Zombie Fight Night: Battles of the Dead (10 page)

As he stood there in the dark, he wondered how many of the dead he would have to fight today. Sometimes there was just one, usually the slow ones, which he found to be an insult. One quick swipe with his sword, a splash of black blood, and the creature would drop. The other ones—Sprinters—were much worse, but still manageable thanks to his armor. Two times in the past he had to fight two of the dead, both Shamblers each time.

The buzzer sounded and the lights went on.

The iron ring lit up.

And the dead began to rise.

Two of them. One a Sprinter. The other the slower kind, it seemed.

“For my country, for my men. Today I will cut off your heads!” Abel shouted, raising his sword, gripping the handle tight. He ran toward the dead men.

The crowd shouted and cheered. “Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!”

“GRRRAAAHHHH!” Abel growled and ran his blade through the shoulder of the slower, dead man. The other one, the Sprinter, was gone.

Abel whirled around, bringing his blade about in a wild arc. He connected with something and a moment later took note of the severed arm on the floor. The Sprinter in front of him shrieked and charged at him, fingers curled good and stiff, sharp nails ready to tear through his flesh, chain mail or not.

Abel moved to the side and the Sprinter moved past him, burying its hands into the chest of its slower counterpart. The Viking drew up his sword and ran it through the back of the Sprinter, piercing both that zombie and the one beyond.

The dead men twisted with the impact and black blood and globs of flesh splashed onto the floor.

Tugging at his sword, Abel hoped to rip it out then bring it up and around for a swipe at the men’s heads. The blade wouldn’t budge; the dead men’s torsos twisted, one to the left, the other to the right, his sword lodged between flesh and bones.

Quickly, Abel brought up his shield and brought its heavy metal frame down onto the Sprinter’s head, crushing its skull. The dead man beyond groaned and tried to pull itself free from the sword. Instead, it only tore up its torso, glops of lung, stomach and intestines splashing onto the concrete floor.

Abel withdrew his soax and plunged it into the slower man’s head. The dead man’s eyes went wide . . . then he went limp, his body still hanging on the sword.

“Boooooo . . .” the crowd droned.

Abel guided the dead men to the floor, placed a heavy foot on the Sprinter’s torso, braced himself, then yanked hard, jerking the blood-covered blade out of both men’s bodies.

“Boooooo . . .” the crowd continued. Others hissed. Many stomped their feet in protest.

Let them howl,
Abel thought.
The world is now less two evils.

The buzzer droned and instead of the cage opening as always, it remained shut.

“Boooooo . . .”

The lights went out.

A few sharp whistles from the crowd, then a few more. Soon the whole place began screaming, “Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!”

Abel didn’t know what to make of it. This wasn’t how things went. He held his sword at the ready, his soax also gripped tightly with his other hand.

The iron ring lit up, casting blue light on a shadowy figure rising from the dark. This wasn’t a zombie, or, at least, didn’t seem like the others. This one was wider and wore something on its head.

The buzzer droned and the arena lights went on.

Primal cheers crashed through the air. It was all Abel could do to concentrate on what was before him.

A dead man.

A dead brother.

Another Viking, this one with the red eyes of a Sprinter, glaring at him from beneath a tarnished helmet. Its chain mail was old and worn, its face hollow with slash marks on the cheekbones. It was then Abel recognized the beard, the muddy brown hair that covered the Norse man’s chin and extended near a foot down his chest. Abel had known only one man in his life with a beard like that: Hári. The man was as fast as a rabbit, if Abel’s memory served him correctly.

A flash back to the boat. The lightning. Hári standing beside him, not fast enough to get out of the way. The lightning must have brought him here, too, though not to the same place. Hári must have been
changed
to the dead at some other point and was gathered to be here.

Gathered to fight.

To the death.

“Forgive me, brother, for I knew you well,” Abel said.

Hári only stared at him. The shackles fell from his wrists and ankles. Hári charged.

Abel moved to bring his blade clean across Hári’s neck, but just as he was about to do so, he withdrew and stepped to the side; Hári ran past him.

“I cannot believe you are here,” Abel said.

Hári merely growled, his bloodshot eyes no longer carrying even a hint of the man Abel once knew.

A warrior’s spirit was a strong one and Hári proved it by pulling his sword from its sheath.

The crowd gasped.

Abel hadn’t known any of the dead to fight with a weapon.

The two Vikings ran at each other, swords slicing through the air, each ready to massacre the other. The blades clashed mid air; a shockwave zipped through Abel’s arm. Quickly he dipped down, bent at the knees, and brought his soax across the inside of Hári’s thigh. Blood immediately spurt out.

Still bent over, Hári brought his blade down on Abel’s exposed back, the force of the blow sending him to the ground. His knuckles hit the concrete first, fingers still gripping his weapons. A dead weight suddenly plowed into his back, pressing him against the ground. A sharp pain shot through his arm and he didn’t need to look at it to know Hári had ran his blade through it.

Screaming, Abel tried to pull himself out from under his former comrade. Instead, the most he could do was rock his body side to side and hope to loose him.

Searing pain lit up his pierced arm. He glanced over. Hári was chewing through it. Abel tugged and tugged, intentionally loosening the muscle and fat for the undead Viking. With a wet tear, he pulled what was left of his arm free, in turn getting him the leverage he needed to jerk out from under Hári’s weight and crawl off to the side.

Hári sat on his knees, hunched over the arm, devouring the flesh off the bone. Blood trailed in a long, thick puddle from the arm over to where Abel sat off to the side, shaking from the pain.

The crowd’s screams droning in his ears, all going blurry before him, Abel wondered about his mates back home and if, even now, they looked upon the deck of the
Snake of the North
to where he once stood, still wondering what happened to their friends and if they wound up overboard.

Abel plunged the tip of his sword into the ground and used it to help himself to his feet. Seemingly sensing that he did so, Hári got to his feet as well, dropped the arm and looked at him.

“Remember yourself, Hári,” Abel said.

Hári charged him.

Abel brought up his sword . . . and brought it down.

21

A Hard Kind of Loathing

I
f Mick had a crowbar, he’d take it to his own head right now. Either that, or take the hooked end, wedge it in his eye sockets and pop his eyes out. At least that way he could claim he could no longer see the Controller and make an informed choice. Bottom line: he lost again, and still owed close to eight hundred grand. It was as if Sterpanko was somehow rigging it—even the fighters. Maybe the money didn’t mean anything to Sterpanko and instead the guy who ran Zombie Fight Night was just a sick freak who enjoyed blood, guts and, well, zombies.

Like before, Mick resigned once again to just spend-spend-spend and hope for the best. No time to even hope for a payout at the end. Now it was all about staying alive and seeing the night through. Once—
if
—he got to the end of it,
then
he could focus on just getting home, seeing Anna, crawling into bed and, hopefully, waking up tomorrow morning and pretending it was all a bad dream.

If only.

“Hmph,” Mick said.

“You say something?” Jack asked.

Mick shook his head. He didn’t feel like talking. Even if he did, he doubted he could even find the strength to speak. It was one of those moments where the words were locked in his throat, as if the words and phrases had hit some kind of ceiling and merely bounced off and dropped back down into his stomach.

There were few times in Mick’s life where he genuinely hated himself. Sure, he had moments like everyone where he wished he was someone else—but no, this was different. This was one of those moments where loathing himself was his reality, the kind of hatred where if he could step outside himself, he’d kick himself in the nuts, tell himself off and kill himself—just to make a point and hurt himself so bad out of pure, rage-filled disgust.

It was one of those moments where he couldn’t believe he was himself, the one with the problem, the problem that was insurmountable, deadly and, above all things—and which made it sting even more—could have been completely avoided had he merely kept a decent level of self control.

A hard kind of loathing.

It was the kind of problem where you simply wanted to turn it off, call it a day and say good night. Except, the irony of those problems were they
couldn’t
be turned off by a simple solution. This kind took an all-out war just to face the music never mind actually solving it.

He was so sick of dwelling on it. He’d been doing that all evening.

New resolution: not only did he no longer care about the money, he no longer cared about
himself.

It was the only way to stay sane. Just write
yourself
off, call it a day and say good night.

After one more bet.

He pulled out the Controller from the seat in front him and just held it. Every few seconds his eyes would begin to drift to the screen, but he’d pull them back and force them to stare forward again past the fight cage and to the rows of seats beyond. Even the faces weren’t digestible. Just blurred beige and brown circles, dotted with tiny black specks and squiggly lines.

A sharp pain sparked in his ribs and his first inclination was his muscles were spasming from the stress, but it was Jack, sticking a thick elbow into him.

“Better make up your mind, friend. Show’s coming down the pike, you know?” Jack said.

“Yeah.” Mick mouthed the words more than said them. He didn’t have to look at Jack to know the guy knew something was wrong. He had to be careful. The betting had to stay personal. Mick cleared his throat and forced the word out again: “Yeah.”

“Then get ’er done.”

Mick nodded and forced himself to look at the pale blue glow of the Controller screen. At first the details of the next fight didn’t even register. He had to read the notes two more times before it sunk in. You could only see the word “zombie” so many times before the death machine it represented didn’t carry any weight anymore. But there was another word there that
did
carry some weight.

Mick gazed passed the Controller to his feet. He tapped his left, then his right, then his left again. He bounced the rhythm back and forth a few times as if the stalling would somehow make the decision easier. And honestly, it did. When he entered his bet, he felt better and, for the first time this evening, felt like he made the right choice.

He had to feel for the pouch in the rear of the seat in front of him because the lights had gone out before he had a chance to put the Controller back.

22

Werewolf
vs
ZombieS

Bet: $350,000

Owing: $794,000

H
er name was Ursula.

When the buzzer sounded and the lights went on, she wasn’t surprised the audience readily booed and hissed at her. After all, she was only four-foot-four, a little over a hundred pounds, blonde, petite and only seventeen. Whichever dead man—slow or quick—rose from the iron ring would surely tear her to shreds.

Ursula wasn’t a stranger to insults or being frequently underestimated. If anything, her home life had taught her insults and condescension was the norm. Her father kept calling her a “skank just like your mother,” and her mother always brought up that if she was any more introverted, she’d turn into a hopeless toad like her father.

It was amazing what could happen to a person when you kept getting told the same things over and over again. By the time Ursula was thirteen, she had already had six boyfriends. By the time she was fourteen, she was up to ten. At fifteen, she took things to the next level with them and the back seat of a car never looked the same again.

His name had been Tom Hudlemon.
Cute.
Brown
hair.
A
little
extra
meat
on
the
bones,
but
nothing disgusting.
He
was
known to be the kind of guy who had a new girl hanging off his arm every few weeks.
He was also known for his vintage 2001 Corvette, still red and glossy after all these years. It was in this ’Vette that Ursula knew she
could
seduce
Tom into taking things around the bases.

One night, after grabbing a couple Slurpees, the two eventually found their way onto a darkened street with very few houses left since the world fell apart and the dead were bombed to smithereens in every city. It didn’t take long for Tom to set his Slurpee down and reach over to her. At first, she didn’t mind, the car being dark from the lack of moonlight thanks to the thick clouds overhead. Ursula let him take hold of her, draw her close and start running his hand up her leg. Within a few seconds, the interior of the car grew lighter as the full moon above revealed itself from behind a dark gray cloud. Ursula pulled away, fearing the light being shone on the vehicle might reveal a little too much for any passersby or someone looking out their window.