The Games

by Ted Kosmatka

  DOWN IN the arena, the guard flinched.

  The old man’s voice came through his earpiece loud and clear.

  He brought the rifle up to his cheek but couldn’t make the barrel stand still. His arms shook, and a runnel of sweat ran into one eye, blearing away the vision. He wiped his eye with the flat of a hand and swung the barrel back around, trying to steady it. The gladiator was out now, clinging to the swaying web like something out of a child’s nightmare.

  “Shoot the damned thing now!” the voice screamed in his ear.

  The guard tried to hold the creature in his gun sight, but the dark shape kept moving; he saw people at the end of his gun.

  “You fucking idiot!” the voice came again. “Shoot the thing now. Now!”

  He pulled the trigger.

  The shot went high. Throngs of people had been pushing toward the exits, but now the crowd behind the gladiator parted in a new direction, and he tried not to imagine where that bullet had gone. What it had hit.

  The shining black creature turned toward him, fixing him with eyes like gray, iridescent headlights. Its leathery wings came loose from its back, stretching, and he recognized it suddenly for what it was.

  He felt his bladder loosen as warmth spread down his pant leg. His mother hadn’t raised any fools; he knew what he was looking at.

  The demon—that’s all it could be, after all—began to crawl toward him across the web, its mouth leering like a jack-o’-lantern.

  He pointed the rifle, squeezed again. The shot was wide, off to the left. He squeezed again, and again, and the tip of the gun was shaking so badly he didn’t know where the shots went. The crowd was screeching now. There are people behind it. People.

  The demon kept coming.

  He fired again and again. He backed up, and his legs smacked into the stands, spilling him into the front row. The gun clattered from his grip. Ten-thousand-dollar seats. I can’t afford these seats. He tried to get to his feet, but his legs jellied. The demon’s eyes bore into him as its leathery wings unfurled completely, lifting it into the air, thrusting it toward him with a single powerful flap. Coming at him. Eyes getting bigger.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he heard himself say.

  The demon’s jack-o’-lantern jaws came open.

  “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and—” He fumbled for the gun, found the stock, pulled it toward him.

  The eyes were huge now, streaking toward him.

  I’m going to die, he had time to know. And then he knew no more.

  THE STRENGTH went out of Silas’s legs, and he sat.

  The hotel room receded around him, but the TV commentator’s terrifled voice was clear as a bell in his head, “—descended into total chaos. People are running for the exits.”

  Silas closed his eyes, and the commentator continued, “The United States’s gladiator has gone on a rampage; dozens have been killed. I want to advise everyone that the evacuation needs to be orderly. Please, people are being trampled, so please evacuate in an orderly manner. We can all—” And then the announcer’s voice cut off as if he, too, had decided it was best to abandon his conspicuous post near the lip of the arena and head for the exits, order be damned.

  Or at least Silas hoped that’s what happened.

  On the screen, the gladiator swooped low over the fleeing crowd. Its huge wings gnashed at the air. People scrambled away in panic, climbing over one another, climbing over seats, knocking one another down. The camera followed the gladiator’s slow upward climb into the night sky. It crested the lip of the arena, banked to the left, flapping hard … and then the image changed, going to static. After two seconds, the static was replaced by commercials.

  For a moment his mind wouldn’t compute. For a span of several more seconds he simply stood, staring at the commercial without comprehension.

  Vidonia touched his arm, bringing him back, and when he looked down at her, there were tears in her eyes.

  “All those people,” she said.

  He collapsed onto the bed, rubbing the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, trying to push away the images that had collected there. It was like Tay all over again, only it was worse, somehow, because these people couldn’t have been expected to know what might happen. This had all started with Tay. The signs had been there, and they’d been ignored. That’s what really happened. There was blood on his hands. First Tay, and now the innocent people in the arena.

  “How many?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “They were all running. I saw people fall, and it was like the crowd just swallowed them up. I don’t know, Silas.”

  He looked up at the white ceiling—the plaster topography of some flash-frozen seascape, the surface of an alien world. A place far away from here.

  He felt her weight shift to the bed next to him. “What do we do?”

  Silas tried to think of an answer to that question, but none seemed right. No answer he came up with could help.

  Part of the problem was that now, looking back, the whole tragedy seemed so damned inevitable. It was as if it had been fated from the start, part of some larger plan that he couldn’t comprehend. His mind twisted with possibilities.

  “There is time,” he said.

  “Time for what?”

  He sat up suddenly. “We’re lucky we didn’t go to the party.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He turned toward her then, and said, “Everything centers on one person. All of this flows back to him.”

  “Baskov?”

  “No.”

  “Silas—”

  “Think about it for a minute. It’s obvious none of this happened by chance. The wings, the nocturnal vision, the teeth. They were all tools. It all fits now. It finally makes sense. What next? Where is that last piece?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Silas, a man who had inherited only tools from his father, understood perfectly well. He climbed to his feet. He felt as if he’d only touched the surface of some broad, cold sea. Did he really want to jump in? Did he really want to know?

  He began gathering his clothes from the floor.

  At that moment, on the dresser, his phone began to ring.

  The first of many times it would ring that night, he knew. He went to turn it off but checked the number first. His sister.

  He hit the button. “Hey, Ashley, I can’t tal—”

  “They went to the Games!” His sister shouted through the phone. She sounded hysterical.

  “What?”

  “Jeff and Eric. They went to Phoenix. They’re there. They’re at the Games!”

  “They’re not supposed to be here!”

  “I know.”

  “I told you not—”

  “And I told them, but he wanted to go so bad.”

  “Why didn’t you listen?”

  “They’d been planning it for months.… We thought you were just being paranoid.… We didn’t understand, thought it wouldn’t matter.”

  “Where are they?”

  “I don’t know, I keep calling and there’s no answer.” Ashley broke into sobs.

  “Listen, don’t panic. It’s going to be fine.” Silas made a writing motion to Vidonia, and she grabbed a pen off the dresser. “What’s Jeff’s number?”

  His sister rattled off the number while Silas repeated and Vidonia wrote.

  “Okay, listen, I’m sure they’re fine. I’ll get hold of them and make sure they’re safe. Just relax. I’ll get back to you as soon as they’re safe.”

  “Thank you, Silas.”

  “No problem. You’ll hear from me soon.”

  He slid his phone closed and turned to Vidonia. “We’ve got to get to the car.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The crowd. Police dogs strained against their leads. The protesters fought and kicked and bit and lost. Lost hope, lost teeth, lost eyes. Bled lives onto white concrete stairs.

  The police advanced, swinging nightsticks like black scythes, safe be
hind shields, behind badges of authority. They advanced through the screaming crowd, suffering few injuries while inflicting many. They were a soldiery.

  And the crowd did scream. Beaten to its knees. And its screams expanded until it seemed to come from everywhere at once, from all directions, impossibly loud and growing.

  A few confused police stopped swinging their slick clubs; and these few confused police turned and were lucky enough to see what was coming, though it wouldn’t matter, and their eyes grew large. There wasn’t enough time to shout a warning or to understand.

  And the arena doors crashed open behind them and howling thousands poured out, fleeing the arena, a surging mob that looked no different from the crowd already in the street—like reinforcements to the battle, and the startled police turned and swung, and were struck down and trampled where they stood. Were swallowed by the mob.

  BEN RAN down the sidewalk as quickly as his legs would carry him, dodging through the mass of people that still flowed away from the arena like shell-shocked refugees. Many of them were crying. Many of them were hurt, limping slowly through the chaos. And then there were the ones who didn’t move at all, dark shapes Ben saw on the ground, matted lumps of cloth, and he knew some of them were beyond hurting ever again.

  The rush of people was mostly past now. There was a sense that something horrible had just happened here, a dark tsunami that had crested and receded, left its high-water mark strewn with corpses. Ben was thankful he’d been all the way up in the skybox. He was thankful it had taken him so long to evacuate to the street.

  Sirens blared in the background as spotlights combed the night sky and crawled the surfaces of nearby buildings. There were no cops to be seen.

  Road traffic wasn’t jammed; it was parked, and EMTs rushed past him on foot, carrying their equipment in huge red tackle boxes.

  He thought of Silas and felt grateful, too, for his own relative anonymity, but then he remembered the interviews he had done and lowered his face from the gazes of people looking past him toward the arena. If someone recognized him, this crowd might tear him apart.

  He dialed Silas’s number on his phone but couldn’t get through. The cell towers were jammed with calls.

  He pushed through the rotating doors and into the lobby of the Grand Marq hotel. He sprinted full-tilt toward the elevators, and his slick-soled dress shoes sent him skidding into the wall hard enough to hurt his shoulder. He pressed number 67.

  The sudden quiet, the sudden sense of space after all that crush of people, was momentarily disorienting. He turned his head and saw all eyes were on him—the men behind the counter, the arguing couple near the doors, even the Asian family with the city map spread before them on a coffee table. He realized he was still panting.

  Very inconspicuous.

  The elevator dinged, and he stepped inside. It was thankfully empty.

  On the sixty-seventh floor he followed the carpet around the corner, forcing himself to walk, forcing himself even to smile at the older couple passing from the other direction.

  When he came to door 8757, he banged on it with his fist. “It’s Ben, open up.”

  Silence.

  “Open the door, Silas. It’s Ben.” Silence.

  “Shit.” He turned, looking down the empty hall, hands on his hips. Where would they be? There was no doubt they had seen what happened at the competition. But what would they do next? Where would they go?

  He started back down the hall just as the men rounded the corner. They were dressed in suits and ties, but there was no mistaking them for bankers. They were eight, walking two by two, and wore dark sunglasses. He didn’t know if they were some sort of tactical police unit or agents of some federal bureaucracy, but he knew their presence on this floor was no coincidence.

  Jesus, they were here for …

  One of the men in front looked down at a key card in his hand as he walked, and Ben had a strong feeling that number 8757 was stenciled across the face of it.

  Ben kept walking toward them, weighing his options. He considered averting his face as he had on the street, fiddling with his watch or taking a sudden interest in the artwork along the wall, but the hall was too narrow and there was no way to pull it off without being obvious about it—which would pretty much guarantee he’d broadcast: Notice me, right here, look, suspicious man. Instead, he decided to take the opposite approach.

  “How’s it going, fellas?” he called, while they were still a dozen steps away. He tried to put a subtle dollop of drink fuzz into his voice. “Did you guys hear about what just happened out there?”

  The men slowed, bottling up the corridor. Ben didn’t give them time to answer.

  “Jesus, I was watching the fights on my TV, and I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. Goddamn hope not to again. Shit, it was gruesome. Did you—”

  “What room are you in, sir?” The glasses were bottomless, not the kind you could still see the faint shadow of a person’s eyes through. These glasses were pitch, the darkness of deep space. Vacuum.

  “Room 8753,” Ben said.

  “Which side is it on?”

  Ben pointed left immediately. It was a guess. “You guys the cops or something?” He put a measured amount of alarm into his voice. “Hey, if John got busted for pills again, you guys are barking up the wrong tree. We got separate rooms, and I don’t do that shit anymore. You can search my room if you want to; I’ve got nothing to hide.”

  He started slowly back the way he had come, looking over his shoulder, stumbling a bit as he walked. “Don’t mind the mess, though. I haven’t cleaned in a while.”

  The agents pushed past him without a word, shoving him against the wall. When they got to Silas’s room, they didn’t bother knocking; the card opened the door, and they filed inside, closing the door behind them.

  Ben turned and sprinted toward the elevators.

  EVAN’S EYES peeled open as he sat up slowly. He stretched stiff arms and tried to push away the fogginess that muddled his thoughts. He’d been awake for nearly two days straight and must have fallen asleep in his chair. Outside the windows, night had fallen again, so he knew he’d been unconscious for several hours. His body still cried out for sleep.

  Something had awakened him.

  He glanced around the room, but nothing had changed. Fiber-optic cables still scribbled across the floor; the screen beneath the plug booth still stood gray and empty; the distant sound of rolling surf was still a gentle static in the speakers. But there had been another sound, hadn’t there? Something familiar.

  Evan watched the screen.

  “Papa?” came a voice.

  Evan jumped to his feet. “Pea, I’m here.”

  “—apa, is … at you?” The voice was barely audible over the crackle of interference.

  “Yes, it’s me.”

  “I can’t h … see … the light … ong.”

  “Come toward the light. Come closer!” Evan shouted. He moved toward the screen until his face was nearly touching the glass. He was looking deep, but there was only grayness, smooth and uniform.

  He waited, and for a terrible minute there was nothing.

  “Pea, are you there?” he called. “Can you hear me?”

  He waited.

  “Pea?” he shouted again at the top of his lungs.

  Then the voice came again, closer now. “Papa, where a … you?”

  “I’m in the light. Come to the light.”

  “It’s so bright.”

  “Come to me.”

  A shape moved on the screen, smoke on gray, a swirl that sharpened slowly into a form that moved hesitantly closer. Closer.

  “I still can’t see you, Papa.”

  “You won’t, not yet. Keep coming, Pea. I can see you now.”

  And then the shape resolved into a boy. He was shielding his eyes with his hand and squinting. The image was hazy and dim, but Evan could see the boy’s dark hair buffeting in a furious wind. It was as if he was moving against the force of a great storm
.

  “Closer, Pea.”

  The boy took a final step forward, and his image suddenly bloomed colors that faded again almost instantly. The colors came and went, a shifting kaleidoscope, as the boy moved closer. Then the wind was suddenly gone, and the boy’s dark hair settled back onto his shoulders. He took a deep breath, and when he spoke, his voice was startlingly crisp and clear. “Papa?”

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  “Where?”

  “You can’t see me, but I’m right next to you.

  The boy’s eyes searched for what he could not see. On the screen, he was only feet away. “Papa,” he said finally, “I’ve missed you.”

  Pea had grown taller in his time of isolation, and now stood at the far edge of boyhood. He could almost have passed for any typical thirteen-year-old that you might expect to see at a mall, or a park, or a game shop. Except for his eyes. They were hard and black as volcanic stone. And they were younger, somehow, than the face; they were baby’s eyes.

  “Why can’t I see you?”

  “We’re in different worlds. The interface isn’t complete yet; I didn’t want to blind you.”

  “You’re still in your world?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you can talk to me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going to leave me?”

  “I’m never going to leave you again. Ever.”

  The boy’s smile transformed his face into something too beautiful to look at with the naked eye. It was suddenly the face of a god-child, and Evan averted his gaze to save his sanity.

  “Tell me,” Evan said, adjusting the video equipment mounted above the screen. “What did you see at first?” He pointed the camera down toward the spot where Pea was standing.

  “Light too bright to look at, but now something else. Something that isn’t light at all.”

  “Shut your eyes, Pea.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m going to open my side of the mirror. I don’t know for sure what will happen.”

  “Will I see you?”

  “I think so.”

  “Do it.”

  Evan flipped the switch on the camera. There was a momentary flash of reflected light on the boy’s face. It faded. Pea opened his eyes.