All Bad Things

—6—

The crowd inside the Arena is screaming for Samson’s blood. They stand in the auditorium booing, throwing bottles and cups full of urine at him that bounce off the chicken wire enclosing the stage. He stands with chains circling his waist, cuffed to his wrists and ankles. His shirt is streaked with dried blood, eyes swollen from the beating he’s taken at the hands of his captors.

Samson does not love this plan.

“I know you don’t feel the blows,” King says, a soothing hand on Samson’s shoulder, “but they sting nonetheless.” King’s perfect teeth shine in the stage lights, his dark blue suit without a speck of dust on it. Being God’s chosen has its perks.

“I can take a beating, Reverend.”

“I know you can, son,” King says. “And tonight you’ll have to. For God.”

“I know, sir. I won’t let you down.”

A shriek of feedback punches through the auditorium followed by a loud belch. “Listen up, you cocksuckers,” says a voice over the PA. “You are going to abso–fucking–lutely love the shit we have in store for you tonight. We got ourselves Luke Samson, who if you don’t know the name you sure as shit know what he’s done. This is the fucker who shut down the Central Market three months ago. The guy who’s been killing everybody from here to Hollywood. And you know what we’re gonna do to him? We’re gonna kill him and pass his skull around.”

The crowd answers with a roar like thunder. They want Samson’s head on a stick. They want to cut him to pieces, light him on fire and parade his skull–fucked corpse down Sunset Boulevard.

“It won’t be long now,” King says. “Hold fast, make it look good, and they won’t know what hit them.”

It’s funny, Samson thinks, that the Locos don’t seem to be asking why he’s here. He just showed up a week ago, walked into the main room, told some kid who he was and waited for the beatings to start. Everyone knew who he was—they all know him on sight—but strangely, no one’s asked him why he surrendered. No one’s asked him why he’s let them beat him and hasn’t put up a fight.

And no one’s asked him where his army is.

“We got five guys gonna get into the cage with Samson tonight and the only one ain’t walkin’ outta there is Big Red himself.”

The crowd is a wild animal, barking, spitting, straining at its leash. They aren’t individual people anymore. The crowd has subsumed them, absorbed them into its seething mass. It’s like a river in a storm, threatening to overflow its banks—nothing but mindless energy bent on seeing Samson’s destruction.

Samson can’t count the people in the crowd, but if the entire pack of Locos wasn’t sitting out there, or somewhere in the building, he’d be surprised.

The stage has chicken wire covering the front, but the back is all razor wire. Once a man goes into a fight, the Locos don’t want him running out the back. Aside from a door in the razor wire fence, itself wrapped in razor wire, there are a dozen trapdoors in the floor.

Five of them pop open at once to let Samson’s opponents onto the stage. They start to pull themselves up, but Samson wastes no time. His feet may be manacled, but there’s more than enough chain to allow him a full range of movement. He takes advantage of that, runs to the closest fighter and kicks him full in the teeth. The guy topples down the trapdoor before he can even clear it.

One down, four to go. The crowd screams at first blood. Two guys come at Samson from each side, circling him. One carries a machete, the other a meat cleaver. Beefy, muscled men, with scars all over their torsos. They’ve experienced violence most people see only in their nightmares.

Samson goes after the machete first. As the man brings the razor–sharp blade down, Samson loops a length of chain around it, pivots on his heel and slides past, forcing the blade down and pulling the fighter off his feet. Samson drives an elbow into his face that fractures bone. The man hits the floor with a dull, wet thud.

The cleaver’s more problematic. Though the machete has a longer reach, Samson was able to use it against itself with the chains. The cleaver’s somewhere between a knife and an axe, a good slicing weapon, and if you have enough room to get a good swing in, you can really fuck somebody up.

Samson backs away from the cleaver’s onslaught, trying to keep enough distance to not die, but not so much that the guy can get a good swing going. It takes everything he has just to keep from being sliced to ribbons.

He needs to do something fast. He doesn’t see them, but he knows there are two more guys behind him. He knows he’s being herded back into them, so instead of stepping back from the cleaver’s attack, he waits until he sees an opening and steps into it.

His timing is a little off, and the cleaver skims along his forearm, opening it up in a long, thin slice.

The pain shoots through him, igniting a fire in his mind that he’s been able to keep tamped down through all the beatings he’s taken in the last few days. Now it doesn’t matter. Now he needs it. He lets the red rage wash through him, feels his features twist into what Cyrus would call his murder face.

With a burst of speed, he knees the cleaver man in the nuts, hears a popping noise past all the screaming, watches blood spread through the crotch of the man’s pants. Samson throws his arms wide, snapping the chains from his wrists. He wraps the guy in a bear hug, squeezing hard until he hears his back snap, then spins, throwing the body into one of the guys coming up behind.

Cleaver’s not getting up again, but the other guy will soon, so he needs to take out the only one standing fast. This one’s got a shiv made out of a sharpened chunk of sheet metal, and he’s big—almost as big as Samson. This might very well come down to a contest of brute strength, and the way he’s feeling right now, Samson isn’t sure he’ll win it.

And then the floor drops out from under him.

Samson falls through a trapdoor, one of the few on stage designed to open down instead of up. He drops a good five feet, rough hands grabbing at him to slow his fall. He swings a fist, connecting with somebody’s face, hears a voice telling him over and over that it’s all right, he’s all right. Someone slaps something onto his face, straps and buckles cinched tight over the back of his head.

Through the smeared plastic of the gas mask, he sees James King standing before him, beatific smile on his face. “It’s time, Samson,” King says. “Time to deliver them to God.”

Above him, Samson hears a series of muffled explosions, five in rapid succession, then ten more over as many seconds. Surprised yelling as the crowd realizes that something’s wrong but doesn’t know what it is.

Then the screams start.

Cyrus had explained that the chemical he’d wanted from Tess, the stuff labeled 35884–77–6, was something called xylyl bromide that was used as a tear gas in some war over a hundred years ago. How Tess got her hands on that shit he had no idea, but now that he had it, he was damn well going to use it.

In small doses exposure leads to burning eyes, throat damage. Higher concentrations and the eyeballs swell and scar, airways close, lungs burn. And in the concentration they just dumped into the Arena, no one’s getting out alive.

Samson follows the group that pulled him off the stage through a tunnel that leads to the outside. They get through a basement door and then seal it with a couple of pieces of rusty rebar through the door handles.

Samson pulls off the mask, takes a deep breath of cool, clean air, then starts to cough. Barely a whiff of the stuff got through the mask, but his skin is already beginning to itch, and his eyes burn. A woman who helped pull him out of the building pushes him to his knees and pours water from a bottle into his eyes.

“This will help,” she says. “And we’ll want to get your skin scrubbed clean, too. But that can wait. Can you breathe okay?”

“Yeah,” Samson says, though his swelling tongue makes him wonder how long that will last. “Just my eyes sting is all.”

She hands him another bottle. “Keep flushing your eyes, sir. I need to get back to the doors, make sure nobody gets through.”

“Okay, Novice…”

“Initiate, sir. Initiate Katarina Volkov. Glory be to God and his Prophet James King.”

“Glory be to God,” Samson says, watching her retreat through blurred eyes.

“A few more minutes and our people will go in and finish up the survivors,” King says. “Every one of those godless sinners delivered unto the Lord. A glorious victory for God’s Militia, don’t you think, Samson?”

“Of course, Reverend,” Samson says. He wonders how many were in there. The Locos had a good hundred, hundred fifty members, and with so many wanting to see Samson’s head on a platter, there had to be a lot more than that in there. Two hundred, maybe? Three? He’s never seen that many dead. He has a hard time wrapping his brain around it.

“Something wrong, Samson?” King says.

“Just that we never gave them the choice. Even at the Market, even at the camps, we gave them a choice.”

“We gave them a choice here, too, son. You walked into their heathen’s den, let them subject you to beatings and torture. They could have stopped. They could have never started. The ones who went to watch your assassination in there, they could have stayed home.”

King shakes his head, puts a hand on Samson’s shoulder. “They didn’t have to participate in that barbarism, but they chose to, anyway. Never think they didn’t have a choice.”

Samson pours more water in his stinging eyes and trusts in James King that they did the right thing.