Free The Undead World (Book 5): The Apocalypse Renegades by Peter Meredith

than face up to reality?”
    The River King smirked and answered, “Yes. People lie to themselves all the time and always have. It’s part of the human condition . I thought those Jews were just going to work camps...it’s just a blob of cells, it’s not a baby...it’s just water weight, pass the doughnuts . Sound familiar?”
    Grey hoped the River King would be proved wrong, but he wasn’t. At the end of the screening, the people cried out for blood.
    With the crowd screaming, Demarco was pushed into the cage opposite Grey. He was thirty-ish, thick, dark hair, bags under his eyes and a little paunch around his gut. He was a good sized man, but not an Adonis by any means. Nor was he a good fighter. He didn’t belong in the cage.
    Without the least artistry, he came barreling forward, hoping to grapple his opponent and perhaps smother him with his greater bulk. Grey stepped nimbly aside while at the same time he peppered Demarco’s face with three quick jabs. They were nothing, just little taps to feel out his opponent.
    Demarco sneered at the punches and again rushed forward. Grey struck hard and fast, a left and right combination, followed by a round-house kick to Demarco’s lead leg. The man stumbled to one knee.
    The crowd went nuts over this, however Demarco wasn’t impressed. “I barely felt that, and those punches? Pathetic. You hit like a pussy.” With barely a pause, he swung a couple of haymakers. Grey let the first whistle on by, but the second he ducked under and then pistoned out with his legs, tackling Demarco. In a blink, Grey was on top of him and raining down punches relentlessly. With his face turning to pulp, Demarco had no choice but to spin and give up his back.
    Grey immediately latched on, slamming his forearm across Demarco’s throat with a rear-naked choke and in seconds Demarco was just a limp body.
    The River King came to stand at the cage entrance. In one hand he held a microphone and in the other was a twelve-inch hunting knife. “Who wants to see this guy’s head come off?” The crowd roared its approval at the idea. The River King smiled and sauntered forward, holding the knife out. Beneath the noise of the crowd, he said, “You brought this on yourself, faking Bone Crusher’s death. You see, now I can’t trust you.”
    When Grey kept his hands at his sides, the River King shrugged. “Either his head is coming off or yours is.”
    Grey considered his position, dispassionately. He could allow himself to be killed or he could go on killing for the entertainment of a city full of ghouls. On the one hand, his death would be gruesome but relatively quick, and on the other his soul would blacken as it piled up an unknown number of innocent deaths on it…except most of the people he would face weren’t exactly innocent.
    “That’s just an excuse,” he said. But there were still innocents involved, Sadie and Eve. He could be their only way out if he just kept his head about him.
    “What did you say?” the River King asked.
    The captain held out his hand for the knife. “Gimme.” Demarco’s head came off slowly and with a God-awful amount of blood. Grey sawed and sawed, keeping his eyes practically shut and his face screwed into a grimace. When the last string of flesh parted and the head came free, the River King clapped him on the shoulder.
    “Hold it up,” he said. “Show it off.”
    The crowds whooped it up and Grey threw off the last vestige of fear over his soul. These people were animals…no, worse than that, they were fiends.
    When Grey had turned a full circle holding the head aloft, he casually tossed it to the River King who couldn’t dodge it in time. The head left a wet smear on the king’s clothes.
    That had been the first execution.
    There had been two more just like it on successive days. The last had been Dixon. He had put up much more of a fight than the previous two, even managing to strike Grey twice. These punches didn’t do much other than to mar