The Games

by Ted Kosmatka

  “They’ve done something to the limbs,” Silas said.

  “I don’t recognize it.”

  “Yeah, me, either. They look … extended somehow. We may not be the only ones with a little independent engineering up our sleeves.”

  This creature didn’t have the awkward, disjointed appearance of most of the earlier contestants. It looked more natural. Nobody would confuse it with Mother Nature’s handiwork, but it was something you could imagine her giving a kind of begrudging approval to.

  By Silas’s estimation, the gladiator probably weighed more than two tons. More than twice the weight of the U.S. contestant. He silently hoped that extra mass would be enough.

  Feeling a squeeze in his hand, he looked over at Vidonia, but she was lost in the screen and didn’t realize how hard her grip had become. She sucked in her breath suddenly, and when he looked back at the TV, the United States door was rising.

  The bear-tiger reacted instantly, maneuvering off to the side. It settled onto its haunches fifteen yards away, coiled like a spring; Silas could see the cat in it moving to the forefront.

  The door continued its ascent, revealing nothing more than a growing rectangle of shadow. The grip on his hand tightened while the tone of the crowd lowered to a rumble, like the idle of a fast car.

  Something moved then, a shadow within the shadow, shiny black contrasted against flat emptiness, a color that was not merely the absence of light but something more. Something alive. The idling car of the crowd revved a notch.

  And then the gladiator simply stepped into view.

  There was a hesitation from the crowd before it reacted, a collective gasp of pulled-in breath.

  And then the crowd exploded.

  The cheer was deafening.

  The bear-tiger stayed in its crouch, eyeing this new strange beast. Silas supposed the upright stature of the U.S. contestant might have confused it. The stance was too human.

  The shiny black creature dropped to all fours and bounded toward the center of the arena, away from the bear-tiger, away from the security of the shadowy doorway. Its wings were folded tightly against its back like the carapace of some strange gargoyle beetle.

  Silas was barely aware of the commentator’s voice bleating wildly in the background. He supposed the voice had a right to be excited. But the man behind the voice hadn’t seen the creature with the goat, hadn’t seen it take the end of Silas’s finger. The man behind the voice hadn’t seen it with the training robot, or with Tay. He hadn’t seen anything yet.

  The crowd continued to cheer. The creature was like nothing they’d expected or imagined. Huge and dark and winged. Vaguely humanoid but massive.

  A fallen angel.

  Large gray eyes blinked against the harsh lights, looking up at the net that enclosed the fighting pit, then past it to the crowd. Now! Strike now, while it’s still adjusting to the lights. But the Chinese gladiator stayed back, watching, measuring. It had obviously been well trained and wouldn’t be pulled into the fight before it was ready.

  The U.S. gladiator did a slow pivot, turning toward the Chinese bear-tiger. The two creatures locked gazes, and for a moment, neither reacted. The Chinese contestant’s predation drive was out in the open now, exposed, naked. It had the thousand-yard stare of a big cat eyeing prey on the open savanna. The glare had weight to it, and an almost incandescent intensity. There was no anger or malice; it was the glint of hunger that shone in the bear-tiger’s eyes. It was the look of a predator making its living. No more, no less. Silas wasn’t sure what he saw in the other eyes, the gray eyes, but he was certain there was more than that. More than hunger.

  Something darker. Something angry.

  The U.S. gladiator howled then. The head reared back, fleshy snout peeling away from the strange double row of teeth, and it sang out high and strong. The sound reverberated in the expanse of the arena but soon drowned in the howl of the masses that rose to greet it, becoming just another voice in a sea of thousands. Then its mouth closed with a scissor snap, and when it locked eyes on the bear-tiger again, its pupils were sharp black ellipses. Muscles bunched beneath the dark shine of its hindquarters, gathering, gathering …

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The mob.

  Marchers shouted angry slogans as they moved through the streets. Cars waited through green lights. Television cameras rolled from the sidelines. The crowd attenuated as it approached the arena, became a line—the amoeboid mass grown suddenly filamentous.

  The men with bullhorns prodded the crowd forward. The bright lights of the arena rose above, merely blocks off now, a shape closing in the distance.

  Up ahead, the police stood their ground, drawing their own lines. Olympic steps rose at the officers’ backs.

  At the final turn, the head of the crowd stopped a hundred yards from the police. But the rest of the crowd filled in from behind, still coming on, like a climbing rope cut from some height, pooling in widening loops as it fell free, gathering strength—a hundred, two hundred, five hundred people. Until the crowd filled the intersection completely, blocking traffic here, too, in both directions.

  The two groups faced each other.

  The policemen stood firm, riot shields brandished in a clear plastic wall. A man in a crisp blue uniform lifted his own bullhorn.

  “BE ADVISED, YOU WILL VACATE THE AREA IMMEDIATELY,” the policeman said. “IT IS UNLAWFUL FOR YOU TO ASSEMBLE HERE.”

  The proclamation was met with taunts and shouts, voices in the throng: “Fuck you, pig!”

  A different bullhorn answered from the crowd in a clear, calm voice: “WE ARE GATHERED PEACEABLY.”

  “YOU ARE OBSTRUCTING TRAFFIC,” the police responded. It was a police sergeant who had answered. A man with bars on his shoulder, to accompany the chip. A man who did not like being called a pig.

  “THIS IS A LAWFUL DEMONSTRATION OF PROTEST.”

  “NO, YOU ARE IN VIOLATION OF LOCAL TRAFFIC ORDINANCES.”

  “WE ARE EXERCISING OUR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO FREEDOM OF ASSEMBLY.”

  There was a pause, then a response from the sergeant, spoken softly but amplified greatly, “Not on my fucking roads.”

  There was resolution in that voice. It was the voice of a man who had made a decision.

  From behind the police lines, another voice was handed the bullhorn. “YOU WILL DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY. ANYBODY WHO DOES NOT DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY WILL BE ARRESTED.”

  “WE WILL NOT DISPERSE.”

  The crowd tightened, becoming hard where it had been soft, becoming sharp where it had been dull.

  “YOU HAVE THIRTY SECONDS.”

  The seconds ticked away as if there had ever been a choice.

  The police sergeant looked at his watch. He nodded to his captains, so they took note that he’d given the crowd reasonable warning.

  From behind the line of police, a howl went up from the arena, a building of voices like cheers, or screams. The sergeant heard the roar of the crowd but did not turn. He wondered, vaguely, what might be happening there. He gave the signal, and the noise was drowned by the explosion of teargas canisters.

  The protesters screamed in rage and fear. Teargas billowed across the crowd. Some of those at the periphery began to flee, but for those in the center, there was no place to go, only swaying bodies all around, the clench of lungs, self-preservation. They lifted their protest signs as ridiculous talismans—or it was their fists, or their bullhorns, that they raised, choking on the gas, eyes streaming.

  The police charged, swinging nightsticks. The two groups collided in a mash of blood and bone.

  “GOD,” SILAS whispered.

  The dark shine of tensed flesh, glossy black shadow. The bear-tiger circled the crouching American gladiator. Silas had seen that crouch before. On the day that Tay died.

  Vidonia’s hand reached for his as they watched the screen.

  The dark gladiator’s ears folded back against its long skull. Muscles spring-coiled, legs back-bent, gathering …

 
And then it struck.

  And the bear-tiger sprang to meet it.

  Once when Silas was a boy, he’d seen two trucks hit head-on in a rainstorm. Two big trucks, one of them a four-by-four. They’d come together in the middle of an intersection while he was sitting at a red light with his mother. They’d had front-row seats for the event. The enormity of the impact, the sound, the sheer power released, had left him unable to speak, unable to breathe while the wreckage spun across the wet pavement in a tumbling wave of shrapnel.

  It was like that for him again when the gladiators collided, that same feeling of breathlessness, that same sense of enormity, of impact. And shrapnel, too, bright red, that spun away wetly, clumping in the sawdust.

  When the beasts disengaged, the U.S. gladiator twirled away, still easy on its feet but missing a crescent of ear. Those big ears are a liability, he heard Baskov saying to him all those months ago. The bear-tiger was slower now. A great peel of flesh dangled from its shoulder, exposing red muscle above stark white clavicle. It wasn’t a mortal wound, but it would sap the beast’s strength. Blood turned the floor to soup.

  The U.S. gladiator wasted no time. It circled, coming in from behind. But the bear-tiger spun with it, keeping its frontal arsenal of fangs and claws pointed toward the U.S. combatant. The shadow kept circling, around and around, wearing a path in the sawdust. The beartiger turned with it, spinning in place. The seconds turned into a minute. The minute into two. Death had patience tonight. It didn’t want to lose its other ear.

  The blackness reversed abruptly in its circular path. The bear-tiger spun onward only a second more before reacting, but it was a second too long.

  They met in a flurry, the impact of giants.

  The bear-tiger was only a few degrees off balance, but yellow fur parted, a roar of pain, and the blackness came away with a chunk of flesh in its jaws.

  Enraged, the bear-tiger dropped into a crouch, hissing and spitting, and again the shadow circled, waiting for its opening.

  The blackness gulped down the chunk of bloody meat and opened its jaws wide again and snapped them shut.

  The crowd cheered and stomped its feet.

  The blackness pounced.

  This time, they battled across the floor for only a moment, but when they separated, the bear-tiger was in two parts, loosely connected. One part still breathed, and focused its eyes, and moved to match fronts with its circling killer. The other part lay in a steaming pile of rubbery loops that dragged along behind, picking up huge cakes of sawdust. Perhaps still digesting its last meal.

  The Chinese contestant was dying now. But it had been a vigorous thing, overflowing with life, and it took minutes more to drain that life to the floor. The dark gladiator stayed just beyond reach, always moving, wearing it down in a slow orbit.

  The end came like the crack of a whip, a snap of movement, black shine. It was too quick to follow with the naked eye. The blackness sprang. Blood spurted to the sawdust—the beast’s head torn away in a dark flash of movement, trailing a short segment of spinal column behind it as it spun away. When the beast’s corpse finally stopped twitching, the creature Silas had once called Felix reared its head back and howled again.

  And how the crowd answered.

  The commentator’s voice was a screech in Silas’s ear.

  Slowly, the gladiator’s mouth closed and its head came down. Two plumes of sawdust swirled away as its wings snapped open, rising to meet in a point high above its head. Its knees bent—if you could call them knees—and its face turned upward again.

  With a powerful flex, its wings thrust downward, propelling the gladiator into the air. It flapped twice, muscular contractions like heartbeats, then slammed into the net. The engineering supervisor was right; the lines didn’t give an inch. But the gladiator didn’t fall away, either. It clung.

  Silas jerked to his feet.

  Its wings slammed shut against its back as it hung upside down by hands and feet. Opening its mouth wide, it carefully moved into position. The mouth closed over a line, but only softly at first, as it threaded the wire toward the back, toward the deeper set of teeth.

  “No,” Silas whispered.

  The jaws worked, muscle bulging all the way across the top of its head. Almost like a row of wire cutters, Vidonia had said.

  There was a loud pinging sound, then the line snapped away like a broken guitar string.

  “Holy fuck,” Vidonia said.

  The gladiator changed its position slightly and wrapped its mouth around another wire. Another ping. A hole was forming.

  Silas knew suddenly what he was looking at. The end of everything. The abyss.

  The men with icing cannons sprinted along the rim of the arena, lugging the heavy equipment on their shoulders, trying to get into a position to fire.

  The men stopped. One of them aimed, fired. But the cloud of ice dissipated twenty-five feet short of the gladiator. On the opposite side of the arena, another of the men let loose a stream of ice, but it, too, wafted harmlessly down through the netting. A third man fired, but by then Silas could tell it was a lost cause. The gladiator was too close to the center of the net. The icers wouldn’t reach. His eyes searched the periphery for the gleam of chrome that he’d noticed earlier.

  “Shoot the rifle,” he yelled at the screen.

  But the movements of the guard in the chrome helmet were disjointed, first carrying him in one direction, then the other. At one moment he held his rifle high against his chest; at the next, it was forgotten and pointed at his feet. He stopped, raised the gun, then lowered it again, looking around in confusion at the sea of nervous faces.

  Another ping. Three wires broken.

  Beside him, Vidonia whispered, “This can’t be happening.”

  The gladiator stuck its head through the opening.

  And now, finally, the crowd reacted.

  People fled their seats en masse, piling in a human crush toward the exits. Screams filled the arena, drowning out the voice of the commentator asking for calm. The aisles and doorways clogged, becoming impassable, crushing death traps, and people clambered upward over rows of seats in their effort to get away.

  The arena was in panic.

  Clinging to the net, the creature shifted.

  The hole was still too small to admit the wide girth of the gladiator’s shoulders. Its head pulled back beneath the mesh, moving to wrap its mouth around a fourth wire. A fourth ping.

  “Shoot it, goddamn you!” Silas screamed. “Shoot it, shoot it, shoot it!”

  “DON’T SHOOT,” Baskov was yelling into the radio transmitter in his hand. “I repeat, do not shoot until I give the order.” People in the skybox stared at him, but he no longer cared. Things had gotten way out of hand, true. There was no covering it up now. But he didn’t want that idiot guard getting an itchy trigger finger and destroying their investment. Too much was riding on this. If the gladiator was killed, there would be no second round, no medal, no victory; the biosynthetic portion of the Olympics would move to a different country of venue during the next games, taking all those billions of investment dollars along with it. That would not do. Losing was not an option. Baskov still had full confidence that a nonlethal method of containment could be employed. Their gladiator had to live to fight in the finals, after all.

  “Tell those icers to crawl out on the web,” he spoke into his two-way. “Have them move within range.”

  The chrome helmet stopped bobbing.

  “Tell them, damn it!”

  And then the guard in the chrome helmet was running along the walkway at the edge of the arena. He stopped at the nearest man with an ice cannon strapped to his back. Baskov hit the zoom on the window, and the face beneath the chrome expanded on the surface of the glass. The face was young, more boy than man, really, and Baskov guessed him to be nineteen or twenty. The jaw worked up and down as he explained what Baskov wanted. The old man didn’t need to hear the young guard’s voice to know he was scared shitless.

  The gla
diator was still hanging upside down by its hands and feet, but it was moving now, repositioning itself at a different angle to the hole.

  “Hurry the fuck up,” Baskov yelled into the radio.

  The young guard jumped at the voice in his ear and then pointed out along the net. The man with the icer on his back took a long look toward the beast hanging under the mesh before nodding his understanding. He tightened the straps of his pack and stepped up on the ledge. Getting to his knees, he leaned forward and grasped the netting with both hands. Then he moved his weight out on the wires and began to inch forward toward the center, toward the creature, one hand at a time. One knee at a time.

  On the opposite side of the arena, the other icers saw what he was doing and followed suit, stepping up to the ledge, then carefully out onto the mesh.

  At first the gladiator took little notice of the men inching toward it, but as they began to close the distance, it must have felt their vibrations in the wires. The dark head pivoted around to look at them. It blinked twice, and then it placed its mouth gently on another cable.

  Faster, c’mon, Baskov thought. Faster.

  The first icer was halfway across now, nearly within range. He quickened his pace as if sensing the urgency.

  Black jaws clenched, bulging. Another ping, this time followed by the rasp of wire against wire. The entire structure shook and then began slowly to sag.

  The hole in the center of the net expanded as the meshwork of cables separated. Lines pulled apart. The gladiator swung along the underside like a spider whose web had broken one too many strands—like a creature that had been designed to climb along just such a web. The wires bobbed and jumped with the weight of its passing, throwing the icers loose and sending them screaming to the floor forty feet below. They struck the floor with snapping thuds, their screams cut off, throwing up clouds of sawdust.

  The gladiator reached through the hole, pulling up and out. First its arms, then its wings and torso, and finally its legs.

  It was free.

  Baskov’s eyes went wide. “Shoot it!” Baskov yelled into the radio. “Shoot the damned thing now!”