Rat Race (Devil’s Playground #2)

1. Cam

Cam

Game on!

I swear Pa thought the fuckin’ sun rose just to hear him crow.

My parents boxed me in on either side of the extended leather bench seat, the black town car we’d taken from the hotel way too big for three people.

But that was the thing about my family—they lived and breathed everything bigger in Texas —and not just because when we all got together there were damn near enough of us to man a football team. It was all about the look of things.

Bigger car? More money.

Never mind that if I lost today we’d go from rooster to feather duster quicker than I could say Rat Race.

Ma squeezed my hand impatiently, and I opened an eye lazily to look at her giant, curled silver hair. Her cherry-painted lips were turned into a frown, talking out of the corner of her mouth.

“Pay attention.”

I’d barely registered that Pa was still talking, his performative praying of no interest to me. There was a time when I would’ve hung on his every word. But that was ages ago—before he rebranded the Ranch from a corporation into a church.

Naw, not just a church. A fuckin’ company in a religious society’s clothing. A Mega Church.

Fuck me, would I be glad to be out.

I’d played the game better than my siblings, or maybe I was the least indoctrinated since I was able to attend a few classes at the local university once I’d scored out of the Ranch’s educational system.

Thank fuck for deprogramming and liberal arts universities.

“And may you, for the glory and honor of your never-ending vengeance, bring Camilla to victory so that we may continue to be heralds of your great message. Amen.”

Yeah, not grace. Not goodness.

Vengeance .

Y’see, the Ranch wasn’t just a church —it was a training facility. A fuckin’ expensive one, though incorrectly touted as a free perk for members of the Church. A church whose membership was contingent on the parishioners supplying a cool thirty percent of their income to “tithing.”

You hand over thirty percent of your income to us and full control over your little frog spawn, and we’ll churn out the most lethal players The Devil’s Playground’s ever seen. How? Don’t worry about it.

God will show them the way.

And by God, they meant brutal, systemic stripping of your entire sense of self to condition you to be able to kill without thinking.

But hey, love and light!

“Amen,” Ma and I muttered in unison, hers much more enthusiastic than my own.

If there was a God, I reckoned he’d be none too happy with the way my parents were portraying him. Naw, if anything, I had a feelin’ I was in for a world of trouble if someone managed to snuff me out today.

“You’re ready, Cammy,” Ma said in her thick southern drawl, pulling a flat, silver cigarette case from her tan leather handbag. “Best and brightest always come from the Ranch. And y’know why?—?”

“Discipline,” I interrupted, barely biting back my sigh. But it didn’t matter. I’d watched Ma give this speech to five of my siblings before me. It never changed.

“—Discipline. None of that funny individualism stuff they tried to paint you with at that… secular …” She said the word like it was dirty. “School of yours. Good old-fashioned family values. That’s what makes Weston’s a cut above the rest.”

“Yes, Ma,” I agreed placatingly, my eyes finding the window as she cracked it open, the sunlight pouring in now that there was a gap in the dark tinting.

She lit the butt, cherry lipstick painting a thick print around the filter of her cigarette as she sucked on it, exhaling a steady stream of smoke a few moments later. “Let’s hear it then, the Proclamation.”

Beside her, Pa wrinkled his nose, thick, black-dyed mustache wiggling. He hated when she smoked in the car. But Ma was nervous, and that meant she’d had a cigarette between her fingers since her eyes popped with the first alarm.

Only pause was to pray, naturally.

Just didn’t do for a good, God-fearing woman to be seen abusing substances. Unless those substances were about a quart of whiskey every Christmas Eve since before I was born.

I fought the urge to sigh. Not this shit again.

As if growing up with the Games shoved down my throat since I could crawl through the toddler-sized maze that my folks called a playpen wasn’t enough, all these reminders in the last few months as I prepared to play in my first Games were really starting to be overkill.

Robotically, though a bit comically given my own accent, I started cycling through the Weston Ranch Manifesto that’d been as good as injected directly into my veins.

“Honor your parents.”

If you asked me, stealing directly from the Ten Commandments was a bit tacky, but hey, this was a late-stage capitalistic cult in a church’s clothing, I couldn’t be that picky. The first, at least, hadn’t been edited from the main text. But the other four tenets?

They read more like a wikiHow on how to become a serial killer than pillars for good Samaritanism.

Probably on the account that they were.

“Make yourself an idol in the eyes of the people, for the glory and greatness of God is the center of all celebration.”

Hard to push more people into your batshit-crazy cult if they didn’t know who you were, I guessed.

“You should refrain from murder,” I sighed.

“The rest, Camilla,” Ma prompted impatiently.

“Unless unduly necessary. Should you claim a life, make it a show of your faith.”

Often shortened at the Ranch to make a show of it . Obviously, they couldn’t push too hard in our written materials to go out and kill people . But in the privacy of our facility? Yeah. We were told to be lethal . It was the reason Hide N’ Seek was the second most popular event for Ranch alumni.

Idols and murderers with style —a perfect recipe for truly lethal Seekers.

Pa hummed appreciatively, smoothing his checked, button-down shirt over his rounded belly. “That’s my good girl. Next?”

“You shall not covet. Observe the desires of the Church and obtain them by any means necessary.”

“And?”

“Hold nothing above the will of your God.”

That is to say, nothing is more important than winning the Games.

Your sole purpose is to bring glory to the family and the Ranch—and get the check that came with it. Because at the end of the day, was there any greater honor than ensuring that the rich continued to get richer? Lining their pockets with filthy, bloody dollar bills and checks from online gambling websites because salvation is now .

I scrubbed a hand through my hair, messing up the dark shag.

Part of me was so bitter about the way my parents had manipulated and used me and my siblings—not to mention the dozens of other children they’d raised to be murder machines over the years. But I did have to admit, our family record, the Ranch record, was unbeatable. A success rate of over ninety-five percent.

Unheard of.

Questioning was just one of the trials of a good devotee. When I made it through this, after I’d brought us into the ninety-sixth success rate percentile… Then I could consider if I was a true believer or not.

This was God’s chance to show me that I hadn’t wasted my life on a false prophet. That this was real .

“Get the earliest wave ya can,” Pa said encouragingly, squeezing my knee. “If yer able, go left first. Statistically, the tougher traps are always to the right.”

“And pace yourself,” Ma chimed in, taking my hand with the one that wasn’t occupied by yet another cigarette. “Pay attention to your surroundings. And for heaven’s sake, don’t forget to?—”

“Smile big for the cameras,” I finished with a charming, lopsided grin I’d practiced in the mirror hundreds of times. “What, y’all don’t trust that I got this?”

“Naw, we trust you,” Pa said, the corners of his dark eyes crinkling with his toothy, gaped smile. Man always could eat a cob of corn through a picket fence. “Always been our little athlete, Cam. Ain’t none that could get through the simulations faster than you.”

I pushed away the warm, preening feelings in my gut. It didn’t do me any good to want my parents to be proud of me… And yet a voice whispered in the back of my mind, Honor your parents.

When I was barely to Pa’s knee, I couldn’t wait for my turn in the Games. My siblings graduated the training program one by one, the entire family piling into a town car just like this to drop them off at the train station to the island. As viewers, we would take one of the ferries—and get ice cream. Not a bad consolation prize.

For Hope’s Games, five years earlier, when I was thirteen, I’d been so jealous of her that I’d cried the entire way to the ferry car park. How dare she go without me? I remembered thinking. Teenage Cam was outraged that their favorite sister had abandoned them in the viewing area while she went off to make the family proud.

It was supposed to be my job.

But now that my turn was finally here? It felt a bit like bread that’d been left on the counter overnight—stale. Not disconnected in the way that things you’re looking forward to often do. Like how graduation is supposed to be this big, life-changing moment, and really it’s just a hot, sweaty day in an auditorium with faulty air conditioning and far too many mouth-breathin’ hogs.

Naw, this was something else.

Like disillusionment, or whatever.

I was just another checkbox in a long line of Legacy babies Ma and Pa had reared for the sole purpose of creating champions. No more or less important than a prize-winning pig they’d been feeding since spring. People just took a little longer to prime.

The insignia on my jacket, a pair of golden interconnected horseshoes with six diamonds fitted into them—real ones, not those lab-grown fakes—had room for one more gem to be fitted into the material. It was my spot. And a silent warning that the only way I was allowed to come out of the maze was as a winner.

Fine, or as a corpse.

Billy’s diamond had been pressed out of his ashes. The only loss in our entire family’s history in four generations.

An embarrassment .

However the fuck I felt about the Games, I knew one thing—I wasn’t no fuckin’ embarrassment.

I’m going to win.

The car slowed to a stop as the train station came into view, halting at the rounded bottom of the drop-off zone. Concrete steps sandwiched between elegant flower beds led toward the modern platform. A few uniformed security guards lingered by the glass sliding doors, made necessary by the quickly accumulating crowd, desperate to get a first glimpse at the people that, in a few hours’ time, could go from run-of-the-mill players to champions .

Ma flicked her cigarette onto the pavement and rolled up her window at the first camera flash, raising a bottle-blonde eyebrow. “Teeth check.”

I smiled big, turning my head in the car’s dim lights for her to inspect for stray food or missed plaque. She nodded, humming in approval before reaching out to fluff my hair into devil-may-care perfection.

Pa huffed. “Betsy, leave ‘em be for Christ’s sake.”

She rolled her eyes, ignoring him. “We’ll be in the gallery, same?—”

“Spot as every year. Yeah, Ma, I know. Now let me out of this car to kiss babies and make the Ranch some money.”

Pa offered me a checkered red and white bandana with the same insignia as my jacket, and I took it, quickly using it to shine my silver belt buckle. “I was worried that with you going off to that fancy school you might come home to us with all these ideas in your head. But you never fail to impress me, Camilla. Congratulations.”

Not good luck.

Luck would mean that there was a chance I wouldn’t win. Naw, as far as he was concerned, I just needed to walk in there and claim my trophy.

He was probably right.

I tucked the handkerchief into my pocket, tipping an invisible hat to my parents as I opened the door of the car to an explosion of screams and applause.

His worries about my newfangled modern secular values were only half right anyways. Questioning. That was the word I kept telling myself.

Turns out it wasn’t so easy to walk away from values your parents spent your entire life beating into you. It took a bit more than a Poli-Sci lecture and a couple well-positioned classes on propaganda.

Thanking my lucky stars for the heavy ropes keeping the crowd back from the steps, I waved with that same practiced smile. “Aw shucks, all this for little ol’ me?”

“Camilla,” Ma started sternly, “Make sure you talk about the Ranch?—”

“Uh-huh,” I said distractedly as I glanced up at the digitized screens by the doors. The first event, Hide N’ Seek, had wrapped up a couple of hours ago as the sun had started to rise, the inarguable winners, wh1te_r4bb1t and k1llerKohl_ waving and smiling in their after-event press coverage.

Christ, they let anything be a hair color nowadays, I thought of the femme’s bright teal locks.

“In and out, no bullshit, no getting distracted being nice—” Pa started.

“Got it,” I interrupted, winking at his look of exasperation before shutting the door with a loud click.

They’d get their time in front of the cameras when they arrived at the arena. This was my moment.

I turned to face the crowd, the smallest of my siblings standing at five foot nine as I raised my hand to wave, smile fixed in place as the barrage of flashes blinded me for several seconds.

The last thing I needed was the embarrassment of being the second sibling to fail out of the maze. Naw, there was no choice. I was gonna go in there and win.

Even if I was the gentlest of the brood—the only one to consistently fail the humanity-based stress tests. Not that I saw how that was my fault. How the fuck was I supposed to just shoot a dog that I raised from a pup?

Fucking insanity. But which one of us wasn’t a bit loose in the mind and morals? I was willingly walking to my possible death after all.

Didn’t matter. I was the last of us. It was time to finish things off with a bang.

And, for the record, the dog in question—Mutty Buddy, a hilarious play on works for a ten-year-old—was living out her golden years chasing around chickens on the farm.

I moved to grab a black Sharpie from one of the women waiting in the crowd with a playful wink. Uncapping the marker with my teeth, I used it to sign several notebooks, posters from my pre-show Legacy coverage, Ranch-branded T-shirts and hoodies, and even one exceptionally well-rounded breast.

I added a little heart to the end of that one. C’mon now, I might’ve been representing a Mega Church, but I wasn’t no saint.

If anything, I was a sinner through and through.

They weren’t just my fans. They were fans of my siblings. Of my whole family . Of the Ranch, where my parents trained class after class of positively fatal athletes with a legacy of winning every. Single. Time.

Best fuckin’ training facility in the country—and I was its heir.

Well, sixth in line.

Sorry, Billy, miss you every day. Even if you were a goddamn disappointment.

No matter how I felt about the Devil’s Playground, I was gonna get that fuckin’ diamond. And it wouldn’t be because I was rottin’ in a body bag.

Game on.