by Chad Leito
He fell asleep after an hour and, again, he dreamed of skeletons fighting with swords while the piano played in the background.
14
Baggs sat at one end of the long table and Larry Wight sat beside him.
In one hour, a helicopter would be taking the Outlive contestants to the Colosseum. It felt unreal to Baggs that they would be leaving so soon. In not long, he would be standing on the sand, holding a sword, battling for his life in front of 200,000 spectators.
But now, he was sipping on a glass of ice water. He swallowed, thinking back to this morning.
After waking up at six in the morning, he had a decent workout. Even though he only slept one hour, he was able to push himself just as hard as usual. He suspected that this was partly due to the fact that he knew that it was his last workout.
Then, he showered and ate. During that meal, he happily took the blue sleeping pill and had rested until he was woken up for dinner. He was dressed in another suit (I can’t believe how much money they are spending on my clothing!), and then the Boxers were ushered down to the Turner’s dining room for dinner.
The dining room table was wooden and stretched far enough to comfortably seat one hundred people. Baggs counted ninety.
Gigi walked around, placing napkins from a bin in front of all the guests. Her mother had announced that even though they had robotic servants, it was good for a girl to learn to set a table. There were lawyers, doctors, business owners and other high-paid professionals that came to support Turner at this dinner, which was to celebrate him sending away his competitors for their Outlive competition.
The conversation droned on. Gigi made her way down to the Outlive contestants at the end of the table, placing the napkins delicately in front of each guest. The Boxers were not wearing Chokes, but two K9s sat patiently beside them, watching their every move.
Baggs looked at his teammates. All of them had put on a substantial amount of muscle. We’ll be formidable, he thought. Though, Shade had told him that a lot of what makes a good Outlive team comes from ingenuity, not strength. He didn’t know how he could mentally prepare for such a competition, but he kept the advice in his mind.
When Gigi’s cart with napkins reached Baggs, she hesitated oddly. She reached for the normal pile of napkins in the bin, and then her hand stopped. She then reached deep within the pile of napkins and produced one that she sat in front of Baggs. Her hands were shaking as she did this. She moved on, placing napkins in front of the rest of the guests from the top of the bunch. Baggs looked around and saw that no one seemed to notice that Gigi had just given Baggs a napkin from a special place.
He looked down at the folded, white piece of cloth. Why did she hesitate with mine? He averted his gaze from the napkin, trying not to draw attention, and went back to listening to what Larry Wight was saying. He was talking on again about how the social classes were merely determined by ‘ones’ and ‘zeros’ that were programmed into a computer.
Baggs was only mildly paying attention to what his teammate was saying; he was staying just aware enough to nod and laugh in the appropriate places. What his mind was really concentrated on was his napkin.
Her hands were shaking when she placed it down on the table.
After a few minutes, Byron Turner came down to pat his competitors on the backs and ask how they were doing.
“I need to go to the bathroom,” Baggs said.
“Go then,” Turner told him. “Titan, go with him,” he told one of the K9s. Its stature went well with its name. “The robot will show you where to go.”
Baggs stood, and swiftly pocketed the napkin. He followed the K9 down a twist of hallways toward a bathroom. On his way, he noticed that there was a room off the hallway that was devoted to computers. That’s probably the mainframe that monitors everything in here, he thought. It’s probably connected to the internet, too.
The K9 sat outside of a restroom’s threshold. Baggs walked past the robot, shut the door, and locked it.
The bathroom was beautifully decorated, just like all of the other rooms in the Turners’ house, but Baggs wasn’t interested in this. His ears were hot as blood rushed through them. He took the napkin out of his pocket, unfolded it, and found a note written in a twelve year old girl’s big, curvy handwriting.
Read me secretely
The last word was misspelled, Baggs noticed. He wondered if Maggie could spell that word.
Never mind that, open it, he thought.
As he unfolded the paper, he wondered what kind of a message she would want to tell Baggs. And what made her hands shake with nervous energy.
But as he read the message, he understood immediately. It wasn’t any new information. The note only confirmed what he knew. For some reason, though, seeing it written out in Byron Turner’s daughter’s handwriting made him very nervous.
My daddy killed Paul Higgins and he’ll try to kill you too if you survive the competition. I heard him tell mom while he was drunk. Something about vitamins. I don’t know what to do. He scares me. I am scared for you and for your girls.
-G
15
Fifty minutes later, Baggs was climbing into the helicopter that would take him to the Colosseum.
16
Fifteen-year-old Baggs thought he was in the clear. He thought he had avoided working for Mr. Snow by declining the gold coin and Lilly. He had thought that Darius Till was just being a Good Samaritan by giving him the Nikes.
But still, images of Bite inhabited his dreams like a malicious parasite. He often woke up sweating and moaning as he came out of a dream in which Bite took Baggs’s fingers in his mouth and savagely ripped them apart with his big teeth. When he woke in the middle of the night, shuddering with terror, he could clearly imagine the nub on Bite’s hand, and the blue marble that was lodged in his left eye socket. He saw the veins in the eyelid as it stretched forward with the fake eye’s unnatural size.
After a week, the dreams subsided some. He hadn’t seen Mr. Snow, Lilly, Darius Till, Pointer, Pinky, or Bite since the party at Mr. Snow’s mansion and he began to think that he had actually avoided getting involved with them. He was calming down.
People asked questions about his Nikes at the grocery store and at home. He told everyone that he bought them, not wanting to admit to the truth, which would have sounded unbelievable. Oh, these shoes? Yeah, a famous baseball player gave them to me.
It was a week after the party. Baggs’s bruises from his fight with Baldy were now gone and he was working the checkout line at the grocery store. Because Baggs was so versed in the process of checking out a customer, he could do it on autopilot. He smiled and asked the customer if they found everything okay while his hands took the groceries off the conveyer belt, scanned them, and put them into a sack. He told the customers their total, asked them to put their thumbprint on the scanner to pay for their items, and then wished them a good day. He then repeated the process again and again.
He liked to daydream as he did this. Today he was daydreaming about Lilly and the way her body looked in her underwear. He knew that he had made a good decision to throw away her number because if he had not, he didn’t think he would have been able to resist calling her. She is a whore, he told himself. You don’t want any part of that. This was the logical part of his brain talking, the part that was best at analyzing options objectively. The part of his brain that facilitated sexual urges always disagreed with the logical part on this subject. No, I very much want a part of that! I don’t give a shit if it’s disgraceful! Oh my God, she looked so good. And she would have had me too, if I had accepted her as a trade from Mr. Snow, my loyalty for Lilly’s body.
The more Baggs thought about Lilly, the more he respected Mr. Snow’s intelligence. Dumb as it sounded, Baggs believed that a lot of men would turn their lives over to a man like Mr. Snow for access to a beautiful prostitute like Lilly.
“Did you find everything okay?” Baggs asked the next customer, smiling politely. His brain was not in the g
rocery store, though, he was thinking about Lilly. He stood there, in his Nike shoes, absent-minded as he reached for the customer’s item to scan it and put it in the bag.
But then, he snapped out of his daydream. The item on the conveyer belt wasn’t sold at Lucky’s—it was a ten-inch knife with an ornate wooden handle. His hand paused while reaching for it. He looked up and noticed that there was only one customer in his line.
“Turn your light off to indicate that this aisle is closed, Baggs,” Bite said to him. “You’re leaving work early.”
“I can’t leave,” Baggs said.
Bite picked up the knife and slid it into a hidden holster that was strapped around his ankle. He straightened his pants over the weapon and stood up. He somehow looked the same as he had the day of Mr. Snow’s party and different at the same time. He was still missing his middle finger on his right hand, he still had the giant glass left eye, and his mouth still protruded like a muzzle. He looked the same, but he was acting alarmingly different. He was twitching, moving quickly, and dancing on his feet. He looked at Baggs with something beyond normal aggression; the look made Baggs want to shrink away into a corner and hide.
“Oh yes you can. The door is back there. Grab me a pack of Chief Smokes before we go.” Bite looked around quickly. He was sniffing and scratching himself.
Baggs was frozen with fear, not knowing what to do. Just a moment before he had thought he had escaped working for Mr. Snow. Now, his heart was pounding as he tried to think of a way out of this situation.
Bite slammed his hand down on the conveyer belt and the surrounding customer’s and employees looked his way, alarmed. He didn’t care about them, though. His one good eye was locked onto Baggs in bloodshot enragement. His lips were drawn back in a feral gesture in which he exposed his teeth. He bit his own finger off with those teeth, Baggs thought. Bite spoke in a hoarse whisper. “Grab the cigarettes and start walking out the door. Mr. Snow told me to come in and get you. He’s not a patient man.”
“Can I tell my boss first?” Baggs asked.
Bite leaned over the counter and slapped Baggs so hard that his head rolled back. A woman in the next lane shrieked and put a protective arm around her small boy who was standing in line with her.
“Grab the cigarettes, and let’s get the fuck out of here,” Bite growled. He didn’t mind cursing with children around.
Baggs turned, grabbed a pack of cigarettes, scanned them, and paid for them with his own thumbprint before pacing beside Bite out of the grocery store.
Louis saw Baggs walking out and jumped out of his office. “Hey! Where do you think you’re going?” he asked as Baggs walked out the door. Baggs didn’t respond, but kept walking.
It was drizzling outside and Bite and Baggs jogged over to a limousine. Bite opened the door, Baggs slid in, and then Bite got in behind him. He shut the door and they began to roll. The door automatically locked.
Instinctually, Baggs started crying when he saw what was inside. Bite sat beside him. Three other people he had seen before also occupied the car, including Mr. Snow whose hair was impeccably gelled and combed; he was wearing a blue suit jacket with a gold shirt beneath it. Baggs also recognized Pinky and Pointer. Pinky’s hair had receded further toward the back of her head, and her blisters looked even worse than before.
There were two people, though, who Baggs didn’t know. The presence of these people, and their condition was what made him start crying. He had suspected that Mr. Snow was involved in criminal activity, but he somehow hadn’t thought that it would be like this.
Both of the men were blindfolded and gagged with their hands cuffed behind them. One man was healthy, and the other was dying.
The dying man looked to be in his early twenties. There was a screwdriver lodged in his neck, and the wound was leaking blood all over the seats. The tool had been stabbed through the side, and the man was wheezing and gasping. Blood ran from his mouth. There were five puncture wounds in his abdomen, which suggested that he had been stabbed in those places with the screwdriver before it was put in his neck. Baggs looked down and noticed that the floor was matted with rubber in this limo, as were the ceilings. There was no carpet into which the blood could leak into and stain. It appeared as though the man with the screwdriver in his neck had vomited. Some of the emesis was caught on the rubber gag between his teeth, but most of it was sitting on his lap.
Both men were in their underwear.
The healthy man looked to be five or ten years older than the one with the screwdriver in his neck. He had a skinny, hairy chest and long legs with socks that reached halfway up his knees. The man’s skin was the color of diluted tea, and his chest rose and fell with sobbing hitches.
“Hello, Baggs,” Mr. Snow said. His eyes were shadowed in the limo’s hushed light. He looked evil. He is evil, Baggs thought.
Baggs didn’t respond, but just kept crying. He was biting hard on one of his fists; the gesture made him look like a giant, hairy toddler.
Baggs’s head rocked back in a quick shot of pain as Bite backhanded him. For a moment, Baggs was disoriented and the limo spun in his vision. Then, things steadied out. His lip was bleeding.
“Mr. Snow is fucking talking to you,” Bite said.
Baggs nodded, still crying, and looked at Mr. Snow.
Mr. Snow smiled. “Do I have your attention, Baggs?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” Mr. Snow leaned back, and withdrew a cigar that looked very much like the one he had smoked outside his mansion on the night that he spoke with Baggs. “Do you remember the conversation we had one week ago, Baggs?”
Baggs nodded. “Yes.”
Mr. Snow flicked his lighter and lit the end of his cigar. The smell of he burning tobacco filled the room. He blew out a cloud of smoke. “Do you remember what I said about people who take things from me?”
“You said that you make them pay you back,” Baggs blubbered, looking at the man with the screwdriver lodged in his neck. Every time he breathed, the handle went up and down. The man’s face was ashen and blood continued to seep from his wounds and bubble out of his nose with his breaths.
“Yes, that’s what I said,” Mr. Snow said, taking another drag from his cigar.
I need to get it together, Baggs thought, looking at the dying man. I’m losing it. I need to control my crying. He let one more sob out, and then quieted. Tears of extreme terror continued to roll down his eyes, but he was calming and becoming more rational. “I didn’t take anything from you, though,” Baggs said. He was surprised to find that his voice sounded level, almost threatening.
Mr. Snow smiled and then his dark eyes shifted to Baggs’s feet. “You bought those shoes?”
Baggs’s breath caught in his throat and he began to stutter. “I-I-I… Darius… Darius gave them to me!”
“And I’m Darius’s agent! I got him his deal with Nike, and he doesn’t move a finger without my permission! I’m the one who got him in the big leagues! He owes me, you understand? Essentially, those are my shoes you’re wearing.”
Baggs had to put a great deal of effort into not sobbing again. He clenched his jaw and again his eyes were drawn to the screwdriver in the man’s neck. It was lodged right up to the handle. Whoever stabbed that in must have put a great deal of force into the motion, he thought morbidly.
“So are you going to pay me back?”
Baggs shook his head violently, thinking, he’s going to make me kill the other guy. Then, he’ll have something that he can blackmail me for.
Still puffing on his cigar, Mr. Snow reached into a leather bag beside him and pulled out three items. He held them out for Baggs. “Take them, start putting them on and go sit over there with the other two,” he said. He held a pair of handcuffs, a rubber gag, and a blindfold.
Baggs couldn’t refrain from sobbing again, and a few brays of terror escaped him as he shook his head back and forth while backing away from Mr. Snow.
“You don’t want to put these on?” Mr. Snow ask
ed.
“NO!” Baggs said.
Mr. Snow looked at Bite with a mocking expression of confusion on his face. “Bite, did you see Baggs shake his head ‘no’ when I asked if he was going to pay me back?”
“I did see that.”
Mr. Snow puffed on his cigar. “Hmmm. That’s interesting, because he then refused to put the handcuffs, the gag and the blindfold on and sit with the other debt dodgers. I guess we’ll have to just force him over there.”
“No!” Baggs cried. Bite had started to move towards him when Mr. Snow held up his hand. Bite froze.
“Well,” Mr. Snow said. “Maybe we misinterpreted his shake of the head. Maybe he didn’t mean what we think he meant. So I’ll ask you again, Baggs. If you answer ‘no,’ you’re going to be cuffed and put with the two other lowlifes on that seat. Will you pay me back for those shoes?”
Baggs waited a long time, trying to think. He didn’t want to say yes, or no. Fifteen seconds went by. The limo turned left and then merged onto the highway. Thirty seconds passed. Mr. Snow puffed on his cigar. After one minute, Bite said, “What’s your answer?”
Baggs swallowed. He once again had his sobs under control. “What will I have to do to pay you back?”
Mr. Snow laughed without humor. “I like this guy, Bite. He’s smart. That’s smart, kid. Never agree to a bargain unless the expenses of both sides have been outlined. He’s a business man.” Snow puffed, then leaned forward and spoke. He had leaned so far towards Baggs that their faces were six inches apart. His dark eyes did not twitch as they looked into Baggs’s. Mr. Snow was only five feet six inches, and his voice was high. His hands were dainty. Still, there was something absent in his eyes that most people had. His stare made Baggs’s guts turn to ice. “You want to know what I want you to do to pay me back?” Mr. Snow asked quietly. “I’ll tell you. The guy on the right, the one who isn’t bleeding yet, I want you to break his knee caps.”