Outlive (The Baggers Trilogy, #1) (30 page)

             
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 grocery 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.