The Tournament Trilogy

by B. B. Griffith

  “Christ, man!” Frank croaked, hand over his heart.

  “Where are we?!”

  “A ditch!”

  “What happened?!”

  “I think we got kicked out of the party! Why are we yelling?”

  “Oh my God, my head.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Brander shot me! That... that scum sucking... of all the... he cheated! You can’t shoot me. I’m a courier. You, you’re different! But me?”

  “Gee, thanks Allen. My guess is he’s not too torn up about it.”

  “I’m gonna throw up.”

  “Go ahead. I already did.”

  “It’s probably a concussion. They told me it was one of the symptoms of a point blank head shot, but I really didn’t believe it could be like this.” Lock leaned left and spit several times but held his stomach together. After a span of staring at the ground, he looked up and found Frank again. “We’re not even dosed.” He pointed at his tattered forehead. “Without the bad stuff in our blood it’s still like this.”

  “Well, it’s a paintball gun on crack. It’s gonna hurt when it hits.”

  After gingerly touching his forehead, Lock seemed to remember something and patted at his chest, then winced. His finger found a small hole in his clothing there, and he unzipped his jacket and his liner in a flurry of movement. He saw a hole in his undershirt about the size of a quarter; it was ringed in red and through it he could clearly see mottled flesh. Lock sucked through his teeth and thought about pulling his shirt up to check further, but decided against it.

  “Oh,” Frank said. “Sorry. I kind of poked you there. To wake you up.”

  Lock hooked his bag with his foot and pulled it to him. He popped it open and looked inside, then zipped it up again. He looked down at himself and eased a tiny piece of a shattered diode from the fabric of his shirt. He held the glittering bit of ceramic up in the failing light. Then he gazed up at Frank, squinting.

  “Why didn’t they kill us?” he asked.

  “Maybe they didn’t think we were worth it,” Frank said. “Maybe they just wanted to see if this was enough to scare us off.”

  “Is it?”

  Frank stood silently as snow swirled around in the hollow. He thought again of his dream and of the life that wasn’t so far behind him still, a life of rolling over whenever anyone asked. Then he’d followed the diode down the rabbit hole and things had changed. Just because that hole had turned out to be deeper than he’d ever imagined anything could be, and just because he’d snagged himself on a few roots here and there on his way down, didn’t mean it was time for him to wake up just yet.

  “Hell no,” he said flatly. “Believe it or not, Lock,” he pointed at his swollen temple, “this is about all I’ve got going for me at the moment.”

  Lock smiled. Frank had never seen the courier smile, and so he ended up smiling himself, and then the two of them were grinning like idiots in the middle of a storm on the side of a road on the outskirts of Moscow. Frank was about to laugh until he noticed Lock had snapped back to his usual, constipated look and had already pushed himself standing.

  “You know why I think they didn’t kill us?” he asked, taking a woolen beanie cap from one of his many pockets. “I think they want us here.”

  “I must have missed the part where they said ‘Welcome to Russia, Comrades!’ Was that after they shot me in the head?”

  Lock winced as he put the cap on, easing it over his forehead last, tapping his teeth together in pain. Then he presented himself to Frank.

  “Can you tell?”

  “What? That your forehead looks like a sausage? No. Although you look like you might pass out.”

  Lock waved him off. “With Mazaryk you’ve got to think sideways. Everything he does has a purpose, an economy. He wastes nothing.” After steadying himself, Lock boosted up on the snow bank and looked up and down the empty highway.

  “So he meant to put us in this charming place?”

  “I know this highway,” Lock said, shielding his eyes from the snow. “I’ve taken it before. It’s part of an old system of Soviet roads that runs between Moscow and St. Petersburg. They all have blue mile markers. See?”

  Frank could barely see a blob of blue in the distance. He was still trying to wrap his head around their deliberate deposit into a ditch. He turned back to where he’d been thrown, the blood already covered by a thin layer of snow.

  “Do you have a hat?” Lock asked.

  “No. Why?”

  “Because the left side of your forehead is sort of... hanging. You’re gonna need to cover that up, and wash the blood off your cheek.”

  “You’re not thinking of going back there, are you? To Brander and Ales? I was thinking we keep looking for Mazaryk. Not go back to those two and get our asses kicked open again.”

  “These old Kremlin roads,” Lock continued, oblivious, “they can only run one way at a time. They’re too narrow. The traffic flow switches on the season. In winter, they run towards Moscow.”

  “Lock, let’s just think about this—”

  “They’re the same person, Frank. The three of them. That’s the thing about Black. They thought we rose above our station, walking into that rally like we were immune. We’re not. They wanted to teach us that, and they did. But if they’d wanted us dead, we’d be dead. If they wanted us out of Russia, we’d be out. Eddie Mazaryk knows that I know about the Kremlin roads. He knows this runs back to Moscow.”

  “So...

  “So clean yourself up and stick out your thumb. It’s time to see what Mazaryk really wants us to see.”

  Chapter Twenty

  DR. BAXTER WALCOTT SET his eyeglasses upon his desk and turned as the three were led into his office. Behind them, like a proud father, walked Greer Nichols. They stopped in a line, each still with a bewildered expression, as if they might find their own pillow around the next corner and awaken in their beds. He could see within them something powerful, even as they eyed everything warily, something like a fuse. There was potential in them, but it was unfocused, like scattered gunpowder.

  The captain, Northern, already had an air of invulnerability. Like the big brother you never worried about; you just took it for granted that he would always be there with his wry smile.

  The woman, Nicole Hix, looked uncannily like a slightly older version of his own daughter, Sarah. Strong and pretty, with an easy, sure stance and a fistful of honey-blonde hair bunched up over a hooded sweatshirt. But this girl was observant; you could see it in her eyes. If Sarah was five years older and ten years more mature, she might look like this one.

  The third man, Max, looked uncomfortable, like he’d swallowed a pill and was waiting for the effects. His brow was furrowed and he stood with arms limply crossed, but Walcott noted that he eyed him directly while the others still panned the room.

  “So,” Walcott said. “These are they.”

  “This is Blue,” said Greer.

  They all looked so young.

  ————

  Walcott waited uneasily.

  He’d been brought deep into the recesses of St. Luke’s Hospital in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where he was shown into a brand new Tournament Medical wing and told that they’d be arriving shortly. The equipment was pristine, hardly a smudge on it: an EKG unit, blood sampling kits and a platelet centrifuge were plunked haphazardly in the center of the room along with a sleek next-generation PolaRead device even Walcott hadn’t seen before. At the far wall, three dressed beds with wall-mounted IV delivery systems and darkened heart monitors waited ominously. Several boxes and a filing cabinet looked to have been hastily pushed up against one wall to free up space. Walcott guessed that this had been a large storage room up until a day or two ago.

  On a counter near the centrifuge sat a red briefcase marked with the ubiquitous T, and secured with an external electronic lock the size of a fist. Walcott took off his eyeglasses and rubbed his eyes.

  This cannot be happening again.

 
; He sat on a stool in the corner, as if trying to blend into the wall. Indeed, his pallor was as grey as drywall, and he looked so drawn that it seemed his thin glasses weighed him down. He sat like this for nearly an hour, left to ponder dark thoughts of the long slow decline he’d just come from in Ireland. Kayla had been a wisp when he’d left. He wondered if she still lived.

  When there was finally a knock on the door he didn’t get up. Instead, he watched warily as Max Haulden brought them in. Two men and one woman again, same as last time, but even younger looking, if that was possible. They looked fearful, even more fearful than the last Blue team that had walked into his own office in California five years ago. Walcott thought that might not be such a bad thing.

  “Max,” Walcott said, nodding. “Is Greer too busy to condemn them himself?”

  “They’ve been given to me to train.”

  “I see. Then you told them? About what happened?”

  “I left out the specifics.”

  “Then allow me. He told you he’s the last surviving member of his team, yes? But did he tell you that when Medical found him he was unconscious, his nose and arm broken, with his shoulder swinging in the breeze?”

  “Walcott, not now—”

  “Because there’s more than one way to die in this game.”

  “Walcott!” Max snapped, and then calmed himself with a deep breath. “Just give them the shot, please.”

  Walcott closed his eyes and slouched. “You can’t expect me to give these kids this curse, this... disease, without letting them know the full of it. I never thought I’d have to bring in a new class.”

  “Of course I can. It’s not a curse, it’s a cure. That shot is their ticket out of the trenches, just like it was for me, and for every player.”

  “It’s their ticket out, all right.”

  “If you don’t do it, someone else will,” Max said simply. “But it’s your formula, and someone else might screw it up.”

  “My formula,” Walcott muttered. “Put that on my tombstone, will you?”

  “The shots, Walcott.”

  Walcott heaved a big breath, disproportionate to his thin frame, but he nonetheless moved to the red briefcase. He pulled a large ring of keys from his lab coat and flipped through them until he found one that could be inserted into the top of the lock, which slid out a keypad and a thumbprint screen. He keyed in a code with a series of beeps and pressed his thumb to the pad at the same time. It opened with a soft chime to reveal a plastic sleeve covered in blaring yellow hazard symbols. He held this up to the trio, which had all three gone slightly green. Tom Elrey, in particular, looked as though he’d stumbled into a morgue.

  “Looks inviting, doesn’t it?”

  Max rolled his eyes.

  “This,” Walcott said, “is what killed Northern and Hix.”

  Max started to speak again, but was interrupted. “—and Kayla MacQuillan, of Green.”

  This gave Max pause. “...What?”

  “Yes. She’s as good as gone. They brought me in to try and save her. To do anything. But once this is inside of you, there’s nothing we can do to get it out. Do you understand me? It’s like removing dye from water.” He panned the three. Cy Bell was looking at the floor, shaking his head. Good, he thought. If I can stop just one... it wouldn’t make up for the three lost, but it would be worth something.

  “They made their choice,” Max said softly. “Nikkie, and Northern and Kayla. And while they lived, they tasted freedom the likes of which nobody but we will ever know.”

  “And I’ve made mine,” said Ellie. She stepped forward, to everyone’s surprise. She looked grim, but her eyes shone with cold resolve. “I respect your position, Dr. Walcott. You look like you’ve wrestled with demons long enough, so don’t take on mine. This is my decision. Give me the goddamn shot.”

  The room stilled as she rolled up her sleeve. Walcott watched her over the rims of his glasses. He eyed the closed door, as if contemplating running, or perhaps whisking her away himself. Max seemed to read his thoughts.

  “She was chosen, Baxter. She’ll get the shot here, or elsewhere. It’s a matter of time, but time is precious now.”

  Walcott looked at the sleeve of serum, unblinking, until his eyes began to water. At least, that was what Ellie hoped was happening. Either way, he cracked the seal and pulled out the first dose.

  “So it begins again,” he said softly. Ellie let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding. When Walcott looked up at her, his gaze was flat. All business.

  “You’re too hot,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The effectiveness of the serum depends upon an even spread throughout the body. The quicker the diffusion, the more accurate the polarization, and the more accurate the diode reaction. It spreads better throughout a body that is at the lower threshold of normal temperature.”

  “You lost me.”

  “When you get hit by a diode, it replicates a bullet wound.”

  “Right.”

  “If you want it to replicate accurately no matter where you’re hit, you need the serum to spread evenly throughout your body. Some of the early adopters reported extreme pain at the injection site, or were debilitated when shot even in the hand or foot. We studied the reactions and concluded that the colder you are, the more even the spread.” Walcott primed the inoculation, squirting a tiny stream into the air.

  “So... what?”

  “So get under the shower.” He shrugged back in the direction of an emergency lab shower in the far corner. It was little more than a hose with a yellow pull tab suspended from the ceiling.

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Do you want it done right?”

  “Well, yeah, but...

  “Then we need you around ninety-six degrees. A few minutes under the water should do it.”

  “But I don’t have any other...

  Walcott glanced up as she trailed off and found her blushing and glancing at her teammates out of the corner of her eye. Cy Bell had a look of genuine curiosity and Tom Elrey wore the beginnings of a grin. Max hit Tom on the arm.

  “Turn around, for God’s sake.”

  Cy and Max turned towards the far wall and Elrey followed, albeit with an owlish hitch to his head. Walcott moved over to the three beds and pulled the thin top sheet from one of them.

  “Here,” he said. “You can dry with this.”

  Ellie moved over to the shower, glanced around once more, decided there was nothing for it, and began to strip. She took her shoes off and placed her jeans and her sweater on the bed nearby, took off her undergarments and set them next to her clothes, then at the last minute decided to cover them up with her jeans. She stepped under the spout and grasped the pull tab.

  “Let it run for a second first,” Walcott called from across the room, where he was plugging in an array of machines the likes of which Ellie had never seen. She stepped aside and yanked on the tab. For a moment nothing happened, then a jet of brown water shot from the spout and splattered all over the floor.

  “Rust,” Walcott said.

  The hose sputtered and jerked before the water turned clear. She touched it with her hand and a crop of goose bumps popped up on the nape of her neck. Without allowing herself to think twice, she stepped under it. It took most all of her nerve to stay there.

  “Jesus!” she cried, rubbing her shoulders vigorously and trying to keep her hair out of the water at the same time. She succeeded only partially.

  “Keep at it!” Walcott said, leaning over the back of a chrome computer display and making small adjustments before it blinked to life. When it kept blinking he slapped it until the display settled straight. Ellie’s teeth chattered as he moved over to another display and did the same, then to the cabinet above, from which he took depressors, a stethoscope, and a thermometer. Finally, he moved to a refrigerator against the far wall.

  When Ellie’s toes were numb, he finally called a halt. Ellie jumped out like she was dodging traffic and wr
apped the flimsy sheet around her. It was instantly soaked.

  Walcott approached the shower and pulled the tab to shut it off. The floor was a dirty puddle that drained slowly. He popped the thermometer in her ear until it beeped. “All right. That ought to buy us some time. But don’t get dressed yet.” He tossed her a Ziploc bag full of ice.

  “I’m fre-eezing!”

  “I know. But you’re nervous, and you need to calm your heart,” Walcott said, as he brought around a needle roughly the length of Ellie’s little finger and set it on the counter nearby.

  “Holy shi—”

  “Breathe deeply,” he instructed. “And stick the ice under your armpit. It’ll chill your brachial artery while you calm down. Keep you around ninety-six.”

  Walcott sat on the bed next to her and gently unwrapped her arm from the sheet. He swabbed a spot on her shoulder with rubbing alcohol as she stood, dripping wet, then he deftly popped the stethoscope into his ears. He pressed the diaphragm to her wrist with one hand while checking his wristwatch with the other.

  “Deep breaths,” he said. “I need you under one hundred beats per minute, and quickly, before you warm up.”

  “You—you’re kind of giving me mixed messages here,” Ellie began, shuffling the bag of ice up under her arm. She forced herself to keep breathing.

  “Don’t talk. Close your eyes.”

  In the silence all that could be heard were here chattering breaths and the struggling sucking sound of the floor drain. Everyone had turned to watch her now, despite her flimsy cover.

  “Okay,” Walcott said, and he reached for the syringe. Ellie looked pointedly away.

  “Look at me,” he said. Ellie turned to him, but kept the needle out of her sight.

  “This is your decision,” he observed. Then he plunged the needle into her shoulder muscle. Ellie snapped up half a breath, but before she could exhale again, it was over. Walcott took the syringe out and pressed a cotton ball to her skin.

  ‘Hold that,” he said, as he stepped up to the sharps container. When he turned around again, he had to pause. He had no doubt that this woman, this girl, was brave, but now she was small and cold, draped in a dripping sheet and holding a cotton ball to her arm like it was the only thing keeping it attached to her body. He smoothed at the stubble on his face and then put his hands on his hips. There was no more point in badgering her, or any of them, any longer. Max was right; they were going to do what they were going to do. And if he could be completely honest, if he was their age and given that door to walk through, he might consider it too. His job, now, would be to keep them alive as long as he could.