Carrion Comfort (100 page)

O
n the second night, Harod had no choice but to try to Use the man he had brought from Savannah.

The first night had been a nightmare for him. It had been very difficult to control the woman he had chosen— a tall, solid, strong-jawed Amazon with small breasts and hair chopped off in an unappealing manner, one of Sutter’s born-again street people that he kept isolated and well fed each year at the Bible Outreach Institute until the Island Club needed a surrogate. But she was a poor surrogate; Harod had to use every ounce of his Ability just to get her to walk with the four male surrogates to the clearing fifty yards beyond the north fence of the security zone. A large pentagram had been burned into the soil there with a chalked circle at each point of the star. The other four took their places— Jensen Luhar walking to his circle with strong, sure strides— and waited while Harod’s female staggered drunkenly to her place. Harod knew there were many excuses: he was used to controlling women at closer, more intimate distances, this one was far too masculine for his tastes, and— not the least of factors— he was terrified.

The other men at the great, round table in the Game Room sat comfortably in their chairs as Harod fidgeted and squirmed, fighting to keep contact with the woman and move her to the right place. When he did have her standing still in the approximate center of her circle, he returned his attention to the room and nodded, wiping sweat from his cheek and brow.

“Very well,” said C. Arnold Barent with more than a hint of condescension in his voice, “we appear to be ready. You all know the rules. If anyone survives until sunrise but fails to make a kill, fifteen points will be awarded but the surrogate will be terminated. If your surrogate amasses one hundred points by eliminating the others
before
sunrise, he . . . or she . . . may be used in tomorrow night’s game if you so choose. Is this clear to our new players?”

Willi smiled. Harod nodded tersely. “Just a reminder,” said Kepler, resting his forearm on the deep baize and turning toward Harod, “if your surrogate is removed early, you may watch the rest of the game from the monitor room next door. There are more than seventy cameras on the northern part of the island. The coverage is quite good.”

“Not as good as remaining in the game though,” said Sutter. A film of perspiration beaded the minister’s forehead and upper lip.

“Gentlemen,” said Barent, “if we are quite ready. The starshell will be fired in thirty seconds. At its signal, we will commence.”

The first night was a nightmare for Harod. The others had closed their eyes and taken immediate control while he had struggled just to reestablish full contact during most of the thirty-second preparatory period.

Then he was in her mind, feeling the jungle breeze on her bare skin, sensing as her small nipples rose in the cool night air, and becoming vaguely aware that Jensen Luhar was leaning from his circle ten feet away, pointing at her— at Harod— and saying with that peculiar leering smile of Willi’s, “You will be last, Tony. I will save you for last.”

Then the red flare exploded three hundred feet above the canopy of palmetto fronds, the four men moved, and Harod turned his surrogate and had her flee headfirst into the jungle to the north.

Hours passed in a fever dream of branches and insects and the adrenaline rush of fear— his and his surrogate’s— and an endless, headlong, stumbling rush through jungle and swamp. Several times he had been sure that he was almost to the north end of the island only to emerge from trees to find the line of the security zone fence ahead of him.

He tried to develop a strategy, create some enthusiasm for a course of action, but all he could do as the hours eroded toward morning was block his reception of pain from his surrogate’s bleeding feet and skin lacerated from a thousand branches and have her flee, a heavy stick held uselessly in her hands.

The game was not thirty minutes old when Harod heard the first scream in the night, not fifty feet from where he had hidden her in a small canebrake. When he had his surrogate emerge ten minutes later, crawling on all fours, he saw the corpse of the heavyset blond man Sutter had been Using, the handsome face staring into the dirt on a neck twisted 180 degrees from the front of the body.

Hours later, shortly after he emerged from a swamp infested with snakes, Harod’s surrogate screamed as Kepler’s tall, thin Puerto Rican leaped from cover and struck her repeatedly with a heavy branch. Harod felt her go down and rolled her to one side, but not in time as a second blow landed across her back, Harod blocked the pain but felt the stunning numbness spread through her as the Puerto Rican, laughing insanely, raised the blunt limb for a final blow.

The javelin— a peeled and sharpened sapling— flew out of the darkness to pierce the Puerto Rican’s throat, fourteen inches of bloodied spear-point protruding where the man’s Adam’s apple had been a second before. Kepler’s surrogate clutched at his neck, went to his knees, fell sideways into a thick nest of ferns, kicked twice, and died. Harod forced his woman to all fours, then to one knee, as Jensen Luhar walked into the clearing, pulled the crude spear from the corpse’s neck, and lifted the dripping point to within inches of her eyes. “One more, Tony,” said the huge black with a smile that gleamed in the starlight, “then it is your turn. Enjoy the hunt,
mein Freund.
” Luhar tapped Harod’s surrogate once on the shoulder and was gone, blending into the night.

Harod had her run along the narrow beach, heedless of the threat of being seen, stumbling over rocks and roots in the narrow strip of dirt, falling into the surf where there was no beach, always moving farther away from where he thought Luhar might be— where Willi might be.

He had not seen Barent’s man with the crew cut and wrestler’s physique since the beginning of the game but knew instinctively that the surrogate would have no chance against Luhar. Harod found a perfect place to hide deep in the vine-filled ruins of the old slave plantation. He made his surrogate wedge her bruised and torn body deep in the web of leaves, trailers, ferns, and old beams along a burned-out wall in the deepest corner of the ruins. He would not receive any points for a kill, but the fifteen points for surviving until sunrise would put him on the board, and he would not have to be with his surrogate when Barent’s security patrol terminated her.

It was almost dawn and Harod and his surrogate were on the verge of dozing, staring dazedly up through a hole in the foliage at a small patch of sky in which clouds and dimming stars exchanged places, when Jensen Luhar’s face appeared there, the grin grown wide and cannibalistic. Harod screamed as the huge hand descended, dragging her up by her hair, throwing her into the sharp-edged pile of rubble at the far end of the slave house.

“Game is over, Tony,” said Luhar/Willi, his black body, oiled in sweat and blood, blocking out the stars as he leaned over Harod.

Harod’s surrogate was beaten and raped before Luhar grabbed her face and the back of her head and snapped her neck with a single, sharp twist. Only the kill added points to Willi’s score; the rape was permitted but irrelevant. The game clock showed that Harod’s surrogate died two minutes and ten seconds before sunrise, thus denying him his fifteen points.

The players slept late on Monday. Harod awoke last, showering and shaving in a daze and going down to an elaborate buffet brunch shortly before noon. There was laughter and story-telling among the other four players, everyone congratulating Willi— Kepler laughingly vowing revenge in that night’s play, Sutter talking about beginner’s luck, and Barent being his sincere, smiling self while telling Willi how good it was to have him aboard. Harod took two Bloody Marys from the man at the bar and sat in a remote corner to brood.

Jimmy Wayne Sutter talked to him first, approaching across an expanse of black and white tile while Harod was working on his third Bloody Mary. “Anthony, my boy,” said Sutter as they stood alone by the broad doors to the terrace that looked down a long swale to the sea cliffs, “you’ll have to do better to night. Brother Christian and the others are looking for style and enthusiasm, not necessarily points. Use the man to night, Anthony, and show them that they made the right decision letting you into the club.” Harod had stared and said nothing.

Kepler approached him while they were all touring the Summer Camp facilities for Willi’s edification. Kepler bounded up the last ten steps of the ampitheater and gave Harod his Charlton Heston grin. “Not bad, Harod,” he said, “almost made it to sunup. But let me give you a little advice, OK, kid? Mr. Barent and the others want to see a little initiative. You brought your own male surrogate along. Use him to night . . . if you can.”

Barent had Harod ride with him in his electric cart as they returned to the Manse. “Tony,” said the billionaire, smiling softly at Harod’s sullen silence, “we’re very pleased you’ve joined us this year. I think it might sit well with the other players if you worked with a male surrogate as soon as possible. But only if you want to, of course. There’s no hurry.” They rode in silence to the estate.

Willi came last, confronting Harod as he left the Manse to join Maria Chen on the beach in the hour before the evening meal. Harod had slipped out a side door and was finding his way through winding garden paths recessed below ground level, the maze further complicated by high banks of ferns and flowers, when he crossed a small, ornamental bridge, turned left through a miniature Zen garden, and came across Willi sitting on a long white bench, looking like a pale spider in an iron web. Tom Reynolds stood behind the bench, his dull eyes, lank blond hair, and long fingers making Harod think— not for the first time— that Willi’s second favorite catspaw looked like a rock star turned executioner.

“Tony,” murmured Willi in his husky, accented tones, “it is time we talked.”

“Not now,” said Harod and started to pass. Reynolds slid sideways to block his path.

“Do you know what you are doing, Tony?” Willi asked softly. “Do you?” snapped Harod, knowing instantly how feeble it sounded, wanting only to be away from there.

“
Ja
,” murmured Willi, “I do. And if you tamper with things now, you will be destroying years of effort and planning.”

Harod looked around, realizing that they were out of sight of the Manse and of the security cameras in this flowered cul-de-sac. He would not retrace his steps to the estate and Reynolds still blocked the way out. “Look,” Harod said, hearing his voice rise with tension, “I don’t give a fuck about any of this and I don’t have the least fucking idea what you’re talking about and I just
don’t fucking want to be involved
, okay?”

Willi smiled. His eyes did not seem human. “
Ja
, that is very well, Tony. But we are in the final moves here and I will not be interfered with. Is that clear?”

Something in his former partner’s voice made Harod more afraid than he had ever been in his life. He could not speak for a moment.

Willi’s tone changed, becoming almost conversational. “I presume you found my Jew when I was finished with him in Philadelphia,” he said. “Either you or Barent. It does not matter, even if they ordered you to play this gambit for them.”

Harod started to speak, but Willi held up his hand and silenced him. “Play the Jew to night, Tony. I have no further use for him and I
do
have a place for you in my plans after this week . . .
if
you offer no complications beyond this point.
Klar?
Is this clear, Tony?” The slate-colored, executioner’s eyes bored into Harod’s brain.

“It’s clear,” managed Harod. In a second’s vivid, hallucinatory vision, Harod realized that Willi Borden, Wilhelm von Borchert,
was
dead, that Harod was staring at a corpse, and that it was not just a skull smiling at him like something sculpted from sharp-edged bone, but a skull that was a repository of millions of other skulls with a shark-toothed maw that breathed out the stink of the charnel house and the mass grave.

“
Sehr gut
,” said Willi. “I will see you later, Tony, in the Game Room.” Reynolds moved aside with the same simulacrum of Willi’s smile that Harod had seen on Jensen Luhar’s face the night before, seconds before the black snapped the neck of Harod’s surrogate.

Harod went down to the beach and joined Maria Chen. He could not stop shivering, even on the hot sand in the glare of the hot sun.

Maria Chen touched his arm. “Tony?”

“Fuck it,” he said, his teeth chattering violently. “Fuck it. They can have the Jew. Whoever’s behind it, what ever they’re doing, they can have him to night. Fuck it. Fuck them. Fuck them all.”

The banquet on the second night was subdued, as if each of them was contemplating the hours ahead. All but Harod and Willi had visited the surrogate pens earlier in the day, choosing their favorites with the care usually given to inspecting thoroughbred race horses. Barent let it be known at dinner that he would be using a Jamaican deaf mute that he had brought and submitted for inspection— a man who had fled his home islands after murdering four men in a family feud. Kepler took some time in choosing his second surrogate, giving special attention to the younger men, twice passing Saul’s cage without looking carefully. In the end he chose one of Sutter’s born-again street orphans, a tall, lean boy with strong legs and shoulder-length hair. “A greyhound,” Kepler said at dinner. “A greyhound with teeth.” Sutter also relied on a conditioned catspaw this second night, announcing that he would be using a man named Amos who had served him as a personal bodyguard at the Bible Outreach Center for two years. Amos was a short, powerful-looking man with a bandit’s mustache and a linebacker’s neck and shoulders.

Willi appeared to be content to use Jensen Luhar a second night. Harod said only that he would be using a man— the Jew— and took part in none of the rest of the conversation that evening.

Barent and Kepler had made bets of more than ten thousand dollars on the outcome of the previous night’s game and they doubled it this night. All agreed that the stakes had grown unusually high, the competition unusually fierce, for only the second night of the tournament.