The Tournament Trilogy

by B. B. Griffith

  “These people are not normal.”

  “When the Qui guy and I were alone in the apartment he seemed... I dunno... peaceful. Like every breath was measured. I think he knew he wasn’t going to have to hurt me, or you, and that’s the reason why he did all of it.”

  “Well I don’t care what he intended. What he did do was break into your apartment and hold you at gunpoint.”

  “But Auldborne,” Sarah paled again at the memory, “Qui has a gun to my back but the only time I got really terrified was when Auldborne walked towards us on the ground.” She turned to her father again. “I think in his mind it’s a coin flip if he shoots me or not. Just because it’s something to do. Is he really gonna run the Tournament? Him and Eddie Mazaryk?”

  “It’s looking that way,” Walcott said darkly

  “What about this stuff in France, with the new Blue? They say Ellie Willmore is trying to get a group together to take them on. Can they stop them?”

  Baxter was quiet for a time as he remembered Ellie as he’d first seen her, when she was the first to step up and take the shot, soaked through, teeth chattering from the cold. That was the moment when he knew he had to make a conscious switch in his mind. He’d tried to dissuade them, to keep them away from the Tournament, but they’d jumped into the fray. Now it was his job to keep them alive. And they were making it difficult.

  “I’ve met them, all three of them. They have heart. And grit. Especially Ellie Willmore. You can see it on her face, plain as day, and that can overcome their fear, which is the first step in standing against the Black House.” Walcott nodded before deflating. “But they haven’t truly seen these men and women in action. They don’t have the experience. No. I don’t think they can beat them, although they will try. And that’s something, at least.”

  They spent the rest of the ride in weary silence. After the fifth time Sarah’s phone buzzed she shut it off. She had no desire to hear either one of her roommates try to explain herself, and the thought of running down the night again over the phone made her head hurt.

  At the Walcott’s home, Sheila was already packing. As soon as she heard their approaching car she dropped a load of clothing on the floor, popped open the front door and ran towards them. Baxter had to stop in the street several houses down when she simply stepped in front of it. Shelia opened the passenger’s door and pulled her daughter out and to her breast, weeping over her and apologizing for the pain she’d had nothing to do with. After thoroughly mussing Sarah she fell into her husband’s arms and did nothing but hold him for such a long time that Sarah eventually pulled the car to the curb herself and moved into the house. She dropped her hastily packed duffel bag and returned to the street; many of the neighbors had come out. She was surprised to see her father reassuring them.

  Old Milt Patterson, longtime neighbor across the street, was particularly boisterous. “We’ve got guns, Baxter. At least I do, and I know Vicky and Matt up the street do too. We’ll post lookouts and patrols—”

  “It’s all right, Milt, it’s all right,” Walcott said, dampening down with his hands. “They’re a better shot than you and Matt anyway,” he added, attempting a smile.

  “That’s what shotguns are for. Pepper the bastards up a bit,” Milt said, and Matt nodded along with the younger couple that had just moved in behind the Walcotts; Sarah hadn’t met them yet. In fact, she didn’t recognize several faces. Wary of the attention, any attention these days, good or bad, Sarah hung back by the porch while Sheila and Baxter carried on with the neighbors, placating Milt who still muttered about “All these goddam kids running all over the world shooting each other for the hell of it.” She marveled at how some people can come out of the woodwork when you are in the spotlight, and others, like the friends she knew and had loved, can disappear completely, when a movement from across the street caught her eye. A man, another neighbor she presumed, was also standing out of the crowd, observing and leaning heavily on one of the streetlights. She might have passed him over completely if it weren’t for a resonating feeling that he gave her, an echo of the fear she’d felt when Auldborne took his slow, clicking steps towards her. He looked as though he wanted to step forward, but was unsure of himself.

  “It’s all right everyone, really. As long as they still need me to cooperate with them, they won’t hurt any of us,” Walcott said.

  The man in back straightened. Sarah called for the crowd’s attention but her throat felt tight as the fears of the night redoubled, like the pain of a bandage ripped off too soon. The man moved into the light and his voice was loud.

  “And what happens when they don’t need you to cooperate anymore?” he shouted, but his words were slurred and blended with a strange accent; his question sounded like an overturned trough of sounds. He stepped back once before he stepped forward again: he was drunk. For several seconds everyone stared at the man, all conversation cut off, as if he’d dropped a platter in a crowded room. He stood awkwardly, weaving as he lipped a cigarette out of his pack and lit up with one hand. He exhaled heavily in the late night chill, hunched slightly, like a wounded bull.

  Baxter Walcott knew him. “What are you doing here, Ian?”

  Ian Finn stepped forward again and Sarah saw the shadows on his face and the sickly curl of his left hand, and when he pulled on his cigarette she saw the ember reflect as a mad flash in his eyes. It was him: she recognized him from television, the one they were calling the One Armed Man and Mad Irish. He was in front of her house. Some of the neighbors recognized him too and reached out to each other as if they might form a wall against him, their conversations now harsh whispers.

  “I have a question,” he said, missing his mouth with his cigarette once. “A little question that won’t leave me, that my father, in all his fucking glorious wisdom—” His voice dripped, his mouth became a sneer around his cigarette. “—a question that he planted in me. A stupid, stupid little question that won’t leave me alone.” He staggered forward before righting himself, and the neighbors gasped.

  “Get away from him,” Walcott said. “Sheila, Sarah, get in the house. He’s sick.”

  The neighbors scattered, even old Milt, running at a bowlegged hitch back up the street away from Ian like he was a rabid dog. Sheila scampered up the steps and reached out for Sarah’s hand but Sarah didn’t take it. Sarah walked slowly forward down the steps.

  “Sarah! Get away from him!” Her father moved to catch her but she waved him off and watched Ian stagger to the near curb and sit down there. He slowly lowered his head to his hands.

  “He’s not sick, dad. He’s just drunk. He needs a bed, that’s all.”

  Sarah weaved around her father and moved to Ian, pausing at his foot. He studied her shoes, the cigarette still in his mouth, the smoke snaked up and around his head. Whatever spark she saw reflected in his eyes was gone. He seemed less like the mad Irishman she’d heard about and much more like a boy wandering the night in search of a lost dog, and who had only now given up. Her heart broke for him in the startling way that a heart can break at the drop of a pin for a picture or a sound or a scene only glanced at in passing. She leaned over him and plucked the cigarette from his mouth. He never moved; his eyes still stared at where her shoes met the ground.

  “Dad,” she said, and found Walcott already there at her side, one hand on her shoulder. “He needs help.”

  “Don’t let him fool you,” Walcott said.

  “He’s not like Auldborne. I can feel it. You said you’d help them. Well he needs help.”

  Ian looked up at this, surprised to find them standing over him. His mission came back to him in a delayed flash. “I have a question,” he said again, and then his head drooped. Sarah noticed his gun, poking out from under his jacket up high on his left hip, perched under his wounded arm. The neighbors found their courage again and edged closer. Sarah glared at them. All around them lights were coming on. Baxter was dismayed to see headlights pooling around the closed gate down the street. He muttered a curse under
his breath.

  “Dad,” Sarah said again, insistent.

  “All right. Grab his other arm. Easy now.”

  Sarah flipped his right arm up over her shoulder and Baxter gently eased him up by the crook of his left. He didn’t weigh much, and he didn’t protest as they half-carried him up the steps. They paused where Sheila held the door open, shaking her head and nodding it at the same time.

  “Get him in already then,” she said. “We’re not going anywhere tonight as it is with the whole county out front.” She locked the door behind her and checked out of the window one more time.

  “He’s not gonna hold us at gunpoint is he? That would be twice in one night for you two. You’d need to seriously reevaluate the directions your lives are heading.”

  “Tell me about it,” Sarah said, directing her father to a big puffy chair in the living room and rolling Ian onto it. In a haze he pulled at his packet of cigarettes in his breast pocket. Sarah took them from him. He didn’t seem to care.

  “Well,” Sheila said. “What is he?”

  “He’s one of the good guys,” Sarah said.

  “Now hold up. Let’s just say he’s not one of the bad guys yet,” Walcott countered.

  “He’s Ian Finn, mom. Everyone knows that.”

  “Ian Finn,” Sheila said slowly. “Riiight. Well he smells terrible. If he’s gonna stay here, he needs a shower. Might sober him up too.”

  “I’ll take him to the back guest room and throw him in the shower,” Walcott said, before Sarah could speak. “I need to take a look at that arm, too. It looks bad.”

  Sarah still held his arm.

  “I’ve got him from here, Sarah,” Walcott insisted.

  Sarah reluctantly let go. She watched her father help Ian up and lead him, hobbling, down the hallway. He gently closed the door behind them.

  Walcott leaned Ian against a wall while he started the shower in the guest bathroom. While it warmed up he removed the filthy bandages from Ian’s left hand. Ian winced.

  “Why haven’t you been cleaning this?”

  Ian shrugged.

  “Have you been taking anything for it?”

  “Antibiotics. My mom gave them to me. I took all of them.”

  “Well thank God for that. Otherwise you might be dead. Just warm soap and water now. I’ll need to wrap it and re-suture it in the morning.”

  “My question,” Ian said, holding up a wobbly finger.

  “Shower first, questions later. Keep the door unlocked. I’ll be right outside.”

  Ian thought about arguing but he was already breathing like he’d run a marathon and he was exhausted. He nodded and unclipped his gun and handed it to Walcott, which Baxter took as a remarkably prescient show of faith from the man. Ian struggled out of his shirt and before he left Walcott couldn’t help but notice three round scars the size of coat buttons that ran right down the middle of his thin frame. Memories of battles past.

  He heard Ian fumble to get into the shower and waited to hear him slip and fall, but he never did. After a time the steady sound of water told Walcott that Ian was at least functional and getting clean. He leaned his head back on the wall and wondered if he was ever going to get an ounce of respite for his family, or if his life was now stuck in a certain gear, engine smoking. Sarah was right. He had to help these players if they came to him. He was surprised to find that he was even a little excited. Some part of the young doctor that had first taken the diode development research position all those years ago, that had rolled the dice with an employer nobody had ever heard of while still on the fast track at UCSD for a staff position, some part of that doctor was still inside of him.

  “Doctor Walcott,” Ian weakly called, snapping Baxter out of his daze. He put his ear to the door.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Blood.”

  Walcott snapped the door open and found Ian holding his left arm and watching with fascination as a spreading trickle of blood skittered from his inflamed scar and danced about in the water as it fell to the basin.

  “Shit. I figured there would be tearing at the sutures. Here, press it.” He pulled a hand towel from its ring next to the sink, eyed it for a moment, then gave it up to Ian.

  “No, take it,” Ian said, water pouring from his arm and down the gash, shooting from the tip of his finger like a red water gun. “Look at it. Is it different? From other blood?”

  “Ian, press it,” Walcott said forcefully. “I’ll get my kit. Pull yourself together and dry off. Don’t worry about the blood.”

  When he came back to the bathroom Ian was asleep on the toilet with the cover down, wrapped about the waist in a big bath towel. His right hand lay over the dish towel on his left forearm. Walcott wrapped the dish towel around with medical tape to keep it in position and left it at that. He awkwardly dragged Ian into the nearby guestroom, set him on the bed, and hoped both towels were wrapped tight enough. He spent the next hour cleaning the shower and swabbing up droplets of blood all over the bathroom with the help of his wife and daughter. The only person who slept in the Walcott house that night was Ian Finn.

  At two in the morning, after staring at the intermittent passing of headlights on the ceiling of his bedroom for almost three hours, with thoughts of Auldborne, Finn, and Qui flipping around in his head, an old window in Walcott’s mind unlatched. He was drawn back to his old laboratory, the one he shared with Bill Beauchamp back in Colorado Springs. He thought of the serum, its properties scrawled in chalk across a great concrete wall. He thought of Ian’s blood swirling down the drain of his shower.

  Is it different?

  The ramblings of a drunken man—although he’d seemed oddly lucid at times, like when he handed Walcott his gun.

  Walcott walked along the concrete wall with his mind’s eye. Then he stopped. Then he backed up. He could almost hear Bill in the background, his friendly bickering with Sarah Foss punctuated here and there by his loud laugh. There was something there, in the chalk, that pricked at him. Something about the blood.

  He sat up in his bed. Sheila questioned him, but he’d already gone to see Ian. In the hallway he found Sarah in her pajamas sitting against the wall by the guestroom door, a book open upon her knees. She closed it as her father approached and stood up as if expecting him.

  “I haven’t heard anything,” she said. Walcott looked at the door as if he’d closed a bird in the room. Sarah understood.

  “I’ll wake him up,” Sarah said, and opened the door before either he or Sheila could speak. Inside Ian lay on the bed exactly where Walcott had set him. All three stopped at once and watched for the rise and fall of his chest in the moonlight from the window. It was there. Walcott let out a breath. Sarah sat down next to him on the bed.

  “Ian,” she whispered. No response. Walcott was brought back, as if tugged by the navel, to the dark, quiet bedroom of Daniel Hurley’s house outside of Dublin, where he’d watched the soft breathing of another member of Team Green. Kayla MacQuillan didn’t answer him when he’d called her name then, either. She never answered anybody, ever again.

  “Ian,” Sarah said again, rustling him at the shoulder. “Ian wake up.”

  Ian took a deeper breath. His eyelids fluttered.

  “Ellie,” he muttered.

  Sarah turned to Walcott and Walcott exhaled. Ian’s eyes snapped open and his bandaged arm shot for the naked spot on his waist where his gun would have been. He cried out in pain. Walcott stepped up quickly and held his hands and Ian started to fight him, hitching his shoulders with deceptive strength. Walcott screamed at him to stop. Ian blinked several times and coughed dryly. He looked wildly about once more then placed himself. He tucked his chin down and shied away and relaxed his muscles and Baxter stood. Sheila handed Ian a glass of water and he drank it down without pause. He pressed the back of his hand to his cracked lips.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I kind of lost track of where I was.”

  “The booze’ll do that to you,” Walcott said. Sarah shot him a g
lare. “You know, for a second there I thought maybe you...” He trailed off as Ian examined the hand towel wrapped around his arm. “Listen, Ian,” Walcott began again, “you can’t stay here. The crazy fans—”

  “Gamers,” corrected Ian.

  “What?”

  “We call ‘em Gamers, and yeah, I know they’ll be here soon enough.” In the cold light of the early morning, groggy and sobering, Ian was reticent. “I should go. I’m not sure what I thought you could—”

  “—If we go now we can catch all the Gamers sleeping,” Walcott cut in. “We should make the hospital before dawn. I have a full Tournament wing there. All the analytical equipment I’ll need.”

  Ian looked up at him, shocked into silence. Baxter clicked on the lamp on the night stand and Ian blinked, shading his eyes.

  “Truth be told, you’ve sort of perplexed me for years, from a medical standpoint. You’re a walking disaster, but you keep walking. Only after you started talking about your blood did the real questions form in my head.”

  “So you think it could be—”

  “—I don’t think anything yet, but I want to take a look at a sample under a microscope.”

  “I’ll get my coat,” Sarah said, leaving the room.

  Sheila watched her daughter run out and turned to her husband, arms crossed, eyes accusing.

  “What?” Walcott answered, unasked. “I was going to tell her to come along anyway. After what happened I want her away from this house and with me. It’s safer for both of you.”

  Sheila shook her head. “Might as well put the coffee on and get back to packing then. I’m think a warm island somewhere in the middle of nowhere might work beautifully for us.”

  ————

  They took the back route to the UCSD Medical Center, avoiding major streets and highways, and they spoke sparingly. Sarah checked various Tournament feeds on her phone but the major sites were still quiet on Ian’s movements. She knew they wouldn’t be for long, though. Not after word got out that he was spotted in the San Diego suburbs.