Josh Bazell - Beat the Reaper - A Novel

The restaurant we stopped at I don’t remember much about. I’m sure it was orange and brown, like all highway restaurants. We ate in the car. Then Magdalena fell asleep in the hatchback with the seats folded down, and I snuck out and called Sam Freed, and told him we were ready to come in.

“This may take a little while,” he said. “I don’t know who I can trust with this.” He thought for a few moments. “I don’t want to call anybody I don’t have to, but we may not have a choice. I’ll get a few people and fly out there myself. It shouldn’t take more than six hours.”

I woke up in the back of the Subaru, with Magdalena curled away from me.

It was still night, but the shadow of someone’s head had jumped onto the fogged-over back window, because whoever it was was backlit by the streetlight behind the restaurant parking lot.

The head was not wearing a police hat. I heard no radios, and saw no flashlight. The owner of the head was doing his best to move as quietly as possible as he worked his way around the car. When the shadow was outside the right rear door, I kicked the door open and into the guy’s stomach, then launched myself out after him.

The guy stayed on his feet for about five sideways steps, then went down, and I was on him. His nylon coat hissed on the asphalt as I dragged him behind the dumpster, out of the light.

I didn’t recognize him. He was early twenties. Thin, glasses, white guy. I slammed him face-first into the side of the dumpster.

“You with the Feds?” I said. He was too nerdy to be a hitman.

“No, man! I thought that was my car!”

“Bullshit.” I slammed him again.

He started crying. “I just thought you guys were effing,” he says.

“What?”

“I wanted to watch!”

He was sobbing. I searched his pockets, but there was nothing there but a velcro wallet. His driver’s license was from Indiana.

And his fly was open.

“Jesus,” I said.

I leaned out to tell Magdalena it was all right. She was sitting up in the back of the Subaru.

Then, suddenly, she was lit up by headlights, and I heard the squealing of tires.

The SUV’s windows must have already been down. The broadside of submachinegun and shotgun fire they vomited out, lighting up the Subaru all over again, came too quickly for them not to have been.

Then the SUV leaped forward and out of my way, as if I had brushed it aside with my hands. I heard it sideswiping cars behind me as it rocketed from the lot.

I reached the Subaru. It looked stepped on, the whole side of it crushed in by gunfire. The air was filled with glass dust and the smells of cordite and blood.

The door came off in my hands. Magdalena’s head lolled as I pulled her out and spun with her to the ground.

Her right cheekbone was caved in, smashed like the side of the car and filled with blood. Both eyes were completely red, the left one with a seam across it that oozed perfectly clear jelly all the way down the side of her head.

When I grabbed her face up to mine, I felt bones I couldn’t see shift beneath her skin.

When God is truly angry, He will not send vengeful angels.

He will send Magdalena.

Then take her away.

I wake up. It’s difficult. It takes a couple of tries. I’m so incredibly cold that staying asleep seems preferable to finding out why.

Eventually, though, I try to turn over, and the fact that my dick is stuck to the floor wakes me all the way up immediately. At first I think my dick has been nailed there, since it’s so numb it feels like a piece of leather that’s tethering me in place. Then I touch it and decide it’s been glued there. Then I realize it’s frozen to the steel floor.

I spit into my left hand—I’m rolled over on my right arm, and I don’t want to lie on my stomach again, even for a moment, to free it—and use the spit to de-ice my dick. It takes a couple of applications. It’s kind of like whacking off.

As I’m doing it, though, the blindness-panic sets in. Because I cannot see anything . Between spit applications I grind the knuckles of my free hand into my eyes. Those weird pixilated multicolored blossoms appear, which I decide means that my retinal nerves are still functioning. Also that, since my eyes themselves feel fine to the touch, it’s just completely dark in here.

Which is where, exactly? The moment my dick is loose I jump to my feet. My hospital gown, which has been bunched up around my chest, falls back down to cover the quarter of my body it’s supposed to. The bandages from my hand and neck, though, are gone.

I reach forward. Touch a steel wall a couple of feet in front of me. Step toward it and bash my front teeth on something hard and metal. The pain and surprise make me jump back, and I hit another bunch of metal things. Shelves. I move my hands over them like they’re a large-print version of Braille. Find dozens of bags of ice in the shape of blood units for transfusion.

I try the other side, then the back. Same thing. The front is a metal door, the handle of which doesn’t move at all.

I’m in a walk-in freezer about the size of a jail cell. A blood freezer.

Why?

Obviously I could die in here. I could also get brain damaged, like a sous-chef I once treated who had spent a full night locked in the deep-freeze of the restaurant he worked at. But for someone to use a deep-freeze to try to do either of those things intentionally seems absurd. It’s like the Joker leaving Batman in a sno-cone machine, then not sticking around to watch.

Though injecting feces into someone’s butt cheek seems a little odd too, when you think about it.

I do think about it for a moment, because it’s so disgusting. Then I move on. If I was going to die from toxic shock I already would have. [59] Toxic shock is an immune response set off by contaminants in your blood such as bacteria—which make up 20 percent by weight of human feces, all grown within your intestines. (Cows can survive on this bacteria, “eating” grass just so the bacteria, their real food, will grow on it.) During shock your veins open up to let white blood cells into your tissues to fight the infection, and the fluid that leaks out with them causes your blood pressure to crash. And in terms of long-term consequences, should I live to find them out, I’m already on every kind of antibiotic there is. Thank you, Assman: I have no idea what’s wrong with you, but I do stand by your treatment protocol.

Then I realize why I’m here.

They’re not trying to kill me. They’re trying to weaken me, like the six different kinds of assholes in Ferdinand who stab the bull half to death before the matador even enters the arena.

So that Skinflick can come in and kill me himself.

With his knife fighting, presumably. Where was it Squillante said Skinflick had been training? Brazil? Argentina? I try to remember if I’ve heard anything about the styles of knife fighting in either of those places. I can’t.

I do know that there are really just two underlying philosophies of knife fighting: the Realist School, which holds that any time you fight someone who knows what he’s doing you are going to be cut, so you should prepare for it (these are the guys you see wrapping their leather jackets around their left forearms before a fight), and the Idealist School, which believes you should devote as much energy as it takes to keeping yourself from being cut at all. By never, for example, having a nonstriking part of your body be forward of your blade.

Both schools follow a couple of basic rules. You have to remember to kick and punch if you get the opportunity, because knives are so scary people forget about the rest of you. And as long as you have a knife with an edge on it, you should never try to stab someone. Stabbing is a sucker move. It exposes too much of your body for too little possibility of damage. Slashing, meanwhile, should be done to any target that presents itself (such as the knuckles of your opponent’s knife hand), but ideally to the insides of his arms or thighs, where the larger blood vessels run. So your opponent bleeds to death, like animals attacked by sharks in the wild.