Outlive (The Baggers Trilogy, #1)

by Chad Leito

  God, I hope that wasn’t glass.

  He also wondered what the steroids would do. He knew that folk-knowledge existed that moderate steroid use could yield benefits without much harm. Even if that was true, whatever Strant was injecting them with was not likely to be a mild amount. Will my testicles shrink? Will I have mood swings?

  And then he thought: Do they not drug test the Outlive participants? Baggs supposed that maybe the Colosseum’s authorities knew that many participants took steroids before the fights, but perhaps they turned a blind eye to the drug because it enhanced the quality of the competitions. Steroids would surely make the competitors more aggressive.

  From the bedroom, Baggs heard a scream. A moment later, Spinks was being pulled into the exercise facility by the horned trainer, who had a fistful of the Boxer’s short, pink hair.

  “Let me go!” She screamed. She stomped her feet and tried to pull away.

  The horned trainer only pulled harder. He dragged Spinks until she was in front of the other Boxers, kneed her in the thigh, and she collapsed to the floor. Baggs’s eyes widened. In his amped-up state, he felt like charging the trainer. The trainer smiled, and the expression made his small horns raise even higher up on his forehead. They were black and sharp.

  In one swift motion, the trainer pulled something from his pocket and held it over his head. The object uncoiled until it was seven feet long—a whip. The item split into several different pieces at the distal end and had barbed tips.

  Spinks’s blue eyes widened as she turned around and saw what was raised above her. “No!” she screamed.

  The trainer’s muscles shifted with the speed of a striking cobra and he brought the whip down. The effect was devastating enough that Baggs knew he wasn’t looking at an ordinary whip; whatever strange weapon the trainer was holding was a new, malevolent technology. Blood leaked from over a dozen places on Spinks’s back. Her gray shirt was torn and stained a dark red.

  “Get up,” the trainer said.

  Spinks wasn’t immediately obedient.

  “Get up,” The trainer said again. This time he raised the strange whip threateningly.

  Spinks staggered to her feet and gave the trainer a nasty scowl.

  “Go line up like the others,” the trainer said.

  Spinks slowly walked over until she was standing with her teammates.

  The trainer with the horns addressed the Boxers. “This is how it is going to work; each of you will be assigned a trainer. My name is Torn; I’m the head trainer. I will be training the pink headed one who thinks she’s tough.” He glanced at Spinks and said, “I used to break horses, and I will break you. You will be obedient to me, or I’ll whip you until you bleed to death.” He raised his voice. “We will start the day with individual training sessions. Let’s get one thing clear—disobedience will not be tolerated. You will lift weights until you collapse. You will run until you pass out. You will not stop when you’re tired, you will only stop when you can’t move anymore. Each trainer has an electronic whip, and K9s will be patrolling the premises. Don’t try anything funny. Let’s get to work.”

  The trainers made their way over to the line of trainees and made their assignments known. A man who appeared to be in his early twenties approached Baggs. “You’re with me, big boy.” He turned and walked, expecting Baggs to follow. The youth had a camp, feminine walk; his hips swayed and his head was tilted back, exposing his neck. He wore blue lipstick and eyeliner that made him look hypoxic. His hair was black like a starless night, and his skin was pale like the moon—it almost seemed to glow it was so white. He looked fast. There were deep crevices in between each of his muscles due to the fact that his body held so little fat. He led Baggs across the room toward a bench press. “Sit,” the blue-lipped man told Baggs. Baggs sat.

  Baggs’s trainer was about as tall as the average female. Baggs noticed that he was the only trainer wearing pants instead of shorts.

  “I hear you made headlines,” Baggs’s trainer said. He smiled down at his trainee, not unkindly, but the effect was strange due to the blue makeup.

  “That’s what Turner said.”

  “That’s good. We can work with that. The other competitors will probably be thinking about you. Your presence may scare people in the arena.” The trainer’s eyes moved rapidly as he looked over Baggs’s body, appreciating his stature and evaluating him. Baggs’s heart was still thudding from the clear drink he had consumed. “Broken radius, huh? How’d that happen?”

  “I was running, fell, planted my hand oddly and it just snapped.” Baggs held up his left arm and looked at it. It was smaller than the other one from being in Mr. Krass’s cast for the past six weeks, and the break was clearly visible beneath the skin.

  “Do you mind if I hold it?” Baggs’s trainer asked.

  Baggs lifted up his arm and the man with blue lipstick held it. He examined it closely, leaning over the hairy arm so that his eyes were one inch from the break. “My name is Shade,” he told Baggs, talking while still examining the arm. His voice was high and he moved his mouth theatrically while he talked. He had odd, feminine mannerisms, but a presence that demanded that others listen. He ran lithe fingers up and down the break. “Open and close your hand. Good job! We can work with this. This isn’t too bad.”

  Baggs grunted.

  “Oh, I apologize, I didn’t mean what I said. I’m sure that it is bad for you. What I meant is that it probably won’t be too bad in the arena. You’ll be able to hold a shield with the hand, you’re just limited on your fine dexterous motions.”

  Shade sat beside Baggs and smiled up at him, blinking. “Let me ask you a question that I ask all my trainees—this is a very important question; what do you have to live for? If you survive Outlive, what will you look forward to in the outside world?”

  “My daughters. My wife.”

  Shade nodded attentively. “I see. You have a family. If you don’t mind me asking, what led you to enter Outlive?”

  The connotation of what Shade had said was, why did you risk not ever seeing your family again to enter?

  Baggs felt his chest tighten with a wave of sadness. His longing for his family was torturing. When he spoke, he worked hard to keep the emotions out of his voice. “I broke my hand,” Baggs began.

  Shade nodded.

  “And I am…was, a pianist. I couldn’t play anymore after I broke my hand, and couldn’t get another job. I had to enter Outlive for the money, otherwise my family would starve.”

  Shade nodded some more. His eyes were the color of charcoal, and Baggs couldn’t detect a hint of judgment in them, which was odd. Most rich or middle class people simply refused to believe that jobs weren’t available for the poor. They claimed that poor people were lazy. Shade either genuinely believed Baggs’s story and had sympathy for him, or was a really good actor. He spoke softly, using his tongue and lips more than was necessary; “Here’s my job, James.”

  “Call me Baggs, all my friends do.”

  Shade nodded. “Baggs. Here is what I do: I train contestants so that they can enter Outlive. I’m good at it, too.” He fluttered his eyelashes. “The Colosseum keeps track of us, the trainers, and records how well we do. Do our trainees tend to live more than other trainees? That’s the question. So far, I’ve done okay. I’ve only trained for five episodes and I’ve had one survivor. That’s a little below average, but five is a small sample size. With you, I feel optimistic, especially if we train hard. So I want you to understand that I’m on your team; we share goals, Mr. Baggs.” He raised his eyebrows. “I’m saddened by your story; you don’t get to see your little girls and your wife right now. But part of me likes your story.” His blue lips curled in a half smile, half snarl of playful aggression. “I like it because it means that you are going to be cooperative, because you want to see the girls you left behind, am I right?”

  “Right.”

  “And we can do this, Mr. Baggs. We can allow you to live. We’ve just got to work super, super hard
and be super, super smart about how we train. Let me tell you about the game plan, Baggs. We have enough time to put in twenty-one training sessions with periods of sleep in between. So, if we…”

  Baggs raised his huge right hand and cut his trainer off mid-sentence. “Wait, did you say twenty-one? I thought there was one week between now and the Outlive episode I’m competing in. How could I possibly sleep…?”

  Shade cut Baggs off now, holding his slender hand patiently into the air. “Baggs, I’m going to stop you right there.” Shade turned and looked around the room with his black eyes. He stood up and spun in a circle, searching for someone listening. Then, he sat down on the bench press next to Baggs. He began to whisper, as though he could get into trouble for what he was saying. “I like you, Baggs. I really do. I just met you, but you seem like a good guy. I don’t want you to get into trouble. Or, rather, I don’t want something to happen to you. The last guy I trained was a man named Paul Higgins.”

  Baggs’s eyes widened with understanding. Shade may know if Paul Higgins died of natural causes after he won Outlive last episode. Or if Turner killed him.

  “I see that you’ve heard the name,” Shade remarked. “As you know, Higgins died of a heart attack after the last episode. Higgins was like you in that he was smart and inquisitive. In the end, I think that all the questions he asked added a certain stress to his heart. I think that his heart attack was partly due to how many questions he asked. Baggs, there are things that you need to know, and things that you don’t need to know. Asking how you will be able to have twenty-one sleeping and waking cycles in seven days is one of those things that it’s best you not know. Asking things like that can make you have a heart attack, especially when Turner is around.”

  Baggs nodded. “I understand.” He felt somewhat relieved to have his suspicion confirmed; Turner killed Higgins because he knew that Turner was cheating. At the same time, he felt panic rising in his throat at the thought that he may not be able to avoid a similar fate.

  “Now, as I was saying, we will have twenty one training sessions. They’ll be hard, but they’ll really help you out in the arena. Each session will be three hours long, then you’ll eat, then you’ll go to sleep for four hours.”

  Baggs nodded, though he was still confused. I feel like I’m going to be awake for the next five days. His hands were shaking with energy from the clear liquid he had consumed with his smoothie.

  “For the first five sessions, we will do things to promote your general fitness. Things that will build muscle, and increase your speed. After those five sessions, I will develop a specialized routine for you and we will follow that for the next sixteen sessions. Sound good?”

  “Yeah. Sounds good.”

  Shade’s blue lips smiled. “Let’s get to work, Baggs.”

  11

  Fifteen-year-old Baggs felt his heart rate increase as the doors on the limousine automatically locked and they began to move forward. Bite smiled at him, showing his big canines.

  Baggs smiled back. He was sweating.

  Why did I get in the car? I should have never gotten into the car.

  The model sat to his left. Her legs were crossed one over the other so that the elegant muscles in her thighs were more pronounced. Her skin was utterly without defect. She wasn’t wearing shoes, and the toes on her left foot occasionally grazed Baggs’s pants behind his knee.

  The clean-cut black man that Baggs had seen before getting into the limousine still looked non-threatening enough, though he was staring unwaveringly at Baggs, which was strange.

  What made him really nervous were the two people sitting on the right side of the limousine. He hadn’t been able to see them until he was completely inside of the car and the door was locked and they were moving through London. Bite sat beside them as though everything was normal.

  How can he stand to sit so close to them?

  To Baggs, the two people looked like zombies, although he knew that, of course, zombies did not exist. But, my Lord! What is wrong with them?

  Sitting next to Bite was a blond female whose age was undeterminable. Her skin was constructed of alternating levels of thickness. In some places, the skin was as thick as a leather strap, while in others it was as thin as tissue paper. In some places the skin was nonexistent; she had exposed red sores dispersed over her body. Like the model, she was wearing a skimpy dress, but unlike with the model’s dress, Baggs was not pleased to see this woman wearing so little clothing. Her skin was wrinkled, calloused, and blistered. Her hair was the same color as Bite’s—dirty blond—but the woman’s hair was even thinner and she had a hairline that was receding on her emaciated skull. She looked like she weighed no more than ninety pounds. Baggs could see the outline of her bones everywhere—her chin, her chest, her bare feet, even on her thighs. Her breaths rattled and wheezed in and out of her skeletal chest, as though the bronchioles in her lungs were coated in plastic.

  The man to her right looked as though he was suffering from the same strange and debilitating condition. He had the skin sores, the callouses, the receding hairline, the frail frame, and the awful, wheezing breaths.

  If it were just one person, I would think that they had an illness I had never seen before. However, when two people seem to have the same rare condition and are riding in the same limo, it appears as though something happened to them. What could have made them this way?

  The two people’s bodies weren’t what disturbed Baggs most, though. What made his throat close in clawing terror and his testicles shrink up in breath-taking fear were their expressions. It looked as though the two people didn’t have souls, strange as that may sound. It looked as though some surgeon had gone in and removed whatever parts of their brain gave them subjective consciousness and left breathing bodies to live on without anyone home in their heads.

  Their eyes both stared straight ahead. The pupils weren’t fixed upon anything and when the wheels of the limo hit a bump and their heads bobbed on their skeletal necks, the pupils did not move in order to compensate for the displacement. Their mouths were open. Both the male and the female had dry bottom lips that hung so far down that Baggs could see half an inch of their gums beneath their rotting bottom teeth. The gums were covered in abscesses. The two zombie-like people did not respond to voices around them, and did not stir when Baggs and Bite climbed into the limo. The female’s dress had fallen off her shoulder and her right breast was revealed. Like the rest of her skin, the breast was sallow, wrinkly, and covered in boils. She did not move to cover herself.

  Baggs breathed. The cabin smelled like leather. The model reached her hand over and rubbed Baggs’s thigh for a moment. “You look nervous,” she said. “Don’t be. We’re going to have fun tonight.”

  Baggs tried to smile, but found that he just couldn’t. He was scared. For the first time in his life, he was really scared. He felt like he was locked in a coffin with a cold reptile slithering over his naked skin.

  Baggs turned to Bite. “You said you’d take me home if I wanted to go home.”

  “You don’t want to go home,” Bite said.

  Baggs looked up towards the front of the cabin. The space between the back seats and the driver’s seat was divided by dark glass; he couldn’t see who was driving them.

  The model scooted over and squeezed herself into the seat next to Baggs. Their thighs were touching. She leaned toward him, pressing her body against him. “You don’t want to go home,” she said, repeating Bite’s words. “Come over with us. Please! Please, please, please!”

  She looked up at Baggs with striking green eyes. Her breath smelled like she had been drinking wine. She wrapped both of her arms around Baggs’s left arm, hugging it to her chest.

  “This is Lilly,” Bite said, gesturing with his right hand; Baggs again noticed that Bite’s middle finger on that hand was cut down to a nub. His voice sounded even more gravely than it had outside when Baggs had been so intimidated by him. His eyes looked colder, more distant. Was the way he was speaking w
ith me outside him trying to be charming?

  “Hi,” Lilly said, looking up at Baggs childishly, and holding on even tighter to his arm. Baggs thought, what are they giving her to flirt with me? He had no misconceptions about his appearance; he was ugly. His nose was large and bulbous, as were his ears, which weren’t symmetrical. Even as a fifteen year old, his body was obtusely hairy. A girl as beautiful as Lilly does not typically fall for a guy like me on first appearance.

  “And the handsome son of a bitch sitting on the bench across from me is Darius Till, the baseball player,” Bite added.

  Baggs didn’t follow baseball, but had heard the name. He nodded at the professional athlete. Darius nodded back.

  “Who are they?” Baggs said, looking at the zombie-like people sitting beside Bite. They didn’t acknowledge that anyone was speaking.

  Bite frowned. It appeared that he didn’t like Baggs asking questions about those two people. “The male is Pointer, and the female is Pinky.”

  “Enough about them, Baggs! Stop being modest. Tell me about yourself,” Lilly said, hugging his shoulder and leaning into him. He could feel her chest against his arm.

  Baggs didn’t feel like talking with her. His mouth was dry. Lilly was obviously a distraction—something to make him want to go along for the ride to wherever they were headed. He addressed Bite: “I want you to take me home.”

  “Relax, buddy. Lean back, enjoy Lilly. Everything is okay. You want some wine. Actually, no, I’m not asking. I insist. You need to relax a little bit.” He made this comment without much humor. He opened up a refrigerator that was built into the seat beside Baggs, and took out a cold wine glass and a bottle. He filled it up and handed it to Baggs. “Anyone else want some?” Lilly and Darius did. Pointer and Pinky didn’t respond.

  Baggs watched as Lilly and Darius sipped on their wine. Okay, so it’s not poisonous, he thought.

  “Drink,” Bite said, smiling with his huge, sharp teeth.