Read The Death Match for Free Online

his nightmares. It had been in the woods behind a mental hospital that had been taken over by the inmates.
    The scene was lit by a single harsh spotlight at the center of the room. Directly beneath the dusty beam of light was a circular pit, approximately twelve feet in diameter and deep enough to be about shoulder height on the naked women currently fighting inside it. Any appreciation this lurid display of nude female anatomy might have evoked in Matt was canceled out by the ugly contusions and sticky, clotting blood covering their desperately twisting limbs and contorted faces.
    There didn’t seem to be anyone directly on the other side of the door, so Matt opened it a little more, just enough to allow him and Stacy to slip through.
    Inside the pit, the relentless action was ramping up to an awful crescendo. One fighter was a little larger than the other, and what was happening in that pit was less of a real fight than a straight-up chainsaw massacre. The smaller fighter was as game as hell and swinging for the fences, but there was nothing she could do to faze her burly pit bull of an opponent.
    The larger of the two fighters took the smaller one down to the blood-slick stone floor. The smaller woman tried to twist away from her opponent, turning her face toward Matt and howling like a tortured animal, her lips skinned back from a mouth full of broken, blood-webbed teeth. Her face looked barely human, a Halloween mask of gore and trauma. Eyes swollen nearly shut, lips distorted, as purple and slick as raw liver. Her nose had been squashed like a dropped tomato, and there was a large, football-shaped wound like a third eye under her left eyebrow. She threw her arms over her ruined face. If it hadn’t been for familiar intricate tattoos on those bloody arms, Matt never would have recognized the smaller woman as Olivia Lopez, the victorious fighter from the pier.
    Her opponent was not as badly injured, but her face also appeared barely human. Not from trauma, but from pestilent corruption. Her lips were cracked and oozing. Crusty sores and patches of mushy necrosis not unlike severe frostbite had covered the entire left side of her face. A crop of pale, quivering insect eggs filled the eye socket on that side. She was as completely subjugated by evil as anyone Matt had ever seen.
    But that wasn’t the thing that filled Matt’s chest with cold, coiling tendrils of familiar dread. Her decomposing face had been painted with some kind of rancid tallow.A glossy black triangle with a point at each temple and one just below her bottom lip. There was a row of smaller white triangles up her jawline to her temples. Like shark teeth.
    Just like the mask he’d seen back at the Carthage Mental Health Center. The same mask that had been worn by a mute Ojibwe fighter in another stone amphitheater just like this one. In all the time he’d been traveling, he’d encountered horror after horror, manifestations of evil so terrible it made him wonder how the human race had survived this long. But they’d all been completely different, a mass killer in one town, a rioting mob somewhere halfway across the country.
    At least he’d thought they were separate. Now he was staring at proof that the atrocities at the mental hospital and the murder frenzy on the Blood Mesa were connected. And if they were part of the same evil, how much of the rest of what he’d seen was too? How much had he missed?
    Matt didn’t have time to think it through. He could tell by Stacy’s reaction that the woman with the painted face was Tanya. And that this was the moment in which things could go horribly wrong.
    He spun and pressed his shoulder against Stacy’s, flat hand against her sternum and whispering close to her ear.
    “Okay,” he said. “Okay, just stay cool. You hear me, Stacy? Stay cool.”
    He could feel every muscle in her body vibrating with fury—she was breathing too fast against his hand and straining toward her friend. He knew perfectly