The Sacrifice Game

(74)

I should have expected it, but I hadn’t negotiated the rules, and they sent four players out against me: Three Balls, a little rotten but looking tougher than ever, and my old mashed-and-charred friends from my last ball game, 15 Immanent, 20 Silence, and 9 Dog. I can’t deal with this, I thought, it’s too Dawn of the Dead around here, but it didn’t help. What was I thinking? I wondered. I still only had one leg and one eye, for Chrissake, I could barely play five rounds of Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots.

“Good luck. Ball One, play ball,” Jaguar Night said.

I got the face-off and hipped the ball west, but as it bounced and 3 Balls gingerly headed it off I realized I’d already screwed up, my hip was spraying blood. They’d let me get to the ball first because the ball was really a spherical knife. It was like this thing that happened to this friend of No Way’s named Cobi, he was in a fight in a school cafeteria and got hit with what they called a ballestero, a hard orange with a whole bunch of single-edged razor blades stuck deep in it with just their corners sticking out. It really messed him up and he had to have about a hundred stitches. Except this thing the Xibalbans had didn’t exactly have blades, it was more like a Mobius strip or a Klein bottle, where even though the surface was round it was still also a big razor-sharp knot that whirled like a Cuisinart blade. Anyway, before I’d gotten it together 3 Balls yoked the thing onto my goal-peg.

I limped back to my marker. Spine ambled out to tidy me up. “Really,” he said, “of all of us, you under me are the most nauseating.” Yeah, yeah, I signed. He dusted me off with a long-haired scalp.

The second ball came down. 9 Dog blasted it into my chest and it stuck. All four of them ran to my side, picked me up, and threw me up against the peg. My ear knocked over the dish of mica flakes and I bounced down the bank like a Gumby doll.

I won the next six balls, though, and won the match.

A cacophony of jeers all rose around me, it was just horrible, like you’d never think people could laugh that way at something so stupid except of course you can see it every day on TV on talk shows. They were gibbering so hard they were gnawing on their own arms, rolling over and down onto the court, lying on their backs and juggling me in the air and kicking me back and forth until I was ricocheting off the stone bank with steel-on-steel impact. I just took it. It certainly didn’t hurt any less than it would have in the real world. They closed around me into a spanking line and thwacked me through it with bone saw-paddles, like I was that chicken the Nephi Knights used to kick around. But I was off in the right direction.

“Hey,” I called to 2 Jeweled Skull. “Toss me another towel, will ya? I’ll schmear you a fiver next time.” I screwed a fist into my working eye and walked forward against the obsidian wind.