The Sacrifice Game

(91)

And I guess the deal is that when you fight with someone at the terminal level, when you’re really trying to kill, when you finally contact flesh and really get your hands in there, they seem so delicate and squooshy, and you can feel them react to the pain, and so if you’re not a natural sadist, which I guess this proved I wasn’t, you naturally pull your punches. Except you can’t pull back. In my overactive but currently not-terribly-original imagination he still seemed like he was me, like I was fighting a gooey mirror, and that made it Oops. Nearly got away there. Hang on. Just another minute. Hang. On. Ha. Ng. Where were they? The cavalry wasn’t showing up. And we were still going down. Even through the thick neoprene the water here felt about ten degrees below zero. Sic’s body was bigger and stronger, but he wasn’t a diver, so the deeper we got, the less well I could deal with it than the good old Jed 1 body could.

I yelled into my microphone. “Where the shit are you?” It came out like “Warashuvarrooo?” Too late I realized that I hadn’t closed the other channels, so now Jed 1 and Jed 1 ’s guards and the people on Jed 1 ’s boat and everybody between here and Key West could hear me loud and clear and knew I was desperate and alone.

Brop. We sank. Brop. Ow. Another sinus popping. Brop.

Sinking. Eight fathoms. Nine. Brop brop brop brop. Ten. Oh, hell.

He’s not committing suicide, I realized. He’s planning to kill me this way. He’ll let the pressure immobilize me, and then he’ll clip a weight to me and wave good-bye, and I’d sink down and-and where the fuck were they? Just leaving me. Lazy bastards. Setting me up to get killed so that they wouldn’t have to do it themselves, so they’d have a record and witnesses of somebody else doing-no, no. Cancel. Paranoia is not your friend in moments like this… except that it’s starting to seem pretty fucking plausible, they weren’t here, they weren’t BRORK. Ow, shit. That smarts. Damn. Get his weights, I thought. And I got one hand on one of them, but then his hand got onto mine, and held it. And there was a weird sort of pause. I held his leg with my leg. I got my other hand into his belt. If you can’t get the weights, then just hang on, I thought. They’ll get here. If “I’m still scared,” Jed 1 said.

“What?” I responded automatically. “You mean like-”

Oof. He’d gotten me in the stomach. I backed up, that is, toward the surface, and got hold of an ankle. Just stay on that. “You mean of, of… of, of, of dying,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. He kicked. It seemed that his foot connected with my right hand, but I couldn’t be sure.

“Then… stop it.” He kicked again. “Damn it, Other Jed, stop jabbing at me.” I couldn’t help smiling.

I clawed up, or down, over his body, past the belt and onto his harness’s cross-chest strap. Despite the cold, and in spite of all the other gazmos and gidgets sticking out, I felt that he had an erection. I nearly got level with his mask. His hands were on my gas hose, trying to disconnect it, but it was a SEAL-grade product made for just this sort of thing, and he couldn’t do it. He twisted away again. He was as slippery as a giant nudibranch, and this time he pulled free. Through mainly pure luck I got the light on him and watched him fin down into the trench. Hell. I swam after him. My right leg felt weirdly warm. I got to him again. His fin got me in the face but my helmet/mask stayed on. I got his ankle, and then his knee, and then the other knee.

There was kind of a lull. Obviously both of us were completely exhausted and it was like we’d agreed to take a break.

“You know,” he said in his own falsetto, “even if you do… get the Domino… it’ll… it will just mean that… you and Marena’ll spend… what time you… have left in… a… cage.”

“Really?” I asked. Was that a clue? I wondered. BPOK. Ow. Sinuses popping. Pressure, pressure. Well, at least I now knew what those eight great tomatoes in that little bitty can felt Sprooong.

Pain. Twitch. Agggh. Oxygen toxicity convulsion. Ow, ow, it hurts, it really hurts. Where were they, where were they, where were they, where were they, where were they, where were they, WHERE WERE THEY?!?!?!?!???? And was I floating up? Yes. I’d gotten the weights off. Surface, here we come. Too fast, though. BPOK. Ow. Ow and ow. So, I thought, if I’m heading into a world of pain, he must be heading into a zillion universes of agony. My hand definitely wasn’t working right. Where were they? The water temperature felt around absolute zero. Was I really bleeding that much? Or was it some fear thing? Well, serves you-him-whoever-right. Bastard. Ow. There must have been floodlights because I could see. The good guys, finally? If so they were too late, too late, too late, I was dead, he was dead, everybody on earth was dead, too late, too late, too late, because now I could see his silhouette against the dark green water, except it wasn’t a human silhouette, it was like some giant sort of black Siamese squid with way too many tentacles. Ow, fuckfuckfuck. I could feel the blood in my toes and fingertips starting to boil. We rose ten feet and now I could see that the tentacles were Jed 1 ’s blood. He’d gotten cut somewhere, somewhere exposed outside of the somewhat self-healing properties of neoprene, and the difference in pressure was squeezing the stuff out of him like a tube of toothpaste open at both ends. Eeks. The hemophiliac’s worst fear. I almost thought I saw a glimpse of his face, that is, my face, with an expression like he was looking at his dying child, if he’d had one. Almost a disgusted expression. By two fathoms after that, my own mask had filled with blood too. Somehow I got it off. Hold breath, I thought, but I couldn’t, and I inhaled a burning snake of seawater. This has got to be it, I thought. Good-bye, Columbethius. Bye, bye, Birdie. Hello, Deathy, well hel lo, Deathy. Just break the news to Mother. Cruel world anyway. So Owch. There were claws lifting me from behind. Maybe I was going to live long enough to at least experience the shame of how badly I’d fucked up. It felt like a year since I’d spotted Jed 1. Which meant it was at least ten minutes. What the hell had gone wrong? I mean besides everything else-Ow, ow. Can’t deal with this bends thing. Ow. They pulled me on board and set me facedown on a sort of stretcher. I threw up. Since I was still thinking I was going to die from pressure poisoning, about all I could do was focus on the kind of cross-hatching in the gray textured linoleum, with ripples of what looked like strong tea-diluted blood-washing over it. After all the water and, it seemed, some of my intestines, had been ejected, they turned me on my back. I got a glimpse of Jed 1 lying next to me. He didn’t look good. I noticed that I could hear my teeth chattering, and meaningless talking-I wasn’t thinking clearly enough to understand what they were saying, so it sounded like it was in a language I didn’t know-and then heard a buzz and felt another buzz in my right calf and then figured out they were the same thing, electric scissors cutting through my suit. A female hand-Lisurate’s? — was holding a sort of cup thing over my groin, that is, on the left side of my doodads. Fuckshitfuck fuckdamshit, I thought. Evidently I’d been too hopped up on O 2 and adrenaline to notice at the time, but the little weasel must’ve stabbed me with his dive knife. Going for the femoral artery. Which, if he nailed it, would have done me in within three minutes. So much for the bullshit reinforced wetsuit. Which I’d known wouldn’t work for shit. Ow. This sucks. Ouch. Jeezus. I’m not supposed to die like this. I’m a movie star, for crying out loud.

“Fear,” Dr. Lisuarte’s voice said. Fear of what? I wondered. Next to me Jed 1 ’s body half-clenched like a big fist and then relaxed again.

Oh, clear. Why do they say that? I noticed that they’d already hooked me up to a baggie of Tony Sic’s white-cell-enriched B+ plus Special Blend, which Dr. L had thoughtfully had me autodonate four days ago.

Well, hell. That was it. I was gone, I thought, or rather he was gone, or rather the world was gone, soon to be gone, anyway. I’d screwed up. Big-time. Biggest-time. Todo por me culpa. All my fault. I’m the biggest fuckup in all creation. Yep. Since the Big Bang itself, no entity in the universe had ever fucked up quite so utterly as I had. I heard the boat’s motor shift into first gear, and about two minutes after that I heard Dr. Lisuarte’s voice talking to the shore crew on the phone, confirming that Jed 1 was dead.