Murder Genes (31 page)

It meant surprisingly little to him.

He wondered if he was callous for not caring more, not mourning his friends.
 
Maybe he'd become immune to suffering.
 
As much as he'd cared for Esperanza, nearly as much as getting back to Kyle, Esperanza was gone and he'd been too late--it was a matter of acceptance.

Rest in peace.

More weeks past and Jay managed to live a simple life.
 
It was quiet and peaceful and it was wonderful.
 
Like vultures, people from Morir came to the secret city and scavenged and pillaged what they could.
 
Jay let them.
 
It didn't take long for the place to be barren of anything useful.

They never found his watch house.

Jay had fought with passion to save the people he could, but in the end they'd died just as brutal deaths as the rest.
 
What else could he do but live his own life?
 
He could be happy alone.
 
Esperanza could be his personal haven.

As much as Kyle meant to him.

Who had he
really
been fighting for?

As much as Kyle meant to him.

Jay was a Murderer-Survivalist.
 
In Morir that meant, simply, Murderer.

As much as Kyle meant to him.

Kyle meant nothing here.

Jay was not a father here.
 
Kyle was no longer his son here.
 
Jay was no one but...himself, alone in Esperanza.
 
In the only place he could be simply be--Survivor.

Not Murderer.

But Jay didn't take the bells off.
 
Not yet.
 
Because they still mattered.
 
Two bells left.

For Hunter.

And Karah.

And when the bells were finally gone.
 
He'd take himself.

Jay slept.
 
And ate.
 
And slept.

The little Asian man crept around Esperanza sneaky like.
 
He circled the perimeter and ducked behind rocks and poked his head up like an imitation Bitch.
 
Jay saw him coming the moment he'd entered and the moment he'd left.
 
He didn't stay long.

The next time the Asian guy appeared, he had friends.
 
Lots of friends.
 
Lots of prisoners, too.

A mass, thousands of little Asian men in fatigues with bound up Morir "civilians" marched in strict formation into Esperanza.
 
Each Asian wielded a different weapon, sticks, shovels, and knives, but they moved with cool menace.
 
They spoke in what Jay could only assume was Korean and they acted in ways only the meanest sons-of-bitches did.
 
North Koreans, then.

They were making Esperanza a Nazi prison camp.
 
The only difference was that instead of 'Heil Hitlers', they sung songs to (dead)Immortal Leader Kim Cho-sung and instead of prisons, there were torture camps.

It started simply.
 
Mere executions at first.

Then
somebody
got creative.

The male prisoners, they began to crucify St. Andrew style--big X style.
 
These men nailed high in the air got ropes tied around their testicles with bricks on the ends.
 
As many bricks as they could before the testicles snapped off.
 
One of the DPRK soldiers turned the gizmo into a swing before he went flying off like Tarzan into the dirt.
 
Then it became a game to see who could fly the furthest.
 
The winner got to take the loser's testicle-swung's head.
 
This went on for days until they came up with head boppers.
 
Literally.

The extra decapitated heads were used as makeshift gloves for female prisoners to fight each other, detached heads bludgeoning still attached heads until someone died of skull trauma.
 
If the women refused to fight or failed to kill each other, both were beheaded for the next round of head boppers.

Jay just watched.
 
A part of himself wanted to do something, but he knew well what had come from the last time he'd tried to be a hero.

The prisoners kept coming, and dying.
 
Each death sunk another hole into Jay's heart.
 
These and the growingly creative ideas were as cruel as anything the Gamers had come up with.
 
In fact, it made the Gamers look amateur.
 
Jay watched the days and days and weeks and weeks past without a dull moment.
 
He even laughed hysterically a few times.
 
Helplessly.
 
He felt like a bastard without an ounce of heart left in his heart.

Over the month came more Asian meanies.
 
And they were running out of people to play with, the steady flow of prisoners trickled and slowed and the torture stretched out and grew even more cruel.
 
Days would pass on one single person.

It wasn't the torturing that was horrible, Jay had seen worse, it was the spirit behind the torture.
 
It was the absolute contempt of anything precious in human life that was horrible.
 
At the very least the Gamers had valued their own as tools.
 
To the DPRK, value went only as far as bouncy-ball eyeballs and man-on-end-of-pokey-stick jousting.
 
The best case scenario was when the women were raped just to be raped.
 
It rarely happened and those lucky few weren't spared long.
 
All this for--fun?

The whole time, Jay was hiding above them, right over their noses where nobody looked.
 
Though it disgusted him, he kept watching.
 
Every person and every torture.
 
When a few of the Gamers appeared in the hands of the DPRK, an icy part inside of him cheered.
 
The other part of him realized what it meant that the Gamers had been captured.
 
It meant the war was over and Morir now belonged to the DPRK.

The honest truth was that he kept his eye out because he hoped, no--DIDN'T hope he'd spot Xiaos or Bitch.
 
Every day that passed meant that there was something going on beyond what he could see in Esperanza.

A week passed, and then two weeks without any prisoners arriving.
 
The games finally stopped and Jay saw commander types walking amongst soldiers, enforcing discipline, bringing order to the camp, drilling exercises.
 
Like they were old hat veterans.
 
Everything fell into order with surreal orderliness.

The Koreans were becoming an army.
 
No, Jay realized, they were already an army.

There were no conflicts of authority, no periods of learning, not a single stumble or stand-by observer.
 
Everyone knew what to do without being told.
 
This was the DPRK army.
 
They'd never been DPRK civilians.

The day came that Immortal Leader himself showed up.
 
The clue?
 
"Kim Cho-sung" chanted enough times even with American ears became easily recognizable.
 
Not to mention the bowing and scraping and death sentences actuated by a flick of the man's finger.

Jay immediately knew what this meant.

Immortal Leader hadn't been assassinated.
 
He was here, alive and well.
 
It meant that the DPRK had "lost" to the UN, but it also meant that the DPRK military had survived.
 
Not only with Immortal Leader, but it looked like his top generals were with him, too--those were the commanders who had set to order the soldiers in such short time before Immortal Leader had arrived.
 
If anyone had known it was Kim Cho-sung, no would have ever let Immortal Leader enter Morir alive.
 
He was here because he wanted to be here and because he had a plan.

A plan that looked a lot like rebuilding the DPRK in Morir.
 
In the middle of motherfucking Arizona.

"I must be fuckshit crazy," Jay muttered to himself.
 
The realization began to push the fog out of Jay's mind.
 
It was insane if he was right.
 
Did the DPRK plan on taking on the U.S. from the inside?
 
They hated the US and Jay wouldn't put it past Immortal Leader, no one sane could after the damn man had taken over South Korea before the US President could as much as say, "wait a second."
 
Kim Cho-sung had taken South Korea right after the UN stripped him of his nuclear weapons, too, succeeding where his father and grandfather had failed.
 
And
they
had been mean bastards.

Amazing.

The same day that Immortal Leader arrived, a new batch of prisoners were escorted in.
 
A group of Enforcers, about a hundred total.
 
More Enforcers than there should have been.
 
They came in like beat dogs, heads down, mangled and wrangled.
 
And in their middle was Hunter.

And Karah, Xiaos, and Bitch.

Fuck.

The sight of them shook Jay down to his core and it didn't take long to decide what to do.
 
He was already as good as dead, anyway.

Of course it was night when he left.
 
Who'd be stupid enough to leave in broad daylight?
 
But even better than that was that Immortal Leader thought tonight would be a great day to revive the games, what with a hundred new bodies to play with and the guns he'd brought in.
 
Where the hell he'd gotten them, Jay could only guess.
 
But this confirmed Jay's theory pretty damn well.
 
Kim Cho-sung had a plan, and it was one that was moving along just nicely.

These guns weren't the primitive guns that the Enforcers carried, either.
 
They were the full on automatic, Carbon-Nanotube piercing, explode-like-a-bomb guns.
 
Jay got to see them tested too.
 
It took about four Enforcers wearing all their gear lined up to stop the blast from a single bullet.
 
And the fifth Enforcer still died because half his body came off in the blast.
 
Kim Cho-sung clapped when he saw it, so did his generals.

Jay had three advantages to his plan tonight.
 
One, he knew Esperanza better than any of the Korean bastards.
 
Two, he'd been watching their every move for the last month and days.
 
Three, Jay didn't care about his own life or even really succeeding.
 
He was doing this for himself because...it made more sense going out with a boom than sitting holed up for the rest of his life, didn't it?
 
Sure, he had a few disadvantages.
 
Jay knew well enough he was aa one armed lunatic against the immortal leader of a country with an endless army of zealots.
 
Crazy, armed, and trained zealots.
 
He knew that.

That's where his plan came from.

He needed chaos.
 
Lots and lots of chaos.
 
Best way to create chaos with the DPKR?
 
Kill their fucking leader.
 

...he needed more bells.

Jay made his way to Xiaos' once-headquarters, the only brick building in Esperanza.
 
It was currently being used as a store house because the building was the only covered building here.
 
DPRK didn't realize that it never rained in this part of Arizona.
 
The storehouse wasn't protected with more than a two men, far in the back as it was, and in the night, Jay's suit made him nearly invisible.

Giving the guards brain damage via big rock wasn't hard.

Jay picked up one of those fancy guns and entered the storehouse.
 
He didn't hesitate in making his way to the control room where Xiaos had installed the general alarm.
 
Yep.
 
He pushed the red button.

A huge alarm screeched like one of those old alarm clocks that sounded like it was dying of a hoarse throat.
 
It cut across the whole of Esperanza, reflecting and humming off the Crystal Onyx buildings.
 
He heard commotion and yelling, and when he emerged from the building he figured out exactly where Immortal Leader was.
 
Like ants protecting their queen, hundreds of soldiers hurricained around a single point as they ushered the guy toward some random place they must've thought secure.
 
It was like a human bull's-eye.
 
Made sense, Jay'd heard they liked picture walls made from humans.
 
Mass Games, anyone?

Jay screamed at the top of his lungs and held the trigger down as he aimed at the center of the target.
 
He was a horrible aim, not even close.
 
The bullets sprayed upward as the recoil threw the muzzle high in the air.
 
He nearly shot himself in the face.
 
Jay cursed and threw away the gun and ran for his life.