The Sacrifice Game

(105)

Even in Tony Sic’s fultballer body I didn’t have the lung power I’d had in the old suns. But still, if you know how to cough into a blowgun, you can send liquid out with enough force to practically go through a closed eyelid. And Grgur almost certainly wouldn’t close his eyes anyway. People trained the way he was… well, he was like us Ball Brethren. We do not blink, even when losing a limb. If their eyes get dry they wink one and then the other.

I blasted it out. He didn’t close his eyes fast enough. He squinted in obvious agony, orange drips sliding over his face, but still he just held my arms tighter behind my back.

I looked back at Hernan. He had his hand in his jacket pocket but he wasn’t pulling a gun.

I did a porcupine, pulling my legs up and curling into a ball, trying to wrench my left arm free, but of course what I really wanted was the right arm, the cast arm, and Grgur let his grip on that slack for just a beat, enough for me to twist it against his thumb and line up the shot, and I slammed the cast down into his inner thigh and drew it up along the artery into his groin, leaving a trail of bloody shredded fabric.

It got him to relax his grip enough for me to slide out and down to the floor, at the edge of the stairs.

Hernan had partly gotten his act together and was nearly on me, even with one arm wrapped around his throat.

So I tipped myself over and rolled down the stairs. At the first landing I sprang up and turned and half ran, half fell down around onto the next flight, four at a time in my little paper booties, pitching forward onto the landing below, my back tingling with imagined bullet-wounds.

I grabbed the inside railing with my left hand and wheeled around. In most combat situations one main thing is to just be decisive and book when you can. A lot of people stick around too long when they’re ahead.

There was one flight of metal-and-tile institutional stairs between me and Grgur, but I could hear him run-creeping down toward me, I could practically see him through the stairs, and as a single foot turned the corner I slashed at it with my cast and it slid out from under him.

I held on to the banister and struck again around the corner at his knee.

He grabbed my arm just before the second swipe could connect but I pulled my cast back and down into the crook of his elbow, the big artery there spraying blood onto the wall, and as he released the cast I backhanded him with it up into the left eye.

I was pretty proud of the job I’d done on my little hand-mace. After working on the thing near forever it was nice to see it doing its job.

Behind Grgur Hernan was crawling down the stairs at us, all bloody like a flayed captive. So much for the instant-killing technique. It was taking this guy’s uays forever to leave. And his body was still thrashing around dangerously. I dropped back from Grgur, decided to take a chance, and gave Hernan a shot in the split-open neck with my left foot.

Ordinarily I’d never kick in an actual weapon-based fight, it’s not worth possibly getting off-balance, but this time it seemed like the timing and everything was right and when the futbol-edge of my foot flipped his chin up he spittered up a fountain of arterial blood and crumpled.

I noticed a sort of porcelain knife, a six-finger-width black-blade thing with a blue Chinese-water-beast-skin handle, lying on the floor next to him-I guess he’d pulled it and I hadn’t even noticed-and I grabbed it and turned back around to Grgur.

For a beat I thought I was fucked and then I realized it wasn’t a gun in his hand, just a phone. Maybe he didn’t even have a gun with him.

Still, he’d probably hit some alarm. Just as bad. I gave him a left haymaker to the cheekbone with the butt of the knife, being careful not to break a finger, dropped it, twisted the phone away from him with my left hand, hooked his legs out from under him, and as he slid back down against the wall I tried to size him up.

Grgur definitely didn’t look hazardous. So just to be safe I picked the light little knife back up, scampered up the stairs again to the landing-I was feeling like a little grasshopper-dancer, an elf, sort of-and got behind Hernan, sunk the blade into his head under the ear, pulled it out, and wiped both sides on his shirt. I could smell Hernan’s shit releasing as he died. I went back down, sat behind Grgur, and started choking him with the elbow of my mace-arm.

I sat behind him, holding his neck from behind with his fat muscular ass between my legs and I was a little embarrassed because with all the excitement and everything I had a kind of serious hard-on and it was pressing up against him. Not that I found him at all attractive, it was just that sort of blood-rush adrenaline thing.

Kind of sluggishly Grgur got his arms up and started going for my head so I poked the knife into his elbows, one after the other, trying to pinpoint the nerves that drove his lower arms.

I had to try a couple times on the first one, but finally, from the way his hands reacted, I figured I’d gotten it right. His squeals didn’t come out like much. Hernan’s urine was running down the stairs from above, along with blood and other liquids.

I dug into Grgur’s lapel pockets with my good hand and found his wallet and Marena’s Sylphide lighter, which I guess he’d found on me and was going to give back to her. There were two different key cards with Florida Hospital on them. One said S-WING RESTRICTED USE A. Fabulous.

I felt a disturbance in the air, wind coming up from the bottom of the stairwell eight floors below, probably people answering Grgur’s alarm, and Grgur probably felt it too.

I held the cards against the handle of the knife and jammed it into the cast on my right hand. It went into my flesh a little bit but I could hardly feel it. The blade was facing his neck, and I pulled my arm back as far as it would go without cutting him.

“Let’s try to stand up together,” I said. If I fell over, or if he tried to break away, he’d be caught in the crook of the cast and the knife. Or at least that was the idea.

We stood up. His mangled leg nearly slid away from him and then he got it back under control. I was practically riding on his back. His arms dangled.

“So, look, why don’t we go back up to our floor, and we’ll be really, really mellow, and check out the pharmacy?” I asked.

Even though he was gasping, I could see him thinking. I hoped what he was thinking was that if he was too recalcitrant I’d probably just kill him and run, but if he came along, the others would probably find us and pick me off pretty fast while he broke away.

“Grgur? Okay?”

“Okay.”