by Jude Hardin
“I’m Zachary,” he said. “It’s time to choose your weapons.”
Zachary was tall and thin. He wore a long white lab coat, a blue dress shirt with a button-down collar, and gray pants. Curly salt-and-pepper hair and a mustache. His eyes were red and he blinked all the time, like someone had just thrown sand in his face. I guessed it was a nervous condition.
I pointed toward the metal cabinet. “Got a machine gun in there somewhere?” I said.
“I’m afraid not. But each drawer contains a different weapon, and you’re allowed to choose two. You tell me the numbers, and I open the drawers and hand you the weapons. What you end up getting is a matter of luck.”
I knew all that from reading about the video game.
“Have all the other players chosen already?” I said.
“Yes, but every time an item is taken out of a drawer an identical one is put back in its place. That way everyone has a fair chance at getting one of the better items.”
“Just out of curiosity, what ten weapons are in the drawers?” I said. I couldn’t remember all of them from the Wikipedia article, and I wondered if they would even be the same.
“That’s irrelevant. You’ll get what you get.”
“Like I said, just curious.”
He started blinking like crazy. He seemed very nervous. He hesitated and then started counting the weapons off on his fingers. “There’s a survival knife, a slingshot, a set of brass knuckles, a bullwhip, a pair of nunchucks, a policeman’s nightstick, a two-foot length of tow chain, a fifty-caliber blowgun with three darts, a can of pepper spray, and a rechargeable eight-hundred-thousand-volt stun baton.”
I stood there for a minute, trying to think about what I would pick if I had my choice. The slingshot or the blowgun would be good, because you could hurt someone from a distance. You could hurt them and then move in for the kill. All the other weapons would have to be used at close range. Depending on what you had at your disposal, close range could be risky as hell. If the other guy had a stun baton, for example, and all you had were some brass knuckles, your ass would be grass.
“Again, just out of curiosity, can you tell me what the other players got?” I said. I was trying to get a feel for what I would be up against.
“Absolutely not. That’s part of the challenge, learning what weapons the other players have and then figuring out ways to defeat them.”
“When I defeat someone, do I get to keep his weapons?”
“You obviously haven’t read the rule book yet. No. When a player dies, his weapons die with him. You’ll only have what you choose today.”
“That sucks. I’d like to make an appeal for that rule to be changed.”
More blinking. He knew I was fucking with him, but he couldn’t help himself. “I need you to go ahead and choose now, Number Eight,” he said, weariness in his voice and exasperation on his face.
When I was a kid, there was a show on television called Let’s Make a Deal. The host was a guy named Monty Hall, and he would choose people from the studio audience to be contestants on the show. The people in the audience came dressed in outrageous costumes, hoping to get his attention and become contestants and win fabulous prizes. Monty Hall would walk up to a guy dressed like a rabbit or whatever and talk to him for a couple of minutes and then ask him to choose door number one, door number two, or door number three. One of the doors always had a great prize behind it, a washing machine or a recliner or a stove or some other big-ticket household item, and another would have something small but useful like a case of instant oatmeal. If you weren’t lucky enough to choose either of those doors, you got the worthless booby prize behind the other one. Then there was the dealing part. Let’s say the guy in the rabbit suit chose door number two, and let’s say he got the good prize. Let’s say he won a new television. Monty Hall would try to make a deal with him and get him to trade for what was behind a curtain on the other side of the stage. Sometimes there was a brand-new car behind the curtain, but most of the time it was a twelve-foot-high rocking horse or some other useless piece of crap. So it was a gamble. Rabbit Man had two choices. He could sit down and be happy with his new TV or he could go for the curtain and hope for the super duper mega prize. Of course the producers of that show knew greed was part of human nature. They knew most people would try to trade up for the better prize and therefore go home with nothing. But occasionally, just often enough to keep viewers tuned in, the guy in the rabbit suit would win the new car.
When I was a kid watching that show, I always wished I was psychic or had X-ray vision or something. If I had been psychic, or if I had had X-ray vision, I could have gone on the show and I could have taken Monty Hall for all he was worth. That was my wish, and that was around the time I came up with Rule #18 in Nicholas Colt’s Philosophy of Life: Wish in one hand and spit in the other, and see which fills up first.
“I’ll take drawer number four,” I said.
He opened the drawer. It was the survival knife. He pulled it out and handed it to me. It had a black handle and a black leather sheath, and the blade was about seven inches long. It was a nice knife. I figured it would come in handy for all kinds of things, killing people being only one of them. I was happy with the choice I’d made. I felt I’d gotten lucky.
“One more,” Zachary said.
“Seven.”
“Are you sure you want drawer number seven?”
“Why, what’s wrong with seven?”
“Nothing’s wrong with it. Are you sure that’s the one you want?”
He was trying to pull a Monty Hall on me, trying to put doubt in my mind. The most powerful weapon in the cabinet was the stun baton, and the least powerful the pepper spray. I figured drawer number seven contained one of the two. Zachary was trying to get me to give up the best weapon of the bunch, or he was trying to sway me from the booby prize.
I stood my ground. There was no point in second-guessing a decision wholly dependent on random chance. “I’m sure,” I said. “Drawer number seven.”
He opened it.
It wasn’t the pepper spray, and it wasn’t the stun baton. It wasn’t the slingshot or the brass knuckles or the bullwhip. It wasn’t the billy club, and it wasn’t the tow chain or the fifty-caliber blowgun with three darts.
It was the nunchucks.
He handed them to me, two steel handles connected by a steel chain. Before I saw the collapsing rods inside, I thought the handles were only about four inches long. But with a flick of the wrist, they telescoped to three times that.
“You know how to use those?” Zachary said.
“Sure,” I said. “I watched more than my share of martial arts flicks when I was a kid.”
It was true. When I was thirteen, karate and everything that went along with it was all the rage. There were Bruce Lee movies at all the drive-in theaters, where you focused on the remarkable skill of the master and tried to ignore the terrible English overdubs. There was a wandering Buddhist monk named Kwai Chang Caine on television, pretending to be a philosopher and a pacifist but kicking umpteen kinds of ass every week, and there was even a dopey little novelty song called “Kung Fu Fighting” playing on AM radio a thousand times a day.
I never had any money to buy real ones back then, so I made my own set of nunchucks. I cut about twelve inches off the wooden handles of a couple of garden tools, drilled holes in one end, and connected them with a strand of rawhide. I practiced whizzing them over my shoulder and between my legs like they did in the movies, often conking myself on the head or racking myself in the balls. Eventually I got pretty good with them, but when my stepfather found out I’d sawed the handles off the rakes he never used anyway, he took my nunchucks away and punched me in the jaw with his fist. That was about two years before he blew his own brains out with a .44 magnum.
Zachary shut the drawers and locked the cabinet. “Goodbye,” he said. “And good luck.”
The nunchucks were pretty cool, but I didn’t know how effective they would be aga
inst some of the other weapons. I wanted the eight-hundred-thousand-volt stun baton.
“I’d like to trade for what’s behind the curtain,” I said.
Zachary turned and gave me a puzzled look and then pushed his cart out and disappeared.
I exercised for a while and practiced with the nunchucks. I did OK. I didn’t conk myself in the head or rack my balls. I read the rule book twice and refamiliarized myself with the bios on the other players and went to bed at ten o’clock.
I was tired, but I couldn’t sleep. One of the more interesting things in the rule book was the section on alliances. I was allowed to form a partnership with one other player, knowing eventually I would have to kill him or be killed by him. I didn’t see how it would work, how you could trust someone who at any time might slit your throat or bash your head in, or zap you into submission with electrical current and then slit your throat or bash your head in. I figured I would go about Snuff Tag 9 the way I’d gone about most things in my life. I figured I would go it alone.
I finally dozed off around four a.m. At five all the lights came on. An alarm sounded over the intercom, followed by the voice of Freeze.
“Good morning, gentlemen, and welcome to day one of Snuff Tag Nine. Please rise now and don your uniforms. Your escorts will be with you shortly. Best of luck to you all.”
I shaved and brushed my teeth and put on the black fatigue pants and the boots and the red number 8 jersey. I crammed the disposable razor and the can of shaving cream and the toothbrush and tube of toothpaste and the soap and shampoo and deodorant and the spool of dental floss into my backpack. If possible, I wanted to bathe and shave every day. They say it helps keep your spirits up. That’s what they tell potential prisoners of war. As an afterthought, I threw the notepad and pen from the desk in with the toiletries. Maybe I would chronicle this little adventure. Today seemed like a good day to get started on that memoir I’d always intended to write.
I amused myself with the absurdity of that thought for a second, and then I threaded my belt through the slots on the knife sheath, slid the blade in, and snapped the leather strap around the handle. I pushed the telescoping rods into the handles of the nunchucks and stowed them in the flap pocket on my right pants leg. I looked in the mirror. With the G-29 transceiver attached to my ear and the cam-collar wrapped around my neck, I looked like some sort of futuristic rugby player.
My eyes were bloodshot from sleep deprivation, but otherwise I looked OK. I was well nourished and well hydrated and physically fit, and my clarity of thought seemed as though it had actually improved over the past couple of weeks. Maybe it was because I hadn’t had any alcohol. In my normal routine there are days I don’t drink, but there aren’t that many of them. Alcohol wasn’t an addiction for me, like cigarettes had been and, more recently, narcotics, but it was a habit I was starting to think I might do well to give up. Then again, I probably wasn’t going to live through the day, so it didn’t make much sense to start worrying about lifestyle changes now. Like it or not, I was on the wagon, and I would probably never get the opportunity to fall off.
A few minutes after I got dressed, Wade came in and handed me a black bandana. Wade was my personal trainer. I hadn’t seen him in a few days. He wore a navy-blue warm-up suit and too much cologne. His short blond hair was still wet from the shower.
“How do you feel?” he said.
“Not bad, considering I only got one hour of sleep.”
“Don’t worry. All the players are anxious. Some of them didn’t get any.”
“You want me to put this on now?” I said. I knew what the bandana was for. The rule book said all of us would be blindfolded until we got to the playing field. I guessed Freeze didn’t want anyone to know the exact location of the game, even though only one man would walk out of the swamp alive.
“Yes,” Wade said. “It’s time.”
I wrapped the cloth around my head and tied it in the back. Wade checked it out to make sure I hadn’t left any peepholes.
“Does someone usually get killed the first day?” I said.
“Someone always gets killed the first day. Freeze makes sure of it. I want you to walk behind me, with your right hand on my right shoulder. We’ll take the elevator to the first floor and from there I’ll lead you to the bus.”
“Bus?” I said. It didn’t make sense to let all the players ride together. What was going to stop one of them from taking his bandana off and going on a quick little killing spree?
Wade must have read my mind.
“Nobody’s allowed to make a move during the transport,” he said. “If they do, they’ll be terminated immediately.”
“I keep forgetting everybody has one of these defibrillator things wired to their heart. I guess it’s good in a way. Everyone has to follow the rules or risk getting zapped.”
“It’s extreme, but effective,” Wade said. “You ready?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be.”
I put my hand on his shoulder and followed him out of the room that had been my home for the past two weeks. It had been a safe and comfortable abode, and I knew with certainty that the place I was headed to was going to be neither.
Wade sat next to me on the bus. We rode in silence for a while, and then he quizzed me on some of the rules.
“When does the game begin each day?”
“When the alarm sounds once,” I said. “Usually around sunrise.”
“And when does it end?”
“When the alarm sounds twice. Sunset.”
“Are any sorts of engagements allowed at night, between sunset and sunrise?”
“No.”
“That’s right. Unless Freeze says so. When are you allowed to use your weapons?”
“When the alarm sounds three times. Otherwise, weapons are illegal.”
“Yes. And when the alarm sounds four times, it means the weapons period is over. What happens if you’re caught using a weapon during a period when they’ve been prohibited?”
“Immediate termination,” I said. “No warning.”
The player in the seat behind me started crying. I could hear his sobs. I wondered which one it was. I knew it wasn’t Number Seven, the former Navy SEAL who was a diving instructor in Florida now, and I knew it wasn’t Number Six, the pilot who got his training in the Marine Corps. I was pretty sure those guys had faced death before. Maybe many times. Maybe it was Number One, the insurance salesman from Waterloo with a black belt in tae kwon do. Or Number Two, the computer programmer who played tennis at Stanford. Whoever it was, I started thinking of him as a weakling. I started thinking I would rip his whiny little face off with my bare hands as soon as I got half a chance. Freeze had gotten to me already, had stripped away part of my humanity. It was kill or be killed, and today was day one. There was no time to feel sorry for anyone, no time to think about anything but survival. I didn’t want to murder any of these guys, but I had no choice. It was them or me, and I had no intention of allowing it to be me.
“Shut the fuck up,” I said to the crier.
Wade grabbed my arm, whispered in my ear. “Relax, Number Eight. I’ve been around since the first season of Snuff Tag Nine, and I’ve seen this kind of thing more than once. Sometimes the guy really is crying, and other times he’s putting on a show to make the others think he’s weak.”
Wade was right. I felt like an idiot. I’d almost forgotten Rule #11 in Nicholas Colt’s Philosophy of Life: Never underestimate your opponent. Maybe the guy was a genuine pansy or maybe he was the best hustler on the planet.
On my thirty-first birthday I went to a nightclub in Jacksonville called Harlow’s. I went there with Joe Crawford. Joe and I were both single at the time, no wives, no girlfriends, and we were out for a night of heavy drinking and blues music. We’d taken a cab downtown and planned to take a cab home. Matt Murphy was scheduled to play, and his band included a bass player named Donald Dunn who’d done some studio work with me a few years previously. I was sipping my drink and talking to Joe,
waiting for the band to come on, thinking I would chat with Donald and Matt after their first set, when a short, dark-haired guy wearing a navy-blue nylon jacket grabbed me by the arm and said, “Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office. We need you to step outside.”
Another guy in another navy-blue nylon jacket was already pushing Joe toward the door. I’d had a few drinks and I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong and I sort of copped an attitude with the asshole who had me in a wristlock.
“I want to see your badge,” I said.
“Here’s my badge, motherfucker.”
He opened the nylon jacket. The badge was mounted on his belt. It looked real, and so did the semiautomatic pistol holstered beside it.
“What’s this all about?” I said.
“Just step outside.”
We stepped outside, and there were four police cruisers parked near the door with their red and blue lights flashing. The officer who’d escorted me out, whose name I later learned was Esselsyn, took my driver’s license and Joe’s driver’s license and read the numbers into his walkie-talkie. A few minutes later he told us what was going on.
“We got a call from one of the bartenders,” he said. “Thought the two of you looked like a pair named Hodges and Kelper. You heard about them?”
“I heard about them,” I said. “They’re wanted for murder. They drive along and randomly blast other cars with a shotgun. You thought we were them?”
“Bartender called the hotline with the tip, we had to check it out.”
“So we’re free to go?” I said.
“Yeah.”
And that was it. Officer Esselsyn didn’t apologize for rousting us out of the bar, didn’t offer to buy us a drink or anything. When we went back inside, the bartender who had made the call showed us some pictures of Hodges and Kelper that had been published in that morning’s edition of the Florida Times-Union.
Right away I saw why the bartender had made the mistake. The resemblance was uncanny. Hodges and Kelper looked like genetically inferior versions of Joe and me. They looked like the ugly versions. Our evil twins. It made me think about how being in the wrong place at the wrong time and looking like someone else can screw your life up forever. Innocent people go to prison. Innocent people get executed. It happens. It probably happens more often than anyone wants to admit.
