The Sacrifice Game jd-2

by Brian D'Amato

  “So it won’t hurt,” he said.

  “Not only will it not hurt, but you won’t even notice it.”

  “This is malarky.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Well, just to see what we can do… look, the fact is, we’re going to have to torture you.”

  “Go ahead. The White God is going to get me through this one just like He’s done every time.”

  “Look, Lindsay,” she said. “Boss. Why is it so important to you to run this test right this moment?”

  “It’s not a test,” Lindsay said. “It’s air support.”

  “For what? For an invasion of Pakistan?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “They’re invading right now?”

  “Correct, Indian troops started crossing in from Srinagar as of-as of about eight minutes ago.”

  “So I bet this is going to destroy Islamabad. That’s like two million people. If it weren’t going to destroy everything, I mean.”

  “Miss Park, if we do not provide our allies this support, it’s not just going to be the end of the trail for the Warren Family. It’ll be the end of the United States of America.”

  “Enough,” I said. “Get ready.” I took out my bone-scraper needle-it was really just an old woman’s hairpin-and an antiseptic towelette, sterilized it and Lindsay’s left elbow, and slid the pin into his ulnar nerve. There was a grunt deep inside him, and a half a flinch, but nothing else. He was tough.

  I looked into his eyes. They looked back like two freshly drilled blue holes in the face of the Serpentine Glacier. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought it was possible-maybe even likely-that Lindsay was one of those few people who have no fear whatsoever. Of course, even they respond to torture eventually. Like I say, no matter what you’ve heard, torture works. But it could take time. And there was no time. In fact, soon there’d be no time at all, anywhere. Two beads of sweat slid from his forehead into the hollow of his right cheek.

  “We were afraid you were going to be difficult,” I said.

  He didn’t answer. The ice holes looked back.

  “So,” I said, “have you ever heard of Sampson Avard?”

  “No.” He was lying. He was smooth, but there’d been a quarter-beat too much hesitation.

  “I’ve got some letters from him that I put up for posting,” I said. I typed eighty-one characters into a Firefox window on the desktop, downloaded a PDF file from a very-far-offshore server, and flipped the window around and slid it over to him.

  He looked at me for ten beats and then couldn’t resist looking down at the window. It was the real thing. He looked back at me.

  “Well,” I said, “to answer your unspoken question, yes, I got that off the LDS vault server,” I said. “In Salt Lake. And, yes, we also have the other two hundred and nine sensitive files from the folder.”

  “And he used the Game to do so, I’m reckoning,” Lindsay said, getting himself back together.

  I nodded. Shut up, I thought. Contrary to media portrayals, a supervillain, or superhero or superantihero, should not explain to the other side what he’s about to do.

  “And he gave the folder to your friend Quinones and Quinones gave it to you.”

  I nodded.

  “So, what’s it got to do with me?” he asked.

  “You really don’t want this going out, do you?”

  “I don’t care,” he said.

  I pulled the window back, flipped it around again, and hit POST.

  “Okay, it’s up,” I said. “Google it.”

  He glared. At first I thought it was my imagination, but then I saw that it was happening: His ears were glowing pink.

  “I only put up the first letter,” I said. “And, you know, it’s not, it’s not the worst one. My favorite’s the Joseph Smith eight-year-old girl rape stuff. Although the Elamites on Mars business is also pretty great. Right?”

  His ears had become a true, deep red. That’s the trouble with being a WASP, I thought. Your eyes might be opaque, but your skin’s an open window.

  “Fine,” he said. “The first password is RALSTON. All caps.”

  I started typing.

  (114)

  We all watched the clock. 11:59:8, 11:59:9, Noon. All in. Les jeux sont faits, motherfuckers. It was the cosmic sell-by date:

  I looked back at the RASP coordinates. Well, there they are, right next door. Might as well just relax. We’d experience another three point one minutes of what we like to call living, and then we’d feel a short sharp shock and maybe even a flash of heat, and then, well before we felt any pain, we wouldn’t exist anymore.

  “Too bad we couldn’t just stop the test, huh?” Marena asked.

  “Lindsay?” I asked. “Any ideas?”

  “For that we’d have to call a meeting,” he said. “If we want to bring a few of the directors in here for-”

  “Forget it,” I said. “Rerouting is the way we’re going to go. Sorry about the nonexistence thing.”

  “Well, let’s try this anyway,” Marena said. She was looking at something called ELEVATOR FUNCTION and then RAIL LEVEL.

  At first I thought the room was falling down into the cleft canyon of the underwaterworld, and I saw the numbered floors rising past us and saw they were real, or rather real images, and realized what Marena must have noticed already but hadn’t bothered to tell me, that we were actually, physically sinking, that the reason the place could be on the thirteenth floor and still be called a Safe Room was because the whole room was really an extra-large elevator. Weirdly, most of the cameras were still functioning, and the transparency macro was chugging along, so it was as though we were sinking through the transparent building into a transparent earth, with explosions flashing around and over us. On the ceiling, translucent wipes with those green wire-frame edges represented the horizontal doors sliding shut over us. We passed a few brightly lit subbasement floors and decelerated.

  “Damn,” Marena said. “Maybe we’ll make it after all.” She sounded eager, but also like she didn’t want to get her hopes up.

  “That’s great,” I mumbled. I must have sounded vague. Really, I wasn’t good for anything anymore. It was all I could do to keep straight what was realish and what was waking-dreamish.

  “Check this out,” Marena’s voice went somewhere. “‘When at its lowest level, this facility was designed to withstand a force of twenty kilotons and slash or two thousand degrees Celsius for over twelve hours. This is roughly equivalent to detonation on the scale of the Nagasaki blast only six hundred yards away.’ Isn’t that great?”

  “Is that the operating manual?” I asked.

  “Yeah. ‘Cooling is achieved by the use of onboard vacuum sealers and conventional freon refrigeration. Nitrox is supplied from six units in the live floor, each with a capacity of, blah blah blah, ventilation is redundant with, blah, blah…’ Damn.”

  This can’t be happening, I thought. Although, on the other hand, I guess if anybody would have something like this, it would be Lindsay. Paranoia was one of his most characterizing and endearing traits. There was stuff like this in Jed’s memories, things he’d heard about on good authority years ago, in Utah, like supposedly there’s a vault under the Church Office Building, the LDS headquarters on North Temple, that you could dip in the sun for twenty-score beats and pull it out and it would still be seventy-two degrees inside. I suppose at the time, Jed had thought it was just a suburban legend. Well, for once somebody wasn’t just paranoid, but was paranoid enough.

  I blinked around. Everything was still sideways. All over the room’s six sides the last surveillance systems were going dead. Window after window closed down, but instead of just going to blue the confused system replaced them with video mirrors. We saw ourselves re-reflecting our reflections into serried ranks of identical Chacal-in-Jed 3 — in-Tony-Sic and Lindsay Warren and Marena Park toy figurines, with the table and chairs replicated in infinite rows curving away toward hidden vanishing points, like long freight trains disappearing over the curvatur
e of the earth. Somewhere among the receding clone armies I thought I saw Maximon, wearing his old manto and and sombrero and smoking and smirking like I Told You So, but it was probably just me. I saw what Lindsay had meant about the Sealing Room. The room was a high-tech version of the marriage chapel they have in Mormon temples, which have huge enfiladed mirrors on all four walls, “set,” as they like to say, “to catch eternity.” Evidently the designers hadn’t thought that was cool enough for the New Age Moron weddings Lindsay and his pals planned to have here, though, because now the display programs were going into some preset routine where they pulled images from the ongoing recording stock and replayed them in palimpsests over the current “reflections,” so we could see ourselves enlarged, shrunk, from above, from the other side of the room, unreversed, in slow motion, in ultrafast motion, four-hundred-score beats before, one beat before, everything except a beat from now. I saw us walk in again, and I saw Marena run the video where she called Lindsay to resign from the Warren Group, right after the Chrononaut trailer preview. It was like being in the head of some obsessive-compulsive person who could think only about the three of us, stuck in our little lifeboat from here to eternity The room rattled like a little box in a big box and then seemed to settle. The screens flickered and went to blue, and it was like we were in a glass bathyscaphe deep in the ocean. Big red letters scrolled across the walls: EXIT AIRLOCKS ALIGNED. There was a click and a loud hiss. The air pressure changed and cool, oxygen-rich air welled up out of the floor, noisily. Excellent, I thought. Not with a wimp, but with a banger.

  “-00:00:13:00,” the readout said. “-00:00:13.5”…

  We sat, and looked around us, watching the fifty-two windows, the in-house and public news feeds on the south wall, the stars wheeling on the ceiling, the maps on the north wall, and the news videos and charts and graphs and flickering equations and scrolling code and a thousand other varieties of data. I figured that to an outside observer-God, if only there were ever an outside observer-we looked pretty much like three random blobs of videonarcotized trailer trash anywhere in the random world. Marena touched my wrist, like, Thanks for saving Max, or trying to.

  We waited.

  “-00:00:09.50,” it said,

  “-00:00:09.00,

  “-00:00:08.50…”

  FIVE

  To the Jaguars of Ix

  (115)

  Most of the drone cameras got knocked out by the first shock wave, but there were a few dozen that had stationed themselves at a five-score-rope-length circumference, and the screens in the Safe Room automatically switched to them, and then when those got knocked out they switched to an octet of drones at the quarter-jornada mark, and so on, so we got a gods’-eyes view of the blast.

  I’d never seen an explosion before. That is, as Chacal I hadn’t, even though there are sometimes all-natural ones, dust explosions in caves and volcanic incursions into oil pockets and so on. So to me it was new. Somewhere what was left of Jed-in-Me compared it to the many explosions he’d seen, many on video and a couple in his real life, and now I could hear him again, for the first time in a long time, thinking that it seemed bizarrely slow, that explosions in films are always shot in high-speed and then slowed down, but that this one, maybe because of the size or the convection or air pressure or whatever, would actually have to be sped up to look convincing. And I heard, or felt, echoes of the many metaphors they use in English to describe explosions, words like flower and mushroom. But to me it seemed to be taking place very fast-I wasn’t used to the speed of this world in general-and more than a flower or mushroom it seemed to me to be a tree, the Tree of Four Hundred Times Four Hundred Branches, the Tree with the Mirror Leaves. The canopy of dirt and carbonized flesh and smoke and sand and steam and barium isotopes and four hundred times four hundred other materials branched out two-score rope-lengths over us-and we could still see it from underneath on some of the drone cameras, as well as from the side and even from a seventy-degree angle over it-in such a wide, embracing curve that I couldn’t help feeling it was welcoming and motherly, like the Tree, and we felt its voice, a long growl through the millions of cubic rope-lengths of packed earth around us.

  I felt burning in those head-caves where tears would be made if I were the sort of person who would make them, and then the groan faded, and it seemed the three of us were still alive. The collider had been cut in half by a premature release of millions of BTUs of spontaneously generated heat, and despite the loss of life upstairs, the outcome had been, by his lights, a huge relief, and maybe everything would be okay, so to speak… and then, although Jed-in-Me was stronger than he’d been in a long time, he seemed to wilt and go silent, as though his consciousness had fainted from the excitement.

  When my attention slid back to them, Marena and Lindsay were, oddly, having something like a civil conversation. Lindsay said the air supply was fine-“for three little breathers, adequate for over a month,” was how he put it-and that it would be better to hold off for two days on using the tram system because the air over the terminus, a jornada away at a facility on the highway to Belize City, might still be toxic. Marena-who I thought might almost want to thank me, at some point, for saving Max, despite everything else, but who seemed unsure, to say the least, of how to behave with me-said, “We can’t be sure about the O 2.”

  “What?” I asked. I started untaping her.

  “We got, our seal got breached. I can smell it.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  Even down here we were getting a whiff of oxidized polymers and carbonized flesh. And we’d have to worry about earth gases getting in. They aren’t good for you. Anyway, our own air would leak out pretty fast. We couldn’t stay.

  “I can’t find the hole,” Marena said. She’d gotten herself the rest of the way loose and was feeling around the west door. “I think it’s on the other side of the, the inner door vaulty thingie.”

  “I wouldn’t open it right now,” I said.

  “I’m not.” She untaped Lindsay and as he massaged his ankles she went back to typing.

  I rolled over. There were three red dots on the blue Zeonex floor, and as they came into focus I saw they were beads from Marena’s necklace, which must have broken during the unpleasantness. I laid my head down. Beds and whatever are great, but really, I thought, there’s nothing so comfortable as a nice flat floor. The blue screens shut down, meaning the system wasn’t finding any outside electricity and wanted to be thrifty. Emergency lights came on, just a few red and white LEDs in the floor and ceiling. It was quiet. Like all military elevator shafts, the one above us had a set of baffles that slid over us as we went down. But I could still feel an occasional explosion through the thousands of tons of clay, as soft as that earthquake in Oaxaca that rocked me to sleep “We have to cruise,” Marena said.

  “How much air do we have?” I asked. “It should be, uh, keeping track of that-”

  “I’m going to open the other door. I mean, the main door. Hang on.”

  “Let’s wait.”

  “If there’s a problem with the tunnels, nobody’s going to bother to dig us out.”

  “I just need a little nap,” I said, although I knew she was right. “Forty score-uh, ten minutes.”

  There was a click and whir from the main door. Maybe I dozed off. At any rate, I saw something, like a snake farm, maybe “Damn it,” Marena said. “I can’t get the thing open.” Lindsay was working on it with a penknife.

  Great, I thought. We’re going to get through all this and then get stuck in here. Asphyxiate.

  “Come on,” Lindsay said, “help us with this.”

  “Five minutes and I’ll be good to go.”

  “Hang on.” Maybe there was a pause. At some point I heard something loud, and only a few beats later I smelled cordite.

  “Come on, we’re cruising,” she said.

  I made a last effort, stood up, and slid back down. I started to try again, and then realized I really, really couldn’t stand up, and it wasn’t just lazi
ness. I could have stood up on the wall, like the way I used to run up the angled sides of hipball courts, but not on the floor. The reason I’d slid off the table wasn’t just because I was tired, but because pressure from that nearby explosion had blown through my semicircular canals and harshed my equilibrium. And if you’ve ever had that happen, you know that when it’s gone, even though you know that the ground is still the ground, you believe, in your heart of hearts, that you know better, that the sky, or the wall or whatever, is where the gravity is. For some reason Marena didn’t have that problem. Maybe she’d been chewing gum or something.

  I gave up the standing idea and either crawled or got dragged over an irregular threshold, into a red-lit tunnel with the smells of stone mold, fresh concrete, and Janitor In A Drum. There was a backlit map on the wall showing the network of tunnels, glowing in Ocelot emerald. YOU ARE HERE , it said. As always, I thought.

  “Sit in this,” Marena said. She kind of molded me into one of the Aeron chairs and rolled me past some pieces of door. I guessed the bang I’d heard had been exploding bolts blowing the door outward into the tunnel. Thoughtfully designed for just such an emergency. I’d expected to run into a crowd of refugees in the tunnel, but there was nobody. Evidently this one was for VVIPs only, and we were the only ones left.

  She started pushing me along like I was in a wheelchair. “Stop leaning over,” she said.

  “I’m not.”

  “Lean in the other direction.”

  “Why don’t you go ahead and come back and get me after you get settled?”

  “You know,” she said, “I’ve just about had it with your martyr syndrome.”

  “Sorry.”

  Bathetically, there was still that Dvorakmusak on somewhere and it echoed behind us, woodwinds wailing. We went a long way. Lindsay fell down a few times-despite everything, he really was an old guy, I thought-and I had to hold his arm most of the way. I knew that later all I’d be able to remember would be long, long, long passages, dreary pipes and concrete, and a sense that we’d walked for at least two-score rope-lengths. At some point Marena was banging on a door above us, and then she was strongly encouraging us to climb up some stairs, and eventually, on all fours, I did. She steered me through a door and up more stairs and it took me more than a minute to realize we were outside because the fresh air wasn’t fresh, it was full of gasoline smoke, although there were a few nicer smells in it, wood and green-leaf smoke that made me think it was the burning season, and it was hot, and it was night already. No twilight. Except it wasn’t dark. The sky was charred tangerine. I listened for explosions or artillery but didn’t hear anything, just distant sirens and that sort of over-Niagara-in-a-barrel sound of the wind of glass rushing past us on its way to the giant updrafts, columns of a million different carbon compounds rolling up into the stratosphere, and then I thought I heard lightning but I think it was actually malfunctioning defense lasers firing blind. They make a sort of crackle as the air boils away in the beam, and then a miniature thunderclap as the surrounding atmosphere closes in around the vacuum.