Outlive (The Baggers Trilogy, #1) (31 page)

             
“Hello, Baggs,” Mr. Snow said. His eyes were shadowed in the limo’s hushed light. He looked evil.
He is evil,
Baggs thought.

             
Baggs didn’t respond, but just kept crying. He was biting hard on one of his fists; the gesture made him look like a giant, hairy toddler.

             
Baggs’s head rocked back in a quick shot of pain as Bite backhanded him. For a moment, Baggs was disoriented and the limo spun in his vision. Then, things steadied out. His lip was bleeding.

             
“Mr. Snow is fucking talking to you,” Bite said.

             
Baggs nodded, still crying, and looked at Mr. Snow.

             
Mr. Snow smiled. “Do I have your attention, Baggs?”

             
“Yes.”

             
“Good.” Mr. Snow leaned back, and withdrew a cigar that looked very much like the one he had smoked outside his mansion on the night that he spoke with Baggs. “Do you remember the conversation we had one week ago, Baggs?”

             
Baggs nodded. “Yes.”

             
Mr. Snow flicked his lighter and lit the end of his cigar. The smell of he burning tobacco filled the room. He blew out a cloud of smoke. “Do you remember what I said about people who take things from me?”

             
“You said that you make them pay you back,” Baggs blubbered, looking at the man with the screwdriver lodged in his neck. Every time he breathed, the handle went up and down. The man’s face was ashen and blood continued to seep from his wounds and bubble out of his nose with his breaths.

             
“Yes, that’s what I said,” Mr. Snow said, taking another drag from his cigar.

             
I need to get it together,
Baggs thought, looking at the dying man.
I’m losing it. I need to control my crying.
He let one more sob out, and then quieted. Tears of extreme terror continued to roll down his eyes, but he was calming and becoming more rational. “I didn’t take anything from you, though,” Baggs said. He was surprised to find that his voice sounded level, almost threatening.

             
Mr. Snow smiled and then his dark eyes shifted to Baggs’s feet. “You bought those shoes?”

             
Baggs’s breath caught in his throat and he began to stutter. “I-I-I… Darius… Darius gave them to me!”

             
“And I’m Darius’s agent! I got him his deal with Nike, and he doesn’t move a finger without my permission! I’m the one who got him in the big leagues! He owes me, you understand? Essentially, those are my shoes you’re wearing.”

             
Baggs had to put a great deal of effort into not sobbing again. He clenched his jaw and again his eyes were drawn to the screwdriver in the man’s neck. It was lodged right up to the handle.
Whoever stabbed that in must have put a great deal of force into the motion,
he thought morbidly.

             
“So are you going to pay me back?”

             
Baggs shook his head violently, thinking,
he’s going to make me kill the other guy. Then, he’ll have something that he can blackmail me for.

             
Still puffing on his cigar, Mr. Snow reached into a leather bag beside him and pulled out three items. He held them out for Baggs. “Take them, start putting them on and go sit over there with the other two,” he said. He held a pair of handcuffs, a rubber gag, and a blindfold.

             
Baggs couldn’t refrain from sobbing again, and a few brays of terror escaped him as he shook his head back and forth while backing away from Mr. Snow.

             
“You don’t want to put these on?” Mr. Snow asked.

             
“NO!” Baggs said.

             
Mr. Snow looked at Bite with a mocking expression of confusion on his face. “Bite, did you see Baggs shake his head ‘no’ when I asked if he was going to pay me back?”

             
“I did see that.”

             
Mr. Snow puffed on his cigar. “Hmmm. That’s interesting, because he then refused to put the handcuffs, the gag and the blindfold on and sit with the other debt dodgers. I guess we’ll have to just force him over there.”

             
“No!” Baggs cried. Bite had started to move towards him when Mr. Snow held up his hand. Bite froze.

             
“Well,” Mr. Snow said. “Maybe we misinterpreted his shake of the head. Maybe he didn’t mean what we think he meant. So I’ll ask you again, Baggs. If you answer ‘no,’ you’re going to be cuffed and put with the two other lowlifes on that seat. Will you pay me back for those shoes?”

             
Baggs waited a long time, trying to think. He didn’t want to say yes, or no. Fifteen seconds went by. The limo turned left and then merged onto the highway. Thirty seconds passed. Mr. Snow puffed on his cigar. After one minute, Bite said, “What’s your answer?”

             
Baggs swallowed. He once again had his sobs under control. “What will I have to do to pay you back?”

             
Mr. Snow laughed without humor. “I like this guy, Bite. He’s smart. That’s smart, kid. Never agree to a bargain unless the expenses of both sides have been outlined. He’s a business man.” Snow puffed, then leaned forward and spoke. He had leaned so far towards Baggs that their faces were six inches apart. His dark eyes did not twitch as they looked into Baggs’s. Mr. Snow was only five feet six inches, and his voice was high. His hands were dainty. Still, there was something absent in his eyes that most people had. His stare made Baggs’s guts turn to ice. “You want to know what I want you to do to pay me back?” Mr. Snow asked quietly. “I’ll tell you. The guy on the right, the one who isn’t bleeding yet, I want you to break his knee caps.”

             
The man on the right began to try to holler in protest, but the sound was muffled by his gag.

             
Mr. Snow continued, his dead eyes still staring straight at the bigger man’s. “I want you to know that I’m punishing those two men because they defied me. We had a deal, and they owed me money last week. I was kind enough to tell them that they could have another week to pay me, on the condition that if they didn’t I was going to flip a coin in front of them. Heads would mean the one on the right and tails would mean the one on the left. I would kill the unlucky man whose side turned up. I am in the process of doing that.”

             
Baggs broke eye contact and noticed that Mr. Snow’s suit was speckled with blood.
He stabbed the guy himself.

             
He smiled, realizing what Baggs had noticed. “I told them that I would break the other one’s legs and feet so bad that they’d never walk again. I won’t kill both of them, yet. I’m a business man, Baggs. I realize that a dead man can’t pay me money. Anyways, back to our end of the bargain. You took my shoes, and so I want you to break the man on the right’s legs so bad that he never walks again. We’re going out to a little place I know of to do the business.”

Part 3

1

Thirty three year old Baggs sat on one of the plastic stadium seats in the Colosseum. Sixteen hours had passed since Gigi had
slipped him the warning letter on the napkin at Turner’s house. The death match was quickly approaching, and time seemed to be slipping by too quickly. The stadium seats were painted a glossy green. Baggs’s hands were handcuffed and rested between his knees. He twisted his arms, fruitlessly trying to maneuver the cuffs into a more comfortable position.
They’ve got enough guns pointed at us; why do we have to wear these stupid things?
His wrists had such a diameter that even on the biggest size, the cuffs were uncomfortably tight.

“After the next battle, we’ll take ye’ to get ready,” one of the guards shouted at the Outlive participants, straining to be heard over the roaring crowd.

              Baggs thought about those words as he watched gladiators battle on a levitating platform. Every so often one of the competitors would be pushed off the edge and fall one hundred feet to splatter on the hard-packed sand.

             
The crowd loved it.

             
As Baggs looked around, he saw people of every culture and social class in the 200,000 stadium seats. He saw a black woman in an evening gown sipping on wine. He saw a kid in a t-shirt with a sword on it eating a hotdog; mustard had dripped off the dog to stain his front side. There was a man a few rows behind them who yelled, hollered, and clapped until his voice was hoarse and his hands were red; Baggs turned in his seat to look at the man and saw that he had an untidy grey beard and was missing most of his front teeth; he looked like a vagrant (
Although people sometimes thought that I was a vagrant,
he reminded himself). There were families in the box seats eating five-star meals as they watched the blood and gore. There were vendors walking up and down the stairs that ran between the stadium seats selling cotton candy, peanuts, margaritas, beer, hot dogs, and packaged candies. Baggs saw a little girl who hadn’t yet learned that it was okay to watch people die; she was sitting on her daddy’s lap, crying with her head buried in his shoulder; she didn’t want to watch anymore.
They’ll keep taking her to these things until that sensitivity is beaten out of her. Her father certainly doesn’t seem bothered by the blood.
The father’s eyes were locked onto the action as he rubbed his daughter’s back, comforting her.

             
The Boxers were seated together in a row, all wearing expensive suits and dresses. Again, Baggs thought of how the money used to decorate the Outlive participants could feed his daughters for months.
I wouldn’t have had to enter this awful thing if they could have just settled for cheaper suits and then given me the extra.
Baggs was sweating in his shirt and coat, but could not remove them because of his handcuffs.

             
Since he boarded the helicopter that would take him to the Colosseum, his anxiety had been building. All seven Boxers had ridden to the Colosseum in the same helicopter. As the machine whirred and hummed and lifted them above twinkling cities in the dark night, they all remained quiet. Baggs had not felt like talking at all.
It was just beginning to feel real then,
he thought. As he had slumped down in the leather seat with a stomach full of steak, he had thought of what it would be like to die on the sand. His mind had gone back to watching the rerun of Outlive on the HoloVision Box at Greggor’s.
Those people had actually died.
He had looked around the helicopter.
Some of the people that I’m with tonight will be dead in the next twenty four hours, whether its from puncture wounds caused by blades, or teeth, or blunt force, maybe from falling ten stories or taking a hammer to the face.
He found it strange that as they had ridden in silence to the Colosseum, the prospect of Outlive had seemed more real to him. He had never thought of the upcoming match as a joke, but something about the act of traveling towards the place where the atrocities would happen brought the outlook into sharp, unforgiving focus.

             
During the ride, he had considered telling his teammates about the letter that Gigi had placed in his napkin at dinner.
That was another example of something becoming more real,
he thought. He had strongly suspected all along that Byron Turner planned on killing them if they survived Outlive, but it still had jarred him to see the proof in Turner’s daughter’s handwriting. After reading the letter, Baggs had ripped the paper up into small pieces and swallowed it in an attempt to destroy any evidence. After considering, he had decided not to tell his teammates Turner’s plan;
first thing is first, we’ve got to survive tomorrow in the arena. Then we can worry about Turner.

             
“Hey guys, look,” Larry Wight had said around eleven o’clock the night before. He was staring out the helicopter’s window, the streetlights below reflected on his spectacles. “This is it. This is the Colosseum.”

             
All of the Boxers had looked out of the windows, not saying a word amongst themselves as the monstrous building came into view. It was enormous—a spectacle. The arena was bigger than a city block. The structure dwarfed all that it surrounded, and reminded Baggs of a great pyramid in ancient Egypt.

             
The Colosseum was an odd mixture of ancient aesthetics and new world technology, which was exactly what Emperor Daman had wanted when he sat down with architects and planners and gave them his vision for the arena. The outside walls looked rough and weather-beaten. They were not metallic or concrete, like the walls of many modern structures. Instead, they were famously constructed of travertine, a type of limestone that the Ancient Romans had used in many of their buildings. The acquisition of this material had been extremely costly, but Emperor Daman had insisted; just as he had a library devoted to Adolf Hitler and a lifelike statue of George Washington in his bedroom, he wanted this building and the acts that went on within it to be a tribute to one of the most dominant civilizations in the history of humanity—the Ancient Romans. In contrast to this, he also wanted the building to be extremely cutting-edge and practical; the roof, which looked somewhat like a metallic turtle shell, was completely retractable to allow sunlight in on days when it wasn’t raining or snowing.