by Jude Hardin
I fell to the ground. My vision had partially returned, but everything was green and distorted and blurred. Like looking through a Coke bottle. I held the knife up with both hands in a final gesture of defense, but he had me now. He had me, and we both knew it. He was going to live, and I was going to die.
He staggered toward me. The strength drained from my arms. They fell limp to my sides. I still had the knife, but I couldn’t wrap my fingers tightly enough around the handle for it to be of any use. I was helpless. All he had to do was crush my skull with the heel of his boot. It’s what I would have done. He positioned himself and lifted his leg to do just that. Like he’d read my mind.
And then a miracle happened.
Number Two grabbed the side of his neck with his only hand that still worked. He grabbed the side of his neck and pulled something out and looked at it. While he stared at whatever it was he pulled out, another red jersey entered my warbled field of vision and the man wearing it grabbed Number Two by the hair and jerked his head back and opened his throat with a survival knife identical to mine. The gash was enormous. It nearly decapitated him. Number Two fell to the ground in a bloody heap.
I looked at the man standing over him, strained the number on his jersey into focus. It was Number Five. The architect from Bainbridge, Georgia. The marathon runner. He’d killed Number Two, and now he was coming for me.
“Wait,” I said. “You don’t have to do this.”
He didn’t say anything. He was nervous as a cat. He was circling around me and looking in all directions, making sure someone didn’t surprise him like he’d surprised Number Two.
“Please,” I said. “I know a way out of this.”
He didn’t stop moving. Kept circling. He glanced at me and snarled, “What the fuck you talking about?”
“I know a way to get these things out of our chests.”
“Impossible,” he said. “They’re booby-trapped. If you try to take them out, they discharge into your heart and kill you.”
“I know a way.”
“What way?”
“You don’t have to kill me. We can form an alliance. My trainer said we’re allowed to do that. We can team up.”
“Why would I want to form an alliance with you?”
“It might not look like it at the moment, but I’m a good fighter. And I’ve faced death before. I’m not going to freak out under pressure. And I can show you a way to get the defibrillator out of your chest once this thing is over.”
“Only one of us can win the game. Even if we team up, one of us will have to die eventually. If I let you live now, you might kill me later. There’s really no reason for me to take that chance.”
“I might know a way out of that too. I might know a way we can both walk out of this alive. Think about what life is going to be like even if you win. You’ll be relegated to a foreign country, and you’ll still have that death machine wired into your chest. You’ll still be under Freeze’s control for the rest of your life. Let me live and I’ll give you some names. Then, if you win, they’ll help you remove the defibrillator and you’ll be free. You can even come back and kick Freeze’s ass if you want to.”
“I know people too. I know some of the best architects and engineers on the planet. If they can’t figure out how—”
“Do you know a surgeon who won the Nobel Prize?”
The alarm sounded twice, which indicated a time-out period. Nobody was allowed to attack until the alarm sounded one time again. Number Five stopped circling me. He took a deep breath.
“You’re full of shit,” he said. “You’re just making things up as you go along, fabricating everything in a desperate attempt to save your own life. For one thing, Freeze and the boys are listening to everything we say over the G-twenty-nines. If you really did know about such a surgeon, you wouldn’t be advertising it to them.” He paused. I had the feeling he would have killed me then and there if the time-out alarm hadn’t sounded. “Forming an alliance with a stranger goes against my better judgment, but you might be of some use to me. I might be able to use you to lure another player into a trap or something. Get up. Consider yourself a prisoner of war.”
I thought about that. Maybe this was it for me. Maybe today was my day to catch the bus. Maybe it was in the cards. I didn’t want to die, but I wasn’t going to let him use me for bait. I was already Freeze’s prisoner. I wasn’t going to be Number Five’s as well.
“Forget it,” I said. “We can be equal partners, or nothing. You can kill me now, but I’m not going to be your bitch.”
He looked me directly in the eyes. His expression was unchanging. I could see the pulse in his neck. “You got balls. I’ll say that. Double-cross me and I’ll cut them off and feed them to you.”
“So we have a deal?”
“Whatever. Yeah. We have a deal.”
He offered his hand. We locked wrists, and he helped me to a standing position.
“I must look like something from a horror movie,” I said.
“Something like that. Come on. Let’s go get you cleaned up.”
“My place or yours?”
“Yours. You lead the way.”
I opened the compass and started walking south, back toward my house. Number Five fell in behind me.
“For this to work,” I said, “we’re going to have to trust each other. You watch my back, I watch yours. If one of us gets in trouble, the other comes to the rescue.”
“That seems to be the arrangement.”
“In order to establish some of that trust, it might help to know some things about each other.”
“What things?” he said. “You want me to tell you my life’s story?”
“Just the good parts.”
“You don’t have a high enough security clearance for me to tell you anything about myself. In fact, you don’t have any security clearance at all.”
I wondered what he was talking about. Security clearance. He must have been employed by a government agency. Not part of the bio I’d seen.
“I already know a few things,” I said. “I know you’re an architect, and I know you’re a serious long-distance runner. I know you’re from Bainbridge.”
“The only information you have on me is what Freeze gave you, and that’s all the information you’re going to get.”
“Ever go to war?” I said.
“None of your business.”
“Ever been married?”
“Again, none of—”
“OK, enough about you. Let’s talk about me. I was born in Jeffersonville, Indiana, right across the river from Louisville, Kentucky. My father joined the navy while my mother was pregnant, and he ended up getting stationed at the naval air station in Jacksonville. He moved my mother and me there when I was still a baby. My mother and father divorced when I was two, and then my mother married a drunken asshole named Tyler Walker. All I remember is them shouting and cussing at each other every day until my mother died in a car wreck when I was five. My father was out of the picture, so I got stuck with Tyler. He took me fishing sometimes and taught me how to shoot a gun, but most of the time he stayed plastered. Anytime something went wrong he blamed me. He beat me with a belt or a strip of Hot Wheels track or whatever else was handy. One time I was washing his car and I accidentally broke the radio antenna, and he beat me with that. I still have scars on the back of my legs from that beating. When I was twelve—”
“You’re annoying me, Number Eight. I really don’t care about any of that shit. All I want to do is make it through the next five days without getting my ass killed. I don’t care about your lousy childhood, and I don’t care about—”
“I was a rock star,” I said.
“What?”
“In the eighties. Southern rock and blues. I had mansions on both coasts, flew to gigs in chartered jets. Booze, drugs, a different chick every night. The whole nine yards. I’m not allowed to tell you my name, but if I did you would recognize it. My songs still get airplay on the classic rock
stations.”
“That’s cool, I guess. But it really doesn’t have anything to do with our situation right now, does it? Being a former rock star isn’t going to save your ass from the six other guys who want to kill you.”
“Five.”
“What?”
“Five other guys who want to kill me. There’s me and you and five others left. You killed Number Two, remember?”
“Yeah, but there’s going to be a ninth player. We don’t know who it is or when they’re coming, but there’s going to be a ninth.”
“Right. I almost forgot.”
“My trainer told me some things about the ninth player,” he said.
“Like what?”
“He said it’s always a very dramatic scene when they bring in Number Nine. Freeze makes movies from this shit and shares them with his rich friends. You knew that, right?”
“Nobody ever told me, but I thought it might be something like that.”
“Yeah. Reality TV for sadists. Anyway, my trainer said there’s always this big drama when Number Nine is introduced. Usually it’s someone that one of the other players cares about. It’s someone they care about dearly, like a brother or a cousin or a best friend or something. Can you imagine?”
“What would you do?” I said. “What would you do if you were forced to go against your brother?”
“What could I do? I would have to kill him. I wouldn’t have a choice.”
I didn’t say anything. We walked on. My eyes were still stinging from the pepper spray, and my face felt like it had gone through a meat grinder. After a few minutes I broke the silence. I wanted Number Five to be on my side, and I thought sharing some things from my past might help.
“Being a former rock star isn’t going to save my ass from the guys who want to kill me,” I said, “but I’ve been through some shit that might.”
“What shit?”
“I was the sole survivor of a plane crash. Let me back up a minute. I’d gotten tired of the coke and the smoke and the kinky road bitches, and I decided to clean up my act a bit. Soon after I did, we were doing a show in Kingston, Jamaica, and I met the most beautiful woman on the planet. Her name was Susan. I took her on the road with me and eventually we got married. Our picture as bride and groom was on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. We didn’t know it at the time, but Susan was pregnant with our daughter, Harmony, when that picture was taken. Long story short, I watched them and all the members of my band roast in the wreckage of a chartered jet. For some reason I lived and they died. And it’s been that way all my life. Bad luck follows me, but I always seem to walk away from it somehow. And I’ll walk away from this Snuff Tag Nine thing too. Stick with me and don’t do anything stupid and we might both get to walk away.”
“I don’t believe in luck,” Number Five said. “If I walk away from this, it will be because I’m a better man than the others. Because I’m smarter and have a higher level of patience. Better endurance. It’s the way I’ve won races, and it’s the way I’ll win this.”
“What if it’s me and you in the finale?” I said.
“Won’t happen. I’ll have to kill you before that. But if by some miracle it does happen, I’ll take you in five seconds. No offense, but I wouldn’t even break a sweat with you.”
“No offense taken,” I said. “But you should never underestimate your opponent. That’s always a mistake.”
“Is that your house up there?”
“Yeah. That’s it. I’ll get cleaned up, and then we can talk about how we’re going to eliminate the other players.”
When we were about thirty yards from my house, the alarm sounded once. The time-out period was over. The game was on again. On like Donkey Kong. It sounded once, followed by three staccato bursts. The game was on, and weapons were allowed.
In one swift motion I swiveled and pulled my knife from its sheath and buried it in Number Five’s gut.
He looked at me in astonishment. The assault had caught him totally by surprise. He hadn’t expected it, and the truth was neither had I.
I twisted the blade and then yanked it out. A thread of bright red blood oozed from the corner of Number Five’s mouth, and he fell to the ground. He never went for his knife. He never said another word or took another breath. He died silently at my feet.
It wasn’t the first time I’d taken another man’s life, but it was the first time I’d done so when there was no immediate threat to my own. I felt sick about it. There was an acid-soaked sewer rat writhing around in my gut, twisting and gnashing and trying to claw its way out. I felt sick about killing Number Five, but it was what I had to do. The alliance wasn’t going to work. He was going to eliminate me as soon as it was no longer convenient to have me around. He’d practically said so. I wouldn’t even break a sweat with you, he’d said. Big mistake. His hubris had gotten him killed.
The alarm sounded twice. Time-out again. I wondered why so soon, but I wasn’t going to complain. The more time-outs the better. A perpetual time-out would have suited me just fine.
I wanted Number Five’s blowgun and his darts, but taking weapons from a dead player was against the rules. I left him lying there and walked toward my house. I wanted to get cleaned up before the time-out period ended.
I was disturbed by what Number Five had said about the ninth player. Almost always someone one of the other players cared dearly about, he’d said. I was disturbed because now I knew who Number Nine was going to be. Number Nine was going to be Joe Crawford. My best friend since sixth grade. My best friend in the whole world.
The armed escort the day my defibrillator was implanted, the guy wearing khaki pants and a sports coat, had been on the Sea Lover III with us. The charter fishing boat. He had followed Joe to the lower deck to get some coffee. Joe had given him a business card. That’s what that was all about. Now they knew Joe was my friend, and they knew where he lived. They were going to abduct him and surgically implant a defibrillator in him and force him to play the game. Joe was going to be Number Nine. I was almost sure of it. Thinking about it made my stomach churn even more. Joe was going to be Number Nine, and I was going to be dead. Number Five had said he would kill his own brother if it came down to it, but not me. Joe was the closest thing I ever had to a brother, and I would die for him without hesitation. I would sacrifice my own life to save his. No way I was going to kill him.
Which meant I was going to die.
I made it to the house and walked inside and turned the faucet on. I splashed water on my sore face and dabbed it dry with a towel. Assessed my wounds with my fingertips. The cuts from the rocks Number Two had thrown at me weren’t deep. They weren’t even really cuts. More like abrasions. They weren’t deep, but they hurt. My jaw hurt too, especially when I clenched my teeth.
A voice came over the G-29. It was Ray again.
“Get the other box under your cot,” he said. “Pull it out and open it.”
I pulled it out and opened it. It was about the size of a shoebox, and it was filled with first-aid supplies. I opened the bottle of hydrogen peroxide and dribbled some onto a square of gauze and dabbed my abrasions. I squeezed some triple antibiotic ointment onto them and covered them with gauze and secured the gauze with tape. After I’d done all that I wondered why I was so concerned about getting an infection when I was going to be dead soon anyway.
“You did good today,” Ray said. “Better than any of us expected.”
“Glad you think so. It feels like I went fifteen rounds with Muhammad Ali. And the day’s still young.”
“No, that’s it for today. Two players are dead already, and that’s the limit for a single day. You rest up for tomorrow, Number Eight. Lots more fun coming your way tomorrow.”
“Tell me something,” I said. “When do we get to meet the mysterious Number Nine?”
“It wouldn’t be much of a mystery if I told you, now would it?”
“It’s not much of a mystery anyway, because I already know who it is. It’s Joe Crawford, isn
’t it? You motherfuckers are bringing my best friend into this. Let me tell you something. It’s not going to work. I’m not going to fight him, so you might as well find someone else. I’ll refuse to fight, and you’ll have to zap me with the defibrillator. No drama in that. So find someone else for Number Nine. You hear me?”
No response. The audio on the G-29 went dead, which confirmed my suspicions. Joe Crawford was going to be Number Nine. My only hope was that they would change it to someone else now that I knew.
I decided to use the rest of the day to figure out a way to find something to eat. I’d seen some blackberry bushes in the woods, and there were plenty of acorns on the ground, but I needed more than that to keep me strong for five days. I needed some sort of meat. I went outside and walked into the woods and tested a few branches from a few different types of trees. Most of them broke with little effort, but there was a sycamore that still had some spring in it. I cut a long, skinny branch and started tearing the leaves off. The leaves were brown and crunchy, but the branch still had some moisture in it from the summer. It still had some flexibility. I wanted to use it for a fishing pole, so I needed something that wasn’t going to be too brittle. The sycamore branch seemed like it might fit the bill. After I tore the leaves off, I stripped the bark with my knife. The branch was about six feet long. One end was as fat as a handlebar grip, and it tapered down to the size of a pinky finger on the other end. I rubbed the entire length of it with handfuls of sand to get the sticky resin from the bark off. Now I had a pole, but I needed a line and a hook. And I would need some kind of lure.
I walked back to where I’d slain Number Five. The flies had already started on his wounds, and half a dozen buzzards circled overhead. It was against the rules to take weapons from a dead player, but nobody ever said anything about body parts. I thought I might be able to carve some hooks from his bones, slice off some strips of his flesh for bait. He was dead. I couldn’t hurt him any more than I already had. If things were reversed, he would probably do the same to me. A guy who would kill his own brother probably wouldn’t have a problem desecrating the corpse of a stranger.