5
Adam and Dagmar were awakened by a clang down the hall beyond their cell door. As they straightened up, their chains clinking, several sets of footsteps approached.
“What do you think’s gonna happen?” Dagmar asked, sounding very much like the frightened child she was.
“Nothing, if I can help it,” he said, grabbing the two stakes he had fashioned from the plastic tray during the night. He had split the tray diagonally, then snapped off the upturned edges, ending up with a pair of hard, sharp, right-angled triangles. He held the stakes in his lap and drew his knees up to shield the stakes from view from the door.
The steps stopped at the door, and once again there was a clack, followed by the turning of the wheel in the center of the door. The door swung open.
The Annihilator stepped into the room. Behind him came Schweeliski, the guy in the fencing outfit, and a dour black‑haired dwarf who carried a two-headed battle axe and wore a suit of badly tarnished chain mail.
“It’s your big day,” the Annihilator said with mocking good cheer. “Not only are you gonna provide us with some entertainment in the arena, but you get to meet the boss first. Lucky you.”
He raised his blaster at Dagmar, who flinched a little but otherwise just stared at him with steely disdain, jaw set. She was playing queen again. Good. It would help her deal with whatever trials were to come.
“Here’s how this is gonna work,” the Annihilator said. “I’m gonna keep my blaster on the girlie here while the guys blindfold you, unchain you from the wall, and then tie your hands so we can go meet the boss. You so much as look at me funny and she’ll be a bloody, smoking mess from the neck up, got it?”
Adam nodded, outwardly composed but inwardly seething with rage and frustration. The stakes he had made were useless. With his strength behind them, they could probably punch through even the Annihilator’s armor, but any attempt to use them would risk Dagmar’s life. And that was a risk he was not prepared to make.
The Annihilator looked at his companions. “Schwee’, you’ve got the big guy. Tork, you deal with the girl. Artemis, keep your swords ready, just in case.”
“They’re not swords,” said the man in the fencing costume. “They’re epees.”
“Whatever. Just get to it, guys.”
When Schweeliski bent over to blindfold Adam, he saw the plastic shards in Adam’s lap and with a shrill squeal grabbed them and held them up for the Annihilator to see.
“Well, well, well,” the Annihilator said. “Looks like somebody was workin’ on an escape plan. I oughta blow off the girlie’s head for that just on principle.”
Adam merely glared at him.
After blindfolding Adam and Dagmar, the Marauders undid the chains that bound them, had them stand, and then bound their hands behind their backs, Dagmar’s with a pair of handcuffs, Adam’s, because handcuffs would not fit around his thick wrists, with a length of thin but extremely tough rope. Then—and this infuriated Adam more than anything else—they buckled dog collars around their necks, hooked long metal leashes to the collars, and led them along with the leashes.
As they got ready to leave the cell, the Annihilator said, “Just in case you’re thinking of some daring last-minute escape, remember: I’ll have my blaster pointed at the girlie the whole time.”
“You are a brave man to threaten a bound and blindfolded child,” Adam said.
“Shut up and get moving.”
With Artemis in front, Schweeliski leading Adam, Tork leading Dagmar, and the Annihilator bringing up the rear, they exited the cell, turned left down the corridor, went through another doorway, turned left again, headed down a long corridor that smelled like mold, turned right, went down a tiled corridor, turned left near a room in which large machines hummed and thrummed, then…
Adam stopped keeping track. It was pointless. He had hoped he would be able to get a good grasp of the building’s layout, but the place was too large and mazy.
Finally, after what must have been at least fifteen minutes, the procession stopped.
“Wait here,” the Annihilator said. A moment later Adam felt him brush past to the head of the line. A door opened and closed, and as it did, Adam caught a strong smell of…was that perfume? He considered breaking the rope that bound his wrists—he had surreptitiously pulled it taut a few times during the walk to test its strength and he was sure he could snap it easily—then whisking off the blindfold to fight the three Marauders remaining in the hallway, but he had no idea if they had their weapons drawn. If they did, they would have plenty of time to wound or kill him and/or Dagmar before he had removed both rope and blindfold. An escape attempt wasn’t worth it.
Yet.
A minute later the door opened, and the Annihilator said, “Bring ‘em in.”
They were led inside. And, yes indeed, the room smelled of perfume or incense or something similar. It was a strong, cloying scent both fruity and floral.
The Marauders had them stand side-by-side in the middle of the room, their backs to the entrance.
“Take off the blindfolds,” said the Annihilator.
When the blindfolds were removed, neither Adam nor Dagmar could think of anything to say for several long moments.
They were in a spacious chamber with walls painted bright pink and adorned with streamers of various colors. Against the wall to their right was a red divan littered with pillows and several well-worn stuffed animals (inanimate ones, thankfully). Crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling, their small oval bulbs blazing with electric light. Several full-length mirrors with ornate gilded frames were spaced strategically about the room to reflect and amplify the chandeliers’ light. Against the left wall stood a long table covered with food—fruit, candy, a half-eaten drumstick, a nearly empty box of Twinkies, and a cut-glass punchbowl brimming with punch. Balloons lay in drifts on the floor. Bouquets of fresh flowers exploded from tall porcelain vases set in the room’s four corners. The floor had been painted pastel green with pink hearts and yellow stars, and across it a ribbon of red carpet stretched from the entrance to a marble dais in front of them. Atop this dais was a throne of sorts: a tall wooden chair slathered in gold paint, a tiger hide draped over the seat. In an arc across the top half of the seat’s backrest sparkling green gems—probably fake, but you never knew—spelled out “Emily.”
But neither the garish throne nor the wantonly girlish decor—both of which seemed incongruous and somehow offensive in this brutal world—were what stunned Adam and Dagmar speechless.
No, what reduced them to silence was the girl lounging on the throne with her left leg dangling over the left armrest. Twenty years old at most, she wore a hot-pink belly shirt with the words “Let’s Face It, I’m Cute” across the chest in white letters, a mind-bogglingly tight pair of white shorts with virtually no legs at all, and glittery purple wedge sandals with five-inch heels. She had straight black hair, long in the back, cut in bangs in front. Frosty silver eye-shadow accentuated her green eyes. Her lips shone with cherry-red lip gloss. Her fingernails and toenails were painted bubblegum pink. She sported several jeweled rings and bracelets, a plain silver band on the second toe of her left foot, and an anklet of shark’s teeth. Lying on the right arm of the chair was an object that looked like a child’s idea of a laser gun. It had a plump, bright yellow body like a lemon, with sleek white fins swooping off it. The barrel ended in a glassy rod with a bulbous tip.
The girl grinned at their shock. “Not what you were expecting, am I?”
Adam shook his head slightly, then said, “Is this a joke?” He looked at the Annihilator as he said it. He couldn’t help it. In comparison, the Annihilator seemed more like a leader than this…this teenager. The Annihilator saw him looking at him, but answered, insofar as he did, only by fixing his gaze upon the girl.
“No joke, dickweed,” the girl said. “Though soon enough you’ll be hoping it was. You killed members of my army, and for that you’ll pay a very big, very unfunny price.”
“Your ar
my killed my parents,” Dagmar said through clenched teeth. “Which pretty much means you killed them.”
The girl shrugged. “So? They weren’t me, so why should I give a fuck?”
“Bitch!”
Adam expected the girl to lash out at Dagmar, but instead she just smiled as if Dagmar had given her a great compliment.
“That’s right honey,” she said. “I’m the queen bitch of the universe, and don’t you fucking forget it.”
She turned her attention to Adam. “So are all the rumors true? Are you, like, really Frankenstein?”
Adam frowned in confusion. “No, Frankenstein was my creator. I am called Adam. If we are to be interrogated and ridiculed, I should at least like to know the name of the person responsible.”
The girl spread her arms and said, in a manner that was both self-important and gently self-mocking at the same time, as if she were deriding the very institutions she had chosen to embody, “I am Queen Emily the First.”
“Queen of what? An abandoned building?”
A light kindled in her eyes, a light that made Adam’s blood run cold. It was the same light he recalled seeing in his creator’s eyes. It was the light of those who believe they are driven by destiny.
“Queen of everything, dumbshit. This whole fucking world is gonna be mine one day. This is just the beginning.”
“What gives you the right to toy with people’s lives?”
“I give me the right.”
As she said it, she jerked a thumb at her chest, which called Adam’s attention to her full, round breasts nicely defined by her tight shirt. And that, in turn, made his eyes drop to her equally tight shorts, which boldly displayed the contours of her pudendum. He had never seen a woman dressed like that before. Even the whores he had seen during his travels across Europe dressed more conservatively than this. The sight of it stirred feelings and instincts that had been unfulfilled since his creation decades ago. For one very brief moment he wanted nothing more than to fuck this girl’s brains out right there on her throne.
Then he remembered why he was here. He had to rescue Anna and Dagmar. And then there was Bob. His mind flashed back to that ghastly bust sitting atop the pile of rubble, and his lust evaporated in the heat of his hatred for this joke of a girl and her idiot soldiers.
“I am the queen here,” Dagmar said suddenly, her chin up, her eyes narrow and stony. “This is my land. These are my people. You have no claim to anything here.”
Emily stared at Dagmar in surprise for a moment, then shrieked with laughter.
“You’re a queen?” Emily gasped out between laughs. “You’re what, like, eight years old? How the fuck can you be a queen?”
“Your men killed my parents, the king and queen of this land. That means I am now the queen.” She pointed at the Annihilator and Schweeliski. “Ask them. They will tell you they found me in a palace.”
Emily looked at the Annihilator, eyebrows raised questioningly.
“It’s true,” the Annihilator said. “More or less. The palace was in ruins.”
“That was because of the Cataclysm.” Dagmar looked at the Marauders. “If you kill this false queen now, I will grant you a full pardon for all your crimes.”
The Annihilator chuckled. “Yeah, right, kid. If it comes down to a choice of queens, I’m stickin’ with Em here.”
“My offer does not include you. You were the one who killed my mother, the queen. For that you deserve only a long, lingering death. But the rest of you—none of you care to join me? I will not make this offer again.” Her eyes fell on Schweeliski and narrowed. “Except you. My offer does not include you, either.”
“What’s wrong with Schweeliski?” asked Emily with amusement.
“He cannot be trusted to follow orders. Do you not have a rule that says your men must not mistreat the female captives without your permission?”
Adam heard the Annihilator draw in a sharp breath, and sensed the other Marauders stiffen.
Emily said nothing for a moment, only stared at Dagmar with a small smile.
“Yes,” she said. “I do have such a policy.”
“Well, the night your men had me cooped up in that cage, which I easily escaped from by the way, I overheard Schweeliski confess to Skippy that he had done something he shouldn’t have with one of the captives. Something bad.”
Schweeliski emitted a squeaking sound.
Emily didn’t even look at him. She just continued staring at Dagmar with that deceptively mild smile on her face. If anything, the smile seemed to widen a bit more.
Out of the corner of his eye, Adam noticed the other Marauders edge away from Schweeliski.
“Schweeliski,” said Emily, her eyes still fixed on Dagmar, “is this true?” Her voice was soft and gentle. She didn’t sound angry at all.
Schweeliski made that squeaky noise again, then said, “I—I—I—I couldn’t help it. She’s so pretty and—”
What happened next completely dispelled any ideas Adam and Dagmar might have had that Emily was just some self-absorbed teenager with no right or reason to be leading a group like the Marauders.
Moving so fast her hand was a blur, Emily snatched her “toy” laser pistol from the arm of the chair, pointed it at Schweeliski’s head, and pulled the trigger.
With a brief, low hum, a purple beam shot from the gun’s glassy tip and hit Schweeliski right between the eyes. The beam flared when it struck, briefly casting the room in purple hues and vaporizing ninety percent of Schweeliski’s face. His body toppled backward, the front of his head a smoking crater.
Emily cackled and pointed at Schweeliski’s corpse as if gold doubloons had just poured from its ass.
“Did you see that?” she cried, her eyes bright with mad glee. “Did you fucking see that? His head just went—” she put her hands together in front of her face then flung them wide apart “—fwoosh! That was fucking awesome!”
Both Adam and Dagmar were stunned into silence by this display. It wasn’t simply because Emily had killed one of her men, or even that she enjoyed it; it was how fast she had moved and how accurate she had been at that speed. Whoever or whatever this girl was, she wasn’t a normal human. Adam wondered if she were a super-powered survivor from Granite’s world, or a world like it.
Emily returned her attention to Adam and Dagmar. “Do you know what I’m gonna do with you two?”
“I heard one of your men mention an arena of some sort,” said Adam.
Emily nodded, grinning, as if she were amused to hear someone slated to appear in the arena refer to it so casually.
“That’s right,” she said. “Do you know what that means?”
“It means, I suspect, that you are a spoiled, selfish child who finds amusement in others’ pain.” He turned to the Annihilator. “Mark my words, one day you will be on the receiving end of that laser-blaster. She feels no loyalty toward you. You are just a tool to her, and will be discarded as such when you no longer prove useful.”
The Annihilator snorted. “Don’t talk about shit you don’t understand, asshole. Emily here’s the future. The old way, it’s done and gone. We gotta survive in this shitty new world, and to do that we gotta rally round the people who can best help us do it.” He looked Adam up and down. “Damn, it’s a shame you’re such a fuckin’ Boy Scout. You woulda made a damn good Marauder.”
“A-hem!” said Emily. “Save the male bonding crap for some other time, okay?”
“Sorry, my queen,” said the Annihilator with a bow.
“As I was saying,” Emily said to Adam and Dagmar, “you guys’re heading for the arena, where your lives will quickly go from bad to over. There, the two of you will face two Marauders—Tork here, and the Grottle—” Adam felt a slight surge of hope, for he found it conceivable that he and Dagmar could defeat two Marauders; but that hope was shattered as Emily continued “—both of whom will be allowed weapons. You two will not only have no weapons, but your hands will remain bound behind your backs.” She leaned forward in
her throne, smiling. “Won’t that be fun?”
She waved a hand dismissively. “Get them to the arena. Show’s gonna start in half an hour.” Her eyes fell on Schweeliski’s still-smoking body. “And send someone in to clean that up.”
The Marauders re-blindfolded Adam and Dagmar and led them away. As they exited the room, Emily called out, “Oh, and Vic, once you’ve got everything set up, head down to the kitchen and find out where the hell Twitchy got to with my fuckin’ Twinkies.”
Chapter 11
The Arena