Outlive (The Baggers Trilogy, #1) (42 page)

             
When that was done, all that was left on the sand below were the carcasses and blood. An automated tractor with dragging nets flanking the big wheels drove out onto the arena floor and scooped up all the bodies. While this was going on, the bottom of the HoloVision box retracted and Baggs saw that he and the other survivors were not simply inside of the HoloVision Box, but they were in a clear box that was placed within the entertainment system.

             
The box that the survivors were placed within was lowered to the sand, suspended by cables up above. Baggs looked around him; some of the other teams were crying, or hugging each other. Larry was slumped against the wall; the top of his head was bleeding into his grey hair.
I don’t remember him sustaining a head injury,
Baggs thought. Spinks was also slumped against a wall. Her arms were limp by her side and seemed to be sitting
lower
than they should be on her torso. Her nose was bleeding down the front of her neck and her chest.

             
“Have you ever dislocated a shoulder before?” Baggs asked Spinks.

             
She nodded. She didn’t seem like she wanted to talk right then.

             
“Hey guys,” Larry said, his dirty face alight with a smile. “We made it.”

             
“Yeah,” Baggs said.

             
“We’re going to live,” Larry said.

             
Baggs didn’t respond to this for two reasons. The first was that he didn’t feel like talking to Larry after what he did to Hailey in the arena.
He’s a murderer.
The second was that Baggs felt awkward agreeing with such a statement because he knew that they were still in jeopardy. He thought of Gigi’s letter that she had left in his napkin. He had memorized it.

My daddy killed Paul Higgins and he’ll try to kill you too if you survive the competition. I heard him tell mom while he was drunk. Something about vitamins. I don’t know what to do. He scares me. I am scared for you and for your girls.

-G

              Baggs thought of Byron Turner with his pointy white beard, his beady eyes and his lisp that somehow made him more intimidating. The lisp seemed to challenge someone to make fun of him, or note it. He was one of the most powerful men on earth, and he wanted to kill Baggs.

             
God, what are we going to do?

             
The clear box landed on the ground and the Outlive participants were led off the sand and inside of the Colosseum by guards. As they strode over the sand, the 200,000 people in the stands did not cheer them. They were talking amongst each other, taking drinks of coke, eating nachos, going to the bathroom, fixing their makeup, and in general getting ready for the next death match.

             
Baggs watched Spinks as she walked with her arms limp by her side. He wondered how Turner might kill them.

             
And can he really expect just to keep killing people every time his contestants win?

             
That seemed likely. According to Spinks, Turner had raped a girl, been caught in the act of doing so by a security tape, and then was found innocent in a trial. In the court system in New Rome, the fate of the condemned was voted on by six jury members and one judge. The judge’s vote counted as though the judge were three jury members. Baggs suspected that Turner was voted innocent by the judge and by all the jury members after he raped that woman, even though there was footage that proved he was guilty.

The judge’s vote would be easy to get,
Baggs thought.
Turner is a councilman. He has enough power that he could end a judge’s career, if the judge voted him guilty and then Turner was found innocent by the votes from the jury; which would be possible, if fiver out of six of the jury found him innocent, Turner would be free to continue his career as a councilman, and would ruin the judge.

             
And, even if he were guilty, the jury would probably vote him innocent too.
Baggs imagined himself on the jury at Turner’s trial. He would be offered a large sum of money, one hundred thousand CreditCoins, for example, to say that Turner was innocent. The amount would be loose change to Turner, but enough to keep Baggs out of Outlive, and to ensure that his daughters didn’t starve to death. As much as he hated to admit it, Baggs would take the money and give the vote for Turner’s innocence. If he refused, what good would that do? One person alone wouldn’t ensure that Turner was treated as though he were guilty. In that situation, Baggs would assume that the judge and all the other jury members would take the money.
And then if I voted guilty and everyone else voted innocent, Turner would walk free and then I’d have to enter Outlive for a moral stance I took that amounted to nothing.

             
That’s not all, though. It’s not like Turner’s employee would offer a hefty bribe and then just leave the jury member alone if the money was turned down. No. Turner probably has people on his payroll like Bite (or eighteen year old me) who would threaten to break someone’s kneecaps if they voted guilty. Or kill their kids.

             
The Outlive participants were lead through underground tunnels to a garage, where they were siphoned into helicopters depending upon their team. Baggs, Spinks, and Larry were still wearing their Outlive outfits. As they got into the helicopter to be taken back to Turner’s house, Baggs could hear Emperor Daman’s voice rumbling through the arena as the next gladiator event was announced. The door to the helicopter closed, the machine drove them out into open air, and then they took off.

             
Baggs felt tired, but he knew he had to think.

             
If all three of us died of heart attacks, there would probably be some kind of trial about it, but Turner doesn’t care about going to trial. What he cares about is Emperor Daman catching wind that he’s giving his participants performance-enhancing drugs. Then, he’d be banned from Outlive. There wouldn’t be a trial if Daman had evidence that Turner was cheating, he’d simply be kicked out of the Outlive system.

             
But then another thought occurred to Baggs;
wouldn’t Daman suspect that Turner was cheating if his Outlive teams kept dying after they won?

             
Baggs honestly didn’t know.
Maybe he’ll just assume that Turner likes killing them. Killing vagrants in your free time isn’t really something that people lose their rights to ownership in Outlive for.

And, that’s not for me to decide. The thing
to worry about is how to avoid dying, not whether or not Turner would get away with killing me. The fact is that Turner thinks he’ll get away with it, as evidenced by Gigi’s note, and that’s all that matters.

The Colosseum dwindled below them.

              Spinks seemed to be in a lot of pain. She grunted, leaned her head back and blinked heavily. “Could one of you help me? If I had one good arm, I could relocate the other.”

             
Larry was disgusted by the prospect. He sunk back into the seat he was sitting in and looked away from the dislodged shoulders.

             
“Uhh, I can help you,” Baggs said. “I mean, I don’t know anything about dislocated joints, but I’d be willing to try, if you tell me what to do.”

             
Spinks’s voice was nasally; blood from her broken nose painted the bottom half of her face. “Yeah. I know how to do it. This used to happen loads of times to me as a kid. I’m just predisposed to dislocated shoulders, I guess. You can’t wimp out on me, though. I’m going to scream, but you’ve just got to keep going.”

             
“Alright,” Baggs said. He scooted closer to Spinks and thought about how Spinks’s knowledge of how to fix dislocated shoulders showed that she came from a lower social class. The upper class had no reason to learn such things when they could simply fly to the nearest emergency room when they had joint dislocations.

             
“Grab my wrist and elbow and make it so that my elbow is at a ninety degree angle,” she said.

             
Baggs grabbed her arm and slowly rotated her wrist towards her shoulder until it was at the proper angle. Spinks was sweating from the pain, her teeth were clenched tightly together.
She’s tough,
Baggs thought.
When this is over, I’ll tell her about Gigi’s note. I could use her help.

             
“Now, slowly pull my wrist away from my body while keeping my elbow tucked against my side. Keep the ninety-degree angle. Go until you feel that you’re stretching my arm out.”

             
Baggs kept his large, dirty hand firmly wrapped around Spinks’s wrist as he pulled it away from her. He looked at her shoulder, exposed in the leather tank top she had been given to wear under her solid red breastplate. He could see the head of her humerus moving beneath her dirty skin.

             
Larry was looking purposefully out the window. Apparently dislocated joints bothered him.

             
Baggs saw that Spinks’s face was red, but she hadn’t cried out.
She’s trying to hide how much this hurts.
Baggs guessed that if Larry were in the same situation as Spinks, he would be wailing at the top of his lungs, wanting everyone to be aware of how much agony he was in.

             
“Good. You’re doing good. Now, here’s the part where you’ve got to be really firm with me. You’ve got to cup my elbow and just jam my upper arm towards that socket. Do it hard. It’ll hurt, but it’ll hurt more if it takes a bunch of tries.”

             
Baggs thought,
she saved my life. I owe her this.
He cupped her elbow and yanked it upward so hard that Spinks came halfway off the ground. She cried out and tears streamed down her face. “Don’t let go,” she said, “you got it. Don’t let go or it’ll pop back out of place. Slowly move my hand across my chest so that I can grab a piece of my clothing. I need to rest a moment before I do the next one. You can look again, Larry, it’s done.”

             
Larry turned around and gave a nervous smile, showing his yellow teeth. His glasses were speckled with blood, Baggs noticed.

             
Baggs placed Spinks’s hand over her chest and said, “I can’t believe we got it in on the first try.”

             
“The big thing is just relaxing your muscles enough. Used to hurt so bad when someone relocated my shoulder that I would have an instinct to tighten up. I’ve trained my body to relax so that my muscles are loose and the bone can just slide back in. And, you did a very good job.” She gave him a pale smile.

             
Baggs sat back for a moment and thought about how best to introduce the topic of Gigi’s letter to his teammates. He imagined that, for them, it would be a difficult fact to accept. He sympathized with them because of their ignorance.
They’re sitting here with me, thinking that they’ve just defied the odds and that now they’re going to get to live with freedom. Well, Spinks probably doesn’t think that. Even if she thought Turner wasn’t going to kill her, she must know that the authorities wouldn’t let a criminal like her go free. She’ll probably be confined in some way—maybe prison, maybe house arrest. Whatever she imagines her fate to be, it is surely better than Turner killing her tonight, though.

             
The whirr of the motor beneath them and the chopping blades above them was monotonous and comforting. Larry fell asleep sitting up in one of the leather seats. Spinks stayed awake but didn’t talk for a long while. She kept her relocated shoulder in place, clasping her fingers around her leather top so that her arm wouldn’t fall to her side. Her green eyes stared off into the blue skies; she appeared to be deep in contemplation.

             
A few times, Baggs tried to open his mouth to start the discussion about Gigi’s letter, but closed it. At first, he thought that he just didn’t know how to address such a delicate topic. Then, he began to suspect that his hesitation was due to something else entirely.

             
Maybe it wouldn’t be such a good idea to tell them,
he thought.

             
Baggs imagined Gigi listening in on Turner drunkenly telling his wife his plan to waste all of his winners. He would have been talking generally.

             
But I’m not like the others,
Baggs knew.
Things have changed for me.

             
Baggs had begun to have these thoughts after Turner told him that he was on the cover of a national magazine for his fight with Mobb Harvey. At that time, he had thought that he might be invited to become a gladiator after Outlive. It had happened before to people who were athletic enough and performed well in their initial Colosseum appearance.

             
I’m six feet, five inches tall, and I’m pretty strong. I’ll be especially formidable if I go through gladiator training.