hand on his shoulder in comfort and he shook it off. Poseidon was on the declining side of his career’s arc, but he still should have had good years in the future! Whoever owned the tattooed newbie had just earned himself or herself a considerable amount of attention. The blonde appeared beside Cantine, a shot glass in her hand. She was waiting for him to accept what had just happened, and then she would offer it.

“ . . . Thor . . .”

Ink had forgotten about Thor. He almost sprained his neck from returning to the ring so quickly. Thor was still alive, not the first down, not even the fifth down or the twelfth down. He was just starting to wrestle with Ares when someone else smashed into Ares’ side and knocked the two away from one another. Thor spun around wildly and crashed onto the ground. Jumping back to his feet, he hurled himself at the one who had interrupted his fight. The two began to battle, and Ares charged off to attack Dionysus.

“I think someone is going to be singing soprano from now on
!” the announcer chuckled through the pandemonium. A zombie looked out briefly to the stands, blood running down his chin. He spat something out of his mouth and threw himself back into the fight.

Twenty were down.
Twenty-five. Thirty. The remaining competitors were staggering over bodies as they launched themselves at each other. Not all of those who had fallen were dead, but had injuries to the legs or back that were preventing them from rising. Two were wrestling down there, unable to get up, yet still wanting to kill. Ink couldn’t tell where Thor was now, because everyone was covered in so much blood.

“Excuse me!”
Somehow in the insane decibel level, Nadia’s voice punctured right through to Ink’s ears. She was trying to pass by people enraptured with the melee to get to her seat. No one took any notice of her and her shopping bag.

Stranded on the aisle, she tried to get Ink’s attention.
He screamed at the fight with all of the loathing he felt for her and his rotten life, for the person who killed Samson and forced Ink to dwell ever longer in this
almost
purgatory. He screamed until a lance of pain went through his head, and then he screamed at that. Nadia began to push her way through, using her bag as a battering ram, and the man on the aisle yelled in her face and pushed her back. So she stayed on the aisle and Ink spread out a little in the space she wasn’t filling before her seat.

“And we just need o
ne more!” the announcer shouted, and the noise achieved an even higher level of desperation.

Zombies
were down all over the ring. They just needed to eliminate a last opponent and the melee ended. Fists cracked against skulls and burrowed into kidneys; teeth tore at flesh and one zombie on the ground hobbled one standing with a well-placed chomp to the shin. Ink threw a quick glance to the clubroom, wanting to see his blonde. She was taking the drained shot glass from Cantine and nodding to whatever he was saying. He had probably asked that she keep those shots coming. The one who had had her hand shaken off his shoulder looked pouty.

The announcer cried out
over the speakers as a zombie fell. His words were lost to the craziness as the screaming from the audience turned into one massive orgasm of frenetic sound. Then the bell rang to end the melee. The lights went on all around the ring, dazzling the zombies and showing in stark relief the injured and the dead. Ink picked over the bodies one by one, searching for Thor. Some were facedown and so covered in blood that he couldn’t tell their identities; four others were in a heap and all he saw was legs.

People began to sit down all over the stadium.
Only one zombie was still attacking, and that was because his face was buried in the throat of a dead opponent. Both bodies were jerking as he dug in, and then he suddenly stilled his violence and rose to stare at the lights. Sitting down in a huff, Nadia said, “They wouldn’t let me through when I asked.”

They hadn’t realized that they were in the presence of a princess.
“How rude of them,” Ink said. He felt spent from the soles of his feet to the ends of his hair, and the throb of pain in his head had released. Now he was just drained. The melee was incredible no matter how many times he witnessed it, and he always finished with the craving for beer.

“Just astounding!” the announcer said, repl
ays going by in slow motion upon screens divided into four parts. “Poseidon! Who saw that coming? I sure didn’t!”

People clapped and cheered much more calmly, speaking to each other between pants for breath.
The gates opened and stadium organizers flooded into the ring. The living-and-standing were pulled to the side as the dead and living-but-down were loaded onto stretchers. Borne away through the gates and into the funnels, more employees came out to clean the ground for the next entertainment and the women’s melee.

“Who’s still standing here?” the announcer boomed, and the replays
high above vanished into names.

Thor.
Dear God above,
Thor
had survived the melee. Not just survived but triumphed. Ink stared dumbly at that name between Dionysus and Nemesis. Thor would have a match against one of the other survivors and fall there. That was all right. That was better than all right! Making it to a match was extremely respectable, whether your fighter won or lost. His phone vibrated with a text from Vasilov, who was up in the clubroom.
Where did you find this one?
Well done, my boy!

People would now believe,
truly
believe that Thor had taken down Samson. Ink had made lemonade out of lemons. He read the other names up there. Most of them were the usual crowd: Dog of Tartarus and Zombie Jesus, Bow Down Before Me and Volcanus . . . Cauldron of Fire always made it through by the skin of his teeth and it was ever a bewilderment how one-eyed Fightin’ Titan survived anything. Burning Bush was also on the screen, a good fighter completely mismanaged by his young and arrogant manager. The guy had no sense whatsoever, and stuck him in backyard fights to entertain his friends right before competitions. He called it a warm-up, but it meant Burning Bush came to every show at a disadvantage with injuries. Other managers did the same, swept up in the guy’s charismatic personality. They also enrolled their fighters in armed combat, which didn’t matter to the overall score and wasted their energy. Another doofus starved his zombie in the mistaken notion that he would fight harder, and how annoying that it appeared to have worked. The Immortal was moving on to first matches.

And who was One True God?
That was a new one to Ink. He checked on his phone. One True God had been at Filo and gotten creamed in the melee there. That was the only credit under his name and picture, so this was a relative newbie. Nemesis and Ultimate Hades were total newbies to the official show circuit, as was Thor.

Tickled pink
about Thor’s survival, he got up from his seat and excused himself to get to the aisle. Then he almost flew to the stables, which he cut through to the west funnel where all survivors were being taken. Sofia was there with her two canes and greeted him in good cheer since Ares had come through fine. Constanzo had sent an employee to handle his Dionysus, which was a shame since this would have been a perfect time to question him. Other managers showed up to claim their zombies, one saying, “Good year for newbies, eh? They’re usually easy pickings!”

Ink beamed with pride as the manager
of a newbie. There were three newbies and one nearly a newbie going on to first matches when usually there was one to zero. The best of the best fighters came to a Games melee. Throwing in a newbie showed a lot of confidence or arrogance, depending on if the fighter lived and with what degree of damage. It was exceedingly rare for a new zombie to win the first match. Most didn’t even survive it. Ink didn’t give a shit. Qualifying for a first match at the Games with a rank newbie was coup enough.

The man who had spoken about the good year for newbies collected his zombie, who had had most of his facial prosthetics ripped off.
The rest were hanging around his neck. Trying to stick them back to his fighter’s cheeks, the manager was disappointed when they were too shredded. He scooped up a piece that fell to the floor and mumbled about glue as he directed his zombie to an aisle of stalls.