Surviving Raine 01 (11 page)

“Well, I’m not,” she said.  “I told you, my father was a cop.  He didn’t make a lot of money.”

Well, yeah, I did remember that.  I kind of figured mom must have been a doctor or an executive or something.

“How’d you get on my ship?”

“I used the settlement money from the state,” she answered.  “I never wanted it, but I got it anyway.  Lindsay convinced me to use most of it for the cruise.”

“You should have booked a chalet in Aspen or something.”

“I think you are probably right.”

“But hey, if you had done that,” I said, holding my arms out wide and smiling, “you wouldn’t have met me and had the time of your life with the biggest asshole in the Caribbean detoxifying right in front of you!”

At least I made her laugh.

“You are an ass,” she agreed.

“I know,” I said, still smiling.  I held up a chunk of fish meat.  “At least I’m a useful ass.”

“Why are you so…cheerful all of a sudden?” she asked.

I tore another chunk of muscle with my teeth and ate it, looking at her and debating.

“I always feel this way after a fight,” I finally said.  “Leftover adrenaline or something.”

“Is that when you started drinking?  To get rid of the extra energy or whatever?”

“No,” I said shaking my head and scowling.  “I might have a beer or something, but I never really drank after a fight.”

“When did you start to drink more?”

I looked over to her and knew this was exactly what she was waiting for, and she wasn’t going to let me out of it until I gave her some answers or fucking gagged her.  I did want to gag her, but not quite in that way.  I know – I’m fucking depraved.

“I didn’t start really drinking until after my last fight.”

“Did you lose?”

“I never lost,” I snorted.  Losers didn’t walk away from a fight.

“Tell me about it,” she insisted.

“Finish eating and let me clean this shit up first,” I said with a sigh.

My mood fell a bit, and we ate in silence until neither of us could eat any more.  I let us both drink a little more water than usual since we had enough for now, and the proteins in the fish would take more water to digest.  I thought about taking a few of the bigger pieces of flesh from the Black Jack and cutting them into strips so they could dry, but I doubted we would have enough water left to eat them after a day or so anyway, so it all got pitched over the side.  Raine helped me clean off the top of the canopy where we cleaned and ate the fish, wash out the towels, and get the canopy back in its track so it would offer us sun protection come morning.

Once we were back under the canopy and settled in, I sighed and looked over to her.  She was barely illuminated by the little solar powered battery light at the top of the raft canopy.  The light would only last a couple more hours, and I wondered how long it would take me to tell her all of this.

Part of me was glad – looking forward to it, even.  I’d never told anyone how it all happened.  Most of me was about as scared as I had ever been because I didn’t want her to know all of this about me.  I took a long, deep breath and decided to just get on with it.

“I’m going to tell you a bunch of shit that’s totally illegal,” I said to Raine, looking her in the eye.  “On the off chance we live through this, you can never tell anyone about it.  If you do, someone’s likely to track you down and kill you.”

“If you’d kill me for knowing, why tell me?”

“It wouldn’t be me tracking you down,” I said.  “Understand?”

She nodded and agreed not to repeat anything I was about to tell her.  I didn’t know if I could trust her or not, but I was going to tell her anyway.

“The first time I sent someone to the hospital from a fight was third grade.”  I waited for her gasp and wasn’t disappointed.  “Yeah, I was a dick then, too.  He only needed a couple of stitches, but still – I started early.  I had a lot of energy and a lot of tension, and I didn’t know what to do with it.  I always had problems with my temper, and anytime I got pissed off about something, I usually talked with my fists.  No one ever really tried to get me to channel all the energy and anger somewhere else until Landon, and I was nearly an adult, then.  If I remember right, I already told you the deal with my real parents.”

“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 decent 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.”