Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

“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.

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.