Snuff Tag 9 (A Nicholas Colt Thriller Book 3)

by Jude Hardin

  And one to come, Number Nine, whose identity was yet unknown.

  Number Two and Number Five were dead. Of the remaining players, I’d encountered Number One and Number Three. I hadn’t met Number Four or Number Six or Number Seven yet. Maybe I wouldn’t have to. Maybe they would die in battle before I got the chance. Then again, maybe I would be the one to die. Five people in relatively close proximity wanted that to happen. I tried not to think about it.

  The woods were still and quiet. No wind. The birds had even stopped singing. There was an ominous vibe to it, like something was about to happen. I stood up and looked around, but I didn’t see anything.

  I decided my spear was sharp enough. I bunched up some leaves to use as a target, gave it a couple of practice throws into the pile. It flew straight and true. I’m a decent barroom dart player, so my aim wasn’t bad. My arm felt good. I felt good. I felt like stripping naked and running through the woods with the spear and yelping at the top of my lungs. But I didn’t. I found a nice spot by a stand of oak trees and crouched down and waited.

  And waited.

  It was as if the squirrels were aware of my presence now, aware that I had a new tool to skewer them with. Or maybe their breakfast time was over and they were taking naps in their nests. I’d seen dozens earlier, and now there were none. Just my luck, I thought. I nibbled on some berries and waited some more.

  I heard some leaves rustling, and I turned and saw a man about fifty feet away wearing blue coveralls and a red ball cap. He was adjusting a camera mounted on a tree. It wasn’t the guy who had brought me the flashlight, but he looked familiar. I’d seen him somewhere before. He finished what he was doing and turned to walk away. That’s when he noticed me. He pulled the bill of his hat down and took off at a trot. He’d screwed up. I wasn’t supposed to have seen him. I tried to think when and where we’d met previously, but I couldn’t remember.

  I sat there and waited on the squirrels some more. Finally, after I’d been in the same spot for over an hour, one of the crummy little bushy-tailed bastards cautiously descended the trunk. He came down in nervous increments, with a stiff tail and surveying eyes. He stopped at the base of the tree, where the roots met the ground. I was close enough to see his nostrils flaring. Our eyes locked and his muscles tensed and I stood and heaved the spear in one quick and fluid motion. My aim was way off, nearly two feet to the right, but he’d started to dart that way and the spear impaled him between the shoulders. He flopped up and fell to the ground and clawed the air a few times and then lay still.

  I’d done it. I’d killed a squirrel. First try. I couldn’t believe my good luck.

  I walked to him and looked down. He wasn’t dead yet. He was still twitching. I pulled my knife and slit his throat to put him out of his misery, and then I lifted him and carried him away on the end of the spear.

  On the way home, a voice came over the G-29. A voice I hadn’t heard before.

  “Good morning, Number Eight.”

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “My name is Charles, and I’ll be your guide today.”

  “OK.”

  “I see you’ve killed a squirrel.”

  “Yeah. My lucky day, huh?”

  “In more ways than one. Since you killed another player yesterday, today is going to be a bye for you. You’re not to engage with any of the remaining players, and they’re not allowed to engage with you.”

  “I get the whole day off?” I said. “What’s the catch?”

  “No catch. Enjoy it, because tomorrow you’ll be back in the fray.”

  I walked into the clearing where my house was located.

  “Sounds good,” I said. “So why do I need a guide if I’m not going to be playing?”

  “I’ll show you in a few minutes.”

  I set the dead squirrel and the spear and the pillowcase full of berries and onions and acorns on the porch and walked inside to get a drink of water.

  I drank two cups of water, sat on my mattress for a few minutes, and waited for Charles to come back on. When he didn’t, I walked out to the porch and used my knife to skin and gut the squirrel. I’d never done it before, but I managed OK. I gathered some kindling and some large branches and used the butane lighter to start a fire. I cooked the entrails in the skillet to use for fish bait later. Raw would have been better, but I didn’t want them to lie around and rot and I didn’t have any ice or a refrigerator. I set the squirrel’s carcass, minus the skin and head and guts, directly on the makeshift grill but not directly over the fire. I wanted it to roast slowly, over an hour or so. I scooted some hot embers under it, and occasionally a drop of fat would land with a sizzle and let me know it was cooking.

  “Hello, Number Eight. It’s me, Charles, again.”

  “Hello, Charles.”

  “I want you to go inside now. We have a surprise for you.”

  “I don’t want to leave my meat unattended here. It might burn.”

  “It looks like it’s cooking very slowly. It’ll be fine. This won’t take long.”

  I lifted the skillet and carried it to the house and left it and the steaming squirrel guts on the porch. The blob of organs and intestines actually smelled pretty good. I was tempted to eat it myself. I was very hungry.

  I walked inside, and to my amazement there was a flat-screen television against the wall adjacent to my bed. It was fairly large, thirty-seven inches, I guessed.

  “Where did this come from?” I said.

  “From a recessed cavity under your floor. Nifty, eh? I accessed the motorized lift remotely. It’s all closed circuit, so don’t get any ideas about watching Seinfeld reruns or something tonight. Now, have a seat on your mattress there and enjoy the show. This is live, by the way. What you’ll be watching is in real time.”

  I sat on the mattress and looked at the screen. Outside, I heard the alarm sound once and then three times in a row. The game was on, and weapons were allowed.

  The video faded in.

  Number One was walking through the woods. He heard the alarm sound, pulled out his nightstick. The bullwhip was looped and attached to his belt. He crept slowly through the brush, breathing heavily. Continuously looking left and right. Occasionally checking his back to make sure nobody was behind him. He reminded me of the squirrel. Hyperaware and ready to take action at a moment’s notice.

  The video cut to a harshly lit interior. There was a concrete floor with oil stains on it and a lawn mower draped with clear plastic and a Ping-Pong table folded up and rolled to the side. It was the inside of a residential garage. It was the room I’d seen on video before, where they’d beheaded Nathan Broadway. A new man was sitting in the middle of the room, strapped to a wooden chair with duct tape. There was a black hood over his head. Otherwise he was naked. There was a Japanese samurai sword mounted on the wall several feet behind him.

  The video cut back to Number One stalking through the woods. I could see how this was going to go. It was going to cut back and forth between the interior scene and the exterior scene. They were going to show me two murders occurring simultaneously. I didn’t want to watch either one of them. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t turn away.

  Number One came to a clearing. In the middle of the clearing, there was a house identical to mine. The camera zoomed in on the porch. There was a brass 3 tacked to one of the supports. It was Number Three’s house. I’d been inside it yesterday when I stole the stun baton. Number One and Number Three had been partners yesterday, and now they were going to be forced to battle. Number One had two weapons, the nightstick and the whip, but Number Three only had a partial canister of pepper spray. Number One got down on the ground and started belly crawling toward the shack. He had more weapons, and he had the element of surprise on his side. He was going to win. I would have put money on it.

  Someone walked up to the hooded man strapped to the chair. It was someone I hadn’t seen before. He was wearing a black T-shirt and tight leather pants. The camera cut to a close-up of his hand.
He was holding a shiny silver scalpel. The camera cut to a two-shot as Leather Pants made a short incision along the back of Hooded Man’s left arm.

  “Fuck you,” Hooded Man shouted. He was hoarse, and his voice was muffled and distorted because of the hood. “Fuck you, and fuck your mother, you worthless piece of shit.”

  Leather Pants laughed. “You’ll be begging for mercy before I’m done with you. I can promise you that. Just tell me what I want to know and I’ll make it quick and painless.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Leather Pants made another incision, this time on the back of Hooded Man’s right arm. Blood flowed from both wounds in a steady stream. Leather Pants grabbed a bottle of rubbing alcohol, screwed the top off, and doused the incisions.

  Hooded Man screamed.

  Number Three walked out to his porch, holding what looked like a pillowcase full of stones. He’d made his own weapon with the materials on hand. He’d been in a good position to go far in the game with the stun baton, but he didn’t have it anymore. I’d stolen it from him. Now he had a bag of rocks. He spotted Number One crawling toward his house. You could see it in his eyes. Then, Number One saw that he’d been spotted. You could see it in his eyes. Number One rose and ran toward the house with the bullwhip in one hand and the nightstick in the other.

  “You motherfucker,” Hooded Man shouted. “Oh my god, you’re going to fucking die.”

  “You really need to watch your mouth,”Leather Pants said.

  Leather Pants knelt down in front of the chair.

  “What are you doing?” Hooded Man said. “Wait. Don’t do that. Wait! Wait!”

  The camera zoomed in to a close-up of Leather Pants pulling the skin of Hooded Man’s scrotum taut with his left hand. With his right hand he made a midline incision with the scalpel. Blood oozed from the site.

  Number Three stood there and let Number One come. When Number One got close enough, Number Three aimed the Mace canister toward him and started spraying. But Number One had been expecting it. He shielded his eyes with his arm, reared back, and cracked the whip. The canister flew from Number Three’s hand and rattled to the back of the porch. Now Number One went at it with no mercy, lashing Number Three with the whip again and again and again. Number Three slung the bag of rocks toward Number One’s head, but Number One ducked, and the bag dropped harmlessly to the ground. Now Number Three was weaponless. He retreated into his house, and Number One followed.

  Hooded Man screamed and thrashed, but he was strapped to the wooden armchair with duct tape and the chair was bolted to the floor. He was helpless. Leather Pants reached into the bloody pouch with his ungloved fingers and with a cut here and a cut there liberated both of Hooded Man’s testicles.

  “There,” Leather Pants said. “Now you won’t have to worry about getting some bitch pregnant.”

  Hooded Man was heaving and gasping and screaming. I couldn’t see the expression on his face, but I knew it was one of unimaginable terror.

  “Fuck you, you cock-sucking son of a bitch,” Hooded Man said.

  Leather Pants rolled the testicles in his hand like a pair of dice and then threw them overhand at the wall behind Hooded Man. They splattered under the samurai sword. Leather Pants reached between Hooded Man’s legs, grabbed his penis and stretched it out, and severed it at the base with the scalpel. He forced the organ into Hooded Man’s mouth.

  “Now who’s the cocksucker?” Leather Pants said. He laughed big and loud.

  I couldn’t take it anymore.

  “How much of this shit am I going to have to watch?” I shouted. “You hear me, Charles? Freeze? You sick motherfuckers.”

  “It’s almost over,” Charles said. “Keep watching. There’s a nice twist at the end.”

  I looked at the screen. My stomach lurched, and I tasted the sour blackberries in the back of my throat. Number One discarded the whip and followed Number Three into the house with the nightstick raised overhead. He was moving in for the kill. That’s what he thought. But when he got inside, there was a surprise waiting for him. Number Three had taken the mattress off his bed frame, as I had, but Number Three wasn’t using his for a cooking surface. He had created an electrocution device.

  The camera showed some flashback close-ups in quick succession, illustrating the method behind Number Three’s madness. He had pulled the electrical cord from his lamp, stripped the ends to expose the wires, and wrapped the bare wires into the springs on his cot. The plug was on the floor, not yet inserted into the 120-volt outlet.

  Number One looked around, puzzled. By the time he realized what was going on, it was too late.

  Number Three had been standing behind the door. He jumped out, shoved Number One onto the bed frame, quickly grabbed the plug, and jammed it into the electrical outlet. There was a loud buzzing sound and Number One went into convulsions and started foaming at the mouth. He flopped around like a fish out of water, and blood oozed from his ears and eyeballs, and after a few seconds his scalp started smoking. He was being cooked from the inside.

  Satisfied that Number One was good and dead, Number Three pulled the plug.

  That scene between Number One and Number Three was the nice twist at the end, I thought.

  But I was wrong.

  The screen switched back to the drama in the garage interior, with Leather Pants and Hooded Man, and I gazed in horror as my life changed forever.

  Leather Pants snatched the hood off the man strapped to the chair.

  It was Joe Crawford, my best friend in the whole world.

  “No!” I shouted. “Oh, hell fucking no, you crazy motherfuckers.”

  I got up and kicked the television. I kicked it like I was punting a football, but the screen didn’t break. It didn’t go black. The video kept rolling. My heart bounced around in my chest like a bat in a can. I couldn’t catch my breath.

  Leather Pants grabbed the sword from the wall. He gripped it with both hands, like a baseball bat. I figured Joe’s head was going to get chopped off now, the way Nathan Broadway’s had. At least it was going to be over soon for my dear friend, I thought.

  But I thought wrong.

  Leather Pants dribbled some rubbing alcohol on all of Joe’s wounds. He dribbled some on the incisions on the backs of Joe’s arms and on his missing genitals. Joe had been on the verge of passing out, but the stinging alcohol woke him up. It brought him back to a high state of arousal. He snapped right out of it. His muscles tensed and he started screaming wildly.

  Leather Pants capped the alcohol bottle and set it on the floor. He hefted the sword overhead like an axe, came down hard, and sliced Joe’s left hand off at the wrist. The hand fell to the floor, and blood pulsed out in squirts from the severed artery in Joe’s arm. That was it, I thought. Joe would bleed out quickly, and it would be over for him. But Leather Pants had other ideas. He walked off camera for a second and came back holding a metal clamp, the kind used on cars for radiator hoses. He fitted the clamp around Joe’s arm, just above where his wrist used to be, and tightened it with a screwdriver. The bleeding stopped immediately. Leather Pants walked offstage again and this time came back holding an electric power drill. He pulled the trigger a couple of times, and the camera zoomed in on the rotating steel bit. God only knew what the crazy son of a bitch was going to do with that drill, but I refused to watch anymore. I walked outside to the porch and leaned over the railing and retched into the dirt.

  “I’m going to kill you, Freeze. You hear me, you motherfucker? As long as I’m able to take a breath, my sole purpose in life is going to be to see you suffer and die.”

  Freeze came on the G-29. He laughed. “Good luck with that,” he said. “You brought this on, you know. You’re responsible for what’s happening to your friend right now.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “No, it’s true. You guessed he was going to be the ninth player, and you were right. You took all the fun out of it. You ruined my surprise. Now I’ll have to find someone else, and there’s not a lot of time lef
t. If you had kept your mouth shut, your friend would be just fine right now. Let that be a lesson.”

  A mixture of guilt and anger roiled through me, as though my heart had been plucked from my chest and stuffed into an electric blender.

  “Fuck you,” I said again. “I will take your ass down, Freeze. Somehow I’m going to take your ass down.”

  He laughed again. “Since you won’t stay in the house and watch, I’m going to give you a play-by-play commentary over the G-29. How about that? Javier Lorenzo, my beautiful young man in the leather pants, is now drilling a series of holes into the back of Mr. Crawford’s skull. Javier is so good with tools. He’s such a manly man. The bit must be getting pretty hot, because there’s little plumes of smoke coming from the site where Javier is drilling. But it must not hurt much. Mr. Crawford isn’t thrashing about and screaming like he was before. Oh, my. I hope he hasn’t lost consciousness. That wouldn’t be any fun, now would it? I’ll be right back, Number Eight. I need to have a word with Javier.”

  I walked out to my fire pit. The squirrel looked done. The meat had turned from pink to golden brown. The embers had mostly died, so there was no chance of the animal burning now. Not that I cared. I didn’t give a rat’s ass about the squirrel now, or anything else. My best friend since sixth grade was dying a slow and horribly painful death, and there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t help him, the way he’d helped me against Kenny and Calvin in the boys’ restroom at Hallows Cove Elementary. And Freeze was right. It was my fault. I never should have let them know what I suspected, that Joe was going to be the ninth player. If I’d kept my mouth shut, Joe would still be OK. He would still have his balls and his dick and his left hand. He wouldn’t be duct taped to a chair right now, with a lunatic in leather pants named Javier drilling holes in his head.

  I wanted to run away. I wanted to yank the G-29 off my ear and fling it into the ashes and run and run and run until I was far away from this hell. I wanted to run away, but that would have been tantamount to suicide. If I ran, Freeze would push the red button on his remote and fry my heart with the internal defibrillator. I didn’t want that to happen because now, more than ever, I wanted to stay alive. I wanted to stay alive and win the game and figure out a way to mercilessly obliterate Fatboy Billionaire. I wanted to shove him into a giant meat grinder and make hamburger out of his fat ass and then feed him to his mysterious Sexy Bastards. I didn’t want there to be any evidence that he had ever existed.