Outlive (The Baggers Trilogy, #1) (15 page)

             
“’Been lookin’ at a lot of things,” Baggs said. “The chairs, the bar, the lights, the band.”

             
“You’ve been undressing my girl with your pervert eyes! You were looking at her tits. I saw you!”

             
Baggs shrugged. “That was one of the things I was looking at.”

             
Baldy’s face grew red. Baggs didn’t feel any anxiety upon looking at the man, and that enraged Baldy. He wanted to be feared. Baldy’s hand swiped at the shot-glass and it tumbled out of Baggs’s hand to the floor, where it shattered. A puddle of whiskey formed around it.

             
The bar suddenly grew even quieter. All the patrons knew to watch out if Baldy got mad. Glasses stopped tinkling against the bar. People stopped talking. The band stopped adjusting their instruments.

             
“Hey!” Baggs cried, looking down at his spilled drink. “That drink was nine CreditCoins!”

             
Baggs still had no intention of fighting at that point, but Baldy wasn’t done trying to provoke him. Baldy was in the mood to punch someone, and he wanted that someone to try to punch back. He took the cigarette out of Baggs’s hand and threw it into the puddle of whiskey on the ground.

             
“What the hell?” Baggs asked. “Get away from my stuff! Those are expensive!”

             
The woman working at the bar didn’t stop Baldy. Like the rest of the crowd, she stood there, watching the show. She didn’t want to become the object of Baldy’s anger.

             
“Maybe that’ll teach you for looking at my girl,” Baldy said. He reached for Baggs’s pack of cigarettes on the bar. Baggs grabbed Baldy’s wrist. He wasn’t going to let Baldy ruin his whole pack. There was a moment where they stared at each other—Baggs’s green eyes looking upon Baldy’s blue ones. Baldy didn’t know that Baggs was fifteen. After the fight, this would be another source of embarrassment for him. If he had known that Baggs was fifteen, he never would have started anything. When a man like Baldy fights a teenager, he can only lose. If he wins, it’s because the other person was much younger. But if he loses, it’s quite embarrassing.

             
With his free hand, Baldy reached up and grabbed Baggs by the bottom of his jaw. He spoke slowly, breathing out hot beer breath. “Give me your cigarettes and I walk away. You owe them to me. That’s the price for staring at my girl.”

             
For Baggs, this ultimatum was unacceptable. He would not be able to buy any more cigarettes that weekend if he also wanted to drink the next night—which he did. So, he uttered the words that he knew would lead to a fight. “Screw you.” He then pushed Baldy roughly in the chest. Baldy took a step back and sneered at the big teenager.

             
Baggs slipped off his stool and stood at his full height. For a moment, he thought that he saw fear in Baldy’s eyes. He thought that his height surprised the man.

             
But it didn’t intimidate Baldy enough to stop the fight. He took a fighter’s stance, balling his hands into fists. Baggs did the same, and then took two steps forward. As he did so, something remarkable happened—he didn’t feel as drunk anymore. With the approaching threat of a physical altercation, his mind became sharper. The ground no longer wobbled so much beneath his feet. His senses were attuned to things around him. He could hear the heavy breaths come in and out of Baldy’s nose. He could see a jagged scar underneath his eye. And, most importantly, he noticed Baldy’s weight shift before he began to punch.

             
Baldy’s right hand came flying at Baggs’s face, and hit him square in the jaw. The collision was painful, but Baggs had seen the punch coming, and so he had rolled with it, lessening the force of impact. Scattered voices cheered from around the bar at the start of a fight. A fight was a lot more entertaining than watching the band—especially when Baldy was involved. Baldy was known for being creative during fights.

             
Baldy punched again, but Baggs was able to sidestep. Baldy went forward a few paces so that he wouldn’t fall with the momentum of his punch, and then caught onto the edge of the bar so that he wouldn’t slip on the whiskey on the floor.

             
Baldy turned around and looked at Baggs. They were a few paces apart.

             
Baggs felt blood beating in his ears. His cheek was growing hot where he had been punched. His jaw was clenched. His hands were curled into fists the size of softballs. He was getting mad.

             
Baldy’s next move took Baggs by surprise. He grabbed a barstool, and threw it at Baggs with a swift rotation of his torso. The barstool soared through the air at an alarming speed towards Baggs’s face, but he was able to deflect the object with his huge hands.

             
Before he could look back, Baldy was there. He hit Baggs in the stomach, knocking him breathless, and then brought a fist up into Baggs’s face. Baggs lifted his arms to blindly defend himself, and just by luck, the next two punches were averted.

             
The people watching at that time must have thought that Baggs was in trouble, but it was just the opposite. Baggs had a mental switch—just like everyone—that told his body to dump adrenaline into his bloodstream and go crazy with frantic effort for a few short moments. The phenomenon is seen a lot in life or death situations; a one hundred pound woman lifting a car off her child, a man jumping horizontally over twenty feet from one rooftop to another to escape a burning building. Everyone has an arcane switch that, if turned on, makes them as strong as if they were having a grand mal seizure, but only for a moment; the thing with Baggs was that his switch was easier to turn on than other people’s.

             
In Baggs’s mind, time slowed. He saw blood pulsing through a vein atop Baldy’s head. He heard his skin make friction against his shirt as he shifted his stance. Baldy got in another blow on the back of his forearms, and Baggs saw his skin ripple out from the point of impact. It didn’t hurt.

             
Baggs looked at Baldy. He could tell from the man’s smug expression that he thought he was winning. Baggs felt like killing him.

             
Baldy reared back and swung wildly again. Instead of blocking the punch with the back of his forearms, Baggs put his palm up and caught the blow in his left palm. Then, he smiled. He leaned forward and before Baldy could react, he headbutted the smaller man in between the eyes. While Baldy was still dazed, Baggs threw his first punch. It was all he would need.

             
When Baggs threw the punch, he was still in a state of heightened sensitivity. He felt his legs, abdomen, and back tighten like springs as he cocked his hand back for the blow.
This will kill him,
he thought, sensing his own strength.
I’m going to kill him with a single punch. I feel like I could break his skull.
Baggs didn’t care. It turned out, he didn’t kill Baldy with that punch, but he felt like he could have.

             
A cascade of huge muscles contracted over his body, he twisted and uncoiled, feeling rage like a hurricane screaming inside his head. His fist made contact with the tip of the man’s zygomatic bone, which stuck out on his cheek, and Baggs felt it break beneath the immense pressure. Baldy’s face crumpled to a grotesque, bleeding form, and he went instantly unconscious.

             
But Baggs wasn’t done. Baldy slumped over and Baggs grabbed the limp body by the front of the shirt and launched him over the bar where he fell to the floor below. The bartender stepped out of the way. Baldy could have fallen and broken his neck. But Baggs didn’t care.

             
When it was over, he became aware of the terrible silence. Eyes were on him from all around the bar, including the eyes of Baldy’s girlfriend. Baggs had heard of her reputation. She liked tough guys. By the way she was eying him, she liked him too. She didn’t know that Baggs was fifteen.

             
Suddenly, Baggs felt incredibly tired. Even though the fight had only lasted seconds, he had put as much energy into it as he would have if he had run a marathon and then competed in a weight lifting competition. His arms felt like they weighed one hundred pounds each, and they hung limp beside him.

             
The eyes upon him were unnerving.

             
What the hell just happened to me?
He wondered. He felt like he had just been possessed by a demon. He felt like something else had taken over, and that during the fight he had had no control over himself.

             
It had felt good. He had felt powerful.

             
But now, it was over and he needed to rest. He had the bartender pull up his tab and he placed his thumbprint on electronic pad, paying for his bill and tipping generously. He grabbed his pack of cigarettes and began walking out. Everyone was still watching him. The band still had not resumed playing. From behind the bar, Baldy was moaning. He would be alright. His broken face would take months to heal, but he didn’t die from the fight that night, and in a few months he was as good as new, except a bit uglier. He never talked to Baggs again.

             
No one moved as Baggs walked towards the exit. He put a cigarette in his mouth and was almost at the door when he realized he didn’t have any matches. He turned to one of the men sitting at a table. There were a box of matches with the name of the bar sitting in a bowl beside the man.

             
“Will you hand me a couple packs of matches?” Baggs said.

             
The man reached for them, and held out a few for Baggs. Baggs noticed his hands were shaking.

             
“Gracious,” Baggs said. He took the matches and walked outside. No one began talking until he had left the building.

             
The gang took note of him; they decided that they would approach him with a proposition the next time they saw him. 

5

              Baggs was slumped into a leather seat as the blades above whirred in a circular motion, sending the helicopter through the air.

             
He still did not know where it was taking him. There were eight days before the next episode of Outlive.
Am I going straight to the Colosseum? Turner’s house? Somewhere else—maybe some training facility?

             
The cabin on the inside of the helicopter was expensively decorated. The seats were black leather—impeccably cleaned and shining. Leather bench seats lined the four walls of the cabin. Upon inspection, Baggs found that one of the seats folded out to make a bed. Pillows and blankets were neatly stored in a compartment that lined the ceiling. There were seatbelts, but Baggs did not wear one.
If this thing crashes, I’ll die with or without a safety belt.
By looking out one of the square windows he could see the clear blue sky. Far below, little houses were diminished to the size of gnats by the perspective of such an altitude. There was a mini-fridge under one of the fold-away seat cushions; inside Baggs found beer, wine, sandwiches wrapped in cellophane, fruit, protein drinks, and bottles of water. Baggs took a bottle of water and passed on the other accommodations; he was still full from lunch. The floor was carpeted with grey mats, which Baggs was thankful for beneath his aching, shoeless feet. The ceiling was roughly six feet three inches above the floor; Baggs only had to stoop slightly to stand up. There were buttons for the thermostat against one of the walls, and Baggs kept the cabin at sixty-eight degrees as he cruised above the earth, piloted by a computer. The seat vibrated with the work of the engine.

             
From the position of the sun, Baggs gathered that he was traveling south. The Colosseum was Southeast, and so it was ruled out as a destination. He hadn’t looked up where Turner lived, and so he didn’t know if he could be heading to his house.

             
He was concerned about Tessa, Maggie, and Olive. He knew that they would have surely found his note by then. It was even possible that Tessa could have jogged up to the Media Tower in an attempt to convince Baggs not to enter Outlive and sacrifice his life for them. Baggs tried to shove these thoughts from his mind, though. He would have time to be sad about them later.

             
As he slumped down in the leather seat, Baggs was thinking about Paul Higgins, the man who supposedly died of a heart attack after surviving a round of Outlive on Byron Turner’s team. The more he considered the idea, the more sure he was that the man didn’t die of natural causes. The first piece of evidence was the series of events that led to Baggs flying through the air in a helicopter; a woman named Regina Eldridge was killed so that Baggs could be on Byron Turner’s team. Turner wasn’t opposed to killing. He probably looked at poor people as no more important than a rat. He probably thought that there was something fundamentally different between himself and Eldridge that made it okay for him to end her life. It wasn’t a stretch to also believe that Turner had also felt comfortable having Paul Higgins killed. It would have been especially advantageous to have Higgins killed if the man had somehow seen evidence that Turner was cheating—and this was likely. As Tartuga had suggested, Outlive was not conducted on an even playing field.
Perhaps Higgins was given a hint as to what kinds of obstacles he would face in the Colosseum before he got there. Perhaps Turner was afraid that Higgins would reveal the fact that he cheated in Outlive.
Baggs compared this to George Thurman pointing the gun at him after he tried to take the cake out of the garbage bin.
Some people are so far removed from the poor that it’s as if they can’t realize they’re dealing with real people who breathe, think, and feel things just like them. If Turner thought Higgins might blab, I’m sure he would kill him.
Another thing that made Baggs believe that Turner was responsible for Higgins’s death was that Byron Turner was a practicing medical doctor,
specifically
a cardiologist, before going into politics. Given the other considerations, it seemed like too much of a coincidence that Higgins died of a complication of the heart, which was Turner’s specialty. Baggs would bet that there was no diagnostic testing done on Higgins after he died—there was no one who would pay for it. If Turner declared that the man died of a heart attack, it wouldn’t be questioned. Turner probably wrote up the medical chart himself.