Flesh Worn Stone (27 page)

He was out of breath and sweating profusely by the time he finally reached the top of the mountain and the road’s end. He kneeled down and used the shotgun to steady himself, working a bottle of water free from the backpack with his other hand. The water was warm, but what water from the Cave wasn’t? Up ahead he saw a small adobe building with a multitude of satellite dishes and weather monitoring equipment. He stuck to the shadows and crept towards it. It reminded him of the famous old Spanish missions in San Antonio, Texas, constructed of white adobe with grand sweeping arches and tall windows. The windows were plate glass and depicted various scenes from the Bible, including the birth and death of Christ. The building was very old, and Steven had no doubt the original tenants of the Game, some five hundred years back, had constructed it. It stood in stark contrast to the multitude of satellite dishes and antennas around it.

The walls inside were packed with electronics that he couldn’t identify, the thousands of blinking lights giving the interior of the room the appearance of a lit Christmas tree. There were dozens of television panels, and on them he could clearly make out the Canyon from many different angles. There were also a few showing the inside of the Cave and the hundreds of sleeping residents. Still staying low, he followed the outline of the building and found the masses of wires and cables leading out and away from the building. There didn’t seem to be anyone inside, but he didn’t want to risk it, so he followed the cables instead.

Several hundred yards from the buildings, the cables split and ran in multiple directions. He kept following the center mass, and within another hundred yards found steps leading down into the mountain. They led into a series of manmade tunnels that split off in every direction. He picked one randomly and followed it until it ended at a steel door set in the rock. Opening the door and cringing at the ancient sound of steel on steel, he stepped down into one of the skyboxes overlooking the Canyon. There was no one present, but the trashcans were full of beer cans and food containers. The one-way mirrored window offered a perfect view, though, and he could visualize the fights and atrocities below, some prospective fans cheering here in the box while drinking beer and eating popcorn like they were at an MLB game. In the center of the skybox was a camera pointed down, and he guessed that’s what all the cabling was. These cameras all fed back into the main building, and then were broadcast to who knew where.

He explored the entire complex, finding four more skyboxes and then the throne room. He sat in the stone throne, looked directly at the camera, and tried to imagine the man who’d sit there during the Game and decided if an entire village ate or went hungry. What sort of man could sit in that chair and decide if people lived or died in the name of a sporting event? He fantasized about the man being there, right then, and wondered how loud the shotgun would sound in the narrow confines of the stone-walled room. Next to the camera was a simple console with a keyboard attached. Reading from the menu on the main screen, he knew at once what it was. There was a drop-down menu to select a person’s number, a place to select the action, be it kill, rape or self-mutilation, and then more drop-down boxes to select more numbers. Tacked to a bulletin board next to the console were dozens of photos with numbers stamped across the bottom. Everyone had their eyes closed in the pictures as if they were sleeping, and he recognized many of them. There was one of Darius, his wife, John…he picked the one of himself off the board and stared at it. It must have been taken right after they were abducted, he thought, as he was still clean-shaven and his hair had yet to grow into the wild mess it was now. In the waste bin next to the console were dozens more, the man he’d killed in the last Game on top.

The room next to the control center was larger, open to the air above, and reeked of years old garbage. There was a path big enough to back the big roll-off truck down and it ended at a hole in the ground large enough for the truck to dump its contents. In the hole, a hydraulic ram would push the garbage forward to the steel doors that he was finally seeing from the other side, and into the chute where the citizens of the Cave would pick it up off the ground. Since they never heard the truck, he guessed that the garbage was dumped in advance, and then, if the Game went as they’d wanted, pushed out later.

In the entire complex he hadn’t found one person, but he knew they had to be somewhere. There had to be people to run the cameras and maintain the fancy electronics. He also suspected spectators were shipped in to watch the Game, considering the amount of garbage in the skyboxes. And that meant there had to be people there to tend to the guests. He figured there had to be at least a dozen men and women somewhere in the area that worked on the Game, and yet the entire complex was deserted. Exiting the complex of tunnels, he found another pathway that ran just beneath and behind the rim of the canyon. It was deeper than the lip of the Canyon like a parapet on a castle. The path led around the canyon, widened where the machine gun posts sat like dutiful prison guards watching over their charges.

He stopped at the first machine gun nest. The gun was ancient, of a WWII variety, and hadn’t been fired in decades. The barrel was rusted but covered with black spray paint. He tried the action on the gun, but it wouldn’t move, then burst out in laughter when he saw it wasn’t loaded anyway. Their guards, the demon machine guns watching above, not only wouldn’t function if they had to, but didn’t have any ammunition anyway. He wondered if there were any guards watching during the Game. How would any of them know for sure?

The rest of the machine guns were in exactly the same shape, if not worse. The path didn’t look like it had seen use in a long time as sand, blown in from the beach, covered everything. He didn’t think about his footprints in it until he’d made his way all the way around, but by then there wasn’t anything he could do about it. It didn’t matter, though, he thought, because he’d have already killed the girl and died himself by the time his footsteps were discovered. And even if they did find them, what exactly were they going to do about it?

He left the path and made his way back through the tunnel complex, exiting the place and standing in front of it, trying to figure out where the people where. There had to be another location, somewhere close by, where the spectators would stay while at the island. It would have to wait for another night, he knew, as he saw the sun peeking over the eastern horizon, reminding him he had to get back to the Cave.

* * *

Finding five prone bodies in bright, brand new blue jumpsuits, complete with burlap bags over their heads, in the Cage was the last thing he expected to see on his return. He hurriedly reburied the shotgun and the backpack in the same place and then tiptoed around the drugged men and women and snuck back into the Cave, thinking of what those people were about to go through. He wanted to stop and wake them up, to somehow prepare them, but he knew that at least half of them had asked to come to the Cave willingly and made some sacrifice, be it a loved one, rape, or some insane amount of money, in order to do so. There wouldn’t be any way, now, to tell the innocent from the guilty, and suddenly he knew how those in the Cave had felt when they arrived. How did you trust anyone in a group of newcomers when some of them, at least, were capable of such evil in order to just play the Game?  

There just wasn’t anything he could do about it, and the more he thought about it, the less he realized he wanted to do about it.

People were already up and about, but no one, at first, noticed him coming out of the tunnel leading from the Cage. He made his way towards the shelter, exhausted and ready to lie down and sleep for a while. Drawing the garbage bag curtain aside, he saw Darius sitting there, waiting for him.

“Where have you been, Steven?” the big man asked, prowling through the basket of stuff John had collected with chits and not looking up.

“I don’t need to tell you where I’ve been,” he said, trying to hide his panic, wondering if Darius had a clue to what he’d been up to.

“You weren’t with your wife. I saw her fucking some other three-marker last night. She’s pretty intense when she wants to be,” Darius told  him, trying to get a rise out of him. “I’ve never known a girl to suck a dick as well as her. I mean…how in the hell do you get that high a compression ratio?” Darius chuckled. “You weren’t anywhere in the Cave, actually, and I know because I walked around most of the night looking for you. So, if you weren’t banging you wife and you weren’t in the Cave, where were you?”

“Why were you looking for me?” Steven asked, trying to change the subject. He would not let the man know he had a way out under any circumstances. He’d prefer the man dead, but he could just as well rot in this hellhole for all Steven cared.

“I need you to come work for me. You do need a job, don’t you?”

“I can’t see why I do,” he replied, nearly laughing. Darius was just as batshit insane as his wife.

“You need a job, Steven, in order to be a productive citizen of the Cave. You don’t get to leech off the work of others anymore; you have to pay your own way.”

He couldn’t believe the man had actually convinced himself of his silly speech. “Yeah…I think I’ll do without before I work for you.”

“No, sorry. It doesn’t work that way. See, I’m the boss, and the boss gets to pick and choose who does what. And the boss picks you to work for me.”

He couldn’t imagine what sort of humiliating task Darius might have for him, but he still wasn’t going to play that game with the man. “As I said thanks, but no thanks.”

“Then what do you propose to do to eat? Food is no longer free.”

He wasn’t going to mention that he knew several places on the island where food was, in fact, free. “I’ll manage.”

“You won’t manage. You either contribute work or you contribute to the pot, you know what I mean?”

Steven prepared to back out of the shelter and sprint for the beach and the shotgun buried there if he had to. “I know you think you know what you mean, but you’re insane. I’m not going to get a loan from a mythical bank to buy food, then turn around and work some made-up job in order to pay that loan back. Let me guess, the interest rate is pretty high too, right?”

Darius shrugged. “We have to make it worthwhile for the bank to loan money.”

“You do realize John is dead, right? If there ever was any truth to his tale, the odds of reclaiming that money now, even if you made it out of here, are exactly zero. Zilch. Nada. Your chits are, as they always were, worth nothing, and worth less than nothing now. The people will eventually realize this.”

“They are worth more now,” Darius argued, “because I control how many of them there are.”

“That’s insane.”

“It’s working. People are out there right now, cleaning the Cave, gathering things to trade, and helping each other. You should see the spirit of comrade that’s overtaken this place. You’d be surprised at what people will find to do, even in a place like this, in order to make a living. I’ve turned it from hell into a Utopia. I’ve given people hope.”

“And what are you going to do when the food runs out or if there’s a dry spell between Games? What are you going to do about the crime? What are you going to do when people start stealing in order to eat?”

“Nothing, why should I? It will all work itself out. Stealing is illegal in the Cave, punishable by death. If they steal, they’ll end up in the pot, same as always.”

Darius was clearly delusional, Steven thought, and in that delusion he was dangerous. “Well, I can’t help you. I’m taking another job,” he lied.

“Oh? Where at? With who? I wasn’t aware that there was actually another employer besides me here.”

“It’s a surprise. I’m sure you’ll be proud.”

The big man stood and Steven wondered, again, if he was going to have to run. If he were killed here, he’d never get a chance to strangle Mia in front of her mother. But instead of attacking him, Darius simply walked out of the tent, ignoring him as if he weren’t there and like the conversation had never taken place.

Steven thought he’d be able to sleep the rest of the day, the night’s excursions weighing heavily on him, but there was no such luck. The alarm for the Game sounded and was followed by a rousing cheer from the residents of the Cave. Steven sighed, wishing once again he’d murdered the little girl and then gotten a nap instead of exploring.

* * *

He watched as the newcomers stumbled in behind the crowd and wondered if they’d had similar conversations as he and his group of five on arrival. Had they accused each other of being responsible for their arrival there, distrusting all? The group was just as varied—there was an Asian couple, the woman crying so hard that Steven thought she’d collapse from the deep heaving, a tall, slender black man who looked as if he had been stripped right out of an NBL team, and two young college-aged girls. Steven wondered which of the girls had betrayed the other, selling her best friend into a life of slavery, which of the Asians had stabbed his or her mate in the back, what price the black man had paid. He didn’t care about the people, and though he knew a few were probably innocent, he was more curious about what evil had been committed in order to fulfill the terms of the Contract.

Jackson pushed through the crowd as the gladiator cartoon played, making his way towards Steven. Steven was suddenly very, very nervous. He wasn’t ready to be busted for escape yet, and he was quickly aware of all the tracks he’d left, the things he’d taken from Jackson’s cabin…the complete mess he’d made while trying to be discreet.

“Hello Steven,” the man said, smiling. “How have you been?”

“I’ve…what kind of fucking question is that for a place like this?”

“Indeed, it would be an awkward question for one not quite as,” he paused, looking for a word, “resourceful as you are.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Steven said, his heart racing frantically.

“The bit with the pig was sheer brilliance. It’s still quite interesting to see how a little food will change the entire attitude of the Cave, and you played that to the hilt. You went from villain to savior in the span of a week. I told them in the Castle that you deserved better, that you were smart and driven, but they insist that you’re a threat. I might have disagreed with them if I didn’t know what you’d taken from my cabin.”