Read The Death Match Online

Authors: Christa Faust

Tags: #Supernatural Thriller, #Fiction

The Death Match (7 page)

BOOK: The Death Match
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The fish-pale guy with lank, dust-colored hair on the far left was reaching for a holstered pistol. Matt flinched, grip going sweaty on the ax handle, knowing that if they all pulled guns he was fucked. He was starting to feel a little light-headed, and there was a fierce hissing sound like a hundred snakes so close to his ear that he almost thought he might be imagining it. And a smell, a thick, sulfurous stink, like…

Like gas.

Matt turned toward the skinny, busted pipe and then back to the pale guy with the gun. The armed guy was about to shoot when his fat buddy noticed the pipe and the horrified look on Matt’s face and knocked the gun out of the pale thug’s hand.

“Are you crazy?” the pale guy spat.

His fat buddy smacked him in the back of the head and gestured at the pipe.

“Gas, asshole!”

The pale guy realized what had almost happened and went white.

Matt took that moment of distraction to attack. He lunged at the pale guy and cracked him in the temple with the flat back of the ax head. The pale guy went down but not out, and the fat guy grabbed the ax handle, struggling with Matt over possession of the weapon.

In the pit, Stacy had the upper hand and Tanya seemed to have completely changed her attitude, as if all her aggressive evil had drained away. She lay almost passive beneath Stacy, not defending, not covering up. Unconscious, maybe, but from Matt’s angle it was hard to tell.

The pale guy got his feet back under him and grabbed Matt from behind, wrenching his arms back and allowing the fat guy to gain control of the ax. Matt
responded instinctively by raising both feet up off the floor and mule-kicking the fat guy in the center of his padded chest, causing him to drop the ax and stagger back, gasping. Matt planted his feet back on the stone floor and slammed the back of his head into the pale guy’s face, breaking his grip.

As Matt dove for the ax, an awful, keening wail spiraled up out of the pit. It was Stacy. She was cradling Tanya’s lifeless body in her arms, Tanya’s head lolling too far backward on a broken neck.

Matt grabbed the ax and backed up and away, surrounded by more of Long’s corrupt henchmen. There was no way out and no way he could take on all five guys alone, but Stacy was in no shape to help him.

They were fucked.

As the circle of thugs closed in around Matt, he gripped the ax handle tighter, determined not to go down without a fight. Between the broad backs of the advancing henchmen, he could see Long get up from the couch and come up behind Stacy. He leaned over her, sliding his hands over her bare, bloody breasts and whispering to her.

She stayed tense and frozen for a moment, then exploded into action, turning on Long and taking him down like a speeding truck. He let out a comical yelp that quickly cranked up into a shriek of pain, turning the heads of the thugs surrounding Matt.

“Boss is down!” the guy on the far left hollered, gesturing with his chin toward the pit.

Four of the five fell back and ran to their boss’s aid, while a single man stood his ground with Matt.

Matt faked a high swing with the ax, then swiftly reversed it, ducking low and shattering a kneecap. The thug howled and dropped to the stone floor, but Matt didn’t stick around to watch his reaction. He had to save Stacy.

When Matt made it to the edge of the pit, Stacy was fighting like a trapped wildcat, far too much white visible around the irises of her eyes. Two men had her arms, but her feet were loose and kicking, preventing anyone from getting close enough to hit her. Matt didn’t hesitate to let the guy holding Stacy’s right arm have it in the back of the head with the ax. As soon as he let go of her arm, Stacy used it to knock out the guy on the left. Free now, she lunged at the man on the right, locking him up in a vicious choke hold. The last man standing tried to pull her off his blue-faced buddy, but Matt’s ax had other ideas.

Once the final man was down, Matt turned toward Stacy to make sure she was okay. She stood alone in the center of the pit, breath harsh between her teeth, eyes narrow and flint hard. Matt unbuttoned his shirt and was about to remove it and drape it over her quivering shoulders when she launched herself at Long’s lifeless body, pounding his already broken and bloody face into unrecognizable meat.

Matt tried to pull her away from Long’s corpse, but she shook him off and renewed her mindless attack, an unhinged howl of bottomless agony spiraling up out of her and echoing through the stone arena.

“Stacy,” Matt said, wrapping his arms around her from behind again. “Stacy, it’s over. He’s dead. He’s
dead.
Let it go. We need to get out of here.”

She paused and looked back at Matt with anguished eyes.

“Leave me,” she whispered, balling up and covering her face with her hands.

“Stacy, no…”

Stacy pounded her fist against the floor, hitting and jarring the mesh cover of a large, blood-clotted drain in the center of the pit.

“I won’t go,” she said. “Let me die here with her. I don’t deserve to live after what I’ve done.”

Matt ignored her for a moment, peering down into the drain. He could hear a trickle of running water down there, like some kind of primitive sewage system. The manhole-sized grate was easy to remove, and the slimy, stinking drainage pipe beneath would be a tight squeeze, but they could both fit. It could be a way out. Or a claustrophobic death trap.

A new group of corrupt thugs burst through the distant door into the arena, guns drawn. An electric spike of adrenaline shot though Matt’s chest, galvanizing him into action.

He grabbed both of Stacy’s ankles and jumped feet first into the drainage pipe, dragging her down with him as a gunshot shattered the stillness inside the arena.

Like the flint on a Zippo lighter, the gunshot ignited the gas from the broken pipe, sending a roiling wave of cleansing blue-and-white flame down the pipe behind them. When Matt and Stacy hit the foul water below, he sucked in a deep breath and pulled her under with him, less than half a second before the flames hit the surface.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The drive back to Long Beach seemed endless. They were both cold, wet, and filthy from the crawl through the sewer to the storm drain grate beneath Long’s burning mansion, Matt bare-chested and Stacy dressed only in his oversized shirt. Stacy didn’t speak, and Matt didn’t push her.

When she finally pulled into the driveway of her small, forgettable house, she killed the ignition but made no move to get out of the car.

“Come on,” Matt said softly, his hand on Stacy’s arm.

She just sat there in the driver’s seat, staring down at her hands.

“Let me have your keys,” he said.

She looked at him as if she’d just realized that he was there but had no idea what he was talking about. Her eyes were all cried out. Empty.

“Keys,” Matt said again. “To your house.”

Stacy pulled the key from the ignition and handed over a jumbled ring with a tiny silver boxing glove dangling off it. Matt took the keys, got out of the car, and went around to the driver’s side to open the door and help Stacy up, but she shoved him away.

“I’m fine,” she spat.

“Fine,” Matt replied. “Come on.”

Matt unlocked the door to her house and guided her inside. For a moment the two of them just stood there in the cluttered living room.

“You gonna be okay?” Matt asked.

She didn’t answer.

A pink-and-black short-sleeved Fight Chix rash guard had been thoughtlessly discarded in a crumpled heap near the door. She took a single step toward the shirt, stopped for a moment as if swaying on the deck of a ship, and then sank to her knees, gathering the discarded rash guard up against her chest and pressing her face into the fabric.

“I’m so sorry, baby,” she whispered.

Matt backed away, feeling awkward and uncomfortable. He wanted to say something supportive to help her through her anguish, guilt, and grief, but the words just wouldn’t come.

“What am I supposed to do with her things? Take them down to Brazil and give them to the mom that pimped her out before she even had her period? Be, like, ‘Sorry I killed your daughter with my bare hands, but here’s her toothbrush’?”

Matt was going to say he didn’t have any idea, but she cut him off before he could speak.

“You know what? Fuck it.”

She started gathering armfuls of stuff and throwing them blindly out the open door into the driveway. Clothes and shoes and books and training gear and anything she could get her hands on. Matt just stepped back and let her wind down on her own. Eventually she stopped throwing things and covered her face with her hands. He led her to the sofa and made her lie down, covering her with a fuzzy purple blanket that looked like it had been picked out by a child.

She turned away from him, curling her body in on itself.

He probably should have left, but looking at Stacy with her tangled red hair in her face and clutching the blanket up under her battered chin, he knew he couldn’t do that. He owed it to her to make sure that she was going to be okay on her own before he took off.

There was a large, puffy easy chair opposite the couch, and Matt eased his sore body down into it with a grateful sigh. It was amazing how good something as simple as a comfortable chair could feel. It almost made the madness of that strange and endless night seem worthwhile. Maybe they hadn’t stopped Mr. Dark for good, but they’d certainly put a major dent in his latest scheme. That was enough for one night.

Matt slept. He didn’t dream.

* * *

The next day, Stacy seemed intensely grateful to discover that Matt hadn’t left her. She didn’t want to talk about what had happened, but she was glad to have company and offered Matt a place to stay for a few days. He let her think that she was helping him out by letting him sleep on her couch, but really he wanted to keep an eye on her, to make sure that she was coping with what she’d been forced to do.

They spent a lot of time in her large, weedy backyard, Matt chopping wood and Stacy hitting a large truck tire with a sledgehammer. Not speaking, just sweating and enjoying the silent companionship and good, clean physical labor. And as Stacy sweated through her grief, she became gradually more comfortable with Matt.

Stacy didn’t talk much, but she turned out to be an excellent listener. He found himself sharing details about his own experience with losing Janey that he’d never told anyone before. Details about what he’d been through with Andy. She was sympathetic and understanding, and eventually she started to open up about Tanya.

At first she wouldn’t talk at all about what had happened in Long’s underground arena, just about the complex nature of her relationship with Tanya. Stacy had never been with another woman before Tanya, or even in love at all for that matter. She really had no standard to compare the relationship to, but she had to admit that there were times when she wasn’t sure if Tanya’s feelings were as strong as hers.

“She…she said something to me during the fight,” she told Matt, leaning on the handle of her sledge with one hand and using the hem of her T-shirt to mop sweat from her freckled brow with the other.

This was the first time she’d made any reference to that fight, so Matt didn’t want to spook her. He just nodded and waited for her to continue.

“She…she said she never loved me. That she was just using me for a place to crash while she was fucking every guy at the gym behind my back. I mean, that’s exactly what I was afraid of. Exactly. But… This is gonna sound really weird.”

“It’s okay,” Matt said. “Go ahead.”

“Well,” she continued, “it’s like in that moment, for the first time since we found her, I saw the real Tanya in her eyes. Like the evil inside her lost its grip, just for a second. She knows what a hot temper I have, and it’s like…like she said those things because she
wanted
me to kill her.”

“Jesus,” Matt said.

“What do you think was really going on there?” Stacy asked.

“Man, I don’t know,” he said. “But whatever it was, it’s over now.”

He didn’t say the next thing that came to mind, because there wasn’t any point. But he couldn’t help but think it.

It’s over for Stacy. It will never be over for me.

CHAPTER NINE

“You sure you won’t stay?” Stacy asked.

Matt looked at her. She seemed to have aged ten years in the past week, not so much in the face as in the eyes. She was still clearly wrestling with what had happened, with what she had been forced to do, but for her the fight was over. For Matt, the horrible, inexplicable events that took place in Long’s compound were just jumbled pieces of the bigger puzzle. Questions within questions, like nesting dolls, and Matt knew he had no choice but to move on. To keep searching for answers. To understand the true significance of these repeating patterns and find out what Mr. Dark was really up to. Because he knew that until these questions were answered once and for all, settling down and trying to live a normal life was laughably impossible. He’d tried with Rachel when he’d first been resurrected, and look how well that turned out. Normal lives were for the living, not for undead
r
ōnin
like Matt.

But trying to articulate all this seemed pointless. He had developed a powerful kind of foxhole bond with Stacy, and he knew that she really understood him in a way that few living people ever could. He also knew that it was time to move on for both of them. She needed to get on with living, and he needed to get on with something else.

“Thanks,” he said, “but I can’t.”

Stacy nodded.

“Thank
you
,” she said, shrugging and not making eye contact.

It was his turn to nod and look away. He was about to go when she spoke again.

“Does it ever go away?” Stacy asked. “The hole. Missing her.”

Matt shook his head.

“No.”

She looked up at him like she was waiting for him to qualify his answer somehow, or make it seem not so bad. But he didn’t. He didn’t have the energy to lie to her, and he didn’t think it would help even if he could.

To his surprise, she came forward and hugged him, hard. He just stood there and let her for a moment, awkward and unsure, then wrapped an arm around her muscular back and squeezed, giving her three solid pats on the shoulder the way he might if he were hugging a close male friend.

BOOK: The Death Match
10.45Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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