The Games

by Ted Kosmatka

  The gladiator was dead.

  Like Silas, it was reduced to little more than an arm dangling from a mass of flesh. That, too, seemed fitting. She couldn’t tell where the head used to be. She wanted to find the eye and gouge it out. She wanted to taste its blood, carve out its heart. At that moment, nothing was too gruesome. After a moment more, she realized she wanted only to walk away.

  She was tired. But there was still so much for her to do. In the distance, the city was still dark; something had happened to the power again, and not just at the lab. She knew there would be no one coming for quite a while. They had other problems to deal with. Besides, how would they even know? Had some alarm been tripped? Without power, she doubted it. No, nobody was coming.

  Very carefully, she picked her way through the hole the car had made in the wall and moved inside the building. The air was thick with dust. Lab benches lay strewn about the floor, their contents reduced to puddles and shards of glass. She looked around but didn’t recognize the room. She’d worked in this building for months, but everything looked different now in the darkness. She could not connect what she knew of this place with what she was now looking at. They were part of different universes.

  Stepping over the larger pieces of glass as she crossed the room, she barely felt the chemical burns to the bottoms of her bare feet. She swung the door open and stepped into the hall. As she walked, she slowed occasionally to look at the nameplates on the doors. It was too dark to decipher the writing, but when she found one about the right size, she ran her fingers across the raised letters. She was running on autopilot. She continued on, checking the next two doors in the same way. When she found the room she was looking for, she went inside.

  The mass spectrometer sat in the far corner before a bank of computers. She followed the copper tubing to the tanks chained neatly inside their safety rails. The windows in the room let the moonlight in, and she could read the sign over the tanks: Dangerous, Highly Flammable. The mass spectrometers used hydrogen.

  She unchained the hook and pushed the tank over. The copper tubing snapped, and she quickly turned the nozzle off. It was too heavy to carry, so she rolled it instead, using her feet to guide it down the long, dark hall.

  When she finally got back to the shattered room, the tank made submarine pinging noises as it rolled across the remaining fragments of cinder block. It came to a stop at the pile of debris near the car.

  She bent and very carefully backed the nozzle off until she heard the soft hiss of the tank. Then she gave it a quarter-turn in the opposite direction, resealing it. She stood. The floor was already covered in spilled, fuming chemicals that made her eyes water, but in the corner, she found two bottles of stoddard solvent and monomethlyamine. She unscrewed the cap of solvent and made a trail down the hall, pouring the liquid, moving deeper into the building. When the bottle was empty, she dropped it to the floor and unscrewed the other cap. She poured the contents out on the floor in a broad pool and then walked back to the room. Her head swam with the fumes. She almost fell once, but something told her that if she fell to the puddled floor, she would never get up.

  She stumbled against the broken nose of the car and slipped across something wet and sticky. She didn’t look to see what it was. The car still rumbled and popped, the electric motor still racing.

  She moved around to the hole in the wall and stuck her face through for a deep breath. She breathed. A minute passed. Her head cleared slightly, and she bent back toward the hydrogen tank. She turned the nozzle until the hiss came again, then she stood and moved quickly out through the hole. The wet grass stung the bottoms of her feet as she walked back toward Silas’s body. She dropped to her knees. The world drifted away. She was happy to let it go.

  The explosion, when it came, was far worse than she had anticipated.

  The shock wave knocked her on her stomach, and the car cart-wheeled past her on the right. Flames shot high into the air.

  When the heat became too much, she faced the choice of leaving Silas’s side or being cooked alive. She relinquished her spot and rolled away through the steaming grass. She went several dozen yards before collapsing. She reached for a piece of twisted metal wreckage lying nearby and pulled it toward her. She lifted it and crawled into the cool wetness underneath. The lab burned high into the dark sky, and after a long while, the world went away again.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Vidonia sat in the glare of the equatorial sun. She looked out at the shimmering blue Pacific as it slapped at the crowded beach.

  A gentle offshore breeze tousled her short hair and cooled the little dots of perspiration as they welled up on her skin. Over the last few years the sun had pushed her complexion past golden and into a deep, warm brown. She liked it; darker skin was so much less forgiving of her scars. She wanted them to show.

  She finally gave up on the novel she was holding and let it slip from her fingers and drop to the sand. The bookmark tumbled out of place, but she barely noticed. She’d already left the story behind. She’d never open the book again.

  The truth was that she’d been having trouble maintaining interest in any book; it had been a long time since she’d been able to immerse herself wholly in a context of somebody else’s manufacture. So much in her had changed. She missed the escape of make-believe stories, but a person can’t always decide what parts of themselves they shed. It was the price of new skin. A new life.

  She twirled the straw in her Coke and melting ice and took a long sip. Her eyes moved to the sound of splashing. “Samuel,” she called out.

  The boy’s head snapped around. He was big for four years, already taller than the six-year-old cousin he was wrestling with in the waves. It seemed she was always buying pants for him because his legs were too long.

  “Not so far out,” she called.

  “Se faz favor, Mae,” he replied.

  “No.”

  Such a big boy. She watched him roughhousing in the surf. The sun shone off his wet skin. Since he’d started school, he’d taken to speaking Portuguese more and more often at home. The other children were influencing him. Sometimes this worried her. Other times it was a comfort. He was a smart boy, the teachers said. He could be anything he put his mind to. She wondered, And what would that be?

  Vidonia saw her sister approaching across the waterline with her new boyfriend’s arm thrown over her shoulder. Paulo, she thought his name was. But it didn’t particularly matter; the names, like the boyfriends themselves, were interchangeable set pieces; they came and went like the cycles of the moon, and this one would be gone in a few weeks. They were always gone in a few weeks. He was short, dark, and muscular, with wavy hair combed straight back from his forehead in the newest style of the local connected men. He wore a white T-shirt with cutoff sleeves to show his arms. She knew he thought it made him look tough, that T-shirt, and she supposed it did. He looked like what he was; and that was something, at least. It was the ones who didn’t that scared her. The ones who looked nothing at all like what they were. And sometimes her sister’s boyfriends were that kind, too.

  Paulo bent and scooped water into his hands. He flung it at Vidonia’s sister, who ran away, screaming and laughing. Paulo chased.

  He was even attractive in his own way, Vidonia decided. Very much like her father, she suspected. Another local connected man from a generation ago.

  She waved a greeting. They waved back, both of them smiling. In all their time apart, her sister had not changed a bit. She was still like their mother. The trick was not hating her for it. She needed. The men provided. Perhaps there was nothing so terrible in that. And she was raising her own son well. Vidonia clung to that. Motherhood was the remaining commonality that bound their lives back together.

  The splashing came again, and she called out, “Samuel, I said not so deep.”

  The boy turned and waded back toward the shallows, dragging his older cousin behind him like a knapsack. Samuel peeled the boy’s arms from around his shoulders and threw him i
nto the swell of an oncoming wave. The boy was up in an instant, splashing and wrestling in a salty spray of foam.

  Vidonia shook her head slowly, smiling. Boys will be boys. She knew she should keep him out of the water altogether, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. He enjoyed the sea. Vidonia resigned herself to another trip to the doctor in a few days.

  Samuel was prone to ear infections. She’d had tubes put in his ears last year, and that seemed to help, but water still played havoc with his internal piping. As she watched him, she was certain he understood the trade he was making today, a day at the beach for a night of pain.

  It seemed lately that he’d decided to just live with the pain. You could get used to almost anything if you put your mind to it. Bad ears. Bad tubes. It would get better when he was older, or it wouldn’t.

  She’d stayed in America long enough for him to be born. She wanted him to have that citizenship available to him. Later, he could do what he wanted with it. Parents give their children opportunities. What the children do with the opportunities is up to them.

  But the United States wasn’t what it had been. It was hard to guess where Samuel’s future lay. So much changed after the Olympic debacle and the nuclear disaster. Millions died in the initial blast. Millions more in the civil unrest that followed. Parts of the southwestern United States went without electrical power for months. And for a long time after that, in some places, it was too expensive for many households to afford.

  It seemed at the time there was more than enough blame to go around: the scientists, the government, the big companies that ran both. The infrastructure that had been built up over the last half-century collapsed like a house of cards when popular support crumbled beneath it. A radical shift advanced across the political landscape like a second nuclear wind, laying waste to the old guard and depositing a new. But then it was revealed that many of the new guard, those new, fresh faces, had the same old allegiances—and so that second wind had to keep blowing. And blowing. People wanted change. In colleges and universities across the country, civil unrest fomented, institutionalizing itself, becoming its own product. Radical influence grew, and the reactionaries did what they do best—and took things a step too far.

  A special session of Congress was called, and the laws governing genetic engineering were changed almost overnight. Advancement didn’t grind to a halt, exactly, but it did slow to a reasonable crawl. Draconian licensing practices were also instituted for all research into artificial intelligence and VR computers.

  Vidonia thought this last precaution was perhaps the most unnecessary. There would never be another Evan Chandler. There would never be another Pea.

  The gladiator event, of course, was discontinued entirely and permanently. It would never again be a part of the Games. It now resided only in the history books, a sad and bloody chapter.

  “Samuel, Rão, come in. It’s time to eat.”

  Samuel ran, high-stepping through the waves just ahead of his cousin, and hopped across the hot sand to Vidonia’s blanket. The boys knocked sand loose from their feet.

  “Not on the blanket,” Vidonia said.

  They sat, and she pulled the sandwiches out of the cooler and handed one to each boy. They ate like starving men, and she knew better than to blame it on a day spent in the water; Samuel ate like a horse anytime, when given half a chance. But she could still count his ribs. Not so with Rão. He was squat and plump, and kept his bones well insulated from the world.

  “Can we get back in after we eat?” Samuel asked. He’d already learned his chances were better when he asked for something in English.

  “I’ve got a class to teach in an hour. Sorry, boys.”

  They moaned in unison. But the sandwiches continued their disappearing acts.

  Samuel made a face as he finished the last bite. He stuck his tongue out, spitting. “Sand in my teeth,” he explained. His sharp cheekbones and high-ridged nose gave him a fierce, angular appearance, but he was still handsome in the way of rough, healthy boys. She sometimes wondered how he might look in a dozen years. His face was a mixture of familiar features, combined into something new and his alone. The long body, though, that was a thing he’d inherited whole and complete.

  Vidonia hadn’t listed a father on the birth certificate. She’d endured the looks of the nurses and checked the box for “unknown” paternity. It wasn’t such an uncommon thing. A lie easily perpetrated. The world wasn’t ready to hear that Silas Williams had a son. Perhaps it never would be. So much death was associated with that name now. Rightly or wrongly, in the public’s eyes that name carried a portion of the responsibility for what had happened. But she’d made sure that wasn’t a burden Samuel would have to carry.

  And she’d also made sure that Samuel knew his father had been a good man, even if the boy didn’t know his real name. Even if he never knew it.

  And she made sure the boy knew his mother loved him. In the end, she hoped that was enough.

  EPILOGUE

  The man in the white lab coat lowered his eye to the scanner and let the laser turn the world red. He blinked reflexively against the sting, and the scanner beeped. “Please try again.” He almost always blinked on the first attempt.

  He stood and rubbed his eye, then lowered his face back to the scanner, concentrating. This time he stared into the red beam without blinking. Or tried to.

  “Please try again.”

  He gritted his teeth. He lowered his eye to the scanner, and through force of will kept his eye open. A musical tone sounded, and the door unlocked. “Access approved. Stanley Mueller, you may enter.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  He stepped in via the steel door frame and nodded to the armed guard sitting at the desk on the other side. He followed the corridor deeper into the building. The halls were empty, white, cold. His hard-soled shoes made clicking noises on the gray tile. He pushed a steel cart in front of him. One of the wheels squeaked as he rounded a corner.

  At the end of the hall, Stanley pushed open the thick double doors. He stepped into the nursery chamber, and the lights came on automatically. He donned a sterile mask and gloves. He put on the white smock and tied it behind his back. Then he backed through the doors and entered the inner incubator.

  It was hot and bright and humid.

  Stanley’s purpose today was to draw more blood. He checked the vial seals, unclipped the syringe, then inserted the tip of the needle. The organism lay silent through the procedure. It was small, shiny, black. Information about the creature was need-to-know, but Stanley was no idiot. He knew what he was looking at, even after all these years. The differences were significant—the wings were vestigial, the feet twisted into little shovels. The teeth were small and fine, and pointed out of the head in different directions. But the similarities were also significant. It looked like the gladiator in the old news clips, only smaller and twisted. It was a stunted thing—a distortion—but there was no mistaking what it truly was. There was no mistaking it for anything else.

  It had been more than five years since the Helix lab fire, but as far as he could find, nobody had heard of this organism’s existence before six months ago. It had come out of nowhere. This perhaps was not so surprising, considering that, officially, it still did not exist. But he’d heard rumors. He’d heard the thing had crawled out of the bushes that had grown up around the abandoned Helix site. In another version, he heard the thing had been found by a groundskeeper, or something like that, in the ruins of the lab itself.

  They were likely rumors. Exactly the kind of likely and believable rumors that will often seep into the void created by an absence of fact. There was no reason to think either rumor might be true … other than the idea that the creature had to come from somewhere. The rumors provided at least possible, if not plausible, explanations. But sometimes even made-up stories happened to get it right.

  Regardless of where it came from or how it came to be in the lab, the fact remained that it was a fascinating biological
specimen.

  The creature almost never ate, and another team was still working on how that was possible. It was dormant, comatose.

  “Hibernating,” one team had called it. But most creatures did not hibernate at 95 degrees.

  There was much he didn’t know. But he was the blood man. That was his territory. And the blood had its own story to tell. The blood, it turned out, was emphatic.

  He’d tested it several times now.

  The organism in front of him was a living, breathing gamete—a step in the life cycle that functions with only a single set of genes. It was haploid—no different, genetically, from either a sperm or an egg.

  Everything had changed in the last five years. So much had been lost. The new, young scientists freshly minted from the genetics schools were now faced with an odd situation: the golden age had passed them by. Gods no longer walked the earth.

  Specialists had tried to reconfigure what had happened after the fire. But everything was lost. The blood and tissue samples were burned to nothing. Helix Labs had been an isolated, centralized unit. Everything was kept on-site, with very little outsourced to other labs. When the place burned to the ground, everything had burned with it. All its secrets. All but this one.

  The top scientists in the country had been working for the last six months to unravel the complexity found within the little black-skinned organism that lay before him now. They’d done CAT scans and X rays and genotyping, and as of yet, the attempt had been a complete failure. The results explained nothing. The thing was a relic from a past golden age. A reminder of greatness lost, like the Pyramids of Egypt.

  The organism carried more gene sequences in its haploid configuration than most species did as diploids. It had more genes than it could ever use. It was a vessel.

  When the blood vial was full, he snapped the seal closed and placed the vial in a plastic container. He loaded up his cart and wheeled it out of the incubator. He shut the door. He took off his smock and his gloves and his mask. And then he turned and walked away.