Read The Sacrifice Game for Free Online

the way back from MP’s. One of the odder things about the No-Go Zone was that even though some places were still clocking in at over 40 curies per square kilometer, since it covered over four thousand square miles, and there were about four hundred different roads leading into it, and since squatters don’t much care about long-term health anyway, the police speculated that the population of the NGZ area had actually gone up since the Horror. I’d been there a couple of times to buy fake identity papers and it was actually kind of great, a whole sort of lawless Pirates’ Nassau Town with a smorgasbord of meth, horse, crank, dogfighting, and preteen BJs, but actually not all that dangerous because M13 and a couple of the smaller gangs wanted to keep the carriage trade and policed the place themselves. Next, since it was a personalized feed, I got the malacological news: Sun-Min Hsu and Tobi Ramadan had described a species of nudibranch from the Line Islands area that they said might be eusocial, that is, divided into castes like ants and bees, although I couldn’t imagine how that could be possible, and I actually do know a little bit about opisthobranches. Some people think nudibranchs are the world’s most beautiful living things, with all the extruded gills and polyps in Fantasia-Phiokol colors, and other people think they’re the ugliest, and most people haven’t heard of them at all. Although to some other critter—to a lobster, say—they probably look pretty drab. Anyway, they have some unusual characteristics, including the almost unique ability to devour their prey and, instead of digesting all of it, incorporate some of its useful cells—cnidarians’ stinger cells, for instance, or photosynthesizing algae—into their own bodies. I’d miss them. Except of course I wouldn’t, because I wouldn’t exist. And, experientially anyway, not existing is exactly equivalent to never having existed. So really we didn’t have a problem. Anyway, after the Jedcentric news, for some reason the car decided I’d heard all the news and now wanted to listen to a feed called Last Age of Heroes, which seemed to be having a Stones/Byrds/Doors festival. Debuting at Marker 31, DHSMV had initiated another decade of postdeconstruction on the granny lane— INJURE/KILL A WORKER—$7,500 + 15 YEARS, a sign said, so temptingly that I couldn’t imagine anyone resisting the offer. At the Kissimmee exit I voice-texted Marena that I’d be there in ten minutes. Why give her any more time to stage the place? See what she’s really wearing, doing, reading, smoking, fucking, fisting,
et ceteris paribus ad foetidus hepaticum
. Right?
    Marena’s house was just outside the south city limit of Orlando on Orchid Island, one of quite a few residential patches that weren’t only not abandoned, but were making a good-neighborly effort to muddle through as though things were normal. The faux-wrought-iron gate was open, but the dude came out of the guardhouse, made sure I was really me, and he was really polite about it. Classy. I tip-tired through the two S -curves of a long pink-concrete driveway flanked with close-packed pepper trees. There was a three-car garage, but Marena’s Cherokee was parked on the side of the big circle, with two other dark SUVs behind it, and I parked in the front of the line.
    At some point, I forget when, Marena’d told me that Walt had built her house during Epcot’s early grand Utopian phase, and I’d thought she’d been exaggerating, but it turned out to be true, and the place was a nearly exact replica of some Frank Lloyd Wright house or other. From this side it looked a lot like the palaces at Uxmal, which is a Yucatec Maya city that was a big capital in the AD 900s, and which, incidentally, had been ruled by some of my ancestors, the Xiws.
    I scrumbled out. Crack. Ow. Stiff. Getting old. Damn, it was stuffy. I repocketed my wallet and phone into my shirt and left my jacket on the passenger seat. Okay.