by Chad Leito
The man on the right began to try to holler in protest, but the sound was muffled by his gag.
Mr. Snow continued, his dead eyes still staring straight at the bigger man’s. “I want you to know that I’m punishing those two men because they defied me. We had a deal, and they owed me money last week. I was kind enough to tell them that they could have another week to pay me, on the condition that if they didn’t I was going to flip a coin in front of them. Heads would mean the one on the right and tails would mean the one on the left. I would kill the unlucky man whose side turned up. I am in the process of doing that.”
Baggs broke eye contact and noticed that Mr. Snow’s suit was speckled with blood. He stabbed the guy himself.
He smiled, realizing what Baggs had noticed. “I told them that I would break the other one’s legs and feet so bad that they’d never walk again. I won’t kill both of them, yet. I’m a business man, Baggs. I realize that a dead man can’t pay me money. Anyways, back to our end of the bargain. You took my shoes, and so I want you to break the man on the right’s legs so bad that he never walks again. We’re going out to a little place I know of to do the business.”
Part 3
1
Thirty three year old Baggs sat on one of the plastic stadium seats in the Colosseum. Sixteen hours had passed since Gigi had slipped him the warning letter on the napkin at Turner’s house. The death match was quickly approaching, and time seemed to be slipping by too quickly. The stadium seats were painted a glossy green. Baggs’s hands were handcuffed and rested between his knees. He twisted his arms, fruitlessly trying to maneuver the cuffs into a more comfortable position. They’ve got enough guns pointed at us; why do we have to wear these stupid things? His wrists had such a diameter that even on the biggest size, the cuffs were uncomfortably tight.
“After the next battle, we’ll take ye’ to get ready,” one of the guards shouted at the Outlive participants, straining to be heard over the roaring crowd.
Baggs thought about those words as he watched gladiators battle on a levitating platform. Every so often one of the competitors would be pushed off the edge and fall one hundred feet to splatter on the hard-packed sand.
The crowd loved it.
As Baggs looked around, he saw people of every culture and social class in the 200,000 stadium seats. He saw a black woman in an evening gown sipping on wine. He saw a kid in a t-shirt with a sword on it eating a hotdog; mustard had dripped off the dog to stain his front side. There was a man a few rows behind them who yelled, hollered, and clapped until his voice was hoarse and his hands were red; Baggs turned in his seat to look at the man and saw that he had an untidy grey beard and was missing most of his front teeth; he looked like a vagrant (Although people sometimes thought that I was a vagrant, he reminded himself). There were families in the box seats eating five-star meals as they watched the blood and gore. There were vendors walking up and down the stairs that ran between the stadium seats selling cotton candy, peanuts, margaritas, beer, hot dogs, and packaged candies. Baggs saw a little girl who hadn’t yet learned that it was okay to watch people die; she was sitting on her daddy’s lap, crying with her head buried in his shoulder; she didn’t want to watch anymore. They’ll keep taking her to these things until that sensitivity is beaten out of her. Her father certainly doesn’t seem bothered by the blood. The father’s eyes were locked onto the action as he rubbed his daughter’s back, comforting her.
The Boxers were seated together in a row, all wearing expensive suits and dresses. Again, Baggs thought of how the money used to decorate the Outlive participants could feed his daughters for months. I wouldn’t have had to enter this awful thing if they could have just settled for cheaper suits and then given me the extra. Baggs was sweating in his shirt and coat, but could not remove them because of his handcuffs.
Since he boarded the helicopter that would take him to the Colosseum, his anxiety had been building. All seven Boxers had ridden to the Colosseum in the same helicopter. As the machine whirred and hummed and lifted them above twinkling cities in the dark night, they all remained quiet. Baggs had not felt like talking at all. It was just beginning to feel real then, he thought. As he had slumped down in the leather seat with a stomach full of steak, he had thought of what it would be like to die on the sand. His mind had gone back to watching the rerun of Outlive on the HoloVision Box at Greggor’s. Those people had actually died. He had looked around the helicopter. Some of the people that I’m with tonight will be dead in the next twenty four hours, whether its from puncture wounds caused by blades, or teeth, or blunt force, maybe from falling ten stories or taking a hammer to the face. He found it strange that as they had ridden in silence to the Colosseum, the prospect of Outlive had seemed more real to him. He had never thought of the upcoming match as a joke, but something about the act of traveling towards the place where the atrocities would happen brought the outlook into sharp, unforgiving focus.
During the ride, he had considered telling his teammates about the letter that Gigi had placed in his napkin at dinner. That was another example of something becoming more real, he thought. He had strongly suspected all along that Byron Turner planned on killing them if they survived Outlive, but it still had jarred him to see the proof in Turner’s daughter’s handwriting. After reading the letter, Baggs had ripped the paper up into small pieces and swallowed it in an attempt to destroy any evidence. After considering, he had decided not to tell his teammates Turner’s plan; first thing is first, we’ve got to survive tomorrow in the arena. Then we can worry about Turner.
“Hey guys, look,” Larry Wight had said around eleven o’clock the night before. He was staring out the helicopter’s window, the streetlights below reflected on his spectacles. “This is it. This is the Colosseum.”
All of the Boxers had looked out of the windows, not saying a word amongst themselves as the monstrous building came into view. It was enormous—a spectacle. The arena was bigger than a city block. The structure dwarfed all that it surrounded, and reminded Baggs of a great pyramid in ancient Egypt.
The Colosseum was an odd mixture of ancient aesthetics and new world technology, which was exactly what Emperor Daman had wanted when he sat down with architects and planners and gave them his vision for the arena. The outside walls looked rough and weather-beaten. They were not metallic or concrete, like the walls of many modern structures. Instead, they were famously constructed of travertine, a type of limestone that the Ancient Romans had used in many of their buildings. The acquisition of this material had been extremely costly, but Emperor Daman had insisted; just as he had a library devoted to Adolf Hitler and a lifelike statue of George Washington in his bedroom, he wanted this building and the acts that went on within it to be a tribute to one of the most dominant civilizations in the history of humanity—the Ancient Romans. In contrast to this, he also wanted the building to be extremely cutting-edge and practical; the roof, which looked somewhat like a metallic turtle shell, was completely retractable to allow sunlight in on days when it wasn’t raining or snowing.
As Baggs’s eyes had crawled over the place where so many would die the next day, his mouth had turned dry and his heart had begun to hammer.
Turner’s helicopter was actually programmed to land inside of the Colosseum. Baggs hadn’t learned this until it was happening. The machine had hovered over the center of the roof, which had begun to shiver and fold in on itself until there was an opening big enough for the copter to descend through. The copter had aligned with this opening, and then had lowered itself inside until it was sitting atop the sand floor of the Colosseum.
“Thank you for riding,” said a robotic voice from inside the cabin. Then, the helicopter doors had opened and a group of guards had led them off the machine and through the Colosseum to sleeping quarters where they would spend the night. As Baggs had walked away from the helicopter and over the sand that night, he had felt as though time had slowed. He had examined the seats, which rose up and out a magnificent distance a
bove his head and had imagined what they would look like filled with cheering fans.
Now I don’t have to imagine, Baggs thought as he sat in his seat, looking around. It made him feel nauseous to think that all of those people were comfortable watching other people die. Don’t they feel bad watching others suffer?
The gladiator fight on the levitating platform was over. Three gladiators were still alive at the end, and three dead men were surrounded with puddles of blood on the ground. One of them was still twitching, but a referee came over and examined him and made sure that the movements were merely reflexive seizures, and not caused by life.
Larry Wight sat beside Baggs, watching the Colosseum employees clean up for the next event, which would also be a gladiator fight. Custodians dressed like Ancient Roman paupers, wearing cloth togas with bare feet, sprinted over the sand and dragged the corpses out to one of the doors along the walls where the bodies were disposed of. The gladiators were big, well muscled men, and so it took three custodians to drag each one away. A ladder descended from the levitating platform, and the fatigued and bloodied gladiators who still were alive climbed down, waved at the screaming crowd, and exited with their lives intact. The levitating platform then flew up to the high Colosseum ceiling where robotic ropes automatically wrapped around it and held it in place out of the way so that the next event could start.
After this next event, we’ll be taken to start getting ready for the Outlive contest, Baggs thought. He breathed in and out, trying to calm himself. There are so many different ways that this episode of Outlive could be designed.
The Colosseum implemented a lot of surprises and diversity into the different events to make them more interesting. Today, there would be a dozen shows, each with different competitors and different events. The most popular event was either Outlive or on-the-ground sword fighting between gladiators. Baggs had watched three of these swordfights as he sat in the plastic chair next to Larry; in all of them so far, attack animals had been released in the middle of the fight to add another element to the battle. In one, the gladiators were fighting two-on-two with swords and shields; as they battled and clanked metal against metal in deadly blows, hyenas were randomly released from the walls surrounding the Colosseum floor. The animals were no more than forty pounds, but they were fast, vicious, and unafraid of the humans even with their weapons. Each time one of the dogs was released, the crowd gasped, screamed and cheered. The hyenas sprinted over the bloody sand and attacked the nearest competitors with chomping jaws, and sometimes changed the outcome of a swordfight by biting the back of a gladiator’s leg who was about to win a battle. Other fights weren’t as simple as normal swordfights. Some gladiator battles involved horses, levitating platforms (such as in the fight that Baggs had just seen), shark infested tanks of water, attacking birds, bows and arrows, rhinos, cannons, poisonous snakes, komodo dragons, K9s, javelins, and much more. This aspect of gladiator battles was copied from gladiator battles in Ancient Rome, where surprises and a myriad of different battle obstacles were used to build the audience’s suspense.
Gladiators, unlike Outlive participants, were highly trained athletes who were paid great sums of money to compete. The gladiators were all male, and lived in a secluded training facility in an undisclosed location. Baggs had heard that not even the gladiators knew where the facility was—they were sedated before traveling to the place, so that they could not deduce the location when they arrived. The gladiators were hand selected premier athletes that were willing to fight for their lives on the off chance that if they lived they would become some of the richest men in the country.
There were many ways that gladiators were chosen.
The most common was through prison try-outs. Like Ancient Rome, New Rome had a very large number of prisoners awaiting a death sentence. As with most populations, some of these criminals were superb athletes. Before Mass Prison Killings (these were events in which thousands of criminals were put to death on a single day in the pursuit of efficiency and saving funds; Mass Prison Killings usually took place four or five times a year.) the prisons had large, complex fighting tournaments to find the best fighters; those that proved themselves would then be rewarded the opportunity to fight in the Colosseum, where they would most likely die anyways.
There were also civilian fighting tournaments in which anyone could enter and fight others in an attempt at winning a spot as a gladiator. The civilians who entered these tournaments were usually poor and starving, as Baggs had been. He had considered fighting in one of these tournaments, but had decided that Outlive was a safer bet. For starters, many citizens died in the Civilian Fighting Tournaments and their families did not receive any money for their death; this was a risk in entering. Also, in order to live as a gladiator, a citizen had to do well in one of these tournaments, be chosen as a gladiator, and then win, on average, five consecutive fights in the Colosseum. This was a long shot, although the prize money was much more substantial than that offered to Outlive competitors, and was given to the families whether the gladiator lived or not, as long as they were chosen. Baggs chose the safer option of entering Outlive, as there were no tryouts, and all he had to do was sign up and his family was guaranteed CreditCoins.
Another means by which people could become gladiators was celebrity sign-ups. Sometimes former premier boxers or baseball players would blow all their money and want to sign up to be a gladiator in hopes of regaining their lost fortune and fame.
No matter how the gladiators came to be, they bargained with the Colosseum until both parties agreed upon a contract; the new gladiator would then sign his life away and begin training. The contracts usually had a few components to them. The first was that once they were signed there was no chickening-out. It was easier to be brave when the deathmatch was six months away, but harder when you were sitting in the Colosseum, knowing that the contest would begin in a couple hours (Baggs could attest to this as he sat in the stadium seats, sweating, heart pounding, dreading the moment when he would step out onto the sand). Another component of the contract was that there were a certain number of contests that each gladiator would have to win in order to be given their freedom and the prize money; this was negotiable. For normal prisoners, the amount of fights they had to survive was usually between five to seven; for some high-profile criminals, the amount could be as high as fifteen. Celebrities who entered usually were able to bargain for more lenient treatment. Often times if a celebrity could survive a couple fights, they would be given freedom and the reward. The number of fights that the gladiators had to survive in order to live was called their Freedom Number. The final negotiable aspect of gladiator contracts was the reward money they would be given if they reached their Freedom Number. For a normal prisoner, this amount was typically in the ballpark of one million CreditCoins; for celebrities, it sometimes went as high as one hundred million CreditCoins.
Baggs looked left and right at the different Outlive teams that were sitting around him. There were thirty teams of seven contestants, making two hundred ten total participants. He felt nauseated as he looked over them. How many of us will still be alive at the end of the day? he wondered. Thirty? Twenty? Maybe only three. Three was a low number, but it wasn’t unprecedented. Baggs had heard of an Outlive contest in which only one person lived. At the beginning of an Outlive contest, the competitors stepped out onto the sand and the rules were explained over the intercom. Seconds after the rules were read out, the battle began; part of the challenge was that the competitors have to think fast. In the Outlive episode when only one person lived, the rules had explained that it was an every-person-for-themselves kind of battle; the teams didn’t actually matter.
I bet the crowd loved it, Baggs thought, pursing his lips. They got more blood than they could have hoped for. I just wish there was some way that I could know what kind of battle I’m getting myself into before it starts.
Up until the moment he had actually gotten into Turner’s helicopter to fly to the Colosseum, Baggs had
held out hope that Turner would reveal what kind of obstacles they would face in the arena. He had not. Tartuga was telling the truth, Baggs thought, they keep that information top secret. He looked at the other teams again. Either that, or Turner doesn’t know the right person to buy it from.
Baggs looked at his own teammates; Hailey Vixen was wearing a sleeveless dress, which exposed rock-hard triceps that made a little shadow on the back of her arm. I wonder how many other teams were given steroids, he wondered. Most of the men on the other teams had sleeves on; some of the females were toned, but he couldn’t recall anyone’s particular physique from the Contestant’s Dinner that he could compare to what he was seeing now. He remembered Chobb Lowe from the Pirates, the ex powerlifter who was half-naked on the HoloVision Box, but Chobb was five rows down and wearing a sports jacket. His neck looked as thick as a tree trunk, but this wasn’t a noticeable change—he had been big even before training. He was probably using steroids before entering, too. Baggs wondered why a guy like that didn’t try to become a gladiator; he may think that competing in Outlive will be a breeze. He may just want to get this over with so that he can return to powerlifting.
An unmanned helicopter that was no bigger than a crow hovered down from the awning and stopped a few yards in front of Baggs. The machine whirred quietly; a camera was attached to the bottom of the contraption. It’s come back to get more footage of me, Baggs thought. He looked up and saw his face in the giant HoloVision Box that hung from cables high above the arena floor. Upon seeing Baggs’s face—his big ears, his crooked nose, his thick black beard, and his protruding forehead—the crowd erupted in whoops, whistles and shouts of joy.
I’m a celebrity, Baggs thought, not amused. He remained expressionless until the small, flying camera moved over to get footage of other contestants.
Baggs supposed that the cameras were the only reason the Outlive participants were allowed to sit in the stadium seats instead of being locked in some cell in the Colosseum’s basement. Locking them in cells out of sight would have been cheaper—the vendors could have then sold tickets to the seats that the teams were now occupying. But we are here to entertain. The crowd seemed to love getting to see images of the Outlive participants on the big screen. And I bet the viewers at home love it too, Baggs thought grimly. They probably like seeing us scared out of our minds, counting our time until they lead us away to get ready to kill each other.