“You said they abandoned you,” Raine confirmed.
“Yeah, I guess so. I was three when the owner of some hole in the wall bar in Chicago’s Southside found me crawling around underneath a pool table after the place was closed. He had never seen me before, so he called the cops and I became a ward of the state or whatever. At least, that’s what one of my foster mothers told me. I don’t remember that far back.”
“I was in eleven different foster homes from then until I was fourteen. That’s when the kid I put in the hospital needed a lot more than a couple stitches. I ended up in a juvenile detention facility for a few months. The foster parents said they didn’t want me back, so I got put in a group home.”
“I think I was in that one for about eighteen months. I beat the shit out of anyone who came anywhere near me, so most people didn’t. I had a pretty decent reputation when this girl was brought in. See, the group homes were really kind of a campus with a boys’ side, and a girls’ side, and a big building in the middle where everyone ate and had school classes and shit. The first day I remember seeing her, we were sitting down to eat, and some dick walked behind her and groped her. She went fucking ballistic, screaming and crying. They ended up having to sedate her to haul her out.”
“I didn’t think anything about it – that kind of shit happened all the time – but a couple days later she came up to me in the yard and sat down about three feet away from me. I just glared at her and asked her what the fuck she wanted because I’m a dick. That’s when she made me a deal that no hormonal teenage boy would ever pass up.”
I looked over to Raine and saw she was staring at me intently, just waiting for me to go on. I wondered what she would think of me when all of this was over. I wondered if I should even tell this part of the story.
“Those homes were…well, brutal. All kinds of nasty shit happened there because there were too many kids and not enough staff or money or whatever it was. People didn’t fuck with me because I’d cracked someone’s skull open the second day I was there, but there were plenty of opportunities for guys to…”
My mouth shut and I didn’t want to go on. I hadn’t thought about any of this shit in so long, and at the time, none of it had really even bothered me. The fact that it didn’t bother me then was really bothering me now.
“Go on,” Raine said softly.
“Shit,” I mumbled, then just spit it out. “Chicks got raped all the time because there was no one there to stop them. This chick wanted me to act as a…bodyguard, really. She didn’t like people touching her when she wasn’t expecting it and wanted me to stick around her and keep any of the other guys from fucking with her. She snuck over to the boys’ dorm every night and sucked me off for protection. It was totally fucked up, but she begged me to do it, so I did.”
“What was her name?”
I realized I was rocking back and forth and made myself stop. I could feel all the extra energy building up inside of me again, with nowhere to go. Maybe the decent meal, such as it was, gave me more energy than I was going to be able to handle in this little raft. That could be bad.
“Theresa,” I finally said, not looking over to her. The memory hit me right between the eyes, and my head actually hurt saying her name out loud. I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t talk about this shit, so I skipped ahead a couple years.
“I ended up on the streets when I was seventeen,” I continued. I saw Raine’s eyes narrow slightly, realizing I had just skipped over a big chunk of time. Tough, she was just going to have to deal with it. “One night, I watched a fight between a couple of kids in an alley, and when it was over, all the people standing around them started passing money back and forth. The guy that won the fight got a big wad of it handed to him. Next thing I knew, I was street fighting for cash.”
“About three months afterwards, I was in a really nasty fight. The guy I took down was a big name in street fighting, and all the bookies and shit had ten to one odds against me. When it was over and he was still lying in the street bleeding, there was only one guy besides me collecting any money.”
“He came up to me and started asking me a shitload of questions. How long I had been fighting, how I ended up on the streets – lots of bullshit like that. Then he asked if I wanted to make some real money fighting, and I said ‘hell yeah.’”
“He asked me two more questions, and my answers changed everything.”
I stopped, running over the scene from my memory a few times, wondering how things would be different if I had said yes instead of no.
“What did he ask you?” Raine prompted.
I was rocking back and forth again and seriously doubting whether or not I should be saying any of this to her. I also knew our chances of survival were going down really, really quickly. Maybe I needed to tell this shit to someone before I actually died.
“He asked me if I was afraid to kill. Then he asked me if I was afraid to die.”
“What did you say?”
“I said no to both,” I told her. “That’s how I met Landon.”
I paused and thought again about all the shit I was contemplating telling her. Once I kept going from this point, there was no turning back. She’d have enough information to get herself killed if she ever talked about it to the wrong person.
“You can’t ever tell anyone about this,” I reminded her. “No one – ever.”
“I won’t tell anyone, Daniel. I swear.”
“Okay,” I nodded. Maybe I needed to trust her with this. Maybe I needed to tell her. Maybe that’s why she was here with me. “We probably need to start right there. My name’s Bastian, not Daniel.”
I guess I was going to tell her everything after all.
Chapter 6 – Game
There. I did it. I told her my real name. I didn’t know why, but it felt good saying it.
“Why did you say it was Daniel?” Raine cocked her head to one side and looked at me quizzically.
“I’ve gone by Daniel for years – ever since I quit fighting.” I looked down at the floor of the raft, as if there was something interesting there.
“Why did you change your name?”
“You’ll have to wait until I get to that part,” I said. I tilted my head the opposite way of hers and gave her a half smile.
“Go on, then.”
“Are you sure you want me to?”
“Yes, I am.” Raine stopped twisting her fingers around long enough to look up at me through her dark lashes. Some of her hair had fallen into her face, creating a curtain in front of her eyes.
I took a couple of deep breaths and wondered what I should say next. I didn’t want to go into a lot of detail. She might think she wanted to hear this shit, but the particulars were pretty ugly. While I was trying to decide, Raine spoke again.
“I ended up adopting one of those pit bulls, you know. His name was Mister Fluffy.”
“Mister Fluffy? Seriously?” I laughed and Raine laughed along with me. I tried to picture that name on a tag hanging from the studded metal collar of a short-haired pit bull. “Mister Fluffy, the pit bull.”
“He was my best friend,” she said with a glorious smile that jumped from her face right to my dick. “He had a really rough start in life, but he ended up with a yard to play in and a basket full of tennis balls, so it wasn’t all bad. I think he ended up pretty happy, but he was always skittish around strangers. I always felt bad that he could never tell me what happened to him.”
“So I’m back to being a dog again?” If she thought she was being subtle with her analogy, she was seriously wrong.
“If you want to think of it that way.”
“If you refer to me as ‘fluffy’ in any way, I’m going to get pissed.”
She laughed again.
“I’ll try to remember that,” she said.
I took a deep breath and got on with it.
“We went for a ride in Landon’s Mercedes and eventually stopped at one of his apartments. He ordered me dinner, which was the first decen
t meal I had in…well, maybe ever. I don’t know. He told me he wanted me to fight for him, but the fights were different from what I was used to seeing. He told me not everyone comes out of the fights alive and asked me what I thought about that. He was seriously understating everything, but I didn’t know that at the time. He told me I could make a shit-ton of money and have chicks begging me for my cock if I was any good. I knew I was good, so I said I was interested.”
“Landon took me to watch a tournament about a week later. I met a bunch of other people that ran the games then, too. It became pretty clear that I was basically Landon’s new racehorse, and as far as the rest of them were concerned, he owned me. That kind of pissed me off until he told me how much money I’d make if I won the first game. For a kid who had never had anything, it was too tempting. I couldn’t turn that shit down.”
“What was the game, Dan…um…Bastian?”
“We went into a big warehouse,” I continued. “Landon told me this was a small tournament – a kind of beginner’s game. Small area – only the size of the building. Some of the bigger tournaments went on for miles through all kinds of terrain. We went past an area that was all windows, and you could look down into kind of an arena down below. Some people were standing around there, looking through the windows, placing bets and shit, but most people were in the next room. Mostly guys but a lot of women, too, all done up in fucking cocktail dresses and diamonds. There were observation windows like the first one, but there was also a huge wall full of closed circuit television monitors.”
“Each one showed a different area. A bunch showed the big arena area from different angles, but others showed empty corridors, stairwells, and rooms filled with boxes or crates. Then there were six cameras that were moving around. I figured out later that they were attached to helmets on people in the tournament and whenever they turned their heads, you saw what they saw. It made you feel like you were in there.”
I stopped for a minute and took a deep breath. I was hitting that point of no return, and I glanced over to her one more time to see if she really wanted to hear the rest of this. She was staring at me intently with those soft, brown eyes, and I was nearly torn in two with the simultaneous desires to protect her from knowing any of this shit existed and telling her everything.
“Go on,” she said.
“Why do you want to hear this?” I questioned.
“Because I saw what it did to you,” Raine told me. “I want to know.”
I looked back into those eyes but saw nothing to indicate her decision wasn’t complete, so I went on.
“Five guys, one chick, and about fifteen minutes. That’s all it took, and there was one camera still moving on the chick who was left standing. She ran out to the middle of the arena area and waved to everyone watching while the other players were carted off. The guys placing bets were just like the ones on the street, but the amounts – those were a lot different. On the street, I’d maybe make a couple hundred bucks on a good fight. Since the first one I watched was smaller, the stakes weren’t quite as high, but the winner walked out with a quarter million.”
“A quarter million dollars?”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “Not bad for fifteen minutes of work.”
“How did she get so much?”
“Just like with any gambling, it’s all about who loses the bets. With six people to bet on, a lot of the betters are going to lose. When you bet fifty grand on a game, it adds up fast. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to do it, even after watching the first game. Landon knew I wanted to play and then spent two months training me. He said I was the best he had ever seen, and I started making a ton of money right away.”
“Bastian, I don’t think I understand.” Raine rose up a hand and stopped me from going on. “How did they fight? What happened to the other people in it?”
I had hoped she would get it right away, so I wouldn’t have to be so blunt. I also kind of hoped she wouldn’t get it at all. Obviously, she was going to make me spell all this shit out to her. I drummed my fingers on my knee for a minute, trying to think of a way to explain.
“It’s like a live video game, you know? We’d all be put in an area, and there are cameras everywhere, so the people who are watching and betting on us can see everything from every angle, even as the players see it. In most games you went in with nothing but whatever you were wearing – no weapons or anything. If you looked around, you could find something – pieces of pipe, knives, ropes, wrenches, candlesticks – you know, the whole ‘Clue’ complement. There were special tournaments with firearms and all kinds of shit like that, but those were really exclusive. I was only ever in three of them. You fought the other players, and the last man standing won.”
“What do you mean, exactly – ‘last man standing?’”
I took another deep breath.
“Whoever was still alive.”
“You mean you…just killed…?”
“I won because I killed everyone else there.”
I just blurted the last bit out, and watched a modicum of understanding flare up in her eyes as they went wide and she comprehended exactly what I was saying. For a while she just sat, taking it all in and looking up at me like I was going to tell her I was only joking or something.
“You are like the pit bulls.”
I glared at her. I wasn’t a fucking trained dog. I knew what I was doing, and I loved every minute of it. My head was starting to pound again, and I didn’t feel like arguing with her about it.
“Maybe,” I said with a shrug. “Not really, though. I had a choice.”
“No,” Raine said with conviction, “you didn’t.”
“Of course I did.”
She let it go.
“And this was a…game?”
“That’s how we saw it, yeah.”
“You did it for money?”
“Millions,” I confirmed. “In my first fight, I made enough to take me from the streets to a penthouse apartment. I went from going to sleep hungry every night to five star restaurants. Instead of stealing bus fare, I was driving a fucking Ferrari. My hand got replaced by ten women a night begging me to fuck them. They’d actually line up outside my hotel room and just wait their turn.”
“I made a name for myself pretty quickly because I was faster, and smarter, and more brutal than any other tournament player Landon had ever seen. In one night, I went from nothing to something. I fought and won three to five games a month for almost seven years. I got stabbed in the back – you saw the scar – beat up, shot, burned, you name it, but I never lost a game.”
* * * * *
The light was out, but I knew Raine was still sitting in the darkness and trying to wrap her head around everything I told her. I was kind of surprised she asked me to stop before I just couldn’t go on anymore. Now that I was no longer going forward with the story, I found myself backing up to the parts I skipped over – mainly, Theresa.
In my mind I could still see her clearly – blonde hair, long legs, and blank, expressionless eyes that screamed “I’ve seen too much.” I remembered the way she’d always sit hunched over, like she was trying to make herself invisible. Whenever any other guys came near, she’d immediately move over and stand in front of me so I could put my hands on her hips and show whoever it was that she was claimed.
I remembered how, for the first couple of months, she’d suck my cock every night, but I wasn’t allowed to touch her while she did it. I just leaned back on my elbows and let her go at it. Once she trusted me more, I could put my hands on her shoulders but never her head. She hated that.
I knew she’d had some fucked up shit done to her before, but she never told me what or who.
Raine shifted around, and I could hear her fold up the towel and lay down on it. After a few minutes, I heard her take a deep breath before dropping off to sleep. I spent about an hour watching for lights of any kind on the horizon but saw nothing, so I lay down to sleep as well. I should have known better because the kind of dre
ams I hadn’t had since I went to bed drunk every night started coming back.
Theresa walked slowly away from me, waving her hand and looking at me with her half closed, dead blue eyes. An owl flew across my line of sight, and I watched it as it flew up into the air and landed on the branch of the big tree in the yard of the group home. When I looked back, Theresa was gone. The new counselor was gone, too. I knew he was going to hurt her, but I just kept standing there, watching the owl up on its perch. Then I was in a bathroom, looking down a line of showers. I hadn’t been in here before, but I knew where I was. I took a couple of steps forward and slipped in a bright red pool on the ground.
I sat straight up and covered my mouth to stop any sound from coming out. Sweat dripped into my eyes until I wiped my brow with the back of my hand. I tried holding my breath to stop it from coming out so fast, but I couldn’t. I had to allow myself to pant until my body calmed down a little.
I pulled back the flap to let in some fresh air, allowing the light from the full moon to pour in around me. With shaking hands, I pulled the last cigarette out of the pouch on my belt and lit it. At least the regular deep breathing that goes along with smoking helped me to relax a little. The visions were still in my head though. The nicotine didn’t do anything to help with that shit.
I smoked and tried to think about doing shots in the bar the night before The Oblation capsized. I thought about the hooker who left me her business card and how good it was getting off in her.
It didn’t make any difference. All I could see was a pool of blood on the floor of a little walk-in shower stall, and all I could hear was the last conversation I had with her as it played through my head.
“Can I ask you a question, Bastian?” Theresa asked. She used the back of her hand to wipe off the corner of her mouth.
“Sure,” I said, pulling my jeans back up and lighting a smoke.
“Do you like me?”