by Jude Hardin
The ordeal had my heart pounding, much as it was pounding now. I was on my way to the swamp with a busload of guys who wanted to kill me. Random chance had put me here. Wrong place, wrong time. If one of the two private investigators ahead of me in the phone book had answered Nathan Broadway’s call, I wouldn’t be dealing with this shit right now. I would have never heard of Freeze and The Sexy Bastards and Snuff Tag 9. It was all so ridiculous and absurd, just like the night Joe and I got hustled out of Harlow’s by JSO homicide detectives for crimes we didn’t commit.
“You OK?” Wade said.
“Yeah. I was just thinking about something.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“I don’t belong here,” I said. “This was never supposed to be me. It’s like the time I was almost locked up for someone else’s crime. It’s just—”
“You going to start crying, like that guy back there?”
“Fuck you, Wade. You’re not the one on the way to the slaughterhouse.”
“You don’t have to die,” he said. “You just have to win the game.”
“Do you think I even have a shot?”
He hesitated. “It doesn’t matter what I think. All that matters is what you think. You have to believe in yourself. You have to, or you’ll never make it through day one.”
I took a deep breath. I sensed we were getting close to our destination.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s go over the rules again.”
And we did.
The bus slowed and made a series of turns and then hissed to a stop.
“Are we there yet?” I said.
“We’re there,” Wade said. “I want you to put your hand on my shoulder, same as you did when we left your room. I’m going to lead you to your house, where you’ll be staying for the duration of the game.”
“OK.”
We disembarked, and I kept my hand on Wade’s shoulder. We started out on pavement, moved to what felt like a trail lined with pine needles, and finally walked into some fairly heavy underbrush. We trudged through the thickets and thistles at a lazy pace for maybe thirty minutes. I figured we traveled a mile or so west of the beaten path. I knew it was west because the sun was directly behind us. I heard a splash at one point, a small one like a fish jumping, and Wade told me we were walking past a pond. A few minutes later we stopped.
“You can take your blindfold off now,” Wade said.
I took my blindfold off. We were standing in a clearing, and at the center of the clearing was a wood-frame structure the size of a large garden shed. It had cedar lap siding and a window and a metal roof. It was yellow with white trim. It looked like a kid’s playhouse. There was even a small front porch with a brass number 8 tacked to one of the support posts.
“Home sweet home,” I said. “Can I go inside?”
“Absolutely. This is your place. You can do anything you want to here. Within the constraints of the game, of course.”
I stepped onto the wooden porch and opened the door and walked inside. Wade followed me in. There was a cot against one wall with white sheets and a pillow and a sleeping bag rolled up at the foot. A plywood cabinet concealed the plumbing to a stainless steel sink and chrome faucet mounted against the opposite wall.
“Where’s the bathroom?” I said.
Wade laughed. “I’m afraid you’re on your own, Number Eight. There’s a roll of toilet paper under the sink.”
“What about food?”
“The swamp is your smorgasbord. All you can eat. Free.”
“You’re joking, right? Can’t I get a pizza delivered up here or something?”
“Consider yourself lucky. This is the first year we’ve piped running water into the houses. Too many players were falling out from dehydration, so Freeze spent about a hundred grand on some deep wells and basic plumbing. Beats the hell out of boiling swamp water to drink.”
I was still concerned about the food situation. “I have a knife and a pair of nunchucks,” I said. “What am I going to do, sneak up on a squirrel and slit its throat?”
“Surviving out here is all part of the game. If you live long enough to get hungry, you’ll find a way.”
“Thanks for trying to cheer me up,” I said.
Wade took a step toward the door. “Time for me to go now, Number Eight. Best of luck to you.”
“Thanks.”
We shook hands. I stood on the porch and watched him cross the clearing and disappear into the woods.
I looked at my watch. It was 9:37. I went back into the house and got a drink of water and opened the door to the cabinet under the sink. There was a roll of toilet paper in there, as Wade had promised, and a towel and a washcloth and a bar of Ivory soap. There was also a steel frying pan, which seemed useless at the moment. Even if I was able to kill a bird or a rabbit or something, it was going to be next to impossible to start a fire. I wasn’t a Boy Scout. I didn’t know how to strike up a flame by rubbing two sticks together. Freeze could have spent an extra buck and provided us with a box of matches or a butane lighter, but he didn’t. He wanted to see who could survive five days in the swamp with barebones supplies and eight opposing players out for blood. Old Freeze. Old sport. What a game he had devised. If I made it out of this alive, I planned to spend every waking moment for the rest of my life thinking of a way to kill the fat son of a bitch.
I tossed my backpack on the floor, reclined on the cot, and stared at the ceiling and waited. There was nothing else to do. Soon I would be forced to kill someone for no good reason. I would be forced to kill someone for the fat man’s amusement. I was exhausted. I had only slept an hour. I closed my eyes for a minute, knowing I shouldn’t, and fell into a restless sleep poisoned with bizarre dreams. I was climbing some sort of jungle gym, and I kept climbing and climbing, trying to reach the top, but when I looked upward the steel bars went on to infinity, and when I looked downward they descended into a bottomless pit. I climbed higher and higher, my lungs burning and my muscles screaming in pain, and suddenly I was in a white room with black curtains and my father was there talking to me. This was my biological father, not my stepfather. My stepfather committed suicide when I was fifteen. My biological father was still alive, as far as I knew. I’d only met him once, when I was twenty-five. We got drunk on wine at an Italian restaurant and then he bought me dinner. A salad and a plate of spaghetti. It was the only time he ever bought me anything. I had only met him once, and now he was in this white room with black curtains talking to me in my dream.
“Pretend they’re me,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I said. “I don’t understand.”
“Pretend the men in the game are me. Then it will be easier to kill them. That’s what you want, isn’t it? You want to kill me. Pretend they’re me, and it will be easier.”
“I don’t want to kill anybody.”
“Yes, you do, Nicholas. Yes, you do. You want to kill me. You’ve always wanted to.”
“Seriously. I just want another glass of wine. And some more spaghetti.”
We sat at a white table in the white room and passed a silver cup back and forth. We passed it back and forth and I lit a cigarette and the smoke curled between my lips and nostrils and I inhaled it deeply and felt a euphoric calm wash over me.
“Are you still hungry?” my father said.
“No. Not anymore.”
“Kill me, then. Do it now, and then we can eat.”
I laughed, knowing what he said didn’t make any sense. I laughed and I took another drag on the cigarette, and an obnoxious high-pitched piercing wail penetrated my eardrums and drilled its way into the core of my brain.
It was the alarm. Time to play the game.
I sprang out of bed and pulled my knife from its sheath, and then I remembered you couldn’t use weapons unless the alarm sounded four times. It had only sounded once. At least that’s what I thought. I put the knife back and secured it and looked out the window. Nothing.
The audio on the G-29 earpie
ce buzzed to life and a voice said, “Hello, Number Eight.”
“Hello,” I said. “Who’s this?”
“You can call me Ray. There are two boxes under your cot. I want you to pull out the one on your left.”
“OK.”
I knelt down and looked under the cot. There were two boxes. I hadn’t noticed them before. The one on the right was the size of a shoebox. The one on the left was much smaller, like a box for a wristwatch or a necklace. I grabbed the smaller box on the left, as Ray had instructed.
“Do you have the box?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Open it.”
I opened it. It was a compass. An old-fashioned compass the size of a stopwatch, with a brass housing and a glass face.
“It’s a compass,” I said.
“I want you to leave your house and start walking north,” Ray said.
I had wondered how they were going to orchestrate the battles, and now I knew. Each player was given a compass and instructed to travel in a certain direction. Eventually the players Freeze wanted to match up would collide. I took the toiletries out of the backpack and stowed them under the sink with the toilet paper and the washcloth and the bar of Ivory soap and tossed the notepad and pen on the cot under my pillow. I walked out to the porch and looked at the compass and headed north. It was ten fifteen. The sky was clear, and the sun to my right beamed dots of brightness through the canopy. Cameras everywhere, mounted on poles and tree branches. They didn’t try to hide them. No sound but the occasional chirp from a bird or rustle from a squirrel or electric servo from a camera tracking me as I made my way through the brush. I walked by an area roped off with the red plastic tape they used to define boundaries. I was tempted to duck under the tape and sprint eastward. To the east was the road the bus had come in on. To the east was freedom. But I remembered the video and knew better than to veer to the other side of the tape. Doing so would mean instant death. I had no choice but to continue north, the direction Ray had dictated.
I walked into a clearing and Ray said, “Stop. Be on your guard, Number Eight. Your first opponent will arrive soon.”
I stopped, looked in every direction, didn’t see anyone. I backed up against an oak tree and waited. Listened. There was a fat branch low enough for me to reach, so I heaved myself up and climbed high enough to be hidden by the leaves. Ray didn’t say anything, so I must not have broken any rules. There was a camera mounted to a branch a few feet away from me. Its servo hummed to life and the lens swiveled in my direction. I felt like giving it the finger or sticking my tongue out at it or something, but I didn’t. Freeze had me by the balls and there was no point in antagonizing him. As much as I wanted to, there was no point in it.
I was in a good spot. I was in the catbird seat. Literally. From my tree branch I could see the entire clearing, so no chance of my opponent sneaking up on me. I waited. Sweat trickled down my back, and blood swished through my arteries in bounding waves. I was hyperalert. The short nap had done me good.
I scanned the area left to right, and then in my peripheral vision I saw him. You could see those red jerseys they gave us from a mile away. It was Number Two, the computer programmer from Hannibal, Missouri. The Stanford graduate. The tennis player. It made sense that Freeze matched us up. He was six feet tall and weighed one sixty-five, about the same as me. About the same as me before I was abducted. I think I’d lost a few pounds since then. There was a slingshot sticking out of one of Number Two’s pockets, and it looked like another pocket was full of ammunition, rocks or whatever. I couldn’t see his second weapon. It would have been hard to conceal the bullwhip, the nightstick, the tow chain, the blowgun, or the stun baton, so I figured his other weapon was the brass knuckles or the pepper spray or the collapsible nunchucks. Or the survival knife. My knife was fairly well concealed under the tails of my jersey, so his could have been too. He crept along the perimeter of the clearing, eyes darting here and there at the least sound. He was nervous. More nervous than I was, if that was possible. He didn’t want this any more than I did. But one of us had to die. That was the deal. In a matter of minutes, one of us wouldn’t be breathing anymore.
I waited for him to stroll past the tree, thinking I would pounce from above and finish him with no warning. I would knock him to the ground with my momentum and then break his neck with a quick jerk. But he never strolled past the tree. He did something I never would have expected. He walked to the center of the clearing and sat on the ground. He folded his legs in the lotus position and just sat there with his eyes closed. It looked like he was meditating.
It was a clever thing to do, when I thought about it. From his position he could hear if anyone started to come his way, and he had time to get up and prepare himself for a response. It would have been a bad move if the weapons alarm had sounded. If the weapons alarm had sounded, another player with a slingshot or a blowgun or even a knife could have wounded him from a distance and then moved in for the kill. But the weapons alarm had not sounded. No weapons allowed. Breaking that rule meant instant termination, so nobody was going to break that rule. So Number Two was smart. Sitting at the center of the clearing was as good as or better than being hidden in the treetops. Better, I decided. If someone saw me and climbed up after me I had nowhere to go. This wasn’t a Hollywood movie, and my name wasn’t Tarzan. There were no vines to grab on to and swing to another tree. One of the stronger players could grab my leg and yank me down and that would probably be it. The fall would probably kill me. No more climbing up in trees, I decided, unless weapons were green-lighted. Then it would be a different ball game.
“Time to engage, Number Eight,” Ray said.
“I’m still planning my strategy,” I said.
“Time to engage. You have sixty seconds to climb down from that tree. Starting now.”
I looked across the clearing at Number Two. His eyes were still closed. Good-looking kid. I was sure his parents were very proud of him. Second seed on the tennis team at Stanford. Good job now as a computer programmer. Good money, bright future. And today it would all come to a screeching halt. Today it would come to a brutal and violent end, because it was him or me, and it damn sure wasn’t going to be me.
“Thirty seconds, Number Eight,” Ray said.
“Fuck. All right, I’m coming down.”
I climbed down from the tree and sprinted toward Number Two. His eyes opened wide and he stood and took a defensive position. Like a boxer. I guess he thought we were going to have a bare-knuckle fistfight, but that wasn’t what I had in mind. I barreled toward him, and when I got close I dived in with my shoulder aimed at his knee. In football it would have been called a personal foul. In football my team would have been penalized fifteen yards. But this wasn’t football. We were fighting for our lives. Everything was fair.
I tried to clip his knee with my shoulder, but he dodged the blow and I tumbled into a somersault and landed back on my feet. Before I had a chance to fully recover, to fully regain my balance, he came at me like a bullet and head-butted me in the gut. I stumbled backward and fell to the ground. He’d knocked the wind out of me. I couldn’t breathe. He straddled me and started pummeling me in the face with his fists. He caught me with a couple of good ones to the nose, and I tasted the blood as it trickled down my throat. Now it was even harder to breathe. For a second the world went purple and I thought I was going to pass out. That would have been the end of me. But I didn’t pass out. He hit me squarely in the jaw with his right hand, and I heard something crack. It wasn’t my jaw. It was his hand. He’d broken his hand. My face was going to be bruised badly where he hit me, but he got the worst of it. His hand was shattered. I heard the bones crunch. It sounded like someone stepped on a box of pencils.
“Shit!” he shouted. He got up and cupped his right hand in his left and held it against his chest and paced around in tight circles. He was obviously in excruciating pain. You could see it in his face. His eyes and lips were screwed into an expression of extreme agony.<
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I managed to rise and stumble toward him. Dazed and dizzy. It felt like the earth beneath me was falling away. He swung with a left hook, but I ducked and nailed him with a solid punch to the rib cage. While he was still trying to figure out what hit him, I grabbed his busted hand and squeezed it as hard as I could. His ears turned purple and his eyes rolled back in his head. I kept squeezing until he fell to his knees. His pained expression turned to one of resignation. He was done. He knew it was all over for him. I cocked my right arm, intending to give him a karate chop to the windpipe and finish him off, but before I delivered the fatal blow the alarm wailed three times in quick succession. That meant weapons were allowed now. No point in risking an injury to my hand, I thought, so I went for the blade.
I was going to slit his throat, but a split second after I gripped the knife’s handle a million volts of electric-blue acid flooded my eyeballs. It was the pepper spray. He’d reached into a pocket and pulled it out as soon as the alarm sounded. He’d pulled it out and sprayed it directly at my face. He’d beaten me to the draw. Now I was blind, and a mixture of tears and snot and saliva and blood flowed from my eyes and nose and mouth and dribbled off my chin like a leaky faucet. The tables had turned. He had the advantage now. I couldn’t see a damn thing.
I pulled the knife from its sheath and started swiping wildly at the air, hoping to fend off any further assaults, hoping to keep him at bay until my vision cleared. I knew he couldn’t operate the slingshot with one hand. No way. I was enjoying a measure of satisfaction in knowing that when he started pelting me in the head with the rocks from his pocket. He was throwing with his left hand, so the stones weren’t traveling at the velocity they would have been with his right, but they were traveling fast enough. They hurt, and I felt cuts open up on the right side of my neck and my right cheek. Then one hit me dead center in the forehead. He must have heaved it with all his might, with all he had left. It hit me like a sledgehammer. My knees went weak. I was going down. I struggled to stay on my feet, but it was no use. I’d suffered too many blows to the head.
