Read The Death Match for Free Online Page B

loving every minute of it!”
    “Just stay cool,” Matt whispered, gripping Stacy’s muscular shoulder. “Stay cool and think this through.”
    But the truth was, he didn’t even know how to begin explaining to Stacy that saving her friend was already a lost cause. Plus, he didn’t have any idea what their next move should be. Clearly there was some kind of link between the events at the insane asylum, the cannibalistic murders on the mesa, and this horror currently unfolding in the stone pit. But what could that link be?
    Nothing to do but watch and wait. But Stacy wasn’t the watch-and-wait type. She looked like she was going to burst into flames if she didn’t start swinging at someone. Matt really felt for her. She was hurt, confused, and angry, just as he had been when his simple world was first turned inside out by Mr. Dark’s twisted games. But he couldn’t let empathy keep him from reining in her impulsive anger and trying to learn more about what was really going on here.
    “Are you cool?” he asked.
    “Fuck that,” she replied, head down and lips pressed into a determined line.
    “Stacy, listen to me—”
    Whatever he thought he was going to say to her was obliterated by a fierce whoop from Mr. Long, who had dropped the fighter’s hand and leapt to his feet, cheering like a drunken frat boy watching two chicks make out in a sports bar.
    Matt turned his attention back to the pit. Tanya was kneeling on her helpless opponent’s shoulders and pounding the other fighter’s face into stew meat with wild hammer fists. The smaller woman was either comatose or dead, no longer able to defend herself or even try to cover her face, yet it wasn’t until Tanya leaned down and bit a large, stringy chunk out of what was left of her opponent’s face that the bookend thugs stepped in to separate her from the unmoving loser.
    She spat the wad of cheek meat at Long’s feet and raised her gory fists in victory.
    “Well done,” he said, clapping like a happy kid at the circus. “Absolutely fucking beautiful.” He turned to the thugs behind her. “Have her cleaned up, stitched up, and made ready for my bed.” He waved a casual hand at what was left of the loser. “And get that mess cleaned up.”
    Matt turned back to Stacy. Her flushed face was a kaleidoscope of jagged and conflicting emotion. He hated that she had to see something like this, remembering how it felt when he first realized that his best friend, Andy, had been hopelessly corrupted by evil, but it made his job a little easier. At least she didn’t have to take his word for it. Anyone with eyes could see that Tanya was not behaving like a normal person.
    One of the thugs helped Tanya to the other set of steel doors while the other three went to work disposing of the loser’s remains. The first thug didn’t go through the doors with Tanya, just ushered her through and then went to help his buddies. Meanwhile there was some kind of romantic liaison occurring on the couch between Long and the blondfighter that Matt really didn’t want to see. He was about to pull the trembling Stacy back to the first set of doors when she took off in the direction of the doors through which her friend had disappeared. She stuck to the shadows, circumventing the pit with her back pressed against the rough-hewn wall. The thugs were busy with the corpse, and Long was busy with his blond paramour. No one noticed Stacy. They didn’t notice Matt either as he went after her.
    On the other side of those doors was a small, immaculate medical room. White walls, shiny stainless-steel cabinets full of suture packets and gauze and vials of lidocaine. One wall was mostly tinted glass, a window into another part of the complex. A skinny woman with short dark hair and a blood-spattered white coat was tending to Tanya’s wounds, sinking some prickly black stitches into her forehead.
    Both Tanya and the fight doctor turned toward the unexpected visitors with shocked expressions.