Outlive (The Baggers Trilogy, #1) (38 page)

             
Iggy’s sarcastic voice came over the intercom, “In a move that was sweet, but a little stupid, James Baggers has just returned to the starting line to help out a fallen teammate. We’ll see how that works out for him. Everyone else already has about a thirteen second head start over him now.”

             
“Shut up,” Baggs growled through his beard as he ran. The announcers talked about other people, but Baggs tuned them out; he was concentrating on putting as much distance between himself and the cage before the lion was released.

             
The first corridor down the left hand side seemed to stretch on forever; Baggs thought that their only chance of avoiding the lion would be to make several turns before the animal was released. Baggs, Spinks, Larry and Hailey were still running down the same straightaway when the crowd began to chant the countdown time in unison.

             
“THREE, TWO…”

             
Holy shit, I thought there would be another hallway by now,
Baggs thought, panicking. It was strange, but in that moment of exertion, he thought about the gladiators of Ancient Rome and how so many of them had died a similar death to the one he was about to experience.
Our lions are mutated to be smarter and meaner, but I bet that being killed by one of them feels about the same.

             
“ONE!” the crowd cheered.

             
Baggs instinctually looked behind him to see their lion leap from his cage in a single bound and begin to sprint over the floor. He expected the lion to make a sharp left and come after them. Baggs couldn’t believe what he was seeing, but the lion sprinted straight instead of turning left and then he heard people screaming.

             
“Ooooh, that’s got to be painful,” Iggy Smiles said in a light-hearted manner. Baggs didn’t know what he was talking about. He didn’t care.
Some other team probably ran right in the path of our lion.
It chilled him to know that some of the humans who had been sitting on the bleachers with him just a moment ago were dead. He picked up the pace.

             
In his mind, he estimated that the Colosseum floor was about two hundred yards long and one hundred twenty yards wide. The Boxers had started at one of the ends of the arena’s ovals, which meant they had begun one hundred yards away from the ladder. This wasn’t technically fair, given that some people started sixty yards from the ladder, but the Colosseum was more concerned with showing blood than fairness.

             
“It’s a dead end!” Larry puffed, looking forward. They had almost reached the first wall and had encountered no hallways among the twelve-foot tall clear walls that flanked them. Baggs’s heart rate picked up and he thought about how by the time they made it back to the starting point the first team would have probably made it to the HoloVision Box.
If not the first two teams.

He felt like an animal in a trap.
Which is kind of what we are,
he thought, and almost laughed deliriously.

Baggs looked to his right and through the glass he saw an enormous lion charging at an Outlive contestant in a blue and yellow breastplate. The contestant had his sword and shield brandished and was standing his ground instead of running from the lion. The one thousand pound carnivore leaped into the air and soared through the man’s outstretched sword and shield as though they were toys. The lion took the man’s torso in its massive jaws and
tossed him against the clear wall, causing the man to spray blood and scream at a high tone Baggs didn’t think was possible for a male to hit.

“Oh no!” Hailey said, looking at the man dying on the other side of the wall. She was pressing her knuckles to her forehead as she said this. The lion ripped and tore and then stared at Baggs and Hailey for a moment. Its yellow eyes flicked between them, and then the creature glanced up at the top of the wall that separated them. For one second, Baggs was sure that the animal was about to vault itself over the wall. Instead, the lion backed up a few paces over the bloody sand, turned and trotted off to kill more people.

Up ahead, Spinks had reached the wall and said, “it’s not a dead end.” Baggs could see it now. There were circular holes within the far wall that the participants could use like a ladder to climb over to the other side. The four of them climbed as fast as they could, one right behind the other. Baggs was the last one over and as he landed on the sand he thought,
that ate up a lot of our time.
He looked behind him and was dismayed to see that only one wall divided him from the entry point of another team.

The Boxers now had two hallways that they could chose from; they could either take one that initially ran parallel to the outside wall then turned inward, or take a hallway that initially ran towards the ladder and then turned left.

              Baggs examined the two paths, thinking of which one to go down.
The one on the left looks as though it curves towards the center, but it could be a dead end.
From what Baggs knew about the Colosseum, it wouldn’t surprise him if they had hired psychologists to make the maze as unintuitive as possible.
So we go right then,
he thought. He looked down that path and saw drops of blood on the sand.
Is a lion hiding behind the turn?
Though the walls were clear, they were becoming opaque with sand, sweat and blood in places as the contest went on.
Is that what that blood is from?
Baggs supposed that it didn’t matter. The lions moved fast enough that the presence of blood or a carcass didn’t mean that the animal was still there.

             
Spinks ran towards the left, stopped, skidding on the sand and looked right; her head swiveled between the two paths as she hesitated, contemplating which way they should go.

             
There’s no way to know which passage is the right way,
Baggs thought.
The only thing we can be sure of is that staying frozen with indecision won’t lead us to the safe room.

             
Without seeing if the others would follow him, Baggs took off down the right path. As he ran, he heard the sound of footsteps behind him, meaning that the others had followed. Baggs felt
fast.
He had always moved well for a big man, and after the drug-assisted week of intense training he had just undergone, he moved with speed that surprised the spectators. A flying camera was perched on the corner, recording him as he and his teammates sped around the turn.

We picked the correct path,
Baggs thought upon seeing his new options in front of him. He faced a straightaway that ended in a wall with pegs sticking out of it that someone could use to climb over the wall. On the right side of the corridor there were three hallways running off of it.

He ran forward, wondering if Shade was watching him. His sword was in
his massive hand. Baggs still lead his teammates and had made the decision that he would take the second corridor on the right; he had no real rational for this—all of the hallways on the right seemed to lead closer to the ladder and the safe room; Baggs had chosen this hallway because of a gut feeling he had about it. His intuitions seemed to be often right, and he didn’t think that it would be wise to use up any more time trying to rationalize the different paths.

He was just about to take the hallway when his ears pricked up to something the announcers were saying; they had been talking most of the time he had been in the maze but he had been tuning them out. They mostly announced the gruesome deaths that were happening all around him on the Colosseum floor. Now they were saying something that affected him.

“Oooohhhhh,” Iggy Smiles said in his nasally, comedic voice. “I think all of their necks are broken.”

             
“Agreed, Iggy,” Tom Bernard said. “It appears as though the mass murderer Tonya Wolf and two of her teammates, Ned Tunk and Marcy Tull have been taken out. The Boxers now only have four teammates remaining in the competition.”

             
So that’s their names, Ned and Marcy,
Baggs thought.
And Tonya is dead. Wow.
It was hard to believe that the same Tonya Wolf that he had just argued with before the competition started was now deceased.
It also means that the four of us are going to have to be some of the fastest on the sand to make it to the ladder; we can’t hope that our teammates will do it for us anymore.

             
They ran, taking the second corridor at their absolute fastest pace. Spinks was hot on Baggs’s heels, but Larry and Hailey Vixen were falling behind, often trading positions for last place.

             
I’m glad I haven’t smoked at all this past week,
Baggs thought.

             
He led them, making quick turns and often going down long straightaways. He lost track of time and of how many turns he made. Each time he rounded a corner he had a surreal feeling that they were about to come face to face with a lion. Around the arena, people were screaming and lions roared—the sounds were deep, loud, and furious. The crowd was a constant white noise of clapping and hollering coming from all around. The announcers on the HoloVision Box commented on the contestants dying as the audience ate junk food, relaxed and tried to enjoy the show.

             
Baggs took a left turn and Spinks yelled from behind him, “I think we’ve been here before; we’re going in circles.”

             
Baggs didn’t think so.
But on second thought, that decapitated corpse looks familiar; didn’t I jump over that a few moments ago?

             
Baggs didn’t know. There was no way of telling. He had been running at a full-out sprint for the past two minutes, pulling and pushing with his abs and arms, launching his body forward, one step at a time, with his agonized legs. He didn’t pay attention to the pain, or how tight his chest felt, or how much sweat ran down his hot face and into his beard;
I will run until my legs fall off,
he thought.
But it’s no use if we’re going in circles.

             
Baggs looked at the corridor beyond the corpse and saw a right turn, which seemed to lead to the ladder, followed by a spot on the left wall that had a hole in it big enough for a human to crawl through.
Yes, we have been here before,
he thought. He had taken the right turn a few moments ago, and it had led him back to this spot. “You’re right,” he said back to Spinks. He huffed in a few breaths before saying, “sorry.”

             
She didn’t respond. He could hear her panting behind him. He kept moving with long strides; he leapt over the corpse, went past the opening on the right and then looked up to see something that brought an electrifying fear into his chest and throat. Dozens of yards away, three people were climbing the ladder up to the HoloVision Box; two of the people wore gold armor and the third wore green and red.
That’s two teams! Only three more will be allowed inside the safe room!

             
He couldn’t imagine the terrified dismay he would feel if he learned that the safe room door had locked and he was damned to run around the maze until lions overcame him.

             
Baggs slid to a stop, got down on his hands and knees, and then crawled through the hole in the left wall.
I hope that this is the right way,
he thought. He got out onto the other side and stood, looking around as Spinks, Hailey and Larry crawled through.

             
“The Tigers and the Crows have both made it to the safe room now,” came Tom Bernard’s voice from the speakers. “Just in time, too. Here comes the second batch of lions.”

             
Spinks cursed. “It feels like we’ve been in here longer than three minutes.” Her face was blotchy with patches of pink on her cheeks and neck that matched her hair.

             
Baggs imagined Tessa sitting on the Linstrom’s saggy, patched couch as she watched the television.
I hope she’s not watching this.
He thought back to the night before he left and walked to the Media Tower. He remembered lying in bed with her for three hours while she slept.
I wish I had stayed four. I wish I could live through that time again.
Tears welled up in his eyes and he purposefully bit his tongue hard enough to draw blood.
This isn’t the time to be remorseful, damn it!

             
Baggs and the others were in a long corridor they had never seen before; they could either turn right or left. Both passages split off into many adjacent hallways. The right side had a series of seven corpses lying atop the sand;
all of the bodies belonged to the same team
, Baggs noted, looking at their green and pink colored armor. Six of the corpses were on their backs with dead, unseeing eyes gazing up at the sky. One of the corpses had sand on its exposed eyeball, but it didn’t seem to mind. It appeared as though each of the corpses had been killed in the same manner; deep puncture wounds ran along the sides of the corpses’ necks;
The same lion probably killed every one—it probably grabbed the backs of their necks in its jaws, shook the people, broke their spinal cords, and then moved onto the next one.
This sight disturbed Baggs, bringing on a wave of nausea. In Ancient Rome, the lions entered the arena hungry so that they would be more likely to want to eat the gladiators.
The lion that did this wasn’t hungry, it just wanted to kill people. All of the meat on these corpses is still there.