The arena comes alive with a fanfare of thunderous heavy metal thrash-music and a fusillade of hyena yelps from the stands—and on cue, the crusty, scabrous, subliterate tank known as Eugene Cooney emerges from the shadows of the north vestibule like some thrift shop Spartacus. He wears secondhand football pads over his iron-girder shoulders, and carries a bloodstained bat wound with reams of tape.
The crowd eggs him on as he passes the gauntlet of walking dead chained to the gateposts on the edge of the infield. The creatures reach for him—rotting mouths working, blackened teeth gnashing, delicate stringers of black bile looping through motes of dusty light. Eugene gives them a middle-finger salute. The crowd loves the man, and roars their approval as Eugene takes his place out in the center of the infield, brandishing the bat with a kind of pumped-up majesty that would shame a marine color guard. The stench of ripe body organs and stewing offal mingles with the breeze.
Eugene twirls his bat and waits. The spectators wait. The entire arena seems to go quiet in a strange tableau as everybody awaits the challenger.
*
Way up in the press box, standing behind the Governor, looking on, Gabe wonders aloud, raising his voice enough to be heard, “You sure about this, boss?”
The Governor doesn’t even look at him. “The chance to see this bitch take a beating without me breaking a sweat? Yeah—I think it’s a good move.”
A noise down on the field wrenches their attention to the pool of light around the south portal.
The Governor smiles. “This is going to be good.”
*
She enters the showground from the darkness of the vestibule with a brusque, almost curt rhythm to her stride. Head down, shoulders square under her monastic cloak, dreadlocks flagging in the wind, she moves quickly and decisively despite her wounds and exhaustion, as though she’s about to simply grab a stray rabbit by the nape of the neck. Her long, curved saber, gripped firmly in her right hand, points downward at a forty-five-degree angle.
It happens so quickly, so casually, so authoritatively, that the exotic nature of this person—the strange officiousness of her demeanor—seems to momentarily hold the audience rapt, as though the entire gathering has inhaled and held its collective breath. The moving corpses reach for this woman as she passes—this odd specimen with the fancy sword—almost like supplicants, surrounding her, converging on her as she approaches Eugene with no expression, no pleasure, no emotion.
Eugene cocks the bat, and he growls some inane threat at her and then lashes out.
The man’s movements might as well be in slow motion as the woman simply and swiftly delivers a perfectly placed kick to the big brute’s genitals. The blow lands in the soft spot between his legs and elicits an almost girlish squeal from the behemoth, doubling him over as though he’s suddenly intoxicated with agony. The spectators howl.
The next part transpires with the swift and certain arc of a chef’s knife.
The woman in the cloak simply does a quick turn, a sort of low pirouette, the sword gripped in both hands now—a movement so natural, so practiced, so precise, so inevitable, as to be almost innate—and then brings the sword down on the big man’s neck. The hand-forged blade, tooled by artisans in the tradition of ancestors down through millennia, severs Eugene Cooney’s head with barely a whisper.
At first, up in the bleachers, the sight of steel flashing, a glimmer of tungsten on the blade—and the entire cranium of this giant man being lopped off with the ease of a band saw cutting through Brie—is so surreal that the crowd reacts awkwardly: a coughing sound among many, a chorus of nervous laughter … and then a tsunami of silence.
The sudden hush that grips the dusty stadium is so inappropriate and out of place that it takes the subsequent geyser of blood frothing out of Eugene Cooney’s cleanly dismembered neck, as the headless body drops puppetlike—first to its knees, then to its belly, landing in a heap as lifeless as a pile of shed skin—to suddenly elicit shouts of outrage.
Up in the crow’s nest, behind panes of grimy glass, a wiry figure springs to his feet. The Governor gapes down at the infield, teeth clenched, hissing: “What. The. Fuck?!”
For a long, dreamlike moment, it seems as though a strange paralysis grips each and every person within the confines of the press box and across the stands. Gabe and Bruce move in toward the glass, clenching and unclenching their fists. The Governor kicks his folding chair behind him, the metal contraption banging against the back wall.
“Get down there!” The Governor points at the tableau on the field—the dark amazon with her sword poised, the circle of cadavers reaching for her—and he screams at Gabe and Bruce: “Rein those biters in and GET HER THE FUCK OUTTA MY SIGHT!” Liquid rage courses through him. “I swear I’m going to kill that bitch!”
Gabe and Bruce stumble toward the door, tripping over each other to get out.
Down on the field, the woman in the cloak—nobody has yet bothered to even learn her name—unleashes her controlled fury on the ring of walking dead circling her. It begins almost as a dance.
From a crouch, she spins and simultaneously swings the sword at the first walker. The sharp edge whispers through mortified neck cords and gristle, effortlessly taking off the first head.
Blood and tissue bloom in the artificial light as the head falls and rolls in the dust, and the body collapses. The woman spins. Another head jettisons. Fluids fountain into the air. The woman spins again, zinging through another putrefied neck, another cranium flying off its ragged, bloody mooring. Another spin, another decapitation … another, and another, and another … until the dust is running black with cerebrospinal fluids, and the woman gets winded.