Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

“Forget it,” I said, “you’re right, you can’t help me.” It was probably true, this whole session was a waste of time. Anyway, they must be finding those badges by now. Better hustle.

It had made me feel a lot better, though. Not out of revenge, like I cared about No Way or anything, but just more like I was back on my sacrificer track.

“You’re going to check me out of here.”

“Whatever you say, asshole,” he whispered.

“Look, here’s the deal,” I said. “Are you listening?”

“Sorry, what?” he said. He was trying to stall me.

“I know you heard that,” I said. “Okay. You feel sort of numb and cold right now, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve given you a mix of paralytics and depressants and a few other things and it ought to kill you in less than a half hour. You got that? And it will be very… claustrophobic, it will feel like you are drowning in feathers. So, we are just going to take the other elevator down into the Emergency entrance and you’re going to tell everyone who hassles us how okay everything is. Okay? And if you, if you screw up, I just will not tell them anything, and by the time they figure out the mix of things that’s wrong with you you’ll be a big blue bulgy-eyed turd.” I held the little drug bottles up in front of his face. “But if you’re really helpful, I’ll give you the bottles when I leave and maybe they’ll figure out what ails you. You understand?”

He grunted a little.

“You got that?” I asked. “Otherwise they’ll never work it out in time.”

He made another grunt that sounded a little more affirmative. Meprobamate is a hypnotic and I hoped he was getting into a receptive state of mind. Not like it was a truth serum or anything. Nothing is.

I took the wad away. He was gasping and I was pretty sure he wasn’t faking, he had that rattling shiver specific to Pavulon. This stuff is great, I thought. Maybe Jed did have a grain or two of useful information in his head.

I looked into his eyes. He was still glaring, but his eyes were already looking a little dilated and lymphy. I got the feeling he didn’t believe I’d care enough to let him live.

“Lube, I’m serious,” I said. “You may not know me, but the one thing I wouldn’t do is renege. On the other hand, if your guys pick me up I’m not talking. You know, even if they think to ask what’s wrong with you. I mean, I’d be upset to get nailed, but letting you die would take a little of the edge off. Okay?”

He nodded a little.

“Okay, here we go,” I whispered. I stood him up. He was weebly but he could stand, so I guessed the stuff was working correctly. I realized I was still in my gown. There weren’t any doctor costumes in here. Damn. Have to remember to take Grgur’s jacket on the way out.

Okay. Anything else? No. I cleaned his face up a bit with some Sani-Wipes and squirted some Phisohex on his stringy hair and slicked it back. I tied his right wrist to mine with a surgical tube and held on to it so that at a distance it would look like we were handcuffed together. I opened the door and walked him out to the elevator. There were glass doors two rope-lengths ahead of us, and it even looked like there were car lights past them. We took four steps out of the elevator. Grgur was pretty sluggy but so far he could walk. There were some cops around, but with all the flat bright artificial colors, like everything was flat weavings, I couldn’t really pick out whether they’d noticed us. This era has so many dyes and paints and Electromats, anything can be any color. In front of the eye-dazzler stew a woman who looked kind of in charge came toward us from around a desk and I turned Grgur’s head away. I read her name tag. Teresa de la VillaReal.

“Good night, Teresa,” I said in his voice through my almost-closed lips. “So now I gotta transfer Mr. Sic to the state police. Sorry. See you later.”

“Wait, are you okay?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” I made Grgur say.

“You have to wait,” Teresa said. “The other police are here, there’s been a killing-” She was the voice I’d heard before, upstairs.

“It’s okay,” he/I said. Teresa hit some keys on a black thing in her hand and an alarm started wheeping like a hundred linked screech-owls. Some big guys in suits were pushing toward us from the other side of the lobby and there already were four cops between us and the doors. I veered us left, dragging Grgur, into an area where the crowd was thickest. There was some sort of punk gang dressed as neo-Maya bloods over there, five or six nearly naked teenagers with major tats and dyed green feathers, who I guess had been in a fight because a couple of them were bleeding into sorbents. There was a boom box with rack music blasting softly, and a couple of interns running around trying to get them all to settle down.

“Freeze, asshole,” somebody said in a studiedly authoritative voice, stepping in front of me. It was one of the cops from upstairs. He had his gun out but I pushed Grgur into him. “The prisoner has drugged me,” I shouted in Grgur’s voice. “He’s got a bomb.”

The cop hesitated for a beat. It wasn’t even that convincing, it was just weird, I guess. Then he realized what was going on but I’d already cut myself free of Grgur and I slid left into the knot of kids. Grgur kind of grabbed at the guy as he fell, and that gave me another beat. I singled out one of the healthier-looking of the punks and punched him in the face, not hard enough to really hurt him.

“You’re under arrest, scumbag!” I shouted. He recovered and he and a couple of friends came at me, grabbing my hospital gown. I shrugged out of it, letting it rip over my head, and punched my way through the gathering melee over another tier of waiting-room seats and I vaulted over it. It felt good. I tossed the tranq bottle into a big pebbly trash can. Old Gruggle’s had it, I thought. He shouldn’t have messed with Big Red in the first place. He was bug meat from Go.

“Hang on,” some major male voice said into a megaphone on the right. “ Sir! ” I just pushed toward the doors, only ten arms away. Through the fabric I spotted a couple of big guys in light suits pushing into the area along with the cops, but now there was a whole big Mexican extended kinship group coming in around us-a couple of the teenage bloods or guys or whatever they’re called were wearing Kings colors-and I sort of steered us around them and got to the outer door and started to dance through it, like I was just a drugged-out party dude. Somebody grabbed my shoulder from behind and I whirled, not seeing well through the cheesecloth-covered eye-ovals in the mask, but it was just the kid I’d punched in the nose. I snapped the tip of my cast through his wrist and he dropped back, looking at it. I turned and walked at a relatively normal pace, toward the first pair of big double glass doors, and they opened around me. It seemed like being nearly naked was working in my favor, it threw people off a bit. Still, the sound coming from behind me gave me the impression that the Warren security people had almost gotten to us. The second door opened into a rush of blissfully real hot toad-breath twilight air. I didn’t look back, I just padded across the concrete, opened the shotgun door of the Mexican family’s old Dodge van, and slammed the door. There was a middle-aged woman, a maiden-aunt type, sitting at the wheel, and a couple of kids in the back. I crawled into the front seat and across her lap and looked out the open window. There was a black Maxima low-rider with a weird black-light glow coming out from under the chassis, like it was floating on a Xibalban color-cloud, and there was another fifteen-year-old pseudo-Maya wannabe at the wheel. I slid out the driver’s door of the van, opened the Maxima’s passenger door, slid in, way, and yanked the door shut behind me.