The Sacrifice Game Read online

  “Sir? Are you hurt?”

  No, I thought. I’m fine, can’t you tell? I turned. I could only see a little bit of him, just his face and hat, like I was looking through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. I pushed past him and staggered to the exit door on the side with the drive-thru window. There was gray stuff around him and a smell that shouldn’t be there. Oh, hair, I thought. Yes. The front section of my hair, short as it was, was on fire. Evidently I’d spattered oil on it and the rock had ignited it. No problem. I patted it and it went out, I think. The pain rose again and I screamed again. Whoa. Okay. It’s out of my system. Damn, that was a whopper freakout. I took a quick look back over the counter at the eating area, expecting to see Grgur walk in the front door. He wasn’t there. Neither were any other new visitors. ES must be having problems, I thought. Well, don’t fuck a gift horse in the mouth, et cetera. Okay. As I’d learned from No Way back in the day, drive-throughs are the fugitive’s best friend. Let’s go car shopping.

  Side door. EXIT. Right.

  Step, step—

  Whoa. Who are you?

  A dude—who I guessed was the Manager on Duty, finally alerted by the panic button—had strode in from somewhere in the back and was blocking my exit. He was big, blond, about thirty, and, as seemed to be de rigueur, somewhat overweight. I noticed I still had the lava rock in my left hand. He said something about how I had to stay where I was and wait for the police.

  “Thank you, sir,” I said, keeping my eyes on his eyes. I pressed the rock into his paunch. It sizzled. He emitted a high, shrill scream, almost louder than the ones I’d just produced myself, and his body recoiled, although, I guess reflexively, his right arm threw a sort of halfhearted haymaker punch. I just crouched under it—it wasn’t coming fast enough for me to claim that I ducked—and I edged around him. There was a three-AA flashlight hanging in its own OSHA-mandated spot next to the first-aid kit, and I took it as I left the food prep area. Damn, if I’d known pain like this existed I would have crawled back into the womb and lived there for the next eighty years. Although it had made me forget about the cold.

  “Sir, excuse me?” Herb asked somewhere behind me. I looked around. My vision seemed to have opened out a bit, and I could see that he was still back at the grill station.

  “You’ve been great, Herb,” I said. I went out. The patrons looked up to watch me leave, but only one or two of them stopped chewing.

  ( 14 )

  The car at the head of the drive-thru line—a first-generation Equinox in Navajo Nectarine—had its window down, I guessed waiting for the rest of its order, and I edged forward to where I could see the driver.

  A woman. Young. Plain. White. Fat. Bewildered by life.

  Perfect.

  Okay. Plan Um.

  I held up the flashlight in that underhand cop style and flicked it on.

  I don’t think I’ve mentioned this, but actually I have a pretty deep voice. “Police emergency!” I said, in as authoritarian a basso as I could manage while also reining in my chattering teeth. I flashed my American Malacological Society membership card. “License and registration, please.”

  She obeyed. The license said she was Miss Kristin Dekey, 24, of Winter Haven, not that I cared, but I felt I had to look at it long enough to seem official. I tried to hand it back but she was fumbling in the between-seats thingie for the registration. The woman in the passenger seat blinked at me. She looked enough like her to be her twin sister, except all crackers look alike to me, so who knows. “I’m sorry, I can’t,” Kristin was saying, “I’m sorry, I have um, I have a proof of insurance, here, I’m not sure, the registration, I’m not sure where the registration is, is this going to be enough to, I’m sorry—”

  I took the piece of paper. Pretending to look at it used up twenty seconds, but when you’re impersonating, it’s a good idea to get the subject used to the idea that you’re who you’re pretending to be before you tell them to do something unfamiliar. And the best way to do that is to put them through whatever rituals are most familiar. If you do it right, even if you’re, say, a five-foot Chinese teenager in a Gothlita dress—or if, like me, you’re covered in blood and your hair is smoldering and there’s smoking bloody charcoal scab all over your face—by the time they sign the report they’ll swear you were six foot six, wearing a full police captain’s uniform, and looked like Clint Eastwood.

  I gave the paper back and took out the larger of my still-jammed phone. “One Adam thirteen,” I said into it. “I am in pursuit of suspect in a civilian vehicle, over. Ma’am, you and your passenger must exit your vehicle.” As normals usually do, she obeyed. Her vehicle mate took longer but also got out. Instead of both backing up, though, they sort of sought each other out and met in front of the car, standing there like they were going to confer about something. I got in and leaned over the open door.

  “Ma’am, for you own safety, please step away from your vehicle.” She did. I said the same thing to her twin. Her twin did the same thing. Then, she thought of something.

  “Are you hurt?” she asked.

  “Hey, are you really a policeman?” Kristin got it together to ask, too late. I got in the rest of the way, slammed the door, reached over and slammed the passenger door, found the thingy that locks all the doors, locked all the doors, got the thing in gear, and took off.

  Ahh. Freedom. I—

  Oh, hell, I thought. I’d left my hat back in the kitchen. I thought of going back for it, realized that was ridiculous, and then got worried that just the fact that I’d considered it meant I wasn’t thinking clearly. Focus, Jedface.

  Up the ramp. On the off ramp, on the other side of the highway, my abandoned Barracuda was lit up with halogen light. Above it, a helicopter swept a second light around the car in a widening spiral. Hah, I thought. They’re way behind. Way.

  Onto 400. Forward. Upward. Ad astra per atrocitas. I adjusted the seat and wheel to suitable positions for nonporkers. The highway straightened out and pointed the Equinox toward the burnt-orange glow over the No-Go Zone. My hands were still shivering and my teeth were still chattering, and I was tired and light-headed, but I wasn’t quite in shock yet, and if I held on to the four quarts or so I had left, and if I kept making adrenaline, I’d keep going for another few hours. Just need to be supercareful until I find a dealer . . . well, the last time I heard they were selling blood packets there, so they ought to be able to get factor IX too . . . and maybe some thrombogen, a few burn packs . . . top up the O negative . . . hmm, while I’m at it, pick up some Oxy or at least some Hydro, and a saltshaker of the old benzoylmethylecgonine. Maybe a Glock 36 and couple of Heizer DoubleTaps, and a few hundred rounds of HydraShok. And a papered ride, of course. I just had to stay ahead of the ES people. And the way I’d set it up I knew I’d manage it. Finally my paranoia was coming in handy. I’d set up four different legends, of varying degrees of detail and remoteness, and if I cycled through all of them over the next few weeks they’d never catch up. ES was top-shelf, but nobody’s resources are unlimited. Of course, they’d be using the Game to find me, but I’d be using it to stay ahead of them. And I’d be doing it better.

  I passed a row of abandoned detoxification trailers and a tossed-aside ROAD CLOSED barrier. There were more cars here, all heading to the twenty-four-hour cop-free party zone. The fugitive’s first rule is that the more people there are around, the harder it is to find the one you’re looking for.

  Past eighty. Hmm. There’s a slow-pokin’ cat. I passed him on the right. I voiced the car’s “radio” onto commodities news. The Dalian and Zhengzhou had both just suspended trading. The fourth domino had tipped over right on schedule. Well, it’s out of my hands. Need to just sit back and wait.

  EOE, I thought. Well, they deserve it. Factor IX indeed. They’d been planning to kill me for a long time.

  And she knew it.

  Marena was no damn good.

  People were no damn good. Even dogs were no damn good. Even lichens were no damn good. I’d don
e the right thing. I was doing the right thing. I let myself feel a full blast of elation, not just the kind that comes after you make a narrow escape, but the deeper kind you get when you know your future’s assured. By the time I passed the abandoned checkpoint, I knew I’d make it. Mission good as accomplished. Fifty-two days left. Or, counting down by seconds:

  Four million, four hundred and ninety-two hundred thousand and eight hundred . . .

  Four million, four hundred and ninety-two hundred thousand, seven hundred and ninety-nine . . .

  Four million, four hundred and ninety-two hundred thousand, seven hundred and ninety-eight . . .

  Four million, four hundred and ninety-two hundred thousand, seven hundred and ninety-seven . . .

  ONE

  The Scorpio Carfax

  Jaguara Skull with Jade Sphere

  Recovered at the Ruins of Ixnichi Sotz

  Curious Antiquities of British Honduras

  By Subscription • Lambeth • 1831

  ( 15 )

  The world had ended eight days ago, just as Lady Koh had predicted, on 4 Earthtoadess, 5 Vampire Bat, 9.1 1.11.12.17—or, in Gregorian terms, on May 1, AD 664. Or, at least, almost everyone here—and I really mean almost everyone, that is, the entire population of Mesoamerica and large swaths of North and South America—believed that it had. Today, the eighth in the new lineage of suns had just died at 289 degrees west by southwest, and still the light on the Altiplancie Mexicana, that is, the altiplano, the Central Mexican Highlands—was a disconcerting diffuse maroon, like they say daylight looks on Venus, hadn’t changed since dawn, and it was the same as it was yesterday and the day before. The faint path curved around a stand of scrub pines and up a gentle grade toward a line of wrinkled mesas. We hadn’t seen a living person for at least a thousand rope-lengths now—a little over four miles. And we hadn’t seen a dead one for least three hundred. At least not a whole dead one. Just a few odds and ends.

  We still smelled them, though. It was really true that you never got used to that cadaverine foulness, the indescribable foetor that the 1945 generation brought back from the camps riveted in the snuggest fold of their brains and which they wanted to forget more than any other memory. Rotting flesh, burning flesh, and burning rotting flesh. It’s not just the worst smell in the world. It’s truly the worst thing at all in the world. And this is in a world that’s full of unsavory things.

  Thousands, and thousands, and thousands, I thought. And more thousands. Poor bastards. Well, bless ’em. Even before this latest apocalypse, I’d estimated that suicide was at least the second main cause of death around here—second to starvation, that is, not counting deaths in childbirth—and now it was obviously a strong number one. And it probably would be for the fore—

  Oops, I thought. If there’s one cliché I of all people really ought to give up, it’s “the foreseeable future.” Let’s just say the self-immolations would go on for a good long time. Thousands, and hundreds of thousands. In the seventh century—that is, now—Central Mexico had the largest and densest concentration of people in the New World and one of the densest in the world. There were thousands of villages and scores and scores of—hmm, I said scores, so I guess I’ve already been here long enough to start thinking in base 20—and dozens and dozens of full-scale hundred-thousand-plus-population cities. Corn was simply a hugely efficient, labor-unintensive crop, and a corn economy left people enough time to build purely ceremonial buildings, craft meticulous luxury goods, maintain troops of full-time athletes and entertainers, squander food in potlatch orgies, and kill, capture, torture, and sacrifice each other not out of any necessity but just for the sheer kicks. According to Michael Weiner, the Warren Group’s resident Mayanist, population here would have doubled in the last forty years, and in the next forty, despite the dip of the last few days, it would double again. Still, right around here, settlement was patchy. The populous river valleys were separated by wide swaths of near-desert, and up here we were in a high area without aquifers, on crappy soil that would never be cultivated. So it was on the Chocula team’s map of good areas to bury the gear. Although the gang would be amazed that I’d come this far from Ix. They—

  Jeg jeg jeg jeg jegjedjwhzzeeew?

  It was the long guggle of a nightjar.

  Jeg jeg jeg jeg jegjegjegjedjwhzzzeeeew?

  To almost anyone, even to a Mesoamerican who wasn’t a member of our sixty-two-man column, it would have sounded natural. But it came from one of our front-runners, or I guess we can call them recon men. They were fanned out about forty rope-lengths, or ten minutes’ walking, ahead of us.

  Jeg jeg jeg jeg jegjegjedjwhzzeew?

  Jeg jeg jeg jeg jegjegjegjedjwhzzzeeeew?

  The call itself meant that there was a crossroads four hundred paces ahead of us, and repeating it four times meant all-clear in all four directions. Good.

  A red deer darted across the path ahead, redward, that is, eastward, running away from the fires. One of the guards behind me must have looked like he was going to throw a javelin at it, because I heard Hun Xoc give a let-it-go whistle. We weren’t here to hunt. Anyway there were still so many animal refugees running in front of the fires you could net almost anything you wanted, field rats, jumping mice, hares, rabbits, armadillos, ocellated turkeys, quail, and even Mexican silver grizzlies. You’d have thought the villagers around here would have trapped and eaten them already, but I guess they believed they wouldn’t need food. After all, the world was still ending.

  There was—were?—was a handful of skeptics, of course, master manipulators like Lady Koh or my adoptive stepfather, 2 Jeweled Skull. Or even Hun Xoc, who was pretty sharp. Or myself, who doesn’t count. But the bulk of the public had either been reborn—like Koh’s trail of eighteen thousand or so followers—or raptured, like the millions who had killed themselves or died in the fires or who were now starving to death or dying in interpolity raids.

  Step. Step. Steppedystepstepstep. The pines gave way to ocatillo and prickly pear. Every so often we passed giant century plants, some of them two stories tall, like frozen land-mine explosions, with sawtoothed leaves that were so thick and wide you could walk out on them and bounce up and down like you were on a diving board. There—

  Huh. I saw something.

  Stop, I touched on Hun Xoc’s back. He touched the blood in front of him and the order to halt traveled through the three bloods ahead of him. Around here—I mean in Mesoamerica—the ranking hotshot usually came last. But on this job, the senior blood, Hun Xoc, was breaking protocol by marching near the head of the file, and he kept me behind him. Oh, by the way, “blood” is a literal translation, but it does work in English. Or Elizabethan English, anyway, like “young blood.” “As many and as well-borne bloods as those,” as I guess King Philip says. In Ixian it could mean any warrior-age male from one of the “great houses,” that is, from the ruling class.

  The halt rippled back down our column, through fifty-seven other men all the way to the rearmost, the last of the four sweepers raking over our trail. I signed to Hun Xoc that I was going on alone. He edged aside, reluctantly, and tilted his head, asking me to be more careful. The bloods in the vanguard closed around me, but I pushed through them. Did they not see anything? I widened my eyes into the unnatural dusk.

  A figure sat at the crossroads, a hundred paces ahead of us. A man. A man with a cigar. It wasn’t as though he materialized, and in fact he looked like he’d been lounging there a long time, but I’d just looked there a few beats before—when you’re marching, you develop a rhythm of looking at your feet, and then look around, and then look ahead of you, and then repeat—and I hadn’t seen him. And none of our forerunners had noticed him or they would have given us an owl screech.

  I turned and signed to the sitz’, the fourteen-year-old boy, behind me. His provisional, preadulthood name was Armadillo Shit, and he was my k’ur chu’, my “fellator,” or I guess if we want to be delicate we can call him my squire. Or if we want to be indelicate we could call him
my bitch. Every blood had at least one. It was kind of a Spartan erastés-and-erómenos system. The k’ur chu’ob who survived all the hazing—about forty percent, I figured—would, eventually, get admitted into whatever society it was, in this case the Harpy Ball Brethren Society. Like jonokuchi Sumo wrestlers, they did everything for us, including, shall we say, wiping.

  He came up alongside me and spat drinking water into my eyes. I rubbed my face dry on his manto and looked again. The figure was still there. He wore a long orange-and-black-striped manto and a wide straw traveling-trader’s hat, almost a sombrero, that gave him an incongruous nineteenth-century-European-peasant look.

  I walked forward, alone. The gentleman readjusted his hindquarters on the dessicated and defanged barrel cactus, took a deep drag on his cigar—it was a green Palenque-style stogie as thick as a Churchill—and studied me.

  Hmm. He looked familiar.

  I switched my gait to the deferential Ixian halt-step and then stopped four paces from him.

  He let out a snake of blue smoke. I squatted, and touched the ashy ground. He didn’t speak, so I did.

  “Salud, Caballero Maximón,” I said, and then, remembering when we were, I saluted him again with his older name: “X’taca, halach ahau Mam.”

  He answered in Spanish, though. “Hola, cabrón. Estás que Cholano gringo de San C.”

  I clicked yes. His Spanish was rustic but awfully good for someone who, technically, probably hadn’t spoken it regularly for twelve hundred years.

  “Están buenas Pirámides.”

  “¿Perdón?” I asked. Oh, right, the cigars I’d given him back in San Cristóbal Verapaz. Back in the twenty-first century. “Ah, cierto. Claro, yo soy . . .”