Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

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.”

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.

The footsteps went by outside. I didn’t breathe.

All right.

Pause.

For a few beats I thought about skinning him and wearing his face out, but, based on experience from doing the same thing in the old days, I figured it wouldn’t actually be so convincing. You needed trained taxidermists to work on it, and even then the effect was odd. And even assuming his head was big enough to fit over mine, there would be the bloody eye sockets and nostrils, and the whole nose issue would be a real problem, and if I couldn’t sew the lips together they’d hang open and show another pair underneath.

So even if they mistook us for him, they’d think we were so messed up they’d bring us right back to the hospital, where we don’t want to be. And skinned faces don’t really look that much like their previous owners until you preserve them correctly. Without all the muscle attachments and everything on underneath, they just look kind of droopy and abstract. Taxidermy is an art, and the human variety is the hardest.

“So, look, you’re going to transfer me out,” I said. Grgur mumbled something like “Okay.” He was still bleeding so I surgi-taped his worst wounds, just so he wouldn’t shock out on me, before I started rooting through the shelves. Hmm. Turbocurarine. Meprobamate solution. Most of the potions seemed familiar, I suppose because Jed had spent so much time in hospitals when he was little he’d memorized a volume known as the Physicians’ Desk Reference.