by Jude Hardin
I figured I had one chance at winning this thing. One in a million. I pulled out my slingshot and loaded it with one of the lightbulbs from the dressing room. I nearly cut a finger off when I reached into my pocket, but I was so amped on adrenaline I didn’t even feel it. I stretched the sling to its limit, took aim, and fired. I got lucky. I got luckier than I’d ever gotten in my entire life. The bulb hit him dead center in the forehead and shattered with a pop. It took him by surprise. He hadn’t been expecting it. He staggered back a couple of steps. Bright red blood gushed from the wound. I ran toward him with the nightstick raised over my head, as if I were about to serve a tennis ball. I wanted to come down hard on the top of his skull. I wanted to end this thing before he had a chance to regain his composure. I figured his guys were waiting in the wings. I figured they would cut me in half with the shotgun as soon as I delivered the fatal blow, and I was OK with that. I was OK with dying as long as I could take Fat Boy with me.
But Fat Boy had been bluffing. The light bulb to the forehead hadn’t really dazed him much at all. When I got to within three feet of him and started to come down with the nightstick, he smiled and shot me in the gut with the stun baton. I froze midstride. Every nerve cell in my body, from the nails on my pinky toes to the hair on my crown, screamed in fiery pain. I stiffened like a plastic mannequin for a brief moment and then fell to the hardwood stage floor with a thud.
I was aware of my surroundings, but I couldn’t move. Total paralysis. While Elton John sang about passing through burning hoops of fire, steam rose from the hot coals on both sides of me. Freeze casually walked through them, knelt beside me, and pulled his second weapon, the survival knife.
He gripped the handle with both hands and raised the weapon over his head, ready to plunge it into my heart. He looked me in the eye and said, “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time; and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying—”
Before he could say nothing and bury the dagger in my chest, a deafening blast rang out and the side of his head exploded and showered me with blood and bone and brain tissue. He fell sideways and landed in the hot coals to my left. The stench of rayon melting onto his skin mingled with the smoky aroma of charred flesh. I couldn’t hear anything, but the effects from the stun baton were wearing off. I started to get some feeling back in my arms and legs.
I felt as though I had been granted some sort of pardon, but I didn’t want to celebrate too soon. I didn’t know what was coming next.
I tried to get up but could only manage a partial sitting position. I thought maybe one of the stooges who had captured me had come to his senses and taken Freeze out.
But that’s not what happened.
I looked to the edge of the stage, and Juliet was standing there with the Walther 9mm semiautomatic pistol I’d left under her bed.
The emergency room nurse said I looked emancipated.
She meant emaciated.
“That’s right,” I said. “I might be skinny, but at least I’m free.”
She gave me a puzzled look. She didn’t get it.
I chalked it up to fatigue. Hers, not mine. The ER was short-staffed. She had worked all night and was working over into the day shift for a few hours to help. That’s dedication. Nurses had an extremely difficult job sometimes.
I was married to one, so I knew.
I got a chance to talk to Juliet for a few minutes before the ambulances arrived and carted us away from Freeze’s hellish playhouse forever. I’d left the pistol from the maintenance guy’s car under her bed, along with a note explaining that the defibrillators were phony. Armed with the gun and that bit of knowledge, I figured she might be able to escape before being forced into battle. The odds were still a million to one against her, but she could have made a run for it. She could have tried to save herself.
Instead, she chose to try to save me.
She followed the smoke to the house I’d torched and stayed out of sight until she was able to isolate one of the guys there trying to put the fire out. She threatened to shoot him if he didn’t give her directions to Freeze’s house. He refused to talk—until she told him about the defibrillators being nothing but inert chunks of stainless steel.
“I’m living proof,” she said. “See, I have one too, and I’m way beyond the boundary. If Freeze was telling the truth, I would be dead by now.”
Knowing he now had a chance to actually walk out of the swamp alive, the guy she held the gun on gave her the information she needed.
Juliet found her way to the mansion, but then she had to get past the two men Freeze had kept there with him. They weren’t expecting anyone, so they’d gotten a little careless. They pulled out the beds of hot coals when the fog machines came on, and while they were doing that Juliet found their shotgun. She held it on them when they returned to the lighting booth, and then she forced them into a supply closet and wedged a chair under the doorknob.
With them out of the way, Freeze was a sitting duck. She used the nine-millimeter pistol I’d left for her because the scattershot pattern of a shotgun blast would have taken me out as well. Smart woman. I was glad I’d taken the time, years ago, to teach her a little about guns.
After killing Freeze, Juliet climbed onto the stage and tended to my bleeding finger. I was on my back, still feeling the effects of the stun baton. She applied a pressure bandage, and then she just sat there beside me for a while, stroking my forehead with her cool fingers. We heard the rotor blades of a helicopter whirring overhead and sirens wailing in the distance. Apparently someone had finally noticed the smoke from the fire I’d started and had alerted the authorities. Help was on the way.
“I love you,” I said.
“And I love you, my darling.”
“What about my affair in LA?” I said.
She paused for a second and then said, “What affair?”
That’s what I needed to hear. She leaned over and kissed me then, and for the first time in a long time I felt like everything was going to be all right.
We rode in separate ambulances to the trauma center in Jacksonville. They wheeled me to a curtained-off area, and I assumed Juliet was taken somewhere nearby. A couple of hours and a couple of liters of IV fluids later, she stepped in and asked me how I was doing.
“How come you get to walk around?” I said.
“I wasn’t starved and dehydrated like you,” she said. “How do you feel?”
“Surprisingly well, but the doctor wants to admit me for twenty-four-hour observation.”
“That’s probably a good idea.”
I shook my head. “It’s a terrible idea.”
“Why?”
“Because we have a ball game to go to, that’s why.”
It took some coaxing, but Juliet finally agreed to call Brittney and have her pick us up at the hospital. I signed out against medical advice, and we drove straight over to the stadium to watch the Florida Gators play the Georgia Bulldogs.
I knew there would be a lot of things to clear up regarding the whole Snuff Tag 9 thing. Detectives from the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office had spoken with us at the hospital. They were satisfied that we had been taken against our will and that everything we’d done was in self-defense. Still, they told us to not leave the area for the next few weeks. There would be a major investigation, they said, by local authorities and by the feds.
And there was.
In the weeks to come, we would learn more about everything that had happened, and we would learn some astonishing details about the man who called himself Freeze. His real name was Malden Zephauser, for instance, and his father had first made a fortune in oil and then in technology. When Daddy died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-four, young Malden had inherited o
ver twenty billion dollars.
With that much money, you can do anything you want. You can submarine to the bottom of the sea or rocket to outer space. You can start your own country if you want to. It funded his little playground in the swamp with no problem, and it kept a cartel of career criminals on the payroll.
The guys at the mansion were only the tip of the iceberg. Retail video game outlets had been set up all across the eastern United States, mostly in towns nobody had ever heard of. Towns like Quincy, Illinois, and Bainbridge, Georgia. Malden used the locations to sponsor in-store Snuff Tag 9 tournaments. When someone filled out a form to participate, the manager would forward that information, and Malden would pick the cream of the crop for his real-life version.
So Nathan Broadway had guessed right about that part, about why he’d received the letter in the first place. Someone had gotten his name and address from a card he filled out in a video game store. It was the one thing all the contestants—that is, victims—had in common, and the FBI had never made the connection.
Then I came along.
A pair of agents had interviewed Joe Crawford soon after I disappeared. Joe told them about the letter I was investigating, and from there the feds started putting two and two together. They were actually close to cracking the case, closer than they even knew, but not close enough.
Juliet and I would have died if we hadn’t done what we did. Unless of course one of us had won the game, which didn’t seem likely. Not with a former Navy SEAL and an ex–Marine Corps airline pilot still playing.
When Number Six and Number Seven heard the helicopters and the sirens, they retreated to their houses and stayed there. A few hours later, a battalion of National Guardsmen who were combing the area found them. Number Three, the radiologist I’d bound and gagged and performed surgery on, survived as well, although rumor had it he’d been confined to a psychiatric ward for further evaluation.
The men who comprised the staff at the mansion were all arrested. It turned out that some of them were winners from previous years. Their actual prize was a lifetime of servitude, not the opulent existence in a foreign country they had been promised. They all had defibrillators implanted in their chests, which they thought made escape impossible. Those guys were eventually released. Some of them landed book deals and others became the subjects of heartwarming reunion shows.
The films Malden Zephauser produced were distributed via e-mail, mostly to wealthy clients overseas, and although their content called for the utmost discretion, some of the footage had started showing up on rogue websites. One of the videos actually went viral. I couldn’t understand that kind of mindset. Anyone who took pleasure in watching men slaughter each other needed to get a life.
We learned all that, but the thing I was most curious about remained a mystery. Who were The Sexy Bastards? Nobody seemed to have a clue. Maybe the term was a code name for something. Maybe it was a secret society of billionaires aiming to rule the world.
Or maybe The Sexy Bastards were a figment of Malden Zephauser’s imagination. He’d said nobody would ever know their identities, and so far he was right.
I knew there would be court dates and police station interviews and further medical treatment and maybe some therapy sessions for post-traumatic stress syndrome. There would be surgery consults to remove the fake defibrillators, and of course the media would be yapping about the whole ordeal for months.
All that would happen, but not today. Today was for football.
It was a crisp, cool October Saturday, with just enough breeze to keep the flags waving. We were in the middle tier, near the end zone on the Florida side, not the best seats but not the worst. I had a hot dog and a beer and the two best women in the world at my side.
I was in heaven, and I hoped it would never end.
The publication of another novel is always a celebration for me. Though the actual writing process is by nature solitary, turning a manuscript into a book is always a collaborative effort. In no particular order, these are some of the people who have helped me along the way. Please forgive me if I have forgotten anyone.
Thanks to all the wonderful folks at Thomas and Mercer, and their associates, especially Andy Bartlett, Charlotte Herscher, Renee Johnson, and Jacque Ben-Zekry. I know that you truly care about the books you release to the world, and it shows.
Thanks to my agents, Jane and Miriam, for being such great first readers and business partners. I consider myself truly fortunate to have Dystel and Goderich Literary Management as part of my team.
Thanks to all my friends, family members, and peers, for their continuing support. Corey Hardin, Kathy Ledford, Sue Mudd, Stephen Parrish, Erica Orloff, Joe Konrath, Mark Terry, Jon VanZile, Dan Peters, Kathy Blue Quindoza, David Ryan, Scott Nicholson, David Morrell, Lee Goldberg, Bill Rabkin, Melody Woods Raymond, Nita Bingham, Norm Kelly, Mike Priddy, Alan Orloff, Jane Driskell, Allison Brennan, Blake Crouch, Bud Elder, Char Chaffin, Dana King, Denise Puthuff, Eric Christopherson, Dusty Rhoades, LaDonna Koebel, Lainey Bancroft, Linda McCandless, Tess Gerritsen, Tammy Downard, Trish Barr Johns, Pete Helow...and so many more. At one time or another, every one of you has touched my life in amazing ways, and the ongoing journey would not be the same without you.
And a very special thanks to Bob Florence, my best friend since sixth grade, for helping me with the explosive ordnance disposal work in Crosscut. Your expertise is much appreciated, my brother.
Photo by Pete Helow, 2011
Jude Hardin is coauthor of the Dead Man series of adventure/horror thrillers created by Lee Goldberg and William Rabkin. His debut novel featuring Nicholas Colt—Pocket-47—received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. The New York Times best-selling author Tess Gerritsen wrote, “Pocket-47 sucked me in and held me enthralled...[Nicholas Colt] is a character I’m eager to follow.” And David Morrell, creator of Rambo, called the second Nicholas Colt thriller, Crosscut, “fast, fierce, and relentless.” Hardin has held down a variety of jobs—from drummer to chemical plant supervisor to freelance journalist—each of which fuels his writing. When he isn’t creating his next story, he enjoys fishing with his son. He lives in north Florida.