Surviving Raine 01 (12 page)

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 dreams 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?”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Just what I said – do you like me?”

“I like the way you look up at me when your lips are wrapped around my cock,” I said with a laugh.  She looked away and didn’t join in my laughter.  “Shit, babe – I was just fucking with you.  You know I like you.”

“What if I didn’t want to do this anymore?”  Theresa waved her hand between the two of us.

“You want to stop?” I said with a scowl.  “This was your idea, not mine.”

“I’m not saying that – just wondering if you would still like me then.”

“This is a fucking stupid conversation.”  I sat back against the wall and played with my cigarette.

“You should stop smoking.  It’s bad for you.”

“What the fuck, Theresa?”

“I just don’t want anything to happen to you.”

I brought the cigarette back up to my mouth and sucked hard before flicking ash out over the water.  I watched it float off, spinning around in the wind until it hit the black water and disappeared.

“Bastian?”

I took another drag on the cigarette, not wanting any of this last little peace of mind to be wasted.  I didn’t look at her.

“Are you all right?”

“Sure,” I said.  My voice sounded dead, even to me.  I took the final drag off the final cigarette, cringed at the taste of burning filter in my mouth, and tossed the butt into the water.

“What happened to her?”

“Who?” I asked, knowing full well who she meant.  How she knew I was thinking about her, I couldn’t fathom.  Women’s intuition, I guessed.

“Theresa.”

My shoulders tightened, and I closed my eyes for a second before looking back out over the water.  I slowly closed the flap back up and moved myself back before lying down a couple feet away from her.   I shifted, tried to find a more comfortable position on my back and stared up at the dark canopy.

“She killed herself,” I finally said.

I heard Raine scooting across the floor, moving closer to me.  I turned my head to look towards her and saw her reach her hand out to me.  Her fingertips met the hair near my temple, and she stroked down over my jaw and cheek, and then under my chin before she reached back up to my temple and started all over again.  I flinched at first but didn’t back away, and she didn’t stop.

Raine moved a little closer to me, and I felt my breath lodge in my lungs and refuse to come out as she wrapped her arm around my head and brought me against her shoulder.  Her fingers kept tracing over my cheek.

All my muscles tensed up, and I simply didn’t know what to do, so I froze.  For a few minutes, I did nothing.  With closed eyes, I lay there on my side next to her and just felt her fingers caress me.  Of its own volition, my hand reached out and tentatively crept over her abdomen until my arm encircled her waist.  I pulled her against me and opened my eyes, looking up at her.

I could only barely make out her face and her eyes in the darkness, but I could see her sad smile, and her eyes held an expression I didn’t think I had ever seen before.  I didn’t know what to make of it, so I just stared at her for a while as she ran her fingers over my face.  Eventually I tilted my head back down, settling against her shoulder, and letting the darkness swallow me back up.

* * * * *

The situation was becoming more desperate.

There was a day’s worth of water left, assuming I didn’t start cutting the amounts in half.  I didn’t really have much choice.  I decided to cut myself back more than Raine – I really didn’t think she could afford it.

I heard her waking up behind me and handed her a half cup of water without saying anything or meeting her eyes.  I didn’t understand exactly what happened between us the previous night, but I was about as uncomfortable with it as I could be.

“I think I felt better after eating that fish,” Raine told me.

“I’m sure you did,” I said with a nod.

“Will you try to get another one tonight?”

“If I do, you better be in the mood for spinal fluid.  You can’t eat any more fish.”

“Why not?”

“Because the water level is getting low,” I told her, trying not to sound too pissy because I was pretty sure we’d been over this shit before.  “It doesn’t look like there’s going to be any rain anytime soon, so no protein.  It takes too much water to digest proteins.  Don’t drink any more than I give you and only one and a half of the ration bars today, too.”

“Getting bossy, aren’t you?”

I glanced over to her with narrowed eyes, but she was smiling at me.  Maybe she was joking, but I wasn’t very sure, and I definitely wasn’t in the mood for it.  At the rate we were going, we would be out of water too soon.  There were no signs indicating land was near, and we had to be way too far south to be in the normal shipping lanes at this point.  In other words, we were almost completely screwed.

I needed to think and come up with a plan.  I needed to get us the hell off this raft and onto some land where finding water was more likely.  I needed to be able to think with a clear head, and I just couldn’t.

Whenever I tried to focus on something I was doing, I felt her body pressed up against mine.

Whenever I lost focus on what I was doing, I could feel her torso moving slightly up and down as she breathed in her sleep.

Every time I closed my eyes, I could feel her hand running over my face.

This was completely and totally fucked up, and I didn’t know what to do about it.

I tried watching for any signs of ships, or land, or a fucking sea turtle I could strap a note to, but there was nothing. I was starting to get agitated and was actually considering going for a swim just to get some of the energy out.  As it was, I drummed my fingers against the binoculars or on the side of the raft.  Sometimes I pulled at the unraveling hem at the end of my shorts, or I went through the survival packs for the umpteenth time.

I was so wound up, I couldn’t even hold myself still.

“You are driving me crazy,” Raine voiced.