Outlive (The Baggers Trilogy, #1) (40 page)

             
Spinks wasn’t listening, she just stood there, staring down at the sand.

             
“Let’s move!” Baggs yelled. He could hear panic cracking through in his own voice. He looked up and saw that the man had made progress up the ladder, but he was moving slowly. Half a spear was lodged through his left leg and he was climbing upwards by gripping the rails above his head and then hopping up a rung with his right foot.

             
“I need to think,” Spinks said. “Let’s stay here for a while.”

             
“Are you kidding me?” Baggs screamed. Now the panic wasn’t just peeking through in his voice, but it was coloring every word he spoke. “If that guy makes it, we’re dead, and he’s still climbing. You want to wait here for another group of rogue teammates comes and tries to murder us? There are sixty lions in here, we need to move before they come and corner us!” His voice was shrill.

             
Spinks shook her head. “Shut up, I need to think.”

             
Larry pulled out a clump of his gray hair; tears from frustration and panic were streaming down his face. He looked from Spinks to Baggs, searching for guidance.

             
Baggs took three steps backwards. “I’m leaving without you,” he told Spinks. But as he reached the next corridor, he paused. Spinks’s eyes were closed; she was breathing hard.

             
“Wait! Come back,” she said.

             
Baggs was trembling. The bleeding man was over halfway up the ladder. He was bent over the rungs, panting and exhausted, but continuing his slow march upwards.

             
“I have an idea,” she said. Baggs stood there for a moment, wondering if Spinks had gone crazy.
Whatever your idea is, it should take place outside of this dead end.
Spinks kicked sand towards Baggs in frustration, “C’mon! Help me!”

             
Even though it made no sense to him, he jogged by her side.

             
“Lift me up,” she said. “I want to reach the top.”

             
Baggs grabbed her by the waist and hoisted her up so that her knees were atop his shoulders. She placed her palms on the clear walls to balance her body and then stood up on Baggs’s shoulders. She reached as high as she could, but her fingertips were still a couple feet below the top of the wall.

             
“Isn’t this against the rules or something?” Larry asked.

             
Neither Baggs nor Spinks answered him.

             
Baggs wasn’t sure if they would be punished in some way for this maneuver, but as the bloody man climbed higher and higher up the ladder, he didn’t think they had much choice.

             
Spinks’s spear was slung up over her back, the sharp metal reflecting sunrays.

             
“Higher,” she told Baggs. “I can’t reach.”

             
Baggs grabbed her small feet inside of the leather sandals in both of his big hands and then shoulder pressed her upwards until his arms were locked in extension.

             
“Still can’t reach,” she said. Her fingertips were now six inches from the top.

             
Baggs stood on his toes and scooted closer to the wall.

             
“Higher,” Sinks said above him.

             
“That guy’s almost there,” Larry shouted.

             
Baggs’s legs were completely exhausted, but he forced them to give an additional effort. He bent his knees and jumped as high as he could, sending Spinks into the air. He came down empty-handed. Spinks had gripped the top of the maze and was pulling herself up to a standing position atop the wall. The wall was about as thick as a finger, and Spinks shook slightly as she stood atop it.

             
“In a bold move, the Boxers’ pink-haired computer hacker, Sally Nooks, has climbed atop the maze and it looks like she’s going to try to tight-rope her way to the ladder,” Tom Bernard said.

             
“This looks like too little too late,” Iggy Smiles responded. “Theo Ozark of the Bears is almost at the top of the ladder. Once he gets inside the safe room, the door will be shut to all other contestants.”

             
Tom Bernard was wrong about Spinks’s plan of walking over the top of the maze. Instead of trying this, she crouched down and jumped over the next hallway and grabbed the top of the next wall; her body slammed into the wall and she screamed. One of her hands came loose, and she turned for a moment, revealing a bloody nose. Spinks gripped the top of the next wall, pulled herself up, and repeated the process. She was only one corridor away from the ladder now.

             
Baggs looked up at the top of the twelve-foot wall that he had just helped Spinks mount and then down at Larry Wight, who blinked up at him. He decided that he would have to take a different route to the ladder than Spinks had—
there’s no way Larry can lift me that high and I’m not wasting my time helping him up after what he did to Hailey.

             
Baggs backpedaled, turned, and once again was running through the maze, trying to retreat out of the corridor that lead to the dead-end. He glanced up to see that Spinks was now climbing up the ladder on the opposite side of the bleeding guy. The man had made it nine tenths of the way up, but he was moving at a slow pace due to injury, blood loss and fatigue. Spinks was shooting up the ladder as though she were bear-crawling over the ground, taking quick, one-rung steps up towards the safe room.

             
Larry followed closely behind Baggs, gulping air into his inefficient smoker’s lungs.

             
From above came the announcement: “The third batch of lions have been released.”

             
I’ve only been in this place for six minutes? It feels like days.

             
The news that he was now in a maze with ninety lions drove Baggs to run faster, turning around bloody corridors, looking for the ladder. He was dismayed when he looked up to see that he was further away than when he had helped Spinks into the dead-end.
This maze is probably counter-intuitive, though,
he thought.
You may have to go further out to eventually reach the ladder.

             
Baggs and Larry turned a corner and came into a corridor in which a lion was snacking on someone’s abdomen. The lion had a stack of corpses lined up behind him and didn’t so much as take a step towards Larry or Baggs.

             
They ran onwards. Baggs was thankful for the good luck, but aware that the odds were not in the favor of the next lion they passed being as docile.

             
The crowd began to whistle, scream and cheer in a crescendo that told Baggs that someone was about to make it into the HoloVision Box and secure the last spot available.

             
Please let it be Spinks,
he thought.
If it’s Spinks, the door will open for us.

             
But it wasn’t Spinks; it was Theo Ozark of the Bears, hopping along the rungs on his one good foot. Spinks was thirty feet below him; at that height, she was diminished to the size of a mouse by perspective.

             
Baggs wondered what would happen to them if Theo made it inside.
What if we make it to the ladder? Will we hang there until we are too exhausted to hold on any longer and we fall to the lions below?
Baggs didn’t think that this was likely—it would take too long. Someone as small as Spinks could even sit on the rungs, making it possible for her to stay out of the lions’ reach for days.
They’ll probably send some animal like baboons after us—something that can climb. They won’t want this to take up too much time.

             
High above, Spinks took her spear out from the leather holder behind her back, and flung it skyward at Theo Ozark.

             
Good try, but there’s no way she’ll hit from that distance,
Baggs thought. He was running through the maze and watching her at the same time.

             
Baggs was pleased to see that his prediction wasn’t true. The spear wobbled through the air and seemed to be headed right at Theo Ozark. Theo saw this too, and was quick enough to jerk his body backwards and dodge the projectile. In doing so, though, his right foot slipped on the bloody rung and he tumbled down into a sitting position. Spinks wasted no time; she climbed up the ladder, pulling herself upwards in violent strokes.

             
Then the corridor led to a turn and Baggs was forced to run in a direction that made it impossible to watch Spinks any longer. He turned twice more and thought,
we’re getting close to the ladder.
He couldn’t be sure, but he suspected that the next turn would lead him to the base of the ladder.
Which won’t do me any good if Spinks doesn’t pull through.

             
Baggs looked up above again. Spinks had closed the gap between herself and Theo Ozark. She had switched over to the other side of the ladder and had one hand wrapped around the ankle of Ozark’s injured leg. Blood leaked down onto her face. Theo’s hands were only two feet away from the opening at the bottom of the HoloVision Box, but Spinks was preventing him from climbing any higher. He jerked downwards and in a stroke of violence he kicked her in the face. Her body slumped and for a moment, Baggs thought that she had passed out. Her face was now leaking blood that mixed with the blood dripping from the injured man above her. She managed to hold onto the ladder and Theo’s foot, though.

             
Baggs’s attention was torn from Spinks as he looked ahead.
Something big is coming,
he thought; he saw a large shadow move down one of the adjacent corridors. The object came hurtling out into the open and Baggs saw that it was Chobb Lowe, the powerlifter from the Pirates.

             
The man was wearing his helmet but had ditched his breastplate. The skin on his torso seemed ready to burst as it tried to hold in the mass of dense muscle. Lowe was grimacing as he ran forward, holding a sword in his right hand—his left hand was covered in blood.

             
At first, Baggs was glad to see that the thing approaching was Chobb Lowe and not a lion. Then he saw the man’s eyes. They were tiny slits of fierce anger and determination.

             
We might have to fight him. He probably won’t attack us, though, because there would be no point. The battle for the last spot within the safe room will be between Spinks and Ozark; none of his teammates have made it, so there would be no reason for him to try killing us.

             
Up above, Leo Ozark tried to kick down again, aiming the heel of his good foot at the center of Spinks’s face. Spinks still had the injured man’s left ankle in her hand. When Ozark kicked, he was only holding onto the ladder with his hands. Hundreds of yards above the earth, Spinks tried something desperate. Spinks latched onto Ozark’s ankle like a rock climber holding a rope and just as Ozark kicked, she pushed her feet into the ladder, lunging away from the solid surface and propelling her body over open air.

             
A moment later, both she and Ozark were falling fast towards the ground. Ozark’s arms and legs flailed but he was too far away from the ladder to grab hold of it again. He landed on the sand with a disturbingly loud BOOM. Spinks had managed to stay close to the ladder as she fell, but she dropped thirty feet before she managed to grab hold of a rung. She was falling fast when her hands grasped the metal and she let out a gut-wrenching cry of agony as she stopped her downward motion and slammed into the ladder. She wrapped her legs around the rung and then sat there, high above the maze floor. Seconds went by and she didn’t move. Her arms hung limply beside her and she made no effort to keep climbing.

             
She’s injured,
Baggs thought, horrified.
Maybe she can’t climb anymore. This makes Chobb Lowe a problem. There’s still a spot for him in the safe room.

             
Chobb Lowe was sprinting towards them and was about to turn down a corridor on his left side when he skidded to a sand-spitting stop. Baggs and Larry stopped beside him a moment later.

             
We’ve made it,
Baggs thought, looking down the hallway. The ladder stood before them, thirty yards away, reaching up to the safe room.

             
Between themselves and the ladder, though, a skinny lion was lying on the sand. He looked young—his mane only came out a couple of inches over the top of his head.
But he’s still three times as big as I am,
Baggs thought. The lion stood, roared angrily, and then charged them.

             
Up above, Spinks still hadn’t moved.