Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

“Fuck you, I’m in great shape,” I almost said. Resist that impulse, I thought. If, I mean when, you get away, it’s better if they think you’re still dead in the car. Except if they’d wanted to kill me they could have, right? So maybe the deal is that they’re nearby already and they wanted to mess me up enough so that I wouldn’t be able to get away. So they crashed the thing delicately enough not to kill me but to keep me here. Well, if that was true they’d grab me pretty soon and I wouldn’t be able to do much about it. And if the Executive Solutions goons got hold of me-hell. Even if I, say, killed a few people right now to get the cops to put me in the state prison, Boyle-I mean, Laurence Boyle, whom among ourselves we called Lance Boil, and who was one of Lindsay Warren’s younger let’s-say cardinal nephews-would find a way to get people in and give me a going-over. And it wouldn’t take long. Lately there’s been a media disinformation campaign about torture, trying to convince the public that it doesn’t work and how you’re liable to get false information, but the fact is that torture works just fine. Even if you’ve read only one or two manuals on the subject, these days, with just a recorder, some conductant, and a modified stun gun, you can basically get anything out of anyone in a couple of hours. Although I do still have that dirt on Lindsay Warren, I thought. Or actually it wasn’t dirt on him, it was dirt that he and the other eighty Church elders had been hiding for more than a hundred and fifty years, scans of old letters by somebody named Sampson Avard, who was a founding elder of the Church of Latter-day Saints. No Way had dug it up months ago, before the downloading-I guessed from one of his antimissionary comrades in Ixcan, one of the CPR communities, which by the way is not the same place as the ruins of Ix-but he’d sent it to me on paper, to a FedEx store in Tampa that I used once in a purple moon, so I’d only just gotten and scanned in the folder a week ago. Just offhand it looked like dynamite stuff, really incriminating revelations, but it might take a while to use that sort of thing to threaten him. And I hadn’t set up an automatic post. So it wasn’t something I could do while I was being interrogated. If anything, they’d just get me to give it up. Hell, hell.

Hell.

So-well, hell. Might as well just sit back and wait. Just settle down to the big sleep. It’s nothing. I’ll get colder, I’ll get woozier, and my thoughts will drift, and then, without even a click of the tongue to mark the spot, I’ll lose my train of thought and I won’t get it back, and that’ll have been the end of everything of me, oh, God, the end, the end No, my other side said. No, no, no. Focus. “Open the doors,” I said, slowly and clearly, but either the car didn’t have good voice recognition or this was all starting to form a bit of a pattern. That’s what happens when you let your gadgets get too smart. Other people can tell your stuff to do stuff. I pulled at the door handle but it was holding itself shut and the little peg just wouldn’t go up. My face was hot. I pushed all the window-down thingies but of course those didn’t work, and then finally I found the moon-roof button but that didn’t work, either, even though everything else in the car was still merrily running along. I brushed a hair out of my face and felt a tiny, discreet spurt above my left eye, like there was a little kid there with an old plastic squirt gun filled with hot water. I looked at my hand. Blood. I felt a brush of THE FEAR, a stroke out of the reservoir of terror that all hemophiliacs carry with them always, which wasn’t rational since I was doing away with myself and everything else anyway in fifty-two days, but of course rationality has nothing to do with it, or with a lot of things. I put my hand up again. The kid squirted me again. Another squirt. One of the supraorbital arteries. Oh, hell. Slip the juice to me, Bruce. Still, I’m factor IX’d up. In fact my clotting was at two and a half last time. Right? So it’s not life-threatening. I found the overhead light and hit it and that at least turned on. The dashboard and the seats and door upholstery-which were all new tan real top-grain natural Napa buckskin and ungodly-ly expensive-were blotched and streaked and spattered with red that looked as shiny and opaque as enamel. I felt down my face and blood was running out of my nose in streams like wet snot. I rubbed some of the blood between my fingers. It’s hard to tell, but it didn’t feel sticky enough. Maybe the last batch of factor-IX I’d gotten was defective. Except that never happens these days. Does it? There was a larger, wetter stroke of THE FEAR. Head wounds are a big problem. There’s never been much you can do about them, especially if they’re internal, like in the nose. You can’t tie a tourniquet around your neck.

Wound kit, I thought. In the, the thingie, the thingie between the seats.

Oof. Nnnnk. Ah. Got the thingie’s padded lid open. PREEEP, PREEEP, PREEEP…

Hell. Junk in here. Too much crap. I scooped out handfuls of crumpled Post-its, low-denomination bills, used and fresh Purell wipes, coins, used and fresh Kleenex, pens, pen caps, rubber bands, wadded up fast-food receipts. Out, out, out.

No wound kit. No loose pads either. At least there was the Thrombostat spray and Surgicel pads in my jacket. Left inner utility pocket. Right. Hah. I got my hand on the little plastic spray bottle. I got it out. Medique Brand Blood Clotter, it said.. 2 % Benzethonium Chloride. Okay. Pads. They were the new kind, made out of shrimp cartilage, and they could pretty much patch you up by themselves, even if you were nonclotting. Gotta be in here.

Left patch pocket. No, not there. Right. No. Okay, wait.

Be systematic. Left lapel pocket. No.

Right lapel pocket. No.

Specially ordered inner utility pocket. No.

Other specially ordered inner utility pocket. No.

Key pocket. No.

Handkerchief pocket. No.

Left patch pocket. No.

Right patch pocket. No.

Silk-pocket-thingie-inside-right-patch-pocket.

No.

PREEEP, PREEEP, PREEEP, PREEEP.

Hell.

On the seat. No. In the crack of the seat. No.

Under the seat. I found my little flashlight and bent double and rooted around. It was all just sandy carpet and rubber mats and wadded Kleenex and metal seat thingies like cave formations in the red light. No. Not there. They took them. Not there. They really want to kill me. The Warren people really want to kill me. I was the Man Who Didn’t Know Too Much, But Could Certainly Find Out Too Much, and they-except, then, why, if they went through the jacket while my car was sitting in Marena’s driveway, why would they take out the pads and leave the spray? Or else-well, patch up first. Then worry.

I gathered some clean Kleenex, sprayed Medique onto two sheets, and packed one into each nostril. Woooffffff. This’d better clot. If you don’t clot, packing doesn’t do enough, the paper’ll just keep capillarying up with your unviscous blood until you’re the Scarlet Mummy. Okay. I wiped my forehead, sprayed up another Kleenex, and pushed it into the wound in my forehead with the heel of my hand. Yeoww. Huge juicy bruise there too. Okay. Hold on. Hold on. This isn’t right.

Okay. Grgur’ll be here any second. Got to get out of here. Take stock. Any other lacerations, contusions, or third-degree bruising? I wriggled and flexed and patted myself down with my right hand. Nothing apparent. Headlamp light slid upstream through the interior, and its source car zoomed past, and then another. Not stopping to help. Although of course they weren’t supposed to anymore because of all the carjack kidnappings they did that way, in fact there’d been a whole campaign in Florida to get people to just call it in and if possible not even slow down, but of course now with police and fire stretched beyond the limit, calling did nothing. In the Loose Union of Socialist Banana Republics of America, one was basically on one’s own. Cars passed. No cops. No good Samaritans. No ES goons. No Grgur. Keep up the pressure. I still had the bottle with my free hand and sprayed a little backward into my palm. I rubbed it between my fingers. Medique has a specific calone-ish smell to it. Hmm. I sniffed again. There was some of that smell there, but was there much of it? And there was alcohol in there, I could tell from the temperature, but wasn’t there usually more? And as that evaporated the real thing had a milky texture and this maybe, well, I guess it did, or maybe it didn’t… I mean, I’d been relying on the stuff for years…