by Jude Hardin
“I hate to tell you this, Mr. Freeze, but the ancient Romans invented the same goddamn thing. The players were called gladiators. What you’re doing here is nothing new. The ancient Romans were some sick motherfuckers, and you’re a sick motherfucker, and you’re going to fall hard just like they did.”
He sighed. “Well, you’re wrong about that. Ever heard the expression ‘too big to fail’? That’s me. I have more money than some countries have, Mr. Colt. I have cars and yachts and jet airplanes and fabulous mansions all over the world. I can have a different sex partner every night if I want, and I’m not talking about some sleazebag prostitute either. I’m talking quality poo poo. But I get bored with all that, you know? It’s all just so...ordinary. I need something fresh and new and exciting. Snuff Tag Nine is kind of like the television show Survivor, only in my version the contestants play for keeps. Anyway, enough of all that. I said I was going to introduce you to the other players, so on with the show.”
He pushed a button on his remote and two men appeared, one on each of the screens. The guy on the left wore a jersey with the number 1 printed on the chest, and the guy on the right wore the number 2. Both jerseys were red. Both men were Caucasian.
“Number One is an insurance salesman from Waterloo, Iowa,” Freeze said. “He’s six foot one, weighs one hundred and eighty pounds, and holds a second-degree black belt in tae kwon do. He’s single, of course. All my contestants are single. Number Two is a computer programmer from Hannibal, Missouri. He got his undergraduate degree from Stanford and played second seed on the tennis team while he was there. He’s six feet even, weighs one sixty-five.”
“They have names?” I said.
“Their names aren’t important. Your name isn’t important. From now on, you’ll be known as Number Eight. It was supposed to have been Nathan Broadway, but now it’s you.”
He clicked the remote and two more guys popped up on the screens.
“Number Three is a physician, a radiologist from Quincy, Illinois. He’s tall, almost six five, and he weighs two hundred and ten pounds. He played basketball in high school and, more recently, soccer in a corporate league. He likes to hunt deer with a bow. Quite good at it. Number Four is an electrical engineer from Indianapolis, Indiana. He’s five nine and weighs one seventy. He’s a gym rat, pure and simple. He lifts weights and drinks protein shakes and all that. When we captured him, his blood tested positive for steroids. He’s aggressive and unpredictable, like a pit bull or something. I expect him to do well in the game.”
“How do you expect me to do?” I said.
“I expect you’ll be killed the first day.”
“Why’s that?”
“All the other men are younger than you and in better physical condition. You don’t fit the profile for Snuff Tag, not at all. If the circumstances had been different, I never would have chosen you as a player.”
“Then why don’t you just kill me and find someone else?”
“We have a schedule to keep. Finding another player would take too much time. The game starts on October twenty-sixth and ends five days later on the thirtieth. The finale is always the day before Halloween. I don’t want to deviate from that. No, the finale has to be the day before Halloween. I’m afraid I’m stuck with you, Mr.—I mean Number Eight. I’m hoping you’ll surprise me and do better than I expect, but I doubt it.”
“The finale is a contest between the last two players alive, right?”
“That’s correct.”
“So how do you know you’ll be down to two players by the thirtieth of October?”
“I’ll get to that. Let’s just say it’s all very carefully orchestrated.” He clicked the remote again. “Number Five is an architect from Bainbridge, Georgia. He runs marathons and stuff. He’s skinny, as you can see, but his endurance is remarkable, both physically and mentally. Number Six is an airline pilot. He got his training in the Marine Corps and was flying jumbo jets from Louisville to Atlanta when we nabbed him. Very smart fellow, Number Six. His IQ is off the chain, like one fifty or something. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him at least in the final four. And look at those eyes. Isn’t he just gorgeous?”
“Gorgeous,” I said. I said it out of the side of my mouth.
Freeze pushed the button on the remote again, but only one photograph appeared this time. It was on the screen to my right.
“This is Number Seven. He’s a diving instructor from Palatka, Florida. He’s a former Navy SEAL. It was a bitch getting him to cooperate, but I think he’s finally settled down now. He’s five ten and weighs one sixty. He improvises well, and he knows about a hundred ways to kill a man with his bare hands.”
“What about Number Nine?” I said.
“Pardon me?”
“The game’s called Snuff Tag Nine. I just assumed there were nine players. You showed me seven, and I’m the eighth. Where’s Number Nine?”
“Ah, very astute of you. That’s correct, there are nine players, but the ninth is always a surprise. Typically, the ninth contestant is one of the most challenging players to defeat, if not the most challenging. Number Nine has been the winner more than once. All of you will meet Number Nine after the game is underway.”
“Can’t wait,” I said.
“I want to show you one more thing, and then I’ll have the guys get you some clothes and a nice room for the night.”
“You mean I don’t have to stay in this cage? I’m going to get clothes and everything?”
“You’re a player now, Number Eight, and officially in training. You’ll be given the finest accommodations until the game begins. I have a full-time chef here who’s an absolute culinary genius, and I will assign you a personal trainer. Nothing to eat after midnight tonight, though, because you have surgery in the morning.”
I didn’t say anything. This whole goddamn scenario was surreal. It was blowing my mind. I felt as though I’d fallen into some kind of portal, a rabbit hole to hell. Freeze pushed some more buttons on the remote and a guy wearing the number 6 on a red jersey came up on the screen to my left. I assumed he was a player from a previous year. He was outside, somewhere in the thick brush in the swamp, and it was daytime. His sandy blond hair lay in filthy, disheveled clumps, like someone with axle grease on their fingers had tried to pull it out. Black grimy smudges covered his face and arms. There was some kind of collar around his neck. Not a dog collar like Greg and Jim had put on me, but something that appeared to be hard and plastic and high-tech. He walked along a row of trees connected by lengths of plastic tape about four feet from the ground. It resembled crime scene tape, only it was red instead of yellow. He looked around, ducked under the tape, and started sprinting through the trees on the other side. The scene switched to his point of view, one angle and then another, which told me the plastic collar on his neck was equipped with several cameras. He got maybe twenty feet from the taped-off boundary and then stopped and gasped and clutched his chest. He fell to the ground and twitched a few seconds and made some snoring sounds and then lay quiet and still.
“That’s what will happen if you try to escape,” Freeze said.
The guys came and wheeled me to the elevator and took me to the second floor. They let me out of the cage and led me to a steel door with the number 8 stenciled on it and a deadbolt with the twist knob on the outside. One of them opened the door and I walked in alone and the door shut behind me and I heard the deadbolt click to the locked position.
It was a large suite, maybe twenty by thirty, with plush burgundy carpeting and a king-size bed and a leather sofa and a wooden desk and chair. There was a notepad and a ballpoint pen on the desk and a brushed steel reading lamp. It looked like a good place to sit down and write a suicide note. I scanned the area, looking for a way to escape, but steel bars blocked access to the only window, and the air vents on the ceiling were too small to crawl into. I walked into the bathroom and looked through the vanity cabinet and the medicine cabinet, thinking I might be able to find something to use as a w
eapon, but there was nothing but a disposable razor and a can of shaving cream and a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste and some soap and shampoo and deodorant and a spool of dental floss. The mirror over the vanity was stainless steel, like the ones they use in jailhouses, so no chance of breaking off a sliver and making a shank.
I shaved and took a shower and dressed in the set of surgical scrubs they’d left on the bed. I sat on the sofa and tried to think of a way out, but there wasn’t one. After a while a guy wearing a white uniform opened the door and wheeled a cart in with a dinner tray on it. Another guy stood outside the door with a machine gun. The guy in the white uniform left the cart in the middle of the room and walked away without saying anything and locked the door. There was a salad and a plastic bottle of Perrier and a shiny steel dome covering what I guessed was the entrée. I lifted the dome, and a puff of steam rose from a mound of fettuccine Alfredo. The pasta and sauce had been ladled onto a flimsy paper plate, the kind you see at rescue missions and church picnics. It smelled great and I was starving so I pulled the cart to the sofa and sat down and ate the noodles and the salad with a plastic fork and drank the bottle of mineral water. It was very good. Soon after I finished, the guy in the white uniform returned with his armed escort and took everything away.
There was a thirty-two-inch flat-screen television on a stand against the wall opposite the couch. I found the remote and switched on the television and scanned all the channels but couldn’t find a signal. Then I saw a DVD on the shelf below the TV with Defibrilador Automatico Implantable written on the case. I took the DVD out of the case and loaded it into the player. The video was all about the thing that was going to be implanted in my chest in the morning, but it was in Spanish. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but the animated footage gave me the gist of how the device was implanted and how it worked.
I didn’t want that thing inside me. Once it was in, Freeze could control me for the rest of my life. I didn’t want that, but I didn’t seem to have a choice. If it had been just me, just my life to worry about, I would have taken the plastic fork from my dinner cart and stabbed the guy in the white uniform in the eye. I would have used the metal cart as a shield, and I would have rushed the guy with the machine gun. He probably would have shot me dead before I got anywhere near him, but assuming I got lucky and somehow wrestled the rifle away from him and crushed his skull with the butt of it, I might have been able to get outside and make a run for the woods. If it had been just me, just my life to worry about, I might have tried something like that.
But it wasn’t just me. Freeze knew about my wife and my daughter, and after seeing the Nathan Broadway video there was no doubt in my mind he would make me watch them die if I tried anything.
“Hello, Number Eight.”
It was Freeze. His voice was coming from recessed speakers mounted in the ceiling.
“Hello,” I said.
“I trust you enjoyed your dinner.”
“Yeah, it was swell.”
“Andre is such an awesome cook. Did you find the video about the surgery you’re having in the morning?”
“I found it, but it’s in Spanish.”
“Oh, my. That was a mistake. I’ll have the English version sent in right away.”
“Forget about it. I’m having second thoughts. I’ve decided not to go ahead with the procedure after all. Tell them to bring me a movie or something instead.”
“You’re funny, Number Eight. Try to get some rest tonight, OK? Sweet dreams.”
“Hey, before you go can I ask you one question?”
“Go ahead.”
“Let’s say I win the game and you set me up in another country and all. What’s going to stop me from ripping that defibrillator thing out of my own chest or hiring someone to take it out for me? What’s going to stop me from doing that and coming after you and wringing your fat fucking neck?”
“Such language. You really need to watch that. Anyway, the device you’ll be getting has a special tamper-proof circuit. Any attempt to remove it will result in a deadly electrical discharge. Your heart will be forced into V-fib and you will collapse and die. Then your estranged wife and your adopted daughter will be tortured for several days before we finally kill them as well. But you’re not going to have to worry about any of that, because you don’t have a chance in hell of winning the game. Any more questions?”
“No.”
“Good night then, Number Eight. See you bright and early.”
They came and got me before sunrise. There were three of them, two wearing surgical greens like mine and the other khaki pants and a sports jacket. The guy wearing the khaki pants and sport jacket was carrying a gun. I could see the bulge under his left sleeve. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on where I’d seen him before. He stood there and watched while the other two put an IV in my arm and strapped me to a gurney and wheeled me out of the room. We took the elevator to the first floor.
“How long will this take?” I said.
“Less than an hour,” one of the guys in scrubs said. “It’s a very simple procedure. Don’t worry, you’ll be fine. Freeze would have our heads if anything ever happened to one of his players.”
“Will I be anesthetized?”
“Yes. In fact, I’m going to give you something to help you relax as soon as we get to the operating room.”
In the operating room they stripped me naked and transferred me from the gurney to a stainless steel table draped with white absorbent pads. There was a cart beside the table with an assortment of surgical instruments arranged neatly on top and something bundled in a blue towel on the shelf below. They wrapped a blood pressure cuff around my left arm and clipped a wire to my right index finger to monitor the oxygen level in my blood. One of the guys piggybacked a small IV bag onto the larger one, and a couple of minutes later a wave of euphoria washed over me and I felt myself slipping into unconsciousness.
I fought it off.
I couldn’t let this happen.
I couldn’t let them do this to me.
I rose and ripped the IV out of my arm and tore off the blood pressure cuff. The guy wearing khaki pants and a sports jacket went for his pistol, but before he could get it out of the shoulder holster I snatched a scalpel from the cart beside the operating table and used it to slit his throat ear to ear. His eyes bulged and he clutched at the wound and gurgled and coughed and fell to the floor. I grabbed his gun and shot Green Scrubs One in the chest. Green Scrubs Two ran for the door, but I drilled a round in his left ass cheek before he got his hand on the knob. He fell and retched and I finished him off with two shots to the head on my way out.
I took a right out of the operating room and ran and ran, but I was groggy from the drug they’d given me and my legs felt like there were sandbags tied to them. It was like trying to run underwater. The hallway seemed to go on forever.
I finally made it to a T and had to decide, left or right. I took a left and soon found myself in a large area with dozens of people milling around. The people weren’t paying any attention to me, which was odd considering I didn’t have any clothes on. Along the perimeter of this large space there were doors with numbers on them, and outside some of the doors there were people sleeping on blankets on the floor. I walked by them, trying to be as quiet as possible, the pistol in my hand as inconspicuous as a shark in a bathtub.
A nurse walked up to me and said, “The doctor will see you now.” She wore an old-fashioned form-fitting white dress and white nylons and one of those stiff hats with a red cross on it.
“I’m not sick,” I said.
“It’s just a checkup.”
“All right.”
She didn’t seem to notice my nakedness. I followed her through one of the doors and into an examining room. She took my blood pressure and temperature and told me to wait there. A few minutes later a bald man wearing wire-rimmed eyeglasses and a stethoscope stalked in and said, “Your blood pressure is too high. We need to operate.”
“I feel fine,” I said.
“I need you to get on the table now. It won’t take long.”
I was tired. Someone had hooked lead anchors onto my eyelids and I couldn’t keep them open, no matter how hard I struggled. I climbed onto the examining table and reclined to a supine position, and the doctor wiped my chest with something cold and wet. There was a bright light and I felt an uncomfortable pressure, like someone had placed a concrete block on my left collarbone.
“How do you feel?”
“I’m OK,” I said. “I don’t need an operation.”
I heard laughter. I opened my eyes and saw the blurry face of Green Scrubs Two, the guy I’d double-tapped on my way out of the operating room.
“We’re all done,” he said.
“But you’re dead. I shot you.”
He laughed. “That’s the anesthesia talking. Don’t worry, it will wear off shortly. We’re going to take you back to your room now.”
“You’re finished with the procedure?”
“Yes.”
“That thing’s in my chest now?”
“Everything went fine.”
His version of fine and my version of fine were altogether different. In my version, I’d blown his brains out with a nine-millimeter semiautomatic handgun. Everything had seemed so real. I couldn’t believe it was only a dream.
But the defibrillator was inside me now and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.
I was back on the gurney. I felt the brake release, and they wheeled me out of the operating room and to the elevator. The guy wearing khaki pants and a sports coat led the way. I finally remembered where I’d seen him before. He was the guy on the charter fishing boat, the Sea Lover III, the one who had followed Joe down to get some coffee.
I didn’t do much for the next week or so. The stitches under my left collarbone were healing nicely. A doctor came in one day and said so. I was confined to my room and I slept a lot and ate when they brought me food. It was starting to get to me, the solitude and the sensory deprivation. I needed something to do.
