Outlive (The Baggers Trilogy, #1) (32 page)

             
As Baggs’s eyes had crawled over the place where so many would die the next day, his mouth had turned dry and his heart had begun to hammer.

             
Turner’s helicopter was actually programmed to land inside of the Colosseum. Baggs hadn’t learned this until it was happening. The machine had hovered over the center of the roof, which had begun to shiver and fold in on itself until there was an opening big enough for the copter to descend through. The copter had aligned with this opening, and then had lowered itself inside until it was sitting atop the sand floor of the Colosseum.

             
“Thank you for riding,” said a robotic voice from inside the cabin. Then, the helicopter doors had opened and a group of guards had led them off the machine and through the Colosseum to sleeping quarters where they would spend the night. As Baggs had walked away from the helicopter and over the sand that night, he had felt as though time had slowed. He had examined the seats, which rose up and out a magnificent distance above his head and had imagined what they would look like filled with cheering fans.

             
Now I don’t have to imagine,
Baggs thought as he sat in his seat, looking around. It made him feel nauseous to think that all of those people were comfortable watching other people die.
Don’t they feel bad watching others suffer?

             
The gladiator fight on the levitating platform was over. Three gladiators were still alive at the end, and three dead men were surrounded with puddles of blood on the ground. One of them was still twitching, but a referee came over and examined him and made sure that the movements were merely reflexive seizures, and not caused by life.

             
Larry Wight sat beside Baggs, watching the Colosseum employees clean up for the next event, which would also be a gladiator fight. Custodians dressed like Ancient Roman paupers, wearing cloth togas with bare feet, sprinted over the sand and dragged the corpses out to one of the doors along the walls where the bodies were disposed of. The gladiators were big, well muscled men, and so it took three custodians to drag each one away. A ladder descended from the levitating platform, and the fatigued and bloodied gladiators who still were alive climbed down, waved at the screaming crowd, and exited with their lives intact. The levitating platform then flew up to the high Colosseum ceiling where robotic ropes automatically wrapped around it and held it in place out of the way so that the next event could start.

             
After this next event, we’ll be taken to start getting ready for the Outlive contest,
Baggs thought. He breathed in and out, trying to calm himself.
There are so many different ways that this episode of Outlive could be designed.

             
The Colosseum implemented a lot of surprises and diversity into the different events to make them more interesting. Today, there would be a dozen shows, each with different competitors and different events. The most popular event was either Outlive or on-the-ground sword fighting between gladiators. Baggs had watched three of these swordfights as he sat in the plastic chair next to Larry; in all of them so far, attack animals had been released in the middle of the fight to add another element to the battle. In one, the gladiators were fighting two-on-two with swords and shields; as they battled and clanked metal against metal in deadly blows, hyenas were randomly released from the walls surrounding the Colosseum floor. The animals were no more than forty pounds, but they were fast, vicious, and unafraid of the humans even with their weapons. Each time one of the dogs was released, the crowd gasped, screamed and cheered. The hyenas sprinted over the bloody sand and attacked the nearest competitors with chomping jaws, and sometimes changed the outcome of a swordfight by biting the back of a gladiator’s leg who was about to win a battle. Other fights weren’t as simple as normal swordfights. Some gladiator battles involved horses, levitating platforms (such as in the fight that Baggs had just seen), shark infested tanks of water, attacking birds, bows and arrows, rhinos, cannons, poisonous snakes, komodo dragons, K9s, javelins, and much more. This aspect of gladiator battles was copied from gladiator battles in Ancient Rome, where surprises and a myriad of different battle obstacles were used to build the audience’s suspense.

Gladiators, unlike Outlive participants, were highly trained athletes who were paid great sums of money to compete. The gladiators were all male, and lived in a secluded training facility in an undisclosed location. Baggs had heard that not even the gladiators knew where the facility was—they were sedated before traveling to the place, so that they could not deduce the location when they arrived. The gladiators were hand selected premier athletes that were willing to fight for their lives on the off chance that if they live
d they would become some of the richest men in the country.

There were many ways that gladiators were chosen.

The most common was through prison try-outs. Like Ancient Rome, New Rome had a very large number of prisoners awaiting a death sentence. As with most populations, some of these criminals were superb athletes. Before Mass Prison Killings (these were events in which thousands of criminals were put to death on a single day in the pursuit of efficiency and saving funds; Mass Prison Killings usually took place four or five times a year.) the prisons had large, complex fighting tournaments to find the best fighters; those that proved themselves would then be rewarded the opportunity to fight in the Colosseum, where they would most likely die anyways.

There were also civilian fighting tournaments in which anyone could enter and fight others in an attempt at winning a spot as a gladiator. The civilians who entered these tournaments were usually poor and starving, as Baggs had been. He had considered fighting in one of these tournaments, but had decided that Outlive was a safer bet. For starters, many citizens died in the Civilian Fighting Tournaments and their families did not receive any money for their death; this was a risk in entering. Also,
in order to live as a gladiator, a citizen had to do well in one of these tournaments, be chosen as a gladiator, and then win, on average, five consecutive fights in the Colosseum. This was a long shot, although the prize money was much more substantial than that offered to Outlive competitors, and was given to the families whether the gladiator lived or not, as long as they were chosen. Baggs chose the safer option of entering Outlive, as there were no tryouts, and all he had to do was sign up and his family was guaranteed CreditCoins.

             
Another means by which people could become gladiators was celebrity sign-ups. Sometimes former premier boxers or baseball players would blow all their money and want to sign up to be a gladiator in hopes of regaining their lost fortune and fame.

             
No matter how the gladiators came to be, they bargained with the Colosseum until both parties agreed upon a contract; the new gladiator would then sign his life away and begin training. The contracts usually had a few components to them. The first was that once they were signed there was no chickening-out. It was easier to be brave when the deathmatch was six months away, but harder when you were sitting in the Colosseum, knowing that the contest would begin in a couple hours (Baggs could attest to this as he sat in the stadium seats, sweating, heart pounding, dreading the moment when he would step out onto the sand). Another component of the contract was that there were a certain number of contests that each gladiator would have to win in order to be given their freedom and the prize money; this was negotiable. For normal prisoners, the amount of fights they had to survive was usually between five to seven; for some high-profile criminals, the amount could be as high as fifteen. Celebrities who entered usually were able to bargain for more lenient treatment. Often times if a celebrity could survive a couple fights, they would be given freedom and the reward. The number of fights that the gladiators had to survive in order to live was called their Freedom Number. The final negotiable aspect of gladiator contracts was the reward money they would be given if they reached their Freedom Number. For a normal prisoner, this amount was typically in the ballpark of one million CreditCoins; for celebrities, it sometimes went as high as one hundred million CreditCoins.

             
Baggs looked left and right at the different Outlive teams that were sitting around him. There were thirty teams of seven contestants, making two hundred ten total participants. He felt nauseated as he looked over them.
How many of us will still be alive at the end of the day?
he wondered.
Thirty? Twenty? Maybe only three.
Three was a low number, but it wasn’t unprecedented. Baggs had heard of an Outlive contest in which only one person lived. At the beginning of an Outlive contest, the competitors stepped out onto the sand and the rules were explained over the intercom. Seconds after the rules were read out, the battle began; part of the challenge was that the competitors have to think fast. In the Outlive episode when only one person lived, the rules had explained that it was an every-person-for-themselves kind of battle; the teams didn’t actually matter.

             
I bet the crowd loved it,
Baggs thought, pursing his lips.
They got more blood than they could have hoped for. I just wish there was some way that I could know what kind of battle I’m getting myself into before it starts.

             
Up until the moment he had actually gotten into Turner’s helicopter to fly to the Colosseum, Baggs had held out hope that Turner would reveal what kind of obstacles they would face in the arena. He had not.
Tartuga was telling the truth,
Baggs thought,
they keep that information top secret.
He looked at the other teams again.
Either that, or Turner doesn’t know the right person to buy it from.

             
Baggs looked at his own teammates; Hailey Vixen was wearing a sleeveless dress, which exposed rock-hard triceps that made a little shadow on the back of her arm.
I wonder how many other teams were given steroids,
he wondered. Most of the men on the other teams had sleeves on; some of the females were toned, but he couldn’t recall anyone’s particular physique from the Contestant’s Dinner that he could compare to what he was seeing now. He remembered Chobb Lowe from the Pirates, the ex powerlifter who was half-naked on the HoloVision Box, but Chobb was five rows down and wearing a sports jacket. His neck looked as thick as a tree trunk, but this wasn’t a noticeable change—he had been big even before training.
He was probably using steroids before entering, too.
Baggs wondered why a guy like that didn’t try to become a gladiator;
he may think that competing in Outlive will be a breeze. He may just want to get this over with so that he can return to powerlifting.

             
An unmanned helicopter that was no bigger than a crow hovered down from the awning and stopped a few yards in front of Baggs. The machine whirred quietly; a camera was attached to the bottom of the contraption.
It’s come back to get more footage of me,
Baggs thought. He looked up and saw his face in the giant HoloVision Box that hung from cables high above the arena floor. Upon seeing Baggs’s face—his big ears, his crooked nose, his thick black beard, and his protruding forehead—the crowd erupted in whoops, whistles and shouts of joy.

             
I’m a celebrity,
Baggs thought, not amused. He remained expressionless until the small, flying camera moved over to get footage of other contestants.

             
Baggs supposed that the cameras were the only reason the Outlive participants were allowed to sit in the stadium seats instead of being locked in some cell in the Colosseum’s basement. Locking them in cells out of sight would have been cheaper—the vendors could have then sold tickets to the seats that the teams were now occupying.
But we are here to entertain.
The crowd seemed to love getting to see images of the Outlive participants on the big screen.
And I bet the viewers at home love it too,
Baggs thought grimly.
They probably like seeing us scared out of our minds, counting our time until they lead us away to get ready to kill each other.

             
Even though it was hot, he shivered. Thinking about how emotionally detached some people could be gave him the creeps.

2

              A face that somehow managed to be unsightly and handsome at the same time filled the HoloVision Box and a queer silence began to spread over the crowd like a virus. A small percentage of people were looking up at the display when the face appeared; as they saw it they turned to their neighbors and whispered to them. “Hey, be quiet! The emperor is about to speak!”

             
The quiet spread until most of the two hundred thousand were completely silent and as still as statues, gazing up at the face of their leader. The vendors who walked up and down the aisles selling snacks stopped where they were at the sight of Emperor Daman’s strange face; the one nearest Baggs took his hat off and knelt on the ground as a sign of respect. The giant hologram of the emperor’s face looked upon the crowd with dark eyes as big as wrecking balls; the man wore a serene expression; Baggs thought that he loved hearing the silence rush over his crowd. Like Hitler, whom Emperor Daman admired, the leader desired complete subservience from his citizens. Baggs could hear squalling babies and crying toddlers—their voices echoed through the hushed arena. Mothers and fathers were frantically trying to quiet their children to no avail. Speaking while the emperor was speaking was punishable by immediate death. Usually the great and sovereign Emperor Daman forgave ignorant babies if they babbled on while he spoke.