“The craziest part is, when we were working out there, we never saw any of the infected. Just the thousands of them that surrounded us the first few days and then nothing. I’ve always thought there was something more to it. How does one of the largest metro areas in the United States end up with none of those things wandering around?”
— Miller, speaking to Colin, Jackson, and Allen in the cages, Day One of the Triad of the Martyr
After Charles had seen Marshall, Colby, and Sid off, he sat down with Sam to study their map. The two discussed alternate routes and methods of egress from the City of Atlanta. They both agreed that going west away from the stadium and then circling back to the southeast was their best course of action.
“And you do not know anything more about these population centers over here?” Charles asked as he indicated to a large blank space on the map where the Atlanta airport was.
“I don’t, Chuck,” Sam said. “The radio went out before I could get anyone on the phone. Besides, if there are any aircraft there, I doubt there is fuel. If there’s fuel in the tanks, it’s more than likely spoiled by now. Even if they added stabilizers to the tanks before they closed the airport, those would have dissipated by now. And who is going to fly anyway?”
“Maria is a certified pilot. I know enough to co-pilot for her if we find a single engine.”
“I do not think it is worth the risk, Charles,” Maria said, looking up from her notebooks that were spread around her as she continued to study what information she could on the Disease. “Sam is right, the fuel would have gone bad by now. If we were lucky enough to have the time to perform a full systems check on an aircraft before taking off and then were lucky enough to find fuel in the tankers, it might get us into the air, but it would not last. We would stall before we reached two thousand feet.”
“That’s part of the reason for heading to the coast,” Sam explained. “The petroleum industry in and around Savannah, Georgia was huge and the shelf life of LPG is practically limitless.”
“Alright,” Charles resigned and walked towards the window. “West and then…”
Charles trailed off.
Sam and Maria shot him a glance and noticed he had begun to study something on the ground outside of their building.
“Have these people been coming in all day,” Charles asked.
“I noticed a few groups this morning on my watch,” Sam said as he and Maria got up to join Charles at the window.
“Wow,” Maria exclaimed in surprise.
“Nothing like that though,” Sam said.
The three of them watched as thousands of people were streaming past their building towards the former baseball stadium.
As the mid-morning light crept down the tunnel entrance at the back of the cages, Colin was stirred awake by the shutting of the gate at the front of their cell. Miller stood in silence with his head hung low. His huge frame was silhouetted against the light at his back, so Colin could not see his face.
Colin reached over to shake Jackson and silence his snoring. He managed to wake Jackson who shot bolt upright with a look of terrified surprise until he remembered where he was and his look of terror turned into dismal resignation. As he rubbed the sleep from his eyes, Jackson turned to wake Allen, but was stopped by Colin.
“Let him sleep,” Colin said. “He probably needs it more than us.”
“I’m up,” Allen whispered. “What’s going on?”
“Miller’s back,” replied Jackson. “Let’s get going.”
Colin and Jackson went into their tried and true morning routines that got their blood flowing and brought them to their senses. Colin rolled over and did a dozen push-ups before springing silently to his feet. Jackson managed half that number of push-ups then rolled to his back and did a handful of crunches before performing a near perfect kick-up.
Allen lay still on the ground and studied his two friends. They both offered a hand and pulled him up with ease. As they did, Allen doubled over and winced with pain as he held his head.
“You alright,” asked Jackson.
“Probably not. But let’s get on with it.”
They walked over to Miller who had found his cot near the entrance of the cages. He was sitting down, head still hung low in an attempt to avoid eye contact.
“What was that about last night?” Colin inquired. The commotion was starting to arouse the other men in the cages.
“Let him be,” came a voice from the back. Colin thought it was from either Freddie or Jonesy, the two men who had lent them some gear for last night’s battle, but he could not be certain.
“It’s alright, man. These guys need to get a crash course. I think the bitch has taken a liking to this bunch.”
Miller stood up and studied the three men. As he did, Colin saw the dirt on the man’s face was streaked with either tears or sweat. Given it had been a cool night and his eyes were bloodshot, Colin assumed it was the former and wondered what could bring a man of his size to tears. He had deep bags under his sunken eyes and more than a few scars marked the untold battles he had seen in the arena.
“Come on,” Miller said once he had let the three men realize he had in fact been crying. “Let’s get some grub before it gets cold. It might taste like crap, but at least we can pretend like it’s warm crap.”
The three men followed Miller through their dimly lit cell to a unexplored corner of the locker room. Dozens of men and women wore sullen and downtrodden looks upon their faces. Once in the far corner of the cages, they could hear the busy workings of the room behind their door. Silverware and plates clattered. Voices talked on a variety of subjects.
As Miller pounded his fist, the door opened and they could see at the end of the hallway past another set of guards was a room that had been fashioned into a cafeteria. Colin recognized the layout of the room as an exterior entrance into the stadium and noticed that it was in fact a loading dock that had been walled up on the far end of the ramp leading to the road. The makeshift cafeteria was filled with a couple dozen women that appeared to be captives as well. Miller explained that the women held captive generally did not make it to the cages. Most of them performed menial tasks for Olympia’s upper crust. These were most of those women. Some of the really unlucky ones found themselves in the guard’s quarters for nightly entertainment. The women that really pissed off Constance were sent to the pens.
“That’s not the first time I’ve heard that word. What or where are the pens?” asked Colin.
“Let’s work up to that one. I’d like to get some food in my stomach first,” Miller replied.
As they waited in line, several women came up to Miller and asked how he was. More so to offer condolences for some unknown loss than casual flirtation. Miller was pleasant enough, but Colin could tell he was starting to dial it in before they reached the service counter.
Breakfast amounted to powdered eggs and oatmeal that were only distinguishable by their color. Water was offered and Miller explained that it was likely gray water taken from the reservoirs that caught the rain water. They tried to treat the water when able, but there was only so much chlorine and iodine in the world and the Patricians took most of those.
“Let’s start there,” said Jackson. “Patricians and Plebeians.”
“Roman caste system. Pats are the fancy pants and the Plebs are the commoners. Last night’s shindig was for the Pats. I was against the whole caste idea,” insisted Miller. “But Constance seemed to think that if people brought enough to the table they should be rewarded. So people that bring valuable resources to Olympia get rewarded by being placed into the Patrician caste. This is supposedly to encourage participation in rebuilding Olympia, but I just saw it as a way for people whose crap didn’t stink to get whatever they want.”
“So lawyers and bankers get away with murder even after the end of the world,” Allen reflected.
“Shit no. This is the real world, man. Lawyers and bankers don’t account for nothing. Contractors and farmers. Those are the important people these days. You figure out a way to engineer clean water or fix a pump station with too much sewage and not enough electricity then you get rewarded by Constance.”
“You seem to know a lot about our benefactor here, Miller. What’s your story?” Colin asked.
“How much time do you have?” he laughed.
As it turned out, Miller, a farm-boy from North Georgia, had been a former pro baseball player who had gotten an early call up to the majors during spring training before the Disease hit. Going into August he had a three-forty batting average, twenty-two home runs, and forty-two runs batted in. He had been talked about for Rookie of the Year. The week the Disease hit Atlanta, Miller had been at Turner Field with the trainers trying to work a pulled muscle he had gotten the night before. When the call had come across the sound system that the city had designated the stadium as a quarantine zone and that all staff and personnel needed to remain in the stadium until further notice.
Miller had helped Constance establish several key infrastructure improvements of Olympia including the rainwater reservoirs and solar panel arrays around the city. He had, after all, used his baseball scholarship to the Georgia Institute of Technology to receive a decent education.
“The craziest part is,” Miller continued, “when we were working to setup all of the infrastructure, we never saw any of the infected out there. Just the thousands of them that surrounded us the first few days and then nothing. We would occasionally run across a handful here and there, but the prefects that were with us were under strict orders to capture and imprison the ones they could. I mean, maybe that’s why it’s mostly cleared of those quote-unquote believers, but I’ve always thought there was something more to it. How does one of the largest metro areas in the United States have none of the infected wandering around?”
“I’d like to know that myself,” said Jackson. “We were surprised at how few we saw once we got into the city. Why call the Diseased believers?”
“Diseased. Huh. Don’t let the guards hear you calling them that,” Miller explained. “Goes to the whole Church of the Martyr folklore that Constance preaches I guess. Something about the ones that turn become believers since they’ve died and been reborn. The people, like us, that don’t believe in that stuff — well, we’re called non-believers. Easy enough to follow?”
“Yeah. Well, if crazy is easy to follow, then yeah,” Allen answered. “So you don’t buy into the whole religion thing? Is that why she sent you to the cages?”
Miller rolled up his tattered sleeve to reveal a tattoo of a cross.
“I’m as Christian as they come, boys. All this stuff has yet to cause my faith to waver. But these believers as they’re called — these sons of bitches are pure evil sent from the butthole of Satan himself. And I find myself in the unique position of having the pleasure of killing every single one of them that Constance puts in front of me. As to why she sent me down here, yeah, let’s just say we had a difference in opinion and leave it at that.”
Miller spotted Captain Harding on a beeline towards their table.
“Ah, hell. Finish up. Here comes trouble,” Miller warned. “Captain Hard-on! To what do we owe the pleasure of your distinguished company this fine morning?”
“Hard on? Good one. You stay up all night working on that one? The way I hear it, you didn’t get much sleep at all did you?”
Miller’s demeanor once again turned as cold as ice and Colin saw his knuckles go white from clenching his fists.
“Yeah, just give me a reason, asshole,” Harding said. As Miller relaxed his grip, Harding continued. “That’s what I thought. Now, take these three and get them ready to go out to the Plebs kickoff event. Eleven AM sharp. Can you manage that?”
“You’re the boss, boss,” Miller replied.
Harding turned to leave and the men hurriedly finished their meals.
“So this is basically like the other night?” asked Allen as he scraped the last bit of eggs and oatmeal on to the same spoon.
“Like the other night plus a couple thousand people,” Miller replied. He pushed what was left of his oatmeal to the center of the table and stood. “Today is for the Plebs. The Pats had their intimate little wine-and-fondle last night. The Plebs get the main show. They want to see what they’re betting on before tonight’s fights.” He looked at each of them in turn. “Think of it like a pre-game walk. Except we’re the ones being walked.”
“And the religious angle?” Colin asked as they began to gather themselves and stand up to leave.
“Every day of the Triad has a theme. Day one, the community gathers. Today’s about the masses bearing witness before the suffering begins.” Miller said it with the same tired cadence of a man reciting scripture he’s memorized against his will. “Day three is the rebirth. Constance’s anniversary.”
“Whose rebirth?” Allen asked.
“Hers. It’s the day she took this place over.” Miller picked up his tray. “Day two is supposed to be ours.”
Nobody said anything to that.
“I’ll give you what rundown I can on the way,” Miller said. “Let’s move.”
The display area had been set up in the open grounds on the south side of the Coliseum, between the stadium wall and the outer perimeter fence. Someone had fashioned four wooden platforms about three feet off the ground, spaced apart in a rough square formation so that the crowd could move freely between them. On each platform stood a post with chains attached — purely for show, Colin noted, since they’d stopped chaining the non-believers to their posts after the second Triad when one of the fighters had used the chain to put a prefect in the infirmary according to Miller.
The crowd was already thick by the time Harding’s men marched them out.
Colin had expected something like the Patrician reception — controlled, intimate, strange in its own particular way. This was different. This was ten thousand people who had walked from wherever they’d come from and were spending their first full day of the Triad trying to justify the trip. They pushed against the rope lines on either side of the path. They called out to Miller by name. Some of them held signs written on cardboard or salvaged cloth. One man near the front had a hand-painted banner with Miller’s likeness on it.
“Miller time!” someone screamed from the left.
Miller raised one enormous hand in acknowledgment without breaking stride. The crowd screamed louder.
“You have a fan club,” Jackson said.
“I am a reasonable bet in a gambling economy,” Miller replied. “Different thing all together.”
They were split up at the platforms. Miller to the far left. Jackson to the right. Allen — still moving carefully — was positioned closest to the main pathway, which Miller had quietly arranged with the prefect escorting them without making it obvious. Allen’s spot had the least amount of foot traffic and the most shade. Allen had not acknowledged the gesture, but Colin had seen it.
Colin’s platform put his back to the stadium wall and gave him a clear line of sight across the full display area. The crowd moved in the slow circular patterns of people who weren’t sure which direction had the best view. Prefects worked the perimeter. Food vendors had set up along the fence and were doing business in whatever passed for currency here — salvaged goods, labor credits, the barter systems that sprang up in every colony Colin had ever passed through.
It was, in its way, almost normal. That was the part that bothered him most.
The first hour passed the way most hours in captivity passed — slowly, and with diminishing dignity.
People approached the platforms to study the fighters the way you’d study horses before a race. They circled. They pointed. They debated among themselves in voices that didn’t bother to come down to a whisper showing a despicable callousness towards the objects of discussion. A heavyset man in a wine stained toga that had seen better days climbed halfway up the rope barrier to get a better look at Colin’s arms and had to be redirected by a prefect. Two women who might have been sisters spent four minutes arguing about whether Allen could still fight effectively or whether his obvious injuries made him a liability in the coming evening’s match-ups.
Allen stared at a fixed point on the middle distance throughout this exchange and said nothing.
Colin tried to take stock of the layout. The platforms were positioned to funnel crowd movement in a loose clockwise rotation, which meant he got a decent look at the same faces cycling past multiple times. He noted the prefects and their patrol patterns. He noted the two points where the rope barriers had gaps wide enough for someone to step through if they were moving with purpose. He noted where the shade fell in the afternoon and where it didn’t, because in his experience the guards assigned to uncomfortable posts paid less attention.
He filed it all away without knowing yet what he was filing it for.
Then he saw the bear again.
It was a girl, maybe five or six years old, being carried on the hip of a woman who was moving through the crowd with the easy authority of someone accustomed to people stepping out of the way. The girl was swinging a stuffed bear by one arm in the distracted, rhythmic way children did when they weren’t paying attention to the thing they were holding.
Colin watched the bear.
It wasn’t the bear itself. It was something on the bear’s chest. A small stitched patch, circular, with a design he couldn’t quite make out from this distance. The crowd shifted and the woman moved. As the bear swung, Colin got a better angle for just a second before losing it again.
He kept watching.
The woman worked her way around the rotation, pausing to speak with a prefect near Miller’s platform, then continuing in his direction. She was Patrician by the look of her — the slight cloudiness in her eyes gave it away even in the open daylight. She had the unhurried bearing of someone who had never once in two years of Olympia had to wonder where her next meal was coming from.
The girl on her hip was swinging the bear.
Closer now. Fifteen feet, ten, and Colin could see it clearly.
A circular emblem on the bear’s chest. A blue and yellow Cub Scout patch.
His Cub Scout patch.
The one he’d unpinned from his shirt in the town square of Lebanon Junction and pressed into the hand of a woman with auburn hair and blue eyes who had kissed him on the cheek and called him one of the good ones and as she walked toward certain death.
Colin kept his face neutral by force of will alone. His heart was doing something complicated in his chest and he had to force himself to not cry out.
The woman with the cloudless-sky eyes paused near his platform. The girl looked up at Colin with the open, unguarded curiosity that adults spend their whole lives learning and trying to suppress.
“That’s a new one, baby,” the woman said. “Constance says he’s special.”
The girl considered this information with the seriousness it apparently deserved.
“What’s his name?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” the woman said. “Do you want to ask him?”
The girl looked at Colin. Colin looked at the bear.
“What’s your bear’s name?” Colin asked. He used his friendly voice. The voice he used with the children in the civilian columns back before Fort Knox, when keeping the kids calm meant keeping the parents calm.
The girl held up the bear. “This is Scout.”
“That’s a good name,” Colin said. “Can I see Scout for a second?”
The girl looked at the bear and then at Colin. She considered this with the same grave deliberation she seemed to apply to everything else.
She held Scout out toward him.
Colin reached for the bear. His fingers closed around it. He turned it slightly to get a clear look at the patch. It was a circular bordered Cub Scout emblem with yellow stitching. And there, on the back of the patch where the stitching had been done in a hurry, a small irregularity — a double loop that he’d noticed when he’d removed the badge from his jacket and pressed it into Rae’s hand.
This was his badge. He turned the bear back toward the girl with a smile that cost him more than he’d expected.
“Scout’s a good fighter name,” he said.
The girl smiled and took the bear back.
“Excuse me.”
Colin looked up. The man had materialized from the crowd with the focused efficiency of someone who hadn’t been browsing. He was compact, hard-faced, and wearing the insignia of a sub-commander. His eyes went from Colin to the girl to the woman and back to Colin.
“Step back from the rope, please,” he said to the woman, and to Colin: “You don’t interact with guests.”
“The child approached the platform,” Colin said. Easy. Reasonable. Nothing to defend.
“I don’t care,” the sub-commander said. He said it the same way a man closes a door — not angry, not personal, just final. He turned to the woman. “My apologies. Why don’t you take her over to see Miller? He’s much more entertaining.”
The woman nodded and moved away, the girl on her hip, the bear swinging. Colin watched them go.
The sub-commander looked at Colin for a moment longer than was necessary. His expression said nothing. Then he turned and moved back into the crowd.
Colin filed him away alongside everything else he had seen.
They were back in the cages by mid-afternoon.
Allen was asleep within minutes of lying down, which nobody commented on because the alternative was commenting on the fact that he was getting worse, not better. The concussion was still doing something to his eyes and Colin had noticed him listing slightly to the left when he walked, which Jackson had also said nothing about.
Jackson was doing stretches in the corner that looked casual but weren’t.
Colin sat with his back against the wall and ran the badge through his head on a loop. The girl. The patch. Lebanon Junction.
Rae.
“You going to tell me what happened out there?” Miller said. He’d settled onto the cot across from Colin with his arms resting on his knees and the patient expression of a man who was in no particular hurry but was going to wait you out regardless.
“The girl with the stuffed bear,” Colin said. “Who is she?”
Miller’s eyebrows rose a fraction. “That’s what that was about.” He paused. “She’s Constance’s goddaughter. Sarah. Her mother is one of Constance’s personal Patricians.” He tilted his head. “Why?”
“The bear had a badge on it,” Colin said. “Cub Scout emblem. Circular patch.”
“And?”
“And I gave that badge to someone I knew before we came here. Up in Kentucky.”
Miller was quiet for a moment. He looked at the ceiling as if he were reorganizing information.
“You think someone you know is here,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“I think that patch got from Kentucky to Atlanta to that little girl,” Colin said. “And I’d like to know how.”
Miller leaned back. “The sub-commander who got onto you,” he said. “That was Decker. He runs the pens. Not someone you want noticing you.”
“He already noticed me.”
“Yeah.” Miller rubbed the back of his neck. “Try not to give him a reason to notice you more.” He stood and stretched. “Look. There are women here from all over. The ones in the cafeteria this morning for example. Most of them came in from outside, same as you. Some came willingly. Most didn’t.” He said it plainly, without inflection as if he had burned through emotional reactions some time ago. “Constance’s personal attendants get assigned based on…” He paused. “She likes attractive people around her. It’s a status thing.”
“These attendants,” Colin said. “Do they have access to the general population? The cages?”
“No.” Miller looked at him. “But they have access to places the cages don’t.” He let that sit for a moment. “Why?”
Colin looked at the wall for a long moment. “Just trying to understand the layout,” he said.
Miller studied him with the calm, assessing look of a man who could tell the difference between a lie and a calculation.
“Sure,” Miller said. He sat back down on his cot. “Get some rest. Tonight they’re going to work us hard.”
Deus ex Morbus 