Chapter 1

The roar of the crowd was muted and distant as Zack stepped out onto the stadium’s false grass. There was never enough rain in Texa to grow the real thing, but Duke Garcia insisted on maintaining the field as it had been, even though the plastic leaves had been soaked in enough blood to leave large, rust-brown brown stains. The remaining green had recently been painted over with thick white lines, marking the field into sections five yards across.

“It’s because you are too good,” Duke Garcia had explained during their weekly dinner. “You are too good, you and the Bull! No one wants to bet against the Executioner, not if they expect to win. So now they bet on where you leave the corpse.”

Zack had only nodded and gone back to his food. The Duke was not a cruel man, he just enjoyed cruel tastes. He had been a mid-ranked cartel enforcer back before the Rupture, specializing in escorting large or unique shipments of drugs. He and his men had been stopped at Ox Run when the old world had ended. Their trucks had stopped working, but their guns hadn’t. The locals had been armed too, just not as well as the cartel bmen. Things were tense between the two groups for the first few days, but when a tribe of starving goblins came howling in off the plains, it had been quality that mattered most. After the dust had finally settled, Antonio Garcia had gone from being a cartel enforcer to Duke Garcia, First of His Name, Lord of Ox Run.

Ox Run had not been a particularly large town, at least not in terms of population, but it had been home to a large football stadium that was the town’s pride and joy. Having once operated against the law, Duke Garcia had suddenly found himself obligated to enforce it. Seeing the opportunity to indulge some his more questionable tastes, he had turned the stadium into the Arena. After all, there were plenty of reasons for the law to kill a man. Why not do it in a way that the public would enjoy?

Any man sentenced to die ended up being sent to the Arena, where he would spend his last moment’s fighting for the crowd’s pleasure. If he was good or lucky, he might push those final moments back by days, weeks, or even years. But in the end, there was no escaping justice. Everyone sent to the arena died in the arena.

And yet ... Duke Garcia was a man of cruel tastes, but he was not necessarily a cruel man. Those who fought well and survived could make a life for themselves, limited as it might be by their incarceration. The Arena’s primary trainer, Greg Homewell, had been sentenced to die for the murder of a man in a drunken barroom brawl over twenty years ago, but now he had a wife, two kids, and half a dozen personal slaves. He’d could never be anything other than a trainer, but at least he no longer had to worry about his blood watering the astroturf ever again.

He was, so far, the only man to make it to the fifteen year mark that had earned him a place off the field. Only two others had made it as far as ten years. One was the Bull, a herdless minotaur who had been caught and convicted of cattle rustling. The second was Zack himself. He’d been found unconscious on the side of the road, wearing bloody ribbons for for a shirt, and a dead man with a broken neck and a knife in his hands laying by Zack’s side. It had been the Duke and a hunting party that had found him. They’d hogtied, arraigned, convicted, and sentenced him on the way back to the hospital. He had woken up three days later to discover he was a dead man.

A dead man just like the youth who had been pushed out of the gate opposite of Zack’s. The young man couldn’t have been more than sixteen. He had the bulky frame of someone who had grown up doing hard farm work, and a brand new iron collar had been locked around his neck. There was a madness in the young man’s eyes, a mix of anger and hate tinged with fear. Sweaty hands clutched a fool’s blade, an enormous great sword with a wide, four foot long blade and whose hilt was an intricately carved piece of spikes and scales designed to look like a dragon’s claw. It was the sort of sword that belonged on one of the Bull’s fantasy novels, not on the battlefield. The idiot hadn’t even picked out a helmet, though he was at least wearing an ill-fitting breastplate held on by fraying leather straps.

Zack’s armor was a much more expensive set of segmented lorica, custom fit by one of the Duke’s own armorsmiths. It had been designed to offer him the most protection without limiting his movements, covering him from throat to thigh in overlapping steel plates riveted to boiled leather. The short sword in his right hand had a mere two foot long blade, and its unadorned hilt had been wrapped in leather thongs to make sure he kept a tight grip. The shield strapped to his left arm was a simple quarter inch thick piece of steel a yard in diameter, though the kevlar straps that bound it to his forearm had been lined with fleece for extra comfort. Rounding out his equipment was a bleached football helmet from which the grill had been removed in order to leave his face exposed to his opponent.

“Going to fucking kill you,” the boy spat. “Going to chop you up real fine. Fuck this shit. I ain’t going to die here. Real mistake giving me this pig sticker.”The kid waved the sword around in a broad circle. “Oh yeah, gonna chop you up, then I’m going to kill the guards, then I’m going to track down the little puta who got me into this shit. Little whore should have just spread them when I told her to. Little bitch just had to go and tell Daddy. Yeah, we’ll see how she likes it when I come back for round two!”

Zack just tuned the kid out as the younger man continued to rant and rave. He’d heard a dozen variations of the theme. Some swore they were innocent, some begged for mercy, and then there were the assholes like this punk. The ones who wanted to blame anyone but themselves. Zack had long since stopped caring about their excuses. Listening didn’t make the killing any easier. Didn’t make it any harder. He already knew how the fight was going to go. He was just waiting for-

A deep-throated horn drowned out the crowd. The kid jumped in his skin. Most first time fighters did. Zack knew it was coming, could have taken advantage of the kid’s surprise, but chose to let the opportunity go.

The kid whirled around and let out a blood curdling shriek as he charged. Zack shifted his footing, putting his weight on his back heel in anticipation of the coming strike. The sword went up high over the kid’s head, clutched in a two handed grip meant to take Zack out with one powerful blow.

Instead it bounced off Zack’s shield, which had come up just as the sword started to come down. Steel rang off steel. The boy had put all his strength into the cut, and now all that strength rebounded through the sword and jarred his arms back into their sockets. The same shock rattled Zack’s shield, but most of the force was absorbed by the fleece cushioning the shield’s straps.

Zack recovered first, pushing off his back foot as he lunged forward. He led with the shield, and bone crunched and blood flew as the boy’s jaw shattered under the blow. The boy’s sword dropped from nerveless fingers as he stumbled backwards. Zack’s sword plunged into the boy’s exposed throat, scraping against his spine as it slid out the back.

The boy’s eyes crossed as he tried to look down at the blade that had killed him. Zack twisted his wrist, widening the hole as the boy began to slump to his knees. All Zack had to do was make sure he held on as gravity pulled his blade free for him.

It had been less than a minute since the fight had started.

The roar of the crowd surged again as the horn sounded his victory. Zack didn’t bother to acknowledge their cheers, but simply turned on his heel and walked back into the darkness of the locker rooms.

The Bull was waiting for him just inside the shadows. The minotaur was easily a foot and a half taller than the human, with a dark crimson hide that seemed almost too tight for his extensive muscles. His only clothing was a plain loincloth that was several inches too short to protect the bovine’s modesty. The Bull chucked a rag at Zack, who pulled it from the air and began to wipe down his blade.

“Nice job, Executioner,” the Bull Grunted.

Zack shook his head. “It wasn’t even a fight.”

The Bull nodded. “And that’s why they call you the Executioner. Quick, clean, and done. If they had wanted him to suffer, then they would have sent me out there.”

Zack snorted his acknowledgement. The Bull enjoyed playing with his opponents, driving them around the field as he tried to see how many cuts it would take to kill them. The current record stood at forty-four, though the Bull was sure that one day he could make it forty-five.

“Are you going to be part of the cage match later this afternoon?” the Bull asked as they headed down a narrow hall. What once had been the offices for the visiting teams’ coaches had been converted into private ready rooms for the more popular fighters. The rest had to make do with the regular locker rooms.

Two guards nodded as the pair of fighters approached, but they made no move to disarm Zack. Strange as it might have seemed for what was essentially a prison, they were there for the fighters’ protection and not to keep them from trying to escape. The one on the left had grim eyes as he nodded to Zack. “Thank you.”

Zack froze as the comment caught him off guard. “For what?”

“The girl he attacked was my cousin.” The guard spat to the side, then turned to the Bull. “No offense. I wish he had fought you.”

“Some other time, perhaps,” the Bull answered with a grin. Zack just shook his head and pushed open the doors to this quarters.

The concrete walls had been painted forest green, and the metal desk and chairs that had once occupied the room had been replaced by a queen sized bed and a small table with chairs. Lounging on the bed was a bronze skinned beauty in a silky black wrap that clung to her hips while leaving everything else exposed. Her amber eyes lit up when she saw Zack standing in the door. She immediately rolled over so that there was enough room for him to join her on the bed. “I’m glad to see that you haven’t made me a widow yet.”

Zack bit his lower lip to keep from smiling as he lay down widthwise across the bed. “We’d have to be married in order for me to make you a widow, Gabrielle.”

“Mmm, true,” Gabrielle admitted. Her fingers stroked the thin iron collar that was bolted around the base of her throat. “But then how do the dead ever get married?”

“Usually in front of a priest,” the Bull laughed. He scooped Gabrielle up off the bed and twisted round so that she ended up on his lap as he sat down on the closest chair. “Why do you stay with this one, Gabrielle? You should come to my quarters! They’re just down the hall, you know!”

“And I know that Amy and Holly could probably use a break from you, you lustful beast!” She playfully flicked the Bull across the tip of his snout. “I’ve seen the way the two of them walk crooked once you get through with them! And the screaming! Night after night after night!” She began to moan and groan with great exaggeration. “Have you no shame?”

“Shame is for you humans,” the Bull said as he patted her on the knee. Then his thick fingers began to creep upwards along the inside of her thigh. “For champions such as myself, however...”

Gabrielle squealed as she hopped up off his lap and leapt on to the bed. She pulled Zack’s arm around her protectively. Her lashes batted flirtatiously as she grinned at Zack. “You’ll protect me from the big, bad, beast, won’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Zack teased. He cast an appraising look at the Bull. “He is rather big, he is rather bad, and he is very much the beast. Perhaps it would be for the best if I were to just turn you over to him!”

“Alas! I am undone!” Gabrielle swooned to the side, tucking her head under her arm as if she were trying to hide from the world. Both men laughed at her theatrics and Zack immediately set upon tickling her.

This, more than anything, was why he continued to fight. Not so that he could keep breathing, but for the peace it bought for him and his friends. Gabrielle had been a gift from the Duke, taken as a slave in one of his numerous raids on nearby towns. If anything were to happen to Zack, then she would just be re-gifted to another man, most likely the one who had killed him. There was no guarantee that the next man would be as kind to her as Zack had been. Actually, given the list of crimes that could get a man sentenced to the arena, it was pretty much a given that her next owner would be an abusive asshole. The Bull would survive, but friends weren’t easy to make when you might be expected to kill them the very next day. It had taken the two of them years to get to know one another, and even then it had only really happened due to the Duke’s unspoken promise that they would never fight each other.

The Bull let the two humans roll around on the bed for several minutes, right up until it looked like it was going to become an entirely different sort of struggle. He rumbled deep in his throat, reminding the pair that he was still in the room.

“Sorry,” Zack gasped as the pair sat up. His cheeks were a bright red and his hair was in a complete disarray. Gabrielle was in a similar state, her nipples pebbled with obvious arousal.

The Bull bared his teeth in what passed as a grin for his kind. “Please, I would have asked to join! But I wanted to talk to you about the match today. I have word from one of the Duke’s men that it will not be the normal sort of cage fight. They are opening it to any fighter who wishes to be included and I wanted to know if you planned on participating.”

Zack shrugged. “It sounds like it’s going to be rather crowded if they’re opening it to everyone.”