Outlive (The Baggers Trilogy, #1) (22 page)

             
I hope I wake up. I don’t want to die,
he thought.
I don’t want to die without seeing Tessa again. I want to hold Maggie. I want to kiss Olive’s red head of hair and watch her eat cake until her belly protrudes. I want them to grow up with a father. I don’t want to die alone.

             
He tried to get up, to fight the sedative. He pushed his hands against the floor and held his torso in the air for a moment. His neck was completely limp and refused to hold up his head. He tried to shout, but only a whisper came out of his mouth. Then, the drug’s effect grew stronger. He perceived the world as tilting around him and he fell to the ground. He opened his eyes one last time and saw Mobb Harvey stirring on the floor. His face was a broken mess.
Please don’t get up.

             
Then, Baggs’s vision tunneled down and he became completely unconscious.

9

              Fifteen-year-old Baggs had not yet developed plantar fasciitis, but after working a sixteen hour double shift at Lucky’s, his feet were throbbing. He walked down the London sidewalk, smoking, looking up at the fog. The roads that made the London grid were still used frequently enough that weeds had not yet grown tall through cracks in the cement. Cars passed on the road. An occasional helicopter flew overhead, though they couldn’t be seen through the fog.

             
Baggs smoked. His parents didn’t like how much he used tobacco, but
so what?
Baggs paid for his own food, and his own clothes. If they started nagging him about it, he’d move out. Regina and Pat Baggers never voiced their disapproval, but Baggs could sense it in the faces they made when Baggs came home smelling like smoke. Baggs felt that his parents were up-tight and oppressive. They worked too much to have developed a close relationship with him. He didn’t resent them for this—it was a necessity that they worked so much; he also didn’t love them much, either.

             
It had been a week since he beat up Baldy. The bruise on his forehead where he had head-butted the older man was fading into a yellow-greenish color. He hadn’t returned to the Barbed Wire since the incident, but his friend Johnny said that Baldy wanted to kill him. “Bring it on,” Baggs had told his friend. He wanted to act as though he was fearless and without remorse. In reality, though, this wasn’t his true sentiment. Thinking about the fight made him sad. He had broken Baldy’s face, and rumor held that he was concussed pretty badly. Johnny added: “The dude has been, like, getting headaches all the time. You beat his ass good.”

             
In some ways, he was proud of the fight. It was unusual for someone as young as fifteen to be so formidable in combat as Baggs was. Thinking back on the incident made him feel powerful.

             
Stronger than his pride, though, was his guilt.
Did I really have to throw his limp body over the bar?
he asked himself. The answer was obviously,
no.
He had gotten carried away, and hurt Baldy beyond necessity. Even if the older man started it, he was still another person. Baldy felt and had emotions and goals, just like Baggs did. No matter what Baldy did to Baggs, Baggs didn’t desire to cause him harm.

             
The gang that had watched Baggs and Baldy fight from the back of the bar called themselves The Shepherds. Unlike Baggs, they didn’t feel sorry for Baldy. They saw Baggs as a tool that they could use, and they wanted him.

             
The man with the glass eye first approached Baggs as he was walking home that night from the double-shift at Lucky’s. Baggs was seven blocks from home, and enjoying his cigarette and the freedom of being off work.

             
As Baggs walked, the man materialized out of the fog; he was leaning against a brick building, looking in the direction that Baggs was coming from, as though he had expected him. Indeed, he had. The man with the glass eye wore a black suit with a black tie. He had long, blond hair; it was thin and shoulder length—cut evenly and combed back out of his face. Both of his eyes were blue, although the left one was clearly just a big, monochromatic, lubricated marble.

             
When he spotted Baggs, he stopped leaning on the wall and stood up straight.

             
Baggs glanced at the man, and then stared ahead. He was sure that he had seen the guy before, but hadn’t ever been introduced.
Probably at a bar or something,
he thought. He tried not to make eye contact; something about the guy made Baggs’s spine shiver. Baggs tried to walk past the man with the glass eye without talking to him.

             
The man with the glass eye wouldn’t allow this. He approached Baggs, limping a little, with his hands in his pockets. “People call you Baggs, right?” his voice was raspy.

             
Baggs looked around. The man made him uneasy, and his nervousness was amplified by the fact that there was not another soul in sight in the night fog. “Yeah,” Baggs said. He took a drag from his cigarette and kept walking.

             
The one-eyed man walked along side him. “My name is Bite,” he said, and held out a scarred hand for Baggs to shake. The middle finger had been cut in half.

             
Baggs shook the hand firmly, wanting to seem strong to this odd stranger. He looked at Bite (
what kind of name is Bite?
) up close for the first time. He couldn’t decide if Bite was old or young. He had the posture of a young man—well muscled, lean—but his face was ashen and mapped with wrinkles. Bite was almost as tall as Baggs, had hands almost as big as Baggs’s, and was almost as wide in the shoulders; he was a big man. His nose was small and straight. His left, fake eye was dark blue and seemed a few sizes too big for the occipital socket it was lodged into. His left eyelid was half open and bulged with the size of the glass eye beneath it. Bite’s mouth protruded an unusual amount and was reminiscent of a chimpanzee’s muzzle. When he spoke, he showed huge incisors.

             
Is he called Bite because he’s proficient at biting people?
Baggs wondered. 

             
The oddest thing that Baggs noticed most when he walked beside Bite was that the air seemed to get
colder
around the man. It was as though he sucked the warmth and compassion from his surroundings. “Hey, uhh, I don’t want you to be scared or nothin’, but a car is going to come this way in a second.”

             
Baggs looked ahead and took a drag of cigarette. What had started off as a pleasant walk home in the cool London fog was now becoming worrisome. “Why would a car coming worry me?”

             
“Well, not to be pushy, but I’m going to ask you to get in.” Bite smiled, showing sharp teeth.

             
Baggs’s heart started to thud. Bite’s smile added new meaning to his phrase. He didn’t mean
ask you to get in,
he meant,
make you get in.

             
“I hear you’re fifteen? Holy Jesus, is that true? You look thirty, at least,” Bite exclaimed. He did not seem at all nervous speaking with Baggs.

             
“Yeah, I’m fifteen.”

             
Bite whistled, then looked Baggs up and down. “You’re just a little tyke, ain’t ya? Well, that’s alright. You’re a little tyke who knows how to make an impression, though. My boss is interested.”

             
Baggs looked behind him and still did not see another car. “Impression? What do you mean?” He looked at Bite and wondered if he should run.
He’ll probably catch me. If I see someone else walking on the street, I’ll ask for help. But will anyone help me?
Baggs had a suspicion that others would sense the frigidity in the man’s presence, and want to stay away from him. Baggs thought that Bite was the kind of man that made dogs tuck their tails and scamper away. Something essential about Bite was jarring, unforgiving and ice cold.

             
“I mean what you did to Trevor Lowe, AKA, Baldy last week at the Barbed Wire. You knocked ‘im to hell and back. My boss was very impressed. Do you like my shoes?”

             
It was a peculiar, seemingly out-of-the-blue thing to say, but Baggs looked at the shoes anyway. They were black, finely tooled boots. “They’re nice,” Baggs answered honestly.

             
“How do you like my watch?” He held up his wrist so that the cuff of his jacket slid further up his forearm to reveal a gold watch. A label on the face said ROLEX.

             
“It’s nice, too.”

             
“You want some new shoes or something?” Bite looked at Baggs’s shoes. “All your rags are kind of old, honestly. You don’t look fresh. Why don’t you buy new things? Why don’t you buy a Rolex? Answer honestly.”

             
Baggs laughed nervously. Bite was walking very close to him so that their shoulders were almost touching. Baggs wanted to back away, but didn’t want to offend Bite, or reveal his terror.
Why am I so scared of this guy?
“I can’t afford a watch like that. I can’t afford any watch. I work at a grocery store, see the uniform.” Baggs was glad to hear that his fear wasn’t being revealed in his voice.

             
“Yeah, I see that.” Bite shrugged. “You’d like to make some more money, though, right?”

             
“Wouldn’t everybody?”

             
“Then you should get into the car with me when it pulls up.” Bite plucked the cigarette from Baggs’s mouth, took a puff, and then handed it back. He was surprisingly quick, and Baggs didn’t dare speak against the stranger. “You like your job?” Bite asked.

             
“It’s okay.”

             
“I didn’t fuckin’ ask you if your job was okay.” Bite looked angry. “I asked you if you liked your job. Do ya?”

             
“Yeah. I like it.”

             
Bite squinted at Baggs with his real eye. “You serious? You like doin’ shit work for shit people? Cleanin’ counters, that’s the kind of shit you do, right? You like that kind of busy work? Moppin’ floors and crap. Seriously?”

             
Baggs thought:
Why is this guy making me so nervous? Just last week I beat up someone bigger than him. So why is he having this kind of an effect on me.
His hands were shaking. “No, I really do like it. It’s not that the work is super fun or anything, but I’m grateful to have a job. There are lots of people who can’t get a job, so I’m thankful for what I’ve got.”

             
Bite plucked the cigarette out of Baggs’s hand, smoked on it, and did not give it back this time. He finished it, and then dropped it to the ground. “What do you mean by, ‘It’s not that the work is
super fun?’
What kind of work would be ‘super fun?’”

             
Baggs was completely on edge. He thought,
why would someone feel so confident stealing a cigarette from a guy as big as me?
Every nerve in his body screamed at him to sprint away, but he continued to talk. “I guess some kind of meaningful work, I don’t know.”

             
Bite looked up at him quickly. “What about beating up Baldy; was that ‘super fun’ to you?”

             
Baggs shook his head adamantly.

             
Bite reached up and adjusted his glass eye in its stretched socket. He spoke while he fiddled with it, pushing it and moving the blue glass to a more comfortable position. “It looked to me like you had a good time. The way you were so pumped up. I can see that feeling in other people. I get it too. Feels good, don’t it?”

             
Baggs didn’t answer. It horrified him to know that it was so obvious that a part of him relished in the dominance of physically overcoming another human.

             
“Look, kid. I can offer you some things, okay? Money, girls, and a lot of ‘super fun’ shit to do for some good people. When the car comes up, I want you to get in.”

             
“I don’t know,” Baggs said.

             
“What else you gonna do with your life, kid? You going home to your parents’ place, probably. What you gonna do when you get home, heat up some canned soup or somethin’ for dinner? Screw that. That sucks. Come with me and you can eat steak and potatoes. You can swim with models. I won’t tell ‘em you’re fifteen,” he winked at Baggs.

             
Baggs’s throat felt tight. He heard a motor behind him.
If it’s not Bite’s car, I’m going to jump in front of it and ask for help.
He didn’t know what he would do if it was the car Bite said was coming.

             
“That’s our car,” Bite said with his nasally voice. He grinned up at Baggs. “Let me tell you somethin’, Baggs, if you get in the car, you’re not agreeing to anything. I just want to show you a way of life. I just want to show you how some other people live, who don’t do shit work for shit people.”