Gods of the Dead (Rising Book 1) (18 page)

Chapter Nineteen

Vin

“Kill him.”

The stranger’s eyebrows shoot up into his sweat soaked hairline. “No, please! I didn’t mean anything by it!”

“You meant to steal from me.”

“No! I didn’t! I was only talking to him.”

“You were headhunting.”

“It’s not like that.”

“That is precisely what it is. Your people have been stealing from every gang in the wild and now you come to my house looking to steal my gear man?”

Out of the corner of my eye I see Yenko shift on his feet. His hands are clasped in front of his body, the thickly corded muscles of his arms eternally bare in his cut off t-shirt, and I catch a flex. A brief tightening of his hands that rolls up into his arms like a ripple in water. Like a stone just disturbed a calm surface.

“I wasn’t stealing him,” the stranger tries to explain. “I told you. I was only talking to him.”

“Do you know what would happen to my operation if you took Yenko onto your island?”

The guy looks to Yenko and back again at Marlow. Sweat is pouring down into his eyes, making him blink rapidly. “If he’s your only gearhead—“

“And he is.”

“Your Jennies, your generators, they’d wear out. They’d die.”

“And we would lose power and heat and do you know what would happen to this Arena and the Stables if there were no light or power to them?’

“People would stop coming here.”

“Do we look like farmers to you?”

“No.”

“No, because we’re not. Fighting, drugs, and women – that’s our trade. If you take our trade away from us we’ll starve. We’ll die. All because you wooed away one man.” Marlow levels his gaze on the guy, his voice falling quiet. “Now do you see what you tried to steal from me? You tried to steal everything.”

The stranger is trembling. I’m pretty sure he’s a shiver away from pissing himself. “I’m sorry,” he whispers.

“Imagine if I did that to you. If I strolled onto your island and took away every valuable asset you had, every tool you needed to survive. Imagine you were about to lose everything all over again. How angry would you be?”

“Very angry.”

“Angry enough to kill.”

The guy swallows hard, his lower lip shaking.

“How many do you have on the island now?” Marlow asks, his tone lightening. Becoming conversational.

“I don’t know. I don’t know how many we have. Over… over three hundred.”

I pause, the circles I’ve been walking around the Arena coming to a screeching halt. Yenko meets my eyes over the stranger’s head and I can see the same shock as I feel.

“Three hundred,” Marlow repeats slowly.

“Yes.”

“Three. Hundred. People.”

The guy nods, his eyes on the floor.

When Marlow looks up at me I know the guy is going to die. It was a threat before to get him to talk but it’s real now. It’s a fact already written in history. The ink just isn’t dry yet.

The size of the new camp on Vashon Island is a blow to Marlow’s unhealed ego. We were over a hundred strong three years ago. Could we have grown to three hundred in as many years? Probably not, but try telling Marlow that. As far as he’s concerned we were on a permanent rise before the Colonists ripped the rug out from under us. Now they’re expanding all over town. Marlow always imagined us a distant second in size to them but to find out we’re not even in the same class as the Colony’s competition… things are going to be tense in the Hive for a while.

“Kill him,” Marlow tells me. He turns his back and heads out of the cage, probably up to his office to break the shit out of something.

I bristle at the command. I’m at the top of his counsel of six, his right hand man, and telling me to do his dirty work with a guy like Yenko standing right here and armed is a slap in the face. One I won’t bear.

“No,” I tell him firmly.

He pauses with his back to me. “What did you say?”

“Not my job, Marlow,” I remind him calmly. “You want someone to get their hands dirty like that, you gotta get one of your footmen because I’m not doing it.”

He turns on his heel and eyes me coldly.

I don’t flinch. I don’t give an inch of ground because I’m dead serious. I’ll go toe to toe with him on this. I won’t be treated like a low level lackey, like some kid off the street on his first day. I don’t do the dirty work. Not anymore.

Finally he comes forward, straight for me, and still I don’t move. Even when he pulls my knife from where it sits sheathed on my hip, even when he holds the blade up close for me to see, I don’t move. I barely breathe.

Quick as a snake he reaches out and slices the knife clean across the guy’s throat. The Vashon topples over, clutching at his torn flesh as his life slips through his fingers, warm and thick. It pools on the floor of the Arena and mingles with all the rest. All of the other lives lost.

Marlow throws my knife down on the ground next to the dead body. “The next time I tell you to kill a man you’d better fucking do it or I’ll put your own blade in your back.”

He stares at me for a good ten seconds before leaving the Arena. My muscles ache from the strain of staying still. From the clench in my fists and my gut, the rotted out anger rolling in my chest.

“Be careful,” Yenko says ominously.

I laugh roughly. “Or what? He’ll kill me?”

“Sounds like it.”

“He threatens to kill me at least once a year, usually when I remind him what an old bastard he is. I offered to find him Depends last month and he only laughed. I was due for a death threat.”

Yenko scowls. “He’s not kidding, Vin.”

“No, and neither am I,” I tell him seriously. “I’m not gonna slip down the ranks into minion level work just because he’s having a bad day. He wouldn’t call Doc in here to clean up this mess and he shouldn’t have asked me to make it. Besides, I don’t agree with it anyway. He should have left him alive, asked him more questions instead of going all premenstrual on him.”

“What kind of questions?”

“Like how they got the island Fever free. They killed off all the Risen and are locking it down so no new infected can pop up, but how did they do it without losing half their people in the process? And how are they keeping it secured? All that shoreline can’t be under constant guard so how are they doing it? Fences? Walls like the quarantine used to be?”

Yenko shrugs. “Wouldn’t surprise me. They’re from Oregon. Walls kept the Risen trapped in with them for a year. Probably have a lot of faith the walls could keep them out too.”

Mike appears at the door, poking his head inside. He frowns when he sees the dead guy on the floor but wisely doesn’t ask about it. “Guys, meeting. John just got back from rounds. He has news on the people in the park.”

Yenko and I nod, slowly filing out of the Arena.

“I got a dime that says he wants them all dead,” I offer Yenko.

He laughs with a shake of his head. “That ain’t a bet, man. That’s a sure thing.”

***

“Take ‘em out again,” Marlow commands angrily. “They’re getting too big. You’ve let them grow.”

John sighs heavily. “They’re not a threat. Their numbers are bigger than ours, yeah, but a quarter of that is kids.”

“Kids who will grow up to be adults.”

“Yeah, someday, but—“

“So put a stop to it. Rob them of everything. Keep them
down
, do you hear me?”

“Yeah,” John answers unenthusiastically. “Yeah, I hear you.”

“Tonight.”

“Fine. Yeah.”

Yenko casts me a knowing look from the far corner of the room and I raise my hand toward him, rubbing my fingertips together in a sign for ‘money’. He smirks and flips me off.

John leaves the room, his annoyance broadcast loud and clear in his body language.

I get why John is mad. He’s an original like me, one of the guys thrown out of our home in the stadiums years ago, and we know the people living in the small city park. The Colonists threw them out of the baseball stadium the same day they took the football field from us. Nothing but farmers and families, they went the wholesome route while Marlow built his tarnished empire. And they took a lot of our defectors with them. While we took on whores, they started having babies. We sell Honey, they grow crops. They’re not a threat to anyone and still Marlow insists on keeping their numbers lower than ours. He has their fields destroyed and their homes invaded every time they start to look too secure. Too comfortable.

It’s petty and a little insane, but that’s Marlow. He can be a real dick sometimes.

“Is that it?” he asks when John is gone. “Nothing else?”

“Nothing, boss,” Hector answers from the desk, closing his little blue accounting book.

“Good. Get to your posts and be ready for anything. It’s fight night.” He turns to me, his eyes hard and still angry. “Is the Arena ready?”

No, you sloppy motherfucker,
I think bitterly,
it’s not ready because you threw a tantrum and left a corpse rotting in the center of it.

“It will be soon,” I promise.

He smiles slightly. “Make sure that it is.

I get a lackey to do it. Some new kid who just joined up a month ago. He pales when I show the body to him, telling him he has twenty minutes to make it disappear.

“What do I do with it?” he asks nervously.

I look at the guy on the ground, slack and empty. It’s not a person. It’s a meat suit. It’s a weird smell and a big pile of bones. It’s catnip for the dead. Marlow wants it dropped in front of the Pikes but I’m pretty sure if I send this rook out in the wild with a dead body into Pike territory we’ll never see him again.

“The Sound,” I tell him finally. “Toss it in the Sound. Maybe the current will take him home.”

“Where’s he from?”

“Just get it done.”

I leave him to figure out how he’s going to get the body to the pier out back. Fastest route is to drag it through the long hallway filled with doors that rattle and moan and scratch. A hallway that stinks with death and all the Risen I keep on hand for fights. He won’t take that hallway, though. No one likes going down there. Not even me.

I head through the lobby to go upstairs and get dressed for the night. It’s already buzzing with people waiting to get into the Arena and start betting. To start drinking and getting laid and forgetting their troubles, or making them as it turns out more often than not. A few people call my name but I ignore them. I don’t have time. The body in the Arena is setting my night back and I need to hurry to play catchup.

The Hive is crazy when the Arena is open. I’ve got an Eleven and a Hive member signed up for the openers, Hyperion as my closer. Guy’s a champion. Tall, built, golden eyed, and the kind of charismatic fighter that makes me miss the thrill of the bout.

Fighting in the Arena isn’t exactly what it was in the Underground, and it’s not just because of the zombies or the fact that it’s to the death. There are different tiers of fights now. Third tier allows you one weapon. It’s what most newbies choose to get a feel for the fight, to get their confidence up, but the payout is minimal. Second tier has no weapons and instead of one infected you’re fighting two. It’s a lot harder but the payout is a lot bigger, so it’s worth it. Then there’s the first tier fight. The Blind. You go in with no weapons and no sight. We blindfold you and pit you against three zombies. The payout is huge, assuming you survive, but it’s only been attempted twice and successfully completed once. Not even Hyperion will do the Blind.

When I get downstairs the room is already buzzing with guys in the stands looking down into the ring, and tables on the outskirts are filling up fast. They’re buying booze and placing their bets with my assistant, but what most are waiting for is either the fight or the women. The girls haven’t come in yet but when they do the real money will start to flow.

I’m doing my final checks on the locks to the cage when the doors to the Stables swing open and the men start to cheer. The women file in slowly, all smiles and hips swaying. All but one.

Seven pulls up the rear with Bennett following close behind, both of them sour faced and annoyed. He gives her a shove, muttering something in her ear, and she recoils from his hand like he burned her. She slowly makes her way around the edge of the room before taking up post in a far corner.

I haven’t seen much of her in the last few weeks. Just these moments when she takes to the floor before the fight starts. We exchange a few words, mostly hostile shit that makes me smile, and she goes on about her night. Most of the time I’m too busy to care where she is or what she’s doing, but when I look at her now something inside me aches a little. Her face is in shadow but it looks like she has a black eye. Maybe a swollen lower lip.

“Hey, Bennett,” I snap angrily as he passes by. I nod to Seven. “What’s up with your girl?”

He snorts, oblivious to my tone. “That trick? She’s giving me nothing but trouble. I can’t wait to cut her loose.”

“What’s with her face, asshole? Did you do that?”