Sacrificing Virgins (26 page)

“Kind of like a human version of Go.” Terry smiled.

Jasmine looked blank.

“It's an ancient Oriental board game,” he explained.

She shrugged. “The loser gets a dunk in the tank out back.”

“What does the winner get,” Wayne asked.

“A date with me, if he's good.” She winked. “You boys in?”

Terry started to decline, but Wayne cut him off.

“Wouldn't miss it. When does it start?”

From the bar came an awful clanging. Terry looked up and saw the bartender bashing a spoon against a cowbell with his one good arm.

“Right now,” she said. “C'mon.”

Wayne was out of his seat before Terry could say another word. Reluctantly, he slid off his stool and followed the two of them—and most of the other patrons—into the back room.

The Fish Bait room looked much like the outer area of the bar, only there was no bar. The roughhewn plank floor was painted in an interconnecting lattice of black lines laid out in a square grid nine rows deep and nine rows across. The walls were paneled in rough, unfinished pine and bare, except for a handful of stuffed fish, which were nailed to the far wall in descending size. Terry thought of a cartoon he'd once seen where a minnow was being eaten by a fish that was about to be snapped up by a shark, which didn't notice the whale looming behind it. The room stank of brine and rotting fish.

The crowd lined up along the walls, and the one-handed bartender stepped into the center of the room.

“All right then,” he yelled. “My name's Bruce, as ya'll know, but we got us a couple a' newcomers, so let's make 'em feel welcome and let 'em in on a little game of Fish Bait, eh? Do we have any volunteers for t'night?”

The bartender pushed a low-seated pair of glasses back up his nose, scanned the room for the briefest time, and then shook his head.

“Tell you what, let's keep the odds fair here and let these two gentlemen try a game betwixt the two of them. C'mon out here, boys, and let me teach ya how it's done.”

Terry held up his hand to decline, but Wayne stepped instantly onto the game field.

“We got us a shy one.” Bruce grinned, looking directly at Terry. “Watch us a bit,” he said. “Then you can play the winner. Jasmine, bring us the pieces.”

Jasmine pushed through the crowd to a wooden box in the back of the room and returned lugging two nets. One held what appeared to be a couple dozen starfish, while the other was filled with dark green turtle shells.

“Goal is simple,” he explained, handing the turtle bag to Wayne and keeping the starfish for himself. Jasmine uncinched the netting for him, and Terry couldn't help but admire the curve of her barely hidden ass as she crouched. He still couldn't make out what it was, but the dark sketch of something intricate seemed to rise from below her waistband. Its outline just missed touching the edge of her well-worn shirt. He could almost see her skin through patches of the tight shirt.

“Place a piece on any line intersection,” Bruce explained. “I'll do the same. It won't seem like much at first, but after a while you'll see that we're fighting to control the board. Whoever does that and blocks out the other player until there are no more moves wins.”

“You're on,” Wayne said. He dropped his first turtle to the grid with a confident grin.

“We'll make this a practice round,” Bruce said and placed his starfish close to a corner.

Terry watched and nodded at the deceptive simplicity of the game. He saw how Wayne plotted to cut off the bartender's pieces and soon decided that unless the one-armed man was really stupid, he was angling to lose. After only fifteen minutes the game was decided.

“Hey, hey!” Wayne yelled and came over to high-five Terry. Then he stepped up to Jasmine.

“So…do I get that date now?” he prodded.

Her eyes narrowed, but the corners of her lips lifted. She pulled a cigarette from her mouth and blew a cloud of smoke into his face. This time the smoke was lit.

“That was a practice round. See if you can beat your friend for the real thing.”

She reached down and picked up a turtle shell, shoving it into his hands.

Wayne quickly dragged Terry onto the playing field, and Bruce handed over his bag of starfish.

“Loser of this round goes in the tank,” the bartender warned.

“Fish bait,” the crowd yelled.

Something in Terry's stomach clenched. A grizzled old man with a cane and a black eye-patch leaned forward and whispered something in Wayne's ear.

Wayne smiled and nodded, looking up at Terry. “Gonna feed you to the fish,” he threatened.

“Keep thinking with your worm, and it's going to get bit off,” Terry retorted and placed his first piece.

This time the game seemed to go longer. Terry struggled to stop the alcohol from clouding his mind. He pinched his side again and again, willing the pain to clear his head. He was determined not to let Wayne win, if for no other reason than because he'd forced him into this. Wayne always got the girl, and this time Terry aimed if not to get her, to at least stop Wayne from going there.

He drew a diagonal line across the board, and Wayne placed a series of disconnected turtle shells. But when they started filling in the holes, for a while it looked like Wayne had the game. At one point he cut off four of Terry's starfish, and the crowd drew a collective breath. “Fish bait,” someone squealed. There was laughter.

But Terry had grown up playing chess, and this little diversion was something he'd counted on. This was a more fluid game than chess, but he was working toward a strategy; he had tried to focus Wayne on the small part of the map while he angled his attack. He ignored the loss of pieces and closed a line across the upper center of the grid.

“Give up,” Wayne enthused, closing another gap and missing the larger strategy that was about to encircle his pieces.

“Go fish,” Terry answered and dropped the last piece of his trap in place.

“No fuckin' way!”

“Gotcha.” Terry grinned. Behind them the crowd began to chant.

“Fish bait. Fish bait. Fish bait!”

A heavyset man with a white goatee and piercing blue eyes stepped out of the crowd and put a hand on Wayne's shoulder. He pushed him a step forward and pointed.

“Time to take a dip,” he said. His voice was low, but Terry could still hear it above the crowd's chanting. “Take a walk through that door.”

The crowd surged forward onto the playing field. Bruce and the white-goateed man began to push Wayne forward.

“All right, all right!” he yelled, shrugging off their hands. “I'll take my punishment.” Then he turned to Terry, a flare of anger lighting his eyes.

“Don't think I won't get you back for this,” he hissed. He'd always been a sore loser when it came to women.

Jasmine slipped past Terry then and put her arm around Wayne's shoulders.

“I'll dry you off,” she promised.

As she went by, Terry froze when he finally got a good look at the tattoo on her back. It was an octopus. But that wasn't what made him freeze. The reason he hadn't been able to make it out from a distance was because it was so twisted. It writhed in coils and strange twists across her lower back, one tentacle reaching its sucker cups toward the crack of her ass, another testing its way around her side, as if in search of her belly. And the reason it was so twisted was that it had been drawn to hide the scars.

The teeth marks.

Wayne's frown slipped away with Jasmine's promise, and he started through the doorway to the dunking tank.

Terry looked from the ragged pink lines of scar tissue across Jasmine's back to Bruce, the one-armed bartender and the one-eyed old man next to him. He finally noticed that most of the people in the bar seemed to bear the track marks of life-threatening accidents. An Indian man shook his head as if in ecstasy, bobbing to a beat that no one else could hear. Not surprising, since he was missing an ear—and a quarter of his skull.

Petey, the bandleader, hobbled into the midst of the crowd on his one leg, the wooden stump of his fake foot clomping louder than the growing chants of “Fish bait.”

A woman in a blue tank top with frizzy brown hair pushed past Terry to be in the front of the spectators. When her left boob crushed warmly against his arm, he turned to look at her and saw the right half of her shirt hung loosely, with no flesh to hold it up.

There was almost nobody here, he realized, who wasn't visibly, horribly disfigured. Something was very wrong in Winston.

“Wayne, don't,” he suddenly screamed and pushed past the tank-top woman and the peg-legged bandleader.

But Wayne had stepped through the dark doorway.

“Keep going,” Bruce advised and put his hand on a switch at the side of the door.

“Is there a light in here?” Wayne called, and the bartender threw the switch.

The room came to life, and Terry could now see that Wayne stood at the end of a diving board. A plank of wood extended out over a vast pool of water. Lights blazed down from the unfinished beams of the ceiling spotlighting blue water. Terry pushed Jasmine out of the way and tried to see better. He couldn't tell how deep it was, but the room looked like a poor man's gymnasium. A narrow wooden walkway led around the long stretch of water. Somewhere a pump hummed.

Here was where the smell he'd noticed in the game room came from. That room had smelled, but this room stank. Of fish.

Rotting fish.

“Wayne, don't,” he said again, pushing past the bartender to stand alone in the doorway.

“I'm going in,” Wayne said, holding his nose and dramatically waving with his one free hand as he fell backwards into the pool.

Two shadows darted out of the corners of the tank before Wayne even hit the water.

“Oh my God,” Terry whispered.

“Fish bait!” roared the crowd, who had filed around Terry to stand on opposite sides of the plank along the narrow walkway surrounding the tank.

He stood at the safe edge of the plank, just inside the room, and watched as the two dark shapes shot forward, the edge of one telltale fin breaking the top of the water just as Wayne's face disappeared beneath the blue. His eyes were closed as he sank toward the bottom of the pool, holding his nose. But even from where he stood, Terry could see them pop open wide as the shapes converged on the bait. Wayne thrashed then, and his hand left his nose as he screamed beneath the water and tried to pull himself with one wild arm to the surface. Something dark colored the water where his other arm had been seconds before.

Terry could see the pale fingers of a hand disappear down the maw of one monstrous gray mouth. “Oh God, no,” he cried, falling to his knees at the edge of the plank in time to see the other shark bite down on Wayne's midsection. The water bloomed bright in blood, and for a moment Terry couldn't see a thing. Then the sharks wrestled the body to a clearer section of water, and he saw the winding coil of his friend's guts unfurl as one hungry fish snapped at the delicate flesh and pulled.

“Fish bait!” roared the mangled crowd in appreciation.

Wayne's head was shaking from side to side, his mouth wide and shrieking bubbles. But all Terry could hear was the crowd and the splash of shark tails as the hungry creatures breached the water and angled down for another bite.

In moments the water was still. Terry was weeping, utterly in shock, unable to move.

Someone touched his shoulder. He looked up into the unnaturally bright eyes of the goateed man.

“Sorry about that, son. They've really grown up, it seems. Used to be they just got a piece of you, not the whole package.”

Jasmine bent down to wipe the hair and tears from his eyes.

“I'm glad it was him and not you,” she said. “You're a pretty good player. Wanna go another round? I'm sure someone will want to take you on, and since they've had dinner, the loser oughta be able to get dunked without losing a limb.”

“Get the fuck away from me, you freak!” Terry screamed and pushed her back.

“What is with you people?” he yelled, looking at the parade of limbless, scarred locals lined up around the pool. Until his outburst, some had been clapping and cheering. “How can you do this to someone?”

“Not much else to do out here.” Bruce shrugged. “Passes the time.”

“Pass this, you fuck,” Terry screamed and barreled into the man, forcing him three steps down the plank. The bartender flailed for balance, reaching for the edge of the plank with the ghost of his hand and only catching the edge of it with the smooth scar of his stump as he tumbled headfirst into the bloody soup.

Goatee man leapt forward and punched Terry square in the face. The pain arced behind his eyes like a white-hot poker.

“You push someone in, you go in yourself,” his deathly voice boomed across the pool.

Terry fell backwards, slamming his head against the wood. He started to slip off the side but caught the edge of the plank with a foot as he struggled to clear the red stars from his eyes. His nose felt on fire, and his head pounded with heat. A heavy foot stomped on his calf and Terry screamed, kicking back blindly at his opponent, who only took the opportunity to kick him again.

“Give it to 'im, Gordon,” someone yelled. “Fish bait!”

He began to slide off the plank and grappled frantically with both hands and a foot to hold on. Below him he saw the sharks circling the bartender, who flailed about with purpose. Bruce rounded on the sharks and kept them at bay with a series of well-aimed underwater kicks and punches. Some of the crowd had gathered at the point closest to him and urged him on, calling to him and holding out their hands. Terry also caught a glimpse of Wayne beneath the water, eyes and mouth wide open, his face miraculously unharmed. The rest of him looked as raw and torn as if he'd been chain-sawed.

Then another kick sent his feet off the plank, and Terry dangled dangerously from his fingertips, his feet beneath the water.