Flesh Worn Stone (26 page)

She walked out on him, again, and left him wondering if she was, in fact, completely insane.

* * *

The grumbling of the people continued, but after Darius had armed the men with honest to god weapons from the ship, there was a decided drop off in anger directed at him. At least no one was saying things to his face any more. He wished he had been able to get the muskets working, but there was no powder around, and neither he nor any of the men he talked to knew the first thing about using one of the antique rifles anyway. The swords, from cutlasses to broad swords to Middle Eastern-style scimitars, were intimidating enough, though, and the men wore them proudly. He suspected that trusting them with the cutlery had endeared one or two to him even more.

Darius wasn’t happy at the marking ceremony, especially when Steven stepped forward, not a trace of fear on his face that he could see. He cut the man’s head as hard as he possibly could, down to the skull, but he didn’t even flinch. In fact, he grinned the whole time like a cat with a dead bird in its grasp. With that cut he’d put the man on an equal basis with himself, in terms of the Cave and the Game, and that just wasn’t right. He leaned in close as he cut and whispered, “She said you couldn’t fuck for shit.”

“She also murdered my children,” Steven whispered back. “So I guess I don’t quite give a shit what she said.

Steven started to step away, smiled, then turned back to Darius and whispered, “Did she tell you she had AIDS?”

He left Darius silent, and the big man wanted nothing more than to lash out and break Steven’s neck. He knew the man was just messing with him, or so he hoped.

“Brothers and sisters,” he said, trying his best to hide the frustration and anger in his voice and, at the same time, sound as reassuring as Block, “we come together tonight to celebrate the victories of two brothers in the Game. They’ve done well, done the will of the Castle, and the will of the Cave. In their victory we shall, once again, feast and remain strong for the next Game.”

There was no cheer, and even to Darius he sounded like a crooked televangelist. If he couldn’t convince himself, how could he convince them? “Are you ready to eat?”

Still the crowd stared back at him, angry.

“Fuck it,” he told them.“Line up and eat if you want. I don’t guess I give a shit. Sign them up,” he told the guy he’d hastily arranged to replace John. The big man, more brawn than brain, was visibly nervous as he sat to record how much each person owed for his or her meal.

When no one lined up, he turned to them. “What, are you not hungry?”

“They’re simply not paying for what is already theirs,” Steven told him. “And I don’t blame them.”

“You people don’t understand, do you?” Darius said, turning to them, inspired. “This is not my will. It is the will of the Castle. You have become weak, here in the Cave, and broken. Under Block’s babying, you’ve become fat and lazy. Did any of you come to this place for a hand out? Did any of you come here to wallow in your own filth and beg for food? You’ve lost the spirit and determination to succeed, to win the Game.” There was a murmuring among the people as they began talking about what he was saying. “I don’t want you to not have food. I share in your hunger when there is none,” he lied. “But the Castle has deemed it necessary so that only the best and the brightest, those willing to earn their keep, so to speak, should succeed. The people of the Cave have become fat and lazy, and only through hard work and diligence can we become what we were meant to be. You came here to be champions, did you not? To be reborn?”

Darius had to give himself credit, though he stopped short of patting himself on the back. He wasn’t quite sure where the words were coming from, but they were brilliant and he could see the impact in the people’s eyes. “It is a Game outside the Game, and only those who are successful here, in the Cave, will have the opportunity to participate in the actual Game.” The murmurs grew louder and the people began to understand. Only if they succeeded in surviving would they be given the opportunity to play the Game, and only through the Game could they be reborn. Once he told them, it made perfect sense, and he wondered why he hadn’t thought of it sooner. He wondered why John hadn’t thought of it. The conniving little bastard had seemed to think of everything else.

“You’re a bastard,” Steven told him. “You don’t have any control over who is in the Game and who isn’t, and none of this scheme of yours is the will of the Castle. In fact, it’s just the opposite and you know it.”

Steven was right, of course, but the people didn’t need to know that. How the man knew about his meeting with Jackson irked him, but it wasn’t going to change anything. He’d make changes in the Castle when he got there as well. This was all his, every last stinking bit of rotting flesh…his. He raised his hand high above his head and was tempted to shout ‘Hallelujah!’, but instead told them, “Brothers and sisters, are you going to work for your food? Are you going to strive for greatness for the Castle?”

“Yes,” the cheer came back unanimously.

“Are we not the people of the Cave? We are bound for greatness! That is why we are here!”

There was a roar, and Darius couldn’t believe how easily turned the people were. In a few moments, he’d gone from staring down potential rebellion to convincing the people that they needed to work in order to trade for phony money to pay back phony loans they’d received in order to buy food that was already theirs. He marveled at just how stupid people really were.

The line formed quickly, and people smiled as they traded their chits for the gruel. The man doing the accounting, who had been nervous and sensing his immediate demise before, was happily collecting them, laughing it up with the people. The band started, and those who weren’t eating danced. It was the biggest party he’d seen in sometime in the Cave, and he was a bit proud of himself. He’d given them purpose other than just winning the Game. He’d given their lives direction.

Darius smiled, looking out over his soon-to-be-productive people. The Castle wouldn’t be happy, but what could they really do about it?

“That was a good move,” Rebecca told him, from just behind him. “Brilliant, even.”

He turned to her, smiling. He knew she’d tried to go back to Steven. He’d heard reports of their conversation. He also knew what was coming now.

“Rebecca, my dear. How are you today?”

“I’m hungry and Mia is hungry,” she said, about to step to the pile of bowls and get a scoop from the cauldron.

Darius stopped her with a hand on the shoulder. “The line is back there. If you’re hungry, you should get in line.”

“I don’t have to get in line,” she told him. “I’m with you.”

“You were with me,” he said, stressing
were
. “And you could have stayed with me had you not gone crawling back to your husband when he won one more fight. Do you see how long his popularity lasted? The people have already forgotten about him and his pig. I am god here, now and forever.”

“I’m sorry, Darius,” she said, not attempting to lie. “It won’t happen again.”

“No, I don’t think it will, considering I’m not going to let it. Now get out of here before I add you to the pot, and take that thing,” he pointed to Mia, “with you.”

Rebecca turned away, and the complete lack of anger on her face worried Darius for just a moment. There had always been a calculating part of her, a cold, honest woman who would do anything to protect her daughter. He respected that. It was how she stayed so calm about everything that worried him more.

And then he remembered a popular song from before he arrived and singsonged, “I got ninety nine problems but a bitch ain’t one.”

* * *

Steven was alone again, in the shelter he’d constructed for the five of them. He lay back on John’s sleeping bag, trying to put the pieces of the day together and form some plan of action on what to do. That he was coldly and logically plotting the death of not only his wife, but of her daughter, didn’t strike him as the least bit odd. That he wanted the people of the Cave to eat Darius alive from a boiling vat of hot soup didn’t bother him either. These were things that needed to be done, choices he needed to make as John might say. Some people, he thought, just needed killing.

His biggest internal debate, though, was if he cared whether he lived or not after he’d killed Mia.

It would be simple to go out in the night and dig up the shotgun, then come back in the Cave blasting. No one would challenge him, and the deafening roar of the shotgun would be more than enough, he was sure, to drive back any who might. It would be easy enough to find Rebecca and her daughter, and he could imagine both of them headless courtesy of the .00 buckshot. But he didn’t have enough ammunition to kill everyone, and there wasn’t enough in Jackson’s shack. If he didn’t kill every person in the Cave, they would likely come after him for violating the rules. He didn’t know if he could execute Rebecca and Mia and then escape.

So the decision came down to whether or not he cared enough to live afterwards.

There wasn’t anything to live for anymore, he decided. He’d lost his sons, but even then, he’d still had Rebecca. Hope of them escaping together was what had driven him in those early days in the Cave. That hope had slowly eroded until it finally dropped completely off like an ocean side hill in California. There wasn’t any hope anymore, and as long as those who needed killing died, then he really didn’t care if he lived or not.

Once everyone was asleep, he rose and quietly made for the exit to the Cage. Once outside, his head cleared of the rage and anger, and for a few quiet moments he enjoyed the night air, the sound of the waves lapping at the beach, and the dim light from the half moon above.

He retraced the thirty-seven steps from the corner of the Cage to where the shotgun was buried and dug it up, unwrapped it from the plastic garbage bag, and then made sure it was clean and loaded. He sat in the middle of the Cage, enjoyed a simple meal of MREs, and sipped from a bottle of water, all the while staring at the hundreds of years of graffiti staining the cliff face. It took him a long time to see Amanda, Cassandra, and John’s names on the wall, all freshly etched there, and he wondered how he could have missed them on his weeklong exile to the Cage. It took him several moments to realize that the names weren’t those of people who’d arrived at the island, not in the same sense as someone passing through a truck stop might write that they’d been there along with a date, but a record of the dead. The cave face told a story of everyone who’d ever been killed in the Game. He stood and solemnly nodded to those lost souls, vowing vengeance for them as well, slipped the backpack onto his shoulders, and started back into the Cave, intent on ending Mia’s life.

But he stopped before he made it through the Gate and looked in the opposite direction of where he’d been exploring his last few nights in the Cage. The entire place was still a mystery. He had no idea if it was an island or just an out of way place. He still wanted to know more about the men in the Castle before he died or escaped, and wanted to know more about how the Game was run. It was nothing more than sheer curiosity. What sort of men pitted their fellow men against each other? What sort of men would have an old woman cut off both of her hands and then feed them to her? Worse, what sort of man would condition the old woman to like eating her own hands, to think of it as some glorious step on the path to redemption?

The thoughts of murder and revenge danced logically around with the curiosity of exploration. That he was fantasying about murder, about the look on his wife’s face when he took her daughter’s life, no longer even bothered him. He didn’t even think about it as right or wrong anymore; it was simply something that needed to be done in the most efficient, yet bloodiest, form possible.

His curiosity got the best of him, though, and he decided that he could put off brutally killing the little mute girl one more night. Instead, he turned down the beach and headed north from the Cage, the opposite direction of where he’d gone previously. He kept the shotgun and backpack in case he ran into someone he shouldn’t.

The mountain never sloped down like it did at the other end of the beach, and it was miles before he found anything besides endlessly perfect beach butted up against a sheer cliff face. Eventually, though, he started seeing signs of human habitation. There were empty beer and soda bottles scattered about, and booted footprints. There was an old cobblestone path along the cliff face, half buried in white sand. After he’d followed it for another half mile, he found it led to a large concrete dock.

He was disappointed, though, when he found there was no boat of any kind, no ship docked there, thought the dock looked big enough to handle a large one, say the size of a cruise liner. There were large roll-off trash containers he recognized from back home. The big dumpsters were hoisted up onto a truck with a hydraulic wench and carried to a landfill, dumped, and returned. They were most common at construction sites where large amounts of debris were likely to be generated. He climbed up on one of the three and saw it was loaded to the rim with garbage from a cruise ship. Recognizing the prize from the Game made him hungry and he quickly found some half-eaten dinner rolls without too much mold as well as an orange.

The truck for moving the containers was just off to the side of the dock next to a huge fuel tank. Steven scrambled to it, hoping there would be a license plate, a company logo…anything that would help identify where in the world he was. The truck was plain white and dirty, though, and missing all its glass windows. The glove compartment yielded nothing but sand, and there wasn’t a license plate anywhere.

He stood back and chuckled. What did he expect from these people? They hadn’t been doing this for over five hundred years only to slip up and give away some details of their existence in the glove compartment of a garbage truck.

An asphalt road led away from the dock and up a ravine through the canyon. It was lit with street lamps, but he was wary of stepping into the light, less someone see him. He wouldn’t solve the mystery of where the Cave was, though, from the dock, so he carefully began making his way up the winding, one-lane road, sticking close to the rock sides.