The Tournament Trilogy

by B. B. Griffith

  He held his gun in his hand as he might present a sword, its flat edge balanced on his open palm. He contemplated it for several moments as shadow chased the sun down the mountain to the sound of wind rushing about the leaves of the trees.

  He slowly grasped the gun around its handle and rested his finger lightly upon the trigger.

  “In order to understand this business, we must feel the worst of it. On our terms. Only then can we know fully what we go into.”

  Obata turned to Fuse, who eased his gaze from the gun to his captain’s face. He squared his shoulders and set his hands loosely in his lap.

  “Fuse, do you trust me?” Obata asked, his voice just above a whisper.

  Tenri Fuse bowed theatrically, sweeping the ground from his sitting position. “I do,” he said.

  “Will you follow me? Even into darkness?”

  Fuse bowed again.

  In a single fluid motion, Obata leveled his 9mm at Fuse’s left shoulder. Fuse had only enough time to slightly raise his thin eyebrows before Obata fired. The noise startled the mountain around them; birds nearby took flight in the sulfur aftermath, their shrill caws joining the clapping echo. Fuse lay prone. He was groaning, his long, manicured fingers draped over his right shoulder, tapping it gently as if probing for a puncture, although there was none.

  “Sit up,” Obata said.

  Slowly, Fuse sat up, grappling at the spongy moss like a climber seeking purchase. He had gone very pale and was whimpering. Every movement seemed to grind an invisible set of steel teeth further into his shoulders. He sat slumped, head down, as if he wanted to nuzzle up against his wound. Jinbo was torn between watching his colleague and grabbing his own guns.

  “We must feel the spreading effects of the diode first hand,” Obata said, his voice flat as he watched his partner suffer.

  “The pain will spread, followed by a numbness that will eventually take you under. But fight against it as long as you can. Slow your breathing. Clear your mind.”

  He turned to Jinbo and saw that he was reaching for his weapons.

  “I won’t shoot you, Jinbo,” Obata said, setting his gun back on the stump and sighing. He had hoped by now to have Jinbo’s full trust. The boy was eccentric, probably had been ridiculed in the past. Trust was a long time coming with one such as him.

  “If you allow him to, I want Fuse to do it,” Obata said.

  Jinbo looked at Fuse and pinched his lips. The sight of a well poised man brought so low was almost revolting for Jinbo, although it was Fuse himself that looked about to be ill.

  “No one is forcing you to do anything. As you can see, he is in no shape to overpower you.”

  Jinbo shook his head, not in answer to Obata, but at the situation as a whole. Obata had given Jinbo a choice, but Jinbo knew a refusal irreparably harmed his standing in the group. He watched Fuse try to work moisture back into his mouth while taking deep, haggard breaths.

  Obata looked at Jinbo for a moment more and then, turning to Fuse, gave a single sharp nod. Fuse reached for his gun on the stump, hissed as a violent cramp wracked his left shoulder and upper chest, then moved a good deal slower to finally grab it. He dragged it heavily off of the stump and dropped it to the ground before he could hoist it up again to a position leveled at Jinbo’s left shoulder. Obata turned to Jinbo once more, awaiting answer. Jinbo leaned his head back and away, fluttering his eyelashes slightly in anticipation. He whined, but nodded.

  Fuse took a deep breath, sighted, and fired.

  Jinbo too was slammed back, but he caught himself with his left palm briefly before a shooting pain collapsed him in an awkward, turned about position. He held his forehead to the cool lichen floor and uttered a stream of epithets. Despite everything he heard about the tearing, raw, nerves-exposed pain of getting hit by a diode, he was in no way prepared for the actuality of it. His mouth watered heavily in anticipation of vomiting, and then just as suddenly went dry as he realized that already the locus of the pain was slowly expanding. His shoulder felt horribly warm as well, as if blood now saturated his shirt.

  “Now,” Obata said, “You will shoot me.”

  As his wits returned and he once again placed himself in the little clearing in the woods on the mountainside of Toyama, Jinbo grabbed his own gun, unsure if he was going to shoot out of anger or obedience. For the first time in his life he seriously regretted choosing weapons of such weight and size. At first he thought he could use his dominant hand regardless of the wound, but the gun dropped to the floor like a rock. He switched to his right hand to bring it up and to sight it at his captain’s shoulder.

  The gun fired with such a loud cannonade that all was a muted ringing for several seconds afterwards. When it cleared Obata still sat upright, but his dark eyes were glossy.

  “Now we wait,” he said, his voice hoarse.

  The three men said very little over the course of the next several hours as the pain spread across their bodies like a smoldering brush line. The rending burn was followed by a dead cold. Near the end, Fuse began to lilt his head forward against his will. Then he fell over. Minutes later Jinbo panicked under an onslaught of numbness-induced claustrophobia, then he crumpled like a hobbled deer. Last of all was Obata. He watched his colleagues lie motionless for almost fifteen minutes more before he too went under. His head tilted forward and his chin pressed against his chest.

  When all three men were out, the monk came back up the trail, walking lightly and bobbing about like a man on a summer stroll. He seemed not at all surprised. He methodically picked each man up, one at a time, and effortlessly draped each over his shoulder like a bag of rice. He moved each back down the trail and placed them in front of the large out-jutting rock that hid his house and gardens from view. Once all three were lying against it, their heads flopped on their shoulders, their arms lying palm up on the ground like a strange assortment of rag-dolls, he stepped back and cocked his head as if admiring a painting. Then he hopped up the trail and back into his grounds beyond.

  When the Tournament medevac helicopter chopped its way through the skies above twenty minutes later, the medics dropped into the foliage to find all three still sitting peacefully against the rock, faces blank. A small cleanup team circled the surrounding area but found nothing more than an immaculate sand-garden and what looked to be an old, abandoned sake bar.

  So it was, five years ago, that Team Red initiated themselves into the organization that would become their life’s blood.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  THE MEXICANS WERE ON the run, and Alex Auldborne’s patience was wearing thin. He knew it was the natural progression of things; They would have to blow through Team White before they could then meet up with Northern, provided Northern and his crew got past the Japanese. But he was already thinking beyond White. The ultimate victory would ring hollow if it didn’t at some point involve walking over Northern’s face.

  The Bludgeon Blackout was a new term in Tournament vernacular, developed during the last cycle, and one that Auldborne and his team were intimately familiar with. In every previous Tournament cycle, every team member brought down was done for with a diode. And until Blue faced Grey in the last Tournament, everyone assumed that was how it would continue to be done. But on that day, the two teams had run out of ammunition. With every bullet spent and two members on each team still standing, something had to be done. Northern had thrown himself upon Auldborne like a whole pack of wolves, and Auldborne had learned, to his detriment, that a gun butt to the temple can count a player just as dead as a diode to the face.

  Auldborne was never fooled twice. Not only did he intend to break Blue; he intended to do it with style and flair. Perhaps add a new term of his own to the annals of the Tournament. He was determined that the Yank’s humiliation at his hands go down in history.

  In the meantime, however, he had to catch these goddamn Mexicans. He had no idea that they could be so fast. He and Christina and Draden landed three days ago in Puebla, just about one hundred kilometers so
utheast of Mexico City, and had been chasing them north ever since. Auldborne hated Mexico. It was entirely too hot. Nobody from England ever went to Mexico. When the English vacationed they went to Brighton, where it was only marginally warmer than London on a good day. In November it would be a comfortable ten degrees Celsius there, perfect weather for a greatcoat and a strong gin. Here, however, over a thousand kilometers northwest in the city of Teocaltiche, a name that Auldborne refused even to try to pronounce, it had to be at least twenty-five degrees Celsius—in November! Ridiculous! But he was too hot even to work up any anger.

  Auldborne wiped the moisture off his brow with a hand-kerchief and tucked it back into the breast pocket of his wilting button-down shirt. He’d decided to ditch his jacket, tailored linen though it was, three towns back. His shoulder holster was blatantly displayed now, but he no longer cared. He’d found that the ratty beggar children were less prone to approach him when they saw the gun.

  Christina bitched constantly about the heat, ignored everyone who talked to her outside of the team, and refused to touch anything she didn’t absolutely have to touch. She walked around with a look of perpetual disgust, as if there were was a rotting stench at every turn. Only Draden Tate seemed unaffected; he spent most of the time glowering at everything, especially the cheap map they’d purchased.

  The drill went as follows: A member of Team Grey administration would phone them with coordinates of the area in which White had last been seen. Auldborne had no idea how they found these, nor did he care, as long as they continued to find them. Once they had the coordinates, Draden would place them on a map, convene with Auldborne and Stoke, and the three of them would calculate how best to get where they had to go in the shortest time possible.

  They had already been through several odd towns, if they could indeed be called towns, and they had already experienced too much of the local flavor. One day of this traipsing about was all it took for Auldborne to become thoroughly convinced that Mexico was the armpit of its particular hemisphere. Thankfully the natives seemed not to understand the horror in which they lived and breathed. If they did, he’d no doubt there would be some sort of uprising.

  They were forced to go inside a bar to ask for directions in a ramshackle little town called San Miguel El Alto. Apparently, the roads in Mexico were not always reliable—often they were not named, and in some cases they simply disappeared. They were looking for a specific passage out of the city that allowed for them to go through the foothills to the north instead of around them. The car that they rented (and that they intended to leave in a ditch at the earliest convenient opportunity) was overheating again, and they needed water anyway; might as well ask how the hell to get out of there at the same time.

  Everything was going nicely in the bar: Auldborne was doing all the talking as per usual while Draden stood by the door, shimmering in the heat like a big block of black lacquered wood. Then one of the men touched Christina. Whether this was intentional or not didn’t matter. Auldborne heard a sound like a piece of paper ripping and turned just in time to see a man scream and fall from his stool onto the dirty wooden floor.

  “Oh my,” Alex said with understated surprise. “What did he do to you?”

  Christina screamed at the man lying on the floor bunched up in a ball.

  “You prick! You absolute sodding prick! Don’t ever touch me. Ever!”

  She spat at him as he struggled to sit up, and spat at him again as he took his hand away from his face and Auldborne saw that Christina had split open the cornea of his right eye. The man looked as though he was weeping blood. Auldborne glanced at Tate.

  “Everythin’ okay?” Tate asked.

  “Not for this gentleman,” Auldborne smiled. “Seems to have had his eye on the wrong woman. Taking it rather hard though, isn’t he?”

  Auldborne looked down at the writhing man and cocked his head like a curious animal. Christina, sickened by the very air she breathed, hurried past Draden and outside. She paced the wood planked deck and seethed.

  “There you are,” Auldborne soothed the man. “See? It’s nothing. Nothing a friendly patch can’t fix. You’ll look like a pirate! It might even serve you well here,” he said, looking about the bar distastefully at the smattering of horrified patrons.

  That was how they left the sleepy little town of San Miguel el Alto.

  Even Draden Tate, a man who usually kept his anger at bay until a time of his own choosing, was feeling the monotony. In Tepic, three days into the chase, he lost his cool. He was standing on the dust sidewalk outside of the car and discussing further coordinates with their administration when two men walked out of a nearby building and one of them made a comment in his general direction. Tate had no idea what they were saying, or indeed if it even was in reference to him, but it was too late. A combination of things set him off, most notably that the car was overheating again, and that Diego Vega and his team seemed to be gaining ground ahead of them.

  He paused his phone conversation and eyed the men as they walked past. Then he covered the receiver almost daintily, as if to spare Administration the indignity, and blew up at them.

  “Whatchu lookin’ at man? Keep fuckin’ walkin’ if you know what’s good for ya.” The two men couldn’t have been more surprised if the car itself had just bellowed at them. After a moment, one of them chuckled nervously. Tate snuffed loudly and curled his lip, set the phone gingerly on the hood of the car, and took out his .45 just as Alex Auldborne exited the building in front of them.

  “No shooting, Draden,” Auldborne said as if idly commenting on the weather. He continued to the passenger’s side of the vehicle, took the phone from the roof, and sat inside the car.

  Draden spat hard, a habit recently acquired from Christina, who watched the incident unfold from the back seat with a smirking grin. The men were still rooted to the earth in shock when Draden flipped his gun around and slammed it onto the top of each of their heads once like it was a carnival game. As both collapsed, Draden returned to the car and sat in the driver’s side.

  “What was that all about?” Auldborne asked.

  “Just practicin’,” he said, looking directly ahead as he started the car and pulled it out into the street. Christina laughed from behind him.

  “This isn’t working,” Auldborne said, scanning the twisted brush and bits of trash on the shoulder of the road as if he might find Diego Vega hidden within them.

  “Goddamn Mexicans! If we keep this up, we’ll all be in Canada before long. Give me the map,” he said, motioning for it with his hand. “And the phone. I need Admin to do some digging.”

  Alex smoothed the map out on his knees. “We won’t catch them—that’s clear. And since we can’t catch them, we’ll have to draw them back down to us. It’s very simple, really. Turn around, Draden.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  IT WAS FOUR DAYS before any of them could walk unassisted. Before that, the Noel triplets were, for all intents and purposes, dead to the world.

  An adrenal concoction tapped into their veins took each out of the diode coma, but it didn’t immediately revive them. Tournament Medical advised against forcing consciousness upon fallen players, reasoning that increased mobility risked damaging already bruised organs. Also, the players were spared the pain when asleep. Conversely, Medical refused to prolong the unconscious state once a player awoke naturally, although many begged for it.

  Dominique Noel, the striker, was the first to regain movement, having sustained only two shots to his person, one to the stomach and one to the right front quadrant of the top of his head, both from Eddie Mazaryk’s weapon. Although the stomach shot pained him the most with a continual nausea on par with the worst depths of the stomach flu, it was the headshot that most worried the doctors. The electrical stimulation inflicted by a diode occasionally interfered with the brain’s natural electrical synapse. Thus far, only severe headaches and minor vision impairment had been noted as serious side effects of a direct head shot, but Tournamen
t doctors worldwide were of the almost unanimous opinion that the true extent of the damage could be far worse.

  Yves Noel, the captain, was the second to awaken, with pain a good deal more considerable than his youngest brother’s. He had sustained a direct shot to the neck, and two shots to the small of his lower back, courtesy of Ales Radomir. The shot to his neck caused severe tracheal bruising. It would be almost a week before Yves could eat anything solid and a month before he wasn’t reminded of his wound every time he swallowed. The shots to the lower back welted his skin to a crushed grape color and induced random and debilitating back spasms for weeks. The ripping pain could drive him to the floor, frozen stiff, as if tiny shards of metal were coursing through his spinal fluid. Sometimes they would last for the better part of an hour before vanishing as quickly as they hit.

  But by far the worst off was Tristan, the sweeper. The shot to the shoulder had left a fist-sized green and brown bruise with an angry red eye in its middle, but what had finished him was when Eddie Mazaryk fired three point blank shots into a single spot on his head, right where the skull met the neck. When his two brothers were finally able to shuffle about under supervision, they would move to and from Tristan’s bedside where he lay unconscious, attached to a ventilator. Its hissing, the methodical beeping of the monitor, and the bulbous and erratic movements of his lidded eyes were the only indications of life about him. He never twitched, and he looked pale to the point of translucence. The Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital’s Tournament neurosurgeon stated flatly, in the way that only surgeons can, that Tristan might never wake up, and warned that if he did there would most likely be some irreparable damage to his motor functions.

  But he did wake up. Ten days after Yves, and a full two weeks after the battle at Frieze nightclub, he opened his eyes, shut them again, opened them once more, declared in a raspy voice that he was blind, and then threw up on his bedding.