Nathan Yocum - The Zona

“You poor Goodman,” she said

Lead woke in the night air. A stoic man in white robes was undoing Lead’s restraints. The man lifted Lead out of the cot and onto his feet. He presented Lead with a waste bucket and watched him empty his bladder. Lead looked around the empty tent. The white-robed man gripped Lead’s arm and led him to a different bed.

“Why are you feeding me?” Lead asked on his third day in the medical tent.

Beatrice smiled at him. She put the spoon of warm stew back in the bowl.

“So you won’t die,” she said cheerfully. “You are my charge and I’m to take care of you.”

“Am I to be released?” Lead asked.

“I don’t know,” Beatrice replied. “I don’t think so. You come from the traitors. I don’t know of any traitors who’ve ascended to freedom.”

She spooned more stew into his mouth.

“It’s all fine. Your body can be purged here and ascend to Heaven in spirit.”

Lead chewed the food with left side of his mouth. The stew was the best he’d eaten since joining the Church.

“Why are you here? This seems no place for a Mary.”

“Ah, Mary I am not, Goodman. My husband resides in the hereafter awaiting my return.”

Beatrice spooned more stew into Lead’s mouth.

“I am a Goodwife and will be until I too pass on.”

Lead woke to black-robed guards unbuckling his restraints. They held his shoulders and guided his feet to the floor.

“Come, Goodman. You’ve another day in court,” one of the guards said.

Lead recognized the scarred face guard from his first day in Purgatory.

“You need to stand for your charges.”

The guards held Lead in the same courtroom with the same judge.

“Do you know why you’re here?” The judge asked.

“Am I to be released?” Lead asked.

The judge smiled and covered a stifled laugh.

“Released? What have you possibly done to be released? You are a traitor. You were assigned to serve your penance in the Traitor’s Pit, the Ninth Ring. You were in for less than five days when you slew two men in wrath. You caved in their skulls front of the eyes of watching guards, in the open, with no mercy or remorse.”

The judge held forth the tip of Aaron Century’s knife; it glistened in the judge’s candlelight.

“You smuggled a weapon into the Pit and used it in the assistance of murder.”

“They were cannibals!” Lead said defiantly. “I fought them to save myself and the others!”

“They were eaters of the dead. They slew no man. They consumed that which was already passed,” the judge said.

“I witnessed them slay a goodman in their house. They crushed him with a rock.” Lead said. “They were murderers and deserved to die. I fought them in the defense of myself and the others.”

“And yet no guard corroborates your story. Oh, so now the guards, men in the holy charge of witnessing the actions of the Pit, hold false? Is that it? All holy men are liars but you, a slaughterer of men?”

The judge flung the knife tip across the courtroom.

“All men in the Pit deserve to die, but they die by the Lord’s hand, not yours. You are a murderer, a slayer of men, a sinner. You’ve indulged yourself in the gluttony of sin and violence and as such you will be treated as a glutton.”

The judge struck the podium with his fist.

“You are to spend five days in the Hall the Gluttons, after which you will be returned to the Pit of Traitors. May God have mercy on your soul!”

The guards dragged Lead out the courtroom and across the Purgatory grounds. They waded through long grasses which rolled like the ocean in wind to a portable near the back of the complex.

“Hold,” said a guard.

The men paused in the field. The guards affixed cloth masks to their faces. The masks wafted scents of cinnamon and clove. Lead struggled against their iron grips.

“What are the masks for? What is the Hall?”

“Strip down,” a guard commanded, his voice was muffled by the mask.

The guard leveled a .45 caliber pistol at Lead.

“I’ll have your silence, goodman, unless you want me to hit that fragile face of yours.”

Lead stopped struggling.

“I realize you have questions, but the answer is in the doing and there’s no getting out of this. Strip down.”

“What?”

“Strip down goodman, no prisoner enters the Hall clothed.”

Lead looked at the two guards. He stripped off his hospital gown and stood naked in the sun.

The guard motioned forward with his pistol and the party continued. The men walked past trailers and buildings with latched doors and blackened windows. The wind carried moans and screams and the clack and whir of old machinery still in use. The party walked past the edge of the Pit and Lead wondered if the emaciated man was still alive. The wind shifted and Lead smelled something new, a putrid, human waste, like the smell of a cesspool.

“That’s ours.” The guard pointed his pistol at a single-story log cabin. The party walked up a short stair case to an ornate door. The door was oiled redwood carved to show a hailstorm raining down upon men chained like dogs; the men wallowing in garbage.

“Had that door made special. In we go then,” the guard said, leading the party through the door.

Inside were raw wood floors and four white doors, set against badly carpentered walls. The air hung thick and impenetrable with the scent of human waste, Lead’s stomach clenched and heaved. His vision wavered and he fell against the scarred guard.

“Don’t let any of your wounds touch the ground,” the scarred guard whispered as he pulled Lead to his feet.

“If your wounds touch the filth in this hall, you will surely die of infection before your sentence is complete.”

One of the guards opened an interior door. The stench doubled in potency. An orchestral chorus of buzzing flies emitted from the room. The armed guard placed a chair and rope behind Lead.

“Sit down,” the guard commanded.

“No, please,” Lead pleaded.

Lead’s stomach unclenched and he vomited on his feet. The stink permeated all; it layered on Lead’s skin and coated his tongue. The armed guard pushed Lead into the chair.

“It’ll be alright,” said the scarred guard. “Survivors of this hall speak of getting used to the smell. Just don’t let your chair tip over. The corpses we do find tend to be laid out in the muck.”

The scarred guard coiled the rope around Lead’s body, feet, and wrists. Two guards lifted Lead and the chair through the open doorway. The floor of the room was an ankle-deep swamp of human waste. Countless flies covered all things wet and gave the room a disorienting illusion of motion. Lead vomited again, this time down his chin and chest. The room was small; the only light beamed down from a window in the ceiling. The guards set Lead against the wall furthest from the door. Lead’s feet dipped into the slime. His placement disturbed flies which clouded up like thunderheads.