The Games

Chapter TEN



Evan stepped into his office and closed the door against the stares of the techs in the anteroom. His filing cabinets were overturned, his desk inside out, his stacks of digilogs scattered. Baskov’s men had gone through everything, leaving his office in complete disarray—in short, slightly more messy than usual.

He righted his swivel chair and slid into its familiarity. Only this time, the wailing of its overburdened hinges was missing. It had been so long. Much had changed.

How many weeks? Seven, ten; he didn’t know. But he had been sure that he would never leave that hospital, never be free from the injections, or Baskov’s questions. He looked down at himself and saw half the man he had been.

The drugs they gave him made him too sick to eat, and he had lost whole chunks of himself. He felt naked without the slabs of fat that had cloaked his body for so many years. He was exposed, vulnerable, too small for his baggy skin, which now drooped and sagged around him. Maybe it had been longer than ten weeks. Maybe much longer.

What had they told his techs? He had no friends or family that would require an explanation for his absence, but what about the institute? What had they been told?

He glanced out the window, and the sky was darkening, fading to gray. He didn’t know whether night or a storm approached, but he welcomed either. He welcomed the darkness and wanted to lose himself in it. He looked around for the light switch on the wall but couldn’t find it. The lighting panels had activated automatically when he entered the room.

He picked a desk drawer from the scatter on the floor and flung it upward toward the fluorescent panels. The cheap plastic shield caved, and the bulbs popped in a shower of glass on his head. Picking up the desk drawer, he stepped beneath the next light panel and flung the projectile again. Again, a shower of glass. He moved throughout the room until all the lights had gone blind and he could see only by the dying glow outside the window.

He thought of Pea as night descended. He sat in the clutter and let darkness fold around him. And when he could hold back no more, he wept.


SILAS MET Baskov just outside the broad glass doorway. “Good afternoon,” he said, extending a hand.

Baskov shook it, nodded, then said, “I hear it’s a big day for our young Olympic hopeful.”

“Yes, it is. The trainer thinks it’s time for the first live meal. I thought it would be appropriate for someone from the commission to witness it, and frankly,” he added with a smile, “it will save me the trouble of writing a long-winded report about the event. Now you can report to the commission.”

“I’m sure the trouble will be more than worth it. I’m curious how it’s developing. My eyes and ears have been telling me some interesting stories.”

Silas led him inside and past the elevators. He hated the way Baskov always managed to mention his spies. He referenced them so casually, as if they were of no more interest than the weather. But Silas recognized the warning in Baskov’s informal banter: nothing could be kept secret.

“We’ve recently transferred the gladiator into its new pen,” Silas said, then couldn’t resist: “though I’m certain that your eyes and ears have already informed you of the move.”

Baskov glanced at Silas as they walked.

“It outgrew its old living space,” Silas added.

“I know about that because I signed off on the construction project budget. I don’t even want to mention how much it cost.”

They turned left at the end of the hall and made their way down the final long corridor leading to the rear dome behind the building. At the door, Silas showed his badge to the armed guard and they stepped through.

His nostrils were immediately assaulted by the warm smells of life. It reminded him of the cat house at the Los Angeles Zoo. Tangy, pungent; it was the smell of a predator.

Bright sunlight filtered through steel mesh openings in the roof sixty feet above. Just ahead, a shell of iron bars separated them from the enclosure beyond. Silas lead Baskov toward the group that had gathered. Ben, Vidonia, and Dr. Nelson nodded their introductions.

“Where’s Tay?” Silas asked.

“Last-minute problem with the goat,” Vidonia said.

“Well, I’d have a problem, too, if I was the goat that had to go in there.” Ben pointed between the bars.

Against the far wall, several large, roughly hewn trees leaned at forty-five-degree angles with wide platforms connecting them at varying heights from the ground. Large wooden poles lay scattered in the straw that covered the floor of the enclosure. Thick ropes ran in sagging parabolas between points on the wall and the wooden poles. It all looked like a playground for some very rough, very big little boy.

“I don’t see our little friend,” Baskov said.

“It’s in an adjacent pen, but it isn’t so little anymore,” Silas said. “We thought it best to introduce the goat first.”

There was a loud clang. Then, as if on cue, a small black-and-white goat was pushed unceremoniously through a hatch in the far wall.

It fumbled around in the deep straw for several moments. Slowly, its ability to wallow around in the stuff improved, and the goat made slow progress across the enclosure, jumping from spot to spot. Another clang grabbed the goat’s attention. It stopped, angling its head toward the sound.

The large metal door at the back of the enclosure slid slowly upward.

The gladiator lumbered in beneath it. The growth of the organism had been nothing short of amazing, and Silas couldn’t help but feel a wave of awe as the creature stepped into sight. Even hunched in a predatory stance, it stood easily six and a half feet tall—and it wasn’t done growing yet. The arms were thick with muscle, and the ears now stood round and erect atop the head, like a bat’s.

Only its eyes had not changed. Still large, gray, unreadable. Silas’s heart jolted in his chest when the gladiator bounded across the lake of straw and leaped to the lowest platform. There it sat, looking down at the goat, then out at the people, appearing for all the world like some fairy-tale monster come to life.

Its arms stretched wide from its body, and the wings unfurled from their hiding place against its back, extending twelve feet on either side. There was a rush of wind as the wings began to beat at the air. Silas felt the breeze on his cheek and turned to look at Baskov, who stood open-mouthed at the spectacle.

Silas turned his attention back to the creature in time to see it leap from the platform and drop, half gliding, to the straw next to the goat.

Bleating wildly, the goat sprang backward all the way to the bars. The gladiator’s wings snapped shut against its back as it took a long step forward. The frightened goat bleated again and tried to run past the gladiator on the right, but the gladiator flashed an arm out in front of it. The goat stopped just a half-dozen feet in front of Silas, pinned between the bars and the strange creature. The gladiator cocked its head sideways, looking at it. Slowly, it extended one taloned hand and touched the goat’s furry coat with its palm, almost a caress. The goat shrieked in fear and pulled away while the creature cocked its head in the other direction.

Much later, in the report he would have to write anyway, Silas would not be able to recount what happened next except to say that in one moment the gladiator was sitting near its potential prey, and in the next, after a flash of motion, the goat was somehow partially disassembled in the gladiator’s bloody hands. Bright loops of intestine spilled out from the forward half of the goat as the gladiator raised the carcass up and bit off the head in a single crunch of bone.

It happened so fast.

Silas watched in silence as the creature fed. Minutes later, he was the first to speak. “Well, that was—”

The gladiator’s growl stopped him in mid-sentence. Its head snapped up as if offended by the interruption. An instant later, the uneaten portion of the goat slammed against the bars, splattering blood and bowels over him and those with the misfortune of standing too close to him.

Vidonia turned without a word and walked out. As Silas looked down at his fouled lab coat, the creature reared its head back and howled. To Silas, the howl sounded very much like laughter.