Outlive (The Baggers Trilogy, #1) (23 page)

             
Baggs stood still as though momentarily frozen. He looked back and saw the headlights growing in the fog and heard the motor, which sounded like a predator’s growl.

             
Bite grabbed Baggs’s elbow. “Listen, Baggs, it’s cold out here. How ‘bout this; you get in the car, and if you want to go home, we’ll take you there.”

             
Baggs looked at Bite’s wrinkled, ashen face with the too-big glass eyeball. He wanted to say, “I’m not riding anywhere with you,” but the words wouldn’t come. He opened his mouth, and then shut it.

             
“I just want to give you options, you hear?” Bite said. “No obligation. You’re not obliged to do anything you don’t want to, okay? We’ll just go and have a look.”

             
“A look at what?”

             
Bite smiled. “My boss’s house, brother. When the car pulls up, don’t be rude; get inside.”

             
The car was stopped one block away at a stoplight.

             
“My boss’s house is a mansion,” Bite said. “We’re just having a party tonight, and my boss is interested in your…skills. He wants you to see the kind of way we live before offering you a job. It can be quite convincing to see some of the things. He has an indoor pool. There will be models there. Alcohol, Cuban cigars, some good food. If you spend the night, you’ll get your own room with silk sheets. No obligation to go, but I think that if you don’t, you’ll be missing out. But no obligation.” Bite said that, although he still hadn’t released Baggs’s arm. His grip was strong and commanding. The area on Baggs’s arm where Bite was gripping seemed to be getting cold.

             
Bite’s offerings of food, drink, and luxurious accommodations could have been taken as generous if they came from someone else, but coming from Bite, they seemed scary. Baggs didn’t believe that Bite actually had access to such things.
Sure he has a Rolex, but it could be a fake. His shoes could be faux leather and I wouldn’t be able to tell.
Using the promise of models and alcohol and nice food seemed like the kind of thing someone would do to lure a fifteen-year-old boy into a stranger’s car. The offerings frightened Baggs.

             
Two things happened simultaneously that made Baggs second-guess the way he was feeling about the situation. The first was that Bite released his vice grip on Baggs’s arm. He stood back, and pocketed his hands in a non-aggressive position. The second thing was that the car came into view; it was a long, shiny, black limousine. The engine rumbled, and Baggs couldn’t see inside because of the dark tint on the windows.

             
Bite stepped forward and opened the door. His protruding jaw was relaxed; he didn’t seem ready to force Baggs into anything. “Want to take a ride, Baggs? Want to see how some people live?”

             
When the limousine door opened, the lights came on inside, and Baggs could see two people sitting against the far wall. The first was a clean-cut black man who smiled with impeccably white teeth. In contrast to Bite, this man gave off warmth, instead of a frosty lack of compassion. Sitting next to him was a female who had to be a professional model. She had hair the color of fire that ran down to her shoulders. She was wearing a sparkling white dress that revealed a lot of her body. Everything on her was both slender and filled out at the same time. Her cheeks were healthy and not gaunt, but slender, all at the same time. The same rule applied to her breasts, her hips, her calves, and her neck. Her figure was a genetic anomaly, something that could not be achieved from dieting and exercise. She was somehow amazingly slender, but retained a healthy plumpness. She was stunning—breath-taking—beautiful.

             
So he wasn’t lying about the models,
Baggs thought.

             
“Baggs! Get in here!” the redheaded model squealed. Her cheeks were flushed. She leaned forward and her dress fell some so that Baggs could see more of her breasts. She grabbed Baggs’s hand and tugged him into the limo. Her hand was small, warm, and sweating slightly. Baggs did not resist her pull. He ducked his head and got inside.

             
Bite laughed, and climbed in behind them. He shut the door. It locked. The engine rumbled and they began to roll through London.

10

              Thirty three year old Baggs thought,
damn it, Maggie. Turn the lights off in the living room when the bedroom door is open. You’re going to wake Tessa and me.

             
For a moment, Baggs was too tired to get up and do anything about it; he had just been deeply dreaming about The Shepherds and did not feel like returning to consciousness yet.
Maybe she’ll shut the door,
he thought. Light beamed in from the bulb above the kitchen table and fell upon Baggs’s eyes. He wanted to sleep more. He felt terribly tired and groggy.
What did I do last night? Why am I so tired?

             
“Maggie…” he called into the other room. He didn’t want to have to get up.

             
There was no answer.

             
“Mah-gee!” he called again. His voice was tired and raspy.

             
There was still no answer.

             
Maybe Tessa is up and in the living room,
Baggs thought. He reached his hand over beneath the sheet to feel for her body on the right side of him. Tessa always slept on the right side of him. But as he reached, something peculiar happened—his hand reached the end of the bed.

             
His eyes shot open. He never slept that close to the right side of the bed.

             
Instantly, he knew that he wasn’t in his apartment. The walls that surrounded him weren’t covered in cracks and a hodgepodge of different colored paints. The air smelled fresh and clean. Instead of the ceiling above him being eight and a half feet tall, it was thirty feet above him with great wooden beams crisscrossing through the air. White ceiling fans spun above him.

             
He sat up.

             
Where am I? How did I get here?

             
He was scared.
Why wouldn’t I be in the apartment?

             
He looked around the room. There were seven twin-sized beds lining the walls, similar to the setup in an orphanage. He was sitting on one; each of the beds had thick red bedspreads and soft sheets.

             
It started to come back to Baggs as he looked at the person in the twin bed beside his. She had a face covered in piercings, and even in her sleep, her dark eyes scowled in a hateful manner.

             
Tonya Wolf. Tonya Wolf is a murderer. She’s on my Outlive team, the Boxers.

             
Baggs felt sluggish. Thinking was like wading through mud that morning.

             
Do I have a hangover? What happened last night?

             
After a long moment’s consideration, he remembered the Contestants’ Dinner, and that he hadn’t drunk any alcohol the night before. Then he recalled Mobb Harvey climbing the bars of their cage and coming after Hailey Vixen. He recalled defending her and getting into a fight with one of the best boxers of all time.

             
Baggs frowned, and then winced. His face
hurt.
He lifted his big hands and felt his cheeks and nose. Both of his cheeks were swollen, and so was his nose; he didn’t think that Mobb had fractured any bones last night, though, thankfully.

             
Baggs remembered how the night had ended with him getting injected with a sedative from his Choke.
So that’s why I feel so groggy,
he thought.
I was drugged last night.

             
He reached his hands up and felt his neck; there was no device wrapping around his skin, just finely trimmed hairs from where Caballas had groomed him the night before.

             
Baggs looked around and located the light source that he had mistaken for the living room light in his apartment. Over to his right there was an open doorway that led out to a well-lit, spacious room. He could hear someone walking back and forth in that room, and the sound of glasses tinkling together.

             
“Look at you, alive and well,” came a whisper from his left. Baggs turned, and in the dim light he could see Larry Wight’s face grinning back at him. His teeth were yellow. His gray hair was a mess. His eyes looked smaller without glasses on. “I thought they might have killed you last night with that injection.”

             
“I’m certainly not in tip-top shape,” Baggs said. “Where are we?”

             
“Byron Turner’s house.”

             
Baggs looked around at the paintings on the wall and the hand-carved nightstands beside each twin-sized bed. “Nice place.” Baggs looked at Larry and saw that he was wearing a t-shirt. He looked down at his own body and found that he was still wearing his suit, coat and all.

             
“Wondering where your new rags are? In the nightstand. You’ll have some shoes, too. That room back there’s a bathroom if you want to go change.”

             
Baggs nodded. He still felt groggy. He wasn’t yet ready to get out of bed.

             
“Not to pry,” Larry said, “But who’s Maggie? You were calling that name in your sleep.”

             
Baggs ran a hand over his short hair. “It’s my daughter.”

             
“Were you dreaming about her?”

             
“Yeah.” Baggs frowned. He wished that he were back at his apartment with Maggie, Olive, and Tessa. Waking up in Turner’s mansion with the coming death match in the Colosseum was depressing.

             
Sensing that Baggs didn’t want to talk anymore, Larry stopped asking him questions. He lay back down on his pillow, relishing all the sleep he would be allowed to get. From the other room, someone was still shuffling around. Wanting to wake himself up some before the day began, Baggs opened up his nightstand. The compartments had a lot of clothes, all in Baggs’s size, XXL. There were multiple pairs or underwear, socks, athletic pants, athletic shorts, t-shirts, and athletic hoodies. In the bottom drawer, Baggs found brand new tennis shoes. Baggs took a pair of athletic pants, underwear, socks and a t-shirt, which had the symbol of the Boxers on it, and walked to the bathroom. He dressed slowly, still groggy. He wondered what they would do today.
Train, I guess.
He didn’t really have a good idea of what that would entail.

             
“Jeez,” he said as he looked at his bruised face in the mirror. He had dark bruises beneath both eyes and his nose was swollen. At some point last night, he had also busted his lip. There was dried blood in one of his nostrils. He smiled at his reflection. “You were never that pretty anyway,” he told himself, and washed his face with cold water. This helped him to wake up some.

             
When Baggs returned to the bedroom, everyone had been woken up and Byron Turner himself was walking around the room with a tray of drinks, placing them on the nightstands. “Good morning,” Turner said. His voice was deep and loud; he was moving quickly, as though he had already had breakfast, a pot of coffee, and done calisthenics. Turner was wearing a black suit; he looked to be ready for a day’s work on the council. “You made quite the stir last night, Mr. Baggers,” he said.

             
Baggs stood there for a moment, trying to think of something to say. Turner’s tone was flat, unreadable.
Am I supposed to apologize? Did I embarrass him?
“Sorry,” he said, finally. Although, he was not sorry for what he had done. He was glad that he had intervened and stopped Mobb Harvey from having his way with Hailey Vixen.

             
Byron Turner placed the last two drinks on Tonya Wolf’s nightstand. “Sorry?” he said to Baggs. Again, it struck Baggs as odd that the man had such a strong lisp, and yet it came across as intimidating instead of weak or childish. Turner’s face widened into a gap-toothed smile. “There’s nothing to be sorry about! You made a splash, but I’m not getting fined for it or anything. You’re on the front page of the national paper, James. We’re going to be raking in the bets! Now come, drink your smoothie. It’s healthy. I’ll be back.”

             
Turner left the room, his quick steps echoing down the corridor. Baggs went over to his bed and sat on the edge of it. Two glasses sat on his nightstand—one held a pink smoothie, and the other held a clear liquid. Before Baggs had time to try either of these, he heard a cascade of footsteps returning, indicating that a group of people was about to enter.

             
“Okay, listen up!” Turner began to say even before he was in the room. He entered and was followed by seven people, all in black tank tops and pants. Each of these people was incredibly fit, with toned muscles bulging everywhere. Turner put his hands on his hips and looked around at his contestants. He stared for a long time at Baggs. “Training starts in thirty minutes. These are your trainers; each trainer will be assigned to a trainee. We only have a week to get each of you in great shape, and so if you want to live, you better work hard. You need to drink your smoothie and energy booster on your nightstand before the workout starts; trust me, you’ll need the energy. Any questions?” Turner asked. He looked around the room with his tiny eyes. His huge hands were clasped together in front of him. A brown K9 padded out of the hallway and into the room. He lay down against the back wall and surveyed the contestants.