by Chad Leito
Godspeed, Spinks, Baggs thought. I hope that I didn’t mess it up for both of us by getting the cops called.
And then he passed out.
4
Baggs woke up some time later.
He didn’t know how much time had passed and he felt terribly groggy.
He fell right back to sleep.
He awoke again, and tried to remember where he was. Something is making my mind all fuzzy, he thought. He was on a rubber floor that was vibrating softly. My shoulder hurts. My thigh hurts. This isn’t my apartment. Where am I?
It took him a while for his drugged brain to remember what had happened at Turner’s house. He recalled the tranquilizer hitting him, and attributed his diminished thinking ability to the drug. I hope that Turner didn’t damage my brain by kicking me.
Where the hell am I?
Baggs was too tired to lift his head. He wanted to find out, but right now, his desire to sleep was so great it was too much for him to try to investigate his surroundings.
Wake up! he shouted in his own head, and he forced one eye open.
Baggs saw that he was in a small cell that was surrounded by metal bars. All around him were other cells, and there were people lying in them. Some were talking lowly.
Am I in jail? he wondered.
But then the ground beneath him took an odd lurch and his stomach dropped, making him challenge his initial belief that he was in jail. I’m in a cop helicopter, he realized. These other people and I are being transferred to the jail. The air stunk like booze and sweat. Thunder was clapping in the air outside as they flew through the night. The cabin was chilly. The only light came from the blinking red and yellow anti collision lights from outside the helicopter that shone in through small windows, along with the occasional flash of lightening. Rain pattered against the outside of the machine.
But what happened at Turner’s house?
As though he had asked the question out loud, information came to his ears. Two other prisoners in the helicopter were talking a few feet away. They thought that Baggs was still unconscious.
“It makes no sense,” Person Number One said; he had a high, reedy voice.
“What d’ya mean, it don’t make sense?” Person Number Two asked. This person was a woman with a smoker’s voice, but not Spinks.
Person Number One responded: “Okay, just think about it. The dude gets all the way through Outlive, gets invited over to the Turner’s house, and then kills his old teammate, shuts off the power, slams his owner’s daughter down on the balcony, and then tries to run away. Why the hell would he do that?”
So that’s the story that Turner made up, Baggs thought.
“He’s crazy,” Number Two answered. “Isn’t that reason enough?”
“It don’t make sense,” Number One responded.
No one spoke for a long time and Baggs’s eyes began to close; he had almost drifted off to sleep.
Number One started speaking again in his high pitched voice and Baggs forced himself to stayed up long enough to hear what he said. “What also don’t make sense is that James Baggers was offered a spot as a gladiator. He could have done that, given the money to his family, and then gone crazy in the arena if that’s what he wanted to do. Now that he’s in custody, he’ll be forced to fight in the Colosseum, unless he just wants to die for the crimes he’s committed, but now he’ll get paid way less. That don’t make any sense.”
Number Two said, “What you’re hung up on is this makin’ sense business. What people do don’t always make sense, okay? The guy got in a fight with Mobb Harvey, did that make sense? No. So why do you suspect that he’s gonna make sense now that he’s out on his own?”
Number One was quiet.
Baggs breathed. He was still very sleepy from the medicine. He felt like drifting off, but before he did, he needed to know something.
He moved his hands out by his side and then placed his palms flat on the vibrating floor of the helicopter.
After I see this, I’ll go to sleep, he told himself.
His arms felt as though they were full of sludge, and he fought the urge to lie down again and just find out later. He pushed hard with his chest and triceps until he was on his hands and knees. In the front of the cabin he saw two police officers sitting at the front as the software drove the helicopter through the stormy night.
There were eight other cells in the helicopter, but only five were occupied.
Two were filled with the people whom Baggs thought of as Number One and Number Two. They eyed him suspiciously. They think I’m just crazy, Baggs thought. Then he looked at the other cells with people in them. All three had males of various ages—all of them looked as though they hadn’t bathed in more than a week.
After doing this, Baggs let himself down gently and began to drift off to sleep.
Spinks isn’t here, he thought. Which means that she probably made it. Either that or she was killed. Or picked up by another police copter, but she probably made it.
He drifted off to sleep easily, not bothered by the prospect of entering the Colosseum as a gladiator. He was too drugged to care about such things. He dreamed of pineapple, fried chicken and his daughters at a table. He dreamed of holding Tessa while her chest rose and fell in sleep. He dreamed of Olive holding the doll that Baggs had made for her out of old socks. For that time, he was genuinely happy. In his dreams, he was with them.
5
Far away, in Apartment Building 5160, in London, New Rome, two red headed little girls were snuggling up to their mother in bed. Both of the girls dreamed of their father, who had disappeared, their mother had told them. They knew better, though. Maggie was old enough to be proficient at gathering information on the internet, and she knew what had happened to her father. He had signed up for Outlive, in an attempt to save his daughters from starvation.
Maggie had told Olive this. Tessa felt that Olive was too young to know such things, but Maggie knew better.
Olive is tough, she thought. She was right, too. Olive cried some, but when you grow up impoverished in New Rome, you’re always preparing yourself for the day when your daddy doesn’t come home.
As the two girls went to sleep, they both dreamed of the same person—their dad.
Tessa dreamed of him, too. She took longer to get to sleep than her daughters, but when dreams finally overcame her exhausted mind, they were of James Baggers.
Even though the four of them weren’t technically together at that time, they all felt as though they were, as their minds constructed realities that made them happy.
6
Baggs woke again as the helicopter was landing. Morning light shone in through the window. He had dreamed of his daughters, and later in the night of Tessa. The dreams were fleeting, and he was having trouble remembering them now, but he had a strange feeling that they had somehow been more real than dreams.
He shook his head. Dreams were just dreams. They weren’t real.
But what was real was the way he felt. I will see them again, he told himself. I will not stop fighting until I can be with them. Until I can hold my girls, and read until they fall asleep, and then kiss Tessa and listen to her as she winds down and tells me about her day.
I will see them again.
I swear it.