The Sacrifice Game (67 page)

( 107 )

T
wenty beats later I heard them come around on the other side into the nursing station and run off.

It’s a big sun day, I thought. Excellent. They’re following the badges. I eased up on the wad.

Grgur seemed immobile so I started doing some repair work on my cast-mace, taping in a few scalpels in a sawtooth pattern and then rewrapping the outside with regular white surgical tape.

“Who gave Jed-Sub-One the fake anticoagulant?” I asked.

“When?”

“Back on Halloween.”

“I don’t know, some other cutout.”

“Why?”

“We were not going to kill you, we were only supposed to bring him—you—in.”

“Bring me in to whom?” I asked. I scraped him again. He just squeal-whimpered a little. “Grgur? Seriously. To whom?”

“To Mr. Warren,” he said.

“Who else was going to be there?”

“I don’t know.”

“So what was the next step?”

“We were just going to move you out, we’re here to protect you.”

“We were here to protect you,” I said, trying to imitate him.

“You’re crazy,” he said. “If you walk out of here you’re dead, they know where we are, the whole place is covered . . . you’re sick, they put stuff in you that’s going to kill you if you don’t let them take care of you—”

“You’re crazy,” I said, sounding a bit more like him. I tried to raise my voice to the pitch he’d have if he weren’t so hoarse. “You’re a dead man. They know where we are. I’m here to protect you. You’re crazy. I’m here to protect you.” It wasn’t brilliant, but I thought it might pass.

Grgur must have gotten what I was up to because he shut up, but I wadded and scraped him again. Tough or not, he screamed and screamed. The cotton wad buzzed like a vibrator.

“Come on,” I said. “Who doesn’t like me? I mean, the most?”

“No, that’s the way it is.” He was starting to sound a little slushy.

“All right, let’s just chat, then. Tell me about Lindso’s Grand Prize Game.”

“I don’t know about things like that.”

I held the wad over his mouth and dug the needle in under the tooth. I didn’t find the nerve right away, but a few hundred beats after I did find it his eyes started tearing and five-score beats later he was screeching into the wad.

It’s kind of intimate and pathetic when someone actually breaks, when his whole tough-guy thing—which is a big part of his sense of self—just evaporates. Sometimes an interrogator can start feeling sorry for the subject at that point and stop pushing as hard, and then, even though the subject’s in a pretty bad way, he might still notice and start withholding information. I didn’t have that problem, though.

“Come on.”

“Let. Um. Me think. For . . . a minute. Okay, please?”

“Forget it,” I said, “you’re right, you can’t help me.” It was probably true, this whole session was a waste of time. Anyway, they must be finding those badges by now. Better hustle.

It had made me feel a lot better, though. Not out of revenge, like I cared about No Way or anything, but just more like I was back on my sacrificer track.

“You’re going to check me out of here.”

“Whatever you say, asshole,” he whispered.

“Look, here’s the deal,” I said. “Are you listening?”

“Sorry, what?” he said. He was trying to stall me.

“I know you heard that,” I said. “Okay. You feel sort of numb and cold right now, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve given you a mix of paralytics and depressants and a few other things and it ought to kill you in less than a half hour. You got that? And it will be very . . . claustrophobic, it will feel like you are drowning in feathers. So, we are just going to take the other elevator down into the Emergency entrance and you’re going to tell everyone who hassles us how okay everything is. Okay? And if you, if you screw up, I just will not tell them anything, and by the time they figure out the mix of things that’s wrong with you you’ll be a big blue bulgy-eyed turd.” I held the little drug bottles up in front of his face. “But if you’re really helpful, I’ll give you the bottles when I leave and maybe they’ll figure out what ails you. You understand?”

He grunted a little.

“You got that?” I asked. “Otherwise they’ll never work it out in time.”

He made another grunt that sounded a little more affirmative. Meprobamate is a hypnotic and I hoped he was getting into a receptive state of mind. Not like it was a truth serum or anything. Nothing is.

I took the wad away. He was gasping and I was pretty sure he wasn’t faking, he had that rattling shiver specific to Pavulon. This stuff is great, I thought. Maybe Jed did have a grain or two of useful information in his head.

I looked into his eyes. He was still glaring, but his eyes were already looking a little dilated and lymphy. I got the feeling he didn’t believe I’d care enough to let him live.

“Lube, I’m serious,” I said. “You may not know me, but the one thing I wouldn’t do is renege. On the other hand, if your guys pick me up I’m not talking. You know, even if they think to ask what’s wrong with you. I mean, I’d be upset to get nailed, but letting you die would take a little of the edge off. Okay?”

He nodded a little.

“Okay, here we go,” I whispered. I stood him up. He was weebly but he could stand, so I guessed the stuff was working correctly. I realized I was still in my gown. There weren’t any doctor costumes in here. Damn. Have to remember to take Grgur’s jacket on the way out.

Okay. Anything else? No. I cleaned his face up a bit with some Sani-Wipes and squirted some Phisohex on his stringy hair and slicked it back. I tied his right wrist to mine with a surgical tube and held on to it so that at a distance it would look like we were handcuffed together. I opened the door and walked him out to the elevator. There were glass doors two rope-lengths ahead of us, and it even looked like there were car lights past them. We took four steps out of the elevator. Grgur was pretty sluggy but so far he could walk. There were some cops around, but with all the flat bright artificial colors, like everything was flat weavings, I couldn’t really pick out whether they’d noticed us. This era has so many dyes and paints and Electromats, anything can be any color. In front of the eye-dazzler stew a woman who looked kind of in charge came toward us from around a desk and I turned Grgur’s head away. I read her name tag. Teresa de la VillaReal.

“Good night, Teresa,” I said in his voice through my almost-closed lips. “So now I gotta transfer Mr. Sic to the state police. Sorry. See you later.”

“Wait, are you okay?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” I made Grgur say.

“You have to wait,” Teresa said. “The other police are here, there’s been a killing—” She was the voice I’d heard before, upstairs.

“It’s okay,” he/I said. Teresa hit some keys on a black thing in her hand and an alarm started wheeping like a hundred linked screech-owls. Some big guys in suits were pushing toward us from the other side of the lobby and there already were four cops between us and the doors. I veered us left, dragging Grgur, into an area where the crowd was thickest. There was some sort of punk gang dressed as neo-Maya bloods over there, five or six nearly naked teenagers with major tats and dyed green feathers, who I guess had been in a fight because a couple of them were bleeding into sorbents. There was a boom box with rack music blasting softly, and a couple of interns running around trying to get them all to settle down.

“Freeze, asshole,” somebody said in a studiedly authoritative voice, stepping in front of me. It was one of the cops from upstairs. He had his gun out but I pushed Grgur into him. “The prisoner has drugged me,” I shouted in Grgur’s voice. “He’s got a bomb.”

The cop hesitated for a beat. It wasn’t even that convincing, it was just weird, I guess. Then he realized what was going on but I’d already cut myself free of Grgur and I slid left into the knot of kids. Grgur kind of grabbed at the guy as he fell, and that gave me another beat. I singled out one of the healthier-looking of the punks and punched him in the face, not hard enough to really hurt him.

“You’re under arrest, scumbag!” I shouted. He recovered and he and a couple of friends came at me, grabbing my hospital gown. I shrugged out of it, letting it rip over my head, and punched my way through the gathering melee over another tier of waiting-room seats and I vaulted over it. It felt good. I tossed the tranq bottle into a big pebbly trash can. Old Gruggle’s had it, I thought. He shouldn’t have messed with Big Red in the first place. He was bug meat from Go.

“Hang on,” some major male voice said into a megaphone on the right. “
Sir!
” I just pushed toward the doors, only ten arms away. Through the fabric I spotted a couple of big guys in light suits pushing into the area along with the cops, but now there was a whole big Mexican extended kinship group coming in around us—a couple of the teenage bloods or guys or whatever they’re called were wearing Kings colors—and I sort of steered us around them and got to the outer door and started to dance through it, like I was just a drugged-out party dude. Somebody grabbed my shoulder from behind and I whirled, not seeing well through the cheesecloth-covered eye-ovals in the mask, but it was just the kid I’d punched in the nose. I snapped the tip of my cast through his wrist and he dropped back, looking at it. I turned and walked at a relatively normal pace, toward the first pair of big double glass doors, and they opened around me. It seemed like being nearly naked was working in my favor, it threw people off a bit. Still, the sound coming from behind me gave me the impression that the Warren security people had almost gotten to us. The second door opened into a rush of blissfully real hot toad-breath twilight air. I didn’t look back, I just padded across the concrete, opened the shotgun door of the Mexican family’s old Dodge van, and slammed the door. There was a middle-aged woman, a maiden-aunt type, sitting at the wheel, and a couple of kids in the back. I crawled into the front seat and across her lap and looked out the open window. There was a black Maxima low-rider with a weird black-light glow coming out from under the chassis, like it was floating on a Xibalban color-cloud, and there was another fifteen-year-old pseudo-Maya wannabe at the wheel. I slid out the driver’s door of the van, opened the Maxima’s passenger door, slid in, way, and yanked the door shut behind me.

“Don’t do anything or I’ll kill you,” I said in Spanish. “Drive around that taxi.” The kid started to grab for something between his legs, so I killed him, swishing my cast-mace between his eyes, through the bridge of his nose, and then back through his Adam’s apple. Instead of pushing him out I just shifted into drive, crouched down, pressed his foot down on the pedal, and steered us around the taxi judging by the lights overhead and then around a couple of minivans, sensed their bumpers with the low-rider’s little catfish-barbels, and got us out into the far left lane and accelerated. We got out from under the overhang. Out of range, I thought. I stuck my head up and started really driving. I floored the thing around the sort of rotary and got to the ramp leading to the highway, scraping the ground. Low-riders are great, they really do corner. No flip, no slip. There were cop cars with sirens pulling into the overhang from the other side, way too late as usual. I buzzed over the road’s molars—
rumble strips
, Jed’s mind said, automatically but a little late—out of the hospital complex and up a curved slope and onto a frictionless gray sacbe, sliding between crystals of topaz, all identical and as big as a fist, set into the surface. Even with the sled’s masks down—
windows open
—I was starting to smell the dead pre-blood’s feces and urine, so I steadied the car for a few beats in the left lane, managed to get his jacket off him, and when I got up to about fifty I just opened the driver’s-side door and body-nudged him out. I felt him bounce and the car started jerking all over. His leg was still partly caught in the shoulder harness and he was scraping along the asphalt, and from the way he twitched he was still partly alive. There was a little auto-rush of revulsion from the Jed side of my head, sort of fear and loathing combined, but I slashed through the strap with my cast-mace and finally he rolled away from the sled like a used-up captive into a mass grave. As the back roller bumped over him the car nearly skudged into the median strip, but I wrenched it inexpertly around, got back on course, and closed the door.

I knew to let Jed’s motor memories take over. Despite my shameful fear of the giant sled he got the car onto the Great Sacbe. The wind felt great through my bandages. I’m just getting started, I thought. No stink of them here.
SOUTH
, I read off a green sign. Wrong color for South, I thought. I was going too fast to look around but I moved the rearview mirror from side to side. No cars coming up behind me, at least not fast. I looked at the gas. Enough, I somewhere knew the needle pointed to. Jed’s mind seemed to think that the night watcher bloods, I mean, the police, might be relatively easy to shake because no matter what bonuses they were getting they’d still only assign a couple of people to the case. But I also had a large, well-funded private organization after me, which is a lot more serious. I figured I’d cruise as far as possible for about four-hundred-score beats and then change cars. No sweat, as they say these days. I started pulling at the last layer of magically clear cloth that was still stuck to my right hand. I watched the yellow speed indicator clicking up through these people’s gangly base-ten numerals, up through a sort of sky or ceiling that Jed’s mind called the Invisible Gardol Shield, 67, 71, 79, 83, 97. I touched the
CRUISE
glyph at 94 and held on to the steering plate like a child on its mother’s back, feeling the speed of twenty Mixtec runners.