Outlive (The Baggers Trilogy, #1) (35 page)

             
This will be his sixteenth person to kill,
Baggs thought, watching.

A few rows down, one of the Outlive competitors on another team gagged and then vomited heavily onto the floor. Her teammates lifted their feet to avoid getting their shoes dirty.

Baggs could relate to the woman’s fear.
After this, we’re going to be taken back to get dressed. It’ll be show time.

“KILL HIM, KILL HIM, KILL HIM, KILL HIM,” the crowd continued to say.

              The hologram showed Emperor Daman raising his hands to quiet the crowd. The arena went silent. Even though he was six rows up, he could hear Jon Isaac panting on the sand below.

             
The emperor raised his hand with his thumb outstretched, pointing horizontal. Jon Isaac stared up at the hologram, ragged breaths coming in and out of his chest.
Time must be going so slow for him,
Baggs thought. Baggs knew that some competitors had tried to run at this point, but they had been brought down by gunman placed around the arena.

             
Baggs heard a husky grunt and turned his head to see Tonya Wolf licking her lips and rubbing her palms on her knees as she watched. She squirmed in her seat. Baggs turned away, disgusted.

             
Umu pulled back the sword, getting ready to take Isaac’s head off.

             
Emperor Daman’s thumb wavered slightly and then he gave the thumbs up.

             
He lives,
Baggs thought.
Unbelievable. The emperor went against the crowd.
But, as Baggs thought about it more, he supposed that it wasn’t too unbelievable. While it was true that the crowd would be slightly upset for not seeing Isaac’s head sliced off, Emperor Daman knew that Jon Isaac was one of the most popular gladiators he had.
A gladiator like Jon Isaac sells tickets. The emperor doesn’t want to get rid of him just yet; he just had to pay Isaac’s family millions of dollars for the man; he’s an expensive commodity.

             
Jon Isaac slumped and collapsed into sobs onto the ground while Umu gave the sword back to the referee.

             
From the opposite side of the silent arena, a man yelled, “OH, COME ON!”

             
The hologram of Emperor Daman showed his eyebrows furrowing and then the emperor looked away from the camera. Baggs couldn’t see where Emperor Daman’s suite was from his own seat, but he guessed that the emperor was looking around to see who had shouted and broken the silence.

             
Baggs looked for the lawbreaker, too. He saw guards leading a drunken man down the steps; the man had a dark stain on the front of his shirt. He staggered and cursed as the guards forced him down the steps. “Get off a’ me, you pigs! GET OFF!”

             
The man was forced down to the lowest floor and then Baggs saw him being dragged through one of the lowest doors onto the sand by two guards. The man didn’t seem angry anymore, but was crying and protesting.

             
“Give Umu the sword,” the emperor said.

             
“NO! NO!” Came the lawbreaker’s protests.

             
Umu stepped forward gladly. The
APPLAUSE
sign went up and the audience went mad; they didn’t seem the least bit perturbed that someone who had just shared a seat with them was about to be killed.

             
As expected, the emperor gave the thumbs down this time. The audience cheered wildly and Umu hacked the citizen’s head off in one blow.

             
That was a good move from the emperor,
Baggs thought.
Now the crowd won’t remember this as a day when their leader denied them of blood.

             
The guard with the reflective sunglasses spoke up from behind them. “Get up, all Outlive participants need to stand. It’s time. We’re moving.”

             
Larry groaned from beside Baggs and reluctantly stood with the rest of the crowd.

4

              The Outlive contestants were split up into their teams and led down dark underground corridors beneath the Colosseum. Rock music played from above during a short intermission from the fights and shook the walls and the floors. The music was occasionally interrupted by loud mechanical grating sounds that Baggs assumed meant that some obstacles were being set up for the Outlive competition. The configurations for the Outlive competitions tended to be more involved than those for gladiator fights. It wasn’t uncommon for elaborate sets to be built on which the gladiators would die.

             
As he walked, Baggs grew specifically nervous about the idea that the rules would be called out just before the competition began.
What if I freeze up? What if Emperor Daman calls out the rules but I’m too scared to understand them?

             
Calm down, you’ll be fine,
he told himself.

             
The seven Boxers were led into a large concrete room; the back wall was a garage door. In here, the mechanical sounds were even louder. Baggs stared at the metal door.
One inch beyond that door is the sand. What the hell are they building out there?

             
All of the Boxers stripped down and were then adorned with their Outlive uniforms. Like the gladiators, they wore leather skirts that went down to just above their knees. One of the designers came by and cut Hailey Vixen’s skirt so that it showed more of her legs. “You’ve got beautiful legs, honey; we want to show them off,” he said to her. She didn’t seem to have heard him. She stared at the garage door in the back of the room, looking sick. The Boxers were each given red metal breastplates that held their emblem on them—a man with boxing gloves striking the air. The breastplates weighed approximately thirty pounds. They were then given helmets to put on that weighed roughly ten pounds. They were given spears, which were light, and shields made of dense metal that weighed down even Baggs’s huge arms.
All of this armor seems burdensome.
On top of all these things, the gladiators were given scabbards to be worn around their hips that held swords. Baggs picked up the sword and thought that the weapon was too heavy for some of the smaller contestants to use effectively. He swung it through the air; the light danced over the clean metal.
It’s sharp.
Designers came around, powdering the Boxers’ faces and giving them dabs of lipstick and eyeliner. “Remember!” one of them shouted, “when you walk out the garage door, look scared! If there is a camera flying near you and you think you’re going to die, look at it; there’s no better footage than of a person about to die!”

             
Unbelievable as it was, the designer wasn’t being sarcastic. He raised his eyebrows as he said these things; it was as though he were simply giving inexperienced actors some guidelines.
It’s as though he doesn’t actually realize that we’re real humans and that some of us are really going to die out there! Does he think it’s just a show?

             
Baggs slumped down against the wall, next to Larry. His armor was heavy, making him want to sit down. He looked at his leather sandals with their thin soles and thought that if they had to run a lot it would aggravate his plantar fasciitis.
I probably won’t notice it, though,
he thought.
I’ll be too wired to feel anything.

             
He closed his eyes. The noises from the crowd and the mechanical whining from outside the garage door were giving him a headache. His heart was racing fast and his breaths were coming in and out at a quick pace. He didn’t even try to calm himself down; he knew that it would be impossible as he sat so close to the garage door.

             
He picked up his left hand and looked at the protrusion of bone where his radius had broken.
If I hadn’t have fallen…

             
He shook his head. It didn’t matter. He had fallen, and if he didn’t concentrate on what he was about to do, he would never get to see his daughters and Tessa again. He allowed his mind one lapse into the sweet memories of his last night at home. He imagined Tessa’s naked body snuggled up to his. He imagined reading to Maggie and Olive, both of them lying with their heads on his shoulder. He imagined watching Olive’s stomach rise and fall beneath her pajamas as she breathed—her belly protruding from having eaten so much.

             
“What are you smiling about?” Larry asked Baggs, tearing him away from these pleasant memories. Larry didn’t look good. He had grown even paler and he was developing a rash on his neck. Larry saw Baggs looking at this; “I always get a rash when I’m really nervous.” He smiled wanly. “What were you smiling about?” he asked again.

             
“I was thinking about my daughters and my wife.”

             
Larry nodded a little frantically—his eyes were big and glistening again, as though he was on the verge of tears. “Do you know what Spinks got in trouble for?”

             
Baggs was taken aback for a moment. Larry’s question seemed to be completely random, and he hadn’t responded to what Baggs had said.
He’s really scared,
Baggs thought, and decided to let the conversation go wherever Larry wanted it to. “Software graffiti is what I read. Although I’m not exactly sure what that means.” Baggs stole a glance at Spinks. She was seated against the wall, hugging her knees with her eyes closed, letting the noise from outside wash over her. Her pink hair stuck out from under her golden helmet.

             
“I’ll tell you what it means,” Larry breathed. His eyes were wide, he looked crazy.
He might be crazy.
“It means that she tried to destroy this whole system. She tried to press the RESTART button on our whole society. If she had, brother, you and I wouldn’t be in this mess.”

             
“What do you mean?”

             
Larry cackled, making Baggs feel uneasy again. The man was sweating profusely now. The mechanical noises from outside the garage door were a constant reminder that they were about to have to walk out onto the sand.
And face what? Robots? Dogs? Maybe they’re filling the arena with water, like they sometimes do, and we’ll be atop wooden boats. They could fill the water with crocodiles, or sharks, or alligators, or piranhas.
Baggs had heard of one Outlive contest where there were giant uncovered blenders whirring in circles around the Colosseum floor. The different teams pushed each other into these fast-moving, sharp blades.
God, please don’t let it be that. Or maybe there will be furnaces for us to push our opponents into, or giant pits in the floor with spikes reaching up from the bottom to impale whoever falls within.

             
“What I mean is that Spinks is one of the best hackers of all time.” Larry said. Baggs’s head snapped around to look at Larry and for a moment he was confused. He had been immersed in his thoughts about what could be behind the garage door and had forgotten that he was having a conversation.
Maybe I’m the one who’s cracking up,
he thought. He looked over at Spinks and remembered what they had been talking about. Larry went on. “The papers don’t give her credit for it, but if you know the right sites, people are talking about her. She’s a genius, man.”

             
Spinks’s bulbous nose was sucking in and then blowing out air. “So what did she do?” Baggs asked

             
“Remember what I told you about all those ‘ones’ and ‘zeros’ that say ‘this guy is rich’ and ‘this guy is poor?’”

             
“Yeah.”

             
“Well, she actually developed a computer program that could go in and delete all that stuff.” Larry smiled, but the expression did not reach his eyes, which kept flittering between Baggs and the garage door that led to the sand. “And she almost got it all entered, too. She was caught imputing the information at some government computer. She broke into a government building; I’m not sure, but I think it was a City Hall.”

             
Baggs was confused. “Why wouldn’t she just do it from a personal computer?”

             
Larry shook his head. “I don’t know, something about networks and stuff. But they say that she almost set off the worst computer virus in history. It would have wiped all banking data. Without any physical substance backing our money, who was rich and who was poor would have become hearsay.”

             
“She really got that close?” Baggs asked.

             
“Oh yeah. Everyone agrees that she could do it. She’s done other, smaller things like that before, such as ruining city elections or shutting off a neighborhood’s electricity supply.”

             
“Interesting,” Baggs said.

             
The mechanical sounds outside stopped, but the rock music continued to beat against the garage door like a thief trying to force entry.