[Blood Bowl 02] - Dead Ball Read online

  As Dunk wiped Mackey’s blood, snot, and spit from himself, a tall, thin orc in a black-and-white striped shirt ran up and threw something at M’Grash: a sack of sand wrapped in a long, yellow ribbon of cloth. It fluttered to the ground after bouncing off the ogre’s chest.

  “I don’t believe it!” Bob’s voice said over the PA. “They’re going to call a penalty on K’Thragsh!”

  The crowd’s cheers turned to boos. Dunk started to shout something at the referee, but the official just waved him off. Then the orc stood to face the announcer’s box and crossed his arms in an X over his head. Then he pointed to M’Grash.

  “Holy Nuffle’s battered balls!” Bob said. “It’s a dead ball foul on M’Grash!”

  “What’s the penalty going to be?” asked Jim.

  The ref pulled back his hand and then stabbed his finger to point out over the top rows of the stadium.

  “He’s kicking M’Grash K’Thragsh out of the game!”

  “Oh, the crowd doesn’t like this, Jim.”

  Dunk put his hand on M’Grash’s arm and felt the ogre flex his muscles. They were like steel.

  The ref started to back-pedal as he watched M’Grash glare at him with his saucer-sized eyes. He put up his hands and flinched when the ogre snorted. The crowd went wild.

  “Give! Him! To! Us!” the fans chanted. “Give! Him! To! Us!”

  The ref turned and sprinted away down the field.

  “M’Grash,” Dunk said, trying to hold on to the ogre’s arm. “Don’t do—”

  Before he could finish, though, M’Grash tore free and lumbered after the fleeing ref with a stride twice as long as his prey’s.

  Dunk threw up his hands and decided to watch and enjoy the chase. “They’ve already kicked him out of the game,” he said. “What else can they do to him?”

  2

  “Can you get that through that thick excuse for a head you keep stitched on top of your shoulders?”

  Dunk had rarely seen Captain Pegleg Haken, the head coach of the Hackers, so mad. The ex-pirate had the hook that stabbed from his left sleeve linked through M’Grash’s nose ring and had pulled the ogre’s face down to his so he could scream right into it.

  “Sorry, coach,” M’Grash said, whimpering like a kicked puppy.

  Dunk knew the ogre could kill Pegleg in an instant, just as he’d torn Mackey apart out on the field, but he also knew he wouldn’t. To M’Grash, Pegleg stood at the right hand of Nuffle, the sacred god of Blood Bowl that most of the game’s players and many of its fans worshipped. From the way most of the other players in the locker room pressed against the walls, trying to stay as far away from Pegleg’s wrath as possible, Dunk guessed that M’Grash wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

  “Sorry isn’t going to cut it!” Pegleg said. He gave the ogre’s nose ring a last tweak and let it go from his hook. Then he turned to glare at the rest of the players. Sweat ran down his reddened face, and his eyes blazed with fury.

  “What in Nuffle’s name is wrong with the lot of you?” Pegleg asked. “It’s only halftime, and we’ve lost five players!” He shot a murderous look at the ogre. “Besides M’Grash, we’ll need funerals after the game for four of them!”

  “Coach,” Dunk said, interrupting Pegleg’s rant. He instantly regretted it. The temperature in the room seemed to drop from hot and bothered to ice-cold mean in the space of a second. No one moved, apparently frozen in place. Pegleg might have stopped shouting, but Dunk couldn’t hear anyone else breathing, not even himself.

  He glanced over at his agent, Slick Fullbelly, who stood hiding in the room’s far corner. At only three feet tall, the rotund halfling seemed to be trying to hide under his unruly mop of curly dark hair. None of the other players’ agents dared to come into the locker room for fear of incurring Pegleg’s wrath. The coach considered most agents vermin and would as soon stab one as talk to him, but he tolerated Slick, who always walked around like he owned the place.

  Pegleg turned to stare at Dunk; his eyes wide and amazed as if the young thrower had just had a second head sprout from his nose. “Yes, Mr. Hoffnung?” he said with a formal smile that showed a gold tooth in the centre of his rotted teeth.

  A shiver ran down Dunk’s spine. Ever since the Blood Bowl finals last season, Pegleg had called him by his first name as a sign of the respect he’d worked so hard to earn.

  Slick stared at Dunk in horror and mouthed a single word to him: “Run.”

  Dunk ignored the halfling’s advice, even though a part of him wanted nothing more than to run screaming into the relative safety of the playing field. Instead, he met Pegleg’s steely glare and spoke, taking care to not let his voice crack.

  “Coach, they’re killing us out there, literally. Maybe we should—” Dunk stopped here to swallow. “Maybe we should call it a day.”

  When Dunk stopped talking, the room fell silent. No one else breathed a word. For a moment, Dunk wondered if some horrible magic had frozen them all in place, including him. He thought of trying to test it, but he couldn’t manage to convince his body of the promise the idea held.

  Pegleg reached up with his hook and inserted it into his ear, where he screwed it around two or three times before taking it back out. “Would you care to clarify that? I don’t think I could have heard you properly.”

  Dunk looked down at Pegleg’s hook and saw blood smeared on it.

  “Maybe.” He took a deep breath. “Maybe we should forfeit.” He held up his hands as he heard everyone in the room gasp — everyone but Pegleg, who stood watching him like a statue.

  “Coach, we’ve lost five players. That brings us down to eleven. If we lose another, we won’t have enough left to field a team.”

  “What, Mr. Hoffnung, is your point?” Pegleg reached up and wiped the stone-sharpened tip of his hook clean on his tricorn hat as he spoke. The blood left a dark red streak along the bright yellow crown.

  “If we lose another player, we’ll have to forfeit anyway, right? Since we’ve already lost five players in one half, I don’t doubt—” Dunk cut himself short as he realised some of the other players, the ones not too terrified of Pegleg, were laughing. “What?” he asked, flushing with anger. “We’re going to lose this match. Let’s call it quits before another of us has to die.”

  The rest of the players started to snigger, and soon the locker room shook with laughter. Pegleg had to sit down to hold his belly with his hook and wipe the tears from his face with his good hand.

  “What?” Dunk asked. “Are you all so jaded you don’t care if one more of us dies before we lose the game?”

  Rhett Cavre, a hard-muscled, dark-skinned man standing next to Pegleg, spoke. “Dunk, you don’t need eleven players to keep playing.” Cavre had been on the team longer than anyone and had become a legend on the Blood Bowl pitch. He also worked as the team’s assistant coach and, when travelling by sea, Captain Haken’s first mate. Dunk knew Cavre took the game as seriously as anyone, but he couldn’t believe his own ears.

  “You don’t? But if we don’t have at least eleven, they won’t let us on the field, right? Remember that game in Kislev? We could barely get six of us on the field, and they made us forfeit the game.”

  “That’s because the rest of us were too hung over to move,” Percy said from a far corner of the room. Maybe the catcher was still riding high from his touchdown reception. Most days he’d have been too cautious to say something like that in Pegleg’s presence.

  “Damn that Bloodweiser they serve there,” Slick said, turning toward Pegleg to keep him from turning and plunging his hook into Percy’s chest. “They call it by the same name, but it’s not. They’ve been brewing that stuff in the same cauldrons for a thousand years, and it’s strong enough to bring an ogre to his knees.”

  M’Grash let loose a whimper at the thought of the hangover he’d endured that day. It had taken three men to pull his head out of the bog.

  “Blüdvar, the Kislevites call it. Translates into ‘Blood War’, I think.�
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  Slick’s voice trailed off as he noticed Pegleg looming over him like the shadow of death, his eyes trying to burn holes down through the halfling’s head, straight to his furry, unshod toes.

  “Anyway, son,” Slick said, scurrying toward Dunk to get out of range of Pegleg’s hook, “you only need eleven players to start the game.”

  Dunk stared at the halfling for a moment, and then glanced over at Pegleg. The captain wore a grim look on his face that Dunk could not read.

  “But, coach,” Dunk said, “how many people are we willing to lose before we — well, before we give up?”

  Pegleg hobbled over on his good leg and the wooden stump that sprouted from the bottom of his right knee. Standing as tall as Dunk, he stared deep into the young thrower’s eyes. His were the blue of the open sea, filled with the wisdom of his years but deep and hidden all the same. Although his voice was rough and low, it carried throughout the room as if he spoke over the stadium’s PA system.

  “This is the nature of the game, Dunk. Some teams play to score points. Others play to kill.”

  “What about us?”

  “We play to win.”

  Dunk swallowed hard, and then nodded, never taking his eyes from Pegleg’s.

  A tiny snotling, a goblin-like creature only half the size of Slick, poked his head into the locker room and said, “One minute until the second half.” His high-pitched voice sounded like that of a child with a bad cold, but no one laughed.

  The snotling peered around the room at the Hackers’ sombre faces. “You always have such rousing halftime speeches?” he said.

  Pegleg snatched off his hat and hurled it at the little, green-skinned creature. It sailed toward him, spinning like a disc, and smacked into him with a non-hat-like thunk. The snotling let out a little “Eep!” and dropped to the ground unconscious.

  “I’ve hit my limit today for stupid questions,” the coach roared as he spun around to glare at each of his players in turn. “The next person to ask one will think the snotling got off easy. Now let’s get out there and win this damned game!”

  Dunk charged past the coach and led the way out on to the field.

  In the middle of the second half, Dunk threw another touchdown pass to Otto Waltheim, one of the Hackers’ best catchers. The score put the Hackers ahead of the All-Stars, three to nothing, but after the catch an All-Star with an octopus for a head knocked Otto into the stands.

  Dunk and the other Hackers could do no more than watch as the fans grabbed Otto and passed him up to the top edge of the stadium and pitched him over. The same thing had happened to Dunk in last year’s Spike! Magazine Tournament, and he’d survived only by the sheer luck of tearing through a series of awnings before landing on a food vendor’s cart. By the way the crowd roared again soon after they tossed poor Otto over the edge, Dunk guessed his team-mate hadn’t been so fortunate.

  As Dunk and the remaining Hackers lined up to kick the ball, he allowed himself a quick headcount. Only ten Hackers were left. There were three catchers: Gigia Mardretti, Percival Smythe, and Simon Sherwood; three blitzers: Andreas Waltheim, Milo Hoffstetter, and Rhett Cavre; and three linemen: Kai Albrecht, Karsten Klemmer, and Guillermo Reyes. Dunk, the only thrower left, made ten. M’Grash was the only player left on the sideline, and he’d been banned from the game.

  Milo kicked the ball, and the rest of the team raced down the field to take it away from the All-Stars. As Dunk sprinted along next to Guillermo, he smelled something dark and pungent that made him want to cough. Downfield, he spied a plume of smoke coming from the area where the ball had landed.

  “What are those Chaos cultists burning down there?” Dunk asked Guillermo, but the big, bearded Estalian just shrugged his shoulders.

  “Smells like oil,” Guillermo said. Then a loud buzzing noise, like the sound of a hive of angry, giant bees, came from the same direction. “Sounds like mayhem.”

  With all the players still between him and the ball, Dunk couldn’t see what was going on. Kick-offs often ended up in pile-ups of players that sometimes had to be pried apart before the game could continue.

  Then the screaming started, and the crowd went wild.

  “Did you see that, Bob?” Jim’s voice rang out over the loudspeakers. “I think I saw an arm come flying out of that scrum down there.”

  “It could have been a leg — or a tentacle. It’s hard to tell from here. Let’s take a look at the Jumboball image at the end of the field, brought to us by Wolf Sports, the top name in Cabalvision broadcasting. And I’m not just saying that because they sign our cheques!”

  “No, the network’s Censer Wizards make sure of that. Nothing like the threat of being roasted over a crucible filled with red-hot coals to motivate an on-air personality, eh?”

  Dunk shaded his eyes to glance up at the twenty-foot-tall crystal ball mounted over the rim of the stadium’s west end. It hadn’t been there last year, but he’d heard that Wolf Sports had installed it to show the fans in the stadium what they were missing at home.

  The Jumboball didn’t produce any sound, but the screams still threatened to pierce Dunk’s ears as he and Guillermo stampeded toward the pile. In the Jumboball, Dunk saw a close-up image of the stack of players piled over the ball. The players in the pile would normally all be jabbing and stabbing at each other, trying to inflict an injury that a referee wouldn’t be able to see. Now, though, smoke and a reddish mist that could only be blood obscured most of the view. On the edges of the pile, Dunk saw the Hacker players trying to break free while the All-Stars pulled them back into the pink smoke.

  The buzzing from inside the pile grew to a roar as Dunk charged into the fray. Then a dwarf in Chaos All-Stars armour burst from the smoke, madness pirouetting in his wide, ice-blue eyes. These were the only things that showed clearly under the splattered blood and gore that coated the front of the dwarf’s armour and his face and bushy beard in a thick layer of red.

  Something horrible growled in the dwarf’s hands, the like of which Dunk had never seen before. It stretched from the Chaos-tainted creature’s hands the length of a sword, but its handle roared like a dragon and belched black smoke into the air. The edge of the sword’s blade bore three-inch long serrations shaped like a manticore’s teeth, and they carried bits of bone and gristle caught between them.

  The dwarf cranked something on the weapon’s handle, and the serrations began to move. They started slow but soon spun around the edge of the blade so fast they became a blur of crimson and steel.

  “Nuffle’s holy gridiron!” Bob’s voice said over the PA. “It’s Gimlet the Lost, and he’s got a chainsaw!”

  Somewhere, Dunk heard a whistle as a referee called the play dead, but he knew it wouldn’t matter. From the look in Gimlet’s eyes, he wasn’t going to let anything stop him until he ran out of fuel, and the chainsaw — if that’s what that thing was — seemed fully loaded.

  Dunk gave Guillermo a shove and pointed for the lineman to circle to Gimlet’s right. Without looking to see if Guillermo complied, Dunk veered left, hoping to catch Gimlet in a pincer move. He hoped this might confuse the blood-drenched dwarf, but if it didn’t at least it would mean he could only attack one of them at a time.

  Gimlet swung his chainsaw in a wide circle, trying to gore both of the Hackers as they came at him. The blade missed Dunk, but it caught Guillermo on the side of the helmet and sent him sprawling. Gimlet followed up on the attack, raising the chainsaw over his head as he stomped after the downed lineman.

  With Gimlet’s back to him, Dunk charged at the All-Star and tried to tackle him. He wrapped his arms around the dwarf, but he could not bring him down. It was like trying to tackle a rock. His grasp kept the dwarf’s arms trapped close to his body, but Gimlet kept marching forward, step-by-step, dragging Dunk along behind him like an over-long cloak, until he stood over Guillermo’s body.

  Dunk peered over Gimlet’s shoulder to see that the dwarf’s first blow had cracked open the lineman’s helmet and spilled out t
he contents like a rotten egg. Gimlet cackled with mad glee and began to bring his hands up, angling his wrists so that the chainsaw pointed back over his shoulder, straight toward Dunk’s own helmet.

  As the chainsaw’s buzzing blade came lower and lower, the sound almost drowning out the shouts from the crowd, Dunk squeezed Gimlet harder and harder, trying to force the dwarf’s hands back down. All he managed to do was slow the blade’s inexorable progress. He had to try something else, fast.

  Dunk wrapped his leg around to plant his foot in front of Gimlet’s legs. The dwarf snorted, perhaps thinking Dunk only meant to try to squeeze him with his legs as well. Gimlet leaned forward harder, pushing the chainsaw back behind him as he did so. The whizzing blade met, screeching and sparking against Dunk’s helmet.

  Dunk let go with his arms, keeping his foot steady where it was. Freed from the Hacker’s arms, Gimlet brought his blade back down in front of him and let out a wild laugh. As he tried to step forward, though, his feet met Dunk’s booted foot, and he tripped.

  Gimlet landed on his chainsaw face first. The blade screeched right through his exposed face and then his breastplate, digging its way through his hot, gurgling corpse.

  The machine was still running when the referee came over and shut it off. The scene played over and over again in glorious crimson colour on the Jumboball high above them.

  “Did you see that move, Jim? And the way that chainsaw parted Gimlet’s armour? Amazing!”

  “It sure is, Bob! It looks like Dunk Hoffnung, one of last year’s most promising rookies, is taking charge of this game.”

  “It’s about — wait! What’s this?”

  Dunk looked up to see what the announcers were chatting about, and he saw a yellow penalty flag flutter over the Astrogranite and land at a bloodied player’s feet. Then he looked down at the artificial turf before him. The flag sat right there.

  “They’ve called a penalty against Hoffnung! Can you believe it?”

  “Well, Jim, it’s clear whose gold is lining the ref’s pockets today. What’s the call?”