Bruce rolls toward the fallen weapon that lies in the red dirt about ten feet away. He gets his hand around the wooden shank, when suddenly, without warning, a figure lurches out of the haze to Bruce’s immediate left. Bruce jerks away from the biter, which is crawling toward him with the languid twitches of a giant lizard. Black ooze issues from the female’s slack mouth—its sharp little teeth visible—its jaw snapping with reptilian vigor.
Then something else happens that brings Bruce back to reality.
The chain holding the female in place suddenly clangs, the monster reaching the limits of its bondage. Bruce lets out an instinctive gasp of relief, the dead thing only inches away, flailing impotently at him. The biter growls with inchoate frustration, the chain holding fast. Bruce feels like digging the thing’s eyeballs out with his bare hands, like chewing through the neck of this useless piece of rotting shit-flesh.
Again, Bruce hears that weird cymbal-crashing noise, as well as the voice of the other man, barely audible under the noise: “C’mon, man, get up … get up.”
Bruce gets moving. He grabs the ax and struggles to his feet. More cymbal-crashing noises … as Bruce spins, and then swings the ax hard at the other man.
The blade barely misses Flattop’s throat, slicing through the collar of the man’s turtleneck sweater, leaving a six-inch gouge.
“How’s that?” Bruce mutters under his breath, circling the man. “That entertaining enough for ya?”
“That’s the spirit,” the stocky man murmurs—his name is Gabriel Harris, Gabe to his cronies—as he swings the club again, the nail-studded head whispering past Bruce’s swollen face.
“That all you got?” Bruce mumbles, jerking away just in time, and then circling around the other way. He lashes out with the ax. Gabe parries with the club, and all around the two combatants, the monsters keep growling and gurgling their watery ululations, straining against their chains, hungry for human flesh, stirred into a feeding frenzy.
As the dusty haze on the periphery of the battlefield clears, the remnants of an outdoor dirt-track arena come into focus.
*
The size of a football field, the outer edges lined with cyclone fencing, the Woodbury Veterans Speedway is surrounded by the relics of old pit areas and dark cavernous passageways. Behind the chain link rise latticed bench seats, sloping up to huge, rusted-out light stanchions. The stands are now filled with scores of cheering Woodbury residents. The cymbal-crashing sounds are, in fact, the wild applause and jeering voices of the crowd.
Out in the miasma of dust swirling around the infield, the gladiator known as Gabe mutters under his breath so only his adversary can hear, “You’re fighting like a goddamn girl today, Brucey”—the wisecrack punctuated by a roundhouse swing of the club at the black man’s legs.
Bruce vaults into the air, executing a dodge that would be the envy of a World Wrestling Entertainment star. Gabe swings again and the club goes wide and strikes the head of a young male biter in ragged, greasy dungarees, a former mechanic perhaps.
The nails embed themselves in the thing’s cadaverous skull, sending ropy strands of dark fluid into the air, before Gabe has a chance to dig the mace out and mumble, “Governor’s gonna be pissed with your bullshit performance.”
“Oh yeah?” Bruce counterstrikes with the handle of the ax, slamming it into Gabe’s solar plexus, driving the stocky man to the ground. The ax arcs through the air and comes down within centimeters of Gabe’s cheek.
Gabe rolls away and springs to his feet, still muttering under his breath. “Shouldn’t have had that extra serving of cornbread last night.”
Bruce moves in for another swing of the ax, whizzing the blade past Gabe’s neck. “You should talk, fat boy.”
Gabe swings the mace again and again, driving Bruce back toward the chained biters. “How many times have I told ya? Governor wants it to look real.”
Bruce blocks the onslaught of mace blows with the ax handle. “You broke my fucking nose, motherfucker.”
“Stop your bellyaching, dickweed.” Gabe slams the mace down again and again until the nails stick into the ax handle. Gabe pulls the mace back and wrenches the ax out of Bruce’s grip. The ax goes flying. The crowd cheers. Bruce dives away. Gabe goes after him. Bruce cuts and runs the other way, and Gabe lunges while simultaneously swinging the mace under the black man’s legs.
The nails catch Bruce’s fatigue pants, tearing a swath and superficially lacerating flesh. Bruce stumbles and goes down hard. Thin tendrils of blood loop across the pale, dusty daylight as Bruce rolls.
Gabe soaks up the frenzied, frantic applause—the clapping is almost hysterical—and he turns toward the bleachers, which are filled with the bulk of Woodbury’s post-plague population. He raises his mace Braveheart-style. The cheers swell and rise. Gabe milks it. He turns slowly with the mace over his head, an almost comical look of macho victory on his face.
The place erupts into pandemonium … and up in the stands, amid the waving arms and whooping voices, all but one onlooker seems transported by the spectacle.
*
Sitting in the fifth row, way off on the north end of the bleachers, Lilly Caul turns away in disgust. A faded linen scarf wound tightly around her swanlike neck to ward off the April chill, she is dressed in her customary ripped jeans, thrift-shop sweater, and hand-me-down beads. As she shakes her head and lets out an exasperated sigh, the wind blows tendrils of her toffee-brown hair around her once-youthful face, which now bears the lines of trauma—the wrinkles nested around her aquamarine eyes and along the edges of her mouth—as deep as the grain in burnished cowhide. She isn’t even aware that she’s mumbling under her breath, “Fucking Roman circuses…”
“What was that?” The woman next to her glances up from an insulated cup of tepid green tea. “Did you say something?”
Lilly shakes her head. “No.”
“You okay?”