[Blood Bowl 02] - Dead Ball

by Matt Forbeck - (ebook by Undead)

  As Dunk trotted back to the Hackers’ end of the field, he looked up at the Jumboball, which showed the view from a camra focused on the top of the stadium’s south side. Dozens of people had stripped off their clothes and were going at each other in an amorous way. Each person’s skin had a greyish cast, except for the red rash that seemed to crawl along under the flesh.

  In the centre of it all stood a rat-on-a-stick vendor with a particularly bad rash and a wild look in his yellowing eyes. He stood flinging his product into the stands, yelling for people to eat the free grub, despite the fact that — other than his food harness — he was buck naked and, from all appearances, thrilled about it.

  “You know, Bob, I don’t think those are your standard rats-on-sticks there.”

  Dunk raced back down the field to the Reavers’ side. A few of the players getting into position there tried to slow him down, but he slipped past them until he reached Dirk, who was preparing to kick off the ball.

  “Hey,” Dirk said. “How long have you been playing this game? You’re not allowed back — Hey!”

  Dunk snatched up the football and then raced back toward the middle of the field. When he reached it, he slung his arm back and then unleashed a powerful throw that sailed through the air and caught the rat-on-a-stick vendor square in the chest. The spike on the tip of the ball pierced the vendor’s heart, but he stood there for a moment, shocked at his imminent death and raging against it. Then his heart burst from his chest, showering all those around him in bloody gore.

  “That’s one way to handle an unruly fan,” Bob said. “Remind me to never get Hoffnung angry at me — or to have ball-proof glass installed in the announcers’ booth.”

  “Maybe our new friend Olsen Merlin could tell us something about what’s happening here. Lästiges?”

  “Yes, Jim, I’m here in the Hackers’ dugout with—” The reporter cut herself off with a horrified scream.

  Dunk looked over at the dugout and saw that all of the new Hackers had dashed into it. One of them dashed out of the place with the Far Albion Cup tucked under his arm. A few others chased after him, Lästiges stretched out among them, struggling to free herself with all her might.

  Then something in the dugout exploded, and the other new Hackers came flying out of the place, some in more pieces than they’d been in while entering.

  The fans in the stands behind the Hackers’ dugout started to scream. Then they stampeded away from the field, trying to escape whatever horrible thing they expected to issue forth from the dugout. Their path took them up and south, directly toward the fans in the higher stands, whose skin writhed faster and redder now than ever. Most of them had stripped off their clothes, and either set to scratching at their rashes, heedless of the amount of blood they drew, or started to copulate with any vaguely compatible person they could find, whether infected or willing or neither.

  “Lästiges!” Dirk shouted. “Lästiges!”

  Dunk watched his brother call for his fellow Reavers to follow him and then chase after his woman, who the new Hackers were dragging into the stands.

  Dunk did not see how this could end well. All he knew was he had to put an end to it — now. He sprinted toward his team’s dugout. As he did, he bumped into a Reaver he almost ran over. When he turned to snarl at the Reaver, he recognised her instantly.

  Spinne.

  “Come with me,” he said as he grabbed her hand.

  “Let me go!” she shouted, pulling her arm free. “I need to help Dirk.”

  “He doesn’t stand a chance!” Dunk spun back and held Spinne by her spaulders. “You can’t fight a sickness like that. You have to kill it at its cause.”

  “And where do you think we could find something like that, Dunk?” Spinne’s tone told Dunk she’d lost all patience with him. Despite that, he needed her to trust him just a minute more.

  “Follow me!” he said, offering her his hand once again. To his amazement, she took it.

  When they reached the dugout, Dunk planned to skirt around it and take off into the stands after the traitor Hackers carrying away the Far Albion Cup. Instead, Slick charged up the stairs at them, a Hacker helmet on his head.

  “We need to get the cup!” Slick shouted at Dunk. “Olsen says it’s the only way.”

  “Figures,” Dunk said, glaring up into the stands. The players absconding with the cup were already a few rows into the seats. If they reached the exit only a handful of rows ahead of them, they could disappear in the tunnels beneath the stadium and beneath Altdorf itself. If so, Dunk might never be able to find them.

  Simon and Guillermo sprinted for the stands, hoping to catch the other Hackers on foot. The crowd parted before the diseased Simon, seeming to identify him as a mummy and fearing such a creature’s legendary rotting touch. Dunk could tell, though, that the two would never catch up with the other Hackers in time.

  “M’Grash, Edgar!” Dunk shouted, pointing up to where the cup moved through the stands. “I need to get up there fast!”

  “How the bloody hell do you propose we manage that, mate?”

  “Throw me?”

  Edgar looked at Dunk. “I don’t think I could. You’re a bit bloody large for a trick like that. The wee one here,” he pointed at Slick, “sure, but you’re full grown.”

  “Not you alone,” Dunk said, gesturing to Edgar and M’Grash with open hands. “Both of you. Pick me up and swing me up there — together.”

  “That’s a bloody long way, mate. Could kill you dead.”

  Dunk glanced up at the cup as it neared the exit. “No other way,” he said, putting out his arms for the two giant creatures to grab. “Let’s do it!”

  “On three,” Edgar said as it picked up Dunk’s left arm and leg and M’Grash got the right.

  “Three?” the ogre said. He nearly dropped Dunk as he tried to scratch his head, but he recovered in time to keep the thrower from hitting the dirt.

  “You know: one, two, three?” The treeman narrowed its glowing green eyes at M’Grash. “Oh, bollocks. Just throw him when I say ‘Go’. Ready?”

  The two swung Dunk back and forth.

  “Set?”

  Back and forth.

  “Go!”

  Back and gone.

  Dunk held his breath, waiting for something horrible to happen, for Edgar to let him loose and M’Grash to keep his hold, for someone to pull his arm from its socket. Instead, he zoomed off, arcing high into the air over the stands.

  When he reached the apex of his flight, Dunk realised he had no way to steer himself. The best he could do was keep his arms out and his legs together, like a diver reaching for the water of a pool. At that moment, far too late to do himself any good, he questioned how desperate he must have been to get the cup that he not only let someone throw him through the air like a stone from a catapult but had actually asked for it.

  Fortunately, M’Grash and Edgar had excellent aim.

  As Dunk came soaring in at the Hackers with the Far Albion Cup, he brought his armoured arms and knees to his front and bore down hard on his targets. He slammed into the back of the bestial Hacker holding the cup, a black-furred man-shaped thing with crimson horns shaped like those of a ram. His helmet had been carved back to expose these horns while still offering some protection to the back and sides of his head. His face, however, stood unguarded.

  The ram-horned Hacker never saw Dunk hit him. One moment, he was dashing for the exit, gloating at how easy it had been to wrest the cup away from Pegleg and that old wizard. The next, he’d been knocked unconscious as Dunk’s full, armoured weight slammed into him from behind and drove his face into the last of the cut-stone steps he’d been about to top. The impact cracked his horns off near their bases and forced the jewel-encrusted cup to go flying from his hands.

  While Dunk’s target absorbed most of the momentum from his fall, Dunk still had to roll past the ram-horned one, tumbling end over end like a football dribbling along the gridiron after a kick-off. He came to a halt in the fra
me of the exit, the cup there next to him, within arm’s reach. His every bone aching, he snatched up the trophy and scrambled to his feet.

  Dunk stared down the stairs behind him and saw five of the new Hackers gaping up at him. “Hi, guys,” he said, hefting the cup in his hands.

  He glanced around and saw that the fans in this part of the stadium had all fallen silent in shock. While the stands to the south were filled with people screaming for their lives — images of Dirk and the Reavers closing in on Lästiges and her kidnappers flashed across the Jumboball — here everyone stood in shock at how Dunk had taken out his ram-horned team-mate, staring with open mouths at him and his bejewelled cup.

  Dunk pointed down at his five team-mates and shouted to the crowd, “Are we going to let those cowards get out of here alive?”

  The fans roared in glee and converged on the bestial Hackers like a school of sharks on bloodied prey. One of them, a wolf-faced man with a snout full of vicious teeth that he’d somehow already bloodied, squirted free from the crowd and charged Dunk.

  The thrower considered throwing the cup back toward the field, but he doubted he’d be able to manage it with its unwieldy shape. Instead, he grasped the cup’s neck with both hands and brought it down on his attacker’s green and gold helmet with all his might.

  The cup dented the crown of the wolf-faced Hacker’s helmet, knocking him to the ground. When Dunk brought the cup back up to strike again, though, only the cup’s base and neck came back. The bowl of the cup had snapped off its mooring with the impact.

  Dunk winced and held his breath as he waited for the sky to open up and for the magical energy stored in the cup to strike him down for destroying it, but nothing happened. It seemed it would take more to break the cup — and its curse — than that.

  The wolf-faced Hacker staggered to its feet and snarled at Dunk with a sound that wasn’t human, its reddish eyes glowing with evil and hate. The thrower pulled back his arm, the cup’s neck still in it, hoping he could use it to bash the Hacker’s helmet in even farther.

  Instead of charging, though, the wolf-faced Hacker reached down and scooped up the rest of the cup. It glittered in his hands as he let loose a jackal’s mad cackle of triumph.

  Dunk steeled himself for the creature’s attack. The wolf-faced creature lowered itself on its powerful haunches and launched himself straight at the thrower. Dunk went low, hoping to knock the creature back, just as he would have on the field. As he did, he saw his attacker sail straight over his head.

  At first, Dunk felt relieved that he’d avoided the assault, but he wondered how he’d been able to do that so easily. Then he realised that the wolf-faced Hacker hadn’t been coming at him at all. The cup in his hands, he’d been trying to escape, and Dunk had let him.

  Dunk spun around and saw the Hacker sprinting for the exit, about to reach the tunnel that led through the stands to open daylight beyond. Then something green, yellow, and white burst out of the crowd and tackled the creature, knocking the both of them tumbling down into the tunnel.

  30

  Dunk recognised the new assailant right away: Simon Sherwood. The diseased catcher had made good time through the crowd and caught up with the bestial Hackers and the cup at just the right moment.

  Forging his way through the fans had been rough on Simon. He bled from a dozen cuts, and his beer-soaked wrapping had begun to unravel, exposing his greyish skin. The red rash there seemed worse than ever, red as blood and thrashing about under his flesh like a wild animal trapped in a bag of skin. His eyes were wild with madness, far worse than those of his wolf-faced foe.

  As Simon tore at the bestial Hacker with his bare hands, the creature’s jaws snapped at his face and throat. An unintelligible roar sprang from his lips, and Dunk knew that the illness now had him entirely, body and soul. He moved only on instinct and the final coherent thoughts that had driven him to pursue the cup and bring down anyone who held it.

  Dunk wondered if Simon would have attacked him if the catcher had arrived a moment earlier and found the thrower with the cup still in his hands. Such thoughts didn’t bear more consideration at the moment. He sprinted down the tunnel after the two, but before he could catch up with them, the wolf-faced man clamped his teeth around Simon’s throat and tore it out.

  Simon’s blood exploded from his neck as if every ounce in his veins had been under pressure. The wolf-faced Hacker choked on it and tried to sputter it away, as the rush of fluid nearly drowned him.

  Dunk pulled Simon’s corpse off the blood-soaked Hacker and stabbed the creature in the chest with the jagged stem of the Far Albion Cup still in his hand. The wolf-faced man clawed at Dunk as he shoved the makeshift weapon further in through the creature’s ribcage, its tip hunting for his heart.

  When Dunk found the pulsating muscle, he gave the broken stem a hard shove and burst the creature’s organ. As the wolf-faced Hacker’s life spilled out of him, Dunk snatched the bowl of the cup from under his arm and shoved him back to the ground.

  When Dunk turned around, he saw Simon’s corpse lying there in the tunnel, its throat somewhere else. The pallor of its skin contrasted sharply with the quarts of blood that had covered it and soaked through the wrappings and splashed across the pavement around it. Still, the skin was clear now and rashless, and Dunk could see a savage, satisfied smile poking through the unwrapped parts of Simon’s face.

  Dunk tucked the cup’s bowl under his arm and raced back up the tunnel and into the stadium. The fans around the entrance cheered as he held up the bit of the Far Albion Cup he’d recovered. Dunk didn’t see any of the other bestial Hackers, as if the crowd had simply and permanently swallowed them up. He spotted an official Hackers helmet on one fan’s head, and a couple of fresh jerseys on some others, and he wondered whether or not they’d been there just minutes ago.

  “I need to get down to the Hackers’ dugout!” Dunk shouted.

  The fans nearby roared their approval and held their hands high over their heads, chanting something Dunk didn’t understand. He cocked his head to the side and listened, and it became clear: “Jump! Jump! Jump!”

  Dunk remembered all too well what had happened the first time he’d been given up to the tender mercies of the crowd. At last year’s Spike! Magazine Tournament, he’d been chucked into the stands after scoring his first touchdown, and the fans had body-passed him up to and over the top edge of the stadium in Magritta. He’d survived the fall but been beaten half to death by the owner of the food cart on top of which he’d crashed.

  “Jump! Jump! Jump!” The fans kept chanting at him, and the words took on a hypnotic beat, encouraging him to discard caution and experience and trust them, to comply.

  “Jump! Jump! Jump!”

  Dunk peered down at the field and wondered if he could hurl the Far Albion Cup all the way down to the gridiron, where perhaps Edgar or M’Grash could catch it, but he couldn’t spot them anywhere. When he looked over to where the Reavers had leaped into the stands to save Lästiges, though, he saw the two gigantic players forging their way through the sea of people to lend Dirk and his fellows a hand — or branch. Someone rode on the ogre’s back, beating away infected fans with what looked like a long, thin fragment of a bench. It was Spinne.

  Dunk stared back down the aisle that led through the bleachers to the field below, and fans crammed it from one end to the other. If he wanted to get down to the dugout before the entire stadium succumbed to the threat of the Sure Wood cultists, he had only one choice, only one chance.

  “Jump! Jump! Jump!”

  Dunk wrapped both arms around the bowl of the Far Albion Cup and made a mad dash for the fans standing right in front of him, chanting and stomping their feet so hard he could feel the vibrations through the ground around him. When he reached them, he launched himself into the air and gave himself over to their will.

  Half-a-dozen sets of hands snatched Dunk from the apex of his jump and hoisted him farther into the air. Once he lay level upon them, or nearly so, the fa
ns started to pass him around, from one set of outstretched hands to another.

  Dunk closed his eyes rather than succumb to the vertigo that threatened to overcome him as he spun about over the heads of the crowd at terrifying speed. He clutched the cup to himself as hard as he could, keeping it from the occasional hand that grabbed at it and tried to tear it from his grasp. Then he felt the hands near his feet disappear, and he felt as if he were sliding off a cliff of ice, and into the great, wide unknown.

  Unable to restrain himself any longer, Dunk opened his eyes, which gave him just enough time to bend his knees before he hit the ground. To his astonishment, he knelt crouched on the Astrogranite of Emperor Stadium instead of lying crushed and dying on the pavement just outside. He leapt to his feet, holding the cup over his head, and raced toward the dugout.

  The crowd cheered.

  “Can you believe it?” Bob’s voice said. “Hoffnung has the cup!”

  “That’s what I called dogged determination,” Jim said. “Here the Reavers — including his brother — and two of his team-mates are fighting to the death to rescue our roving reporter from a breakout of a lethal disease that causes madness in all it touches, and Hoffnung’s busy making sure the Hackers still have the magic artefact they need to ensure victory.”

  “Too true! You just don’t see many competitors that cold-hearted these days!”

  Dunk dashed into the dugout and saw Cavre and Slick talking with Pegleg as Olsen railed at them all.

  “This is not going to happen, laddies,” Olsen said. “Not as long as we—” The wizard cut himself off as Dunk entered. “Ah, and here’s the grand prize now, come to us in the arms of the reluctant hero. We’re impressed you managed to recover it.”

  “What can we do to stop this?” Dunk said, holding what was left of the Far Albion Cup before him. “There are hundreds of people dying out there!”

  “Faith, lad!” the wizard said, a strange cross between a smile and a scowl on his face. “More like thousands. Soon, the entire stadium will succumb, we’re sure.”