by Chad Leito
Baggs nodded. “But I came in at seven in the morning. And, there were no openings, then.”
Tartuga laughed loudly and then half smiled, half showed Baggs his teeth. He spoke through a closed jaw. “I think you are mistaken. I think that you came in at fifteen past one—exactly a quarter of an hour after Regina Eldridge, the most senior participant on Byron Turner’s team, passed.”
Baggs was horror struck. They’re going to kill someone so that I can enter! My God!
Tartuga shrugged. “That’s the way luck goes. Outlive is a game of luck—you have thirty teams, all with an equal chance of having good athletes on them, competing together in the Colosseum. How could you possibly strategize that? There is a short period of training, of course, however everyone is training just as hard around the league—all the participants train like their lives depend upon it, because they literally do. But, like I said earlier, when you have men and women competing such as the owners in Outlive, things aren’t always what they seem to be. Men and women like that don’t get to the top because of luck, Baggs. I’m here to tell you that luck isn’t real.”
Baggs lowered his voice: “But why would you do it? Why would you want to help Byron Turner’s team out by sending me there, in place of this Eldridge lady?”
Tartuga laughed harshly. “I don’t! Are you crazy? I don’t want to help anyone! She simply died, and then you walked into the office fifteen minutes later. If you keep mixing up the facts, Mr. Baggers, you’re going to start to worry me. You might get unlucky, too, understand?”
Baggs nodded. He almost wanted to walk out, but he didn’t think that would be an option anymore. He knew too much. It made him sick to think that he would be replacing someone who was killed.
“What time did you enter the office, Mr. Baggers? I forgot.”
“Fifteen passed one.”
“Exactly,” said Tartuga. He finished his doughnut. “But you’re a thinking man, Baggs. You like to think in hypotheticals. So let us entertain a hypothetical. Do you know who Byron Turner is?”
“A councilman.”
“Yes! He’s very high up! And people who are very high up can do other people favors, if they feel like it.”
“I see,” said Baggs.
Tartuga checked his watch and then glanced back up at his desk. He seemed to be thinking about getting back to work, but Baggs wanted to keep him talking. Tartuga was a loose cannon—he said things that he shouldn’t. Baggs suspected that he wouldn’t get another opportunity such as this and that he should capitalize on it by extracting all information he could possibly obtain.
“I have a question,” Baggs said.
“Go ahead.”
“It’s hypothetical.”
Tartuga smiled. “I like hypothetical questions.”
“Do you think that there are any other hypothetical things that may give one owner an advantage over another?”
“Such as?”
Baggs thought. “Such as better equipment. Maybe one team in Outlive has sharper swords than another. Maybe one team has better armor.”
Tartuga shook his head. “It’s an interesting thought, but they have no access to the armor or swords. It is all provided to them in the Colosseum. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other tactics.”
“Such as?” Baggs asked. “Hypothetically, of course.”
Tartuga smiled. “I can’t say. What if, hypothetically, there were tactics that Byron Turner didn’t know about, and then you told him that I told you about them? Or what if he hears you repeating some of his best-kept secrets? Hypothetically, he’d be livid with me. He’d kill you too. So, hypothetically, I shouldn’t tell you.”
“But there are other tactics that owners use to gain an edge?”
Tartuga shrugged. “Hypothetically, you would think so. Listen, Baggs, I’ve got to get back to work, but I’ve enjoyed talking to you. You sit here, and lunch will be served a little before noon. When you arrive here at one-fifteen you can begin to fill out the proper forms to enter Outlive and replace the late Ms. Eldridge. At one forty-five, thirty minutes after you arrive here, I’ll have Jodi lead you to one of my private helicopters, which will take you on your journey. And, hypothetically, you will keep your mouth shut at Byron Turners house about what we’ve talked about, or, hypothetically, I bet you’ll be torn apart by K9s in a freak accident. Understand?”
“Perfectly.”
Tartuga stood up and walked up to his desk. Baggs wondered if the man regretted revealing any of the information he had to Baggs. Probably not he thinks he’s smart enough to have covered his back with the ‘hypothetical’ talk. And he thinks that he’s scared me into keeping my mouth shut. He’s right about that.
Baggs felt uneasy about the idea of another competitor dying so that he could compete. He tried to make himself feel better by thinking that if the woman didn’t die, Baggs’s family would die. This didn’t work. He then tried to make himself feel better by thinking that the Eldridge woman would probably die anyways. This did not assuage his guilt either. There was nothing he could do, though.
For the next hour, Baggs read Under the Dome and lounged on leather couches, drinking coffee. He noticed a computer in the corner of the room that was slightly hidden by some bookshelves, and thought that he might want to do some research on Byron Turner before going to his residence. Later, though. He was enjoying reading. Every once in a while, thoughts of Maggie, Tessa, and Olive came into his mind, but he pushed them away with the written word, losing himself in King’s world. He saw no use in torturing himself by thinking of how sad they must be.
And if Byron Turner is really cheating as much as Tartuga makes it sound like, maybe I have a decent chance. But, maybe if everyone is cheating there is an even playing field.
Baggs didn’t know.
There was one other thing that made Baggs more optimistic about his chances of surviving Outlive: His extensive history of violence. But he didn’t like thinking about that—it made him feel awful. He pushed the thought out of his mind and continued to read.
3
After one hour of reading, Baggs found that his eyes were still skimming over the words, but his brain was somewhere else. The more he thought about it, the more certain he became that he was being put on a cheating team. He had mixed feelings about this; on one hand, he didn’t like cheating and believed in fairness; on the other hand, he wanted to see his daughters again.
Baggs wondered if Regina Eldridge knew she was going to die yet. It was eleven o’clock; if what Tartuga said was true, she had two more hours to live.
It was frightening to Baggs that Byron Turner could have someone killed like that and not face any consequences. It meant that Baggs would only be a contestant as long as Byron Turner saw him as useful. The fact that rich people could get away with such things meant that all poor people were at the mercy of the rich; no one could appeal to higher ideals such as fairness or justice. Consequences were dished out purely based upon who had more power.
Has it always been like this? He wondered. He looked up at the ceiling and noticed that small angels were carved into the stone above—they would be easy to overlook. Does Tartuga believe in angels? Does he believe that some celestial power is keeping track of all his moral rights and wrongs?
At his desk, Tartuga was still typing. A lot of people used dictation software, but it seemed that Tartuga liked typing things in the old fashion way.
Baggs wondered what other tactics the owners of Outlive teams could possibly use to their advantage. How else could they cheat? Tartuga had ruled out the possibility that some teams have better armor than others. But what if they could somehow rig the competition so that their team comes out in a particular part of the arena that is advantageous? Baggs knew that some Outlive competitions took place inside of giant mazes. Surely not all entrances are the same, and perhaps the owners are able to pay someone to ensure that their team is granted an advantageous starting point. That made sense to Baggs, but he didn’t see how it could m
ake that big of a difference.
Then, he had another idea. This one he thought likely, and he planned on trying to pry more information out of Tartuga when they had lunch.
Competitors were supposed to enter the Colosseum with no idea what kinds of obstacles they would be facing. Perhaps some owners were able to buy this information. That would give their team a huge advantage. After the teams were drafted, they had roughly a week to train. If an owner knew that the contest would be heavily dependent upon archery skills, he could make his competitors train more heavily in archery.
Baggs was fascinated by the idea that cheating was going on in Outlive. It made sense to him, and he was surprised that he had never thought about it before. The school system, the healthcare system, and the lack of regulations on hiring labor made it so that the rich only got richer. The legislation they made was unfair, so why assume that they would play fair in a high stakes game like Outlive?
Another thing Baggs wondered about was if Byron Turner was one of the better cheaters. Previously, Baggs had calculated his odds of surviving as though everyone had an equal chance. Typically, there were roughly seven competitors on each of the thirty teams that entered Outlive. Each contest was different. In some, participants from as many as fifteen teams could walk out alive. In other contests, only members of one team would live. Baggs figured that he could hope he was involved in a contest where at least five of the thirty teams had surviving participants. If all members of the remaining five teams survived, with all else being equal, he would have a one in six chance of living through Outlive. However, teams rarely made it out with all of their members. So, if you figure that each winning team makes it out with approximately half their members dead and half alive, Baggs calculated that he had a one in twelve chance of surviving Outlive.
Those odds weren’t good.
In the real world, though, not all things are always equal. And if what Tartuga suggested was true, some owners cheat more than others and gave their teams an unfair advantage.
So maybe my chance of living is as great as one in four. Or maybe even one in two!
Baggs heart palpated and he had to suppress a laugh. He didn’t want to get his hopes up. The chances that he would ever see his family again were slim. He was a realist who believed that people should accept the truth, and not play mind games with themselves to make themselves feel better.
Baggs shut his book and sat up. There was a way that he could better evaluate his chances of living, objectively. A computer sat in the corner. Maybe if he looked at Byron Turner’s track record in Outlive competitions he would have a better shot at knowing his true odds. If Byron Turner had winning teams in one out of two contests, Baggs could safely assume that his odds were then one in four, which was much better than he had hoped for when he made the decision to sign up.
Tartuga didn’t look up from his monitor as Baggs walked over the stone floor—still barefoot—and sat down at the computer in the corner of the room. Baggs felt slightly guilty for his hopes that he was on a cheating team. He touched the mouse and the computer responded immediately, going from a blank screen to one that glowed with a picture of the ocean; icons were scattered throughout the desktop, and he clicked on one of the web browsing programs.
Baggs was frustrated to find that his left hand was not only limited when it came to piano, it also wouldn’t move enough to type effectively. Using his right hand, he typed “records of outlive owners this season” into a search engine. The first page that came up was a statistics page hosted by the Colosseum’s website. He clicked on this.
He browsed the page for the better part of an hour, and found it very helpful and user friendly. He was able to look at owner records for past seasons, and the current season. They hosted statistics such as win percentage and rankings.
A win was counted when an owner had any survivors at the end of a contest. Baggs saw that most owners had a winning percentage of a little over fifteen percent. Byron Turner’s winning percentage was fourteen point three percent.
“Damn,” Baggs said quietly upon reading this. The number suggested that Byron Turner’s teams did worse, not better, than average. It meant that Baggs’s chance of living was worse than one in twelve.
But I have been in a lot of fights, he thought. I’ve hurt a lot of people. My history has to count for something.
Even though no one could hear his thoughts, he grew red in the face with embarrassment. He did not like to think of his history of violence.
Baggs’s first impression from looking at the stats was that as a contestant on Byron Turner’s team, he would not have an advantage over everyone else. Byron Turner apparently did not use some same methods of cheating that other owners systematically used. There were owners, for instance, who won almost twice as much as the average owners. Byron Turner did not have those statistics. But as Baggs continued to scour the figures, he held out hope that Byron Turner was one of the owners who cheated, but that the stats didn’t show it yet. There were two reasons to believe this.
The first was Baggs’s conversation with Tartuga. Tartuga pretty much said that Baggs was going to replace a weaker player on Turner’s team. So, it was clear that Turner cheated.
The second reason to believe that the stats might not suggest Turner’s true ability as an owner was the fact that he had only been an owner in Outlive for seven episodes. The one that Baggs would compete in would be his eighth. And, last episode, Turner’s team had been one of the winners.
Maybe Turner is just starting to cheat, Baggs thought. He still wondered what Turner and others could do to gain an unfair advantage. He supposed that he would find out.
The Boxers, the team that Turner owned, had had one survivor from last episode, which had to do with fighting on horseback. The survivor’s name was Paul Higgins. Baggs copied his name over to the search engine.
What he found out about Paul Higgins made his stomach go cold and the blood drain out of his face. It didn’t prove anything. It didn’t definitively mean that the same thing was going to happen to Baggs. But as Baggs looked at what he found, he had a terrible, ominous feeling go over him.
Paul Higgins died of a heart attack eight hours after his victory at the Colosseum. He was eating at Byron Turner’s house when it happened. According to Turner, the man was talking, eating, happy, and then his eyes rolled to the back of his head and he began convulsing on the floor.
It could be a coincidence, Baggs thought.
“Something wrong, Baggs?”
Baggs jumped, and whipped around in his chair to see Tartuga standing behind him, looking over his shoulder at the computer screen. “Huh?” said Baggs.
“You’re sweating. And you look pale.”
Baggs swallowed. His mouth was dry.
“It looks like you were reading about Paul Higgins’s death—a true tragedy. Come over, have some lunch.”
Baggs was so immersed in reading what he had found on the internet that he hadn’t noticed Jodi come in and drop off steak quesadillas for lunch. They were served on a silver tray, as breakfast had been, along with tea, different sodas, and water. Baggs pulled back a chair and sat down. He loaded his plate and began to eat slowly, thinking about Paul Higgins’s death.
It seems like too much of a coincidence. Maybe Higgins knew that Turner was cheating, and then he died in Turner’s home. Is it a cover up?
But, things like that did happen. And is one instance really enough for me to get so worked up about this? People naturally have heart attacks.
The food was delicious, as was breakfast. Baggs had meant to ask Tartuga some questions, but Tartuga started the conversation.
“Something has changed,” Targua said. He took a drink of water and eyed Baggs over the rim.
Baggs’s heart skipped a beat. He was almost sure that he would be told that they didn’t need him anymore. “What’s that?”
“Eldridge died at eleven a.m., not one p.m., so you’re going to arrive at eleven fifteen a.m., got it?”
Baggs nodded.
“And, I got an email from one of our producers. He wanted me to ask you something.”
“What’s that?”
Tartuga leaned his head to the side, sizing Baggs up. “Before I ask, I want to remind you that I’m helping you out quite a bit.”
Baggs didn’t say anything. He’s not helping me out; he’s helping a councilman out so that Turner will do him some kind of a favor.
“We want you to be in a commercial for the next episode of Outlive.”
Baggs raised his eyebrows.
“Jodi will come in here in a few minutes with the paperwork for you to fill out for Outlive. Then, they’ll take you downstairs, do makeup and all that, and film you saying a few lines.”
“What’s in it for me?”
Tartuga laughed incredulously. “In it for you? The quesadillas, the coffee this morning; I’m giving you the chance of a lifetime! Even though Outlive is full, you’re getting to compete.”
Baggs took a sip of water. He was nervous, but he didn’t show it. “I’m not saying a line unless you pay my family. I want you to send them twenty thousand extra CreditCoins.”
Tartuga laughed again, louder this time. “You’re out of your mind.”
Baggs shook his head. “You need me just as much as I need you. According to you, Eldridge is already dead. You want to replace her with someone who will impress Turner. You won’t find someone else like me. You saw me fight.”
Tartuga laughed again. “You’re an ass! Ten thousand CreditCoins, final offer. But you’ve got to say whatever lines they give you.”
Baggs laughed. He didn’t actually think that it would work. “Deal,” he said.
Tartuga took one final slice of quesadilla and walked off somewhere else in the building while Baggs finished his meal. Just as Tartuga said, Jodi came in a few minutes later with an electronic tablet onto which Baggs could put his thumbprint as a sign that he understood the risks that would be involved as a competitor to Outlive. He also used his thumbprint to bring up his and Tessa’s bank account, which was where the twenty thousand CreditCoins for Outlive, and the ten thousand CreditCoins for the commercial would be sent.
