The Sacrifice Game

by Brian D'Amato

  “Jed’s gone psycho,” Marena’s voice yelled behind me, and in the middle of the word gone, it switched from a normal yell to an iron scrawk blasting out of every speaker of every phone on the system, of which there were probably at least ten in the house and four outside. There was a slight lag between them that made the roar seem to be echoing off the walls of a vast crazy-angled canyon.

  “GRAB HIM RIGHT NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW!!!”

  I veered right. There was a sort of trapezoidal archway between the yard and the driveway, and beyond it there was an orange sliver of my car, and seeing the car must have made me reflexively thumb the key-card because there was the delicious bwheep of the door opening itself. The speakers started up. “Ride the snake,” Jim Morrison moaned, like he was breathing on my neck. Marena’s voice was louder, though, even through the layers of car: “NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW . . .”

  ( 11 )

  “. . . NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW . . .”

  Grgur’s heavy feet scrunched on the gravel behind me and then thwapped on concrete, which means he was under the arch. I’m doomed, I thought, he’s only like five steps back, I’ll never get the door open fast enough, but there was a sort of a scrunch-and-thwack behind me and a growl, “Sranje!,” which I guessed was a cuss word in Urethrafuckistani, and I got the car door open the rest of the way and slid in and pulled the door closed. Reflexively, I touched LOCK ALL on the key card and the teeth inside the door snapped shut. I hit START and then snuck a look out at Grgur. He was just getting on his feet. What I guess happened—and it took me a few seconds to figure it out—was that since Marena’s replica house was one of many expressions of the twentieth-century Prometheus’ fascination with four-fifths scale, and what with the Lloyd Wright ceilings being low to begin with, and since the Grg was at least six foot six, the bastard must have scraped his head running through the archway. Good. The mighty V12 fired up on the second rev. Hah—

  Whoa.

  The supposedly ballistic driver’s window had cracked from side to side. The sound was soft, meaning, I guess, that Grgur had come upon me and smacked it with his elbow. I peeled out backward past him, steering through the mirror, which was something I used to practice. I shifted, swerved around Marena’s Cherokee, Ashley3’s little purple carlet, and another two SUVs that were in the big circle. For a second I thought Grgur was going to climb up on my back bumper and try to hang on to the car while I drove, but I guess he was too trained for that sort of doomed effort because instead my last glimpse of him was as he opened the door of Marena’s Cherokee. I shifted into first and floored it. Whoa. Too much power. Almost did a Tiger Woods. The big baby banked through the two gravelly S-curves, giving me that sickening feeling like I was in a canoe getting sucked into rapids. If that bastard thinks he’s chasing me in that soccermommobile he’s less of a pro than I thought, I thought. Although, of course, I might hit an obstacle or wipe out or whatever. Gate was still open. Thank Satan. As I passed the little booth I saw the guard inside was on his phone, probably talking with Marena. Too late, dork. I got through the residential streets in thirty seconds, running the stop signs, and in forty seconds I was on the access road to Route 400. Things were slowing down and getting clearer the way they do when the adrenaline really floods in. On the other hand, one’s movements get jerky and stiff and you have to watch out for objects and things and stuff because you might bump—

  Jim cut off and the car’s phone rang. “Answer,” I said. The line opened up. “Hi,” I went on. “Sorry about all that.”

  “Jed,” Marena’s voice said. “If we don’t catch you, please reconsider. Don’t kill my kid. Please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please . . .” There was something that might have been either a sniffle or static and I wondered whether she was crying. I wished I could tell her what was what, that my motivation was utterly simple, that I’d simply seen something so horrible, or rather I’d worked out a truth that was so horrible, that I don’t think even the greatest writer who ever lived could convey it, although maybe H. P. Lovecraft, with the whole thing about the Other Gods gnawing at the crust of the universe, would come closest, except even that seems almost hopeful compared to the bleakness I’d seen when—but this wasn’t the right time for that discussion, even if Marena would have listened. I got on the ramp—and I know this is a bad time to brag, but I really took the speed bumps like Adrián Fernández—and onto the Teflon-smooth highway, north toward the orange glow of burning houses in Orlando proper.

  “Do you like Max?” Marena’s voice went.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Do you love Max?”

  “This—I, listen, this train of conversation is, I’m not . . .”

  “You do, I know you love Max, so why do you, why, why, why, why . . .”

  “I know what I’m doing,” I said. For some reason, at that moment I realized I’d left the nudibranch book behind. Damn it, I thought, my resolve was getting nicked up. Marena and Max and whoever were, like, real people, people with families, people who cared about each other, and I was just a fake person nobody including myself cared about, just one of those nowhere man losers who manage to take a few other people down with them, or in my case everybody. Damn, I needed to think about things. Maybe I was wrong, maybe I’d made a mistake, maybe—

  Marena’s tone shifted down. “I knew that samlet shit would eat out your brain,” she said.

  “It’s tsam lic,” I said. “That means like ‘blood lightning.’ A samlet’s like a fishling or some—”

  “You’re a junkie and like, true to form, you’ve gone—”

  “It has nothing to do with the drugs.”

  “Sure. You’re just like any other OD’ing psycho.”

  “Uh-huh.” The needle crossed over to the sweet side of a hundred. There was a Chevy up ahead of me going just as fast. Evidently the police had given up on the area. Billboards passed me like pages flipping in a magazine: Orlando: It’s All about Options. Spartacus Jones, Opening December 19. Legoland Orlando. I felt a thrilling lack of self-preservatory neuromodulators. When you’re sure that death’s around the next curve, suddenly you can deal with anything. What was too bad, though, was that I figured they had a LoJack and any number of other trackers on me, so I’d need to change cars pretty soon and kiss the ’Cuda good-bye. And for that matter, I could practically feel an itch on my scalp where the Warren Communications ROGS, the RapidEye Operational Geostationary Satellite, was tracking me from a hundred and forty miles overhead. And was Grgur actually chasing me? I couldn’t see any fast cars behind me on the GPS. Weird. Maybe he’d decided the cars they had would be too slow and hadn’t even taken one out. Just get downtown, I thought. They have everything. I clicked up a state police page that I’d marked, that showed where the manned checkpoints were and where they weren’t. It looked like if I just kept on 27 and got off at Revolutionary Road, I’d get downtown without dealing with any PoPos. No prob—

  “Jed, I’m serious,” Marena said, “you’re not thinking clearly.”

  “Look, yes,” I said, “I know crazy people think they’re not crazy, but actually I know I’m crazy about a lot of things, it’s just that this particular thing—I mean—oh, fuck. I mean, it really, really checks out. That’s like, suppose I said, ‘two times forty is eighty’ and you said that can’t be true because I’m crazy, that’s just—I mean, it’s that level of certainty.” The road went over an orchard that used to be a swamp and had tried to turn into an industrial “park” before the recession, and now was reverting to swamp. I passed six cars and a semi. There wasn’t much traffic. Even though the Park District had been closed for months, a video billboard advertising the Rainforest Café and the Tree of Life was still running a loop of giant rocketing centipedes. Zoom, zoom, zoom.

  “Jed, everything—”

  “Mister DeLanda?” Grgur’s accented voice interrupted. “We are go to ask you once and we are not go to ask you ag
ain. Stop the vehicle and wait of us. We know where you go. Understood?”

  “Sorry,” I said. Either he’s bluffing or I’m toast, I thought. Maybe I should just aim this crate into the next overpass upright. I’d be out in a blaze of gory—uh, glory—and everything would still go on according to plan. But like Donald Pleasence in Telefon, I wanted to watch every little thing myself. Dimwit.

  “If you do not stop, we are go to shut down your systems. Do you understand?”

  “Put Marena back on and we’ll chat,” I said. I was passing a thirty-two-wheel car carrier with Aerostar vans packed into it like ticks in a wound. EXIT 29, a sign read. GAS FOOD LODGING.

  “Mister DeLanda?” Grgur asked. “Listen. Get right now away from other vehicles. Understood?”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Say again?” He can’t be really serious, I thought. The variable constellation of molded-acrylic-slab fluorescent signage rose into view against the dark orange sky, Taco Bell, Quiznos, Gulf, Texacoco, Burger King, Jamba Juice, Chicken Itza, McDonald’s, Arby’s, a regular Amalthea’s Horn of affordable dainties.

  “We shutting down your systems,” Grgur said again.

  “Not understood,” I said. Bullshit, I thought, hopefully. Still, I got into the right lane and slowed a little. If they were watching me I didn’t want them to think I was taking the threat seriously, but then if he was telling the truth I didn’t want to—

  Pain shot through my nose and into my jaw and there was just grayness in my eyes and everything started happening in a confusing way, and I couldn’t see a thing, just this wall of fog.

  ( 12 )

  —but it wasn’t fog, it was semisolid, and I couldn’t get my arms around it to reach the wheel. Instinctively I stepped on the brake—I brake with my left foot—and the brake was engaging, but I could feel that the car wasn’t quite stopping and at about this time I figured out that the gray stuff was the driver’s-side airbag. There was a rumbling in the belly underneath me and a string of metallic pops as we slid over the line of flexible reflector posts. I could feel my testicles retracting. Cowards. One whiff of trouble and they go skittering back to the inguinal canal. The airbag was already deflating but the car was tipping alarmingly to the right, even though I thought it was totally flat around here, like one inch above sea level, but it was still just tipping and tipping and then there was all this scraping like it was driving over shrubbery and then it was just STOP, an instant absolute stop, and my right hand crunched against the lip of the dash screen and my forehead CHUNKED through the limpening vinyl into the lip of the dashboard with a blue flash of detaching retinas.

  “Your ballroom days are over,” Jim sang. “Your airbag has engaged and you have sustained impact,” the ’Cuda gloated in its Maleficent purr, for some reason neglecting to cut off the music. “Exit this vehicle and seek emergency help immediately.” An alarm preeped. PREEEP, PREEEP, PREEEP, PREEEP, it preeped.

  “Mr. DeLanda, are you injured?” Grgur’s rasp asked. I didn’t answer. The most worrisome thing, I thought, with that sort of pedantic clarity that sometimes kicks in during a high-stress event, was that they hit me with the bag instead of just overriding the gearshift and putting the car into neutral, which would have brought the car to a gradual stop. Maybe they hadn’t been able to spend enough time with the car to develop that capability. Or maybe whatever software they were using to run the car had just screwed up. But that didn’t seem like them. By them I mean Executive Solutions. They were one of the ten biggest military-services vendors out there and certainly one of the two or three classiest, and they were usually very strong on detail. Except if it was just Grgur, maybe he’s not so smart as the rest of them—well, you don’t have to figure it all out right—

  “Mr. DeLanda?”

  “Fuck you, I’m in great shape,” I almost said. Resist that impulse, I thought. If, I mean when, you get away, it’s better if they think you’re still dead in the car. Except if they’d wanted to kill me they could have, right? So maybe the deal is that they’re nearby already and they wanted to mess me up enough so that I wouldn’t be able to get away. So they crashed the thing delicately enough not to kill me but to keep me here. Well, if that was true they’d grab me pretty soon and I wouldn’t be able to do much about it. And if the Executive Solutions goons got hold of me—hell. Even if I, say, killed a few people right now to get the cops to put me in the state prison, Boyle—I mean, Laurence Boyle, whom among ourselves we called Lance Boil, and who was one of Lindsay Warren’s younger let’s-say cardinal nephews—would find a way to get people in and give me a going-over. And it wouldn’t take long. Lately there’s been a media disinformation campaign about torture, trying to convince the public that it doesn’t work and how you’re liable to get false information, but the fact is that torture works just fine. Even if you’ve read only one or two manuals on the subject, these days, with just a recorder, some conductant, and a modified stun gun, you can basically get anything out of anyone in a couple of hours. Although I do still have that dirt on Lindsay Warren, I thought. Or actually it wasn’t dirt on him, it was dirt that he and the other eighty Church elders had been hiding for more than a hundred and fifty years, scans of old letters by somebody named Sampson Avard, who was a founding elder of the Church of Latter-day Saints. No Way had dug it up months ago, before the downloading—I guessed from one of his antimissionary comrades in Ixcán, one of the CPR communities, which by the way is not the same place as the ruins of Ix—but he’d sent it to me on paper, to a FedEx store in Tampa that I used once in a purple moon, so I’d only just gotten and scanned in the folder a week ago. Just offhand it looked like dynamite stuff, really incriminating revelations, but it might take a while to use that sort of thing to threaten him. And I hadn’t set up an automatic post. So it wasn’t something I could do while I was being interrogated. If anything, they’d just get me to give it up. Hell, hell.

  Hell.

  So—well, hell. Might as well just sit back and wait. Just settle down to the big sleep. It’s nothing. I’ll get colder, I’ll get woozier, and my thoughts will drift, and then, without even a click of the tongue to mark the spot, I’ll lose my train of thought and I won’t get it back, and that’ll have been the end of everything of me, oh, God, the end, the end—

  No, my other side said. No, no, no. Focus. “Open the doors,” I said, slowly and clearly, but either the car didn’t have good voice recognition or this was all starting to form a bit of a pattern. That’s what happens when you let your gadgets get too smart. Other people can tell your stuff to do stuff. I pulled at the door handle but it was holding itself shut and the little peg just wouldn’t go up. My face was hot. I pushed all the window-down thingies but of course those didn’t work, and then finally I found the moon-roof button but that didn’t work, either, even though everything else in the car was still merrily running along. I brushed a hair out of my face and felt a tiny, discreet spurt above my left eye, like there was a little kid there with an old plastic squirt gun filled with hot water. I looked at my hand. Blood. I felt a brush of THE FEAR, a stroke out of the reservoir of terror that all hemophiliacs carry with them always, which wasn’t rational since I was doing away with myself and everything else anyway in fifty-two days, but of course rationality has nothing to do with it, or with a lot of things. I put my hand up again. The kid squirted me again. Another squirt. One of the supraorbital arteries. Oh, hell. Slip the juice to me, Bruce. Still, I’m factor IX’d up. In fact my clotting was at two and a half last time. Right? So it’s not life-threatening. I found the overhead light and hit it and that at least turned on. The dashboard and the seats and door upholstery—which were all new tan real top-grain natural Napa buckskin and ungodly-ly expensive—were blotched and streaked and spattered with red that looked as shiny and opaque as enamel. I felt down my face and blood was running out of my nose in streams like wet snot. I rubbed some of the blood between my fingers. It’s hard to tell, but it didn’t feel sticky enough. Maybe the last batch of fa
ctor-IX I’d gotten was defective. Except that never happens these days. Does it? There was a larger, wetter stroke of THE FEAR. Head wounds are a big problem. There’s never been much you can do about them, especially if they’re internal, like in the nose. You can’t tie a tourniquet around your neck.

  Wound kit, I thought. In the, the thingie, the thingie between the seats.

  Oof. Nnnnk. Ah. Got the thingie’s padded lid open. PREEEP, PREEEP, PREEEP . . .

  Hell. Junk in here. Too much crap. I scooped out handfuls of crumpled Post-its, low-denomination bills, used and fresh Purell wipes, coins, used and fresh Kleenex, pens, pen caps, rubber bands, wadded up fast-food receipts. Out, out, out.

  No wound kit. No loose pads either. At least there was the Thrombostat spray and Surgicel pads in my jacket. Left inner utility pocket. Right. Hah. I got my hand on the little plastic spray bottle. I got it out. Medique Brand Blood Clotter, it said. .2% Benzethonium Chloride. Okay. Pads. They were the new kind, made out of shrimp cartilage, and they could pretty much patch you up by themselves, even if you were nonclotting. Gotta be in here.