The Death Match by Christa Faust Read Free Book Online Page A

love me, you’ll let me help you. Leave with us right now. Help us stop this pervert from hurting other women.”
    Tanya stood, the needle still swinging from the flap of skin on her forehead.
    “Okay,” she said. “Okay, let’s go.”
    Stacy let out a rush of relieved laughter and threw her arms around Tanya.
    “Which way?” Stacy asked.
    “This way,” Tanya said, gesturing at one of three doors with one hand while squeezing Stacy’s hand with the other.
    When Stacy turned toward the door, Tanya swung a wide kick, smashing her bare foot into the glass separating the medical room from the training area. Matt, who had been tense and ready for something bad, leapt back from the spray of glass.
    “Help!” Tanya screamed through the broken window. “Help, I’m being kidnapped!”
    The armed thugs all turned toward the ruckus, guns drawn. Matt hit the deck as a burst of bullets shattered the glass-fronted cabinets. Several other heavies came thundering through the door and into the room.
    Matt had gotten to his knees and raised the ax to defend himself when he felt a sudden sharp sting in his left buttock. He turned to see the no-longer-unconscious doctor he’d forgotten all about crouched behind him with an empty syringe in her hand. A dizzy, drowning blackness swiftly overcame him, and the last thing he remembered was the feeling of his grandfather’s ax being wrenched from his numb and useless hands.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    When Matt came to, it took him a few minutes to fight his way back to complete consciousness. He was nauseous and slicked with cold, clammy sweat. It was a battle to make his leaden eyelids peel back from his dry, gritty eyes. Once he had them open, he struggled to focus on his surroundings. It took several seconds before he could make any sense of what he was seeing, because everything was upside down.
    He
was upside down, dangling from a chain around his bleeding ankles.
    He had no idea what had happened to Tanya and Stacy. Or Long. Or his henchmen. Or that shadowy figure in the Tapout T-shirt who may or may not have been Mr. Dark. He was alone.
    First he took a careful inventory of what was going on with his body. His hands were bound behind his back with what felt like thick, splintery rope, not chain. He couldn’t see far enough up his own upside-down body to determine exactly how his ankles had been bound, but whatever was going on with them was excruciatingly painful. His feet were numb and the bones in his ankles felt in danger of being crushed by the swinging weight of his suspended body. There was also a warm, seeping wetness soaking through his socks and the cuffs of his pants that had to be blood. When he struggled a little to test the strength of his bonds, that wetness spattered down onto his chin and face, the meaty copper flavor confirming what he already knew.
    He stilled his body and concentrated on scoping his surroundings.
    It was pretty dim, but he could make out a stone wall covered with a maze of rusty pipes to one side, and on the other, too far away to reach, was the curved back of the familiar red couch from which Long had watched the fights. With that detail in place, Matt put the rest of the picture together and realized that he was inside the now empty amphitheater. The pit below was still slightly damp from being hosed out after Tanya’s fight, and the smell of wet stone was weirdly ancient and cavelike, as if the modern bustle of Los Angeles had never existed. He was suddenly, irrationally convinced that even if he did somehow escape this underground hell and return to the surface, he would find nothing but primitive, empty land, untouched by the structure of civilization.
    He realized then that this place had existed far longer than the midcentury modern mansion above. That this place was as old as the strange altar on the mesa. As old as the hidden stone arena behind the insane asylum. He knew that whatever was happening here, it wasn’t just about some rich guy