Blood Games (20 page)

Raynal
. Ink was interested, and filed the name away in his mind. Once he was in Hawaii, he would sit in his private lanai, look that up on his phone, and see what was being asked for it. Hell! He would do it in the limo tonight! The early bird got the zombie stables. He’d check out the pictures of the property and make an offer if they pleased him.

“Are we ever going to see the true face of Nemesis?” Vasilov cried to Adrasteia
, who was still stationed near the door. Few took notice of it, too engaged in a variety of conversations and others enjoying the Games replays on the television.

“There is no need,” Adrasteia said with a shrug so casual that it was insulting.
Ink didn’t believe that this woman knew who Vasilov even was. Tucking a stray bit of hair behind her ear, she added, “You know his face well, as does everyone else in this room.”

Vasilov came forward
, fingers pinching the last shrimp on his plate, and said, “I do not, my lady!”

“Ah, you do,” she insisted, and walked over to the podium where Nemesis was standing
stock-still. She was so tall that she rose only a little off her chunk heels to part his lips. Pinching one of his teeth, she tugged at it.

“Oh my!
Oh, my, my, my!” Vasilov gasped, swallowing hastily and putting the plate down on a side table. “Do not tell me that it is Lucky Mercury hidden behind that mask? But yes, this could be him!”

Lucky Mercury!
Ink leaned over the back of the sofa to listen. That zombie hadn’t been seen in five or six years now. Lucky Mercury had been one of those golden fighters from his very first show, always,
always
making it to the brawl, and winning it a fair amount of the time. But his manager had been far less fortunate, spending his winnings wildly on a drug habit, and in time he had put Lucky Mercury up for sale at such a steep price that all interest was dissuaded. Vasilov had dropped the manager as a client when he would not listen to reason, and then he and his zombie fighter had just vanished from the circuit. Ink hadn’t thought about those two in years.

The woman
worked open Nemesis’ mouth a little more and tugged the tooth as she said, “Our parents thumbed their noses at vaccines, all of them. They were quite religious, do you understand? God will provide the ultimate healthcare. God will provide only as many children as could be afforded. But neither was true. Religion made destitute fools of them, of all of us, and all eleven children fell to the virus. Zeke was the oldest at nineteen, a strong brute with a weak heart, and I was five at the time. The girls rose again, right as rain several weeks later, but the boys did not.”

Someone at the sofas was trying to get Ink’s attention, but he wanted to see
whom Nemesis was. If this were truly Lucky Mercury, he would make an offer on him. A zombie wasn’t a boyfriend, sorry to say, and the woman might change her tune at what Ink would spend. At the time of his disappearance, Lucky Mercury had been all of twenty-two years old. That made him twenty-seven or twenty-eight now, so there were still good fighting years ahead of him in the 20-35 category.

The height was right, but the frame wasn’t quite right for Lucky Mercury, who Ink remembered dimly as being
a little more thickset at the chest, and narrower at the legs. Vasilov was thinking the same. He gasped again and said, “No, this is not Lucky Mercury. I know this shape. It is Lugus, but . . .”

Ink’s eyes widened at what Vasilov wasn’t saying.
Lugus was another zombie who had been a good fighter but vanished before his time, and he was too old by now to have been enrolled in the 20-35 age group. He was over forty. That meant the Greek woman had been sold false papers, or knew the truth and bought that place in the younger category anyway. Either way, that disqualified Nemesis, and Vasilov wasn’t the kind to shout it out so indiscreetly.

“Lugus died,
didn’t he?” Bayder rumbled as he walked by to the bar. “I heard that from a friend of his manager. He had an infection from a fighting wound to the abdomen and never recovered.”

“That was Lares III,” a
n elderly vet called over. “No one knows what happened to Lugus. The manager just stopped bringing him to shows.”

The woman
kept wriggling at that one particular tooth as she refused to answer Vasilov’s question. Then she went on with her story, and Ink wanted to shake her for not knowing whom she was being so rude toward. “No, the boys never were well again. All four of them had to be taken to the stalls, which my devastated parents built themselves out of scrap metal and boards. It was too dangerous to have them in the house. But God, God is good, and they told us that God would heal them. So I prayed to God, as did my sisters, so hard we prayed . . . but God never answered our pleas. And I grew up caring for them, these big brothers whose former lives I couldn’t even much remember. Feeding them, cleaning them, keeping them company . . . At school, my classmates taunted me as the zombies’ sister. My teacher asked why didn’t my parents just put them down? So many times I chased the curious out of our backyard with Zeke’s old BB gun. Poke the zombie boys with a stick! Moon them and taunt them and see what they do! Block the light with a sweatshirt and watch them get angry! Halloween ever brought the fools out in force, all wanting to give themselves a scare. I would wait for them in the bushes. My brothers were not exhibits for them to see, and they ran with my pellets stinging their backsides.”

“Yes, yes, but who is this?” Ink interrupted, a pointed message in his tone that she needed to act with more care in this room.

Treating him with the same dismissal she was giving Vasilov, she said, “My poor brothers. I could only watch old videos to know their voices, and look at pictures to see their smiles.” The tooth came free. Disgustingly, she tossed it onto the floor like they were in stables and brushed spit from her fingers. “Who knows what they understand? We thought after many years had gone by from their infection that their lives were terribly dull, so my sisters and I lent them to a moving company a few days a week. The three younger ones only in John and Luke and Gabriel; Zeke was still a strong brute but his heart was failing. Our family doctor said the exertion would kill him, and he was flagging more and more each year already. So we just had him lift things around the property for his exercise. That way we could keep an eye on him and stop as soon as we thought he had had enough. Our parents were dead by then, going to their graves in the same year and both angry, so angry at my two oldest sisters, who had started their own families by then and vaccinated their children against the virus. But they had boys, four beautiful boys between them, and they feared God’s disapproval far less than having their sons grow up as our brothers had. Our parents cut them out of the will, what little they had to divide among their many heirs, and my sisters laughed in the lawyer’s face when he read it out loud to us. Their sons were whole, and are whole to this day. What is a dusty heirloom to a healthy son? One trusts in God’s guidance for life, but one still wears a seatbelt.”

Vasilov and Ink exchanged a look and it was there in the old man’s face, the brief flash that he had had when talking up the zombie children for Nadia.
Distaste. It was for the better that this woman wasn’t planning to attend any more shows as a participant. She was making enemies.

And she was still talking, oblivious to their response or just
indifferent to it. “The little money the three boys earned in moving boxes and other heavy items around helped to pay for the stables where all of them lived. Better stables now, for we had fixed them up to be comfortable. And we wanted to think that they enjoyed the work on some level. Better than just sitting or standing in a stall, listening to music and us speaking to them of the life that they were missing.”

She worked her finger into the tear on the cheek and
tugged at the prosthetics. Gently, Vasilov said, “If this is Lugus, Miss Sophoclei, we must have a quiet chat. Come with me into the hallway for some privacy.” Ink was filled with a malicious pleasure at the prize money this unbearable woman was about to lose.

Adrasteia
persisted in her story. “We were heartbroken when Gabriel went missing a few years ago. Absolutely heartbroken. The driver of the moving company said he didn’t know what had happened. He just turned around for a minute and when he looked back, Gabriel was gone. Wandered off. We knew this was a lie. Gabriel didn’t wander away from the lights. None of them do. The police would do nothing, of course. He was just stolen property, or perhaps he had been crushed by something he was moving and his body disposed of under our noses. No body, no proof, no investigation to unearth anything, and we couldn’t sue over that. The cops retreated to what they consider
real
crimes. So we resigned ourselves to never knowing what had happened to our dear brother, and imagine our surprise when he turned up earlier this year.”

The prosthetics
tore reluctantly. She pulled a pair of fingernail scissors from her pocket and snipped at them. “I know now why it was Gabriel taken, and not Luke or John. Gabriel was Zeke all over again, just as tall, a brute of a man, minus the heart ailment. A solid plug of muscle was our Gabriel. Those two were almost identical twins, just with slightly different noses. The other boys were so much shorter and smaller, taking after our mother’s side of the family.” She made another snip and tugged hard at the lower half of the prosthetics. More people were watching now, and whispering in excitement to see the true face of Nemesis. Someone was hissing
Lucky Mercury is back!

“But there he was on our television screen
one day!” Adrasteia said in grim purpose. “At something called the Filo. We had never heard of it. One of my sisters was just flipping through the channels for something to watch when she saw him in a ten-second blurb of a report, but she knew him in an instant. Gabriel! Our brother lived! And so we endeavored to bring him home. We met up with a lawyer, who advised us against it. Finders keepers, as they say. He wouldn’t take the case. None of them would, of the six attorneys we tried. The police refused to make an arrest for his theft, saying by the time anyone was convicted, Gabriel would be halfway across the world in some Russian fighting ring and gone forever. They’re organized, a cop told me. They’ll retaliate if you make trouble. Let it go. He doesn’t know where he is anyway.”

She ripped off the bottom half of the prosthetics at last, and let them hang around Nemesis as a gruesome necklace of fake rot.
His chin was bruised and swollen from a blow. “But
I
knew where he was. My sisters knew. My nephews knew. Our many cousins knew. Peter wanted to march right over to the stables holding Gabriel captive and wrest him free. Those two were best friends as boys. But we did not want to invite a retaliation against our family.”

Ink got up from the sofa and came closer to listen to this strange
, pointless tale of family drama. Nadia’s laughter floated over from the other side of the clubroom. The people over there weren’t paying any attention, and some of those at the sofas had gotten bored and returned to their chats about property near the Hill and on it. One of Cantine’s women squealed, “Oh, I love those houses! I want to live in one someday!” Ink didn’t have to turn around to know it wasn’t the blonde.

Adrasteia began to work at the top half of the prosthetics
, which were sticking on just as stubbornly as the bottom half had. “Gabriel! I wish I could remember more of him. I have to rely on my older sisters’ memories. He was kind. Peaceful. A fair student. Never the one to start an argument, but a great practical joker. Everyone liked Gabriel. John and Luke would push our sisters over and Gabriel would patch up their scrapes. A gentle giant, they tell me. When I cried as a baby, he would run to my cradle to see what was wrong. How cruel that the virus stole away a soul like that. He would have been a wonderful husband and father, a man for other men to look up to, and never did he get the chance. But healthy or sick, he was ours. Our Gabriel. So we plotted how to get him back. And it broke our hearts anew that Zeke’s heart was at last giving out at the same time.”

She lifted the top half of the prosthetics
away, and it was Samson.

Vasilov’s
lower jaw fell open comically. Ink roared in rage, quelling every voice in the clubroom. Coming around the sofa so sharply that he banged his thigh on the back, he charged over to the podium in disbelief. In a flash, Adrasteia had backed to the doors and was holding a gun on him. “Don’t try it. This is my brother, and I am going to take him home.”

Ink
saw it now. He saw Samson’s heavy features reflected in this young woman’s face and build. This was why she had bothered him so much, his subconscious mind making the connection that his conscious mind had not! “You took my zombie! But I saw Samson’s dead body!”

“You saw Zeke’
s body, you idiot!” Adrasteia said. “I gave him a fake brand to match the one I saw that you’d pressed to Gabriel’s arm. I doped him up and had him lift until I feared he was going to have a heart attack at my feet. By the last week, I couldn’t even get him up out of the hay to go to his meat mash, and I held him in my arms and fed him by hand. We could wait no longer. I drove him across the country in the trailer, tied to a mattress, and then I walked my oldest brother from his deathbed and into your stables, dressed him up as your own, and put him out of his misery before his heart could finish the job. God will never forgive me for this! I secured my seat in hell when I killed him, trading one brother for another. I hoped that you would not look too closely at his brand and I took back what is mine,
my brother Gabriel
.”