The Sacrifice Game jd-2

by Brian D'Amato

  Finally, at the base of the hollow wall, nestled against the cinder block, was a stack of rusted rectangles.

  I dug it out carefully, wrapped it in Band-Aids™, and Band-Aided it under my scrotum. It was the safest spot I could think of. Jed’s testicles instinctively retracted, shrinking from the idea of sharpness. Just in case, I stuck forty or so wrapped Band-Aids next to it in three thick little wads.

  Marena was sound asleep. But the nurse might check in early.

  I separated sixteen of the old double-edged razor blades from the brick, scraped as much of the rust off them as possible, and folded them into V’s down the center, so that they had two edges sticking out at about forty-five degrees from each other. After some picking I peeled back the outer layer of my hand cast. It wasn’t plaster, it was some kind of light breathable cheesenylon stuff.

  I cut slits through the edge of the cast and threaded the V’s into them points outward, kind of like fishhooks in a cork, so that I finally had two rows of double blades traveling around the edge of my paddle hand.

  It was a bit like the way they make weapons out of two safety-razor blades and a toothbrush in prison. Two edges do a lot more damage on the first stroke than one because they take out a kerf that’s hard to sew up.

  Finally I filled in on either side of the blades with little folded paper tabs from the back of the Band-Aids, wrapped the outer layer of stiff beige cheesecloth loosely back around the whole thing, and stuck that down with looped Band-Aids on its inside hems so that it would look as normal as possible. When I hit someone with the assembly the edges of the blades would go right through the outer layer of cloth as though it wasn’t there.

  It was bigger and lumpier than before, but I figured if I kept it down at my side and turned away from their lines of sight it probably wouldn’t get noticed.

  Just as a last touch, I made a little balloon out of Saran Wrap, filled it with Tabasco, and secreted it between my teeth and upper lip.

  Right.

  I pulled the IV out of Marina’s arm, rolled her gently under the bed, retaped the needle onto my own arm like it was still in my skin, and hit the lighted call button on the padded bed rail. Wait. Marena’s bag was still on the window ledge radiator thingy. I slid it under the bed just before Nurse Wretched came in.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Yeah, thanks,” I said. In fact I’m feeling great, I thought. I feel more like myself with every p’ip’il. “Sorry to bug you, but I really needed to talk to Grgur, I’ve got to tell him something.” She put down the tray and left. Grgur came in.

  “I really need a cig,” I said.

  “Forget it,” he said.

  “I also have some information.”

  “Save it.”

  “I just worked out a couple of dates Marena wanted,” I said.

  “It’ll wait.”

  “Please, Gulag, you know I am a nicotine addict.”

  “No,” he said, “you have to detox.”

  I thought for a few beats about how Jed would put it. All right. Let’s try this.

  “Come on, please please please,” I said. “We carcinogen lovers have to stick together. Right?”

  “Yeah,” he said. He beeped at the backgammon game on his phone.

  “I’ll split a box of Monte Cristo Piramides with you when I get home.”

  “Ungh.”

  “What’s going on with you,” I asked, “are you wearing like, ten NicoDerms or what?”

  “I have the power of the will,” he said.

  “I’ll wire you ten thousand dollars,” I said. “Otherwise I’m just going to toss and turn and thrash until Grandfather Heat-until dawn. And then I will start screaming. And then when people ask I’ll tell them you did let me smoke, and it messed up my meds.”

  “We can not smoke in here anyway,” he said. “It sets off the sirens. We would have to take us out into the stairs.”

  Hah. Progress. “Or I could go down into the morgue and crawl into a drawer with a dead guy,” I said.

  He went out. I could hear him mumbling something into his phone. He came back in.

  “Grg, old pal next to me,… wow, I knew you had some pity in you.” Tears almost burbled up in Jed’s/Sic’s/my cowardly eyes. “Thanks. Really.”

  “Yeah.”

  We waited.

  There was a rap on the door and the other one from the house came in wearing a shirt woven out of the blue hair of some odd creature that Jed’s memory said was called a Nylon. He also wore a pectoral on his chest with his name and mask. I mean, portrait. Somehow I didn’t think he was so alert as Grgur.

  “This is Hernan,” Grgur said.

  “Yeah, we’ve met, hi,” I said. Did that sound natural? Other One didn’t say anything. I hoisted myself up more unsteadily than I had to. Hurry up, I thought. Marena might cough or twitch or start singing. We went out and they steered me in front of them down the hall, letting me pull my own IV pole. They certainly didn’t seem to notice that the cast on my right hand was a little larger than it had been. I didn’t see any of the guards either.

  We turned right at the far end of the hall. I couldn’t see any of those dart shooter weapons-I mean, guns-printing on Hernan’s clothing, but one never knows. I got an impression of a deserted waiting-area of bolted-down mats. That is, seating units. Chairs.

  We turned down another humming green corridor to a FIRE/EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY door. There was a door across from it labeled NAHSO, which something deep in Jed’s hard drive told me was the hospital’s code for Pharmacy. Grgur ran a badge through the lock, pushed the door open without touching the aluminum bar, and went out ahead of us into the white concrete stairs.

  Other One-Hernan-herded me in behind him and shut the door. He said something about how the Magic were going to make it to the Finals against the Jazz, but Grgur just grunted and pulled a pack of Kolumbos out of his shirt pocket.

  He shook three out, put one in his mouth, handed one to me and one to Hernan, and took out a book of Delano Hotel matches.

  He lit one one-handed and touched it to his own first.

  At least Marena’d really trained this guy to be polite, I thought. A lot of people think it’s polite to light the other person’s first, but with matches you’re supposed to absorb that awful sulfur taste yourself before you move the clean match on to someone else.

  I put my cig in my mouth and sort of moved into position. He held the match out to me and just as the end was about to light I blew the match out through the cigarette.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled. This is the move, I thought.

  I took the book of matches with my left hand, shaking my head, and he let me take it.

  YES! I pulled a match around to the back of the pack with my left thumb, lighting it one-handed, and sucked in the smoke, double-inhaling it up through my nose. You can’t really explain the pleasure of smoking to a nonaddict. It’s like trying to describe sex to a five-year-old.

  Okay. I moved the little balloon of Tabasco out from under my upper lip with my tongue and got ready to bite down on it.

  Right. I held the still-lit match out to Hernan, sucking that big old blowgun breath down into my lungs so that I’d be ready.

  Hernan leaned forward and I moved the burning match to his cigarette and then moved the matchbook under his chin, my thumb extruding two old razor blades from under the cardboard in a V-shape.

  I sliced into Hernan’s throat from the left side, the first blade quickly burying itself up to the crook of the V, and continued the same motion in a smooth arc up toward his right ear. Thin flat strings of blood jetted out of the slit, black in the minty nonlight.

  I let go just before reaching the ear and pulled back. Hernan reacted late to the relatively painless cut, bringing his hand up to his throat, and he lurched forward and grabbed my right wrist with his other hand but I twisted against his thumb and pulled back and fell against the corner of the wall. Only, it wasn’t the wall, it was Grgur grabbing me from behind.


  I accentuated my fall, going off balance, and as Grgur came down after me, grabbing at my cast arm, I bit down on the balloon of Tabasco and swung my head around, getting the bolus of liquid position.

  His face came into range.

  (105)

  Even in Tony Sic’s fultballer body I didn’t have the lung power I’d had in the old suns. But still, if you know how to cough into a blowgun, you can send liquid out with enough force to practically go through a closed eyelid. And Grgur almost certainly wouldn’t close his eyes anyway. People trained the way he was… well, he was like us Ball Brethren. We do not blink, even when losing a limb. If their eyes get dry they wink one and then the other.

  I blasted it out. He didn’t close his eyes fast enough. He squinted in obvious agony, orange drips sliding over his face, but still he just held my arms tighter behind my back.

  I looked back at Hernan. He had his hand in his jacket pocket but he wasn’t pulling a gun.

  I did a porcupine, pulling my legs up and curling into a ball, trying to wrench my left arm free, but of course what I really wanted was the right arm, the cast arm, and Grgur let his grip on that slack for just a beat, enough for me to twist it against his thumb and line up the shot, and I slammed the cast down into his inner thigh and drew it up along the artery into his groin, leaving a trail of bloody shredded fabric.

  It got him to relax his grip enough for me to slide out and down to the floor, at the edge of the stairs.

  Hernan had partly gotten his act together and was nearly on me, even with one arm wrapped around his throat.

  So I tipped myself over and rolled down the stairs. At the first landing I sprang up and turned and half ran, half fell down around onto the next flight, four at a time in my little paper booties, pitching forward onto the landing below, my back tingling with imagined bullet-wounds.

  I grabbed the inside railing with my left hand and wheeled around. In most combat situations one main thing is to just be decisive and book when you can. A lot of people stick around too long when they’re ahead.

  There was one flight of metal-and-tile institutional stairs between me and Grgur, but I could hear him run-creeping down toward me, I could practically see him through the stairs, and as a single foot turned the corner I slashed at it with my cast and it slid out from under him.

  I held on to the banister and struck again around the corner at his knee.

  He grabbed my arm just before the second swipe could connect but I pulled my cast back and down into the crook of his elbow, the big artery there spraying blood onto the wall, and as he released the cast I backhanded him with it up into the left eye.

  I was pretty proud of the job I’d done on my little hand-mace. After working on the thing near forever it was nice to see it doing its job.

  Behind Grgur Hernan was crawling down the stairs at us, all bloody like a flayed captive. So much for the instant-killing technique. It was taking this guy’s uays forever to leave. And his body was still thrashing around dangerously. I dropped back from Grgur, decided to take a chance, and gave Hernan a shot in the split-open neck with my left foot.

  Ordinarily I’d never kick in an actual weapon-based fight, it’s not worth possibly getting off-balance, but this time it seemed like the timing and everything was right and when the futbol-edge of my foot flipped his chin up he spittered up a fountain of arterial blood and crumpled.

  I noticed a sort of porcelain knife, a six-finger-width black-blade thing with a blue Chinese-water-beast-skin handle, lying on the floor next to him-I guess he’d pulled it and I hadn’t even noticed-and I grabbed it and turned back around to Grgur.

  For a beat I thought I was fucked and then I realized it wasn’t a gun in his hand, just a phone. Maybe he didn’t even have a gun with him.

  Still, he’d probably hit some alarm. Just as bad. I gave him a left haymaker to the cheekbone with the butt of the knife, being careful not to break a finger, dropped it, twisted the phone away from him with my left hand, hooked his legs out from under him, and as he slid back down against the wall I tried to size him up.

  Grgur definitely didn’t look hazardous. So just to be safe I picked the light little knife back up, scampered up the stairs again to the landing-I was feeling like a little grasshopper-dancer, an elf, sort of-and got behind Hernan, sunk the blade into his head under the ear, pulled it out, and wiped both sides on his shirt. I could smell Hernan’s shit releasing as he died. I went back down, sat behind Grgur, and started choking him with the elbow of my mace-arm.

  I sat behind him, holding his neck from behind with his fat muscular ass between my legs and I was a little embarrassed because with all the excitement and everything I had a kind of serious hard-on and it was pressing up against him. Not that I found him at all attractive, it was just that sort of blood-rush adrenaline thing.

  Kind of sluggishly Grgur got his arms up and started going for my head so I poked the knife into his elbows, one after the other, trying to pinpoint the nerves that drove his lower arms.

  I had to try a couple times on the first one, but finally, from the way his hands reacted, I figured I’d gotten it right. His squeals didn’t come out like much. Hernan’s urine was running down the stairs from above, along with blood and other liquids.

  I dug into Grgur’s lapel pockets with my good hand and found his wallet and Marena’s Sylphide lighter, which I guess he’d found on me and was going to give back to her. There were two different key cards with Florida Hospital on them. One said S-WING RESTRICTED USE A. Fabulous.

  I felt a disturbance in the air, wind coming up from the bottom of the stairwell eight floors below, probably people answering Grgur’s alarm, and Grgur probably felt it too.

  I held the cards against the handle of the knife and jammed it into the cast on my right hand. It went into my flesh a little bit but I could hardly feel it. The blade was facing his neck, and I pulled my arm back as far as it would go without cutting him.

  “Let’s try to stand up together,” I said. If I fell over, or if he tried to break away, he’d be caught in the crook of the cast and the knife. Or at least that was the idea.

  We stood up. His mangled leg nearly slid away from him and then he got it back under control. I was practically riding on his back. His arms dangled.

  “So, look, why don’t we go back up to our floor, and we’ll be really, really mellow, and check out the pharmacy?” I asked.

  Even though he was gasping, I could see him thinking. I hoped what he was thinking was that if he was too recalcitrant I’d probably just kill him and run, but if he came along, the others would probably find us and pick me off pretty fast while he broke away.

  “Grgur? Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  (106)

  His card relaxed the jaws of the door. Maybe it opens everything, I thought. A little demon in the wall switched on the caged lightning.

  The tiny Pharmakopia room was all eye-dazzling shelves of many-hued translucent jars, some with seals in colors I’d never seen before. Magic Elixir City. Excellent.

  I squeezed my cast elbow tighter around his neck and when I could feel his legs about to give out I pulled out the knife, sliced off his live badge with my left hand, and held it up to his left eye.

  “So listen,” I said, “what other tracking equipment do I have on?”

  He tried to shake his head. “Nothing,” he mouthed. I heard the door shut itself behind us.

  “What else do you have on?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Did you get that alarm sent?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re lying,” I said, “I’m going to gouge your eye out on the count of one.” I held the black blade up to his eye. “Zero.”

  “There’s nothing else.”

  “Dogshit. Show me the other trackers. One.”

  “Go ahead,” he whispered.

  “Never mind, I believe you,” I said. I squoze off his air for another thirty beats, to the point where he was just beginning to pass out, and
let him sprawl on the floor.

  I found some surgical tape and wove his fingers together around the bolted-down leg of a metal shelving unit.

  I sat down and started sawing the tracking box off my ankle with the white-bladed knife while I watched him. It took thirty-nine beats. By the fortieth beat Grgur’d stopped coughing and was getting it back together.

  “So how do I get in to see Lindsay?” I asked. Jed would probably have asked whether Grgur was working primarily for Lindsay or for Marena, and whether Marena had given the order on No Way, and a whole bunch of other trivia, but I really didn’t care.

  “That’s. Difficult,” Grgur choked out.

  “Well, so then what are you good for?”

  “I can try him.”

  “How?”

  “On the phone.”

  “Where is Lindsay right now?”

  “He went to assens today.”

  “Assassins?” I asked. I got the ankle box off and sliced off my ID bracelet just in case. I was pretty sure there wasn’t anything else on me. Had they implanted a surgical tracker? That would be a little much even for this group.

  “No, Athens, Greece,” Grgur said.

  “What’s the best way to reach him?”

  “Text him.”

  “I mean in person,” I said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Hang on,” I said. I stuffed some cotton pads into his mouth and surgi-taped over it, leaving enough of a gap so that even if his nose stopped up he wouldn’t die. Next I cut some airholes in a big plastic trash bag, poured in three economy family-sized boxes of cotton pads, foomped it down over his head, twisted it, and taped it around his neck. He looked like-who?

  Jack Pumpkinhead, Jed thought.

  Right, I thought back. Next. Badges. Steenking batches. Think.

  “Back in a third,” I said.

  I opened the door and walked out, ready to cast-slash anyone in sight, but there was nobody. I wiped some blood spots off the floor in front of the door with the toe of my goddamn cloth slipper and I walked through the blazing flat light to the little waiting area. The couches were this acid orange that kind of upset me, and I tried not to look at them. I climbed up on one and looked out the window. It looked out on a closed courtyard, and there was a fire escape. And it was dark down there. After some fumbling I got the leaf, I mean, the key card I’d taken, to slide into a three-finger-wide crack, threw the glove with the trackers out into the warm dark, and closed the window again. There were footsteps coming up the hallway. I walked back to the pharmacy, closed the door with good delicacy, got behind Grgur, pulled the bag down a bit, weighted his arms and legs as much as I could, and choked him some more to make sure he’d be absolutely silent. If the cops or whoever came through the door I’d throw him at them and then go out the back and see if I could still get away. Although that didn’t sound good.