The Dying Game

by J. D. Heath

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1: GINA

  CHAPTER 2 MORGAN

  CHAPTER 3: GINA

  CHAPTER 4: MORGAN

  CHAPTER 5: GINA

  CHAPTER 6: MORGAN

  CHAPTER 7: GINA

  CHAPTER 8: MORGAN

  CHAPTER 9 GINA

  CHAPTER 10: MORGAN

  CHAPTER 11: GINA

  CHAPTER 12: MORGAN

  CHAPTER 13: GINA

  CHAPTER 14: MORGAN

  CHAPTER 15: GINA

  CHAPTER 16: MORGAN

  CHAPTER 17: GINA

  CHAPTER 18: MORGAN

  CHAPTER 19: GINA

  CHAPTER 20: MORGAN

  CHAPTER 1: GINA

  I wake up out of a strange, dream-filled sleep with my tongue swollen and sticky and my eyes gritty. I try to move, to sit up and shake that dream off, but I can’t. I’m on my back, every limb held fast by some sort of restraint. I try to cry out and that’s when I realize that the sticky thing isn’t just my tongue, it’s some sort of gag.

  What the literal fuck is happening?

  My adrenaline spikes, making my heartbeat race. My pulse elevates, and sweat beads up on my forehead. Panic careens in. My brain sends out a burst of white noise followed by a primal, desperate scream that can’t break past the gag in my mouth.

  Noooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  No. God no! This isn’t happening. It can’t be happening. Déjà vu hits, making a large crater form in my stomach, making my limbs go weak and loose and hot. I need to pee, badly. I can’t breathe. Horror and terror combine, creating some sort of emotion that’s so awful and raw I know I can’t withstand it.

  This is something I’ve felt before.

  Yes, I have felt this before. That terrible understanding makes my breath gallop out of my nostrils in too-fast breaths. Red dots dance across a field of black and I know my eyes are squeezed tightly shut in a feeble attempt to pretend this isn’t happening.

  It’s happening. You know it is. So breathe, goddammit, and think. Think. Scope out the situation as best as you can. Find a flaw in the trap and you’ll find the way out of it.

  This I also know, and all too well. I struggle to control my breath, to get it slowed to a more regular pace. I’m going to hyperventilate if I don’t. That will be bad. I’ll use up whatever oxygen’s available and that will be a fatal mistake, a mistake I just can’t afford to make. There’s a thin weal of panic just below that forced breath control I’m practicing, a rim of panic that could tilt everything toward the wrong side, and I have to control it before it bursts wide open and takes me into full-fledged terror.

  I have to focus on something beyond my breathing. My fingers can move. I wriggle them. My toes next. I can stretch my legs and arms a bit and I do. The rushing of my blood into muscle makes me wince. Little prickles start under my skin, making it itch.

  What’s happening?

  I don’t know but I do know I’m alive. I can feel blood flowing to my extremities, sending oxygen and heat into them. I hang on to the pain, the itchy little pricks and tingles moving below my skin as the oxygen and the blood flows through me. I’m alive. Those things are proof of my life. I hang on to the feel of my lungs expanding and collapsing again, the feel of my ribs moving against my tethered and anchored arms. I’m bound and I’m trapped in a place that’s small and confining. Horror rockets into life, refusing to be held back no matter how much I need to stave it off, to keep it at bay.

  For a moment I just give in to the panic, give in to the fear. I try to scream but it gets stuck in my throat and now I really can’t breathe. My chest rises and falls in rapid cycles of inhalations and exhalations that make me light-headed.

  The light changes, goes slightly brighter and takes on an amber hue. I know that light, it’s an overhead, a bulb. I force myself to focus, to stop trying to scream, and that’s when I feel the motion below my body, a jerky, hesitant movement.

  I’m in some kind of box. I can feel its shape encasing me. A coffin? Am I dead? Or just trapped? What’s moving the box?

  It all comes rushing back to me. The cops who’d shown up at the bar. Them hustling me into the back of a car. The dead man on the ground. The questions the cops asked me.

  I’d seen him die, yes. But the woman who’d killed him probably had good reason to do what she did. No way was I telling them a single thing.

  At some point one of the cops had walked away. There’d been a parade of faces outside the window of the squad car. They stared in at me and I’d stared back, not moving.

  There was no evidence that I’d killed. I hadn’t killed that guy in the bar. The woman who’d killed him had hit him in the head with a bottle then used the broken end of it to stab him in the throat. All they had to do was check the bottle.

  Not my prints.

  Not my DNA.

  Simple.

  I said so. That’s when one turned to me and said, “All the witnesses say it was you.”

  Witnesses. The best friend and worst enemy of criminals everywhere. Nobody really has time to gather all the information when they’re in the middle of a huge traumatic event, and seeing a crime, especially a murder, playing out in front of you is some seriously traumatic shit. Nobody gets all the details.

  But the woman who’d killed that guy did have dark hair, and so did I. She’d been wearing all black. So was I. So yeah. But even so, there was no evidence that would say I was the woman who’d killed that man.

  Even knowing that didn’t ease my mind. I kept telling myself to just breathe, to let them run the bottle’s evidence.

  Then a weird thing had happened. They’d pulled the car over. One of the cops turned around. He sprayed something at me.

  My first thought had been, mace! Only why he’d be spraying me with mace was beyond me. I wasn’t fighting. Hell I wasn’t even speaking. I held my breath when the reek of chemicals tinged the air because by then I’d known there was something wrong, really wrong, but the cop in the passenger seat slid a metal panel over the mesh that separated me from them and eventually—well eventually I’d had to breathe.

  Had to.

  I’d lost it for a second, kicking at the doors and windows, trying to get my hands out of the cuffs. That used up my precious stores of oxygen and I knew better than that, knew better than to panic and to let myself use up precious air.

  And now I’m here, in some kind of box, held down by restraints and with a gag in my mouth.

  Okay. So that’s the situation. I’m in a trap. Find the flaw in the trap and you can get out of it. The light gets stronger. My eyes, used to darkness, adjust slowly. I make out the shape of the light, rectangular but shot through with small holes. Clearly a space meant to let air in so I could breathe.

  Fine.

  I’ll breathe.

  I do that, dragging in large breaths that send more oxygen coursing through my body. I wiggle my toes and fingers, flex my muscles. Legs first, then belly and arms. The muscles in my neck. Nothing hurts or feels broken.

  I’m alive and not injured, at least for now.

  My head clears again. That movement. Either I’m being carried or I’m on some kind of belt that’s slowly moving me along. Horror spikes through me. Could they be putting me into a furnace? Am I about to be cremated?

  I sniff hard, dragging air into my nostrils. I smell my own sweat and the funky aroma that is spent adrenaline and whatever drug they used on me. But I don’t smell flame. Not that I’m sold on the idea that I would, but the thought that I can’t soothes me so that I cling to that.

  The movement stops. The box drops a bit. Hear a slight squeaking sound, then a few hard coughs. My heart beat ramps up and I have to concentrate, to focus on flexing my muscles and breathing, to knock it back down to a normal pace.
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br />   There’s sounds. Feet moving on floors, more coughs. The low drone of a voice. The coughing ends. Silence.

  The box is seized by something then lifted. I fly upright, still held fast by the restraints. I’m on my feet, but unable to move. The lid snaps off. The light, full and bright, hits my eyes. Water spurts from the corners of my eyes and I blink, moistening my eyeballs.

  I track my gaze left and right. What the hell? There’s cells, small rooms with heavy bars all around, not unlike dog pens, arranged in a two short rows on the far end of the room.

  There’s a walkway, a dangerous looking set of metal stairs that go straight upward and end at a room faced with more bars that are also covered by what I’m guessing is bullet and shatter-proof glass. The roof is made of heavy steel beams running in long arcs across the poured concrete ceiling. It’s clear to see that I’ve fetched up in a prison, but which one? And why?

  I’m not alone. Next to me is a young girl, her mouth distended by the gag, which is a hard bit of metal holding a thick leather centerpiece. She looks furious. I can’t say I blame her. Her blonde hair’s soaked with sweat and her blue eyes are wide, fringed with what must be lash extensions. She looks familiar but I don’t know why.

  We’re arranged in two rows, facing each other. I count five on the opposite row, five in the row I’m in. Ten of us, trussed up like Thanksgiving turkeys, so to speak, and all of us in a prison.

  Fright makes my heart bolt upward into an unsustainable pace. I have to slow it down or I’m going to die from a heart attack. I shift a bit, finding no ease from the painful position but the slight motion helps to send a trigger to my brain, a trigger that says I can move, so I still have a shot at breaking free.

  The only time you’re well and truly fucked is when you’re dead. Until you’re dead, you still have a chance.

  Three men walk toward us. One man is slightly ahead of the others. Clearly he’s the boss here. He’s six-foot-five, easy. Maybe taller. Very thin, nearly cadaverous. His skin has a greyish pallor and his very dark eyes are gimlet-bright under thick, snow-white brows. His hair is the same thick white.

  He stops in the precise center of us. He holds his hands up and out, like he’s about to crank up some unseen symphony. He speaks. “Whoever sheds human blood, by humans shall their blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made mankind.”

  Genesis 9: 6.

  I know that verse. Well. That he’s using it sends apprehension along my heart and nervous system. My belly feels likes it gone to liquid. Something’s happening here, and I don’t know what it is. I don’t like that, not at all.

  We all just gape at him. We can’t speak through the gags. He smiles at us. His lips are very red and his teeth very white, giving him a vulpine look. My eyes go to the man to the speaker’s right.

  My pulse picks up again, making my ears ring as I recognize him. His face was plastered all over the news last year. His name’s Tayne Duty. He’s a killer, all right. They found him with the bodies of his parents. He’d done…things…to his mother’s corpse. The guy has a spicy Oedipus complex, to put it in the politest of terms.

  He also confessed to being the Reaper, a serial killer that stalked the city last year, leaving a trail of eleven bodies in that killing spree’s bloody wake.

  I wonder why he confessed. They only had him for the killing of his parents, not for the Reaper killings. He gave the confession, and went radio silent, refusing to speak at all.

  He’s a scrawny guy, all angles and sharp angles. His hair, a thin sheaf of dark blond, is buzzed neatly in the typical prison cut. His eyes, deep-set and too wide, stare at me. I look away from him.

  Beside him is a guy who’s the exact opposite. Very well-built. Dark hair, light eyes. High cheekbones and jaw covered by a well-cut beard. He looks like the kind of guy you’d be more apt to see pouting from an underwear ad than strapped into a metal box in the middle of what has to be the craziest prison ever created.

  The speaker breaks the pause he created. “My name’s Norton. I’m in charge here. Here, being the Fortress. You, all of you, are participants in the Dying Game.”

  Nope. This isn’t good at all. My legs lock. I know it’s futile but I strain against the bonds, which are metal and unyielding.

  He continues speaking, his voice droning on. “And for your lifeblood I will surely demand an accounting. I will demand an accounting from every animal. And from each human being, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of another human being.”

  Genesis 9:5. I strain harder, still knowing it’s useless.

  The other two men head for the last box on the opposite side. A guy, slightly paunchy and very red, squirming madly, is in the box. They press a large metal thing against his arm. There’s a soft, whooshing sound. He groans and squirms harder. They ignore that and kneel to place a wide band of metal around his right ankle.

  The men go from one of us to the next. When it’s my turn I watch carefully as they press the metal tube to my arm. The whoosh sends something against my skin, and then through it. The sting is immediate, and sharp. My teeth bite down on the gag as outrage snaps into life. A little bead of blood shows on my arm when they take the metal thing away and I stare at it, my thoughts swinging in so many different directions I can’t catch hold to a single one.

  The metal band is cold when they first put it on, but it warms as it rests against my skin. Norton watches carefully, saying nothing, which is a relief. I hate people quoting Scripture at me.

  Finally we’re all done. I manage to get a good deep breath through my nose and it helps to calm me down a little but I’m still feeling light-headed. I don’t know if it’s from the drugs they used on me or if it’s from this, this surreal thing that may or may not be a dream.

  I’m pretty sure it’s not a dream, really, but one can always hope, right?

  The men come back around, carefully removing our gags. Every one of us groan with relief. My mouth’s so dry my lips stick to my teeth for a second. I run my tongue between them, feeling the shape of incisors and lips and familiar spaces. It doesn’t center me or slake my thirst but at least now my jaw can relax.

  The good looking guy shouts, “What the fuck’s this shit? Let me out of this box, right now!”

  Norton smiles that cunning, foxy smile at us. “Oh you’ll be out soon. But first I’m going to explain the way things work here. You’re in the Fortress. It’s a very secure prison, and there’s no possible escape for you. Rest assured, I mean that. If you to try to run we’ll track you with the implants in your arm and the device around your ankle. Should you decide to try to remove the band around you’re ankle, the small but very powerful explosive device within will detonate.”

  A sick, gut-punched feeling hits me. My gaze goes down to my ankle. I can’t think past the horror of that, the idea of being blown to bits.

  The blonde girl next to me begins to giggle. It’s a short, sharp burst of sound that echoes around the room. Norton smiles at her. Eventually she stops.

  Norton continues, “The screens, please.”

  Screens drop down from the steel beams, unfurling slowly like a bad dream. Cameras must be hidden in the walls and ceilings because the angles change, swooping in for close-ups of our faces and then panning out to show our helpless poses within our individual boxes. On one screen, Tayne’s face appears. Norton says, “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you…The Reaper.”

  My stomach goes hot and sick again. Under his face there’s written names, the names of the Reaper’s victims. Norton keeps talking. The Reaper’s body count stands at thirteen. I’m sure I don’t need to rehash the details.” Ally’s face comes up. Norton says, “Ally Wells, former child star turned thrill killer. Body count, three. She murdered her assistant, her driver, and a former agent.”

  Ally giggles and then winks at Tayne. She calls out, “Hi Tayne! I’m so fangirling over you right now!”

  Seriously? I gawk at her. This is insane. It just keeps getting crazier though. The face of t
he paunchy man comes up on the screen. Norton introduces him. “Paul McKenzie. Lover of children, and murderer of them as well. Twelve children, to be precise.” The young guy with the pouty lips and carefully cut hair’s next. “Brallen Higgins. You may recognize his name. He’s the son of very wealthy people, which is how he’s managed to escape justice for the two women he killed in Aruba.”

  That gut-sick feeling worsens as I study Brallen. I remember the case. He claimed diplomatic immunity and fled the country, leaving his victim’s families without any recourse to justice. How on earth had they gotten him, and gotten him here?

  More names. I’m too stunned to listen or pay attention thought I know I should. My mind’s locked and rigid, trying to break past the shock settling into my nervous system and threatening to send me tumbling into madness.

  That shock snaps apart when my face comes up and Norton says, “Gina Hartwell. Recent killer, but a vicious one. She first cold-cocked a man at a bar and then sliced his throat with the broken bottle, in a bar filled with witnesses.”

  A low furious scream bursts from my throat. “I didn’t kill that guy! I never even got a trial! I didn’t even make it to the police station! I was drugged and kidnapped and I didn’t kill him!”

  I didn’t kill him.

  I didn’t.

  The injustice of it enrages me. I’m nearly blinded by anger, and the raw words ripping themselves out of my throat hold every ounce of the sheer, unadulterated rage I feel.

  Norton ignores me. A few of the others snicker. I subside into silence, but my body isn’t silent. The blood is rushing to my head, to my feet. My nerves are firing off and the flight or fight instinct is kicking in, leaving me shaken and sick all over again. My fingers twitch open and closed, forming fists that turn into open hands.

  The good-looking guy’s last. Norton speaks. “Morgan Jacks. Cop-turned-vigilante. Caught red-handed standing over several bodies.”

  The hulking man with a long scar down the right side of his face calls out, “I hate cops. You’re mine, motherfucker.”

  Morgan gives him a smile that’s so cold it practically sends frost onto his face. His words are even colder. “I hate scumbag killers. Bring it.”