The Death Match Read online

  At least he’d thought they were separate. Now he was staring at proof that the atrocities at the mental hospital and the murder frenzy on the Blood Mesa were connected. And if they were part of the same evil, how much of the rest of what he’d seen was too? How much had he missed?

  Matt didn’t have time to think it through. He could tell by Stacy’s reaction that the woman with the painted face was Tanya. And that this was the moment in which things could go horribly wrong.

  He spun and pressed his shoulder against Stacy’s, flat hand against her sternum and whispering close to her ear.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay, just stay cool. You hear me, Stacy? Stay cool.”

  He could feel every muscle in her body vibrating with fury—she was breathing too fast against his hand and straining toward her friend. He knew perfectly well that if she really wanted to go to Tanya, he wasn’t going to be able to hold her back. There was also no way that she could know that Tanya had already been hopelessly infected with evil. If the sores that covered her face were not proof enough, she also had the Ouroboros tattoo on her bare right arm. The one that had been accompanied every time he’d seen it by the grinning visage of Mr. Dark.

  CHAPTER SIX

  At the lip of the fighting pit was an incongruously plush red velvet couch, facing away from the entrance where Matt and Stacy stood. The couch was flanked by more beefy bodyguards, but Matt could see the back of a familiar white head between them.

  There were three heads in a row sitting on the long, high-backed couch: two close together and one slightly apart. The center head belonged to the white-haired Mr. Long. Someone with lots of bleached-blond hair was sitting close to him, their heads leaning toward each other as if the two were whispering. Someone else was sitting on their right, someone with wispy, thinning hair on a head cocked like a dog hearing a funny sound.

  Bookending the couch was a quartet of thugs, two on each end, big arms crossed. Matt couldn’t see their faces, but he was willing to bet that they were just as corrupt as their compadres in the elevator.

  Stacy’s breath was slowing, her fists unclenching, so Matt took his hand off her chest and gestured toward the left with his chin. She nodded, and the two of them started moving cautiously along the curved wall. As they moved, a second identical pair of steel doors was revealed, exactly opposite the first.

  Soon they were far enough along the wall to see the faces of the people on the couch.

  The white-haired, noseless man sat sprawled back amid the cushions, a hand on his companion’s leg. The blond companion was obviously a fighter, but no one Matt recognized. She had the prominent, Neanderthal brow and steam-shovel jaw of a heavy human-growth-hormone abuser. A fading black eye was not the only thing wrong with her face. Creeping corruption had sent out ugly tendrils from the swollen mouse beneath her eye, spreading like a disease all across her face. The white-haired man’s gaze was locked on the fight as he lifted his companion’s hand to his mouth. Instead of kissing it, he licked it, his thick, feculent tongue sliding sluglike over her scab-encrusted knuckles.

  On the far side of Mr. Long was another person whose face was mostly shadowed. That person was wearing a cheap Tapout T-shirt and a bright, toothy grin. The one eye that was visible twinkled with a kind of hideous merriment, making him look like a sex offender dressed up as Santa Claus. That person turned slowly toward Matt, face still teasingly hidden in shifting shadows that fluttered like a stripper’s feather fans.

  He looked right at Matt. And he winked.

  Matt leapt involuntarily back into his own cluster of protective shadows. He didn’t even realize he was gripping Stacy’s wrist until she hissed for him to let her go.

  “Do you know those people on the couch?” he asked.

  “The woman is named Ayla Girgis. Juicer.” She spat out that word as if the word itself were poison. “She’s a bruiser, but her cardio sucks. No stamina. She fights dirty.”

  “And…”

  “And Mr. Long,” Stacy whispered, like he was crazy. “What, you already forgot what he looks like?”

  “Nobody else?”

  She squinted at him as if she was trying to figure out if he was fucking with her.

  He looked back at the couch. The third person was gone. “Never mind.”

  “What now?” Stacy asked.

  “Okay, listen,” he began, but Stacy cut him off.

  “This isn’t any kind of sport,” she said through teeth clenched so hard, Matt thought they might crack. “Look at this. This is like a fucking snuff movie with no camera.” She took a step closer to Long, who now looked like he was trying to fit the blond fighter’s whole fist into his gaping mouth. “And that pig is sitting there loving every minute of it!”

  “Just stay cool,” Matt whispered, gripping Stacy’s muscular shoulder. “Stay cool and think this through.”

  But the truth was, he didn’t even know how to begin explaining to Stacy that saving her friend was already a lost cause. Plus, he didn’t have any idea what their next move should be. Clearly there was some kind of link between the events at the insane asylum, the cannibalistic murders on the mesa, and this horror currently unfolding in the stone pit. But what could that link be?

  Nothing to do but watch and wait. But Stacy wasn’t the watch-and-wait type. She looked like she was going to burst into flames if she didn’t start swinging at someone. Matt really felt for her. She was hurt, confused, and angry, just as he had been when his simple world was first turned inside out by Mr. Dark’s twisted games. But he couldn’t let empathy keep him from reining in her impulsive anger and trying to learn more about what was really going on here.

  “Are you cool?” he asked.

  “Fuck that,” she replied, head down and lips pressed into a determined line.

  “Stacy, listen to me—”

  Whatever he thought he was going to say to her was obliterated by a fierce whoop from Mr. Long, who had dropped the fighter’s hand and leapt to his feet, cheering like a drunken frat boy watching two chicks make out in a sports bar.

  Matt turned his attention back to the pit. Tanya was kneeling on her helpless opponent’s shoulders and pounding the other fighter’s face into stew meat with wild hammer fists. The smaller woman was either comatose or dead, no longer able to defend herself or even try to cover her face, yet it wasn’t until Tanya leaned down and bit a large, stringy chunk out of what was left of her opponent’s face that the bookend thugs stepped in to separate her from the unmoving loser.

  She spat the wad of cheek meat at Long’s feet and raised her gory fists in victory.

  “Well done,” he said, clapping like a happy kid at the circus. “Absolutely fucking beautiful.” He turned to the thugs behind her. “Have her cleaned up, stitched up, and made ready for my bed.” He waved a casual hand at what was left of the loser. “And get that mess cleaned up.”

  Matt turned back to Stacy. Her flushed face was a kaleidoscope of jagged and conflicting emotion. He hated that she had to see something like this, remembering how it felt when he first realized that his best friend, Andy, had been hopelessly corrupted by evil, but it made his job a little easier. At least she didn’t have to take his word for it. Anyone with eyes could see that Tanya was not behaving like a normal person.

  One of the thugs helped Tanya to the other set of steel doors while the other three went to work disposing of the loser’s remains. The first thug didn’t go through the doors with Tanya, just ushered her through and then went to help his buddies. Meanwhile there was some kind of romantic liaison occurring on the couch between Long and the blond fighter that Matt really didn’t want to see. He was about to pull the trembling Stacy back to the first set of doors when she took off in the direction of the doors through which her friend had disappeared. She stuck to the shadows, circumventing the pit with her back pressed against the rough-hewn wall. The thugs were busy with the corpse, and Long was busy with his blond paramour. No one noticed Stacy. They didn’t notice Matt either as he went afte
r her.

  On the other side of those doors was a small, immaculate medical room. White walls, shiny stainless-steel cabinets full of suture packets and gauze and vials of lidocaine. One wall was mostly tinted glass, a window into another part of the complex. A skinny woman with short dark hair and a blood-spattered white coat was tending to Tanya’s wounds, sinking some prickly black stitches into her forehead.

  Both Tanya and the fight doctor turned toward the unexpected visitors with shocked expressions. The doctor’s small, triangular face was as flyblown and putrid as Tanya’s.

  “You can’t be in here,” she said in a chilly tone.

  Stacy’s reply was to knock her out of her sensible white clogs with one surgically perfect punch, right on the button. The doctor staggered in a wobbly arc and then went down in a clatter of sterile instruments, leaving a curved needle and a flapping tail of black thread sticking out of Tanya’s half-closed wound.

  Stacy rushed to Tanya, gripping both of her friend’s scabbed and swollen hands.

  “Baby,” she said. “Oh my fucking God, what have they done to you?”

  Matt hung back while the two women spoke in intense whispers, foreheads pressed together and still holding hands. Even though he couldn’t hear everything they were saying, it was painfully obvious from their body language that they were much more than just friends. If this situation had been sure to get ugly before, it was even worse now. It was hard enough to explain to someone that a close friend was no longer the person she knew and loved. Now things had become infinitely more delicate and complicated.

  Not to mention the fact that Matt was dying to grill Tanya, to ask her about the tattoo, the face paint, the fights. And if she was reluctant to talk, he’d have no qualms about using the ax to encourage the conversation.

  But with all this raw, volatile emotion factored into the mix, Matt would have to tread much more carefully. He had assumed that after witnessing what amounted to cold-blooded murder in the pit, Stacy would see that Tanya was beyond saving. Clearly that wasn’t the case. At this point all he could do was hang back and be ready for hell to break loose.

  Which, if experience had taught him anything, would be any minute now.

  “I’m fine,” Tanya was saying, her Brazilian accent making her hushed voice even more difficult for Matt to understand. “Better than fine.”

  Stacy said something else Matt couldn’t catch. All he could hear was the tone, desperate and pleading.

  “You don’t know what it’s like,” Tanya said, sliding a hand up under Stacy’s T-shirt. “No speed limit. No rules. No morals. It’s better than sex.”

  “You’re sick,” Stacy said, raising her voice as she pulled away from Tanya’s touch. “You need help. Please, let us help you. This isn’t you. Don’t you see that? This isn’t you!”

  “This is more me than I have ever been,” Tanya said.

  “Tell her, Matt,” Stacy said, desperately including him with a supplicating gesture. “Tell her we want to help her.”

  Until that point, Matt had been listening with only half an ear, busy looking through the window into the room that was visible on the other side of the one-way glass. Looking for a way out.

  In the next room were a group of about a dozen female fighters and half that many armed male heavies standing around, keeping watch. The fighters were stretching and sparring, hitting focus mitts and heavy bags and shadowboxing. Some of them were fresh and unscarred, except for the pustulant ravages of their own spiritual corruption. Others were so severely battered they looked like they’d gone ten rounds with a Mack truck and been stitched together by Dr. Frankenstein’s less talented brother. But in the very back of the dim training room, half hidden in shadow, there were two or three fighters so wretched, so grievously wounded and profoundly decomposed, that it didn’t seem possible that they were still standing. At first Matt thought they were wearing trendy silver belts, but when he looked closer, he saw that the belts were really heavy-gauge chains that had been padlocked to thick iron rings in the stone floor.

  When Stacy said his name, Matt turned back to her and frowned.

  “Tell her, Matt,” Stacy said again.

  He shook his head.

  “She’s made her choice,” Matt said.

  “Bullshit,” Stacy said, gripping Tanya’s bruised hand. “No, that’s bullshit. There’s always a choice. If you love me, you’ll let me help you. Leave with us right now. Help us stop this pervert from hurting other women.”

  Tanya stood, the needle still swinging from the flap of skin on her forehead.

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay, let’s go.”

  Stacy let out a rush of relieved laughter and threw her arms around Tanya.

  “Which way?” Stacy asked.

  “This way,” Tanya said, gesturing at one of three doors with one hand while squeezing Stacy’s hand with the other.

  When Stacy turned toward the door, Tanya swung a wide kick, smashing her bare foot into the glass separating the medical room from the training area. Matt, who had been tense and ready for something bad, leapt back from the spray of glass.

  “Help!” Tanya screamed through the broken window. “Help, I’m being kidnapped!”

  The armed thugs all turned toward the ruckus, guns drawn. Matt hit the deck as a burst of bullets shattered the glass-fronted cabinets. Several other heavies came thundering through the door and into the room.

  Matt had gotten to his knees and raised the ax to defend himself when he felt a sudden sharp sting in his left buttock. He turned to see the no-longer-unconscious doctor he’d forgotten all about crouched behind him with an empty syringe in her hand. A dizzy, drowning blackness swiftly overcame him, and the last thing he remembered was the feeling of his grandfather’s ax being wrenched from his numb and useless hands.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  When Matt came to, it took him a few minutes to fight his way back to complete consciousness. He was nauseous and slicked with cold, clammy sweat. It was a battle to make his leaden eyelids peel back from his dry, gritty eyes. Once he had them open, he struggled to focus on his surroundings. It took several seconds before he could make any sense of what he was seeing, because everything was upside down.

  He was upside down, dangling from a chain around his bleeding ankles.

  He had no idea what had happened to Tanya and Stacy. Or Long. Or his henchmen. Or that shadowy figure in the Tapout T-shirt who may or may not have been Mr. Dark. He was alone.

  First he took a careful inventory of what was going on with his body. His hands were bound behind his back with what felt like thick, splintery rope, not chain. He couldn’t see far enough up his own upside-down body to determine exactly how his ankles had been bound, but whatever was going on with them was excruciatingly painful. His feet were numb and the bones in his ankles felt in danger of being crushed by the swinging weight of his suspended body. There was also a warm, seeping wetness soaking through his socks and the cuffs of his pants that had to be blood. When he struggled a little to test the strength of his bonds, that wetness spattered down onto his chin and face, the meaty copper flavor confirming what he already knew.

  He stilled his body and concentrated on scoping his surroundings.

  It was pretty dim, but he could make out a stone wall covered with a maze of rusty pipes to one side, and on the other, too far away to reach, was the curved back of the familiar red couch from which Long had watched the fights. With that detail in place, Matt put the rest of the picture together and realized that he was inside the now empty amphitheater. The pit below was still slightly damp from being hosed out after Tanya’s fight, and the smell of wet stone was weirdly ancient and cavelike, as if the modern bustle of Los Angeles had never existed. He was suddenly, irrationally convinced that even if he did somehow escape this underground hell and return to the surface, he would find nothing but primitive, empty land, untouched by the structure of civilization.

  He realized then that this place had existed far longer than the mid
century modern mansion above. That this place was as old as the strange altar on the mesa. As old as the hidden stone arena behind the insane asylum. He knew that whatever was happening here, it wasn’t just about some rich guy getting his jollies. There had to be a connection to those other profane locations. Men fighting with knives. Women fighting with bare hands. But always fighting. Could it be some kind of unholy tournament? But to what end? And what dark and awful grand prize awaited the winner?

  “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

  Matt heard the familiar, intimate voice slightly behind his left ear, but when he turned defensively toward the sound, his suspended body swung in a helpless wobbly circle, past the dim figure behind him and back around to face the wall, where he’d started.

  The urge to vomit struck, and Matt clenched his teeth till his jaw muscles ached, willing down the bile creeping up the back of his throat.

  The figure behind him stepped into the dim light, a hand on Matt’s left elbow to stop his spinning. It was Long.

  But there was something seriously wrong with him. He held his head at a strange, awkward angle, tilted back and to the right. His rotten, bulging eyes were rolling wildly as if searching for a way out of his own skin. His mouth was wide open as if screaming, the tendons in his neck standing out with the strain. He moved with a jerky, crooked gait and held on to Matt’s elbow way too tight. He held Matt’s ax in his other hand.

  “Does this body make me look fat?”

  Long’s mouth didn’t move at all. It stayed frozen wide, and the smarmy, cheerful voice that emanated from his gaping throat belonged to someone else.