Rules of the Game. James Frey
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her fear has been spirited away and replaced with emptiness. Shock, Maccabee thinks. Or maybe a force more powerful.
He peers into her hand. A little ball. Earth Key.
He swipes it from her. Her eyebrow twitches but otherwise she’s expressionless.
“I’ll keep that.” He slips it into a zippered pocket on his vest and pats it.
“Earth Key,” she says.
“That’s right,” he says. He inspects the small room. Where the hell are we? The floor is earth, everything else is featureless stone. There are no windows, no doors. No way in or out. As he looks around he runs a hand over his torso, checking to see what he’s got to work with. No guns, but he has his smartphone, a pack of gum, and his ancient Nabataean blade.
A wave of pain crashes over him as the adrenaline fades from his system. He realizes that everything that’s happened recently—finding Sarah and Jago in Bolivia, tracking them through the Tiwanaku ruins, getting teleported somewhere through that ancient portal, fighting, killing, fighting some more, and then getting knocked clean out by the live-wire Olmec, who is 20 or 30 kilos lighter than him, and then getting teleported yet again—all of that probably happened in only the last couple hours.
He needs rest. Soon.
“Earth Key says that …” the girl says in a monotone.
His pant leg vibrates.
“… says that one is coming.”
It vibrates violently. He touches his leg—the tracker orb!
Another Player!
He looks left and right and up and down and can’t figure out where to go. Is another Player going to appear in this small room? Is he going to have to fight with a broken-down body in this box? This, this—sarcophagus?
He whips around, the lighter’s flame blows out. He thumbs the flint. Flick, flick, flick—the sparks don’t take. But in the total darkness something catches his eye. Right before his face. A thin white line. He follows it, tracing a faint square on the ceiling. He stuffs the lighter in a pocket and places both hands on the stone overhead and pushes. It’s heavy and he strains and grunts as his panting mingles with the scraping sound of rock on rock. An opening. Light. Hot air pours into the small room as he gets his fingers around the edge of the six-centimeter-wide slab, heaving it away. He gets on his tiptoes and looks over the edge.
They are in a hole in the ground. The hole is covered by a pillared gothic cupola like one that might cover a grave or a monument. A point of orange light from a streetlamp somewhere, the muted glow of dusk in the sky beyond the cupola, the black boughs of leafy trees hanging over everything like a curtain. A dove coos and then flaps away. The muted jostle of a city—traffic, AC hum, voices—in the near distance.
Maccabee grabs Sky Key and pushes her out of the hole. He jumps out. They’re in the middle of a vast cemetery from a bygone era, every grave marker grand and significant and carved from stone—domed Victorian tombs that must hold entire families, and seven-meter-tall obelisks and basalt pedestals that weigh thousands of kilos. Many are covered in moss and lichen and all are splotchily weatherworn. Plants grow in every available nook and patch—grasses, palms, hardwoods, weeds, sprawling banyan trees with their air roots diving down to the ground here and there. It’s one of the most impressive cemeteries Maccabee has ever seen.
Sky Key steps onto the path, her arms glued to her sides, her legs moving like a robot’s. She’s completely zoned out but manages to say, “One is coming. He is close.”
Maccabee gets out the orb with his right hand and pulls his knife with his left. His unbending pinkie sticks out. As when Alice Ulapala closed in on his hideout in Berlin, the orb simply glows its warning, not giving any intelligence as to who is coming or from which direction.
Maccabee knows that for the first time in his life he is going to have to run. He’s too hurt and too unarmed and too disoriented and too vulnerable with Sky Key to stand his ground.
He stuffs the orb in a pocket and snags the girl, tucking her under his arm like a parcel.
He takes off along a dirt path, the cemetery dark and claustrophobic, until the trees and massive graves give way to an open area. A three-meter-high stone wall rises in front of them, plain concrete buildings beyond it on the street side.
Where the hell am I? This doesn’t look like Peru or Bolivia at all. Or even South America!
He goes to the solid wall, peers left then right. It’s rough enough to scale, but not while carrying Sky Key. He turns left and trots along, keeping the wall on his right. The orb in his pocket has calmed a little, so maybe whoever’s coming got thrown off the trail.
Sky Key weighs about 15 kilos. He holds her sideways, her head forward and her legs flopping behind him. It’s like he’s carrying a life-sized toddler doll.
Near the interior corner of the wall Maccabee comes across a cache of gravediggers’ tools: a shovel stuck in a pile of sand, a pickax, a coil of sturdy rope. He carefully puts down Sky Key and cuts a four-meter length of rope. He lashes it around his waist and shoulders and then works Sky Key onto his back and loops the rope under her butt and twice over her back. He pulls her tight, tying a hitch in the X of rope that crosses his chest. She’s secure in this makeshift child carrier, and he has the use of both hands. He feels her quick breath on his neck. She remains zoned out, likely from the trauma of being taken from her mama, and from coming into contact with Earth Key.
He wants to climb the wall and get out onto the street of whatever city he’s in, but the wall is smoother here and there’s nothing for him to grab. He’s about to double back to where he can climb but then freezes. The rope! The pickax!
He ties the rope to the wooden handle and hurls the pickax over the wall, creating a kind of grappling hook. He gives it a hard tug and it holds. He places his feet on the wall and starts up.
But then, at the same instant, the orb in his pocket jostles like a tiny earthquake, and Sky Key shakes off her zombie-like state and grabs a handful of his hair and yanks it. He loses his footing and swings a half meter to the side. The air cracks around him. A chunk of wall explodes next to his face, followed by a pistol report.
“He’s here,” Sky Key says.
Maccabee dives behind a stone grave marker as three more rounds tear by them, each barely missing. Maccabee kicks the shovel into the air and snatches it. He spins to his right, but Sky Key yanks his hair again and says, “Other way.”
That would take them across the line of fire, but Maccabee trusts her. He quickly guesses that the male Player must be the Shang, An Liu. Marcus and Baits are dead, Jago’s with Sarah, and Hilal is probably recovering from his wounds back in Ethiopia.
And if it is Liu, then he’s probably got some bombs.
That means that Maccabee has to MOVE!
He takes a shovelful of sand and throws it into the air, creating a smokescreen, and sprints behind it. He hears a muted clunk, and he spins around a thick tree trunk and throws his hands over Sky Key’s head and boom! An explosion from where they just were, debris showering all around, leaves whipping along on the shock wave, bits of wood and rock pinging here and there. It was a small explosion but big enough to have hurt them if he hadn’t moved.
“Turn right here,” the girl says calmly.
He’s blind in this place and his body aches from everything that’s happened but she did save them, so he listens.
“Left here. Straight. Left. Left. Straight. Right. Left, left, left.”
He follows every instruction, even if it feels like they’re going in circles. They bob and weave, pivot and fly. They’re narrowly missed by several more shots and one more small explosion. She’s transforming the dense cemetery into a maze, and it’s working. Somehow she knows where An is. Maccabee realizes that this girl, at least in this moment,