Outlive (The Baggers Trilogy, #1) (46 page)

             
A robotic voice came from somewhere on Gigi’s K9, Titan: “You have attacked a councilman, which is a felony punishable by death. I have phoned the police and they will arrive shortly.”

             
“NO!” Turner screamed. “Don’t phone the police! Tell them not to come! Damnit! NO! NO! NO!”

             
Baggs was flat on his back, being pulled helplessly one way by Roger and another by Titan. His blood was puddling beneath him.

             
“NOT THE POLICE! STUPID MACHINE!” Byron Turner shrieked. He ran half a step forward, planted his left foot on the concrete, and then kicked Baggs’s head like it was a soccer ball. “I’m going to finish you before they get here.” Baggs cried out and tried to get to his feet, but the K9s subdued him. His ears were ringing. Gigi was screaming. Byron Turner kicked Baggs in the back of the head again, using the top of his foot. The impact made Baggs bite his tongue for the second time that day, and he felt hot blood filling his mouth with a metallic taste.

             
Hurry up, Spinks,
Baggs thought.

             
Baggs heard feet shuffling, signaling that he was about to receive another blow to the head, but then it never came. Baggs looked up and saw that Gigi had jumped up from the concrete patio, wrapped her legs around her father and was clawing at his face. Cindi Turner was running after her daughter to assist her husband, but this proved futile. Byron Turner grabbed his daughter by the collar of her shirt, picked her up, and threw her down onto the ground. Her head cracked on the concrete and she was still.

             
“Oh my God!” Cindi said.

             
Byron Turner grunted and began to walk towards Baggs again. “See what the bitch gets for helping you? When the police get here, I’m going to say that you did that to her.” Turner reared back and kicked Baggs in the side of the head. The ringing in his ears was worse.
He’s going to kill me. It’s actually happening, Tessa. Not in the way I thought it would, in the Colosseum, but it sure is happening.

             
But then, the atmosphere darkened suddenly. The glow from the kitchen inside had turned off, and the lights that shone out onto the lawn were utterly dark. The two K9s that had been gripping Baggs so violently before were now lying limp beside him.

             
“What the…” Byron Turner said, but Baggs didn’t give him enough time to finish his thought. He reared back and kicked the man in the crotch, then stood and pushed him over. The fat councilman went over easily, and Baggs took off, running down the stairs.

             
You did it, Spinks!
Baggs thought.

             
From behind him, Baggs could hear Byron Turner shouting and his wife sobbing hysterically. “GET HIM!” She screamed, as though Byron Turner could catch someone like Baggs without the assistance of K9s.

There was also the sound of sirens in the distant, signaling the approach of a police helicopter, responding to the call made by the K9s.
Damn, they’re fast when you call from a mansion like this.

Baggs was on the lawn, huffing and puffing as he sprinted over the
grass, when the helicopter came into view. The machine had huge blades that whirred quickly through the night air. A spotlight shone down on the grass, illuminating select spots on the lawn in a white color that lit up the area like it was daylight. Baggs’s chest was tight. He was still exhausted from running through the maze earlier in the day, but he didn’t let up. He ran at an absolute full out pace, hoping that if he could just make it off the premises that he might have a chance.

The spotlight came down upon hi
m and Baggs cried out as though the light was painful to him. Then, the helicopter began to descend.

The next thing that happened actually was painful. There was a gun blast, and then something that looked like a dart was protruding from his left shoulder, which was a bloody mess from where Roger had attacked him.

              “Oh, no, no, no!” Baggs cried. He kept running.

             
On closer examination, the thing that he thought of as a dart was a syringe, and the plunger was automatically dropping towards the needle, injecting Baggs with clear liquid.

             
“No!” Baggs said again, and then he fell to his knees.

             
“No! No!” he muttered, and he began to crawl over the grass. He still hadn’t reached Larry’s body, and he knew he wasn’t going to make it. Behind him he heard the police helicopter land. The Turners were still shouting from the balcony, which was still dark.

             
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.