Blood Games (17 page)

“What if nothing happens?” the announcer mused.
Very rarely, that did happen. For whatever mysterious reason, two zombies just refused to fight each other. They weren’t related and there was no connection between them that anyone could ever discern. Zombies didn’t feel kinship or make friends. Yet now and then, there was a pair that simply wouldn’t fight, and they just stood there looking at one another until the lights went on. Then they had to be reassigned to other opponents to bring on the frenzy.

But s
omething was going to happen here. Ink could feel it building. Throwing a glance up to the clubroom, he thought he saw a vague hint of blonde.
She
was watching Ink’s zombie, and he imagined saying to her,
hello, I’m Lincoln Delwich
.

She smiled.
In his head, she smiled at him. Intimately, like all of their lives had been leading up to this moment.

“Thirty seconds and we’re still waiting,” the announcer said.

And then they moved as one, as if they had rehearsed it. Each jolted into a run at the very same moment. People cheered to see something finally happening and the music stopped playing. The zombies shot over the ring, headed directly for each other, and collided at the center. Thor was taller and weighed more, so the collision worked to his benefit. Little Dog of Tartarus bounced off him and tumbled onto his back. Picking him up by the feet, Thor began to drag him across the ring.

Shocked out of her silence, the
stadium organizer said, “What the hell is he doing?”

Dog of Tartarus struggled to free
himself as Thor pulled him implacably to the side of the ring. Turning around, he wrapped his hands around Dog of Tartarus’ ankles and jerked.

He
swung him. He was swinging that scrawny little fucker in circles! The same way a parent would play airplane with a four-year-old, except by the feet! Ink gaped as Dog of Tartarus picked up speed, helpless in the revolutions. The announcer said, “What the . . .” Everyone pointed and laughed, and a chant picked up of Thor’s name. After trailing off into momentary speechlessness, the announcer asked if any points were given for creativity, because Thor was nothing if not creative.

He was going to try to hurl D
og of Tartarus over the wall, which went up ten feet into the air. Security was thinking the same thing, because they were spilling down steps and pushing through observers to get over to where Thor was whirling Dog of Tartarus around. Chasers charged over to that area with tranquilizer guns.

Around and around and around . . . Ink was getting dizzy from watching the zombies spin.
Thor was using good form against the diminutive weight of dope-less, tiny Dog of Tartarus. Now
this
was going to go viral. In all of his years, Ink had never seen such a weird thing. God, he loved zombies. Just when you thought you had seen it all, they showed you something new.

“Get back!” Security was screaming at the people
in the stands over there to get out of the way in case Dog of Tartarus came flying over. But they were hanging over the bar stubbornly, barking and cheering, and most refused to relinquish their prime place to watch. Chasers forced their way through and took aim at Thor and Dog of Tartarus. Cluing in to a potential hazard either by eyes or someone telling him, the announcer asked everyone to step away from the bar.

Around and around
and around . . . and Thor let go. Dog of Tartarus didn’t soar over the wall. He was a little too heavy and Thor wasn’t doped up and the wall was too high to clear. But he soared up just high enough to strike one of the lights placed there to dazzle the zombies. It was doused for the match, but there was an explosion of sparks and smoke. Screams broke out, coming dimly over to Ink at the gate, and now the stadium organizer had her hands wrapped around the bars, too.

Dog of Tartarus fell to the ground,
twitched, and was still. The lights went on, a fresh wave of sparks bursting out of the broken one. Thor saw another light and froze to stare at it.

“What did we just
see
?” the announcer roared as the gates rolled open. “What in the world did we just see here right now? Someone find Thor’s manager and ask what kind of psychedelics he mixes into that meat mash, because this . . . this was insane! This was nuts! Bonkers! Crazy! WHAT DID WE JUST SEE?”

They had seen Lincoln Delwich’
s zombie, thank you very much, and he was going on to the brawl.

Chapter Eight: The Brawl

Scrapper had been made Prince of the Games, but Ink was the true prince. He was besieged at the stall. Managers and dealers and vendors, people with backstage passes and reporters, security guards and vets and photographers all wanted a piece of him. Items were shoved into his hands, a beer, a burrito, a pen to sign a woman’s chest, business cards, scraps of paper with nothing on them but phone numbers. Nadia glowed in the fawning crowds. Yes, Ink was her husband and Thor was
their
zombie, and they also had won Prince of the Games!

“Do you think he’ll win the brawl?” someone shouted
to Ink. “Do you think he can take Dionysus? What will Thor do to Dionysus?”

“Show him some aloha spirit,” Ink said
as a joke, and everyone laughed like it was the funniest thing ever spoken.

“Fuck Dionysus!
What is Thor going to do to Nemesis?” another man shouted.

“What’
s Nemesis going to do to Thor?”

Ink
posed beside Thor, the vet posed beside Thor, then all three of them posed and another shot was taken with Nadia, too. Cameras flashed and flashed. Matthias West pushed over and extended his hand to Ink for a shake. Both of them smiled to the cameras and when a reporter asked if Matthias was bitter about his zombie’s loss to a newbie, he answered like a man who wanted to move up in the business. “You win some and you lose some. That was an amazing fight! We’re going to see great things from Thor in the future.”

Someone suggested getting a group shot of all five managers for the
zombies qualifying for the brawl, but the woman who went for Constanzo was refused admittance to the clubroom to fetch him, a security guard posted outside turning her away since she didn’t have clearance. A man who had gone for the Greek woman came back to say she wasn’t anywhere to be found. Nor could Cauldron of Fire’s manager come for a shot; he had just withdrawn his fighter from the competition. His injuries were too great for a brawl, which might finish him off altogether. Saving his career was more important. So it would only be four competitors in the final battle. Volcanus’ manager showed up at the stall, and there wasn’t any point in a picture of just the two of them.

Who cared?
It left Ink as the sole focus of this happy madness. His stack of little gifts rose higher and higher in a corner of Thor’s stall. Wrapped chicken tacos, sodas, popcorn, a blue rosette to hang on the bars, a first aid kit, a pair of red training gloves . . . A man who peddled brushes and combs insisted on gifting a set in a glossy case to Thor. They were quality pieces, and the vendor namedropped Gorvich and Stanson as two of his regular customers. Gorvich! Stanson! Ink was proud to be in their company even for so small a matter as brushes and combs for a zombie who was shaved bald.

When people finally drifted
away, he moved all of his gifts to the locker room and made a grand meal for himself at the counter. Someone walked by the open door and said to a friend, “Nemesis is going to kick his ass!” Ink thought
nope
. Thor was going to kick that stupid prosthetic zombie’s ass and if not, Ink was still going down as the manager of the craziest zombie to ever set foot in the ring.

Wanting to make sure security was nearby, Ink stepped out to look. Two guards were in view
and the aisle was fairly empty otherwise. He peeked into the stall, where Thor stared at the lights with no idea of how incredible he was. The whirling! He wouldn’t be able to repeat that stunt with his three competitors in the brawl. Nemesis was built, and built smart. The Greek woman had a good vet, so the zombie wasn’t so overloaded on muscles that it slowed him down. Dionysus was taller and heavier than Thor, also built well, and Volcanus was shorter but had to weigh over two hundred pounds.

“So no more airplane game for you,” Ink said to Thor
, and retreated in comfort to the locker room. If Thor pulled through the brawl and lived to fight another day . . . as soon as Ink got home, he was going to pull up a schedule of zombie shows for the next three years and plot out a strategy. That was how he would celebrate this. And forget Vasilov’s fucking champion months down the road! Ink
had
a champion right there in the stall, and he’d spent four times as much on a lousy movie ticket as he had on Thor.

He wasn’t going to leave
his zombie undefended to go up to the stadium. Pulling up the live stream on his phone, he stayed in the stables and watched the elderly costume show and melee. They weren’t dressed up as finely as the children had been. All of them were standing in the ring dressed in golf pants and flowered nightgowns, some with their hands wrapped around walkers and others with canes and ear trumpets. One of the men had been squeezed into a sexy little cocktail dress, and puffs of his white chest hair came over the top. The audience was laughing and shrieking at that. The view changed to show a woman in a wheelchair, a blanket tucked up to her neck. Another was a cat lady, her dowdy sweater and shirt covered in pictures of cats fighting balls of yarn. Stuffed cats were strapped to her arms and trailed behind her on strings. The audience liked that one too, but the man in the cocktail dress was the favorite.

And there was Ink’s old Priapus!
The boys that rented him had dressed him up well. Suspenders held his pants up ridiculously high, and STILL SEXY was written on the back pockets. The audience chortled in amusement at that. There was nothing less sexy than Priapus.

The lights were doused
, the one that Dog of Tartarus had taken out replaced, and it fell into pandemonium as always. The woman in the wheelchair almost levitated out of it, the blanket falling away to reveal a skintight superhero outfit on her chunky form. People stood up in the stands and cheered for her. Ink watched and laughed in the quiet aisle, Nadia having vanished again to regions unknown. If Cantine’s blonde belonged to Ink, he would know where she was. He would care. And she had to be up there in the clubroom even now, hearing about Thor and his manager, wondering about him like Ink wondered about her. They were going to collide tonight at the post-party, and sparks would fly.

Tomorrow he would
get comfortable on the sofa and plan Thor’s future. Ink also had to plan his own. He was going to look up a divorce lawyer, hide his assets, do whatever he could to maintain his stables and get rid of Nadia once and for all. He might be on the brink of a meteoric rise, and dear Zombie Jesus Christ, he wasn’t going to pull his feckless wife along with him. Because she would fuck this up for him some way, somehow! She would fuck it up because that was what she did. She was a liability, and Ink had never accepted liabilities on his career. He never wanted her to have the power to embarrass him again, having Vasilov overhear her say that they were going to skip the post-party where connections and friendships and destinies were made.

The elderly mele
e ended with someone sticking the tube of an ear trumpet up an opponent’s ass, and yet another load of protestors getting pulled off the top of the wall and carted away. Their T-shirts read YOUR MOTHER and YOUR FATHER and THIS COULD BE YOUR GRAMMA AND GRANDPA.

But they weren’t anyone’s parents or grandparents now.
They were just creatures with one use. Another T-shirt called out the sponsor, and six more T-shirts asked how the companies advertising the Games could support hate. SHAME ON YOU, SWEET TREATS. DON’T EAT AT DELFINI’S – SANDWICHES MADE WITH A SIDE OF CRUELTY. Ink just rolled his eyes as all of them were hauled away. Nothing could make a dent in his glee, and certainly not inconsequential people with too much money and time.

Priapus had been killed and that was
fine. It spared Ink the expense of the knacker. He saluted the body carried out on a stretcher. One of the protestors leaped into the ring to escape the clutches of security. He knelt beside the wounded superhero woman and put out his hand in comfort, but she ignored it to look at the lights. Then stadium organizers got hold of the fellow and dragged him into a funnel after Priapus’ corpse.

Had Sofia watched the elderly melee?
Ink didn’t want to lose a friend over this, torpedo a connection on one match alone. Since a guard was still standing in the aisle and the late Ares’ stall was only two rows away, Ink went over there to see if she was around. He’d offer his hand, express his apologies over Ares, tell her that he knew she was going to get an even better zombie. Once Ink was standing on the summit, he’d lean down and help her up to it as well. Then they could sit in the clubroom together, drinking something cold from the bar, and bitch through the children’s melee as they always had. But she had to do it a little more quietly than she did in the stands.

The
food and water troughs were empty in Ares’ stall, and all of the hay had been swept out. Ink knocked on the locker door and then opened it to a bare room. A woman across the aisle called, “She left.”

Closing
the door, Ink said, “She did? When?”

“Last night.
One of her kids is having some health issue and she had to take off. Or maybe it was a grandkid. She was out of here so fast, not even an hour after Ares’ match. Hey, could I get your autograph? My son is watching at home and he called me almost screaming about Thor.”

“Of course!” Ink waited as the woman went into her locker room for a paper and a pen.
Sofia had left because of Ares, and Ink was disappointed. Real kids were good for one thing though: he couldn’t be one hundred percent certain that there wasn’t an element of truth to the claim. But this was for the better, Sofia being gone. It was too early for him to make peace, far too early. If a reporter asked about the first match, Ink would talk up a storm about how great Ares had been, and how Ink had always been his biggest fan. Hopefully that would be included on a quick blurb on television or in the newspaper, and Sofia would read it. And it was every word the truth. Ares
had
been great.

But Thor had been greater.

Thor was a damn genius in that zombie form. The woman came out and Ink took the pen and paper. After scribbling his name and putting Thor’s after it, he gave it over and said politely, “Is that stall yours?” There were sheets over it.

“Oh, no, that one is mine.” The woman pointed to the stall on the other side of the locker room, where a zombie female was resting in the hay.
“The hidden one belongs to Nemesis. I’ve never seen so much henna in my life! He’s covered in it.”

“I thought those were tattoos,” Ink said.

“No, it’s black henna. I asked. That woman covered every damn inch of him that isn’t covered in prosthetics. I asked how much she paid and she said that she and her family did it all themselves over the last few days. It’s beautiful, but
fuck
.” She meant the time that it had to have taken, to which Ink agreed. Fuck, he’d never spend hours and hours putting henna on his fighters, or hire people to do it with him. It was good to have a look that distinguished yours from the rest, but within reason.

Ink
returned to his aisle and hung out there, feeling good. People said hello as they went through, and paused to admire Thor. Jackie hadn’t found a single ding on him from the second match. Now
there
was another woman that Ink didn’t mind riding on his good fortune to the top. She was his team at the stables.

Back on his phone, he watched the
women’s brawl. The girl with the Maenad T-shirt was rooting for the right one of the five. Nothing had ever stopped Maenad before, and nothing was stopping her today. She was like the postal service through wind and rain and snow and heat. Except the postal service didn’t deliver on Sundays, and Maenad was delivering
this
Sunday. One after another, she landed her opponents to the ground. Ink didn’t catch the name of the person being interviewed afterwards, but he stated that due to her injuries received earlier, and some of her clumsier moves in the brawl, the manager going to Hawaii was going to be one who had a man in the ring.

Clumsy or not,
Maenad was a freakish force of nature. The Old Guard had lost Poseidon and seen Hades’ defeat, but Maenad was holding strong. When the lights went on, she was the only one left standing. The crowd went wild for her, and the camera showed a shot of Cantine beaming on a chair in the managers’ box. Poseidon’s death had to smart, but Maenad had saved the day. The ring was cleaned of the bodies and blood, and she was led away to thunderous applause.

It was almost time for the men’s brawl.
Another dealer oozed up to the stall as Ink was tending Thor. Before she could say a word, Ink said, “Not interested in selling.”

“I was going to ask if you’re interest
ed in buying,” the woman said. “I have a very high profile fighter who has just been released to the market.”

“High profile?
What’s his name?”

She didn’t want to say, and he wasn’t going to commit to even being interested until he had it.
They danced around the issue until he gleaned the fighter in question could be Son of Zeus. The dealer mentioned that the wife was forcing the manager to offload him, and that jived with what Ink knew of Son of Zeus’ manager and his wife. The wife would have exploded to see her husband cheat. She had all the sense that he didn’t, and dumping Son of Zeus fast was the only way to salvage some of their reputation. People would forget what had happened if they weren’t constantly reminded of the light incident, and the same manager trotting Son of Zeus around to competitions was going to remind them all the time. The best thing to do was sell him, change his name and his look, and take it from there.