Outlive (The Baggers Trilogy, #1) (11 page)

             
Baggs planted his bare feet on the tile and brought his weight down again and again, slamming his massive fists into the side of the man’s head, his face, his chest and his stomach. Angry tears were streaming down his face.

             
I’ll be the feral animal you treat me like! You pig!

             
He was grunting, punching until red leaked over his forearms and he thought that he might kill the man.

             
Maybe I will. Why not? I’ll die anyways! My family will die anyways! What punishment could the authorities bring on me?

             
Later, Baggs would be ashamed of himself for thinking such thoughts, but in his white-hot angry state he fed on them.

             
He felt the officer’s nose break under his knuckles. He punched until his hands were numb. The officer wouldn’t be standing anymore if Baggs weren’t punching him relentlessly; the man’s back was to the wall and Baggs kept punching, supporting him with fast-moving fists.

             
And then, he felt the muscles in his legs contract and jitter and he was on the ground, looking up at the officer. The officer’s face was a bloody, broken mess. Somehow, in his semiconscious stupor, the officer had had the mind to grab his taser while Baggs was punching him.

             
“Stay on the ground!” he yelled, brandishing the taser at him.

             
Baggs did so, breathing heavily through his nose. He was distantly aware that more people had piled into the room behind the receptionist’s desk.

             
The officer came around, picked up his gun, and pointed it at Baggs’s face. He smiled, showing the gaps in his teeth that Baggs had just created and put a bloody finger over the trigger. “You’re in trouble, now!”

             
Someone else came into the room. “What’s going on here? Don’t shoot him! Somebody answer me, what’s going on here?”

             
Baggs could hear breath whistling in and out of the officer’s broken nose. “Mr. Tratuga,” he said. He spat blood on the floor. “This vagrant attacked me. He yelled at Julie and then he attacked me. I feel threatened for my life, I think that I should shoot him.”

             
“You’ll do no such thing! Holster your weapon, Jimmy. What’s wrong with you?”

             
A side door opened, and a man in a nice suit walked into the bloody foyer. He was tall and graying. His face had the smooth look all of the wealthy had; his teeth were impeccably white. “Your face is a mess, Jimmy. And I told you to holster your weapon!” the man shouted.

             
“Sorry, Mr. Tartuga,” Jimmy said, and holstered the gun.

             
“Now what the hell happened here, huh? I want the whole story!” Tartuga demanded.

             
Does this guy own the studio or something?
Baggs wondered, looking at the expensive shoes Tartuga was wearing.

             
Jimmy started; “This guy came in here, yelling and raving about his daughters…”

             
Tartuga waved his hand impatiently. “Not from you, from him. I want the big guy to talk.” His blue eyes were on Baggs.

             
Baggs remained where he was lying on the bloody floor. Now that he had had a moment to calm down, he felt embarrassed that he had resorted to violence. Hot blood still beat through his face, though. His hands were throbbing from throwing so many punches. “I…uhhh…I want to sign up for Outlive. I came in here to sign up, and I was talking to Julie about it, and this guy—Jimmy—he hit me with a nightstick.”

             
“That is not true!”
Jimmy cried.

             
“Don’t talk, Jimmy,” Tartuga said quietly, but with authority. “Julie, what did you tell him when he said he wanted to sign up?”

             
Julie spoke from behind the desk where Baggs couldn’t see her. She sounded like she was crying, though. “I told him we didn’t have any spots! It’s true! Oh, God! Oh, Jimmy, your face!”

             
Tartuga looked down at the mess on the floor. “Julie, call someone to come clean this up.”

             
“Yes, sir.”

             
He then addressed Baggs: “What’s your name?”

             
“James Baggers. Everyone calls me Baggs.”

             
“You still want to enter Outlive?”

             
Baggs nodded.

             
“Can you be trusted, Baggs? If I ask you to come upstairs with me to have a little chat, can I trust you not to go commando on me and beat me to a pulp?”

             
“Yes, sir.”

             
“C’mon, then,” he said. He turned, opened the door, and waited for Baggs to stand up. Baggs stood up slowly, not quite believing all that had just happened and began to walk towards the door, feeling the blood beneath his bare feet. Jimmy was shaking angrily as Baggs passed, but didn’t dare try to impede Baggs. Baggs walked into the hallway with Mr. Tartuga and let the door fall shut behind him.

2

              Tartuga led Baggs towards a spacious elevator that only opened with a key. The inside was covered in windows and had polished metal handrails.

             
“After you,” Tartuga said.

             
Baggs hesitated, looking down at his bloody feet and then at the clean marble inside of the private elevator.

             
“Don’t worry about it. Just go on in, someone will clean it up.”

             
Baggs obeyed and stepped in. Tartuga followed him and the door shut behind them. Baggs still didn’t know what to make of what had just happened. He had beaten up a police officer in a fit of rage and now he was being taken somewhere by this man in an expensive suit.

             
“I never properly introduced myself,” said Tartuga, his eyes crawling over Baggs in an appraising way. He didn’t seem to be the least bit scared of being inside the elevator with the giant that had just lost his temper. “I’m Vinny Tartuga—I’m Head of Entertainment of New Rome. Uhhh… I’d shake hands with you, but I don’t want to get blood on my hands.”

             
Baggs grunted.

             
“You beat the hell out of Jimmy down there. Really beat the hell out of him. I’m impressed. I only saw the tail end of it, but what I did see convinced me that this wasn’t your first time around the carousel. You fight often?” Tartuga looked up at Baggs’s face.

             
“I’ve been in fights before, yeah,” he said. He didn’t like to talk much about his violent past. He wanted to leave those bloody memories behind. Tartuga was looking up at him with greedy dark eyes, the way a jeweler might examine his prized diamond. It made Baggs feel terrible. He was ashamed of his past—and often tried to hide it from himself and from others. What happened in the lobby accentuated those traits that he was ashamed of in a big way.

             
“God!” Tartuga said, and he balled his hands into fists and began to punch at the air while he talked. “You were like
powpowpowpow pow pow POW!
KNOCK OUT! Incredible!” He breathed for a moment, smiling and reliving the fight he had just seen. “This is our stop.”

             
The elevator dinged, the doors opened and they stepped out into a hallway that was much nicer than the one they had walked through on the first floor. From outside large, clear windows Baggs looked out at a bird’s eye view of London. Tartuga walked quickly and decisively down a hallway and Baggs followed him. He was about to open his mouth and ask,
What are we doing? Why did you bring me up here?
but then
Tartuga spoke.

             
“Do you like lobster and eggs?” He asked. They walked by offices, and people who noticed Tartuga walking waved at him. All the women and men that they passed wore clean suits, and had neatly trimmed hair. They didn’t scowl at the huge man walking barefoot and bloody through the hallway because he was with Tartuga.

             
“Never had it,” Baggs said. They passed a vending machine that accepted CreditCoins and kept walking.

             
“Oh, you’ve got to be
kidding me!
It’s the best! It sounds kind of weird, but chopped lobster on a fried egg is my absolute favorite breakfast. I insist that you try it. It’s got a lot of protein, too. It’s good for you.”

             
They walked on for a bit, and a mousy young woman with glasses ran up beside Tartuga to speak with him. “Sir! I wanted to know if I could get you anything?”

             
Tartuga didn’t even turn to look who had come up beside him; he knew who it was, and didn’t dignify the servant with even a sideways glance. “Lobster and eggs for me and the big guy behind me. Make him double-NO!-triple what I normally eat. His name is James Baggers, but you can call him Mr. Baggers.”

             
“Yes, sir.”

             
Tartuga went on: “I want you to bring up a thermos of Americano coffee. Make that two. No, three thermoses! Then, some doughnuts. Pigs in a blanket. And I want sliced fruit.”

             
“What kinds, sir?”

             
“What I usually get,” Tartuga said, annoyed at the question.

             
“Right away, sir,” said the mousy assistant, and she hurried down the hallway in another direction.

             
Tartuga led Baggs into a room that Baggs would have assumed was a library if he hadn’t seen the sign outside the door. “Office of Head of New Rome Media: Vinny Tartuga.” The room was spacious, with a three-story ceiling, and a stone floor encrusted with triangles of sparkling jewels. There were huge, oak tables in the center of the room, and along the walls were shelves containing thousands of books. There was a series of eight stairs further back in the room that led atop a stone platform on which a large wooden desk sat.

             
“Make yourself comfortable. Jodi will be back in a moment with breakfast. I’m going to work for a bit.”

             
Baggs looked around. “Mr. Tartuga, with all due respect, what am I doing here?”

             
Tartuga turned, looked at his watch, and then looked up at Baggs. “What do you mean?”

             
“I mean—am I going to get to enter Outlive? I thought all the spots were full.”

             
Tartuga smiled slyly. “They are! But I bet that you’ll get to enter.”

             
“I don’t understand.”

             
Tartuga looked at his watch. “I’ll tell you what—I’ve got an email from Emperor Daman that I need to respond to. Let me go do that, then we’ll have a talk about it all, and maybe you’ll be able to make sense of what I say.”

             
Baggs nodded, but was confused by the words ‘maybe you’ll be able to make sense of what I say.’

             
Tartuga turned and walked briskly up the stone steps to his desk, directly behind which were corner glass windows that gave a spectacular view of one of the least dilapidated areas of the city. Baggs wondered if perhaps Tartuga had feeds from security cameras that displayed on his computer;
Otherwise, what was he doing down on the first floor?
Baggs’s feet were hurting from walking on hard surfaces without shoes on; this seemed to always exacerbate his plantar fasciitis. He never went without footwear, even in his own home. He wanted to sit down at the table, but more than that, he wanted to explore the library.

             
He spent a moment walking around, looking at all of the hardcover and leather-bound books.
Tessa would love this,
he thought. The library was divided up alphabetically by author. Baggs looked and saw a book that Tessa had wanted to read for years:
How the Mind Works
by Steven Pinker. None of the libraries had it. Baggs touched the back of the volume, wondering if he could talk Tartuga into letting his wife borrow the book. She found Pinker fascinating. He was, in her opinion, the last great psychologist. No one rivaled him since, due to the problems with the education system. Baggs walked a few paces from the “P” section to the “R” section and saw Rowling’s Harry Potter series next to the huge mass of the other books she wrote in her lifetime. Baggs felt a lump in his throat, thinking of Maggie having to read the rest of the series to her sister.
They’ve probably found the note by now,
he thought. He wondered who found it.
Probably Tessa. She’s such an early riser.
He wondered how she told the news to their daughters.