Read The Death Match Online

Authors: Christa Faust

Tags: #Supernatural Thriller, #Fiction

The Death Match (11 page)

BOOK: The Death Match
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Meanwhile, the severed head had landed about six feet to the right, faceup, and something else was leaking from the other half of the cut neck. Something more like smoke than liquid, with a noxious, sulfuric odor and a gritty particulate weight like swirling ash. Whatever animating force Mr. Dark had been using to drive Tanya was gone, and all that was left behind was this weird ethereal residue. As that unnatural substance dissipated into the salty air, Matt couldn’t help wondering, for a fleeting second, what was inside him. What arcane ichor flowed through the channels of his own lifeless body? And if Mr. Dark had brought back Tanya, who had brought back Matt? And why?

Behind Matt, a soft scrabbling sound made him turn his head back to Stacy. She was trying to get her feet under her but was weak from blood loss.

He rushed to her side to help her and she shoved him away with surprising strength.

“Don’t fucking touch me,” she hissed.

Matt stumbled backward, hands up and open.

“Stacy, please.”

“Well, this is an interesting development,” a new voice said as several pairs of arms grabbed Matt from behind, the cold, hard snout of a pistol pressed against his temple.

The speaker’s face was a mass of burned flesh, shreds of skin scorched and melted into one another like a box of crayons left out on a hot day. Grease oozed out of the gaps between the flaps and dripped into the twisted hole that had once been a mouth. Topping this horror was a shining mane of bright white hair. It was Mr. Long, flanked by several of the dull-eyed, rotting henchmen. Matt was still and sick with adrenaline as the thug behind him slid a thick, hairy forearm around his neck, gun sliding down his face and mashing the meat of his cheek against his teeth. He searched the long, narrow room, desperate for options, any kind of plan, no matter how farfetched. There was a rusted pipe wrench and some moldy rope on the far side of the room. His ax lay where he’d dropped it, now out of his reach. There were several gaping holes in the rusted floor and walls, but nothing close enough to be useful. A single round, glassless window the size of a dinner plate gave Matt a stark view of the cold, uncaring ocean. Possibly the last thing that he would ever see. Could this really be the end of the line? The end of Matt’s inexplicable nonlife?

Mr. Long crouched down beside Stacy, and she flinched away from him, eyes wide in her pale, sweaty face.

“You’re quite a tough cookie,” Mr. Long told her. Matt recognized the voice. It was Mr. Dark, inhabiting Long, using his corpse like a puppet.

“I’m not your fucking cookie,” she spat.

“Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong. Your girlfriend was my…fucking cookie. So to speak.” His huge grin got even bigger. “Now that she’s gone, I’ll need a new cookie. Someone like you.”

“Don’t listen to him, Stacy,” Matt said, his voice crushed down to a rough whisper.

Mr. Long gestured at Tanya’s severed head, and it rolled to face Stacy, upside-down eyes fluttering open.

“I can bring her back again to be with you,” Mr. Long said. “You’ll live forever, together forever.”

“Stacy?” An impossible, awful voice emanated from Tanya’s head. “Baby, are you there? I feel cold.”

“I…”

Stacy looked from Tanya’s head to Mr. Long and back again, her face a battleground. Then she screamed and lunged for Matt’s ax. She swung with all her remaining strength at the thug with the gun to Matt’s head. The ax sliced through the front third of his motorcycle boot, chopping off all the toes along with it.

Instead of shooting Matt in the head and ending it all right there, the thug let go of Matt’s neck and swung mindlessly at Stacy as if swatting at an annoying bug. Unbalanced by his missing toes, he toppled sideways, dropping the gun. The two other henchmen were fumbling for their own weapons, and Mr. Long was twisted around to
face Matt. Seething fury animated the pile of flesh that used to be Long’s face into something even more ugly and inhuman. There was no time to think. Matt had to act fast.

He ducked down and lunged forward, grabbing Stacy around the midsection and shoving her through a jagged hole in the wall. Gunshots pinged all around him as he rolled through the gap after her, leaving scraps of cloth and skin behind on the toothlike edges.

Matt raised himself into a wary crouch and surveyed their new surroundings. They were inside some sort of half-deconstructed cargo hold that was solid on their end and nothing but raw metal girders on the other. For a crazy second, Matt thought that it was somehow raining inside the ship, but the sharp stench and the burn of the droplets against his upturned face told him that one of the henchman’s bullets had pierced a fuel tank. The rain was gasoline.

Matt had seen this movie before. Only last time, when flammable gas was pouring out into Long’s amphitheater, there had been a sewer hole to get away in. And Stacy had had two working legs.

He turned to Stacy and saw that she had wedged a warped chunk of steel mesh into the gap and was lying splayed and gasping on her back, one arm thrown across her eyes to protect them from the toxic rain. The puddle of blood from her half-eaten thigh was distressingly large and getting larger by the second. She still had Matt’s ax clutched against her chest.

Matt ran to the edge of the solid floor and looked down. It was about a six-foot jump across exposed and dangerous machine parts and into the icy water beyond. From there, they would have to swim around the massive bulk of the dead ship to reach the
shore. Who knew how far down the high, inaccessible docks they’d need to go before they found a way to climb out of the water? It would be hard for Matt alone, and even harder with the injured Stacy in tow, but he had no other choice. The thugs were pounding and tearing at the steel mesh temporarily blocking them from Stacy. It wouldn’t be long before they got through.

“Okay,” Matt said, taking Stacy’s hand. “Can you stand?”

She shook her head. Her lips had gone a deep, bruisy blue in her pale face. It was clear that she was swiftly bleeding out.

“I can’t make it, Matt.”

“I’ll carry you,” he said, lifting one of her limp arms around his neck. “Come on.”

“Not gonna happen,” she said, shoving him away and then pressing the ax into his hands. “Bleeding like I am, we’d both be shark bait the second we hit the water. I know I’m dying now, but I don’t want to go like that.” She lifted a shaking hand and started fumbling in one of her many pockets. “I have a better idea.”

She reached underneath her back and pulled a gun. “I grabbed it up there to blow Long’s head off, but you didn’t give me the chance.”

Not that it would have made a difference.

“No,” he said, “you can make it. I saved your life once. I won’t leave you now.”

“Yes, you will,” she said. “You know it’s the only way.”

“But…”

She was right. He hated it, so much it made him want to put a fist through the rusted steel wall, but she was right.

“Get out of here, will ya?” Stacy said with a weak half smile. “You can watch the fireworks from the shore.”

The thugs were making serious headway with the mesh covering one end of the gap between the rooms, peeling it back enough to reach through, oblivious to the way the sharp edges tore into their flesh. One of the groping hands clamped around Stacy’s ankle.


Now!
” Stacy cried, shoving Matt toward the edge.

He looked back at her one last time. She held her chin high, and her eyes were clear and sure. All that hotheaded reckless immaturity had been stripped away, leaving behind a cold and terrible kind of wisdom.

Matt jumped.

The murky water was so cold it felt like a slug in the chest, crushing all the air from his body. The ax felt like it weighed a thousand pounds, its weight pulling him down, but he would not let it go. He started swimming one-handed, putting Stacy’s talk of sharks out of his mind and focusing only on the distant shore.

A bright flare of orange made him twist around to look behind him. The old ship was engulfed in flames, filling the afternoon sky with oily black smoke. As Matt rounded the ship’s stern, the dock came into view. A group of surprised dockworkers were pointing and videoing the fire with their cell phones as sirens wailed in the distance. None of them seemed to notice Matt. None except a single man, standing slightly apart from the rest. A man with a Tapout T-shirt and a cheerful smile. Mr. Dark.

He winked at Matt, then turned and disappeared into the jostling crowd.

“Hey, look,” one of the workers cried. “There’s a man in the water!”

“Come on!” another called out to Matt. “Swim this way!”

Matt made his way toward the waving men, allowing them to haul him up by the scruff and onto the dock.

“You okay, mister?” a chubby young Mexican guy asked, helping Matt to his feet and nervously eyeing the ax. “What the hell happened?”

“Long story, kid,” Matt replied, clearing his smoky lungs and spitting seawater.

“You’d better wait here for the firemen,” another, shorter man said. “You might be hurt.”

Matt shook his head.

“I can’t,” he said, shouldering the ax. “There’s still work to be done.”

He took off down the dock, following the elusive Mr. Dark.

About The Author

Christa Faust is the author of several novels, including
Choke Hold
,
Money Shot
, and
Hoodtown
. She worked in the Times Square peep booths as a professional dominatrix and in the adult film industry both behind and in front of the cameras for over a decade, starring in dozens of racy fetish-oriented videos. She also wrote and directed a four-part bondage adventure serial called
Dita in Distress
, featuring world famous burlesque queen Dita Von Teese. Faust is a film noir fanatic, an avid reader of classic hardboiled pulp novels, and an MMA fight fan. She lives and writes in Los Angeles.

BOOK: The Death Match
9.31Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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