Play Ball!

The Doctor finished writing at dawn. Technically he had until next afternoon to get the thing sent, but he wanted - for once - to be early. He also wanted to show them he could still be effective, and this thing - he knew - would accomplish that in spades. They were talking, after all, about history. This was something for the ages to ponder, and his name would be it’s standard for all time. He read through one last time, adjusted the time stamp for the program, and hit send. Tomorrow, all they’d have too do was interface with the jet’s onboard circuit, and then blast the program into the air like frequency modulation from just shy of Mach 1...

***

There was never supposed to be a flyover.

Not that opening day in Pelham, Wisconsin, wasn’t a great, big deal. It was. Chuck Nettles, PR manager and part-owner of the Pelham Billy Goats, knew that better than anybody. Which was he’d set up a midway outside with rides, and vendors, a dunking booth, games of chance, and a Ferris wheel. Beers were special inside and outside the park: $1.00 for a small, $2.00 for the big dog 20oz. There was a giant inflatable waterslide. Every single person in Pelham - all 10,784 of them - made sure they came out on opening day. It was tradition, and towns as small as Pelham were built on tradition.

This year the opponent was a foreign one. The Yunkai Thunder-Donkeys had come all the way from Osaka, Japan to showcase against the Goats. They brought with him, a gentleman by the name of Danuke Sunaki, who threw over 100 miles an hour, and was due to join the Red Sox big club as soon as his lawyers learned enough English to say “More money”. Chuck knew it was a coup: The team, the pitcher, opening night…All of it made his heart sing a song of money and commerce. He’d been slugging his 6’6” frame across the diamond, under the grandstands, and up stadium seating, patrolling around since three hours before the gates opened. He’d busted balls, told staffers where to go, and what to do. He’d given a rousing locker room speech to the Billy Goats, and made sure uniforms were spotless and well-fitted. Now, with game time only minutes away, he’d finally begun to calm down and loosen up. The night, barely even begun, was a success.

Then the flyover.

For a few seconds, Chuck had actually thought they’d been bombed. Nuked, by mistake, from friendly fire, or maybe even unfriendly (Chuck had always thought that baseball in general, and his team’s park in particular, presented about a as soft a target as any team of lazy ragheads could hope for). But as the Goat’s fans began to get up and look about after the tremendous BOOM, Chuck Nettles was - for the moment - at a loss. When a fighter jet strafes a target, that target doesn’t get the benefit of a warning, because by the time the explosive roar of the turbines finally becomes audible, the target has already been reduced to particulate. It was a home truth that Chuck Nettles knew well, him having served two tours in Bagdad and Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. Chuck also knew that a traditional flyover, to commemorate a death, or a battle, or opening day for a AA ball club in a small market, was usually executed with three airplanes in a slow, v-formation. A single jet, usually a bit faster and lower that the vanguard sometimes brought up the rear to commemorate a “missing man”, usually a pilot recently deceased.

But Chuck’s fighter (he knew it was fighter jet, and American. Nothing sounds quite the same as US Steel moving out around mach 1) was way too fast, and way too low. That, coupled with the fact he didn’t order up a fucking flyover had him ducked. He’d seen the thing flash by out of the upper corner of his vision, ripping the sky overhead and blasting a gust of hot air down on the park. He had a spilt-second to wonder just what the shit was happening, when the sound body-checked the full-to-capacity stadium. It was a sound like twenty million shotguns going off at exactly the same time. The plexi covering the new mini-jumbotron in far center/left field disintegrated into thousands of sharp plastic shards that rained down onto the field. The crowd had done two things at just the same time. First they screamed - as one and loudly - in surprise and shock. Then they swooned, taking cover as a group instinct. Chuck saw some grab kids, trying to stuff them between plastic folding chairs and bleacher concrete. Chuck had hit the deck too, but he bounced up quick when he realized the show was over.

Ten minutes later people were still talking about the strafing, but most of them were also glancing at their watches waiting for the game to start. Chuck was making his way toward the owner’s box when he saw the young couple.

He would have kept motoring right out onto the mezzanine, but at the last second, he let his attention wander over to the closet just in back of the beer concession under the grandstand. The door was opened all the way, and Chuck could see the couple inside. He saw nakedness, two bodies mashed together, coupling aggressively. They were covered in something. Was that…Mud?

They’re fucking!

The shouting was from behind him, and as he turned to face it, somebody hit him dead in the face with a cro-bar. That’s what it felt like anyway, ripping a gash in his right cheek and opening him to the teeth and bone. He fell, screaming in pain and confusion, to the cement. There was more shouting then, but Chuck felt his mind slipping out of it. The shouts and screams dwindling, the blows to his curled body, head, and legs softening until he was alone in a blackness that was all his.

Chuck didn’t see the mob that attacked him, and it’s questionable how many of them saw him. By that time, by that time they’d ceased to exist as individuals, opting, instead, for a tiny part in a furious and violent mob-mind. A few of them kicked and shoved and punched Nettles as they made for the better action up on the field.

***

The violence actually began on the field in the same place where violence usually begins at a baseball game: in the 60‘6“ between home plate and the pitcher’s mound. The phenom had walked a guy on balls, thrown behind his head. The next batsman he stayed away from, putting the guy away in three tosses. The batter - Tarkis was his name - was pissed off even without the drilling. He was booking his way out to the bump even as the ump was calling the third strike. The phenom Sunaki stood stock still, watching a snarling Taarkis tear-assing towards him with his bat cocked. He didn’t so much as raise a hand in defense, and so he took the first blow full in the face. The crushing swat took the gifted hurler out of his Nikes, and for a minute he seemed to hover, suspended horizontal over the bump as if by some arcane Japanese magic. Later they would tell his wife he was dead before he hit the ground. They wouldn’t mention that Taarkis, even seeing that he’d caved the guy’s face into his grey matter, wasn’t satisfied to stop. They didn’t mention the hundreds of overhand hammer-strikes that he proceeded to deliver to the motionless phenom lying in the blood-mud, or the way the phenom’s whole body was reduced to a sort of crimson pudding shot through with uniform linen.

***

Chuck managed to rise, and will himself toward what he thought would be the safety of the mezzanine seats. There was a spilt second, just as he was getting to the middle of the ramp, where chuck allowed the blue sky, easy winds, and relative quiet to convince him that what he thought was happening was, in fact, not happening. But Nettles was cresting the top of the ramp at exactly the time when the batsman Taarkis was finishing up with the phenom. The crowd had maintained a respectful silence while Taarkis did his thing, as if they were appreciating the work of a great genius and didn’t want to be distracted. Then the action in the stands began to ramp up. The twenty or thirty people in the field box to his left began to wail like animals and rip at their clothing. Chuck saw a woman leap at the guy next to her and bite a sizable chunk of the man’s face clean off in a gout of purple fluid. He saw a guy rip a swaddled baby from a mother’s arms and begin to whip the helpless things body around like a mace at anyone and everyone. In the upper deck, gang warfare had broken out. He saw a massive pile of flesh where the battle had been joined. A guy near the top of the pile was kicking and stomping the heads and bodies of those trapped below him. As he flailed away a young girl - no more than 12 to chuck’s mind - ran up the opposite side of the pile and body checked the man off the pile and into the pit formed at the ramp. Chuck saw his head break like a watermelon taking buckshot. The body danced and jumped it’s way to the bottom of the ramp, and a mob of angry fans fell upon it, fighting for the tastiest parts. Everywhere he looked now, Chuck saw it: people using their own mouths as weapons like animals. He began running up the stairs for the box now, taking two and three at a time, looking up at the open door to the box only yards away.

But then somebody grabbed his feet and he was down. The screams and violence drowned him, and once again the kicks and the punches mashing his body to a pulp. He heard somebody shouting “burn him burn him burn burn burn…”


Then he saw the flame reflect on the cement under him and he knew he was done. He tuned to face a giggling stranger clutching an aerosol can in one hand and a lighter in another. The man was bringing the weird diy weapon to bear when his head popped like a balloon. Chuck jumped back, recoiling from the spray but he heard more shots. Around him more bodies were falling. He saw a woman’s face disappear in a red foam. Pop! Pop! Pop! Sixteen times over and the screams of pain and hideous confusion were all around him. He saw eyes and heads and limbs exploding. He saw chests and faces destroyed. Finally he saw daylight and broke again for the box. He made it, and locking the wood and steel door behind him, fell to the floor and began to think.

***

The players had joined over the puddle that had been the Daisuke Sunaki, and by this time the victors were feasting on the dead and wrestling with each other for their share of the kill. A woman suddenly broke from the stands and rushed the opposing teams manager as he sucked, unawares, and bit at piece of arm. She slashed a hand down across his face and then another. The second burst the coach’s eyeball in the socket and icor was running from the wet wound. As he screamed the woman lept at him, grabbing his head between her knees and riding him down like a rodeo-wrangler breaking a calf. They hit the muddy field with a wet noise and the woman used her claws again, this time to open the managers throat, and chew at the gushing hole. Then the mob of players noticed her and fell upon her from all sides. They ripped the woman limb from limb, tug-of-warring her arms in a violent spasm until she split in two, flooding musculature and fluid and bone down on the first base line. The fans stopped warring - if only for a few seconds - to take it all in.

***

Then they started up again full-steam. The blood was running in streams now, down every stairway in the place. It pooled and hardened in reflective puddles around the dugouts. Before long the entire backstop area was a crimson/black reflecting pool, hot and pungent. Bodies were raining from the upper tiers. All around him, Chuck saw babies and toddlers falling like bales of hey in a silo. They burst like water balloons all over the field and the lower levels. Each had drawn it’s own circle of predators to suck at the meat and drink the blood. The first wave was over now, and the victors were enjoying heir haul, gorging themselves on the fresh blood and tissue until they were sated enough to go try for more. Chuck heard them howling and snorting in the acrid humidity, sounding like something less than human.

Directly across the park, on the same level as the owners box, Nettles saw what appeared to be a waterfall, dirty brown and thick, gushing down on the first base field boxes. The occupants of the boxes were too busy trying to physically destroy one another to register the thing, but it looked to Chuck like the flow from above was getting wider, and more intense by the second. Only then, soaking the mountain of writhing flesh like a torrential downpour, did the liquid finally declared itself. Just as the reality was dawning on the combatants below, he saw a column of fire climb down the waterfall and the whole pile went up with a big SHOOOOOP Noise. Chuck heard screams from there, unholy and fading, grabbing at last chances in the raging combat. The sour, acrid stench of the gasoline mixing with roasted human flesh, fill the ball park with viscous, dark smoke and bringing sudden nightfall on the field and lower grandstands. The flames, force-fed by the open air swirling and gasoline vapor, enveloped the entire first base seating within a few minutes. With the heat suddenly so close, the gang-battle was forced to pause for self-preservation. Nettles watched as hundreds tested the 45 foot fall to the burning hell below.

For a time, chuck could only watch from the relative safety of his box, the cycle repeating and repeating until there were only a few predators left going carcass to carcass in search of meat. Chuck saw them stumbling about out there, looking as scared as he himself was. What in sweet fuck all had happened here today? His wounds were worse than he’d thought. His shoulder had a coke-can sized chunk taken out and was beginning to stiffen and throb. His cranium had been fractured in three separate places. He was seeing triple and thinking double. It was coming, he knew. Before to long he’d be in shock, and without a rescue soon after that…

In the boxes just below his box, a teenage couple chaperoning a camp trip to the ballpark had just finished butchering every last one of their charges with pro-mo bats. They’d broken one of the fuckers in half to use stiletto style. The girl brandished it to the corpse of a kid she’d been teaching about mockingbirds scant days before. An overpowering stench filled the air on that part of the stadium as she opened the boy, and three others lying next to him with the makeshift blade. When she was done, her and her boyfriend began to reach into the corpses and drape the offal and musculature over their bodies. The girl began to masturbate furiously, crying out in screams and rants as she pumped away at herself as her partner began twitch and convulse like vhe was conducting high voltage. He to vomit and shit all over himself and the pile of guts. Some of the kids were still alive, eyes open, bearing witness to their own calculated destruction.

He risked one more peak through the window, noting just prior that the park was now in almost complete silence, punctuated by the occasional scream or moan. Just then a voice, a woman or a child, took up the loudest death-wail of the afternoon. An awful cry/scream/moan that echoed across the entire, blighted stadium. On and on she went, gaining volume and pitch as the minutes ticked. Finally, a solitary report: Pop!, and it’s echo. Then nothing. Chuck looked around and popped the door. He made it three steps down before noticing the giant black spiders flooding into the ballpark from underneath the grandstands. Old Chuck Nettles saw that and decided he’d had enough, turned, one more time, for the safety of the owners box.