Outlive (The Baggers Trilogy, #1) (36 page)

             
Larry groaned. “I’m scared, Baggs.”

             
This time, since there were no other teams around, he said it: “Me too.” He didn’t speak for a minute, then added, “but so is everyone else. We have a good shot. We trained hard for this, Larry. We can’t let fear get in the way of what we’re trying to do.”

             
Larry nodded. Baggs looked over him and noticed that Larry, while still out of shape, wasn’t as soft as he had been when he had begun training.

             
I think we’ve got a shot,
he thought. The anticipation was upsetting him, though. He wanted to know what they were making outside.

As if set off by his thoughts, a different mechanical sound began outside. Baggs and the rest of the Boxers looked up, towards the ceiling. It sounded like work was being done right above them. Shortly after this sound ceased, the crowd began cheering.
Are they cheering because of what was just built?
Baggs wondered.
Was some interesting, lethal object just erected? Or maybe there’s a message on the HoloVision Box telling them that Outlive is about to start.

             
I don’t want to die,
Baggs thought. On most days he didn’t believe in any kind of deity or celestial force that counted a person’s transgressions and ultimately brought justice to them. But now, in his insanely scared mind, he couldn’t help but wonder if what he was going through was some kind of payback for what he had done while working for the Shepherds. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back so that his helmet was resting against the stone wall.

             
Tessa had told him that he shouldn’t feel guilty for what he did while working for the Shepherds. “You were so
young!”
she told him. “They manipulated you. They threatened you. In the end, if you hadn’t done what Mr. Snow wanted, you would have been killed.”

             
There was now another strange noise from up above and the crowd cheered again. Baggs looked at the ceiling. It sounded like something very big was walking on top of the room the Boxers were seated within.
Bears?
Baggs wondered.
Rhinos? Maybe each team will have to kill a rhino to live.
It was possible. Not all Outlive competitions pitted humans against humans, but most did.

             
Baggs closed his eyes again and tried to ready himself for the battle. He wanted to think of strategies, or pump himself up like a coach does to his team. However, each time he closed his eyes he saw the eyes of the man he had killed that night when it was raining and Mr. Snow had picked him up from Lucky’s.

             
Baggs was fifteen when it happened. It was the first person he had ever killed.

By the time the limo
reached the harbor, the man with the screwdriver in his neck was dead. It was the first time that Baggs had seen glass, the drug. He had also learned that that’s what made Pinky and Pointer the way they were.

             
“Want some?” Bite asked, looking at Baggs with his one good eye while the marble just bulged in the left eye socket.

             
“No,” fifteen year old Baggs said.

“Suit yourself,” Bite said, and then he and Pointer and Pinky chewed up some clear crystals that Bite took from a little plastic baggie. After they ate the stuff, their pupils dilated. Baggs only ever heard Pointer and Pinky talk when they were high; they had voices like they were one hundred years old—dry and raspy. Bite grew more animated when he ate the stuff, too. He never took as much as Pointer and Pinky; he at
e a fraction of what they did, and Baggs figured this was why Bite was not so dead looking as the other two were. Mr. Snow never ate glass himself, but he sold the stuff. Mr. Snow always respected Baggs’s refusal of the drug, although Baggs suspected that his boss would have preferred Baggs to be an addict.
Addicts are easy to control, if you’ve got their drug.

As he rode in the limo, he looked down at his Nike shoes, thinking that he shouldn’t have taken them from Darius Till. He always used to tell that to Tessa, that he shouldn’t have taken the shoes.

“How could you have
known,
Baggs?” she had asked him. “How could you have known what that meant?”

Baggs would remain silent, morose. “I shouldn’t have taken the shoes,” he would repeat.

“Don’t give me that shit,”
Tessa would spit back at him. She rarely got angry with him. It seemed that what made her the most irate was when he was thinking thoughts that would make him feel bad. She loved him, and she didn’t like it when people hurt him, even if it was himself who was the source of those painful thoughts. “They tricked you, Baggs! Where do you think your shoes went when you took them off before getting into the pool? They took them! They stole them from you! It was planned out; they wanted you to be missing your shoes, and they wanted to give Darius the chance to give you his shoes.”

             
After many discussions with Tessa, Baggs grew to believe this. But as a fifteen year old, he had no self-compassion as he looked down at the Nikes in the limo.
Stupid, stupid, stupid—how could I have been so stupid?

             
The limo pulled into the harbor, close to Mr. Snow’s yacht. The salty smell of the ocean had always reminded Baggs of vacation and fun times, but that night as he looked out at the dark body of water with thunderheads rolling in from the horizon the smell struck him as ominous and sterile. Instead of bringing back memories of building sand castles and collecting seashells, the waves striking the earth sounded like ghostly whispers to Baggs. His hackles had risen at the back of his neck.

             
Pointer and Pinky carried the dead man from the limo to the yacht, and Bite led the debt dodger, still blindfolded and gagged, up the dock and over the small bridge to Mr. Snow’s boat.

             
Half an hour later it was raining and Baggs watched as the shore shrunk in the distance. The rain picked up and Baggs sat with Mr. Snow on the back deck of the yacht; there was a large canopy to keep them from getting wet. The boat rocked wildly in the big waves and thunder was flashing down from the sky, followed by rolling thunder.

             
“You look pale,” Mr. Snow said. He and Baggs were both smoking cigars; Mr. Snow had insisted that Baggs take one. He told Baggs that the cigars were two hundred CreditCoins a piece and that if Baggs kept working for him, he’d get to smoke them all the time. Later, when Baggs wasn’t so scared, he grew to like the cigars. They were a brand called Rome’s Finest. As he smoked on the back deck of the yacht with Mr. Snow, however, he barely tasted the cigar. He smoked robotically, puffing it in and out of his mouth. “I’m not going to kill you, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Mr. Snow said, looking out onto the choppy water. He was standing up and having no trouble keeping balance as the boat rocked up and down in twenty feet arcs. Baggs could not stand without holding onto something, and he had taken a seat in a deck chair with heavily rusted metal legs. Mr. Snow turned and looked at him. “You seasick?” he asked.

             
“No.”

             
“Don’t be scared,” he said. “I won’t kill you if you pay me back for those shoes.”

             
The boat rocked. Minutes passed. The lightening and thunder flashed and boomed amidst the heavy rain.

             
“I like to go out about fifty miles and then run parallel with land about thirty whenever I dump a body,” Mr. Snow said. “That way, we’re well beyond the continental shelf. If someone wants to do an investigation, they’ll have to search about one hundred and fifty square miles of deep ocean floor to find what we’ve dropped. By that time, though, the sharks will have gotten them. In this business, you’ve got to be prudent,” he said.

             
Twenty minutes went by and then Bite came out the back door; he had the handcuffed man by the elbow. The man was still gagged, but his blindfold was no longer covering his eyes and was wrapped around his neck. The man’s brown eyes were looking around frantically.

             
“What the hell is this?” Mr. Snow asked.

             
Bite was more animated than ever; he had been doing glass and cocaine in the back with Pointer and Pinky. “Dude started rubbing his head against the wall until the blindfold came off.”

             
Mr. Snow puffed his cigar. “Well, he’s seen our faces now, so we’ll have to kill him.”

             
The man’s eyes widened drastically and he began to shake his head. The gag muffled his screams, but it was still clear that they were frantic.

             
Baggs would later learn that Pointer, Pinky, Mr. Snow and Bite all used fake names. Their customers were never allowed to see any of the Shepherd’s faces and did their transactions with masked men in alleyways.

             
In the middle of the night, Baggs did what was asked of him. In some ways, killing the man was better than having to break his legs; it wasn’t as messy. The man kicked and screamed as Baggs tied the weights to his legs. Mr. Snow ordered that Baggs hit the man a few times in the head with a baseball bat so that he was unconscious when they dropped him in the water. “It’s the conscientious thing to do,” he said calmly, smoking another one of his expensive cigars. Baggs obeyed.

             
Eighteen years later as he sat in his armor, awaiting the start of the Outlive competition, he could see those wide, brown eyes pleading with him as he had handcuffed the man’s left and right wrists to twenty-five pound weights. The ocean waves had been so big and they had been so far out at sea that Baggs thought the man would drown even without any weights tied to him. He had thought that the bludgeons to the head were entirely unnecessary, but he had did it anyways. He hadn’t wanted to be next.

             
The rock music played outside, the thing above them padded on the ceiling, and the crowd cheered, wanting to see more blood. Baggs thought of the CHCKK sound the wooden bat had made as it had hit the man’s head. “Harder,” Mr. Snow had said. At fifteen years old, he had struck the man’s skull four more times. Blood ran on the deck, but the rain had washed it away. Baggs could still see the man falling into the ocean, unconscious. He could picture the body being swallowed up by the waves in his head. The man had sunk immediately, dragged down by the weights on his wrists.

             
“It’s not your fault,” he could hear Tessa say in his mind. “You had no choice.”

             
But he still felt awful about it.

             
He opened his eyes and looked at his teammates. They were all seated except for Tonya Wolf, who was pacing back and forth across the room. She was smiling.

             
Suddenly, the garage door began to rattle; the sound reminded Baggs of the thunder on the yacht that night, eighteen years ago. The metal door lifted and stark-white sunlight beamed in through the opening.

             
“It’s time,” Larry said. His lips were pursed. Baggs stood up and then helped the man to his feet. Larry had trouble standing with all his heavy armor on.

             
The Boxers walked over to the threshold and stood in a line, facing the sand.

5

             
Baggs’s legs felt numb as they took their first steps onto the sand. The sunlight outside was so bright compared to the dim room they had been dressed within that it took his eyes a moment to adjust so that he could see what was around him.

             
He could hear his breath coming in and out of his nose.

             
All around him, the citizens of New Rome were cheering. It seemed louder, now that he was on the arena’s floor.

             
Baggs looked around, thinking,
they’ve been busy.
There were glass walls that rose up all over the sand. The walls were each twelve feet tall, half an inch thick, and spaced out to make various corridors along the arena floor.

             
It’s a maze,
Baggs thought. He had seen scenes from similar Outlive competitions before. After they exited over the threshold, the Boxers found themselves on a spot on the sand that was boxed in by glass walls. There appeared to be nowhere to go, but Baggs anticipated that a door would open up when the competition began, allowing them to start running for their lives out in the maze.

             
Baggs walked over to the nearest wall and peered through it. He could see that not all of the maze walls were exactly the same. Some slanted slightly, and some had ladders and small holes that contestants could crawl through. The transparent walls snaked intricately around the arena in a complicated manner. Baggs looked to his left and could see another team standing outside of their door, examining the glass walls just like the Boxers were.

             
Baggs backed up and looked skyward. His mind was clicking along smoothly, trying to come up with a plan. He was barely aware of the roaring crowd now. In the middle of the arena, there was a clear ladder that rose straight up four hundred feet before it ran into the bottom of the HoloVision Box. Baggs stared at this for a moment and then Spinks said what he was thinking. “We have to climb into the HoloVision Box.”

             
“I think you’re right,” Baggs said. He walked over to the clear wall again and tried to look through it for a well-defined path to the ladder, but the maze was too multilayered and complex for this to be possible. On a whim, he pulled out his sword and slammed the hilt into the wall in front of him. The vibration ran uncomfortably up his arms but didn’t leave any kind of mark on the wall.
It’s not glass,
Baggs thought,
it’s something much stronger.

             
“What the hell are you doing?” Tonya Wolf said. Baggs turned around and saw that she was talking to Spinks, who was taking her armor off and dropping it on the sand.

             
“I’m getting rid of some of this weight,” Spinks said. “This armor weighs a ton.”
              “You idiot, you’re exposing your vital areas; you’ll die the first time someone swings a sword at you,” Tonya said. Her eyes looked angry. She didn’t look as excited as she had when watching the gladiators die; apparently she liked to watch people get hurt, but didn’t want it to be herself.

             
“I doubt swords will be what kills most of us, after seeing that,” Spinks said, pointing behind her.

             
Lions, I should have guessed,
Baggs thought as he looked at the clear cage sitting atop the room he was just in. The feline behind them seemed old, and unusually skinny for a lion.
But he’s big enough to do the job.
The animal stood on its hind legs with forepaws as big as dinner plates pressed against the front of its clear cage. The lion appeared to have been used in the Colosseum before. The top of its muzzle had a series of linear scars running diagonally along it; the scars made deep divots, but appeared to be healed. The animal’s left eye was gone, leaving a black hole in between a partially collapsed eyelid; the sight reminded Baggs of when Bite would take out his marble eyeball. The lion’s nose flicked up and down as it tried to smell through the clear cage it was contained within;
it wants to see what we smell like before it eats us
. The mouth was partially open, revealing yellow teeth that were as thick as the handle on Baggs’s sword; drool dripped from the lion’s mouth and onto the floor. The lion was lean, with blocky shoulder muscles, thick forearms, and a tight stomach with veins running over it.
I bet he’s fast.
The animal was male; his mane was speckled with grey hair.

             
Looking at the creature, Baggs remembered reading an article in the newspaper when Krass was setting his arm. There had been a story about lions that had escaped from the Colosseum and were hunting people down in a local park. Despite the best efforts of the authorities, they had been unable to catch the lions after weeks of trying.
This isn’t a normal animal,
Baggs thought.
It’s been genetically altered to be more aggressive towards humans than any natural lion would be. It’s probably smarter, too.