Blood Games (14 page)

The vampire prince
noticed the manager, who was now running along the wall and screaming for help. The walls were ten feet tall and the man didn’t look like he even cleared six. He leaped as he ran, trying to catch hold of the edge and haul himself over. He only succeeded in tripping over his own feet and crashing to the ground. A necklace snaked out of his pocket.

He picked it up.
By God, he picked it up and jammed it back into his pocket before he took off again.

Now the screen
s were showing the countdown for the melee, which still had plenty of time as the vampire prince began to run for the manager. Sofia’s canes clattered against the row of seats and she left them there to grip Ink’s arm.

Th
is was so good! He was glad that she was there, watching this with him. People were running back into the stadium from outside, crowding along the bars to scream and point at the man trapped in the ring with the zombies. He was sprinting for his life now, the vampire prince gaining on him. Throwing one look of terror over his shoulder, the dope screamed.

Now one of the princesses was coming
for him, too. Her tiara was hanging off the side of her head and her white gown was soaked in blood. Cutting across the ring, she boxed him in. The man dove around her, rolling three times over the ground and leaving a glittering trail of jewelry in his wake.

“
What a shame! And she just had her coronation!” the announcer said about Little Bit, who had never had a chance at her tiny size of surviving the melee. Ink didn’t look over to see what fate she had met, or to check on Scrapper.

Then the upper body of a woman swung over the wall.
She was a security guard, and two men were holding onto her legs as they lowered her down. Holding out a hand to the manager, she shouted to him. He scrambled to his feet and achieved light speed to get over to her. People booed the guard and cheered on the vampire prince and bloody princess.

The latter of the two
caught up just as the man grabbed onto the security guard’s hand. The men began to pull at the woman’s legs and bring the two of them over the wall. Grabbing onto the manager, the princess sank her teeth into his clothing. He screamed in pain and flailed, only inches off the ground and rising with her attached to him. The security guard held on as he twisted and turned, trying to shake the girl off. The men fought to keep hold of her and Ink thought that it would be grand if
all
of them tumbled into the ring.

But they didn’t.
The woman kept rising and the manager rising with her. The princess lifted her head to find some other place to bite and he shook her off. She lashed out and got a fistful of his pants.

They came off.
His
pants
came off in her hands. The audience screamed in laughter to see his tighty-whiteys as he was pulled over the edge and into the stands. The jumbo screens lingered on the protruding coin slot, and then replayed the whole scene right away. The vampire prince attacked the spurned princess, who dropped the pants and fought back. Sofia was crying next to Ink, and holding up four fingers to a vendor that had beer.

“You know what he’ll do the next time?” Ink yelled, even though Sofia was
right next to him. “The next time he’ll be pushing and shoving to be the first one in the funnel!” Christ! The man would be crazed to get beyond that gate at the next show, if he ever came back, and forever he would be known as the manager who lost his trousers to a zombie princess.

When the lights went on
to dazzle the competitors, no one cared about who had lived and who had died. They were still chortling and pointing out the pants in the ring to each other. Ink and Sofia chugged their first, lukewarm beers and savored the second round as bodies were carted out of the ring and everything was cleaned up. Little Bit had indeed met her demise, her broken body loaded onto a stretcher and borne into a funnel.

“This is better than sex,” Sofia said in satisfaction.
Ink agreed, with the silent caveat that nearly anything was better than sex with Nadia, and because he hadn’t had a chance to try out Cantine’s blonde beauty. He drained the last of his second beer, relishing it all the more because it was free.

When an employee picked up the stranded pants in the ring,
Ink laughed until his throat was sore. And dammit! Scrapper had lived. But he looked injured and that was satisfying. His costume was in tatters. The tiny sapphire would have been lost forever if Ink hadn’t pinched it. The boy was taken out on a stretcher. If he died from his injuries, Ink wasn’t buying another child until he had a champion from Vasilov. If Nadia wanted a zombie kid that badly, then she could spend her five hundred dollars in prize money on one.

Who was he kidding?
She’d probably already spent it.

A podium was swiftly set up for a comedian to do a routine, but it was time for Ink and Sofia
to ready for the match between their zombies. They shook hands and wished one another well, trash-talked a little more, and went their separate ways to the stables.

Chapter Six: The First Match

When he got down there, the managers of the children were in a frantic knot on the floor. The employees had hastily swept the ring clean of its sprinkled jewels and costumes, placed everything into two laundry carts, and brought them inside to be dumped. To Ink, the grabbing and pushing looked like children competing for candy beneath a broken piñata. Nadia was among them. She still had the cuffs on. The more polite or reticent managers were standing around the crazy scene, calling out piteously, “If you see a blue stud of an earring, that belongs to me! It’s a family heirloom!” and “Is there a wooden sword in there? Has anyone come across my sword? It’s got a gold-painted handle.” The horse had been lugged in and dumped as well. Blood was splashed on the saddle and mane.

“That’s
mine
!” a manager shouted, shoving over another one and trying to open his fist. “That belongs to
my
kid.” A catfight broke out between two women about the owner of a brooch.

It looked almost as crazy as a melee.
No dignity. When it came to zombie kids, there was just no dignity in any of it. Ink half-expected a crowd of high school students to gather around and chant
fight fight fight
. Nadia tumbled onto her back, an outraged man prying open her fingers and shouting, “That’s not yours! You weren’t even showing a princess!”

She ki
cked at his groin and he let go as she cried, “My prince had a bracelet on each wrist! Where’s my other one?”

Scrapper hadn’
t had a bracelet on. There was no level to which Nadia would not sink. Ink left them to it before she noticed him and expected a husband’s defense of his thieving wife.

The
beer brightening his mood, he wobbled on his way to the stall. He wasn’t drunk, just mildly buzzed, but the excitement of making it to the first match and the silliness of the children’s melee had made him giddy. When they got home, he was going to raid Nadia’s clothes and suitcase and help himself to any jewels she had stolen from here. Added to the sapphire, he’d have a down payment for another zombie.

He took a wrong turn and ended up
lost, turning around in baffled circles in an aisle full of sheet-covered stalls until a woman pointed him the right way. Maybe he was more than a little buzzed. He was tempted to jerk down the sheets as he walked on. Zombies weren’t modest about where they pissed and shit or who saw them do it. They didn’t care if the population of the entire planet watched them eat like animals or scratch their genitals. So there wasn’t any need to be modest on their behalf. It denied who they were when managers kept trying to fit their zombies’ square pegs into humanity’s round holes. Ink
saw
his zombies for who they were, and what they needed.

He wasn’t so drunk that he pulled any of the sheets down, or even peeked behind them.
He was still conscious of who he was and where he was, and what was appropriate and expected of him. He just thought it was stupid and kept his opinion to himself. One moron had even hung a sign atop a sheet with a message of
Shhhh! He’s sleeping!
Ink went around the aisle and found his own, where only one person of the sixteen stalls this way had covered it up.

Jackie
was already in the stall and checking over Thor’s minor injuries. “He’ll be good to go soon,” she said.

“Death row walk,” Ink said.

“Oh, don’t jinx him. He made it through the melee and who saw that coming? I lost a bet on that,” Jackie said. “Shame on me, huh, Thor?”

The battle between Son of Hades and Son of Zeus was scheduled before theirs.
Ink walked Thor down the funnel and to the gate to watch through the bars as the two zombies beat on each other. It wasn’t a very exciting battle. Son of Zeus threw out his fists everywhere, half of them not even connecting with his opponent. Son of Hades took a bad step all on his own and almost went down, letting Son of Zeus get the upper hand had he the sense to take it. He didn’t. The judges weren’t going to award too many points here for form or expediency.

The
n the zombies twirled around in circles, hands locked at each other’s throats. Ink glanced up to the stands, where people watched but their cheering was perfunctory. Son of Zeus and Son of Hades hadn’t built up their names yet. Neither was attractive nor owned by a popular manager. These two were just slabs of doped-up muscle. If they had any special qualities, they had yet to let anyone know. The announcer cried, “Will this ever end?” If neither killed or maimed each other too badly to fight within five minutes, their scores on moves would determine the winner. It was unusual for a match to end that way, but it looked like this one would. Across the ring, Sofia and Ares were visible through the bars of a gate at another funnel.

Standing on Thor’s other side, the stadium organizer yawned
in boredom. “Son of Hades, Son of Zeus, son-of-a-bitch, just end it.”

Whenever Ink had stood here with Samson,
at a gate and waiting for a match, he had been nervous to the point of nausea. Right now, he wasn’t anything. He just wanted to get it over with and find another beer. The cheers for Thor were going to be just as perfunctory, if not more so, than they were for the two currently fighting in the ring. He was a total nobody. The screams were going to be for Ares, the black-haired stalwart staring fixedly to the light over his head in the other funnel. That one had ripped out his own chest hair after defeating opponents at other competitions. If there didn’t happen to be anyone around to attack, he’d go after himself.

“You see the kids’ melee?” the employee asked, snapping gum.
“It was great.”

“Yeah, I saw,” Ink said.
“Nice panties there. That guy should have worn a belt.”

“I heard him yelling that he was going to sue.
Sue the pants off the stadium’s sponsor! The owner, the announcer, the manager of that princess, everyone. But he’s the only one whose pants came off. Crybaby.”

“He was told to get out of there,” Ink said.

“Exactly! What else are we going to do? Do we have to escort everyone out personally by the hand? Apparently we do.” The guy snapped his gum again and leaned on the wall as he watched the never-ending battle. “Oh, please, whichever son you are, take the other one down.”

It ran all the way to the bell and the lights went on.
The two let off their fighting and stared. Their managers were released from the other two funnels and came out to the ring to stand by their injured zombies. Everyone waited while the scores were tallied, and several minutes later, the announcer called it for Son of Zeus. His bloody hand was raised into the air and people clapped for a few seconds.

“Good luck,
Thor,” the employee said as Son of Hades and Son of Zeus were walked to their funnels.

Ink shrugged as the announcer called out the
names of the next pair. He had needed luck the night Samson died. “Thor’s going down.”

The gum snapped
as the gate rolled open. “Think positive thoughts, man.”

Ink held up his hand to keep up the image of an excited manager and walked Thor in to his starting mark.
Hanging back at her gate and raising a cane, Sofia let the stadium employee on that side get Ares to his mark. Everyone was going nuts for Ares as Ink returned to the gate. In one of the stands, four bare-chested men stood at the bar. Each had a thick red letter painted on his skin, and altogether it spelled ARSE. The big screens caught it and everyone howled with laughter at the misspelling, even though the men with S and E had hastily reshuffled to correct it.

“ARSE!
ARSE! ARSE!” the announcer cheered. “I mean ARES!”

The gates closed.
The employee choked on his gum as he snickered about the error. “God, I love my job.”

The brightest lights were doused.
The afternoon had faded away and now other lights were on to shine over the ring, but none at the necessary intensity to dazzle the zombies. Ares and Thor took instant notice of each other. They bolted over the ground between them, eyes locked and fingers clenching into fists. Ink felt a momentary flash of pity for the blind kid. His friend was on his way to zombie heaven.

“Farts,” Ink said.
“You ever light them?”

“Excuse me?” the
employee asked.

Ink didn’t repeat the question, and the employee didn’t ask for clarification.
The two zombies had reached one another. Ares threw a heavy fist at Thor, who whirled around, came up short behind Ares, and leaped onto his back. Both men at the gate said, “Holy shit!” Ares reeled around off-balance and threw up his hands to rip at Thor’s face. But Thor had already gone for his neck and bitten in.

Blood came out in an arc that went several feet away.
The audience gasped as Thor refastened his teeth and hung on like a dog. Ares whirled around and around like an ungraceful ballerina, his staggers growing more pronounced until he fell over backwards. Thor took the brunt of the impact, which forced him to let go. A bloody piece of meat was knocked out of his teeth. He wriggled out from underneath and kicked out hard just as a stunned Ares began to turn over.

Ink heard a crack.
Ares slumped and went still. The timer on the screen read 0:29 and stayed there. Thor threw himself at Ares as the lights went on, and then he stopped to stare.

It was dead silent in the stands.
Then it exploded.

“Oh my God!” the employee at Ink’s side shouted.
“Oh my God, did you see that?
Did you fucking see that?
”

Ink had seen.
He didn’t believe it, but he had seen. The gates rolled open and he stepped out into a swelling hubbub. People were going bonkers at the bars and standing at their seats. The announcer cried, “Thor defeats Ares! Thor defeats Ares in less than half a bleeding minute!” The employee stationed at the other gate came out and rushed over to check on Ares. Sofia just stood there dumbly, gripping her canes for all she was worth.

They weren’
t going to be friendly for the rest of the Games. She wouldn’t forgive this for a very long time. Ares had been her best shot at winning a seat in the clubroom this year, and Thor had dropped him after a fight so short that it was shameful.

The employee knelt down within a growing pool of blood beside Ares.
Then he raised his head to the announcer’s box and made a cutting motion with his arms.
Ares was dead
. Good God! Thor had torn out his neck and then
broken
it, and Ink knew in his heart that the very long time to forgiveness he was anticipating was going to extend to the grave. The screaming of the crowds overcame the announcer, and all Ink heard was, “THOR! THOR! THOR!”

Whoever had killed Samson could go fuck himself or herself, because Ink was now the manager of the zombie who had taken down
Ares
at the biggest zombie competition in the United States. This was going to make the sports section of the papers. A tiny blurb on a back page, but it would be in there as one of the biggest upsets in the Games.

Two employees jogged out with a stretcher to collect the remains a
s Ink guided Thor to the funnel. It was impossible to tell how much he was hurt with the blood saturating his face and chest. But he was walking strong, and Ink fancied the zombie could feel a little of the pride at being the cause of the stadium’s hysterics.

Once in the funnel, the gate closed.
The announcer couldn’t even call the next pair because everyone in the stands was still roaring. The employee clapped, saying, “What did I tell you, man? Positive thinking!”

It wasn’t
the power of positive thinking and it wasn’t luck either. God Himself was smiling down on Ink.

In the stall, Ink washed Thor off tenderly.
Nine-tenths of the blood on him belonged to Ares. The last tenth was coming from his chest, the wound having opened an inconsequential amount, and from his gums. He had taken a pretty hard blow to the back when Ares tipped over onto him, but it couldn’t have been that serious or Thor wouldn’t be walking and standing so well.

He
was unhurt. Jackie confirmed it and then they just stared at each other and at him until people flooded over to the bars. Cameras clicked, everyone wanting a shot and a few of them asking for Ink’s autograph. He smiled and spoke, shook hands and answered questions, did everything he had once done with Samson. A fighter’s audience was built partially on how accessible his manager was, how personable, and each visitor that went away thrilled and pleased was a new fan of Delwich Stables’ Thor.

The excitement at the
bars lasted a whole hour, with updates coming at regular intervals about other fights. Some people were darting back and forth between the stables and the stadium; others were just watching a live stream on their cell phones. Dionysus won his match, no surprise there, and his opponent Hecate was now short an ear. Bastard of Hades was hurt so badly at his match that he had to be euthanized, and how did Fightin’ Titan ever pull that off? God liked Ink, that was certain, but He also had some strange affection for that one-eyed lug nut of a zombie.