The Death Match

by Christa Faust

  It was just after 10:00 p.m. when the lanky foreman with the pustules under his eyes came in for a drink with two other men. One was a gray-haired gorilla with the suspicious, hostile expression of a man trying to figure out if a word he didn’t understand was an insult. The other was lean and angular, with a broken nose under a wool watch cap that seemed like a really terrible idea in that kind of heat. They had very little in common, except for a mild case of a certain skin condition that only Matt could see. Nothing showy or blatant, just a few small, crusty sores on the gorilla’s hands and face and some dime-sized bluish splotches like livor mortis around the chicken-bone neck of the skinny guy. Not big-league evil, just enough to let Matt know that they were assholes. Which, to tell the truth, would have been obvious to anyone.

  Matt bellied up to the bar beside them, nursing a beer and trying not to look like he was eavesdropping. Conversation between the men was minimal, limited to speculation on when “those goofy broads” were going to arrive and whether or not said broads were going to put out. The broads in question showed up about twenty minutes later.

  The three women were all variations on the same theme: bottle blondes with bloated Budweiser physiques and cheap heels. Two of them were manifesting the same minor sores and corruption as their dates, but the third was clear-skinned and innocent. A little younger, sweet-faced and clueless, with way too much muffin top spilling over the waistband of her unflattering skinny jeans and the wide-eyed, anxious look of a kid on her first day at a new school. It was obvious that she had been dragged into this outing by her more aggressive friends and had no idea what she’d gotten herself into. She wound up paired with the gorilla, who greeted her by squeezing her breasts and telling her that they’d better be real. Her solution to the obvious lack of romantic chemistry between her and her date was to become utterly annihilated as rapidly as possible. She had seven tequila shots in the time it took Matt to finish his beer and nearly had to be carried out of the bar. Matt followed close behind them.

  They steered the tottering girl across the street to join a large crowd filing through the open gate onto the DS&T dock. Mostly men, with a few hard-bitten women mixed in. Nearly everyone in the crowd had that same low-level corruption visible in their eager faces.

  There was a young black woman taking people’s money as they entered. She seemed normal at first, but as Matt got closer, he noticed that her scalp had gone ashy and necrotic along the hairline, oozing a thin yellow pus from the roots of her tight braids.

  The group Matt had followed from the bar was still mostly silent, but a pair of men behind Matt were a little more talkative. He listened without turning to look at them.

  “Who do you like?”

  “Considine. Hands down.”

  “No way, man. Considine’s a vicious striker, I’ll give you that, but Lopez’s got a helluva chin, and if it goes to the ground, it’s all over.”

  “I don’t give a fuck. I just want to see somebody’s nose get broke.”

  Okay, so they were headed for a fight of some kind. Clearly this had something to do with the rumored underground fighting that Oscar Amezuita had been involved in before his untimely death.

  Matt couldn’t see how much people were paying to get in, but he sincerely hoped that the lonely pair of fives currently residing in his battered wallet would be enough. When it was his turn to pay the woman with the infected-looking braids, he was relieved to discover that she required only one of the two bills. When he got inside the large aluminum building where the fight was scheduled to take place, he realized why it was so cheap.

  A long plastic folding table had been set up beside the large roll-up door. Behind it, a trio of older men were doing brisk business taking bets on the upcoming fight. From the posted odds, it looked like Considine was heavily favored, at –245 on the money line. That meant that for every $2.45 someone bet on Considine, they would win $1 if he won the fight. So a $245 bet could bring a profit of $100 on a win.

  The crowd around the table was so thick that Matt couldn’t get anywhere near it, so he walked down to the currently empty chain-link cage that had been set up in the center of the huge, echoey space.

  It seemed to Matt that the atmosphere for a fight like this should be grittier, more cinematic. Bloody sawdust on the warped wooden floor. Dim, yellowy bar lighting. Sweaty, desperate men squinting through their own blood and trading punch-drunk haymakers. But this hollow, soulless warehouse space was disturbingly clean and generic. Brightly lit and stacked full of pristine, shrink-wrapped cargo, like a brand-new Costco.

  Still, Matt knew something evil was going on inside this building. Something that lingered in the air like a noxious odor. As the crowd entered the warehouse, whatever small sores they walked in with seemed to swell and radiate a feverish heat. Pustules bloomed like mushrooms, nurtured by greedy anticipation of what the crowd was about to witness.

  As he approached the empty cage, he found the one thing in the room that wasn’t perfectly clean, though not for lack of trying. The mat that covered the cage floor had been scrubbed and bleached and scrubbed some more, but there were still several old brown stains and smears on its pockmarked hide. Remnants of earlier fights, reminding everyone of what they had come to see. Not athletic prowess or sportsmanship or the sweet science.

  Blood. They were there to see blood.

  A thin, cadaverous Asian man in a dandruffy black suit opened the door to the cage and climbed in, thumbing on a wireless microphone.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, his deep, mellifluous voice completely at odds with his ninety-eight-pound-weakling exterior. “Please take your seats. This unlimited, no-holds-barred battle will now begin.”

  The crowd began to fill the cheap plastic folding chairs that had been set up around the cage. Matt moved back and took a seat close to the exit.

  “Fighting out of Irvine, California, weighing in at one hundred thirty-five and one-half pounds, currently ten and one with eight of those wins coming by way of knockout, please welcome to the cage Molly ‘Manslaughter’ Considine!”

  Molly? That seemed like kind of a strange nickname for a bare-knuckle fighter, until Matt turned around to look.

  The fighter was a woman. And she was a knockout.

  Her thick golden-blond hair was woven into unflattering cornrows, but she had mesmerizing green eyes and a haughty movie-star profile. She was clearly a great striker, since after eleven fights that proud nose had yet to be broken. But as beautiful as her face was, her body was even more stunning. It was impossible not to stare at all that tanned, flawless perfection. Muscular but still curvy and feminine. Legs for days. Her white spandex shorts were so thin and tight they might as well not have existed. Ditto her matching barely there sports bra.

  “And her opponent, fighting out of San Antonio, Texas, weighing in at one hundred and thirty-five pounds, four and oh with all four wins coming by way of submission, Olivia ‘La Viuda’ Lopez.”

  Lopez wasn’t nearly as glamorous as her opponent. She was both thinner and taller than Considine and had an odd, lanky build, with long, sinewy arms and legs covered with intricate tattoos. Her acne-scarred face was like a chainsaw sculpture, rough-hewn and emotionless. Her nose had been broken, probably more than once. She was also, like the eager spectators, just a little bit corrupt. Tiny sores clustered around the corners of her mouth and nostrils. Her dark eyes were stone-cold.

  It had never occurred to Matt to cash in on his strange and unique power to see evil in the flesh, but if he’d been a betting man, he could have turned that five-dollar bill into a nice little payday. The pretty blonde had no idea what she was up against.

  There was no ref inside the cage. No checking of gloves, no ritualistic recitation of rules or requests for a good, clean fight. The announcer just got lost and left the fighters to their fate.

  For the first minute, the women just circled like cautious dogs. Considine threw a few test jabs, but Lopez easily stayed out of her reach. Matt could feel the cro
wd getting anxious and restless around him, booing and hissing and screaming for blood. Then something happened that was almost too quick for Matt to register. Considine had thrown a big, wild right and tried to follow up with a knee to the body, but Lopez somehow managed to sweep her opponent’s standing leg and take her down to the mat.

  Everyone cheered and leapt to their feet. It was hard for Matt to see what was going on in the cage, and when he managed to catch a glimpse, all he could see was a tangle of thrashing, straining limbs and flying braids. Considine’s sexy white bra and shorts went pink, then crimson, but from where he stood, Matt couldn’t see where the blood was coming from. Then the fighters broke apart and got back to their feet, and it was revealed that the blood was coming from a huge, gaping cut above Lopez’s left eye, which was swollen nearly shut. There didn’t seem to be any kind of clock or rounds or time-out to check injuries. They just kept on fighting, Considine throwing sharp combos and Lopez dodging and looking for the takedown.

  Matt turned away from the action in the cage to scan the crowd. As the fight progressed, he began to notice a strange tide of corruption ebbing and flowing over the faces of the audience. Whenever anything particularly violent happened inside the cage, a knee to the face or a big, showy takedown, a peculiar ripple effect spread through the crowd, causing their sores to pulse and swell in response. When there was a lull, the infection would fade, pustules shrinking and sores closing like reluctant lips.

  A particularly intense wave of loathsome glee washed over the audience, and Matt turned his attention back to the fighters. They were down again, and Lopez had one of Considine’s arms between her legs, hanging on to it like someone might try to take it away. Considine’s pretty face was bright red and contorted with agony as she tapped her fingers repeatedly against Lopez’s thigh. Lopez responded by cranking her hips upward as if in sexual ecstasy, and there was a loud, juicy crunch like someone biting into a carrot. Considine’s arm bent sharply backward against the joint, jagged edges of shattered bone straining upward against the purple skin.

  Lopez let go of the hideously crooked arm and crawled away from her screaming opponent, head down, blood pattering from her black hair like rain. The skinny announcer came forward to help Lopez up. He got her to her knees first and then to her feet. But she was smiling, fists held high in victory and sores gaping and multiplying across her cheekbones.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, your winner by way of submission, Olivia ‘La Viuda’ Lopez!”

  All around Matt, people were swearing and throwing their bets to the floor in disgust. The suppurating manifestations of evil that had swollen and spread across their faces during the match were fading away as they filed out. The victorious fighter staggered to her corner, where she was met by a pit crew of handlers who immediately went to work on her injuries.

  Meanwhile “Manslaughter” Considine was being stretchered from the cage, still howling in agony and clutching her hideously twisted arm. Matt was distracted by the circus of fans surrounding Considine on her way out the roll-up door and almost missed what was going on with Lopez.

  At first the white-haired man talking to the winner of the fight was indistinguishable from her other handlers. His back was to Matt and the only thing that made him stand out was the fact that he was wearing a suit instead of a cheap, bloodstained “La Viuda” T-shirt. But when he turned and revealed his shadowed profile, he had Matt’s full attention.

  He had no nose.

  Where the nose should have been was a raw, jagged hole filled with stealthy movement. His one visible eye was cloudy and bulging from its socket, ready to burst like the barely cooked yolk of a soft-boiled egg. His face looked worse than the face of the battered fighter he was whispering to, but no one seemed to notice but Matt.

  The white-haired man frowned at Matt, revealing a roiling nest of vigorous, glistening maggots in the hollow where his nose should have been. He put a proprietary arm around Lopez like a jealous boyfriend, turning her away from Matt and leading her out of the cage.

  The second he stepped out of the chain-link ring, he was backed up by a trio of scarred, sore-encrusted bruisers. Fighters, all of them, as evidenced by their flattened profiles and crushed knuckles. They were like unimaginative variations of the same crudely molded action figure. Thinning ginger hair on one, a patchy black goatee on another, and the third with dark skin and a crusty bald head. They also had something else in common. Distinctive matching tattoos. The exact same sinister tattoo the dead dockworker had. The same image Matt had seen carved into that ancient stone. The Ouroboros and the image of Mr. Dark.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Matt pushed his way through the milling crowd, trying to reach the group and confront them. But by the time he reached the gate, the white-haired man was helping the victorious fighter into a waiting limo.

  He was about to get in after her when a woman burst free from the crowd and lunged at him.

  She was a strapping five foot nine and 150 pounds of pissed-off muscle. Big shoulders, big hands, and big natural breasts. Young, too, barely old enough to buy a legal drink. Her frizzy red hair was messy and coming loose from her ponytail. Her blue-flame eyes were hot and narrow, burning with passionate fury. She might have been pretty in a homespun, midwestern farm-girl kind of way if her freckled face weren’t flushed crimson and distorted with anger, a single thick vein pulsing in her forehead.

  The tattooed, rotten-faced thugs grabbed her arms to haul her back, but to Matt’s surprise, she easily broke free from their grip, elbowing one in his substantial gut and stomping hard on another’s instep. While she was distracted, the bald-headed thug stepped up and let her have it with a ton-of-bricks fist that should have laid her out flat. She staggered back, shaking her head and spitting a mouthful of blood, but she didn’t go down. A blow like that would have knocked an ordinary woman into next week. She wobbled a little but managed to keep her feet under her and her wits about her.

  “Where is she, Long?” she screamed at the white-haired man, bloody, pink-tinged saliva spraying from her snarling lips as she lunged forward again between the restraining shoulders of the bodyguards. “What have you done to her?”

  The man got into the limo and slammed the door. The angry redhead slipped the thugs’ grip again and pounded on the tinted window.

  “Long, you son of a bitch, if you hurt her, I’ll kill you. You hear me? I’ll find you, and I’ll fucking kill you!”

  The crowd around them was cheering as if they’d just been rewarded with a free bonus match. The sores that had faded on the way out of the warehouse were back, uglier and more virulent than ever.

  The bald-headed guy tried to grab the angry young woman around her waist and drag her back. She snarled and slammed her head backward into his face. His crooked nose split at the bridge, crushed cartilage clearly visible through the gash. Blood quickly filled the hole, splattering her red hair as she struggled against him.

  The thug with the goatee stepped up, telegraphing a big right. The young woman tucked her chin and ducked to the left, and Goatee was unable to check his swing in time to avoid cracking his bald buddy in the chops. Baldy went down like a felled redwood, and while Goatee was gawking at what he’d done, the young woman stepped nimbly to one side, swinging a tight left hook with the thumb sticking out of her fist. She jabbed that rigid thumb right into Goatee’s eye. He howled and dropped to one knee, cupping his wounded eye.

  While all this was going on, the ginger-haired guy who had taken the elbow to the liver was getting his breath back and fumbling in his pockets. He took out something that Matt first mistook for a cell phone, until he pointed it at the redhead.

  It was a Taser.

  The tiny electrodes shot out like angry hornets and buried themselves in the redhead’s belly. She immediately went rigid, lips skinned back and teeth clenched, and then collapsed, twitching, to the pavement.

  Galvanized by her incapacitation, Goatee got his feet back under him and started putting his boot to her belly
as she shuddered and tried to curl into a fetal ball. Baldy and Ginger joined in the fun, kicking the shit out of the helpless young woman like they were jumping her into a gang...beating her as an initiation.

  Matt had seen enough.

  He had the ax unstrapped and clenched in a solid, two-handed grip when he muscled through the crowd and stepped up to the sniggering thugs.

  Ginger turned to Matt with a look of mild annoyance, like Matt was a salesman or Jehovah’s Witness interrupting a cool movie.

  “Who the hell are you?” he asked. “Her boyfriend?”

  “You want to back off.”

  “Oh yeah? What are you gonna—”

  Matt didn’t let the guy finish. He just let him have it in the temple with the flat side of the ax blade. Ginger went all wobbly-legged and then tumbled backward on his ass. Baldy was right behind his fallen pal, but Matt jammed the end of the ax handle into his sternum, letting the thug’s own momentum triple the impact. When Baldy doubled over, gasping, Matt followed up with a crack under the chin that sent him staggering.

  Goatee was the last man standing, still clutching his injured eye and looking like he was about to be hit by a train. Matt didn’t need to tell him to fuck off. He just did, and his limping buddies quickly followed.

  Matt knelt beside the redhead, concerned hand on her arm. She flinched away from his touch with wild animal panic in her eyes.

  “Hey,” Matt said softly. “It’s okay. I’m not gonna hurt you. Can you sit up?”

  He helped her up slowly, first to a hunched sitting position and then to her shaky feet.

  “I feel like I’m gonna puke,” she said with a rueful smirk. “Thanks for helping me.”

  “No problem.” Matt strapped his ax back to his rucksack.

  He helped the redhead limp across the street to Flame’s bar. The bar was closed, but the kitchen door was still open while Flame finished the nightly cleanup.