Game of Cages

by Harry Connolly

  “A lot of these people here have kids. Somebody needs to stand up for them. Somebody has to be ready to pay the price, Ray, and I’d rather be good than safe.”

  It seemed the definition of good was more fluid than I thought. “I’m not doing this to save your life,” I said. “Well, not only to save your life. Washaway is full of these bastards. Someone ought to report this—” I stopped talking for a moment as a sudden migraine overtook me. Catherine winced, too. Don’t think that thought. Instead, I said: “I might be the one who makes it, not you.”

  Catherine sighed. “If we both survive, I’ll buy you a beer. If you survive and I …” She took a deep breath. “I have two daughters, Ray. If something happens to me, I want you to stay away from them. You and the whole society. There’s nothing you can tell them about me that they don’t already know. Okay?”

  “Absolutely. Here.” I offered her Ursula’s gun. “They’d take this off me anyway.”

  She took it. “Ray, I’m going to say this quickly and get out of here. You’re a decent guy, but you’d better do what you have to do. You’re sending me away, so I’m relying on you. Whatever it takes. Okay?” I wasn’t sure if she was telling me to kill or be killed, and I don’t think she knew, either. She turned and scrambled into the woods.

  I took a candy out of the crate beside me. It was delicious. Then I stepped out from under the table and vaulted into the open.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I sprinted through the stalls, dodging between the tents and hopping over cables. Someone shouted, “Hey!” and I turned at a right angle and ducked under a sign that said SNOWMAN CONTEST HERE!, then ran around a tarp covered with melting, machine-made snow into the open field. I heard shouts behind me and, because I wasn’t really trying to get away, glanced back.

  Men, women, and children raced across the field after me. They were slow, even the teenagers, and for a few moments I worried that they wouldn’t be able to catch me. Then I saw a pickup bounce across the field in my direction. It was the guards who had replaced Waterproof.

  I ran faster, knowing I would only reach the safety of the trees if the truck bottomed out or wrecked.

  For a moment I thought they might try to run me down. I prepared to veer off to the side, but the driver slammed on the brakes a dozen yards away and the men in the back aimed their weapons at me. I stopped and raised my hands. “Don’t move!” one of them shouted.

  “What are you guys doing?” I shouted back, letting my voice crack with fear. Staring down the barrels of their guns, I didn’t have to put much effort into acting. “I just want to leave!” I hate to be afraid, but they’d be suspicious if I didn’t show some fear, and I hated them for it.

  The driver climbed from the truck. Three dozen people were running toward me.

  As I expected, they were complete amateurs—they stepped into the gunmen’s line of fire and generally milled around me. When they patted me down, they missed the ghost knife.

  One boy of about fourteen, sweat running from under his knit cap, took up a position behind me, knife in hand. I told them I would go peacefully, but they didn’t care. They made me walk with them toward the field house and continued milling as we trudged through the mud. The smallest of them, a handful of kids that barely came up to my armpits, had enough energy to run wide, looping circles around me. A couple of them had guns, but most had knives, hammers, shovels, and other household tools.

  I wanted to look over at the pastor’s house, but I didn’t. If Zahn was watching, and I suspected he was, I didn’t want to give anything away.

  Hondo was right beside me, a smear of auto grease on his forehead, and once I’d seen one familiar face, I saw more: one of the stilt walkers, Sue the paramedic, Justy Pivens. None had a white mark that I could see, but they all had the single-minded glare of the sapphire dog’s pets.

  One of the men walking beside me was a tall guy with a jaw like a train cowcatcher and sullen eyes. He stumbled slightly, then turned toward me, his left eye closing in a slow-motion wink. He said: “Buh buh guh glerr,” then his mouth and left arm sagged and he fell onto the grass.

  I lunged at him and turned him over. His hat fell off and a thick strand of drool hung from his lip. He was dying right in front of me—dying of a stroke just like Penny and Little Mark in their cells—and there was nothing I could do about it except watch.

  I rubbed at the stubble of hair on the top of his head. It only took a moment to find a patch of white skin beneath his hair. The sapphire dog had learned to hide its mark.

  The pets moved closer to me, and I held up my hands again. Seven or eight of them fell on me, pressing me down onto the wet grass. They bent my arms behind my back. I cursed at them and tried to struggle free, so they leaned on my arms until I thought my shoulder would pop. I stopped struggling and let them cuff me and pull me upright. Damn. The only way I could get to my ghost knife now would be to call it through my own body. No one tried to help Sullen Eyes.

  Across the field, I saw a gray Volvo creep out of the parking lot. No one else seemed to notice. Go, Catherine, go.

  They shoved me along. As we came near the field house, I saw Preston among the folks still standing guard. He was still holding his double-barreled shotgun, but he didn’t seem interested in scaring me anymore.

  Behind Preston I saw Pippa Wolfowitz and Graciela. I looked for Graciela’s toddler with her tiny earrings, but I didn’t see her nearby. Pippa was still wearing the same Santa cap and bulldog expression she’d worn outside Big Penny’s house, but underneath her jacket she wore pajamas. She looked up at the sky as though she wanted to study the clouds, then fell over backward and was still. No one moved to help her.

  Damn. They were dying all around me.

  Pastor Dolan pushed through the crowd. “Where are the two women who were with you?”

  The stone-cold way he looked at me gave me a chill, so I smirked at him. “They escaped while you dipshits were chasing me.”

  He wasn’t insulted. Maybe he didn’t know how to be insulted anymore. “You’ll tell us more soon enough.”

  “Yeah, sure I will,” I said. “Take me to your pet.”

  Everyone stopped and turned toward me. They looked to be a half second from stomping the life out of me. I felt a sudden nervous tingle on the back of my neck.

  “He isn’t a pet,” the pastor said in a low voice. “Do you hear me? Don’t use that word again.”

  “Sure, sure. But next time you threaten someone, stand on a box first.”

  He didn’t react, just turned away. Hondo grabbed my right arm, and a man I didn’t recognize grabbed my left. This was it. I wished my hands were free so I could grab my ghost knife. The entrance to the field house was just ten yards away.

  A green light lit the sky on the right. Everyone turned toward it, and I stepped back to get a clear view through the tops of the festival tents.

  Green fire had blasted a hole in the roof of the pastor’s house. There was a loud boom, then a series of sharp cracks. It sounded almost like fireworks.

  A nest of blue lights came through the wall. The whole house appeared to buckle, a piece of roof blasted upward, and we heard the explosion a second or two later.

  There was another sudden flare of green flame. “Go, boss,” I said under my breath. “Kick his ass.”

  A section of the downstairs wall suddenly blinked out of existence. The building sagged in on itself. There was a high-pitched sound almost like a scream. The walls shuddered and a column of white flame tore through the entire roof.

  Burning wood rained down on the nearby lawn. I had a sick feeling in my gut. I’d never seen Annalise use white fire; maybe it was a spell she kept in reserve.

  The walls twisted and collapsed into rubble. I stood in the crowd, watching the pieces of broken shingle and siding burn in the mud. I looked for a figure moving amid the wreckage, a glimpse of a dark coat, but I couldn’t see anything.

  Boss, please still be alive.

  The pastor turne
d toward Waterproof. “Get together a dozen men and check that out.” He glanced back at his house, his expression showing as much concern as he’d show for a toppled Porta Potti. “Actually, bring twenty. With guns. Kill anyone you find over there. We don’t want to take any chances with his safety.”

  Waterproof took about a third of the crowd with him, maybe two dozen people, but these guys weren’t operating under military discipline. They marched across the open field in a mob with their mismatched weapons.

  I was hustled toward the open door. People stepped over Pippa’s body as if she was a rotted log. “I’m cooperating,” I snapped. “You don’t have to hold my hand. I’m cooperating!”

  They didn’t let go. My stomach knotted up as I thought about being dragged in front of a predator with my arms pinned. Damn, did I feel stupid.

  We went inside, passing a halogen floodlight set on a stand in the back corner. This was the same white room where I’d eaten the church lunch. The tables, chairs, and steam trays had been removed, and the room was flooded with light. I counted four halogens, each set into a corner and each shining onto a pedestal near the far wall. I nearly tripped over the fat black power cables that ran along the base of three of the walls.

  And there on the pedestal was the sapphire dog, sitting on a big satin pillow like pampered royalty. Its tail wavered, sometimes weaving slowly and sometimes snapping from one position to the next too quickly for the eye to see.

  Its back looked different than I remembered. The last time I’d seen it, it had been smooth like a snake, but now I saw a row of polyps.

  It turned its weird, rotating eyes toward me.

  My God.

  I shut my eyes, trying to think. The floodlights didn’t make sense. Regina and Yin had used lights to trap the thing, but the people it fed on—its pets—had never done that. At first they’d tried to get it out of town, then they’d kept it safe. But they’d never kept it prisoner. So maybe it wasn’t a prisoner right now.

  I felt a sudden rush of affection for it. It was trying to control me again. I shut my eyes and focused on the pain in my iron gate, but I couldn’t keep them closed. I had to look.

  “I love you!” I shouted, fear and hatred giving power to my voice. I lunged forward, breaking the grip Hondo and his buddy had on me, then pretending to fall onto the stone floor. I took most of the impact on my shoulder and a little on my forehead. The pain was sharp, but it reminded me why I was there.

  Was I in range of the sapphire dog’s tongue? The space where its mouth would be was still smooth and unmarked; it wasn’t opening its “jaw.” I had moved my my cuffed hands behind my knees when Hondo and his buddy caught my arms again.

  There was a gunshot outside. Then more shots followed in a sudden rush, including the harsh pecking sound of automatic fire. It faded away, then surged again as people reloaded. I closed my eyes and refused to think about who they might be shooting.

  There was a quick double honk of a car horn from outside. After a few seconds, I heard Steve’s high, strained voice. “What the heavens is going on here? Who are those men shooting at?” He was trying to push into the room with his gun drawn. No one seemed afraid of it. He started calling people by name.

  Of course. No one here had a visible white mark. Steve didn’t know everyone had been turned into pets.

  I heard him shout, then his gun went off. He cried out “Kerry!” in horror and was shoved into the room, unarmed. “What are you people doing?” He looked terrible, pale and drooping, with dark pouches under his eyes. He obviously hadn’t even gotten the meager sleep I had. He scanned the room, then gasped when he noticed the sapphire dog. “Oh,” he said quietly. “The lights. Good work, everyone.”

  They stared at him. I passed the cuffs under my feet, then rolled to my knees. I pulled the ghost knife out of the front of my pants and palmed it as best I could.

  As soon as my hand touched the spell, the sapphire dog turned toward me. I had its full attention.

  “I love you!” I shouted and lunged forward.

  The sapphire dog jumped off the pedestal immediately. It knew.

  Hondo and the other man pounced on me. I didn’t even have time to throw the spell before they pinned me.

  I cut a slot in the concrete and dropped the ghost knife into it. The pets would need a jackhammer to get it now.

  The sapphire dog hurried toward the wall on its awkward, crumpled-leg gait. Steve had just come in through the door on that side, and he shuffled to intercept it. Neither were quick, but Steve managed to step into its path. He crouched low and held out his arms as though about to catch a running child.

  None of the pets tried to stop him, and I knew something was wrong. I remembered the way the sapphire dog found us at the stables, and the way the pastor had immediately run from me when he had no way to know I was planning to kill it, and the way Hondo and his buddy had just pounced on me before they had any way of seeing my ghost knife—the sapphire dog was in their heads.

  Not in the heads of the people it had controlled at a distance, like Regina and Ursula, but the heads of people it had fed on and marked.

  And there was no way it would let them trap it here, no matter how much they loved it.

  I shouted: “Get out of the way!” Steve looked at me in surprise, but it was too late.

  The sapphire dog leaped up as if it was jumping into his arms. Its head struck Steve low on his torso and then sank into him. Its legs, body, and tail pulled back into a thin column behind that oversized head, like the tentacles of a jellyfish, and it slowly, excruciatingly, passed through Steve’s body and the wall behind him.

  It couldn’t have taken longer than five or six seconds, but it seemed much longer. As it happened, Steve’s mouth fell open and a sorrowful expression came over his face. He looked as though he realized he’d done a terrible wrong to someone he cared about.

  Then the predator was through and gone. Steve’s face went slack and he fell onto the floor in a sloppy mess.

  I laid my forehead onto the freezing concrete floor and let out a long string of curses. The predator had not recognized me, or it would have had me shot out in the field. It had seen the ghost knife as soon as I touched it, though, and it had fled. Steve was dead because of me. The sapphire dog had not even bothered to feed on him.

  I had failed.

  Hondo and his pal still held on to me. I struggled, but they were using all of their weight. I was sure the next thing I was going to feel was a bullet punching through my skull.

  “Move aside,” someone said. The speaker’s voice was low and gravelly and heavily accented. “You will move aside! I have only come to talk.” He pronounced will as “vill” and have as “haf” like a cartoon villain.

  They moved aside and Zahn limped in, the right side of his head scorched black and his right arm withered to the bone. His clothes were in tatters, and his left leg was a mess of raw meat. Annalise had hit him hard, and I was glad she’d gotten her licks in. Still, just seeing him walk in here instead of her filled me with an empty, grieving rage.

  Zahn didn’t act like a man with critical injuries, though. He didn’t even walk like a scrawny old man. “Is it not here?” he shouted, his voice raw. “I will speak to it immediately!”

  The sapphire dog’s pets stared at him with the same inscrutable gaze the predator had given me.

  “Very well,” Zahn said. “I will speak to underlings.” He walked up to a young woman in a long red coat, seemingly chosen at random. “I have sealed this town off from the rest of the world. Unless I lift this seal, no one will ever come here again, and no one but me will ever leave. You will be trapped—and starving—on a world teeming with food. Again.”

  From somewhere behind me, Pastor Dolan said: “What do you want?”

  Zahn turned toward Dolan. “I will take you from this place,” he said. “As my captive.”

  Everyone who had a gun raised it in unison and began shooting at Zahn. The old man’s skull split open as a shotgun blast to
re through it. He staggered, and bits of blood and flesh splashed off his body under the barrage. God, the sound was deafening.

  Bullets ricocheted around us. One skipped off the floor near my hand, and Hondo collapsed heavily across my neck and shoulders.

  The firing stopped after a few seconds. I glanced around the room. Six people lay dead or dying on the floor, and eight others were pressing their hands against bloody wounds. The nearest corpse had her face toward me. It was Karlene.

  I had a sudden vision of her dog Chuckles, sitting on a blue tarp in the back of her truck. Was he still alive? If so, I hoped he’d find someone to care for him.

  Someone behind me threw an empty nine-mil on the concrete floor. Preston’s shotgun and a pair of rifles were discarded, too. Obviously, they hadn’t brought enough spare ammunition.

  The old man had fallen on his back into the corner. He raised his left arm and made a horrible choking sound. The woman in the long red coat lay on the floor beside him, a bright spray of arterial blood pulsing out of her thigh onto the wall. I shrugged Hondo’s body off me and got to my knees. Zahn was still making that hrk hrk hrk noise.

  Then I realized he was laughing.

  He sat up. Most of his head and face were gone, and his body was riddled with bloody exit and entrance wounds. His only good eye rolled in his head as he looked around the room.

  He saw the bleeding woman beside him and lunged at her wound, ruined mouth gaping.

  I shut my eyes. My stomach felt sour, and my skin crawled. I wanted to run for the door, but I could hear a couple of the pets nearby reloading. The sounds the old man was making were revolting. They weren’t the wet slurping noises you hear in a horror movie. They were the moans a connoisseur makes during a fine meal.

  I couldn’t help myself. I looked at him again.

  As he gulped down the blood, his wounds were healing, even the ones Annalise had given him. Raw and fresh, I wanted to say again, but the thought made my stomach twist. Annalise used that same spell to heal herself, but at least she limited herself to meat bought at the supermarket.