The Sacrifice Game

Very, very sincerely,

Joachim Carlos Xul Mixoc DeLanda

(2)

Marena’d texted me while I was in the middle of writing my Dear Doomed World letter. She said she was back from Belize, and she was in her house, and I should come by. Wow, now what? I thought. And what do I tell her, besides nothing? I knew I wouldn’t be able to resist, though. She still had a hook in me. Well, let’s say a harpoon. And she knew it. Beeyotch. Anyway, I hadn’t even been to her house yet, so I guess it was on my bucket list. Okay. I got the tanks into self-maintenance mode. I had some Fluffernutter and, just for clarity, a shot of tsam lic. It was basically the same proportional combination of the same two molecules as the drugs that Jed 2 had buried in Oaxaca, except that they were now synthetic, of course, and each with a few pairs of hydrogen atoms added for ease of absorption. It rocked.

I cleaned up and even got out a sort of nice gray summerweight Dormeuil jacket. Wait, is that a moth hole? FUU-oh… it’s not. Just a speck of something. Polonium-210, probably. Whatever. I slipped on the jacket. Ahh. Now I’m an adult. Actually, since the unpleasantness at Disney World, I’d kept the garment all stocked up with my wallet, backup wallet, glasses, Purell wipes, SightSavers wipes, Q-tips, Twist-Em ties, Theraputty, Krazy Glue, grandessa, mandatory medication, optional medication, Adderall, OxyContin, Klonapin, clotting spray, wound dressing pads, blue Pilot Rolling Ball, Post-its, ToothTowels, Go-Between Plaque Stix, red astronomy flashlight, two competing telephones, the Gerber Suspension Butterfly Multi-Tool (which I much recommend), my real passport, my Warren-provided fake passport, nine blank checks from three different banks, about fifteen thousand U.S. dollars in premagnetic twenties, and a little nylon coin folder with twenty-five Krugerrands, which at the moment represented another seventy-five thousand, one hundred and two dollars. And a few other things, because, you know, one never knows. I checked the three working tanks again-I’d had Le

I rolled up my female-I mean, left-pant leg and found a new virgin target on my i

I went out, let the door suck itself closed, and listened to the motion alarms beep on. The overcast and 102 degrees and 79 percent relative humidity and no wind made you feel like you were stuffed in a box with a half ton of styro-peanuts and left on somebody’s porch and not getting picked up. There was a top note of burning something in the air, over the bases of mold and fried crabgrass. Devil’s Night, I thought. Starting a little early. Amazingly, I remembered to let the jacket slide off before I eased into the 120-degree interior of the Barracuda Thermador. It was a metalflake-mango-orange hardtop 1970 Plymouth that I’d gotten ten months ago, with the original body, engine, and drive train, and I called it that because the inside had been scooped out and replaced with all-up-to-code everything.

“Please tell me your destination,” the car purred. Its voice was like the Stepmother’s from the Disney Cinderella.

“How can I turn you off?” I asked. It didn’t answer. Hell and corruption. It wasn’t even the right voice. If this car could really talk, it would sound like Amy Winehouse. Should hire her to do it. Just a few phrases and synth the rest. Where was I going? the car asked again. This time I told it, out of sheer weakness. It suggested I head west on Magnolia Street. I obeyed. Indiantown looked like a neighborhood from The Sims, if there were a “seediness” option and you slid it up halfway. And today it seemed to be deserted. Everybody’s hiding, I thought. Afraid of getting lynched by yahoos. Lately there’d been a rumor the Horror had been caused by some kind of Native American magic, and Indians had been attacked all over Florida. Sometimes I wondered whether that was what the “shoulder the blame” line in the Codex Nuremberg had been trying to mean. Except it didn’t seem really plausible. I mean, that’s too specific even for me to believe. Except, well, you never know. That One Ocelot was a pretty shrewd cat.

“Please make a… right turn onto Martin Luther King Boulevard,” Car Voice said. I did, even though I knew another way and even liked it better. Damn. Getting servile like the rest of the sheep-men. Should’ve kept the old dashboard. On the radio, which of course hadn’t really been a radio since 2003, a woman who kept telling you her name was A