The Tournament Trilogy

by B. B. Griffith

  “I have no idea,” said Max. “For a month now I’ve been trying to figure it out, but I can’t. Two high school kids and—well, and you, Cy. I can’t see it. But the good news is that I don’t have to see it. That’s not my job. My job is to prepare you regardless. Try to keep you alive.”

  “About that,” said Tom, “those two dying in the water, that was just a onetime thing, right? I mean, there are precautions now and whatnot. They’ve figured out what went wrong there, right?”

  Max’s face darkened. “Not yet.”

  Max got up and walked a fair distance away and looked like he might just keep going down the street until he paused and turned around. He put his free hand in the pocket of his coat and took out what seemed a standard bullet. He tossed it at Ellie, who bobbled it for a second, but caught hold. “That right there is like nothing you’ve ever seen or heard of. It can kill you, but will never... should never, let you die. The tool of your trade.”

  Ellie held it up to the light and gave all three of them a look at it. The tip shone dull red in the winter sunlight. Then she remembered she was in public and brought it close to her, looking about guardedly. Cy reached for it and she passed it off to him like it was a precious marble.

  “It’s a bullet,” Tom said.

  “Wrong. A bullet is lead encased in steel, packed with gunpowder. Hammer taps primer, powder explodes, lead flies out. That is a diode. Still has the gunpowder, still has the jacket, but no lump of lead. Instead you basically have a little delivery device.”

  “And what does it deliver?” Cy asked.

  “It delivers pain. Slowly.”

  “So it’s a bullet,” Tom said, raising his voice slightly.

  “How about I shoot you in one arm with a bullet, and in the other with a diode. Then have you report back to us on what happens.”

  “Can it go through clothing?” Ellie asked, cutting them off.

  “Yes. It can cut through fabric and it will do damage to wood and plastics, although it won’t go through them. It reacts to changes in electrical current on skin, like a touch screen. When it hits skin, it breaks apart, but not before it breaks the skin. It affects your blood.” Max puffed a mini explosion with his own fingers over his heart. “It breaks on your skin, and gets into your blood. Travels with it and shuts down your body as it goes. It’s meant to create the feeling of bleeding out. You get dizzy, cold. Nauseous and weak. Then you... you sort of fall asleep. Your heart still beats, slowly, and you can still breathe, but that’s about it.”

  “Jesus,” Tom said.

  Ellie turned to him. “What were you expecting, Tom? Laser tag?”

  “Then what?” Cy asked. “After the sleep part. You come back, right?”

  “The Tournament has people trained to find you wherever you are. They pick you up and carry you out and once you’re under monitoring they give you an adrenal shot. It takes you out of the diode coma, but it won’t wake you up. It’s up to you to bring yourself fully back.”

  “And then we’re okay, right?” Tom asked. “The adrenal sets us right again?”

  “Sets you right? All I can say is that it brings you back. But trust me, when they bring you back there is only one thing you’re going to be thinking, and it’s that you wish they never bothered.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  PYPER HURLEY SAT AT her father’s small dinner table and held her head in her hands. Daniel Hurley’s house was as silent as a cellar. Daniel himself was out, again. He made himself increasingly scarce, often taking Bailey with him on walks, or to the grocery, or just driving around. Anything that took him away. Pyper couldn’t blame him. He was a peaceful man, simple, happy with his garden and his woodshed and a square supper every night with his youngest daughter. Pyper knew she had brought violence and pain into his home. It was a sick ward now. Nobody likes to be in a sick ward.

  She stood, a little too quickly, as she heard the door to Kayla’s room softly close. She placed her hands on the worn wood of the table to steady herself and waited for the flashes behind her eyes to dissipate. When she opened them again, Dr. Baxter Walcott had paused in the darkened hallway and was studying her. He had grayed over the past three months, and his rumpled traveling suit hung from his shoulders. A pair of thin, wire-framed eyeglasses perched low on his nose, and he clutched his black bag with both hands. He shook his head in answer to Pyper’s unasked question.

  Pyper sat down again and dropped her head. Walcott approached the table and sat next to her, placing his bag gently on the floor.

  “Against my better judgment I administered a second adrenal shot. We’ve never tried to force consciousness upon a player before, but I’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s Tournament Medical policy to bring them from the diode coma to a sleep state, then allow them to come back naturally, but she’s been out way too long. The drips aren’t helping. She’s withering away. I had to try.”

  “And?” Pyper asked, although she already knew.

  “Nothing. A minor uptick in heart rate. Slight fluttering of the eyes, but then a return to this stasis she seems stuck in.” There was a quiet, sandpaper rasp of a sound as Walcott ran his hand over the stubble on his face. His eyes were distant and unfocused, as if he sought for a solution in the silence around them, but it eluded him here as well. Then he pulled Pyper’s attention to him with the uniquely sallow gaze that only a doctor can effect, and only when he must say what he dreads to say.

  “Her breathing is more shallow by the day. Her heartbeat irregular. It’s as if her body is slowly suffocating. Her blood cells are losing their ability to hold oxygen.”

  Pyper closed her eyes.

  “She’s shutting down, Pyper.”

  “There has to be something? Anything?”

  “A full transfusion would immediately kill her. All you can do for her now is try to make her comfortable. And contact her family,” he added. His words hung in the air like sandbag weights slowly pulling the curtain down with them.

  “We are her family.”

  “No mother or father?”

  “She was a foster child. A hellacious one, too.” Pyper smiled sadly. “The Tournament watched over her. Put her through University. She has the heart of a lion. Of a whole nation. She can’t just... it’s not in her to quit. We thought about holding her back against Black, but she wouldn’t have it. Ian wanted her out of the round. I told him no, that she’d be gutted to hear him talk like that. I let her fight.”

  “Her willpower is all that’s keeping her. She may not want to quit, but her body certainly does. The bottom line is that the medical reality of the Tournament can break even the strongest of wills. She isn’t the first to succumb to this organization, and she won’t be the last.”

  Pyper was numb. Her face was slack and her eyes drooped, their whites glinting in the darkness.

  “This is going to destroy Ian. He’s in a... a bad way himself.”

  “Diode hits?”

  “No, something else. There’s a creeping blackness about him.”

  “There’s a bit of a darkness about everyone these days. But if you can get a hold of him, I’d tell him to come in if he wants to say goodbye.”

  “How long?” Pyper whispered.

  “A week, maybe. Maybe less.”

  “Maybe more?”

  Baxter paused. “I would not give her much more than a week,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m sorry.”

  “My God. What a mess.”

  “I don’t mean to shift focus here, or take any attention away from Kayla, but I have to say that unless you stop this, all of this, you’ll end up exactly like her. You and Ian and all of you, every last player.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yes, Pyper. I do. More than anyone, save perhaps that young woman in there.”

  “You said everyone reacts differently.”

  “Different paths to the same grave. Unless you stop, unless you get out, you will have to pay. That’s all there is to it.”

 
Pyper let out a strange sound that Walcott at first took for a quiet sob, but he soon realized was a soft laugh.

  “You think this is funny? The diode kills as surely as a bullet... it just drags death out longer and makes it more painful. Why are each of you so deaf to this? I helped develop this system, and that is on my head forever, but you, you can get out of this whole mess. Damage has already been done, but if you stop now, you might live through your fifties, Pyper. Get to see your little sister grow up?”

  Pyper quieted herself and Walcott saw that her eyes told the true story; tears were streaming down her face. She’d broken through and was openly crying. He looked away, out the window at the moon hanging over the street. Occasionally, a car passed, and Walcott wondered what it might be like to be oblivious to the trauma that seemed to weigh down the entire house and all within it... simply passing by instead. Pyper steadied herself, wiped her eyes with the heel of her hands and then dried them on her jeans. She took two shuddering breaths, and when she spoke, her voice was level again.

  “We all know it’s going to kill us. Anyone who has been shot by a diode could tell you that. But look around you, doctor. The world is awake now. They know our faces. Our names. They know what we’ve done.” She leaned in closer to Dr. Walcott, who watched her with a worried and wary eye. “And they love it.”

  She leaned back heavily in her chair and held up her hands as if giving the whole of herself to the sky. “They love it. And what’s funny is that you think we ever could stop this, even if we wanted to.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  FRANK WAS LYING DOWN on the floor of his bedroom back in his shared duplex in Colorado Springs. His head turned to the side, and his cheek pressed to the coarse carpet. He saw only the darkness under his twin bed, like looking down a tunnel at night.

  He wiggled his jaw about because the pressure on his head was slowly increasing, as if a bag draped over him was being filled with sand. Heavier and heavier it became, and soon he squirmed about for freedom, but his head was locked down as if in a vice. He could see a glint of red light in the far corner, like the fell eye of some childhood beast, and it crept towards him. He struggled now, but could do nothing to move himself, and his terror rose with the pressure. He felt the floor giving way beneath him even as the eye came closer, and he half hoped it would collapse before it reached him. The eye emerged from beneath his bed and revealed itself not as some creature, but as a diode. The diode: the one he’d first been given a lifetime ago by Dr. Baxter Walcott himself. It was rolling towards him with the sound of a bowling ball, closer and closer, until it tapped him softly upon the nose. Then the floor of his dreams fell out.

  His fall was brief and he landed sitting primly in his desk chair back at Barringer Insurance. He looked about and saw the same trash bin filled with the same old leads in the Beauchamp file. The same outdated, corporate issued calendar sat upon his metal shelving, with little to accompany it. The old surroundings brought about a Pavlovian moment of terror in which he looked at his door, panicked that his coworkers had seen him fall from the sky, and that his old boss, Winston Pickett, was on his way to speak to him. Then the pressure returned, slow and creeping, pressing upon his head again, and with it the surety that Pickett was walking his way, past the copier, past the water cooler, past the coffee machine, turning the corner, almost at his door. Frank’s head became heavy and he bowed it, slumping his shoulders and dropping deeper into his chair. He crumpled towards his desk as he heard the door to his office creak open.

  “Fraaaaaank,” Pickett said, his usual drawl strung out far too long, until his name became simply a sound, and then a whisper, and Frank knew, in that way one is sure only in dreams, that Pickett was no longer Pickett, but someone else, something else. Something serpentine.

  With unimaginable effort Frank hitched his head a fraction and was able to see out of the corner of his eye. There stood a young man, small, with near boyish stature. He was dressed in black, and his long hair was neatly pulled back from his pale, delicate face. Frank knew him immediately, although he’d never met him, and he saw the red diode descend gently like a snowflake from the ceiling until it landed upon the man, and then settled into him and replaced his eye with a red glow that simultaneously grew and darkened until it was black. Then it flashed with the soundlessness of an underwater explosion, and with the flash his dream was shattered.

  ————

  Frank awoke in a ditch, his cheek pressed to the snowy grit, his head pounding. In the distance he heard the fading sound of a truck’s blaring horn. For several seconds he had no idea where he was, or where he’d been. He forced himself to breathe calmly as pieces of their night at the rally came back to him. Struggling, he rolled himself over on his back, and stared at the gray sky. He blinked as large flakes of snow drifted slowly, almost luxuriously down upon his face, and the final moments of his dream came back to him. He shot up to sitting position. He immediately regretted it.

  His vision didn’t spin, not exactly... it was more like the ditch he’d found himself in bucked back and forth, as if it was a tiny dinghy and he was trying to center all two hundred and thirty pounds of himself astride it. He stepped about for a bit like he was wearing moon boots, then pitched over onto his face in the snow bank. When he gathered enough of his wits to lift himself up a bit, he saw that the left half of the snow bank where he’d landed was dribbled red. He flopped about to a sitting position and closed his eyes. His last waking memories crept back with the slow, measured steps of a large spider.

  He’d been shot. In the head. With a diode.

  He gingerly felt at his left temple. When he touched the fringes of a loose flap of skin, he snapped his hand back. He saw blood tracked down his collar and the oily sheen of blood on the black fabric of his jacket. He unzipped his coat: a few dollops had run down his neck and soaked through his old oxford button up. A wave of nausea hit him and it lingered. When he could open his eyes again, he looked about.

  The ditch was on the side of a one lane expressway. The scenery was sparse. Frank thought he could make out some sort of civilization in the far distance, but squinting moved his skin flap and cracked open the scabbing causing it to trickle afresh, so he stopped looking. He saw where he’d been lying—or where he’d been thrown, from the looks of it, since there were no tracks leading from the road.

  The snow was picking up and the sky was a weighty grey. He guessed it was late afternoon. If he wanted to live through the night, he needed to get indoors.

  But did he want to keep on, really? Bits of his dream kept returning like pages of a manuscript dropping upon each other. Was his time with the Tournament over? He thought of Pickett, lurking behind him like a beast, waiting for him to turn around and beg for his life, for his old job back, for his pittance of a paycheck, barely enough to keep the lights on in his duplex and a half of a tank of gas in his car. Just enough to drive to insurance claims. Forever.

  Frank shivered harder. There were things worse than death.

  The nausea again crested, and this time Frank spit up and made his mark in the snow around his feet. The jolting stung his brain and he had to take several deep breaths to bring himself back from the ledge again. And this was what it felt like without being polarized, he thought. Just the blunt impact of the damn things. Frank reminded himself to stick to the detective side of the Tournament.

  When he regained himself a piece of fluttering fabric down the way caught his eye. The movement was brief, but it reflected strongly even in the stormy half-light. Frank knew what it was. Lock wore the type of ultra-expensive, poly-blend runner’s gear that reflected madly from every angle in just that way. One of his straps or pockets had caught the wind, but there was no other movement from behind the snow bank. Frank wasn’t sure he wanted to get up and go look, but knew he’d have to eventually.

  The last he remembered of Lock, he was pleading with that golem of a man, Goran Brander, who’d instantly turned on them. He remembered Lock shouting something, and
the choking pressure of a gun in the pit of his throat, then a deafening roar. Then the curtain dropped on him. Exit stage left. Open on Scene Two: The Roadside Ditch.

  Frank rocked himself standing and planted there for several moments, hands on his hips, as if surveying his ditch kingdom. He could see Lock, now. He was splayed on the ground in a spot-on impression of the walking man that blinked at crosswalks. Even from a distance Frank could see that his forehead was a mess.

  “Lock?” he asked sheepishly.

  He slowly made his way to him, watching his chest for any rising and falling, but Lock was too bundled up to tell. His signature messenger bag lay next to him, neat and undisturbed.

  “Hey,” Frank said, standing over him. He was afraid if he got down to Lock’s level, he might not get up again. “You all right, buddy?”

  No answer.

  Frank tapped him on the back with his shoe. “Hey. Lock.” He shuffled around to his front. “Oof. That forehead looks pretty bad. We gotta get you patched up. And me patched up. Lock. Buddy, you alive in there?”

  The wind picked up again and a sheet of sideways snow pattered against his back.

  “Nope,” Frank said, shaking his head. “Uhn uh. You are not dead, Lock. You understand me?” He jabbed the toe of his clunky shoe into Lock’s chest, and then nearly had a heart attack when Lock shot up screaming. Frank scurried back blindly until he hit the far wall of the ditch. Lock screamed some more as he looked around, then his voice petered out like a dud firework and he stared at Frank Youngsmith like Frank had been turned inside out.