The Sacrifice Game Read Online Free PDF

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 Anne-Marie García-McCarthy was saying how a mob had stormed the Fort Polk army base in Louisiana and may have been fired upon. The Nation of Islam had issued a statement saying that the U.S. had declared war on the black population, who had to fight back by any means necessary. Time for a new catchphrase, I thought. She said that Dick Cheney, the mind apparently behind the DWH—the Disney World Horror—was still missing, but probably somewhere in Pakistan. She said spot gold had hit a new high of $3,004 this morning and corn, as we know, hit a new high after-hours. She told us her name was Anne-Marie García-McCarthy. Onto 710. It was pretty empty.
Future Site of Rockingham Vistas,
the first big video billboard said. That’s what we need, more GCs. That is, what we real estate buffs call gated communities.
Windsor Forest—Based on the Masterpieces of Thomas Kincaid, Painter of Light
® .
Coke
™
 . . . Life Tastes Good
® .
Take Back Florida/ George Prescott Bush/ Republican for Governor.
An old Mustang with a scrolling LED bumper sticker: IN ANOTHER UNIVERSE, MY SON IS AN HONOR STUDENT.
Pilgrim Homesteads,
which I guess was code for a WASP-flight enclave. An antiabortion ad scrolled by with an upset-looking fetus on it. No worries, little guy. You didn’t miss anything.
Anne-Marie was saying how analysts had thought that with statewide 30 percent unemployment more people would want to be police officers, but the opposite had turned out. Past the Baja Fresh and Fran’s Anemones. They both looked closed. Damn. Fran used to compete with Lenny but I still got brine shrimp from her sometimes.
Federation Forest
™.
Enterprise Estates
™. Those were both for aging Trekkies. Actually, I only knew about them because they’d been developed by the “Warren Intentional Communities Family.” They were big, but WICF’s biggest hits were still the Golden Year Gothams, which were like whole cities made of nursing homes, and the Special Youth Plantations, which I guess were like a cross between giant day-care centers and reform schools.
Colonia Años Dorados
™.
Long John Silver’s
.
Future Site of Pandora
® . I guess that one was going to be based on
Avatar
™
. Rancho Pasa de Uva
™
.
Or had I just made that one up? I looked back but couldn’t read it anymore. God, this is stultifying. Well, this might be the last time you have to deal with the ol’ Pike, I reminded myself. Even the last time you have to drive anywhere. Out over my left arm the big dirty orange sun touched the line of scrub behind dead orange trees. Six-forty P.M. , I thought. Right on the dot. Just a hair west of west-by-southwest. Creeping toward the winter solstice on the Fourth Overlord. Which’ll be the last one. Ever. Ever, everer, even more ever, Everest. OMG, OM—
    Cancel, my other side said. That is, I call it “my other side,” for convenience, but of course it can be either side, it’s just whichever voice speaks second in my internal dialogue.