Free Stadium: A Short Story by Scott Moon Page B

for the end times.
    Beyond the end zone were two chain-link fences, twenty feet high and topped with rolls of razor wire. She glimpsed one of the Dobermans scratching at the bottom of the fence, yelled at it to stop digging, then sipped her water-beer. An hour passed. None of the other black and brown guard dogs appeared. There were few places to hide between the inner and outer fences, even with dusk minutes away. Normally, her killers patrolled like professional treasure hunters, stopping to piss every twenty-seven feet.
    She put aside her drink and her book as she stood thinking of the Mother and her angry, hungry children. They had been running for the open gate as though they expected it to be open.
    She slung the shotgun over her shoulder and checked the batteries to her flashlight, all the while breathing like it was her first time. Think, think, think, she thought.
    She stepped into the no-man's land between fences topped with razor wire. I did this. She inhaled deeply, slowly — then exhaled. A super moon dominated the horizon. Goose bumps blossomed across her freckled skin as anxiety and guilt trembled through her middle. Moving forward without turning on a flashlight, without unclenching her teeth, she found the first dead Doberman. Neither her work nor her planning had protected the dogs. What did that mean for her?
    Coyotes yipped and squealed atonal songs of fighting, fucking, or whatever feral things did just over the horizon. A distant engine revved and spotlights cut the faraway landscape as ATVs ran the lupine death orgy into creek beds and killed them. K. K. stopped, held her breath, looked right and left with only her eyes, then turned a slow circle, shotgun in her hands now, flashlight tucked under her armpit.
    The sound of motorcycles and four-wheelers might as well be machine guns and rocket launchers or the blast engines of alien invaders for the tension they inspired. Confusion tangled her thoughts as though she'd never heard of a combustion engine or conceived of the violence their riders might wield against her.
    The Mother and her brood fled the lights.
    K. K. heard them. During the darkest hour of the night, she felt the dust of their panicked flight on her face. The strangers on ATVs killed many things that night, always in the distance, always with screams and howls. K. K. sat in her tent listening, watching, waiting for the end.
    When the strangers roared away on their machines, she hugged herself and sobbed.
    Things would be better in the morning. She would check the perimeter, look for holes in the fence. Feed her dogs.

#

    Day followed night and night followed day. K. K. slept standing and forgot what she was doing many times. The Mother's brood screamed and howled as though she had been on a four-wheeler chasing them through the night and day and night.
    In places, there were bodies clinging to the fence.
    Singin' in the Rain struggled free of dust-caked speakers. It was a normal day for the sound system. The volume varied and there was a crackling sound that promised the end of the public address system.
    The children could never reach her. They scampered around her Oklahoma panhandle kingdom — small creatures with dirty mouths and mean poke-a-trapped-animal-with-a-stick faces. On the horizon, washed in the light of a Harvest Moon, they trod upon each other as they cavorted across a landscape as dry and red as a ten-mile scab.
    From the high ground of her fortress, they might be adults. Distance worked magic on the little scavengers with faces painted like aboriginal warriors. In the circles of her binoculars, the agile young forms of goblins danced with maniacal freedom through gullies and jagged fracking mazes that had made the stadium the highest point in the small town suburb. Man-made earthquakes had not brought the end times. Contributed, perhaps, but no one held the drilling companies responsible. The end came from the sky. And who was left to care?
    K. K. chewed an expired