Outlive (The Baggers Trilogy, #1)

by Chad Leito

  “You could have a swimming pool. You could probably buy your own helicopter by the time you were thirty or so.”

  The owls hooted. Mr. Snow’s shoes slapped against the pavement. We’re really far away from the house, Baggs thought.

  Mr. Snow was speaking so quietly that Baggs had to walk closer to hear what he was saying. “I would strongly advise that you begin to exchange your services for my goods. And you should start by taking a good from me. Here, hold this.” He reached into his pocket and handed Baggs a gold coin. It was as wide around as a coffee mug, and was heavy in his hands.

  He knew what it was, but had never seen one before. “Oh my God,” Baggs said, turning the coin over in his big hands. On one side there was a picture of Emperor Daman. On the other there was the inscription, One-thousand CreditCoins. “This is real,” Baggs said.

  Mr. Snow did not respond to this. He didn’t react much to anything. “Put it in your pocket. Take it home if you want it. Let’s begin a good, lifelong exchange right here, Baggs.”

  Mr. Snow and Baggs had stopped walking. Baggs looked from Mr. Snow and then back to the coin. He’ll give me this much money to start working for him. If I work for him, I’ll get to spend more time with Lilly. I could have a house. I could have a car. And there will be more booze, and more time with girls like Lilly. Baggs looked into Mr. Snow’s dark eyes. He imagined him ordering Bite to take off his own middle finger. Then there are Pointer and Pinky; what made them the way they are? If I take this coin, will Mr. Snow make me like them? Or will he make me do that to people? He wants me to work for him because of my fighting abilities; he will probably make me kill people.

  “With all due respect, Mr. Snow, I would not like to take this coin with me.” He handed the coin back and Mr. Snow slipped it into a pocket on the inside of his jacket. Then, he grabbed something else within his jacket and began to pull it out.

  It’s a knife! Baggs thought.

  It was only a cigar, though. Mr. Snow lit the end of it and puffed out a small cloud of odorous blue smoke. “Go.” He told Baggs, and then he turned away from him and smoked, looking at the distant horizon.

  Baggs didn’t need to be told twice. Did I upset him? His hands were trembling as he made his way up the walkway. He was afraid that Bite would grab him on his way up the lawn, take him into some basement, and cut him up with a chainsaw for his decline of Mr. Snow’s proposal.

  Baggs would learn, though, that Mr. Snow was oddly fair, in his own peculiar way.

  When he got back inside, he found his clothes and began to dress. He felt small hands touch his back. “Where are you going?” Lilly asked.

  Baggs looked at her, standing there in her underwear. She’s a whore, you idiot! Did you really think that she liked you?

  “I’m leaving,” Baggs said. He pulled away from her and tugged on his shirt and pants. “Have you seen my shoes and socks?” he looked around. They weren’t where he had left them.

  “No,” Lilly said. She bent over, looking under chairs and different tables. “Hold on, let me go see if Darius has seen them,” she said, and she rushed off, half naked, into the crowd, leaving Baggs standing alone.

  He looked at the leopards that surrounded the room in cages, and glanced along the walls. It was then that he saw something that made him want to run, to get the hell out of there. There was a card table set up next to one of the leopard cages; surrounding the table were fifteen men and women; all of them seemed to be suffering from the strange and disturbing condition that Pinky and Pointer had. They all had receding hair, frail frames, boil-covered skin, and had vacant expressions.

  I need to get out of here, he thought.

  Darius and Lilly came back from the crowd. “What size of shoe do you wear?” Darius asked.

  “Fifteen. Have you seen my shoes?”

  “Here, have mine,” Darius said, and he slid off a pair of Nike basketball shoes. They were white and looked to be brand new. He handed them to Baggs.

  “These are like two hundred CreditCoins,” Baggs said.

  “I’m sponsored by Nike, I get them for free. I’ve got like a dozen pairs upstairs. Take ‘em, they’re your size.”

  Baggs accepted the Nikes. They were still warm from the professional baseball player wearing them. Darius Till is a good guy, he thought. “Thank you. I’m going to go.”

  “Good seeing you, buddy.”

  Lilly hugged him, and then reached her hand in his pocket. “I put my phone number on a piece of paper in your pocket, in case you want to see me again,” she said. Her arms were crossed and held up her breasts, making them look bigger.

  “Thanks,” Baggs said. I’m not going to call her, he thought. She’s a whore on Mr. Snow’s payroll. If I accept her, it’ll be like accepting the gold coin; I’ll be obliged to work for him. He pulled on the shoes and before they could say anything else, he was walking out. He walked down the expansive hall with the phosphorescent fish, out the door, down the marble stairs, down the path, out the gate, and then began the walk through London to his parents’ house.

  He got out a cigarette and smoked. He liked tobacco even more when he was drunk.

  “I dodged a bullet in there,” he said to himself. He pulled Lilly’s phone number out of his pocket, crumpled it, and littered it on the ground. He hadn’t accepted the coin. He hadn’t accepted the girl. As far as he was concerned, he had rejected Mr. Snow’s offer to work for him.

  As he walked through London in the middle of the night, what he didn’t think of were the shoes he had accepted. They would come at a cost. As Mr. Snow had said, “You take something from me, you pay me back. End of discussion.” Darius Till worked for Mr. Snow.

  12

  One more, thirty-three year old Baggs thought.

  Just one more, I can do this.

  His feet were throbbing. His legs felt like they were made of rubber. He was panting hot air in heavy breaths. His abs and shoulders burned with every step and movement.

  “C’mon,” Shade said. His blue lipstick and eyeliner were smeared with sweat. “You can do this.” He spoke in his theatrical, expressive voice and then took off around the gym, expecting Baggs to follow.

  “Uggh,” Baggs grunted, and then he picked up his pace, forcing his exhausted body to loop around the side wall of the massive gym so that he could follow Shade through the last circuit of the day.

  As he ran, panting, he thought, I’ve never been in this good of shape before in my life. This was his twentieth workout out of twenty-one. The clock on the gym wall told him that it was one in the morning.

  All around the Turner facility, Boxers were finishing up their workouts with their trainers before settling down for a drug-induced four-hour nap.

  The last week had been one of the strangest in his life. He had worked out so hard that he hadn’t even had much time to think. Baggs still did not know what he was going to do regarding his suspicion that Byron Turner would kill him if he happened to survive Outlive. This frightened him badly, but he didn’t see how thinking up a strategy would be possible with how packed his schedule had been. The Boxers hadn’t gotten to know each other any more than they had at the Competitors’ Dinner; during whatever free time they were given, they were too exhausted to talk.

  The first workout had been the worst, Baggs thought. It had started with dead lift. Shade loaded forty-five pound weight plates onto a bar, put it on the floor, and had Baggs bend down with a straight back and pick up the bar. He had thought that the request seemed simple enough, and the weight was manageable. However, after five sets of ten reps, he was light headed and feeling woozy.

  “I feel sick,” Baggs had told Shade.

  “You’ve got three more hours, then you can rest, champ,” Shade said back. “Do you desire to see Maggie in the future?”

  Baggs didn’t verbally answer, but gritted his teeth with a newfound determination. Shade led him over to a bench press, where, once again, Shade stacked weights onto the bar and requested that Baggs do five sets o
f ten. Baggs didn’t know what the weight was, but after two sets he couldn’t lift it anymore. Shade stood behind him, spotting him, gently helping him lift the weight when his tired muscles couldn’t do it on their own. He finished the fifth set and then vomited on the ground.

  “A robot will clean that. C’mon, we’re jogging to the next machine.”

  Baggs walked, hands on his hips. His face was pale and he was thinking to himself, I shouldn’t smoke cigarettes. I’ll never smoke again.

  “Let’s jog,” Shade said.

  Baggs shook his head, refusing to speak for fear that he might vomit again.

  “Would you rather jog now, or die on the sand? Do you want to see Olive again? Let’s move!”

  Baggs gritted his teeth once more and began to slowly jog over to the next facility—leg press. Baggs lay down on his back and Shade loaded the platform above him with weights. “Ten sets of ten,” he told Baggs. Baggs shook his head. “Tessa is going to watch you die on television if you don’t cooperate. Ten sets of ten, sound good?” Baggs nodded. He placed his feet underneath the platform, lifted with his thighs, dipped it down, and lifted it again. He completed his ten sets of ten. After three sets, he threw up a second time. After four, he threw up for his third time. After six sets, he vomited again. Going forward, he did not have anything left in his stomach to throw up, but dry heaved intermittently.

  Then, the pace started to pick up. Shade had Baggs do dumbbell shrugs, where he held a one hundred pound dumbbell in each hand and then lifted his shoulders towards his ears. He then did weighted sit-ups, lunges, assisted pull ups (Baggs was too tired to do any on his own at this time), dumbbell curls, calf raises, incline press, and dumbbell rows. Baggs continued to think that he was going to pass out, but he never did. Just one more, he always thought. As he moved forward in the workout, nauseated and light headed, his goal was to always do one more repetition.

  Then came the weight vest. Shade made Baggs put on a forty-pound vest and jog around the track. “I’ve got” gasp, “plantar,” gasp, “fasciitis,” gasp, “can’t,” gasp “run that much.”

  Shade shook his head. “We’ll see about that. Let’s start. C’mon. NOW!”

  He didn’t think that he could, but Baggs began to jog beside the little man with the blue makeup on, and after a couple minutes, Shade told him to walk. They walked for a couple minutes, and then ran for a couple more. They continued on like that for half an hour, alternating between jogging and walking. Baggs’s feet grew even more swollen than they had when he walked from his apartment to the Media Tower.

  I hope Tessa knows that if I die, I will have tried my best, he thought.

  Shade took Baggs downstairs into a basement room where punching bags hung from the ceiling by metal chains. He quickly showed Baggs proper punching form, gave Baggs boxing gloves, and had him follow commands. “Right uppercut, left jab, left jab, left jab, right uppercut, right jab, right hook, left hook, right uppercut, left uppercut, right jab, right jab, right jab.” After the first dozen punches, Baggs’s form wavered, but Shade didn’t stop commanding him to punch. Then he led Baggs into another room that had a pool and had him swim laps. The entire length of the pool was over ten feet deep, and after ten laps, Shade had to dive in and help Baggs to the side of the pool. He had swum to the point that he literally couldn’t pull his body another stroke forward and had begun to sink to the bottom.

  After Shade pulled Baggs out of the water he said, “We’re done for the day. You did great. I’ve never had someone work as hard as you.”

  “I just did what you told me,” Baggs said.

  Shade smiled. “People usually start refusing after they’ve vomited a few times. Most people won’t swim until they’ll drown.”

  “I want to see my girls again,” Baggs said. His eyes were out of focus from exhaustion and oxygen deprivation.

  “I know.”

  After the workout, Baggs went back into the dormitory, showered, and put on another set of clothes. He then ate with the rest of the Boxers; picking up the fork to move food to his mouth cost a tremendous amount of effort. Dr. Strant came by and gave every competitor a blue pill to take along with his or her meal; Baggs swallowed his down with some milk without thinking much about what the pill could be. He was too tired to think much. The meal was bland white rice, vegetables, and grilled chicken. He ate more than he ever had before. None of the Boxers spoke while they ate; when they were done eating, all of them went straight to sleep.

  The blue pill made me sleepy, he thought.

  He woke up four hours later, was given a smoothie, an energy drink, an IV injection of some mystery substance by Dr. Strant, and then he started his second workout.

  So that’s how we’re able to have so many sleeping and waking periods, Baggs thought. They drug us with downers to make us sleep, and then energy drinks to make us wake up.

  Unbelievable as it was, Baggs was in better shape during his second workout than he had been during the first one. The injection has to be some kind of steroid, he thought. Normal people don’t heal that fast, or gain muscle in less than eight hours. Also, his voice deepened. Even more telling than that was that the female Boxers’ voices had begun to crack as though they were teenage males beginning puberty.

  By the end of the workout, he had vomited again, but not as much as last time. The Boxers showered, were given food, and then the blue pill.

  The schedule became monotonous. Workout for three hours, shower, eat, sleep for four hours, then wake up and workout. The schedule resulted in the desired effect, though. By the twentieth workout, when Baggs raced around the gym, he was in much better shape than he started. I think I’ve got a good shot at living through this thing, he thought. Mirrors flanked the back wall, and he glanced at himself. In one week, he had put on twenty-five solid pounds. Now when he did bench presses, the bar bent with how much weight it held. The bruises from where Modd Harvey had pounded in his face at the Competitors’ Dinner had turned an ugly green color. He could run a mile in a little over six minutes. He could swim five times as many laps as when he started. The muscles in his feet had been strengthened, and instead of worsening, his plantar fasciitis was bothering him less than before.

  He turned from the mirror and stared ahead at Shade, who was already putting a good deal of distance between them. The back wall was lined with thirty metal boxes in a row. Baggs had been instructed to bunny-hop on and off each of them. Shade was already leaping onto the fifth one by the time Baggs reached the boxes.

  This is my last lap of circuit. I’m going to catch him, he thought.

  With sweat running off his skin and onto the floor, he leapt onto the first one. The first box was as high as his knees. He leapt down, and leapt onto the second one, which was as high as his hips. The boxes went on like that, sometimes as tall as his knees and sometimes up to his hips. By the fifth box, his legs were burning. By the twentieth, they were screaming.

  They finished the plyometric boxes, and then, in order to complete the circuit, they had to run up the stairs, get on the indoor track and run one lap, which was four hundred meters. Baggs saw Shade running up the stairs just as he had finished the boxes.

  I want to kiss Maggie’s head again. I want to hold Olive. I want to finish reading the Harry Potter series to them. I want to give them cake and ice cream until I can no longer see the bones of their skinny chests.

  Baggs actually hollered in agony as the lactic acid seeped into his sore muscles and he bounded up the stairs two at a time. He closed a little of the gap between himself and Shade. When they got to the top, Shade looked back to see that Baggs was catching him. He’s tired, Baggs thought, looking at Shade’s exhausted expression. His mouth was open, his cheeks were relaxed, and his eyebrows were pulled together in pain. And I’m going to catch him.

  Shade took off at a fast pace and Baggs followed him at a sprint. He put everything he could into the last quarter-mile of the workout. Let’s go! He thought. I want to see them again. I want to lie bes
ide Tessa and kiss her shoulder, her neck.

  “Ugghh,” he grunted as he sprinted over the track. His breath was rushing in and out of his mouth and his feet were pounding on the ground. Faster, he thought, but his feet couldn’t pick up the pace. He was developing an odd, mucus-like paste in the back of his mouth; he found that this came only when he had exerted himself near the point of syncope. Half way around the track, his vision tunneled down and his peripheries were clouded with hazy-black.

  I will catch him, he thought. I will catch him, and then I am going to live to see my girls again.

  With one hundred yards to go, he was running right beside Shade, even with him. Shade looked over, his face contorted in a mixture of agony and surprise that his trainee had caught him.

  He didn’t think that I could catch him. I can beat him.

  The two of them both quickened their pace and continued on for one final sprint towards the end of the track. Both of the men were slick with sweat on every inch of their bodies as they tried to beat each one. In the end, Shade won by a margin of five yards, but Baggs was pleased. He had truly almost beaten Shade in a race, which would have been impossible just one week ago.

  13

  An hour after Baggs and Shade had raced down the final stretch of the track, he lay in his twin-sized bed, staring at the dormitory ceiling. It was a little past two in the morning and all the lights were out. Every muscle in his body ached, and he only had four hours to sleep until their next and final workout.

  But Baggs didn’t feel like sleeping.

  Around him, the six other Boxers were all sleeping soundly. After exercising, all seven of the Boxers showered and ate a big meal. Only six of them took the blue sleeping pill, though. Baggs put his under his tongue, carried it to the bathroom, and flushed it down the toilet.

  I need to think, and I can’t think when I’m sleeping. I need to figure out how I’m going to avoid being killed by Byron Turner if I live through Outlive.

  He knew that he would regret not opting for the drug-induced sleep in the morning, when he would have to endure another strenuous workout without sleep. But this is worth it. I need some time to figure things out.