The Blood of Eden

The light of the moon shone down silvery and bright as it poured like mercury through the blinds covering the window of Cleese’s crib. The air outside the window was cool, but not cold, the heat of the day having not yet fully dissipated over the open fields which surrounded the compound. Striated clouds hung like lace across the perpetually surprised lunar face. Only the mournful call of a Red Throated Loon broke the silence of the night.

 Cleese sat on the edge of his bed, quietly contemplating the day and its painful lessons. It had been a long, hard day of training and he felt exhausted to his core. He knew he’d pushed it a little too hard today. His muscles still felt raw and sore, but his mood remained light. After all, he’d passed a milestone today—well, tonight, really—and he was still trying to figure out what that all meant and, more importantly, what it would mean for his future.

He sighed and looked over his shoulder as the milestone stirred slightly in his bed.

Chikara lay face across the sheets; her ass the only thing covered by the sweat and lust stained sheet. Her hair swirled about her head like an onyx halo. Even though she wore it short, it still managed to hide the majority of her face. From this angle, he could only make out her cheek and a portion of her full lower lip.

Cleese took a long, slow look over her. His eyes wandered over the contours of her form like a canoe lazily drifting upriver, bound for nowhere and going there in no particular hurry. As he gazed at her, he felt his heart pulse deep within his chest. The longer he stared at her, the more he was aware of it. In the moonlight, she looked beautiful; much more so than he’d ever seen her look. Her skin blushed with the slowly disappearing flush of afterglow.

Tonight, he’d finally gotten a good look at her in all her glory and she was something. Powerfully built and beautiful, every contour of her body was a treasure trove of wonders. And each of those wonders came finely documented by their own map—her tattoo. It was just as much a thing of beauty as was its owner, truly a marvel to behold. The artwork itself was that of a dragon, but it was so much more. The tail began just above her left ankle and it swirled around her calf, continuing on up around her thigh. The main body of the beast wrapped itself like a lover around her waist and up around her lower rib cage, circling up her back and over her left shoulder where the neck and head came over her trapezius muscle and down the front of her chest. The head was a horrible thing to see; its face set in a malicious frown with deeply set, cruel eyes. Its mouth was thrown wide; drawn as if the beast were just about to bite down on the nipple of her breast. Just under the swell of her lower breast, the monster’s hand came up from under her arm, gently cupping her. The artistry was amazing.

She’d felt compelled to explain the tattoo early on in the evening, just before she disrobed and climbed into his bed. The image was commonly referred to as a "focus image" and it was mostly for distraction purposes. In the early days of martial conflict, it was noted that an opponent’s attention could be drawn away by the sight of an unexpected image in an unexpected place. It was the main reason a lot of fighters got tattoos in the first place. In the first few days of the dead coming back, Chikara had noticed that the reanimated corpses—despite their limited intellect, and sometimes because of it—would respond in the same way, particularly when there were flashes of color. It was a discovery that, up until now, she’d kept to herself, but she’d gotten the tattoo immediately after joining the League. Her thought was that if a little color could distract a UD, then a whole lot just might give her the edge she’d need to stay alive. She’d asked the tattoo artist to simply draw the most fearsome thing he could think of. From its effect on both UD and Man alike, she guessed that it worked.

And then, there were her piercings.

These took a little more explanation. She’d told him how she wore seven closed rings of varying size on her body. She said they were done in atonement for the fabled seven deadly sins. The three large rings in her left ear, she said, symbolized Gluttony, Sloth, and Greed. They were three rings of slightly decreasing size as they arched up her earlobe. The largest if them was about the size of a nickel. Her right ear held two hoops that represented Wrath and Envy. None of the hoops closed all the way and thus the circle was incomplete. Her reasoning was that all of the emotions were empty ones and therefore pointless. The ring in her left nipple was just over the heart for it was in the heart that Pride dwelt. It twinkled softly deep within the dragon’s jaws. The last of them signified Lust and that she wore through the hood of her clitoris.

It was, she said, a ring that few men had seen.

Cleese looked her over again, for what must have been the thousandth time tonight. He used all of the self control he could muster to sip at her image as if it were a fine brandy. Small pools of perspiration beaded up across her back and were set like small oases dribbled sporadically across a desert of bone and muscle. The subtle changes in light and shadow caused by the moonlight played across her musculature and created a landscape of what could only be described as paradise.

She’s so beautiful.

"You’re staring again."

He nearly jumped out of his skin when she spoke, he’d been so lost in the sight of her.

"Sorry. Just thinking," he said.

She stirred and turned languorously onto her back. She smiled and reached out for him to join her on the bed. He laid back and fell into her arms.

It felt like drowning—only more sublime.

"You do that, don’t you? What were you thinking about?"

"This place. The League. You. Me. Us. Pick one."

He gently kissed her, tasting himself on her lips.

"Want to talk about it?" she asked as she brushed some of his hair away from his eyes.

He sighed heavily. He wasn’t sure what he was feeling could be put into words, the fear, the despair, the unavoidable feeling that he was about to be fucked.

And not in the pleasurable way he’d just been.

Abruptly, and for reasons he wasn’t too sure of, he decided to try.

"I don’t know much, Chikara," he whispered, "but, I do know that this place… This place isn’t good for me… for us… for anyone. It’s poison. It’s like the decay and infection of The Dead has touched everything here and soured it."

He felt her reassuring hand on his arm.

"It’s a dead thing—cancerous—and its sole purpose is to leech the Life off of anything and everything it comes in contact with. And once it’s taken all it can while its host still lives, it doesn’t stop. It changes its agenda and begins to take all it can from its dead."

He smiled at her and almost stopped talking, but what he had to say refused to stay bottled up inside of him.

"The only thing it wants is to sour each and every one of us and it will succeed if we aren’t careful. The place is filled with a sickness that we can’t survive if we’re ever infected and I’m not talking here about being bit by a UD. If we play by League’s rules, they’ll use us up and spit us out. I understand that now. Do you?"

"Yes," she whispered and looked away into the darkness.

He turned in her arms and looked toward the ceiling for a second, trying to decide whether to tell her the rest of it. Slowly, he looked back and stared deeply into her eyes. Then, he decided that she, of all people, deserved to know the truth.

"I didn’t tell you before—shit, I haven’t told anyone—but… during my last match, when the spindles turned… The clip they gave me was loaded with blanks."

Chikara leaned up on one elbow and look at him.

"What?" Her expression deflated like a soufflé.

He nodded and pulled her back down to him. Right now, as he told her this, he needed to feel her body close to his. For some reason, being near her made it all not seem as bad.

"I can only figure that it was someone with enough juice to pull it off—my guess is either Masterson or Monroe. With the exception of the armorers, who let’s face it, don’t have the brains let alone the malevolent nature to pull something like that off, they were the only ones who could make the substitution—swap blanks for the live rounds."

"Why? How would they stand to benefit?"

"Who knows what motivates these pricks. Ratings. Animosity. Shits-n-giggles. Hell, I could have pissed the wrong someone off up at Corporate. I have the tendency to do that if you haven’t noticed. Who the fuck knows and, quite honestly, who the fuck cares?"

He watched her as she took a minute more to digest everything he’d told her. A cavalcade of emotions fluttered across her face. It had taken him a while to put it all together. He was patient enough of a man to give her the time to do the same. He wasn’t surprised when she arrived at the same conclusion a lot quicker than he had.

She was a smart woman.

"So, what are you going to do about it?"

"Honestly?" he said as he pulled her body even closer. "I plan to bounce."

"What, really?" Her eyes again went wide.

He nodded and continued, "I figure I’ll gather up as much as I can on the financial end and hit the bricks as soon as possible, some time when no one will notice me gone… until it’s too late. I mean, it’s not like we’re prisoners here, right? They may think they own my soul, but they don’t. And as for my body… Hell, that’s always been up for grabs."

He gently pinched her bare butt cheek and laughed.

"Not anymore, Baby," she said punching at him, but missing. "You have my scent on you. No other woman is gonna dare come near you," she said as she laughed along with him.

She lay there for a long time then as if in great thought. Finally, she pulled back from him slightly and her face took on a look of bound determination.

"I’m going with you."

"What?" Now it was his turn to go wide-eyed. "Are you sure? You don’t want to take a minute and think it over? You know, once the post-coital euphoria wears off?"

 "I am," she replied as if it were an admission of guilt. "Before this…" she motioned her head toward the bed, "I didn’t much care whether I lived or I died here. It was the thing that gave me freedom; gave me my edge. But this… this is somehow different. Now… Now, I want to have a life. Now, I want to find some kind of solace… some kind of happiness and live the rest of my life someplace safe. Someplace…" and she burrowed deeper into his arms, "like here. After everything that’s happened, we of all people, deserve at least that, don’t we?"

She drifted off and seemed to become lost in her thoughts. He stared at her and, even before he had a chance to think it over, he knew he’d agree to take her along. How could he not? She was beautiful and his equal both intellectually and on the sand.

If anyone deserved to get away from this Hellhole, it was she.

In the silence of the room, he heard her whisper softly into his chest, "God… I’m just so tired. Tired of the death, of the loss, of the… fighting." The sound of slight sniffling came next. "Where’s my refuge? Where’s my happy ending?"

 "Chikara…"

"Cleese, I once had people… people I cared about; people who relied on me. I had a life." She stared up at him. "Then, the whole world went… crazy… and I lost them. I lost them all. After they were gone, I swore I’d never love anything ever again. Yes, I’d taken lovers before… Creed, for one, but that was just scratching an itch, y’know?"

He looked her in the eye and nodded.

Yeah, he knew all about itch scratchin’.

"I knew I’d never have that kind of life again," she continued. "So, I gave myself to the League and killed hundreds—hell, thousands—of UDs. It all stopped… mattering to me."

She lowered her gaze and stared back into his chest, slowly running a finger through the hair there.

"Then, you came along," she continued, sounding almost embarrassed, "and now, everything seems to have changed. I don’t want to die, Cleese. I want to try to live again. I want to spend whatever life I have left away from this place… with you. Now, I only want to get away from all of this…" and her voice abruptly cut off.

He hugged her and felt the wetness of her tears on his neck.

"Besides, I’ve gotten kind of used to having you around," she whispered as if betraying a confidence and pulled him still closer. She wrapped her arms around him and ran the inside of her lower leg up his thigh. As she drew lazy circles across his back with a fingernail, she kissed him again, deep and soul-stirring.

Grinning shyly up at him, almost as if she’d just given away some part of her that she thought long concealed. She wriggled up deeper into his arms and buried her head into the well of his neck, this time making his skin wet with her kisses. She giggled nervously and slowly looked back up into his eyes.

It was in that moment that he caught a glimpse of the bright-eyed girl she’d been once. He saw her as she was, back when her days were long and full of hope and her life seemed to stretch out forever like an unchallenged vista. He saw her as she’d been when she was a child; once upon a time. Back when she could drink up a summer’s day like sweet cream, relishing its exhilarating taste of exploration.

For a second, he regretted not ever having had the chance to know her when she was younger. He silently wondered how, if he’d only met her years earlier, how things might have been different.

For him.

For her.

For them.

He leaned in, lowering his lips to hers, and once more felt the heart stopping spark of intimacy. He drank deeply from her mouth and savored the taste of her essence. With a full heart, he drew her body still closer to his own. Primal stirrings took hold and they gave themselves over to their rapture.

Afterward, Cleese lay in the dark as Chikara slept beside him. And in that cold silence, he began planning what he was going to do next.

… and to who.