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

getting his jollies. There had to be a connection to those other profane locations. Men fighting with knives. Women fighting with bare hands. But always fighting. Could it be some kind of unholy tournament? But to what end? And what dark and awful grand prize awaited the winner?
    “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”
    Matt heard the familiar, intimate voice slightly behind his left ear, but when he turned defensively toward the sound, his suspended body swung in a helpless wobbly circle, past the dim figure behind him and back around to face the wall, where he’d started.
    The urge to vomit struck, and Matt clenched his teeth till his jaw muscles ached, willing down the bile creeping up the back of his throat.
    The figure behind him stepped into the dim light, a hand on Matt’s left elbow to stop his spinning. It was Long.
    But there was something seriously wrong with him. He held his head at a strange, awkward angle, tilted back and to the right. His rotten, bulging eyes were rolling wildly as if searching for a way out of his own skin. His mouth was wide open as if screaming, the tendons in his neck standing out with the strain. He moved with a jerky, crooked gait and held on to Matt’s elbow way too tight. He held Matt’s ax in his other hand.
    “Does this body make me look fat?”
    Long’s mouth didn’t move at all. It stayed frozen wide, and the smarmy, cheerful voice that emanated from his gaping throat belonged to someone else.
    Mr. Dark.
    “I don’t know,” the voice continued, while Long cranked his hips back and forth. “Feels a little tight in the crotch.”
    He let Matt go and gave him a gentle nudge with the ax handle.
    Matt forced himself to stay calm, to breathe slowly and evenly through his nose and crush down the rising panic in his chest. If Mr. Dark was just going to flat-out murder him, he could have done it easily many times before. Chopping Matt to bits with his own ax while he was bound and helpless wasn’t Mr. Dark’s style.
    “When Long was a kid,” the voice said, “his mother was murdered by his father’s vengeful lover. Choked to death right in front of him. Can you believe that? He was eleven.”
    Long’s quivering body leaned in close to Matt.
    “Trauma is a zipper.”
    For a second, Matt didn’t have any idea what that was supposed to mean. It sounded like a weird, nonsensical riddle.
Why is a raven like a writing desk?
But Mr. Dark wasn’t waiting for Matt to catch up.
    Long’s body twitched and shuddered, then collapsed to the stone floor.
    “I don’t know how you stand it in there.”
    Matt twisted his head and shoulders to see the shadowy figure in the oversized Tapout T-shirt and baggy jeans standing beside him. In the wavering half-light, that person’s features were finally revealed. The thin, scraggly orange hair, sticking out in wiry tufts on either side of a large, bald pate. The maggot-pale grease paint crusted in the deep wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. The round red ball on the tip of his hooked nose. It was Mr. Dark, free now from his uncomfortable skin suit.
    He was wiping his hands against the legs of his pants as if he’d just touched something dirty, painted lips twisted back from his long yellow teeth in a broad parody of disgust.
    “I can’t believe you people actually spend eighty years trapped inside those nasty meat bags.” He shuddered dramatically. “They’re much more fun to drive by remote control.”
    Matt was only half listening, intensely focused on the rope around his wrists, testing, feeling for the knots.
    “Who do you like in the next bout?” Mr. Dark asked in an abrupt conversational swerve. “I know you have a soft spot for the plucky redhead, but my money’s on the Brazilian. You know, all this beta testing has been such a headache, but this girl. She’s the one. I can smell it.”
    Then he was gone.
    Long was beginning to stir on the stone floor, moaning softly and pressing his hand to his eyes like a man with an awful