The Sacrifice Game (66 page)

( 105 )

E
ven in Tony Sic’s fultballer body I didn’t have the lung power I’d had in the old suns. But still, if you know how to cough into a blowgun, you can send liquid out with enough force to practically go through a closed eyelid. And Grgur almost certainly wouldn’t close his eyes anyway. People trained the way he was . . . well, he was like us Ball Brethren. We do not blink, even when losing a limb. If their eyes get dry they wink one and then the other.

I blasted it out. He didn’t close his eyes fast enough. He squinted in obvious agony, orange drips sliding over his face, but still he just held my arms tighter behind my back.

I looked back at Hernán. He had his hand in his jacket pocket but he wasn’t pulling a gun.

I did a porcupine, pulling my legs up and curling into a ball, trying to wrench my left arm free, but of course what I really wanted was the right arm, the cast arm, and Grgur let his grip on that slack for just a beat, enough for me to twist it against his thumb and line up the shot, and I slammed the cast down into his inner thigh and drew it up along the artery into his groin, leaving a trail of bloody shredded fabric.

It got him to relax his grip enough for me to slide out and down to the floor, at the edge of the stairs.

Hernán had partly gotten his act together and was nearly on me, even with one arm wrapped around his throat.

So I tipped myself over and rolled down the stairs. At the first landing I sprang up and turned and half ran, half fell down around onto the next flight, four at a time in my little paper booties, pitching forward onto the landing below, my back tingling with imagined bullet-wounds.

I grabbed the inside railing with my left hand and wheeled around. In most combat situations one main thing is to just be decisive and book when you can. A lot of people stick around too long when they’re ahead.

There was one flight of metal-and-tile institutional stairs between me and Grgur, but I could hear him run-creeping down toward me, I could practically see him through the stairs, and as a single foot turned the corner I slashed at it with my cast and it slid out from under him.

I held on to the banister and struck again around the corner at his knee.

He grabbed my arm just before the second swipe could connect but I pulled my cast back and down into the crook of his elbow, the big artery there spraying blood onto the wall, and as he released the cast I backhanded him with it up into the left eye.

I was pretty proud of the job I’d done on my little hand-mace. After working on the thing near forever it was nice to see it doing its job.

Behind Grgur Hernán was crawling down the stairs at us, all bloody like a flayed captive. So much for the instant-killing technique. It was taking this guy’s uays forever to leave. And his body was still thrashing around dangerously. I dropped back from Grgur, decided to take a chance, and gave Hernán a shot in the split-open neck with my left foot.

Ordinarily I’d never kick in an actual weapon-based fight, it’s not worth possibly getting off-balance, but this time it seemed like the timing and everything was right and when the fútbol-edge of my foot flipped his chin up he spittered up a fountain of arterial blood and crumpled.

I noticed a sort of porcelain knife, a six-finger-width black-blade thing with a blue Chinese-water-beast-skin handle, lying on the floor next to him—I guess he’d pulled it and I hadn’t even noticed—and I grabbed it and turned back around to Grgur.

For a beat I thought I was fucked and then I realized it wasn’t a gun in his hand, just a phone. Maybe he didn’t even have a gun with him.

Still, he’d probably hit some alarm. Just as bad. I gave him a left haymaker to the cheekbone with the butt of the knife, being careful not to break a finger, dropped it, twisted the phone away from him with my left hand, hooked his legs out from under him, and as he slid back down against the wall I tried to size him up.

Grgur definitely didn’t look hazardous. So just to be safe I picked the light little knife back up, scampered up the stairs again to the landing—I was feeling like a little grasshopper-dancer, an elf, sort of—and got behind Hernán, sunk the blade into his head under the ear, pulled it out, and wiped both sides on his shirt. I could smell Hernán’s shit releasing as he died. I went back down, sat behind Grgur, and started choking him with the elbow of my mace-arm.

I sat behind him, holding his neck from behind with his fat muscular ass between my legs and I was a little embarrassed because with all the excitement and everything I had a kind of serious hard-on and it was pressing up against him. Not that I found him at all attractive, it was just that sort of blood-rush adrenaline thing.

Kind of sluggishly Grgur got his arms up and started going for my head so I poked the knife into his elbows, one after the other, trying to pinpoint the nerves that drove his lower arms.

I had to try a couple times on the first one, but finally, from the way his hands reacted, I figured I’d gotten it right. His squeals didn’t come out like much. Hernán’s urine was running down the stairs from above, along with blood and other liquids.

I dug into Grgur’s lapel pockets with my good hand and found his wallet and Marena’s Sylphide lighter, which I guess he’d found on me and was going to give back to her. There were two different key cards with Florida Hospital on them. One said
S-WING RESTRICTED USE A.
Fabulous.

I felt a disturbance in the air, wind coming up from the bottom of the stairwell eight floors below, probably people answering Grgur’s alarm, and Grgur probably felt it too.

I held the cards against the handle of the knife and jammed it into the cast on my right hand. It went into my flesh a little bit but I could hardly feel it. The blade was facing his neck, and I pulled my arm back as far as it would go without cutting him.

“Let’s try to stand up together,” I said. If I fell over, or if he tried to break away, he’d be caught in the crook of the cast and the knife. Or at least that was the idea.

We stood up. His mangled leg nearly slid away from him and then he got it back under control. I was practically riding on his back. His arms dangled.

“So, look, why don’t we go back up to our floor, and we’ll be really, really mellow, and check out the pharmacy?” I asked.

Even though he was gasping, I could see him thinking. I hoped what he was thinking was that if he was too recalcitrant I’d probably just kill him and run, but if he came along, the others would probably find us and pick me off pretty fast while he broke away.

“Grgur? Okay?”

“Okay.”

( 106 )

H
is card relaxed the jaws of the door. Maybe it opens everything, I thought. A little demon in the wall switched on the caged lightning.

The tiny Pharmakopia room was all eye-dazzling shelves of many-hued translucent jars, some with seals in colors I’d never seen before. Magic Elixir City. Excellent.

I squeezed my cast elbow tighter around his neck and when I could feel his legs about to give out I pulled out the knife, sliced off his live badge with my left hand, and held it up to his left eye.

“So listen,” I said, “what other tracking equipment do I have on?”

He tried to shake his head. “Nothing,” he mouthed. I heard the door shut itself behind us.

“What else do you have on?”

“Nothing.”

“Did you get that alarm sent?”

“Yes.”

“You’re lying,” I said, “I’m going to gouge your eye out on the count of one.” I held the black blade up to his eye. “Zero.”

“There’s nothing else.”

“Dogshit. Show me the other trackers. One.”

“Go ahead,” he whispered.

“Never mind, I believe you,” I said. I squoze off his air for another thirty beats, to the point where he was just beginning to pass out, and let him sprawl on the floor.

I found some surgical tape and wove his fingers together around the bolted-down leg of a metal shelving unit.

I sat down and started sawing the tracking box off my ankle with the white-bladed knife while I watched him. It took thirty-nine beats. By the fortieth beat Grgur’d stopped coughing and was getting it back together.

“So how do I get in to see Lindsay?” I asked. Jed would probably have asked whether Grgur was working primarily for Lindsay or for Marena, and whether Marena had given the order on No Way, and a whole bunch of other trivia, but I really didn’t care.

“That’s. Difficult,” Grgur choked out.

“Well, so then what are
you
good for?”

“I can try him.”

“How?”

“On the phone.”

“Where is Lindsay right now?”

“He went to assens today.”

“Assassins?” I asked. I got the ankle box off and sliced off my ID bracelet just in case. I was pretty sure there wasn’t anything else on me. Had they implanted a surgical tracker? That would be a little much even for this group.

“No, Athens, Greece,” Grgur said.

“What’s the best way to reach him?”

“Text him.”

“I mean in person,” I said.

“I don’t know.”

“Hang on,” I said. I stuffed some cotton pads into his mouth and surgi-taped over it, leaving enough of a gap so that even if his nose stopped up he wouldn’t die. Next I cut some airholes in a big plastic trash bag, poured in three economy family-sized boxes of cotton pads, foomped it down over his head, twisted it, and taped it around his neck. He looked like—who?

Jack Pumpkinhead, Jed thought.

Right, I thought back. Next. Badges. Steenking batches. Think.

“Back in a third,” I said.

I opened the door and walked out, ready to cast-slash anyone in sight, but there was nobody. I wiped some blood spots off the floor in front of the door with the toe of my goddamn cloth slipper and I walked through the blazing flat light to the little waiting area. The couches were this acid orange that kind of upset me, and I tried not to look at them. I climbed up on one and looked out the window. It looked out on a closed courtyard, and there was a fire escape. And it was dark down there. After some fumbling I got the leaf, I mean, the key card I’d taken, to slide into a three-finger-wide crack, threw the glove with the trackers out into the warm dark, and closed the window again. There were footsteps coming up the hallway. I walked back to the pharmacy, closed the door with good delicacy, got behind Grgur, pulled the bag down a bit, weighted his arms and legs as much as I could, and choked him some more to make sure he’d be absolutely silent. If the cops or whoever came through the door I’d throw him at them and then go out the back and see if I could still get away. Although that didn’t sound good.

The footsteps went by outside. I didn’t breathe.

All right.

Pause.

For a few beats I thought about skinning him and wearing his face out, but, based on experience from doing the same thing in the old days, I figured it wouldn’t actually be so convincing. You needed trained taxidermists to work on it, and even then the effect was odd. And even assuming his head was big enough to fit over mine, there would be the bloody eye sockets and nostrils, and the whole nose issue would be a real problem, and if I couldn’t sew the lips together they’d hang open and show another pair underneath.

So even if they mistook us for him, they’d think we were so messed up they’d bring us right back to the hospital, where we don’t want to be. And skinned faces don’t really look that much like their previous owners until you preserve them correctly. Without all the muscle attachments and everything on underneath, they just look kind of droopy and abstract. Taxidermy is an art, and the human variety is the hardest.

“So, look, you’re going to transfer me out,” I said. Grgur mumbled something like “Okay.” He was still bleeding so I surgi-taped his worst wounds, just so he wouldn’t shock out on me, before I started rooting through the shelves. Hmm. Turbocurarine. Meprobamate solution. Most of the potions seemed familiar, I suppose because Jed had spent so much time in hospitals when he was little he’d memorized a volume known as the
Physicians’ Desk Reference
.

Let us see. A few bottles of Percocet. Some dioxyamphetamines in case I had to stay awake for a while. Some scalpem. Scalpels. Aha.

Downerland.

It took a little longer to find syringes. They were way up on the top shelf where the little kids couldn’t get them. I dumped a drawer of twenty- and hundred-millimeter disposables down into Grgur’s bloody lap and climbed down next to him with my bottles.

All right.

I mixed a few things up in little jar, a solution of about four milligrams of Pavulon, four grams of meprobamate, and thirty milligrams of tubocurarine chloride.

If he weighed two hundred pounds, that would make it about a quintuple dose of each. He’d feel it as fast as if it were heroin, but it wouldn’t get him right away. When it got distributed, though, he’d have had it. I pulled his sock down, found a clear vein on the inside of his upper ankle, and shot it in. He was squirming a little so I sat on him, pulled the bag off his head, pulled the wad out of his mouth, and while he was still gasping made a big wad of cotton and taped it over his mouth and nose. He’d be able to talk normally and I’d just be able to hear him, but if he started screaming it wasn’t going anywhere. His head was all red and sopping wet. I unwrapped one of the hundred-milliliter arterial syringes. It had a nice long sturdy needle. Beautiful.

I looked at his watch. We’d been in here for about thirty-score beats. Ten score since the injection. I should really give the shit another ten-score beats to kick in before I tried anything. You just can’t cover everything, though, it’s all a compromise. Give it another fifty-score beats.

“So this may be a cliché,” I said, “but can I ask whom
exactly
you’re working for?” I got more weight on his head, turned it sideways, and felt the edge of his jaw.

“Mrmff,” he said.

“You can talk,” I said. I slid the dry needle through the thin skin over the lower arch of his mandible, under the masseter muscle and away from the facial vein, and rested it against the nerve-rich bone. There was only a tiny bead of blood.

“Now twist, now writhe in ant-blood tickles,”
I said.

I drew the thick needle through a wide arc, scraping against the bone. Grgur didn’t groan but I felt his involuntary tense and shiver. That’s nothing, I thought.

“You understand I look like Tony Sic, but I’m—ah—I’m Jed.”

“Yuh. Somebody said—”

“Come on. Who is your steward of long things?”

“Huh?”

“Your commanding officer.”

“Lindsay Warren,” he said.

“Who put up the money?”

“For what?”

“For the Stake, in Belize,” I said. I tried not to look at the drifts of precancerous dander under his pathetic thinning sideburns.

“Lindsay’s investors.”

“Who’s Lindsay’s superior?”

“As far as I know, um, I don’t think . . .”

“Hurry up.”

“I think Lindsay’s his own boss.”

“Really? Okay, how do I get in there?”

“Where?”

“His office. At the Stake.”

“I don’t know.”

“You’d still better get some codes and names and whatever on the table. I’m serious.”

“I’m serious, I don’t know.”

“Okay, you obviously have nothing to offer.” I drew the needle back and scraped it over and over into his mandible toward his teeth, not widening the single puncture but etching a deep line in the bone, over and over, like I was jerking him off. He started shrieking way back in his throat but I gave him a full twenty strokes before stopping. Working on him was getting me back on track.

“There’s a Warren weapons test on for December twenty-first,” I said. “I want you to help me find out about it.”

“Okay.”

“So, okay, tell me about it.”

He paused like he was thinking of making something up, but he must have decided not to.

“I don’t know,” he said, “there’s a Christmas party at the Hyperbowl, if there’s something on for the Stake I’m not in on it.”

“How do I get to see Lindsay?”

“I don’t even know when he’ll be back, they move his schedule around—”

“Please, be terse.” When the stuff took effect he wouldn’t be able to tell me anything. “What codes do you have?”

“I just have a card.”

“How long is it good for?”

“Forever.”

I eased the needle in further, pushing it down from above with my finger, under his loose, bristly skin, until the point threaded into the base of his number-three molar. He tensed. Maggots of waxy sweat welled up out of his pores.

“Come on, how often does the card change?”

“All the time, it’s live—”

“I mean the whole card.”

“It gets replaced every week. I get the new one in two days.”

I felt footsteps again, and voices I couldn’t make out went down another hall, more urgent and official-sounding this time. I jammed the drift of cotton into Grgur’s face.