The Death Match Read online

  “What am I supposed to do with her things? Take them down to Brazil and give them to the mom that pimped her out before she even had her period? Be, like, ‘Sorry I killed your daughter with my bare hands, but here’s her toothbrush’?”

  Matt was going to say he didn’t have any idea, but she cut him off before he could speak.

  “You know what? Fuck it.”

  She started gathering armfuls of stuff and throwing them blindly out the open door into the driveway. Clothes and shoes and books and training gear and anything she could get her hands on. Matt just stepped back and let her wind down on her own. Eventually she stopped throwing things and covered her face with her hands. He led her to the sofa and made her lie down, covering her with a fuzzy purple blanket that looked like it had been picked out by a child.

  She turned away from him, curling her body in on itself.

  He probably should have left, but looking at Stacy with her tangled red hair in her face and clutching the blanket up under her battered chin, he knew he couldn’t do that. He owed it to her to make sure that she was going to be okay on her own before he took off.

  There was a large, puffy easy chair opposite the couch, and Matt eased his sore body down into it with a grateful sigh. It was amazing how good something as simple as a comfortable chair could feel. It almost made the madness of that strange and endless night seem worthwhile. Maybe they hadn’t stopped Mr. Dark for good, but they’d certainly put a major dent in his latest scheme. That was enough for one night.

  Matt slept. He didn’t dream.

  * * *

  The next day, Stacy seemed intensely grateful to discover that Matt hadn’t left her. She didn’t want to talk about what had happened, but she was glad to have company and offered Matt a place to stay for a few days. He let her think that she was helping him out by letting him sleep on her couch, but really he wanted to keep an eye on her, to make sure that she was coping with what she’d been forced to do.

  They spent a lot of time in her large, weedy backyard, Matt chopping wood and Stacy hitting a large truck tire with a sledgehammer. Not speaking, just sweating and enjoying the silent companionship and good, clean physical labor. And as Stacy sweated through her grief, she became gradually more comfortable with Matt.

  Stacy didn’t talk much, but she turned out to be an excellent listener. He found himself sharing details about his own experience with losing Janey that he’d never told anyone before. Details about what he’d been through with Andy. She was sympathetic and understanding, and eventually she started to open up about Tanya.

  At first she wouldn’t talk at all about what had happened in Long’s underground arena, just about the complex nature of her relationship with Tanya. Stacy had never been with another woman before Tanya, or even in love at all for that matter. She really had no standard to compare the relationship to, but she had to admit that there were times when she wasn’t sure if Tanya’s feelings were as strong as hers.

  “She…she said something to me during the fight,” she told Matt, leaning on the handle of her sledge with one hand and using the hem of her T-shirt to mop sweat from her freckled brow with the other.

  This was the first time she’d made any reference to that fight, so Matt didn’t want to spook her. He just nodded and waited for her to continue.

  “She…she said she never loved me. That she was just using me for a place to crash while she was fucking every guy at the gym behind my back. I mean, that’s exactly what I was afraid of. Exactly. But… This is gonna sound really weird.”

  “It’s okay,” Matt said. “Go ahead.”

  “Well,” she continued, “it’s like in that moment, for the first time since we found her, I saw the real Tanya in her eyes. Like the evil inside her lost its grip, just for a second. She knows what a hot temper I have, and it’s like…like she said those things because she wanted me to kill her.”

  “Jesus,” Matt said.

  “What do you think was really going on there?” Stacy asked.

  “Man, I don’t know,” he said. “But whatever it was, it’s over now.”

  He didn’t say the next thing that came to mind, because there wasn’t any point. But he couldn’t help but think it.

  It’s over for Stacy. It will never be over for me.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “You sure you won’t stay?” Stacy asked.

  Matt looked at her. She seemed to have aged ten years in the past week, not so much in the face as in the eyes. She was still clearly wrestling with what had happened, with what she had been forced to do, but for her the fight was over. For Matt, the horrible, inexplicable events that took place in Long’s compound were just jumbled pieces of the bigger puzzle. Questions within questions, like nesting dolls, and Matt knew he had no choice but to move on. To keep searching for answers. To understand the true significance of these repeating patterns and find out what Mr. Dark was really up to. Because he knew that until these questions were answered once and for all, settling down and trying to live a normal life was laughably impossible. He’d tried with Rachel when he’d first been resurrected, and look how well that turned out. Normal lives were for the living, not for undead rōnin like Matt.

  But trying to articulate all this seemed pointless. He had developed a powerful kind of foxhole bond with Stacy, and he knew that she really understood him in a way that few living people ever could. He also knew that it was time to move on for both of them. She needed to get on with living, and he needed to get on with something else.

  “Thanks,” he said, “but I can’t.”

  Stacy nodded.

  “Thank you,” she said, shrugging and not making eye contact.

  It was his turn to nod and look away. He was about to go when she spoke again.

  “Does it ever go away?” Stacy asked. “The hole. Missing her.”

  Matt shook his head.

  “No.”

  She looked up at him like she was waiting for him to qualify his answer somehow, or make it seem not so bad. But he didn’t. He didn’t have the energy to lie to her, and he didn’t think it would help even if he could.

  To his surprise, she came forward and hugged him, hard. He just stood there and let her for a moment, awkward and unsure, then wrapped an arm around her muscular back and squeezed, giving her three solid pats on the shoulder the way he might if he were hugging a close male friend.

  “Come back anytime,” she said. “My offer is always open.”

  “Thanks,” Matt replied.

  He walked away without looking back. He could feel Stacy watching him as he went. He hoped that she would be all right.

  * * *

  Flame was thrilled to see him and kissed his face so many times that she rubbed off all her lipstick and left him looking like he’d been attacked by a giant squid.

  “I had this awful feeling that something bad was gonna happen to you that night,” she said. “And I ain’t never been wrong when I get that feeling. I was sure I’d never see you again. Look at you.” She went on the attack with more kisses, and Matt laughingly fought her off.

  “I’m fine, honest.” He wiped his face on a bar napkin. “I just came by to pick up the rest of my things and say good-bye.”

  “Love ’em and leave ’em, huh?” Flame pulled a compact from her giant purse and started slathering on more lipstick. “Fine. Break my heart—see if I care. You men are all the same.”

  Matt laughed and shook his head as he gathered up the rest of his meager belongings, a spare shirt and some clean socks and a novel with a broken spine that he kept meaning to finish. Nothing really valuable, but when you own almost nothing, the few things you do have seem much more important.

  “Thanks for everything,” Matt said.

  “My pleasure, honey. You take care out there.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  Matt was about to leave when he nearly ran right into Lenny, the crotchety old guy who’d had only twenty-four more days left at Long’s shipping company. The o
lder man was already plastered, and the sun was just starting to go down.

  “Whoa there,” Matt said, gripping Lenny’s arm as he staggered and nearly fell flat on his face.

  “The lousy rats,” he was muttering. “The bastards. I only had twenty-two days left and they went and shitcanned every last one of us. Every last one.”

  Matt wasn’t surprised. With Long dead and his twisted underground death matches put to a stop, there wasn’t any point in keeping his dummy corporation running anymore.

  “Sorry, Gramps,” Matt said, helping the older man to a barstool.

  “I just went over there,” he said. “Wanted to take a piss on the gate that locked us out of our jobs. Show them what I think of their… Anyway, I go over there, and what do you know? They got cops all over. Found a guy dead. ‘A guy?’ I say. ‘What guy?’ Well, it’s my buddy Glen. Some kinda dog attack, they said.”

  “Dog attack?” Matt repeated, frowning.

  “Worked for DS&T longer than I did. I guess he just wanted to get a few things out of his locker after they shut the place down. He was kind of an asshole sometimes, but we used to eat lunch together. We ate lunch together for sixteen fucking years. He liked a tuna melt.”

  “I’m sorry,” Matt said.

  “Sorry?” Lenny gripped his arm like a crab. “Sorry? Don’t you get it?”

  “Look,” Matt said, trying to extract himself from the old man’s clawlike grip. “I better—”

  Lenny pulled Matt closer, his breath a noxious cloud of booze and bad teeth.

  “There ain’t no dogs,” he whispered. “There ain’t no dogs. No dogs.”

  Lenny’s head sank slowly toward the bar as he repeated himself over and over.

  “I’ll call his wife to come get him,” Flame said with a knowing shake of her spiky orange head. “He’s been like this ever since they laid everybody off.”

  Matt nodded, sympathetic but also knowing that there was nothing he could do to help the old man. He had other things on his mind.

  He thanked Flame for all her help, shouldered his rucksack, and headed over to the pier to see what was going on.

  Across the street was a small group of curious onlookers, mostly drunks from the bars and a few curious dockworkers. Cops had the entrance to the pier cordoned off and were keeping the crowd at bay.

  “Was it a pit bull?”

  “Partially eaten, is what I heard.”

  Partially eaten. Just like those students on the mesa. Just like Oscar Amezuita. There were clearly no dogs to blame here. No hungry sea creatures like the ones that had supposedly snacked on the dead dockworker. In all the frenetic activity surrounding their failed attempt to rescue Tanya, Matt had almost forgotten about the corpse that had brought him to Long Beach in the first place.

  Matt had a sinking feeling that both bodies had in fact been eaten by a human. Or something that used to be human. Something not unlike the corrupted archaeologists on the mesa.

  Could some of Long’s scarred fighters or tattooed henchmen have escaped the fire at Long’s compound and returned to the only familiar place they knew, the DS&T pier?

  A pair of crime-scene techs were stretchering the corpse from the pier to a waiting meat wagon. They’d done a pretty half-assed job of covering the man’s half-eaten face and torso with a stained plastic tarp. Both arms were visible, covered in bruises and scratches, but no Ouroboros tattoo.

  He had to warn Stacy. Whatever was going on, it obviously wasn’t over yet.

  * * *

  Matt knocked several times on Stacy’s door. He could hear music playing inside the apartment, but there was no answer. He reached out to test the doorknob but swiftly recoiled.

  There was some kind of pungent reddish brown sludge smeared on the knob. Like someone had been Dumpster diving behind a Chinese restaurant and didn’t wash their hands before opening the door. Sudden concern for Stacy’s safety overcame his disgust, and he pushed the door open.

  Inside, the burned-garbage smell was even stronger, almost overwhelming. The apartment was dim, lit only with scented candles that didn’t stand a chance against the toothy stench. Ax in hand, Matt crept down the hallway toward the bedroom door.

  There were sounds coming from the other side of the not-quite-closed door. Familiar sounds, not of fighting, but of an altogether different kind of grappling.

  As soon as Matt realized what he was hearing, respect for his friend’s privacy made him take an involuntary step back from the door. But his gut was still telling him that something was wrong.

  He made himself peer through the crack of the barely open door. His first reaction to what he saw in Stacy’s dimly lit bedroom was immediate and intensely physical.

  Stacy had a visitor. A female visitor. They were both naked, and in the dim lighting it was difficult to tell them apart. It was just a fleshy kaleidoscope of glistening curves and sweat-damp hair and tense, quivering legs and secret flashes of things Matt knew he wasn’t supposed to be seeing, but he couldn’t seem to look away.

  Matt felt a guilty flush of embarrassment for peeping on Stacy like some kind of pervert and was about to slink away in shame when the other woman threw her hair back from her face, twisting toward the flickering light in unself-conscious ecstasy.

  It was Tanya. And she was dead. Very dead.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Matt took half a step back, his hands gripping the ax handle so his knuckles strained through the skin. Tanya was not just corrupted with secret rot that only Matt could see—she had gone full-on Night of the Living Dead. A charred and decomposing zombie with an obviously broken neck. Her nude body was riddled with catastrophic injuries, any one of which would be impossible to survive. Exposed teeth gleamed through her flayed and shredded cheek muscle. Sheets of crumbling black skin hung from her shoulder blades like burned wings. It was utterly repulsive and deeply wrong, what he was seeing, but underneath that revulsion and horror was another, more complex emotion. Something so dark and awful that it made him physically sick.

  What if…

  “Just ask,” said that jocular, intimate voice inches from his ear.

  He spun, ax raised and ready.

  It was Mr. Dark. He was wearing that same Tapout T-shirt and a smug grin.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  Mr. Dark shrugged, turned away.

  “You know what I’m talking about. But maybe you don’t really want it bad enough.”

  Matt lunged forward. Mr. Dark flickered like a shadow and was gone.

  The soft sounds from the bedroom were getting louder, more emphatic.

  Matt pressed a shaking hand to his temple. He knew exactly what Mr. Dark meant, but it was so terrible he could barely stand to think it, let alone say it out loud.

  If Tanya could come back, could his wife? Could Janey?

  “No problem,” Mr. Dark said, answering Matt’s unspoken question. “All you have to do is ask.”

  “Bullshit,” Matt said. “What’s the catch?”

  “Catch?” Mr. Dark arranged his leering features into a wide-eyed parody of innocent disbelief. “What makes you think there’s a catch?”

  “There’s always a catch.”

  “I’m sure that we could work something out.”

  “Fuck you,” Matt spat.

  “No, thanks,” Mr. Dark replied. “You’re not my type. What else have you got?”

  “Fuck this!”

  Matt pushed past Mr. Dark and kicked the bedroom door wide.

  Tanya leapt off the bed in a heartbeat, naked body in a ready crouch, with her fists raised. When she saw that it was Matt, she relaxed a little, but not completely.

  “Your timing,” Tanya said. “It is terrible.”

  Stacy was much slower to react to Matt’s intrusion, almost like a sleepwalker who’d just been shaken awake. She looked at Matt, then down at herself. She gripped a handful of the twisted, sweaty sheet and pulled it up over her breasts.

  “I…I thought…” She looked at Ta
nya and then back at Matt. “Is this…real?”

  “I don’t have a clue what that word even means anymore,” Matt replied. “But I see her too.”

  “Then…” She turned to Tanya. “You’re really here. You’re alive!”

  “Well,” Tanya replied with a smirk, “I am here—I’ll give you that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t you understand? I came back for you. Because I love you, Stacy.”

  “How can you say that?” Stacy asked, turning away with a sheen of unshed tears in her eyes. “I killed you.”

  “You had no choice,” Tanya said.

  She sat down on the bed beside Stacy and took her hand, making no attempt to cover her burned and naked body.

  “There’s something broken inside me,” Tanya continued. “It’s been broken ever since I was a little girl. When you are broken, evil can come in through the cracks. Do you understand?”

  Matt thought back to what Mr. Dark had said back in the underground arena. Trauma is a zipper. He shuddered.

  “But I found a way to fight it now,” Tanya said. “I want to. To be with you. Because when you looked at me, you never saw trash. You saw the good in me. You see me.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Stacy said, knuckling away her tears and pulling Tanya close.

  “I know, baby,” Tanya replied.

  “Jesus,” Matt said. “Stacy, listen to me. You have to see… This is so wrong.” The words thudded into the room, as useless and disconnected from the world as one of Ward Cleaver’s sermons on the show Matt had loved to watch as a child. There was no easy way to say this. “You’re fucking a corpse. A rotting, dead thing is fucking you. Is that what you want?”

  “Fuck off, dead man. You are just as wrong as me.” Tanya looked at Stacy and smirked at her shocked expression. “What, he didn’t mention that little detail when he was pouring his heart out to you?”

  “You’re like her?” Stacy looked up at him, eyes hurt and full of questions. “A rotting, dead thing?”

  “You don’t see what I see,” he said. “She’s corrupted. Don’t believe her. She’s still evil.”