Arena (11 page)

“Yes, it happened very fast,” Callie agreed.
Would I have remembered
to draw my weapon if it hadn’t been in my hand? Would I have been
able to?

Why didn’t that mutant hurt him?

“Oh, come on, Row,” Garth said. “You know Pierce’s reflexes. He should have nailed him. But he lost it. Again.”

Rowena studied her nails.

“Fact is,” Garth went on, “he’s getting flat-out unreliable. Somebody’s gonna get killed ’cause of him.”

“So what do you want to do? Leave—” Rowena swallowed the words, glancing guiltily at Pierce, slumbering on unawares.

Then the black woman murmured, “He may be unreliable, but if he’d been with us two nights ago, those muties wouldn’t have surprised us.”

Garth grunted. The two stone skippers joined them then, shifting the conversation to other things. Presently the rest of the group came in, too, and Rowena made the introductions.

The tall black man with the eye patch was Whit, once a star basketball player at the University of Illinois. John was the blond Viking with the twin beard braids and the gold earring. The black woman who’d come to Pierce’s defense was LaTeisha. She was a nurse from Sacramento, and the group’s official medic. The rest of the names Callie didn’t remember longer than the time it took to get them all confused. It would be several days before she would sort them out.

As darkness settled, the cook sliced dripping slabs of pink meat and passed them from knife to knife. Callie used the opportunity to move across the fire, and Rowena took her place on the log.

“We could get mess kits in town,” John explained as Callie awkwardly accepted a knifeful of the meat, “but the more stuff we have, the harder it is to move. And sometimes
moving
is the difference between life and death.”

“I can appreciate that.”

“It’s cleaner, too,” said LaTeisha. “No dishes to wash. Although”—she peered at her own slice, then picked off a four-inch-long hair—“sometimes you have to watch what the food is seasoned with.” She glared at the cook. “Don’t you bother to clean this stuff at all?”

The man kept his eyes on the meat he was slicing. “It’s cooked, isn’t it?” he grumbled in a Middle Eastern accent. “Fire killed all your little bugs.”

“And if you dropped it in the dirt, would you trust the fire to take care of that, too?”

“You don’t like it, you cook.”

“Maybe I should.”

“No way!” cried John the Viking. “We’d starve. You’d be sterilizing the knives and throwing out half the food.”

“At least we wouldn’t break our teeth on the rocks or die of food poisoning,” LaTeisha retorted, pulling the blackened rind off her slice and tossing it into the fire.

“What is this, anyway?” Callie asked, biting gingerly into the seared flesh.

“Redhorn,” Garth said.

“Another engineered bioform?”

“All I know is it’s a big reindeer that roams the mountains. Horns are s’posed to be a more powerful aphrodisiac than dragon horn.”

Pierce appeared out of the darkness, sliding around Garth’s shoulder to accept a slice of meat from the cook. From every side Callie saw the others’ eyes flick to him and away. He took the meat and a cup of coffee, then retired to the fringes behind Rowena and LaTeisha, avoiding eye contact.

“So, Callie,” said Garth, when they’d finished eating, “tell us how they got you.”

“Huh?”

“Your capture story. How you got here. Everyone has one. Was it a bogus experiment, or were you dead?”

“Dead?”

Rowena laughed and slapped Garth’s back. “I told you it’d be an experiment.”

“What do you mean, dead?” Callie asked.

“Well, some of us are here on a second-chance-at-life arrangement,” Rowena said, cocking a brow at her seatmate. “Garth, for example, was mugged in south L.A. and left for dead before our alien friends found him.”

“So what kind of experiment did they get you with?” John asked, rolling one of his beard braids between thumb and forefinger.

“It was supposed to improve decision making.”

“Decision making?” Garth whooped with laughter. “
Decision
making? Oh, now,
that’s
precious. And you just walked in and signed up for it?”

“I needed the money,” Callie said, annoyed. “How was I supposed to know they were aliens?”

Garth held up his palms defensively. “Hey, I’m not tryin’ to step on toes. We’re all here, ain’t we?”

“I was picked up at a workshop thing, too,” John told her. “It was supposed to help me stop smoking.” He made a face. “Well, I’ve stopped.”

“Only because there’s nothing to smoke out here,” said Whit in a startling bass voice.

“Were you really dying?” Callie asked Garth.

“Babe, I was dead. Watched my blood run out in a big dark puddle around me. Things got all foggy, and I saw those bright lights people talk about. I thought, okay, you’re finally cashing in, big guy. Gonna meet your Maker. Or maybe that other fella with the pitchfork!” He laughed, and so did the others. “Turns out it was these other guys. Next thing I know, they’re patching me up in their weird infirmary. Like Row said, I’m on my second life.” He grinned. “Or maybe it’s Purgatory.”

LaTeisha, the nurse, had also died. Her small car had run off a country road, and she’d gone through the windshield. She woke up in the same alien infirmary.

“I was on a cruise,” Rowena said, standing to pour herself more coffee. “Sun. Sea. Hours of nothing to do but work on my tan. It was heaven.”

“I’ll bet it was,” Garth leered. The other men laughed.

Even here, in the worst of conditions, Rowena’s sensuality throbbed. Her blue jeans molded a slender waist and curved hips like a second skin, and her scoop-necked T-shirt clung so tightly it left little to the imagination.

“Three days into the cruise,” Rowena went on, “and well into the waters of the Bermuda Triangle, we sailed into fog.”

Someone whistled the high-pitched four-note warble of the
Twilight
Zone
theme song.

“All of a sudden the ship lurched, the deck tilted and everyone started screaming. Panic flew like swarming harries:
‘We’ve hit a reef!’
‘We’ve sprung a leak!’

“We were all fighting to pile into the lifeboats when suddenly this handsome kid is standing beside me asking if I want to be part of his experiment. I thought it was sort of a strange pickup line, but what the hay! ‘You bet,’ says I. ‘Anything to get me out of this mess.’ So he dumps me here.” She grimaced. “
Not
what I had in mind.”

“It hasn’t been all bad,” Garth said, pulling her into his lap. “You found me.”

She giggled as he growled and kissed her, one hand sliding over her skimpy tee.

Embarrassed, Callie averted her gaze.

LaTeisha rolled her eyes, and John the Viking said, “So did Pierce tell you where we’re going?”

“To a canyon that cuts through to the Inner Realm?”

“Two months max, and we’re home.” John slapped his thighs.

“I understand the last party to try it ended up mostly dead.”

“That won’t happen to us,” Garth said. “We got experience. And we’re tough. What about you, pretty one? Wanna come along?”

“I, uh . . . was kind of set on checking the gates for myself.”

“See?” Rowena elbowed him. “They always have to find out for themselves.”

“Yeah, but so did we, babe.” Garth grinned at Callie. “So happens, you’re in luck. We’ll be stopping at Manderia for supplies b’fore we hit the canyon. If you can wait a few weeks, you can check out your gate there.”

“Manderia? Is that a town?”

“Yup. All the gates have towns. I guess people get that far and don’t know what else to do.”

“Did ya hear about those folks over in Devon who’re building a dirt ramp?” John said. “Figure to walk right on up to the top.”

“Morons,” Garth scoffed. “They’ll die of old age ’fore they finish. But we all gotta do what we gotta do. Me, I’ll keep searching. There’s a weakness somewhere in this bloodsucking prison, and I’m gonna find it.”

He spoke with such sudden conviction Callie almost believed him. No one tittered or made snide remarks. They all just stared soberly into the fire.

Finally John and Whit went to rattle through the equipment out in the dark. Talk started up again, revolving around the day—observations, plans, private talk in which Callie had no part. Presently LaTeisha and three others left the circle, replaced by the four who had been on watch, including the bald, red-bearded Thor.

When it was time for bed, Rowena gave Callie a light brown sleeping bag that provided little padding against the hard ground, but amazed her with its ability to trap warmth. She’d hardly settled in before she had to peel the covers back. Eventually, though, she managed to get reasonably comfortable. Around her, soft rustlings faded to rhythmic breathing and, in some cases, snoring. The fire crackled, its smoke wafting intermittently over her, and somewhere an owl hooted.

She watched Garth pore over his map, tracing a thick finger across its surface. Firelight gleamed on his black ponytail and beard and flickered across his strong brow. He reminded her of the Marlboro man— not as handsome, but powerful, capable, and utterly self-confident. He might be a little crude, but he was the kind of man you could respect— the kind of man other men followed.

Funny how much safer she felt tonight than last.

Yes, he
was
following a path opposite the one she’d been instructed to take, but if he and all his friends—who’d been trying to escape this arena for years—couldn’t find the true Benefactor, was it reasonable to think she could?

In subsequent days Callie’s ambivalence mounted. Though she fully intended to read through the manual’s unencrypted portion before week’s end, she never found the time. Up at dawn and on the move till dusk, it was enough to eat and do her share of the camp chores before falling exhausted into her sleeping bag. And that was on the nights they actually made camp.

Nor did it help that the few times she did wrangle a spare moment to read, she received more ridicule than enlightenment for her efforts. While she paged through fine print detailing biomes, ASBs, and hand-warmer construction, her companions complained incessantly about people not pulling their weight, and idiot rookies who always had to “see for themselves,” and the endlessly annoying mites that always emerged in force whenever the book was brought out.

“The thing’s a nuisance,” Garth grumbled. “You should give it to the mites and be done with it. It’s not like you need it for anything.”

He annoyed her with his pushing, but though she promised herself she would
not
let him discourage her, in the end the manual migrated inexorably to the bottom of her pack’s lowest section, forgotten and neglected. As Garth said, she had no immediate need for it, and the less she read it, the less she thought about reading it. Days turned to weeks until, eventually, even when the opportunity arose and the thought occurred, she found herself unable to muster the effort to get it out.

What she did need to learn in order to survive in the wildlands off the white roads she received in full measure from her Outlander companions. Tough and canny, they knew all the tricks. Whether in trouble or at rest, they worked with an oiled efficiency that amazed her. They showed her how to recognize sand mite habitat and Trog spoor, how to spot redclaw runners under the sand, how to keep to the side of a ridge instead of walking along the top where she’d be sighted, how to run and drop when fired at, and how to handle SLuBs and rifles.

For her part, she was certain they were impressed with her ability to match their rugged pace. After a few days of proving herself not an imbecile, she was assigned her turn at guard duty, and Garth started sending her on scouting forays with Pierce. She suspected this was because no one else would work with him. He’d been sullen since the Trog attack, speaking only when spoken to, and then only in monosyllables. Evenings he’d slip in to grab some food, then return to the fringes, keeping to himself.

Garth dismissed it as sulking, but it was clearly more than that. As the weeks passed, Callie realized Pierce was a deeply troubled man, plagued by horrific nightmares during which he jerked and grimaced and screamed, or curled whimpering into fetal position. Often, his cries woke the others, who’d watch him intently for a while and then go back to sleep as if they were long used to it.