Blood Games (3 page)

The knacker had a big mouth.
Everyone was going to know by tomorrow morning that someone had stolen into Delwich Stables and murdered one of the most impressive zombies to ever fight in the show circuit. Ink was distraught. The managers who locked their stables would congratulate themselves on their foresight and condemn Ink for his lack of it; the managers who didn’t were going to pound concrete to stores to acquire locks and express their sympathy to his face while reveling behind his back at the demise of his zombie.

He could kiss his ranch property near the Hill goodbye.
The Hawaiian vacation. The merchandizing opportunities that would have skyrocketed with Samson’s win at the Games. Ink’s whole future. The old boys’ club would have had to let him in if Samson had won, and now they could keep those big oak doors at the Games stadium closed. Ink would only ever be allowed in as a treat for the post-party, and if he didn’t get another fantastic fighter, or if Medusa hit a losing streak, he wouldn’t even get that.

Oh God, had he wanted to get in there.
To sit between Ivan Cantine and Milla Gorvich in those leather seats during competitions, clinking glasses and jawing about fighters in the past and fighters rising in the present. He had wanted to throw holiday parties at his new house once a year, invite the bigwigs for shrimp and champagne, rub elbows with Hollywood actors and politicians who liked to bet at zombie shows . . . people were fascinated with those who had won it big as managers, and Ink was ready for people to be fascinated in him.

A million dollars, a winning
fighter, stables and a private rink, all of that would have covered up his humble face and humble background, made silk out of a sow’s ear. Cantine was nothing to look at and Gorvich wasn’t either, Bayder had horrific breath and body odor, but all of them had gorgeous young things at their sides, escorts and hangers-on who climbed into their beds to bask in the largesse of success and hope some of it rubbed off. Those in the old boys’ club gave to charities and had their names written up in the paper for their generosity. Everyone celebrated them for the slightest of reasons, jockeyed for their opinions, pivoted around the axis they created. And that had almost been Ink.

Gone.
Just gone. Ink was going to have to start from scratch, save up for a new zombie and doping regimen, put off his dreams indefinitely. The money Samson had brought in covered all the extras Ink enjoyed, and now those were gone, too. His country club membership, where some of the bigwigs golfed, shopping at the ritzy market that they did rather than the discount, the fancy car he had leased to make Delwich Stables look more successful than it was . . .

The cops, the vet, and the knacker went away in time, leaving him in the
ruin of his life. He went back to the house and stood there dumbly in the living room. Nadia sniffed her hair suspiciously to see if the shit smell was clinging to it. It was, because she grimaced. Then she said, “Well, at least we still have Scrapper.”

His fists clenched until the nails bit into his palms.
He didn’t hit her. He had never hit her. He didn’t have the right. She had never pretended to be anything other than what she was, a vain, shallow, and selfish woman who wanted to move up in the world so she could have even more resources with which to be vain, shallow, and selfish. He hadn’t understood the warning when she described herself as a princess, but that wasn’t her fault. It was his fault for thinking with hot pants.

Nadia sniffed her clothes and grimaced again.
He had lost interest in getting into her pants several years ago. What was in there no longer held any charm because of who she was, the actual person he hadn’t wanted to see for so long: a spoiled brat of a kid hidden in the voluptuous body of a woman. That wasn’t attractive. But by the time he’d really started to consider getting a divorce, Samson was winning and he didn’t want to split his earnings in half and give her alimony, too. He would have lost the little stables he had, and he loved those more than he hated her.

He didn’t know what to do, so he just kept standing there.
Looking at the carpet, looking at his wife, looking out the window, looking but not really seeing.

When Nadia checked her shoes, she knocked part of the Prince Charming costume off the coffee table.
She bent down to retrieve it and he gripped his fists even tighter. There would be no more eight-hundred-dollar costumes, or any costumes. Ink would get rid of Scrapper altogether. They couldn’t afford him now. No more expensive haircuts or clothes for Nadia to model to her wealthy friends. She was too foolish even to realize that Samson’s winnings alone had let her have those things. She was a princess, not a treasurer. But her little gravy boat had just beached itself on shore and she was going to whine, oh God, was she going to
whine
when her card wouldn’t cover one of her ten-buck coffees or fifty-dollar thongs. She wasted so much, and evidence of it was everywhere to mock Ink. More clothes than one woman could wear in three lifetimes stowed in every closet of the house . . . the big plastic bags of random shit from Scrap Me Later in the corners, intended for scrapbooking that she never did because it was too tedious . . . all of the music in a pile on the bookshelf from her singing lessons that she’d quit when the instructor didn’t fall over himself for her voice . . . She was in for a rough time. Ink was in for a rougher one, because she was going to blame him.

Nadia bent over again for the hanger.
Ink stared at her ass, but he was really seeing an array of crusty old Cantine’s gorgeous minxes. The guy brought them to every show, a trio of women who were rarely the same as the trio at the show before.

Ink wanted one of those women, or the whole trio.
It didn’t matter to him if they were vain, shallow, and selfish. He wasn’t marrying them. They wouldn’t be around long enough to get comfortable. At Filo, the trio had been a lithe brunette with a round face and perky breasts, a dark one who wore a shirt so tight it had to be cutting off her circulation, and a redhead who had sat in Cantine’s lap and twiddled her slim fingers through the shock white toilet seat of hair that framed his head.

There was so much
Ink wanted. So much that he had been just about to close his fist over. To be loved, to be adored, to read that glowing article in the paper about how he’d dropped a thousand bucks on a charity for homeless children, or something along those lines. Ink Delwich, Games champion and philanthropist. He was so used to going by Ink, he had had the nickname since he was a very young boy, but his true name of Lincoln sounded so very respectable. He’d gone back and forth for months in a fun fantasy about winning the Games and introducing himself as Lincoln Delwich after that. That was the name of a rich gentleman in the old boys’ club.
Ink Delwich
was a hardscrabble, up-and-coming name.
Lincoln Delwich
had arrived.

His finge
rs relaxed, although his nails had made deep grooves in his palms. As Nadia worked the hanger into the costume and beamed at it, Ink said with mocking relief, “Yes, at least we still have Scrapper.” Then he went to the spare bedroom and slammed the door so hard it shook the house.

Chapter Two: The Search

Almost
had defined him all of his life. It made him crazy.

B’s instead of A’s in his classes. Friends who weren’t losers, but weren’t the cool crowd either. He was picked in second or third sweeps for games at recess, never first. No matter how fast he ran or how hard he studied, someone always did it just a little bit better. Above Ink’s desk at home was a dreary line of honorable mention ribbons for school track events and academics. Not trophies.

He lived with his mother in a small town ruled by the gods of the high school football team, and even though the coach yelled that he liked Ink’s hustle during freshman try-outs, Ink didn’t win one of those coveted spots. He was devastated. During a commercial break from one of the million television shows his mother watched, she suggested that he simply try out for another sport. The rest weren’t nearly as competitive, and a few let anyone in. But no one knew the names of the players on the baseball team, or who won the fifty-meter butterfly at the last swim meet. No one cared. Ink didn’t know why he should join a team where no one cared who he was or what he accomplished. He wanted glory. He wanted to stand out. So he never joined any sport and whiled away his days at the high school in growing resentment.

And then he
heard a rumor about a fighting show with zombies set to take place not far away, and never gave football another thought.

The zombie apocalypse had come and gone with more of a whimper than a bang
some time before Ink was born. Less than one percent of the population was susceptible to a rather quirky virus that made its rounds about the planet. Most of its victims were back on their feet within a few weeks, and none the worse for wear. Only in a rare few were there more serious consequences. They didn’t look like movie zombies, rotted and falling to pieces. Their bodies were intact. But their minds were not.

With
in ten years of its advent, there was a vaccine for it. The rate of infection plunged down even further after that. Growing up, Ink hadn’t known anyone with a zombie in the family, nor had any of his friends ever disappeared one day from their neat rows of desks at school and never returned. It just didn’t happen. Zombies had retreated almost to the same mythological status they had had before the virus. Even though they were real. Unless you purposely sought them out, they didn’t exist in day-to-day life.

The only people who ended up
still infected by the virus either hadn’t had the vaccine or else sported some genetic variance that rendered it ineffective. Again, most of them fell ill and recovered. But a few did not. That was good. A whole cottage industry had sprung up around those people. Ink thrilled at his first competition to discover this shadow land that operated beneath the unbearable ordinariness of his life. College applications and making out in back seats paled in comparison to this seething world of fists and blood, money and reputation. You could start as no one and make yourself into someone. All you needed was to manage a good fighter, and eyes turned to you. Saving up every dime he made from working at the gas station for two years, he purchased his first zombie. It was a heady moment.

He’d been young.
And dumb. Too young and dumb to ask around about the dealer first; too young and dumb to suspect that he was being taken for a ride with Gore Fest. They had had different kinds of names back then. Zombies aplenty were dubbed Rage and Heat, Death and Blood Eater, Bone Breaker and Beelzebub and Bloody Mary. There were so many Killers that the show registry finally removed it as a name. You could call them whatever you wanted in your stables, but in the ring, it had to be something else. People had howled about that, the infringement on their freedom, but they howled about everything and the registry stood firm. The first match that Ink had ever witnessed was between a Killer and a Kill You Dead.

The dealer had sold him on the glory of Gore Fest
, sight unseen. He’d won thirty first matches and lost twelve, which was an extremely respectable record. More than extremely respectable. That was amazing! But Gore Fest had lost a hand recently in a brawl, where the top five males in a competition were seeded against one another. Although he was still winning almost as much as he had before, people didn’t want to cheer for or bet on a one-handed zombie. They assumed he would lose. Prosthetic limbs were not allowed in the ring. Prosthetic facial pieces to make them look more malformed and gruesome like movie zombies were fine, but not limbs.

So the owner was putting
up Gore Fest for sale, and wanted to move this along quickly so he could invest in a new zombie. Ink couldn’t believe the deal he was getting. He handed his hard-earned cash over to the dealer and was told the zombie would arrive at his house the next day. That night, Ink set up the backyard shed as a makeshift stables. Hay and food bowls, a dazzling light, he did what he could and didn’t stop until it was as perfect as could be. His mother would be pissed, but it was easier to say
sorry
than ask
can I?
The answer was only going to be no.

It would take her
a long time to notice anyway. Ink’s mom never went into the backyard. She just looked out the windows to it after the gardener had been through and talked about buying a hammock, which she never did. Then she went back to watching television.

When the zombie was unloaded from the back of the moving van,
sedated upon a stretcher, Ink saw in dread that he’d been had. This wasn’t the young, muscular fighter of Ink’s dreams. This was some sad old sack with one hand, and two fingers missing from it. His stump looked infected and his muscles were smaller than Ink’s. Ink shouted at the moving men, but they had just been hired to deliver the zombie and it wasn’t their problem.

The paperwork said GORE FEST.
The dealer had implied the zombie was young but never said it outright. Ink’s excitement had filled in the gaps, and now he was stuck with a zombie whose birth date was a couple of weeks away from qualifying him for the elder circuit.
The elder circuit!
Ink had wanted to make a splash. Now he was just part of a joke, the manager of a damaged, nearsighted old zombie that would hobble into a melee at the halftime show and clobber other geezers he could barely see.

When
Ink called to express his outrage and demand his money back, the dealer didn’t answer. Not the first time. Not the fortieth time. Not the ninetieth time. He was in the wind with all of Ink’s money. All Ink had was a fake name and no way to track the bastard down, an aging zombie whose last win had been many years ago, and a mother who
finally
bought the hammock she’d been talking about for over a decade and opened up the shed to a very big surprise.

They had only gone to one competition together.
Ink dressed up in his Sunday best and did what he could to spruce up Gore Fest in the back of the trailer once they got to the show. The shield tied to his arm was an imitation of a Roman scutum, rectangular and semi-cylindrical and made of hardwood, a steal off an online auction. It was worth three hundred dollars and Ink had gotten it for fifty. Covering up Gore Fest’s bald spot was a centurion helmet that Ink had borrowed from his high school mascot. He left the zombie’s chest bare, but used tanning spray on him liberally. His translucent white skin made him look even older than he actually was. And Ink? Ink looked fine. He’d ironed his pants for the first time ever, and watched several instructional videos online on how to knot a tie. The two of them weren’t going to be the finest pair strutting down the brightly lit walkway to the stadium, but they wouldn’t embarrass themselves too badly either.

When they were almost to the ramp that led down to the stadium’s stables, a woman broke
from the clutch of protestors and climbed over the cordon to the walkway. Screaming
human rights for all, human rights for all
, she’d thrown a can of red paint all over Ink and Gore Fest. Then she tried to flee back over the cordon, but Ink caught her by the ponytail and jerked her down to the ground in a fury. Then he dove on her, fully intending to rip her heart out and eat it. He had been cheated of his real zombie fighter and spent hours making them look less like the joke they were, and now everything was ruined! She screamed and twisted as he struck her, paint dripping off him to her face and clothes.

Guards pulled him off before he had landed his second punch
, and they threw her out of the stadium grounds. Then they gave him a stern talking-to. There were
always
protestors at competitions, and they
always
pulled shit like this. If Ink wanted to make it in this business, he’d keep his temper in check. It was the job of a stadium security guard to give protestors a hard time, not a manager’s. So calm the fuck down and go clean the fuck off.

Ink couldn’t clean it all off
in time for the pictures. Gore Fest had paint even in the white of his left eye, and his costume was drenched in it. Ink’s nice outfit was ruined, and people stared at him wherever he went during the show. Some asked what had happened. It was utterly humiliating, and he couldn’t find any consolation at the sympathy they showed when he explained about the protestor.

Gore Fest had died in that halftime show.
He was the first to fall, and that was humiliating, too. Some ancient zombie woman in a toga took him down. Other people would have thrown in the towel at one disappointment too many, but not Ink. He emerged from the stadium that evening sadder, wiser, and ready for more. He was
done
with being overlooked by this world. And here he had the chance that had been denied him all his life. He just had to play his cards smarter.

The next time he had money
to burn, he spent loads of time investigating the dealer and inspecting the zombie for sale. In person, and with a vet at his side. No one was going to take Ink for a fool twice. He bought Fang just as the bigwigs brought in a fresh batch of competitors all named after gods. No more Black Death and Apocalyptic Storm and Eat Your Liver, these fighters were Zeus of Olympus, Speedy Hermes, and Titan. Ink immediately changed Fang’s name to Neptune. The people who stubbornly clung to the old names looked sillier and sillier as their numbers reduced. Pairing Kidney Punch against Zeus Our Father in matches made the audience laugh, as did Here’s Your Ass versus Hercules.

Neptune was one of the many middle-of-the-road fighters, and a good starter zombie for a new manager. He
was Ink’s side job that occasionally made a little money. His real one was selling cars, and all of that money he seeded into Neptune. Food and hay, costumes and veterinary care, places in shows and photographs, all of that cost. Some managers threw money around on stuff their fighters didn’t need, but Ink was shrewd. He never had to beg or steal to pay for places in shows like those spendthrift managers, who often ended up unable to fight their zombies for no other reason than lack of funds. He never had to deny Neptune a visit from the vet, and rely on the advice of Doctor Internet on how to patch up an injury from the ring. Money was tight, so very tight, but Ink squeezed his pennies until they bled, and then squeezed them some more.

People noticed. They noticed that Neptune was a decent fighter being managed well, and that Ink kept returning to the show circuit when others fell away. It was good to be noticed. He was on his way up, and that was intoxicating.

When Mom had asked him to start paying rent or to work it off in household chores, Ink screamed at her in disbelief. Couldn’t she
see
that he was trying to build a career here? He didn’t have spare money. He didn’t have spare time. He wasn’t buying himself video games and snappy clothes. He didn’t even treat himself to a coffee once a week or take girls out on dates. But his mother wasn’t impressed at how much he was sacrificing day in and day out. She just screamed back that he was twenty years old, almost twenty-one now, and it was time to set aside his silly boyhood dreams and act like an adult. That meant rent, due next month, sonny boy.

Ink moved out
that very night and never spoke to her again. All she needed was her television anyway. It stung that his own mother didn’t believe in him as much as he believed in himself. Well, he didn’t have time for people like that, so he ignored her phone calls, deleted the messages unheard, and then changed his number. She had set him back a whole year in his finances. A year of missed shows! A year of being forgotten by those connections he had just started to forge! That was unforgivable. Every time Neptune had a win at a first or second match after Ink was solvent again, or made it all the way to the brawl, he thought a nasty
see, Mom?
The anger faded in time, and then he just forgot about her.

After Neptune went down for good in a brawl, Ink
got in with a great dealer, the polar opposite of the first one. That was Vasilov, the only name he gave. Everyone knew Vasilov. He didn’t go anywhere in public without two armed guards trailing behind him, because law enforcement knew him too and they were itching to slap him with multiple counts of trafficking stolen goods over state lines and other offenses. Having guards was a pain in the bottom, as he liked to say, and it was a relief when he was safe in a clubroom where no one was let in except managers of a certain magnitude, their spouses or escorts, and select employees of the stadium. He also kept a team of lawyers on speed dial.