Schism (17 page)

Ben cringed at the word but said nothing. He turned the map back over to the Colorado side and kept his end of the bargain.

“Here, there’s a small airport just south of this town. Glenwood Springs Municipal Airport. You’ll find the gas there.” He quickly left the house, taking the map without bothering to ask. After starting the engine, he caught sight of Kyle’s sister running toward the truck. He rolled down the window. “What is it?”

“My brother lied,” she said, catching her breath. “He didn’t take her to Salt Lake City. He took her here.” She held out a piece of paper.

Ben took it and read an address scribbled in black ink. “Los Angeles?” he muttered aloud before trying to calculate whether he had enough gas to get there.

“I’m sorry my brother lied to you. He lies to everyone.”

He pulled his eyes off the paper and looked down at the girl. She was tiny for her age, though most children these days were malnourished. Her hair was parted into two long, stringy ponytails, and her round face was highlighted by bright green eyes. He looked at her with a mixture of gratitude and sadness. Gratitude for the enormous favor she’d just done him. Sadness that her brother was the kind of person he was.

“Thank you for telling me the truth…what’s your name?”

“Amy. Was she your girlfriend? The girl my brother took?”

The question caught Ben off-guard. He blinked at first, and then slowly shook his head. “No, she’s just a friend. A very good friend.”

“I hope you find her.”

“Me too.”

Just as he was about to pull away, he looked back at the girl, hesitated, then put the truck into park. “You know, Amy, you don’t have to stay here. I know a place where you can go and be with good people. Nice people who will help you.”

She gave him a doubtful look. “I can’t leave my brother, even if he is a liar and everything else. He’s still my brother and he takes care of me.”

“I understand,” said Ben. “Take care, Amy.”

As he drove off, he watched with sadness as the girl ran back to her house.

Chapter XIV

A
fter being mostly unconscious for four days, Andy was fed a large meal. Jeremy again watched her eat. When she asked again what she was doing there, he kept silent. She picked up the glass of water, inspected it, and placed it back on the tray.

“It’s just water. I promise,” he said with a smirk. Then he retrieved a small handgun from inside the back pocket of his jeans and placed it on the small table next to the tray. It was the same type of pistol she’d left behind in Aspen. “It’s not loaded, but you’ll need it for tonight.”

“What for?”

“You’ll find out soon.” He turned and left the room without another word.

A few minutes later, the door opened. It was him again, but this time two other men were with him. “It’s time. Take your gun,” he said.

“Time for what?”

He didn’t answer and turned and walked away as the other two waited for her to exit the room. She eyed them as she passed but neither seemed to give her any notice. They walked behind her as she followed Jeremy through a short hallway and down a flight of stairs. They were in a vacant house. When Jeremy reached the front door, he opened it and said, “Get in the car.”

Andy peered outside and saw a black Mercedes sitting in the driveway. “Where am I going?”

His face remained stoic. His eyes looked over at the two men, who grabbed her from behind and pulled her outside toward the car. They forced her into the backseat and then drove off.

Shaken, Andy stared numbly through her window as the Mercedes headed east from Malibu on the Santa Monica Freeway. The sun was descending over the horizon behind her in the rear window. At one point, she considered escaping by trying to convince herself that it wouldn’t hurt to jump out of a moving vehicle going 70 mph.

“Where are we going? Please tell me!” she begged the men in the front, but neither threw her even a glance.

The Mercedes exited the freeway and headed south on I-110 for a brief moment before approaching the University of Southern California. After passing the campus on the right, they took another turn south. People were crowded everywhere on both sides of the road, and they all appeared to be moving toward the stadium.

Andy looked down at the pistol resting on the seat beside her. She picked it up and discreetly checked the chamber to see if indeed it was empty. It was. She tossed it back and watched helplessly as they got closer to the stadium. The car maneuvered its way around the south side before pulling into a gate. Throngs of people from every direction were moving toward the front entrance as though they were being drawn inside by some unseen force. Then suddenly, the Mercedes disappeared into a dark tunnel under the stadium. Moments later, it stopped.

“Get out,” the driver ordered as the other man stepped outside and opened her door.

Her heart pounding, Andy sprang out of the car. Had the two men not been armed, she would’ve made a run for it, but as she stepped further into the underbelly of the stadium with a useless gun, she felt her chances of escape evaporating.

They reached the locker room formerly used by the opposing teams and went inside. With the exception of a single light bulb in the ceiling, the room was dark. There were seven other people; five were handcuffed and sitting on benches near the lockers and two standing over them with rifles keeping guard.

“Sit down,” one of the armed men ordered, and she grudgingly obeyed. She took a seat at the end of a bench beside a frail boy who could not have been more than eleven or twelve.

The guard approached her with a pair of handcuffs, and before she could resist, he slapped them around her wrists. She looked up at him with defiance, but like the others, his face was expressionless.

“What time is it?” the other guard asked the one who had brought Andy from the car.

“Almost seven-thirty.”

“Let’s go grab a drink. We’ve got time.”

The three men left the locker room and locked the door behind them, leaving Andy alone with the five other captives. She turned to the frail boy sitting next to her. “What’s going on? What are we doing here?”

The boy’s eyes remained fixed on the floor. His face was deathly pale and his forehead was sweating. She turned to the other four and saw the same catatonic expressions on their faces.

“Why am I here?” she asked the boy again, this time more softly.

“Shut up!” he snapped back violently.

Startled, she slowly inched away from him. Confused and scared, she looked at the others, imploring them with her eyes to explain. When no one even looked her way, she got up and moved to stand firmly in front of them. “Somebody better tell me what’s going on, now!”

“Or what, you’ll kill us? We’re all dead already, you included. So please leave us alone.”

She stared dumbfounded at the boy who had just spoken. He was less frail than the first, but still young. She eyed him with disbelief and slowly crouched down until her gaze met his.

“Please,” she begged. “Until a few days ago, I’d never been to Los Angeles in my entire life. I don’t know this city or anyone here. I was kidnapped from my home in Colorado and then I woke up and I was here, and I have no idea why. Can you please,
please
tell me what’s going on?”

The boy stared back at her. Dark circles hung beneath his lifeless eyes. He blinked once, then twice before finally answering. “It’s a game, and we’re the losers.”

“I don’t understand…”

“It’s called
One Shot
because we each get a bullet. Just one.” Each of them would be taken up to the field where thousands of spectators would be waiting. One of several “referees” would load their pistol with a single bullet, and then they would be ordered to stand on the ten-yard line on the east end of the field while still handcuffed. Sixty yards down the field stood their opponent, but instead of a pistol with only one bullet, the opponent wore body armor and was given a fully-automatic rifle and multiple magazines of thirty rounds each. The goal of
One Shot
was brutally simple: who could kill the other first in two minutes. Both the competitor and the opponent were allowed to move around the field, but neither could cross the fifty-yard line at midfield. If the competitor survives these two minutes, they would play two more rounds, and if they survived the third round, they would be freed.

“How long has this been going on?”

“Every Saturday for more than a year.”

“Has anyone ever survived the game?”

The boy gave her a look that required no further answer. But he said it anyway. “No. Never.”

“Never?”

He said nothing more.

“And people come to watch other people die?”

He responded with the faintest shrug.

“But I don’t understand. Who controls the game?”

But before she got an answer, the locker room door opened again and two guards returned. One pointed to the boy sitting on the bench that she had first spoken to.

“You’re up.”

He could hardly stand, and his knees buckled when he did. When he left the room, he didn’t look back, and no one else seemed to react to the sound of the door locking shut after he left.

Minutes later, the noise of the crowd began to swell from above. It was interrupted by scattered rounds of gunfire, then silence. And then the crowd erupted. Andy looked at the four others in the room, but no one reacted to the noise. Instead, one sat praying, his eyes squeezed tight and his lips barely moving. Another rocked back and forth with his knees hugged to his chest. The boy who explained the game was now completely still, like a statue. He seemed to be the one most at peace with his fate.

Soon after, the door opened again, and the two guards returned. They gestured to the praying boy. “You’re next.”

The cycle repeated itself. Another competitor disappeared, followed shortly after by a wave of noise from the crowd, then gunshots, and then a burst of cheers. It was after this second cycle when Andy finally grasped the hopelessness of the situation, and she joined the remaining three boys in silent agony. She would die amidst the cheers of thousands of strangers who knew nothing about her, not even her name.

The third competitor was soon taken away, followed by the fourth. Only two people remained, Andy and the one who had spoken to her. As the noise from the crowd began to grow above them once again, her eyes frantically searched the room for something, anything, that could help her flee. She stood up and looked inside each of the lockers.

“You won’t find anything.”

“When they come back, we should try to make a run for it.”

He shook his head. “They’ll find us.”

“Don’t you want to live?”

His eyes met hers. His expression was resolute. “No, I’m ready to die. There’s nothing worth living for anymore.”

“You don’t mean that. There’s always something worth living for.”

“Like what?”

“Like family. And friends.”

“I don’t have any. They’re all dead or gone.”

“You can make new friends.”

“Not here.”

“Then leave. Leave Los Angeles.”

He shook his head firmly. “No, it’s too late. It’s time to go.”

The locker room door abruptly opened and the guards entered to retrieve yet another victim. One of them looked at the boy and said, “I hope you last longer than the others. The crowd isn’t too happy with the performances tonight.”

The boy slowly rose from the bench and walked toward the door with more dignity than the previous four combined. Before disappearing through the doorway, he looked back at Andy one last time. “I’ll see you soon.”

The door slammed shut, leaving her alone with the echo of those words.

***

Ben pushed his way through the crowd to get as close to the field as he could. He’d missed witnessing the first competitor getting slaughtered, though he had heard the roars from the crowd several blocks away.

Every spectator entered the stadium through a single gate on the western side of the Coliseum, and everyone was checked for weapons by one of dozens of heavily armed men and women. Though the evening was unseasonably warm, even by Los Angeles standards, Ben wore a baggy sweatshirt over his T-shirt. He needed someplace to conceal his rifle, which he had separated into its two main components. One half was jammed into his right sleeve and other in his left. Stuffed into each sock was a thirty-round magazine. When he passed through the gate, one of the entry guards asked him to lift up his sweatshirt, which he did without hesitation. Satisfied and anxious to let the remaining stragglers through, the guard quickly waved him off without a second look. Once beyond the entrance, he scrambled to a secluded corner beneath the stadium in the perimeter outside the numbered gates and quickly reassembled his weapon. He removed his sweatshirt and inserted one magazine before concealing the weapon by wrapping the sweatshirt around it.

Inside, the entire eastern half of the stadium was empty, the reason for this became clear when Ben saw the fifth competitor take his position on the field as two minutes on the scoreboard began its countdown: the opponent rained bullets eastward as the competitor ran frantically back and forth. Many of the bullets became lodged into the steps behind the end zone below the long-extinguished Olympic Torch. The single nine-millimeter round in the competitor’s Glock posed little threat to the spectators, for rarely did the competitor get a chance to fire before being gunned down.