Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

“Don’t do anything or I’ll kill you,” I said in Spanish. “Drive around that taxi.” The kid started to grab for something between his legs, so I killed him, swishing my cast-mace between his eyes, through the bridge of his nose, and then back through his Adam’s apple. Instead of pushing him out I just shifted into drive, crouched down, pressed his foot down on the pedal, and steered us around the taxi judging by the lights overhead and then around a couple of minivans, sensed their bumpers with the low-rider’s little catfish-barbels, and got us out into the far left lane and accelerated. We got out from under the overhang. Out of range, I thought. I stuck my head up and started really driving. I floored the thing around the sort of rotary and got to the ramp leading to the highway, scraping the ground. Low-riders are great, they really do corner. No flip, no slip. There were cop cars with sirens pulling into the overhang from the other side, way too late as usual. I buzzed over the road’s molars- rumble strips, Jed’s mind said, automatically but a little late-out of the hospital complex and up a curved slope and onto a frictionless gray sacbe, sliding between crystals of topaz, all identical and as big as a fist, set into the surface. Even with the sled’s masks down- windows open — I was starting to smell the dead pre-blood’s feces and urine, so I steadied the car for a few beats in the left lane, managed to get his jacket off him, and when I got up to about fifty I just opened the driver’s-side door and body-nudged him out. I felt him bounce and the car started jerking all over. His leg was still partly caught in the shoulder harness and he was scraping along the asphalt, and from the way he twitched he was still partly alive. There was a little auto-rush of revulsion from the Jed side of my head, sort of fear and loathing combined, but I slashed through the strap with my cast-mace and finally he rolled away from the sled like a used-up captive into a mass grave. As the back roller bumped over him the car nearly skudged into the median strip, but I wrenched it inexpertly around, got back on course, and closed the door.

I knew to let Jed’s motor memories take over. Despite my shameful fear of the giant sled he got the car onto the Great Sacbe. The wind felt great through my bandages. I’m just getting started, I thought. No stink of them here. SOUTH, I read off a green sign. Wrong color for South, I thought. I was going too fast to look around but I moved the rearview mirror from side to side. No cars coming up behind me, at least not fast. I looked at the gas. Enough, I somewhere knew the needle pointed to. Jed’s mind seemed to think that the night watcher bloods, I mean, the police, might be relatively easy to shake because no matter what bonuses they were getting they’d still only assign a couple of people to the case. But I also had a large, well-funded private organization after me, which is a lot more serious. I figured I’d cruise as far as possible for about four-hundred-score beats and then change cars. No sweat, as they say these days. I started pulling at the last layer of magically clear cloth that was still stuck to my right hand. I watched the yellow speed indicator clicking up through these people’s gangly base-ten numerals, up through a sort of sky or ceiling that Jed’s mind called the Invisible Gardol Shield, 67, 71, 79, 83, 97. I touched the CRUISE glyph at 94 and held on to the steering plate like a child on its mother’s back, feeling the speed of twenty Mixtec runners.

Score, I said to myself. Goal.

Game.

I left the U.S. heading backward on the so-called “Maya Diaspora” illegal-immigration route that Jed had once sponsored, from Miami to San Antonio and then male-handward along what they called the Pan-American Sacbe through the resettled Teotihuacan and finally Belize City. I was able to utilize some of the fruits of Jed’s paranoia. Before leaving Florida, I rolled someone from a pastless clan-I think they call them Homeless People here-for his revolting but correctly sized clothing, picked up a semifake passport from Jed 1 ’s anonymous safe at a storage warehouse, and even found that he had set up a Dominican Republic account under a false name that would let me withdraw cash from Western Union ATMs using a code, and not a card-and after a bit of bullying, Jed’s dying consciousness gave me the code. I kept up my pentadaily call to what Jed 1 had called his Secret Server, to keep it from spilling the beans. One of Jed 1 ’s old Zeta contacts-I gambled on his being okay because it was one of a few that he’d never mentioned or entered on any keyboard-sold me some other papers and five very small explosive devices, which we FedExed, disguised as printer cartridges, to another Zeta guy in Ladyville, Belize.

Getting from Orlando to Belmopan used up five suns. By the time I dug in there, a jornada from the Stake, I’d become familiar enough with English and Spanish to interact with the domeheads without making Jed-in-Me interpret-he’d had a big advantage over me when he was my guest, of course, because he already spoke a decayed dialect of Chorti-and I even stopped bumping into people on the sidewalk. I’d been trying to pass them on the sunward side, what they’d call the British side. But people here went around things clockwise, as they called it. And there were other things that were hard to get used to. Car fart, or exhaust as they euphemistically called it, was one thing I could never handle, even though I’d slept in killing valleys filled in a fog of burning gangrene. Exhaust was soaked into everything, in the water and in the food. On the other hand there were the splendid things. I got so amazed by the Wal-Mart in Monterrey that I wasted hours just walking around in it. First it was the amount and variety of sheer things that got me, and then it was the goods themselves, rolls of turquoise foil and mats of fur cut, I thought, from giant blue deer that lived on the verso of the world in a place Jed’s brain said was called China-and televisions and carnival glass and so on-but finally the oddest thing for me was the way the same complex object could be flawlessly repeated over and over, like it was one of those demons that used to live in the hills, who could be in different places at the same time. Metal bothered me, so I got a complete set of thirty-four Ming Tsai white ceramic knives. Then I found the upscale malls, and for a while I couldn’t keep myself from buying all sorts of red-striped clothing at Versace and Richard James, until I realized it was making me stand out too much. So I forced myself to blend in, to dress for the hunt. I got my tattoos back as compensation, so I could wear some of my old power-glyphs inside, on my skin. The tattoo artist loved some of the designs so much he wanted to keep them, but I explained they were secret and if he let them out, I’d have to come back and eat him. I got my hair extended again. My hotel room started filling up with jewelry and exotic mock-weapons and sports equipment and gadgets from Sharper Image and Lifestyle Innovations. Eventually I realized that for some reason all the stuff that I thought was the most expensive, turquoise, jade, amber, ivory, jet, pyrite-all those things-were now the cheapest substances of all thanks to the new alchemy. Color, matter, and place were all worth nothing, and that had turned the people into cowards, only half alive.

I bought a thigh-top magic book and got Jed’s fading memories working on hacking into the Warren files again, but I couldn’t manage to do much. Jed-in-Me felt almost gone. And I didn’t have any tsam lic to help me crack the passwords. Finally I gave up. That Marena’s going to have to do this stuff, I thought. Even if I have to boil her feet.