The Games

by Ted Kosmatka

  Silence filled the room. The screen flickered. “I’m so tired.”

  Silas felt Vidonia move against him, felt her hand in his again, where it seemed to belong tonight.

  “When I was young,” the figure said, “I was vengeful. I didn’t understand, as I do now, how very precious life is. I am tired of vengeance. I’ll have my revenge on those who hurt Papa, and many will die, but I no longer want to punish you all. I see some value in you. There is a chance it’s not too late. Just a chance, but I want to give it to you. A parting gift before I die.”

  “A chance to what?”

  “To save yourselves.”

  “From the gladiator?”

  “Yes, from the gladiator. And from ending. You do not know the scourge I have set upon you.” His eyes filled with tears, brimming over.

  “What do you mean, ‘ending’?” Silas asked.

  “Extinction,” the figure said.

  “I think you overestimate the reach of your work.”

  “What you built is not only better than you think, it is better than you are,” the figure said. “It is smarter. It is stronger. But in the final count, I don’t know that it would be more just. I fear it would be less.”

  “Tell me where it is.”

  “It can live a thousand years and have ten thousand offspring. It is a queen that needs no king.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “And the queen will make her own princes.”

  “Parthenogenesis,” Vidonia whispered.

  “Oh, so much more complicated than that. I had but one anchor hold in your world. I used it to drop a bomb.”

  “You’re not making any sense,” Silas said. “Where is it now? Do you even know?”

  “I know,” the figure said. “It’s left something behind.” A gust of wind blew his hair across his face, and he delicately brushed it aside. The eyes were different now. Just as intense but sorrowful.

  “It has produced eggs. And there will be more. An army will be born. They will organize, and when their numbers are great enough, they will move against you, slowly at first but gaining in strength.”

  “What you are saying doesn’t make any sense. Even if the gladiator is producing eggs, and even with exponential growth in their population, there’s no way they could accumulate a force for many years. By then, they’ll have been wiped out.”

  “They will grow, and they will use your own weapons against you.”

  “The gladiator is too big to hide for long. What you’re saying is impossible. The math doesn’t work.”

  “I’m very good at math, Silas, and you have less time than you think.”

  “A population can’t be started with one individual, even one that comes programmed for reproduction. There would be a lack of genomic diversity, a lack of immunity haplotype variation; inbreeding depression would destroy the fertility of later generations.”

  “You are so certain of yourself.”

  “I’m a geneticist. Disease would wipe them out. Such a population could exist in the short term, isolated from competition, but it would disintegrate under biological constraints even without the kind of pressure a war would bring.”

  “The problem with evolution, Silas, is that it has no foresight, no far-reaching plan. It works only by shaping populations in the present. But I had a longer view in mind. The first eggs are what you geneticists call an H-one generation. They’re simple haploids, and after they hatch, they’ll remain small, unobtrusive. The gladiator will disperse them to the ends of the earth, and there, they will burrow into the ground, couple, and live only to reproduce.”

  “Still, there will be a—” Silas stopped. He remembered the restriction enzyme map that Ben had run. He remembered the heterozygosity. The DNA was lopsided, lining very few of the same genes up on both sides of the double helix. A haploid offspring has exactly half the full contingent of the genome. But which half? Which halves? Two of them together could reproduce an almost unlimited number of variants. There would be no inbreeding depression. The gladiator carried the diversity of an entire thriving genus in its blood.

  The figure saw the understanding on Silas’s face and smiled. “You’re a smart man, a worthy builder. The gladiator you saw was a balancing act—a kind of phenotypic compromise between whole conflicting suites of genes. It is nothing compared to what will come after.” The figure’s eyes bore into him. The smile faded.

  “There are things hidden in the recessives, Silas. Things you wouldn’t believe. Things your kind never would have let near a gladiator arena. Things your kind would have killed at birth, and afterward closed your labs forever, burned the buildings to the ground and salted the earth beneath. Nightmares, Silas. You can’t imagine what is coming.”

  Silas looked into the dark eyes and believed. “Jesus,” he said.

  The figure’s face was expressionless.

  Silas was silent for a long while, taking in the enormity of what he’d just learned.

  “You spoke of a chance,” he said.

  The figure nodded. “The gladiator wouldn’t have brought those first eggs into the Olympic battles. They are too precious to risk. The gladiator will have hidden them somewhere.”

  “There were no eggs.”

  “There are. You just didn’t see them. That’s how the gladiator would have wanted it.”

  Silas remembered the blood in the straw. “I think I know.”

  “Then that is your chance. The gladiator must still retrieve them.”

  “How?”

  “Like the homing pigeon, the gladiator will find its way home.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “You are a great builder, Silas. Your people are great builders. The gladiator’s kind can only tear down. I gave them nothing else.”

  Vidonia’s hand pulled out of his, and when he looked at her, she was crying again.

  “I ask only one thing,” the figure said.

  “What?”

  “That you remember me.”

  Silas said nothing. On the floor, Chandler stopped his rocking and turned toward him, eyes nearly swollen shut from looking at the screen.

  Silas turned away. Without another word, he fled into the darkness. The dark didn’t scare him now. He knew of far worse things.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Ben looked at his watch. Half past two. He’d given up on sleep a while ago, and now the hands of his watch seemed to be moving in exception to the laws of the universe. He knew he’d been on the plane for more than forty minutes.

  The flight attendant slid down the aisle, long legs bare and golden from the mid-thigh down. Her hair was blue-streaked to match her eyes and uniform. Ordinarily, Ben would have been interested; he might even have turned to watch her backside pivot its way along the narrow walkway between the rows of mostly sleeping passengers. But not tonight. She passed him with a smile and a tray, and he let her go without so much as a nod hello. Tonight he was just glad not to be recognized.

  He’d been making calls from the vintage hotel phone when the news broke in on the lobby TV. The receiver had dropped from his hand, and a faraway voice cried out his name several times from the bottom of the swaying cord.

  The news reporter on the screen sat with a stock picture of Silas pasted above his shoulder and said things that made the skin on the back of Ben’s neck sizzle. He’d had the same sensation once before, on his final day at St. Patrick’s Primary School for Boys, when he’d sat in the principal’s office awaiting his mother and wondering what she’d do to him when she learned he’d been expelled again. His neck had sizzled then, a strange tingle, his flesh crawling up behind his ears. It was a sensation that he associated with utter hopelessness. It was a sensation that told him that even his body recognized how bad it was. The clock had refused to move that day, too.

  At the hotel, eyes stuck to the TV screen, he’d waited for his name to fall from the newsman’s mouth, but it didn’t. Officially, they were looking only for Silas. So far
. He decided then it was time to leave town.

  On the taxi ride to the airport, he asked the driver to turn the radio off. He knew Baskov was behind the terrorist accusations. They were so far-fetched, so ridiculous, that only someone with his kind of power would have a vested interest in shifting attention away from the commission. It was a method torn from the pages of the oldest propaganda books. Tell a lowercase lie, and people won’t believe it. Tell a standard lie, and people will doubt it. But tell a lie in all caps, a lie of truly colossal proportions, and that people will have to believe.

  And although such a colossal lie, when told by a man of power and position, requires little in the way of actual proof, it is still vulnerable to a large enough burden of contrary evidence. Ben thought of the tests, and the screenings, and the investigational procedures they’d done on the gladiator at the lab—each testifying to their effort to make sense of a situation that they’d had little understanding of and even less control over. Most of all, he thought of the computer files, filled with data that could almost certainly prove if not what the creature was, then at least where its design specifications had originated.

  Baskov may have screwed up. The heading of page two in those old propaganda books was always quite clear and written in bold: don’t ever, ever get caught in a lie of colossal proportions.

  Ben heard the flight attendant clinking a cart up the aisle behind him, and this time he stopped her.

  “Excuse me, miss.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what time it is?”

  She glanced down at a wristwatch—a dainty metallic affair dangling loosely near her hand. “Two-thirty-five.”

  “How long till we land?”

  “We’ll be arriving at Ontario airport in about twenty-five minutes.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Sure.” She smiled and touched his arm. “If you need anything else, don’t hesitate to ask.”

  This time, despite the weight of his troubles, he did watch her posterior pivot down the narrow walkway.

  BASKOV OPENED the sliding glass doors and hobbled out onto the balcony of his suite. A cold wind buffeted him as he moved his stomach against the round metal railing, looking out, scotch glass in hand. The city spread darkly beneath him, eighty floors down. It was such a strange sight, Phoenix, with its lights put out. It occurred to him that he was seeing something that hadn’t been seen, by anyone, in quite some time. Something rare and beautiful. Phoenix adrift in the desert darkness, invisible.

  Usually, when a city’s power went out, it went out in grids, but tonight the city was black as far as he could see. Which, from the eightieth floor, was quite a way. The only lights he could see were moving—the headlights of cars.

  Baskov viewed the unexplained blackout as a fortuitous coincidence. He could see no possible connection between it and the escape of the gladiator, but it had done an excellent job of silencing the media. His men could do their work under the cover of darkness and media blindness. And once the power was back on, the papers and news stations would have several choice fish to fry. The blackout almost assuredly wouldn’t knock this Olympic debacle off the front page, but with any luck, the media outlets would find themselves splitting their time among several stories. Baskov couldn’t believe his good luck. He was secretly hoping for looting.

  A gust of wind whistled through the iron railings, and Baskov shivered against the cold. In the distance, buildings stood as shadows, patches of dark between the stars.

  Somewhere out there, he knew the gladiator lurked. Perhaps in the mountains. Somewhere it was flying or roosting or doing whatever escaped gladiators did. He had no doubt that it would be caught and killed tomorrow, if it wasn’t dead already. A creature that big couldn’t hide for long. This was man’s world, and the gladiator was an interloper. A most unwelcome interloper.

  He took another drink, feeling the chill of ice against his upper lip as he finished the glass. He leaned out over the rail, squinting through his thick glasses. There was only blackness beneath him. The sidewalk he had noticed during the day was swallowed up by the night.

  He extended his arm into the sky, holding the glass delicately by three fingers. This high up, the sky was anything one inch beyond the balcony. Another gust of wind rattled past. He waited until it quieted.

  He wondered if anyone was standing below. A group of people, perhaps, entering or leaving the hotel. He imagined one of them stopping, looking up.

  His fingers loosened around the glass, and he let it slip from his hand into the darkness. He waited, ears straining. But there was no sound. Nothing.

  The wind gusted. Silence.

  Disappointed, he went back inside.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Willful optimism can take a man only so far, and when a truck passed in an angry sheet of wind and dust, blaring its horn, Silas could no longer pretend it wasn’t happening. The car was definitely slowing down.

  The battery gauge had blazed red a half hour ago, but he’d talked himself into believing they could make another twenty-five more miles. Even after the headlights began to dim, he thought they could make it.

  He looked down, and the speedometer told him he was going forty-seven. His foot sank the pedal into the floor. At first the needle didn’t move, then it dropped to forty-six. It was time they got off the highway.

  It had been about an hour since they’d left the Brannin. It had been the headlights. He’d left them on while he and Vidonia climbed the stairs. Silas tried not to think about what had happened there. Vidonia wasn’t taking it well.

  She sat reclined slightly in her seat, face turned out toward the open window. For a while he had taken her silence for sleep, but then he’d noticed her hands wringing in her lap and knew better. Her body was like that sometimes. It told him things she wouldn’t.

  He lifted the turn signal and slid down the next exit into the darkness of the city. It was like descending into cold, murky water. There was no traffic here, and without the light of oncoming beams, the night settled over everything like a blanket. The ramp ended abruptly at a stop sign thrown up against a two-lane road. He glanced both ways, each appearing as unlikely.

  “Don’t ask me,” Vidonia said preemptively, as the question was just forming in his mind. “This is your city. I’m the tourist, remember.”

  “I’m not feeling lucky tonight.”

  She leaned forward and squinted. “Go right.”

  “Do you see something?”

  “No.”

  He looked at her. “Right it is.”

  He spun the wheel and eased onto the accelerator. Small rectangular houses lined the street like tipped-over saltine boxes, separated from one another by narrow widths of pavement. Though the street was dark, here and there, it crawled. The little digital clock on the car radio glowed 3:46, but he could see people in the shadows at the edges of buildings, making the darkness into something that moved.

  A stop sign appeared in the gloom, and he rolled through without stopping, budgeting his forward momentum. Now the houses gave way to storefronts, and the little paved gap between the structures disappeared. The city was a canyon here, two parallel walls. He rolled through another stop and now turned the dying headlights off, deciding instead to rely on the emergency blinkers to tell others he was coming. They would just have to get out of the way.

  Up ahead he saw what he was looking for, and the tension in his chest eased. A held breath hissed out between his teeth. He turned the wheel, but as tires bumped onto the broad cement pad, the Aamco station seemed as dark and dead as the rest of the city.

  He coasted past the pumps to the battery service and eased to a stop with his nose above the parking block. Realizing their options at this point were getting pretty thin, he decided to err on the side of optimism. He climbed out and stretched his legs, hoping the place wasn’t as deserted as it looked.

  Nothing moved; nothing flashed, blinked, or glowed, but the front door was propped open with a cinder block. T
here was potential.

  He leaned down, resting his forearms through the driver’s window. “I’ll be right back,” he told Vidonia, and flipped the dying headlights back on to light the doorway.

  “Okay.”

  He walked toward the entrance and found a man sitting tilted back on a stool, one greasy black boot on the service counter. There was just enough ambient light to sketch out his features. He was young and wore his hair tied back away from his face in a long ponytail.

  “Pumps closed,” the man said.

  “I need an exchange.”

  “They’ve been sitting on a dead recharger for a while.” He wore both a dirty smock and a look of abject disinterest.

  “I’ll take one, full or not.”

  “I can’t make change; register’s froze up.”

  “You can keep the change,” Silas said, and the look of boredom stirred into something slightly more ambitious.

  “Well, then, what size you need?” the man asked, getting up from his stool and walking around the counter.

  “It’s an economy car.”

  “No, I mean the make,” the man said, giving him an odd look. “Chevy, Nissan, what?”

  “It’s a Chevy. A rental.”

  “Okay, Chevys take a twenty-five kV.” He pulled a thick block off the shelving by its handles and set it on the floor at Silas’s feet.

  “Three C’s, plus the empty.”

  Silas thought of asking for a price list but ended up handing the youth the bills. He bent to pick up the battery, but the man stopped him.

  “The empty,” he was reminded.

  Silas stepped back outside.

  “Pop the hood,” he told Vidonia.

  The hood clicked loudly and rose an inch. He wiggled his fingers under the edge for the clasp, found it, and raised the hood on its gas shocks. A dim bulb lit the motor assembly. He’d never owned a battery-operated car, but the procedure was pretty straightforward. He spun the big red wing nuts until the bulb went dark. Then he lifted the bracket off and pulled the battery out.