Outlive (The Baggers Trilogy, #1) (2 page)

Baggs was used to
being stared at. People assumed that because of his protruding brow, the thick black beard that grew from his chin, his height of six feet five inches, and his enormous hands, that Baggs was a brute. He was not a brute. He was a kind man who loved art. He was a pianist, and sometimes when he walked across stage towards a piano, people in the audience literally gasped. No matter what suit you dressed Baggs in, his enormous jaw with a slight under bite, his wide ears, and the calluses on his hands gave people the impression that he was menacing.

His daughters g
ave a very different impression; they were far from seeming menacing. Olive and Maggie both had red hair, even though their parents’ hair was black and brown. Where Baggs was big boned, his daughters were both small boned. They had different personalities, but looked strikingly similar. They had the same thin, pale skin; veins shone through in funny places, like their foreheads and their cheeks. Baggs sometimes pretended that these veins were garden snakes and that he was a hawk; he would playfully peck at his daughters’ foreheads, cawing while he did it, while they squealed with glee. Olive and Maggie had the same hair. They had the same knees—skinny and bony, each much smaller than Baggs’s wrist. The girls shared the same straight teeth, which they had obviously inherited from their mother, as every other tooth in Baggs’s mouth was crooked. The variance in their appearance didn’t seem to be the result of much more than their age difference. Baggs thought that they were the two most beautiful things in the world. They were his life. He was sure that he would die for them, if the test ever came.

It was partly the love for Olive’s giggles that broke Baggs’s arm on her birthday. He was running, and braying, and she was screaming, “Faster, pony!”
He obediently ran faster. Later, when looking back at the domino effect that came as a result of his broken arm, he would reflect that the weed that tripped him up was so insignificant and so small. It wasn’t one of the monsters that loomed up as tall as Baggs. The weed that tripped him was trifling enough to go unnoticed—which is why Baggs stepped on it. He was moving at almost full speed with Olive on his back when he stepped on the small thing. The weed crumbled under his tennis shoe, creating a slippery green paste on the pavement, and he slipped and fell backwards. If he had been in the same situation without Olive on his back, he would have fallen on his buttocks and ended up sore, but relatively uninjured. But, he did have Olive on his back. After slipping, while he was falling, time seemed to slow down. He could remember the shine of the sun off of the windows of the building to his left. There was a spider web strung between two parking meters, which went weeks without being used. Above, the sky was cloudless and perfect; two discreet, black helicopters chopped through the air, probably working on autopilot while their owners watched a movie on leather couches. Baggs knew that he would crush Olive if he fell on her. He heard her scream as she realized they were falling towards the pavement. At the last moment, he stuck his hand behind him at an awkward angle. The movement was a success. He stopped their momentum, and he was able to divert his body so that he did not land on Olive. It wasn’t until he had checked on his daughter and kissed her red head of hair that he realized the snapping noise he heard after planting his hand on the pavement had been his radius breaking into two pieces.

“Okay, Meester Baggers. I am going to start cutting now.” Mr. Krass said. He spoke in a formal, choppy manner.

Where the hell is this guy from?
Baggs wondered.
Who talks like that?
He wasn’t close enough with Mr. Krass to ask such questions. “Okay, doc,” he said. Mr. Krass smiled with the cigarette still in his mouth. He liked being called ‘doc.’

Baggs couldn’t watch as Mr. Krass began to cut. Sensing his anxiety, Maggie put a hand on her father’s uninjured arm. Baggs pulled the morning newspaper closer to him and began to read, trying to lose himself
in the stories and pretend as though he didn’t feel like vomiting.

The front-page story was about some hacker named Sally “Spinks” Nooks, who was being charged with first-degree software graffiti.

Baggs turned the page.

In Woodland Park, near the Colosseum, an escaped lion had killed two more pedestrians, Baggs read. Baggs and the rest of the halfway intelligent world didn’t believe the lion tamers’ assertion that the animals used for the Colosseum’s gory forms of entertainment weren’t
genetically mutated. They were bigger than natural lions, for one. More significantly, they were much too smart to be natural. Something in their eye movements made this evident. Baggs thought that it was ridiculous that in this day, with all the technological advancements, they couldn’t catch the lion.
They should plant a GPS chip inside of all the animals in the Colosseum,
he thought to himself.

He heard the cast tearing and felt the cold metal of the scissors against his skin.

If my hand is deformed, I can’t scream. I just can’t.

But what if I can’t help it?

He turned the page again, trying to take his mind off of what was about to be revealed beneath the cast.

He had been looking through the paper trying to find something to ease his anxiety, but instead found something that exacerbated it. There was an advertisement for Outlive.

Outlive was a game show, sort of.
Maybe it’s a sport,
Baggs thought. He didn’t know how to actually categorize it. If you wanted to explain what Outlive was, you had to start with Emperor Daman, Baggs supposed. The emperor was the one who revitalized the Colosseum and brought to life all of the atrocities that should have died with the Roman Empire two millennia ago. The same reason can be given to explain why Emperor Daman loved the Colosseum and to explain why he had as much power as he did.

He was
obsessed
with war.

He had once told an interviewer that when engaging in battle for command of New Rome in the Civil War, he had sometimes experienced
synesthesia
related to different tactical movements. Synesthesia, Baggs learned from the article, is when someone experiences a stimulation of a sensory organ without it actually being stimulated. So, for example, when Emperor Daman was presented with a bad idea by one of his subordinates, he would experience a salty taste in his mouth and see the color yellow. When he was presented with a particularly good idea, he got goose bumps, and a metallic taste came over his tongue. Baggs had never heard of this before, but a neurologist who was consulted in the interview said that synesthesia was a legitimate condition. The neurologist said that he believed Emperor Daman thought about battles and tactical maneuvers so much that the synapses and neurons in his brain devoted to war simulations had become so widespread that they began taking real estate from parts of the brain that would typically only be devoted to things like seeing color or hearing music.

This
rang true with Baggs.

Emperor Daman was creepy.

Baggs had seen the emperor once in a parade that came through London to celebrate the war victory. Emperor Daman had been perched on a throne atop a motorcar, surrounded by bullet resistant glass. The crowd around him either cheered or booed, but Emperor Daman wasn’t watching them. He was staring off into the distance, as though in a trance. He had broad shoulders, stony eyes, and curly black hair. His left cheek was all scar tissue—hard, calloused, and dry. During an assassination attempt, someone had shot him in the face with a shotgun. It blew the man’s left cheekbone and most of the teeth on the left side of his face to the floor. Emperor Daman had been eating with his family when the man broke into his home and shot him. Legend told that the Emperor didn’t wait for his guards to take the man out, but instead shoved a steak knife into the intruder’s neck while saying, “Good try.” Baggs believed the legend. As the emperor rode in between the crowds of people, and stared off into space, Baggs thought,
he’s not human. He’s not like the rest of us.

Emperor Daman spent his days reading about old wars, and controlling armies against computer simulations. He had a library devoted to Hitler, and he was said to have a statue of George Washington in his bedroom.

His greatest obsession, though, was with ancient Rome. The absolute power that they held over the world was, as he saw it, the greatest thing any civilization could accomplish. In his idolization of the ancient culture, he developed a sick fascination with its crude forms of entertainment.

That was why he remade the Colosseum. The
original Colosseum was an enormous stadium in Ancient Rome that could seat 100,000 spectators in circular bleacher seats. In the middle of the stadium seats was a large area of sand where crowds would watch bloody games such as fights to the death between men, and sometimes men versus exotic animals.

The Colosseum that was built in New Rome could seat 200,000 people.

Gladiators were the central aspect of the Colosseum in ancient Rome, as they were in New Rome. In both cases, they were highly trained swordsmen who fought to the death in front of great crowds. Baggs had never been to the Colosseum, but he had seen a battle on television when he was little. He didn’t want Maggie and Olive to watch such things.

Emperor Daman stated that he desired a
unique aspect added to the shows at the Colosseum, and so he created Outlive. Outlive was similar to gladiator fights, except they were conducted with normal citizens. Really, the only prerequisite to competing in Outlive was to sign up. People in good health, people in bad health, the old and the young alike competed.

Typically, Outlive was a team event that was held in the Colosseum. During the television event Baggs had watched, the competitors were divided into 20 teams of 10 people. The Colosseum floor was filled with salt water, and angry sharks. The competitors were then placed on wooden boats around the arena and given sledgehammers, swords, and axes. The last team standing was the only one to live.

As an incentive, people who competed in Outlive were given an allowance of CreditCoins that they could give to the family they left behind. Baggs looked at the amount that was being promised for the coming episode and felt his heart flutter.

SPECIAL: 20,000 CREDITCOIN COMPENSATION TO ALL PARTICIPANTS

Baggs stared at that number. 20,000 would be enough CreditCoins to feed Olive, Tessa and Maggie for the next ten years, or more if it was well rationed. If Baggs entered, Maggie and Olive could eat ice cream more than once a year. His daughters wouldn’t die prematurely of malnutrition.
And,
Baggs told himself,
it’s not even guaranteed that I’ll die
.

NO!
Baggs thought, and folded the paper over and pushed it aside.
I have a job. No matter what they pay, I’m not going to leave Olive and Maggie fatherless. I’m not going to fight someone to the death.

Baggs was appalled that he had even considered the idea.

“Almost done, Meester Baggers,” Mr. Krass said. He had cut a straight line up through ninety percent of the cast. Baggs breathed in deeply through his nose, inhaling the old man’s second hand smoke and thinking for the second time that afternoon,
I could use a cigarette.
The scissors moved higher up his arm, cut the last bit, and then the cast had a slice up the middle of it. “You can take your arm out, now, Meester Baggers,” Krass said, and then dropped his cigarette into the coffee mug Tessa had supplied. The embers hissed like an angry cat as they hit the water.

As Baggs moved his right hand up to open the cast, he thought,
it’s not set right. Something doesn’t feel right. When Mr. Krass set the bone, he didn’t do a good job. I knew it then. But after his third try, I was in too much pain to request that the man try again.

Baggs remembered how he and Olive had gone up to Mr. Krass’s right after his fall. Silent tears streamed down Olive’s face as Mr. Krass examined her father’s wrist. “Eet is broken,” Krass told him. Baggs wanted to say, “Oh! Is that why it looks like I have two wrists now? Gee, thanks!” But he
had held his tongue. A few minutes later, Mr. Krass had both of his bony hands around Baggs’s left wrist and was standing atop his kitchen table, stooped so that his balding head didn’t hit the already cracked ceiling. The old man’s apartment was filthy and smelled of mildew. “Ready, Meester Baggers?” Krass asked. Baggs was sitting in a chair below Mr. Krass, his left, broken arm held above him in Krass’s hands. The former nurse’s knees were bent, so that he could apply as much force as possible to the throbbing agony that was Baggs’s forearm.

“Do it,” Baggs had said.

In one awful jerking motion, Krass straightened his knees, his back, and tried to lift Baggs off the ground by his hand. Baggs refrained from screaming for his daughter’s sake, but when Krass stopped pulling, he felt lightheaded from the pain. “Did you get it?” he asked.

“No, one more time.” Without warning, Krass pulled again; cords of muscle and tendons stood out on his neck. Baggs felt nothing slide back into place,
he felt only pain. The third time was the same, except Krass asserted that he had indeed relocated the bone. It didn’t look or feel relocated to Baggs, but he was sweating by this time, and not thinking straight. The old man then got out the washcloths and rubber cement.