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  “I say we make for the hallway,” Paulo said, gasping and near breathless. “The three guys that brought us here aren’t cheering. If we try to break through them, we might be able to make it. You two at—”

  He didn’t get to finish detailing his plan or rationale. Sarah brought her blade up from her hip, having to go up on her tiptoes to get it through his breast, and sunk it down into the area of his heart, below the shoulder and between the ribs.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Sarah kept repeating, her apology drowned out by the cheers and applause from the crowd of the rec room.

  Paulo dropped to his knees, then crumpled onto his broken arm, not even flinching, beyond the pain now.

  Nikki threw Sarah’s hand away, the girl’s fingers transforming to spitting adders in her grip.

  Chapter 41

  By turning war stories into ghost stories, you could save yourself a lot of heartache, if not many sleepless nights.

  “They call him King Gook. And that’s not just our name for him, that’s what his own people call him, too. He’s taken the name to be a term of endearment, guy just don’t give a fuck. So anyway. The story that’s been told to me is that he runs a POW camp, not like far up north, behind lines, but in these hills somewhere, could be where we’re marching tomorrow for all we know.

  “And you know all that honor and pride and shit that we learned about before drop? The focus on civility and hospitality that’s so ‘engrained in the culture’? Yeah, well, King Gook don’t believe in any of that froufrou garbage. He’s ruthless. And he has a special way of running a camp and has his own detachment whose sole job is to keep that camp stocked with GIs.

  “From what I’ve heard, not that I believe any of it, mind you, is that the men in this squad he’s got, there ain’t many of them, but they’re so good at capturing—not killing but capturing—troopers that it borders on the supernatural. Well, fuck borders actually, ’cause one guy I talked to claimed that these men possessed the power to turn into animals and trees and shit. But that sounds unlikely to me, so I just figured they’re really good with camouflage and traps, snares and nets and shit. They’re so observant that your cute little trip wires and bounding mines don’t mean shit to them.

  “And once you get to the camp? Your name and rank and serial number? You can forget them, or even the thought of giving up anything else you know. King Gook don’t play the game for coordinates or numbers or where you think MacArthur’s headed next. He tortures for the love of it, no questions asked.

  “I hear he’s got quite an imagination, too. He’ll starve you for days and while he’s doing that, he’ll take all his meals in front of your cell, eating big stacks of these buns and rice balls while you watch, close enough so you can smell it, only letting you gather enough rainwater to stay conscious. Then one day he sets down a plate of those same buns in your cell while you’re asleep. You wake to the smell of it, so loopy from starvation and dehydration that you don’t even notice that he’s served you a plate of painted rocks until you’ve swallowed down five or six of them, choking or dying of a blocked gut with him laughing at you.

  “Then there’s the fights. He’ll starve you again, let his men at you with the cat-o’-nine-tails or whatever, maybe partially blind you, and then he’ll offer you a chance to escape, have a guard ‘accidentally’ drop their key or knife or whatever. Then when you get out of your cage it looks like there’s only one guard between you and freedom, at least he looks like a guard, same black hair, yellah, wearing that little hat they got. Only by the time you’ve cut him up, maybe he fought back so you bashed his brains in, you realize you’ve just done in your commanding officer, or your best buddy in the company, whatever will hurt you most.

  “Yeah, King Gook’s insidious and he’s out there, maybe not every story I heard is true, but I believe that: He’s out there.”

  That’s how those stories went sometimes. You were wrapped up in the tale while your man told it, his face demonic in the firelight, but then you thought about it. You scrutinized. There are so many inaccuracies, exaggerations, or things that just don’t make any sense that once you pick at the corners of the story, you aren’t even scared of it when daylight comes because you know it can’t be true. But that kind of realization doesn’t stop you from recognizing the real moral of the story: Don’t get caught.

  —

  Arnold looked around him, at these men and women who had no allegiances besides sport and their own selfish need to be sated.

  As he watched the faces of the spectators, the enemy, the war he was fighting divided itself by its fronts. First the sides formed a triangle: He and his men against the men and women of the rec room, and the nearly vanquished third party being the two women and the man, bleeding out. But then it became a square as he thought of the nude men and their woman leader; and then a pentagon as he included the residents of the cafeteria, sucking the burned corners off the steam trays. The fronts then split exponentially as he divided them by every man and woman who would fight for their own life, no sides if pushed to choose. After that the fronts split so many times that the shape did not resemble an octagon or anything like that but a polygon of such complexity that, with your blurred vision, it resembled a perfect circle.

  If it were every man for himself, his own men not included, to a point, why was he standing here watching this fight, this barbarism?

  Making them watch was the head honcho of the rec room’s way of showing Arnold that he was in charge. But what the man in the headdress didn’t understand was that he was in charge of nothing, since through his actions the chief had made himself the poster boy for anarchy. His spot at the head of the winner’s table was mercurial by its very nature. Luck, not power, ruled the rec room, even when the games were supposedly rigged.

  The shard of glass broken off in the big man’s chest was the last of the punishment he was able to take. The girl had gotten lucky and had been able to sink her blade deep before it snapped off. When the man’s knees buckled like that, even though it took a few more breaths to pump enough blood out of him, he wasn’t going to get back up. Arnold had seen too many men hang on past their time and he hoped that the man would get a quick death, that all the right lines were severed completely. The big young man was an enemy, but still a warrior who deserved better than he got.

  Atop his perch, the head honcho cheered along with the rest of his people at the man’s death but grimaced as he started down his stack of folding tables and broken desk chairs.

  Only just recently seated and taking time to find his balance, he had probably expected the fight to last longer than a surprise round-one knockout. Sure, the dowdy one had been a dark horse, and seeing her betraying her friends was exciting for the crowd, but it was over far too quickly for a prizefight.

  The leader of the rec room had been fat before the healing, but so had most of the residents. While most of his fat had burned off, the healing hadn’t been able to get rid of all of it. There were still fatty deposits in his chest and belly, one tit bigger than the other. His fat added another layer of difficulty to climbing down from his throne and he slipped two steps from the bottom, as one of the folding tables shifted.

  Those who saw the man slip laughed about it, while the rest of them kept cheering the destruction of the male staffer. That was weakness: when your own people laughed at you as if you were a clown, when you literally slipped from the great height that you’d placed yourself upon. Arnold noted that this fat man was no threat and surveyed the rest of the scene.

  The mousy girl who’d stabbed the wounded man was on her knees now, hugging herself and sobbing, turned away from the body. The black girl was above him, holding her hand to his neck and checking for a pulse while the blood pooled, she screamed at the girl, her voice hoarse.

  It was the aftermath of a friendly fire incident, and if Arnold had to guess, he’d bet the black girl would be the first to put her friend in the ground, if offered the opportunity. Which she might be, if he was r
eading the frenzy of this room correctly. The people of the rec room had gone through all the trouble of staging this and were going to insist on a change to their fight card.

  Around the circle, a new division revealed itself to Arnold that he hadn’t noticed before. The room had filled in, and not just with the regulars of the rec room. There were residents in food-stained smocks who Arnold recognized from the cafeteria. A few of these cafeteria people must have just entered the room and hadn’t seen the drama unfold, or even known there was a fight, so they crossed the line into the ring and were pulled back by their arms or necks by the organizers. Things were getting disorganized, chaotic.

  He watched the food-stained residents. There were expressions of covetousness on these men’s and women’s faces as they watched prizes being given, some of them useless trinkets but others whole bottles of Haldol or Cialis, items that had real value and were only going to get scarcer as the days went on. No, the men and women had come into the room empty-handed, nothing except their clothes, a few of them carrying the table torches that they’d constructed in the caf, but they wanted a piece of the action.

  Shifting the box in his arms, not from the weight but because the angles were biting into his palms, Arnold looked down at their bounty and had an idea how they could put it to use, how this box of drugs, paltry in the grand scheme of things and not nearly enough to start up another business again, could help him and his remaining men shift the balance of power.

  He had this idea almost entirely worked through, was thinking of a way he could communicate his plan to both Grant and Beaumont without anyone overhearing, when the old woman darted by him. She slid on her knees and zipped into the ring before anyone could stop her, her body a blur of red and black sweater.

  Whether the woman was the catalyst he needed to put his plan into action or the element of his undoing was unclear as the pandemonium began.

  Chapter 42

  The fat bastard dusted himself off, missing a huge section of his ass where jellied blood and checkers pieces still clung, and walked to the center of the room. His personal bodyguards followed him, but at enough of a distance to ensure that their boss couldn’t hear them giggling at his fall.

  He reached the girls and pulled the one that wasn’t Nikki to her feet, raising her hand up, squeezing her bandaged hand until she yelped.

  “Winner! Winner!” he yelled, then grabbing ahold of Nikki, still oblivious to Harriet’s approach, his back turned. It was bad showmanship, keeping your back to half your audience, not the right way to work a room, but it kept him from seeing Harriet, so she hoped the dipshit would keep doing it.

  Nikki fought him to keep her own hand down but he was stronger, and he twisted her wrist so her knife clattered to the floor and she cried out, finally allowing her hand to be raised in a winner’s pose.

  Her daughter-in-law wanted no part of the killing, it wasn’t glory to her but a crime. Harriet flinched at the girl’s screams, enraged that someone besides her was getting to cause the black witch pain. Was that it or was her resolve weakening? Was her mind knitting itself back together or regressing? Was that tug at her frontal lobe the beginnings of sympathy for this malignant creature who’d ruined her life?

  She licked the scars over her lips, her sores had healed themselves but she felt the desire to open them back up. She told herself that the craving stemmed not from Pick’s disease but because she wanted to taste blood.

  “Winner!” the fat man repeated; he was a dullard, you could tell it from his voice, his lack of vocabulary. Harriet was close enough now that the bodyguards had spotted her. They had stopped snickering to themselves and were moving to intercept her, but they were too far behind, and she’d have done what she needed to do before they could get to her.

  Nikki tried to wiggle out of the fat man’s grip, thrashing like a hooked fish against the line, but failing, her arm too solidly attached to her shoulder. On one of her turns, she caught sight of Harriet creeping, fast and low. Nikki’s eyes went wide and Harriet knew she’d been recognized, her face illuminated by the firelight, probably looking a little different than what Nikki was used to.

  The look Nikki gave her, the fear there, hit Harriet like the finest gin. It was a heady floral scent that spread through Harriet’s nostrils and filled her chest with a drunken warmth. This was going to feel good.

  The girl redoubled her efforts to get away as Harriet approached, the fat man three steps away now.

  “To the death!” the man yelled, renewing the two girls’ contract for another bout, the little nurse withering in his hand like a grape in a sudden cold snap.

  “Not fair,” the girl whispered, apparently thinking that she wasn’t going to be forced to fight again. Still naive, after all the girl must have gone through, that was a true achievement in ignorance.

  It didn’t matter, the fight was about to be canceled. There was something else on the ticket. To truly ruin all these bastards’ fun, Harriet would kill the plain girl after Nikki, if she had enough time.

  Harriet snaked a hand around the front of the fat man’s neck from behind. His skin was slack because of the sudden weight loss but still spongy enough that she could get a good handful as she dug her nails into his neck. The rec room leader, the ring announcer, the big winner was as surprised as anyone else by her appearance behind him, and his fingers released their grip around both girls’ wrists, letting them go free.

  With little time to spare, Harriet anchored herself to the man by grabbing on to his shoulder with one hand and tearing at his throat with her other. On anyone with a normal physiology she’d have been able to tear out his Adam’s apple and be done with it, opening up a new airway, but on the fat man it was different. The skin of his neck stretched out, becoming a huge dewlap as she pulled it taut, the flesh beginning to tear away only as she applied pressure to his stretch marks with her nails.

  Harriet felt it give and tore off a chunk of neck flesh.

  A fountain of blood and a sound like gelatinous offal hitting a butcher shop floor told her that it was over as he fell to the ground, taking her along with him as she tried to roll away toward Nikki with the momentum.

  But Nikki was too smart, had seen her too early, and had time to plan. She was correct to take her chances with the bodyguards and she crawled toward them, running in place on her hands and knees, slipping on blood, some of it old, some of it new, all of it mixing into a thick slush.

  Around them, the circle of spectators disappeared as the group melded into a riot. The main army man had upturned his box of goodies and tossed its contents across the floor.

  It was unlikely that he’d done this to save Harriet from being torn apart for her assassination, but that was one of the results anyway and she would have to remember to spare his life, if they both survived this.

  Residents scrambled toward the bottles and Baggies, others running to their fallen leader, and some—unconcerned with loot or patriarchy—starting their own fights. Cafeteria losers tackled decked-out high-stakes winners, holding them down while they pulled off their ropes of fake pearls and emptied their pockets.

  Although it was more dangerous, made the situation more complicated, Harriet liked things better this way. These pathetic bastards had been gifted with a new lease on life, on vitality, and they had used it to engage in the same activities they had for the last few decades with only slight tweaks. Chaos was a better state for them.

  Harriet was stronger, faster than Nikki, but she was starting out at a handicap of a few feet and it made all the difference. Nikki regained her footing and ran headlong into the group of three bodyguards, the men leaving her alone, more concerned with Harriet as Nikki ducked down and covered her face, their tread threatening to trample her but their long legs missing her completely.

  Harriet picked up Nikki’s prison blade and took her own steak knife from her waist, planting her feet and letting gravity do what gravity is wont to do.

  The three men tried to stop but found it difficu
lt at full gallop; they were superpowered but not too bright. One of them slipped on the blood and went sideways in the air, getting his legs tangled under the other two so that they slid toward Harriet in a tangle. As they came within reach she stabbed and slashed down, taking at least one throat and three Achilles’ tendons with her, the cartilage getting plucked and then retracting with a satisfying elastic snap. Those three wouldn’t be giving her any trouble as she bounded over them and into the melee, keeping an eye out for Nikki’s blond tips and kinky roots in a sea of bad dye jobs.

  Around her, heads were crushed into tile as years-old animosities boiled over into brutal fistfights.

  Those who’d taken the time to arm themselves before the battle royale broke out were both better equipped to handle it and also instant targets for the residents who were still working together. If your weapon lacked range or efficiency, you were just as likely to be tackled while you tried to saw off a person’s hand as someone who had only their fists. The most successful weapons seemed to be flails made from electrical tape and various bits of hardware, since they offered range, speed, and an unpredictability that kept attackers at bay.

  There were a few members of the group who seemed to be eschewing violence entirely, picking off the carrion of war and looting the corpses of the fallen. Then there was at least one couple wallowing in the blood and using it like an erotic oil while they engaged in apocalyptic sex.

  This Hieronymus Bosch tapestry of violence and destruction was turned into a Where’s Waldo? book as Harriet tried to spot Nikki. She took a tentative slash at anyone who got too close, not wanting to provoke a fight but aware that a fight might want to come to her.

  In a stroke of critical thinking that she’d give herself a gold star for if she could, Harriet turned and looked back toward the doorway behind her. If the girl and her friends had been so keen on the basement before, they still would be.