Nathan Yocum - The Zona

“Don’t leave me here!” Lead yelled in fear. “Please, take me back to the tent, or the Pit, anywhere!”

“Tis good for your spirit, goodman. We’ll come back for you in five days time,” the scarred guard said.

Both guards shut the door. Lead whipped his head from left to right and shook his body. He tried get away from the ubiquitous stench. He tried to give the flies no territory to claim. But the smell was overwhelming and the flies were legion and panic blacked his vision and rationality.

“Noooooo!” Lead yelled at the closed door. “Let me out, let me out, let me out!”

Lead bucked his chair against the wall. The floor creaked and groaned through the muck.

“Nooooooo!” Lead yelled.

He struck his head against the wall. The stitches across his forehead broke loose. Blood ran down his face.

“Noooooo!” Lead yelled and struck his head again.

The door opened. A masked guard walked in. Lead tried to open his eyes, but could only squint against a mask of flies. His head throbbed with the beat of his heart.

“Let me out,” Lead said, holding himself against animal panic.

The guard looked up at Lead and then walked back into the hallway. Lead whispered a prayer under his breath but stopped when the guard reentered with a waste bucket.

“Sorry, I didn’t know you were in here. I got to keep these fresh,” the guard said. His voice betrayed him for a simpleton.

The guard heaved the bucket of piss and excrement onto the floor, disturbing the flies. He went back to the hall and retrieved another full bucket.

“Please let me out,” Lead said. “I’ve learned. I’m better now, please release me.”

“That’s not up to me,” the guard said and dumped the bucket onto the floor. “That’s for judges and God to decide.”

The guard brought in another bucket.

“You be good and they’ll let you go. Just be good.”

The guard heaved his last bucket into the room and closed the door.

“No, come back!” Lead yelled. He jerked his body and struck the back wall.

“Come back, let me out!” Lead’s voice was ravaged from yelling and panic and the soiled air.

Lead roared and struck the wall again with his head. He levered his toes against the floor and rocked the chair back and forth. The flies and horror stench erased all vestiges of a rational man. Lead’s entire being converged on motion, escape, freeing itself from that which was unendurable.

The floor creaked under the rocking chair. Floorboards saturated with years of urine and feces warped and cracked. Lead whipped around, throwing off flies and making the chair dance three-legged. A crash broke through the cacophony of buzzing. The boards under his feet cracked and fell into gaping blackness. Lead and his chair were swallowed into the hole.

Lead dropped into the crawlspace beneath the cabin. He landed in mud fed from the old drippings of the Hall of Gluttons. He squirmed in retreat through the muck. He flexed his body against the chair, which groaned and cracked against his straining muscles. Lead flexed his body again. The chair back snapped and Lead’s ropes loosened. Lead pulled himself from the mess of knots. He crawled through filth, head pounding. In his hand he kept a chair leg, still connected to the chunk of seat; a weapon.

Lead pulled himself out from under the Hall of Gluttons and stood. His naked body was coated with human waste. His toes clenched the long crab grass under his feet; before him stood the razor wire fence separating Purgatory from the Zona. Lead bit his tongue against the urge to yell out in joy. He fought the urge to scratch the filth covered skin from his body. Lead gripped the chair leg and pegged his way up the fence. His toes found purchase in the chain-links. The higher he rose the less he smelled the hall, the less he smelled his own body, the fresher and tastier the air became. From the distance alarms sounded and men shouted. Air horns pierced the early evening landscape and the voices of men were soon accompanied by the yowling of hounds.

Lead focused on the fence. Slowly he ascended, driving the chair leg into the higher and higher links. Lead lifted himself up to the bushel of razor wire. In some other world rifles fired and bullets severed links near his hand. Lead balanced himself and shoved the chair leg against the razor wire. A space grew between links and the deadly bushel. A bullet cut the edge of Lead’s ear. He squeezed through the new space and tumbled to the earth.

Lead was embraced by loose sand. A bullet kicked up the grit next to his face. In some far off place Lead knew that his ribs and back and legs hurt, but his body was numb. He rose to his feet and loosed a wild scream at Purgatory. Lead turned and ran into the desert. He was outside, he was free.

Lead ran barefoot against the backdrop of a burnt orange and bruised sunset. Rifle shots peppered the sand and dogs barked with men, and all of it focused and pursued Lead; it all belonged to a world Lead was no longer a part of. He had detached, dissociated. He felt no pain, or rather, that which created pain inside him had broken. He looked at the brilliant setting sun and bolted south, towards Tucson, towards New Pueblo, towards the grave of his friend, Terence Wood.

Lead’s bare feet carried him over sand and rock and brush. From the southern horizon loomed an enormous sandstorm, charging up from the Pima. In the far distance, black-robed guards poured out of Purgatory gates astride horses. Lead ran with strides like leaps. He tilted his head and bounded through the storm wall and into the blinding miasma of howling wind and earth.

The interior of the storm was otherworldly; an alien atmosphere populated by tornado worms and air that could only be ingested through gritted teeth. At the storm’s edge, horses whinnied and bucked and threw their riders, for sometimes animals show wisdom beyond the want of man. Black robes whipped like bats wings and guards struggled to control their beasts, to find fellow guards, to flee the storm before they were consumed like the escaped sinner had been. The storm swelled and reached across the desert into Purgatory. It scoured the structures and swept sand into the pit of men more dead than alive. The residents of Purgatory, freemen or not, fled for cover and more than one contemplated mans’ futility in the face of nature and the unquenchable wrath of God.

Lead shielded his eyes with his hand and squinted through fingers. Every attempt at vision was thwarted by grains of sand inevitably peppering his eyes. Lead waived his chair leg like a blind staff and continued short steps against the storm’s winds. Sand tore at his bare skin and scoured off much of the filth he’d carried from the Hall of Gluttons. His feet stubbed against rocks and cactus as he stumbled first without sense, then without direction.

Lead pushed on against the storm. All sense cut away, he saw nothing, his ears filled with the ubiquitous howl of wind, he felt nothing but sand against his skin and rocks at his feet. Lead was alone.

A dark image peered before him, a shelter against blinding sand, a black obelisk jutting from the earth. Lead knelt against object and cleared the grit from his eyes. It was a limousine, flung upside down and half-buried in earth.