Chapter Text
TWELVE HOURS REMAIN
Jo wasn’t going to fucking die here.
The situation was not ideal: gagged, cuffed, tied to a suspiciously gallows-like frame along with the nine other idiots who should have listened to her when she told them to just run over the scarecrows in the road instead of getting out of the Winnebago. But noooo, no one had wanted to listen to the hitchhiker who’d paid for their last tank of gas, and now here the fuck they all were.
When the attack first started, she’d thought her old bosses might have caught up to her at last, but the notion was quickly disavowed. None of the stripey, mask-wearing goons had paid her any special attention, and her ex-employers sure as hell never wore powdered wigs the size of a medium dog.
Someone down the line started crying as a woman in an equally ridiculous wig began reading off the survival odds, which sounded like they’d been pulled out of someone’s powdered ass. (“Number seven: one hundred fifty to one.”) More joined in when the bewigged man assured them that a wonderful character named Bash-head was going to do his level best to murder them all gruesomely over the course of the next twelve hours. Bash-head was a massive, beefy mountain of a man wearing a metal cage muzzle and a leather getup like something out of a grindhouse flick. He barked and howled and pounded his chest, getting reeeaaalll close so the wires of the muzzle pressed against people’s lips and noses.
Big men moved slow. Jo was pretty sure she could outrun him.
One thing she’d learned from a month on the run - there was always an exit. She’d unloaded half a clip into a guy just outside Philly, burned through the rest of her ammo by the time she hit St. Louis. She’d paid for motel rooms she never slept in and snuck out the bathroom windows of roadside diners just to put a few extra miles between herself and her pursuers. She’d hitchhiked through five states and counting under a dozen fake names and stories. All she had to do was play it smart and careful.
But the one thing she would not do was die for the entertainment of a handful of crusty old British twats.
***
TEN AND A HALF HOURS REMAIN
Number four was gone. The crunch of his spine as Bash-head snapped it over a chunk of concrete would probably haunt her dreams for at least a week. Even worse was the fact that it hadn’t killed him.
God knew what the final blow was. Jo wasn’t ashamed to admit she had run, using Four’s blood-curdling shriek to cover her frantic footfalls. Even if she could take down Bash-head with the shitty metal wrench she’d been given (she couldn’t), there was fuck-all she could do for a man with a broken spine beyond a mercy kill. The announcement of his death over the loudspeaker was almost a relief.
It still sucked coming across his mounted body, every limb sticking out at a different wrong angle and his head spun completely backwards like The Exorcist.
***
SIX HOURS REMAIN
The entire left side of Jo’s face was throbbing. The ankle-biter bitch with the “Sex” nametag had chain-whipped her hard enough to gash her cheek open. Jo retaliated by coldcocking the little skank hard enough to bounce her head off the wall and stealing the knife that was tucked into the waistband of her panties. Had to leave the knife behind a few minutes later after burying it in the tutu-wearing goliath’s leg.
She hadn’t escaped him unscathed, either, and tried her hardest not to think about tetanus as she shredded her cotton overshirt to bandage the bleeding gouges in her thigh. She used the remaining fabric for her hands as a makeshift boxer’s wrap before staggering to her feet and speed walking away from the sounds of German swearing and Two, Five, and Nine’s screaming. If leaving all the others behind was her only way out, then so be it. She could do her penance once she was safely on the other side of the Mexican border. Join a church. Do charity work. Take up mortification of the flesh. Whatever.
God, why couldn’t she have run into Edmund fucking Kemper like a normal hitchhiker?
***
THREE HOURS REMAIN
“You knew about this, didn’t you,” number ten wheezed.
“What?”
Jo was gore soaked to the elbow trying to help the man keep his intestines inside his body. Two clown-painted motherfuckers, he’d said, wielding chainsaws and hollering about fucking people’s eye sockets.
“You knew. ”
“Of course I didn’t know!” Jo whispered furiously. “How the fuck would I have known?!”
“You said ‘don’t go’. ‘Don’t get out.’ And now-”
“Because it looked fucking suspicious! ”
“-now everyone’s dying and Laney’s out there all by herself.” Ten gulped for air, face turning hard. “You mangy cunt. I’d trade you for any of them in a heartbeat.”
A chainsaw revved in the distance. Someone whooped excitedly. Ten met Jo’s eyes, then sucked in a huge breath.
“HEY!”
“Shut the fuck up!” Jo hissed frantically, slapping a hand over his mouth. Ten shook his head free and shouted again.
“HEY, SHE’S OVER HERE!”
Both hands over his mouth now. He started banging his fist against the metal wall behind him.
“Shut up shut up shut up! Motherfucker!”
There was laughter and excited yammering, punctuated by roars of the chainsaw, and it was getting closer.
Jo needed a weapon. She needed to run, but Ten would tell them which way she went. Most of all, she needed him to shut up.
The first stomp broke his nose. The second one reduced his yelling to a gurgle. He coughed up a tooth as Jo brought her boot down a third time.
Everything after that was just overkill.
***
LESS THAN ONE HOUR REMAINS
Jo was going to fucking die here.
Things had gotten real quiet after the clown lunatics had dragged number six, Laney, kicking and screaming off to parts unknown. The final recalculation of the odds put Jo at three million to one.
She was the only one left.
“The patron of our little game always likes to say the dirtier you work, the luckier you get. Well, you must be one dirty, dirty girl, number seven.”
Jo had seen enough lanky, strung-out motherfuckers in her life to know how deceptively dangerous they were. This one had just enough muscle on his lean frame to let her know that she was well and truly fucked. She couldn’t even be sure he was on something - he wasn’t twitchy, but he didn’t fucking blink either. He was centered in a way the other Heads hadn’t been, and it scared the shit out of her.
“I’ve been in this game for a long while now, and I’ve never seen one get taken out by friendly fire quite like that.” He grinned, a toothy, cheek-splitting thing. “ Crunch. Aaahh!”
He chuckled at his little sound effects. Jo instinctively stepped back and immediately bumped into something. She had picked the absolute worst fucking place to be cornered in; all the clutter made it impossible to navigate backwards. If she lost her footing, she was dead. If she turned her back, she was dead. If she dropped the metal-plated bat she’d found next to the dismembered body of number three, she was dead.
Every single possibility was coming up dead.
“My apologies, I’ve neglected to introduce myself.” The man gave a small bow with a flourishing gesture, light glinting wickedly off the machete in his hand. “They call me Doom-Head.”
His getup was a lot simpler than the others’. Tight pants. Slicked back hair starting to stand up on end. White grease paint. A river of dried blood from nose to chin to neck to chest. And he wielded that machete like he kind of wanted to fuck it.
“On the subject of luck, though… I believe it was Hoffer who said ‘A great man’s greatest good luck is to die at the right time.’”
Air was sticking in Jo’s throat. Her mouth felt like glue and every swallow tasted like dirty pennies. Still, she shifted into a slightly wider stance, tightening her grip on the bat until her knuckles popped.
“Now’s the time, lucky seven.”
Jo gathered all her pain and fear and rage as he charged her. Pulled it up through her gut, her chest, her throat, and screamed.
The impact of machete against bat jangled through her arms and nearly knocked her off her feet. She threw herself backwards as Doom-Head swung again. Slipped on a damp patch of ground and went down. Hard roll to the left, barely avoiding the machete as it came down by her head. His reach was so long. It wasn’t fair.
Jo lashed out with the bat, trying to take him out at the legs. It connected, but from her position on the floor, she lacked the leverage to do more than bruise him. Doom-Head swore, then hauled back and kicked her in the ribs so hard that stars exploded in her vision. As she tried not to puke up her own lungs, she saw the machete rising above her like a guillotine blade.
A siren blared from somewhere in the rafters.
“Weapons down! Weapons down!” crackled a loudspeaker. “31 has come to a conclusion.”
The moment froze. Stretched. A fraying wire about to snap. Would he actually…?
“Motherfucker!” Doom-Head roared. He swung the machete at the wall, where it ricocheted off a pipe with a deafening clang. “FUCK!” Pacing furiously, he ran a hand through his hair so viciously it almost looked like he was trying to scalp himself. Then he punched himself in the face.
Again.
And again.
Jo had moved beyond terror into something almost numb. Inching backwards until she hit something solid, she clambered painfully to her feet, using the bat as a crutch. Parts of her were bleeding and she didn’t know which ones. What happened now? What was she supposed to do?
“Congratulations on your victory, number seven,” said the posh voice over the speaker. “Father Murder will see you in the antechamber.”
There it was. She hadn’t believed the “all you have to do is survive” bullshit, not from the beginning. You didn’t let witnesses just walk away from something like this.
Doom-Head wheeled on her. He looked more demon than man: chest heaving, fresh blood pouring from his mouth and nose, face twisted with incandescent wrath. With a final burst of adrenaline, Jo hurled the entire goddamn bat as hard as she could at his head, and ran.
She was not a person with a body anymore, just a passenger in a broken down machine with the throttle wide open. Couldn’t see a damn thing between the darkness and her blurry vision. She bounced off obstacles and let the momentum carry her in a different direction as long as it was away. For all she knew, she could’ve been running off a cliff.
Something heavy collided with her back and took her down a final time.
“Where are you off to?” Doom-Head growled in her ear. “Didn’t you hear? You won.”
He spat the word out like it was poison. Jo couldn’t breathe. His full body weight pressed her into the hard ground; he reeked of blood and sweat.
“Bullshit,” she finally ground out.
“Oh? You don’t feel like a winner?”
Bitter mirth crowded Jo’s tongue.
“An audience with Father Murder?” she wheezed in an atrocious mockery of a British accent. “What the fuck kind of prize is that?”
Doom-Head barked out a laugh. He eased a little of his weight off her, but kept her caged under him. Brushing some of her hair out of the way, he pressed a hard kiss against her bleeding cheek. With tongue.
“You are something fucking else, number seven,” he murmured against the bloody skin. His tongue flicked out, catching the corner of her mouth, before giving her another kiss. She let her eyes flutter shut. Too tired for this shit anymore.
Doom-Head sat up abruptly at the sound of approaching footsteps. Goosebumps prickled along Jo’s skin at the sudden absence of his body heat. Heavy boots drew steadily closer, accompanied by equally steady voices. Cracking an eye open, she watched as several black-and-white striped, approximately man-sized shapes came into view. Doom-Head made an annoyed sound in the back of his throat as he got to his feet, dragging Jo with him by the back of the neck.
“Come, come, on your feet,” he chided loudly in a pompous English accent of his own. “Musn’t keep the good Father waiting, hmm?”