Page 1 of Rat Race

Cam

Game on!

Iswear 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 breathedeverything 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 thelookof 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 performativeprayingof 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 justachurch. A fuckin’ company in a religious society’s clothing. AMega 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 achurch—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 aworldof 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.

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