“Deal,” she said, and I thought I felt her smile.
“There was this guy named David,” I started. “Tall dude, drank a lot, had been playing the games a long time, and he’d won far more than I had. I don’t know how many, I just know that the bookies were giving him a lot better odds than me or any of the other players. We all knew he was a dirty player – if you could really call it that in a game without rules. He’d get someone to tell him where he could find the weapons on the course so he would get to them first or smuggle in something – I don’t know what. He definitely didn’t play fair.”
“The game was in the desert – somewhere in Africa in the savanna or whatever. I don’t know, but it was fucking hot. It had been going on for about three days, I think. There were two dozen of us at the beginning, but we were down to three: David, a chick that called herself Honey, and me. It was a no weapons tournament, but there was still a lot of stuff around you could use. I’d been hiding out for a couple hours on top of a pile of rocks. You couldn’t have seen me from the ground.”
“How big an area was it?” Raine asked.
“Maybe two or three square miles, all fenced off so you knew where the boundaries were. Not huge or anything. We were air dropped. All the spectators were set up in some posh hotel in Cairo. I think that was it, anyway. Really, I have no idea where we were.”
“I bet they were in the air conditioning,” Raine mused. “I could use some of that right now.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” I laughed. I paused for a while, thinking about the air drop and the giant pile of elephant shit I nearly landed in when I hit the ground. Raine turned her head back to look at me, her eyes expectant. “Do you want me to keep going?”
“Yes.”
“Fine.” I took another breath and kept going. “I watched Honey as she came up over the bank, watching all around and looking for me or David. I had a garrote I made out of the bottom of my shirt. I had already taken out two other players with it. I jumped down from the rock and made her the third.”
“You strangled her?”
“Yeah,” I said softly. I waited for her to try to get away from me, or at least get herself on the other side of the raft, but she didn’t move. I felt her hand twitch where it was resting on my stomach, but she didn’t make a move to leave. I paused for another minute before going on.
“I was just finishing with her when David came up behind me. I don’t know where he got the knife – there weren’t supposed to be any weapons at all in this game except ones you made yourself. I heard him behind me just before he swiped it across my arm and back. I managed to turn so the first hit wasn’t lethal, like it should have been.”
“I guess I lost it at that point. I don’t remember it hurting right then. I just remember being pissed off that he had that thing at all. I’d been in enough knife fights to know how to play, though. I dodged him when he took another swing at me, and we went back and forth for a bit. I got a couple good punches into his face, but I couldn’t get as close as I wanted with him waving the fucking knife around, and I kept feeling blood running down my back.”
“David was good,” I said. “I have to give him that. He knew how to fight, with or without the weapons. Maybe if he hadn’t stabbed me, he would have won. Since he did stab me, and it was deep enough that I bled all over the ground, he ended up losing his footing in the pool of blood. I got on top of him, smashed his hand, took his knife, and slit his throat.”
I stopped, and Raine was quiet for a while. For a minute, I thought she had fallen asleep, but she finally had something to say.
“This really was a game for you?”
“That’s how I saw it, yeah.”
“That’s really kinda messed up, you know.”
“No shit,” I said with a humorless laugh. “I don’t recall telling you I was anything other than a lunatic.”
Raine’s finger was slowly moving back and forth over a spot on my stomach where there was another small scar. I couldn’t even remember how I got it, but it sure did feel good to have her running her finger over it. Of course, that made me wonder what it would feel like to have her fingers running over something else. I needed a distraction before my shorts busted open.
“It’s your turn,” I told her.
“What do you want to know?”
“Tell me about your last boyfriend.”
“Seriously?” she asked. “You want to hear about my love life?”
“Yeah,” I said, smirking. Then I realized how bad an idea that might be, considering our positions. “But you might want to get off me because I’m bound to get excited by the details.”
She slapped her hand playfully against my chest, but she did sit up. I did the same and watched her out of the corner of my eye while she seemed to be composing herself.