by Leito, Chad
But the thought of hurting anyone else made him feel nauseous.
He remembered how he had broken that Armadillo player’s ribs right before the Task. If I had known that the Task was about to start, I would have played more conservatively.
Asa checked the countdown clock on his armband.
55 hours 58 minutes 31 seconds
The numbers continued to count down. From deep within the cave, everyone seemed to be sleeping. Asa’s bladder was full. He stood, undid his pants, and stood as close to the web as he dared. He urinated through the holes, and the stream flowed downhill outside of the cave. He was acutely aware of the noise he was making and hoped that no one heard him.
When he was done, he resituated his pants and was about to sit back down for the remainder of his watch when a terrible noise came from the back of the cave. There was a gurgling noise, and something was slapping against the stone.
“Jack!” Asa heard someone say; he thought it was Viola, and she sounded worried.
Asa ran from his post back to where his teammates had been sleeping. They were all awake now, most of them were sitting. Mike Plode threw some stored brush on the fire and it lit up again, illuminating the cave walls and everyone’s face. Everyone was staring at Jack.
He lay on the ground, clutching his throat. His face was puffy and red, his eyes swollen shut. His lips had inflated like balloons, and his tongue, which was hanging out of his mouth, was the size of a fist. On the ground beside him was a half eaten Mountain Berry. His lips were painted blue.
Gabby Carter was crying, her hands over her mouth. “Somebody do something!”
“There’s nothing we can do,” Mike said, stoking the fire with a stick.
Jack Tool was slamming his fists and his feet into the rock in panic. He’s going to fracture a bone, Asa thought. His chest was rising and falling quickly, and a high-pitched whining sound was coming from his throat.
“I could try CPR,” said Viola. She was full of nervous energy, and was biting the fingers of one hand, while she used another hand to tug on her hair.
“Don’t,” Boom Boom said, not taking his eyes off the fire. “You don’t want that poisonous stuff on your mouth.”
“Well, someone has to do something!” Gabby was sobbing very loudly as the whistling sound stopped as Jack Tool’s throat had completely closed; Asa noted that the food was killing Jack even faster than he thought it would.
No one answered Gabby. She continued to sob. Asa sat down, closed his eyes, and pressed his hands against his ears until it was finished. He didn’t want to hear Jack struggling. He couldn’t do anything to stop feeling the vibrations in the rock as Jack’s body seized, struggled, and then was still.
A couple minutes later, Jack Tool was dead. His face was a shade of purple Asa didn’t think was possible. In the end, he had torn away some of the flesh in his throat with his fingernails, making a bloody mess.
The struggle for air had woken everyone up. Roxanne looked at her watch; somehow, she appeared even more tired after her nap than before it. “We need to get going,” she said.
Everyone stood slowly. They left Jack’s body and moved to the mouth of the cave; Gabby was still sobbing. Mike took a torch to the web he had created the night before. The filaments burned to hot liquid, and Asa stepped over it on his way out into the Tropics.
18
Land of Giants
It wasn’t dark for long. The Tropics grew hot and muggy as the Sharks made their way through the land.
When not blocked by trees, the Home Bases could be seen looming in the distance. Asa’s heart picked up to an uncomfortable pace each time he saw what they were walking towards. It reminded him of the realities of the game he was living in—Kill or be killed—and of the fact that at any moment his suit could electrocute him to death without warning.
The Tropics were beautiful, though.
There were only eight Sharks, now that Jack Tool was dead. They followed a brown, fast flowing stream, with Roxanne in the lead. There were purple, black, and blue flowers. Purple hummingbirds fluttered over petals and drank up the nectar. Thirty and forty pound fish occasionally leapt out of the river, and iguanas and turtles rested on the bank. There were black squirrels. There was grass that was such a dark shade of green that it was almost blue. And everything was enormous.
Asa walked beside Boom Boom, who had two coconuts tied around his waist; each of these had been pierced with half-inch diameter holes and had vines sticking out of them. Asa didn’t ask what they were for.
Mike looked pale, just as Roxanne and Bruce did. Asa felt pale. The Tropics were incredibly humid, and Asa was continually producing sweat onto his face. This did not help with his nausea or hunger.
The flow of the river was somewhat directing the course the Sharks were taking through the jungle. Two Home Bases—tall, white structures—could be seen in the distance. “Remind me,” Asa said to Mike, “which Home Base is ours?”
“That one,” Mike pointed to the one closest to them.
Asa felt his hopes sink. They were only a third of the way to an opponent’s Home Base. Even if they reached it before they were electrocuted, they would then have to capture the KEE from potentially hostile Academy students, then turn around and walk back. He became uncomfortably aware that no one was guarding his own team’s KEE and that the electric shock of his suit could come at any time.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Mike said. “You’re wondering how far we traveled yesterday before stopping, and why we’re not closer. Remember after the Boss’s hologram left, when I estimated the distance to the nearest Base at about fifteen miles?”
Asa nodded.
“I was wrong. Very wrong.” Boom Boom looked even paler for a moment, and Asa thought that this was due to a twinge of fear mixed in with the nauseous hunger. It was strange to Asa to see such an emotion in someone who had lured their household dog into a trashcan and then blew it up with fireworks. You’re scared of the electricity charring you, but you’ll kill a dog for fun, Asa thought in disgust.
Through the canopy overhead, Asa saw a pterodactyl flying through the air; it seemed too muscular for a creature in flight.
“How far apart do you think these Bases are?” Asa asked. He kept his thoughts about Mike’s demented tendencies to himself.
“Fifty miles. Maybe seventy-five or a hundred.”
“What!?”
Boom Boom shrugged. “If it was even twenty miles, we would have reached it by now.”
Asa thought back at when he first saw the other Bases out the window of their own Home Base. “But they didn’t look that far away.”
Boom Boom smiled. “Have you noticed the sky, Asa? Look at it.”
Asa did. High above his head, the day was a perfect, clear blue. There wasn’t a single cloud. “What about it?” Asa asked.
“There’s no sun,” Boom Boom said.
Asa gazed up again. Their view of the sky was limited by the jungle surrounding them. “It’s probably still on the horizon,” Asa said. “It’s early in the day still.”
“Yeah, that’s kind of what I thought yesterday when I couldn’t find it in the sky. Except, it was getting close to nighttime, so I thought that the sun was close to setting. But then we came out into a high clearing where I could see the whole sky. I looked all around, Asa. There is no sun here.”
Asa felt uneasy. “What does that mean?”
“It means we’re not outside. We’re in some kind of an arena. Do you remember when they transported us? We weren’t traveling for very long at all; the climate here is much different from that at the Academy. We couldn’t possibly have moved from an artic region of the world to a tropical region in so little time.”
Asa felt a warm breeze move in the same direction as the flowing stream beside them. It’s true. This place is far from artic.
Mike Plode went on: “I think we’re deep underground. The ‘sky’ seems to be some kind of ceiling that glows bluish white in the daytime and
gets black at night.”
“You think that the Academy dug out hundreds of square miles of earth to make an underground arena for the Task?” Asa asked, having trouble believing the proposal.
“No,” Boom Boom said. “I think that the Academy dug out thousands of square miles of earth to make this arena. Which leads us back to why you and I both incorrectly estimated the length between our Home Base and the opponent’s bases.
“When we first looked out the windows at the Tropics, we thought that we were outside. When you’re outside, you can only see so much earth at one time. At a point, things just drop off the horizon, due to the curve of the earth—this point is around twenty-seven miles from where a person is standing. So…”
Suddenly understanding, Asa interrupted, “The horizon is different because there is no curve. The whole thing is flat. The designers of this place didn’t think to make the arena curve with the earth.”
Boom Boom nodded. With his recent weight loss, he appeared to be suffering from an acute illness. “Exactly.”
They moved on and no one spoke for a while. There were the sounds of their shoes on moist dirt, the trickling of water beside them, and a symphony of animal noises from the surrounding jungles. They passed one of the giant, buffalo like animals that Asa had seen out the windows of the Home Base. It was standing on the other side of the river (which was being supplemented by adjacent streams and was growing much wider as they traveled on), and was eating without noticing the Sharks. Mosquitos circled it, and it whipped at them with a short tail. Its feathers were beautiful: Metallic green, yellow, purple, blue, orange, and red. It’s feet made deep imprints in the dirt on the shore opposite Asa. The animal was licking moss off of a boulder with a purple tongue as large as Asa’s foot.
That thing probably has to eat all day, thought Asa, appreciating the animal’s size. It looked comfortably over one ton.
Then, remembering the carcass of the same species that he had seen during his first few moments in the Tropics, he felt cold. The animal had been just as big as this one, maybe even bigger, and had been taken down by a predator. Whatever killed that thing is lurking in this arena.
A dragonfly zoomed over Asa’s head and he was shocked to see that the wings were each three feet long. Boom Boom saw Asa looking at this creature and patted him on the back. “In prehistoric times,” Mike said, “animals were much bigger. There are dragonflies with bigger wingspans than this one in the fossil record. A lot of people think that the oxygen concentration in the air was much higher back then; they think that’s why the brontosaurus, and T-rex were able to get so large. With more oxygen, they had more fuel to grow. Do you know what else oxygen is good for?”
Asa shook his head.
An evil gleam danced in Boom Boom’s eyes and for a moment, he didn’t look tired or malnourished. “Oxygen is good for explosions.” A sick smile played on Boom Boom’s lips, and Asa thought about how the U.S. courts had given the human he was talking to the death sentence for blowing up a bank.
As they moved, Asa’s hunger took hold of his stomach, gripping it with a nauseating force, begging him to eat. At one point, Roxanne bent over a fallen tree and dry heaved until a spew of lime-green bile spilled into the dirt. She didn’t comment on this, but just stood and kept on moving at a slightly slower pace. Asa looked up at the Base they were approaching and thought, we’re not going to make it without food.
A few miles later they could hear the roar of a waterfall, and the river that the Sharks were following suddenly dropped straight down into a vast lake. They crested a hill and took in the view.
The water was moving frantically towards the one hundred foot drop off on their right, and before them was a massive body of blue water. More impressive than the water were the animals that flanked the shores.
“Triceratops,” Boom Boom said, and Asa thought, he knows a lot about dinosaurs.
The creatures were lined along the water, many of them with their heads down so that they could lap up a drink. Some stood so that the slow gentle waves came up to their knees, which were comparable to elephant limbs. The animals were like reptilian hippos, with green-brown scales that blended with their surroundings and three huge horns protruding from their skulls for defensive purposes.
When Asa heard about the Task, he had been scared of zombies, or genetically altered animals, but he had never thought of dinosaurs. He should have guessed, though. The extinction of dinosaurs was only permanent as long as genetic technology wasn’t able to resurrect them. Asa felt his wings, folded up beside his spine. Obviously, the Academy has the technology.
The Sharks stood watching for some time. It filled Asa with wonder to see such large and graceful creatures move over land. Near the tree line he saw a mother dinosaur standing guard over her young child as it chomped on foliage from a small bush.
Asa thought of what Jen had said yesterday, about the pterodactyls and pterosaurs being able to land on the ground atop the sharp incline of dirt that housed a river. Why then, are they not able to come and attack us, as we stand adjacent to this huge waterfall? We are high above the ground and the lake below. Asa did not know the answer to this. Perhaps the sensors along the elevated river weren’t communicating with the flying creatures’ neckbands properly.
“Let’s move,” Bruce said impatiently. He looked as pale as the dead, and Asa thought that he would collapse again soon.
“You can go,” Mike told him, “but I’m staying up here. I don’t want to get eaten. We should cross the river and walk along the opposite bank, as soon as that one is done eating.”
“Triceratops are herbivores, they’re not going to eat us,” Bruce said.
“I’m not talking about the triceratops,” Mike responded, pointing out into the water. “Look. There, you see it? It’s moving in from the center towards the bank.”
“An alligator? What are alligators going to do?” Bruce asked.
Asa tended to agree. He saw the creature that Mike was pointing to, but wasn’t worried about it. The alligator moved through the water, only its eyes visible. It was hard to see from so high up. If it tries to attack, we are much faster than it.
“That isn’t an alligator. I think we’re looking at spinosaurus,” Boom Boom said.
Asa and the rest of the Sharks watched mesmerized as the beach ball sized eyeballs moved through the water towards the unsuspecting triceratops. Each triceratops weighed more than a school bus. He was about to ask what a spinosaurus was when the animal struck.
The eyes moved forward at a blurring speed. At the last moment the triceratops yelped in surprise. It wasn’t nearly fast enough.
For just a second, Asa saw the top half portion of the spinosaurus’s body. Just seeing a creature of such size and power was fear evoking. Its mouth was big enough that Asa believed it could comfortably fit the entire Sharks team inside. It had a shape similar to the tyrannosauruses that Asa had seen in movies, except it was much larger than he had ever seen a t-rex depicted. The creature latched onto the triceratops with claws longer than broom handles a set of massive teeth. Blood ran from the triceratops’s heavy body into the water and it continued to squeal. The spinosaurus drug the triceratops out into open water with such speed that Asa believed the creature could have taken two triceratopses at a time. When the screaming, yelping triceratops was in the center of the lake, the spinosaurus pulled it under. A circle of red blood flowed to the surface, but the Sharks didn’t see either animal come back up again.
“Spinosaurus is the biggest predator to ever walk the earth,” Mike whispered. “Much bigger than the t-rex.”
“Let’s hope we don’t run into one,” said Gabby. People had been taking turns carrying her, and she was now on Lilly Bloodroot’s back, her bandaged stump now soaked with blood.
“Let’s cross to the other side,” said Bruce; his voice was hoarse and his eyes bloodshot.
Time dragged and no matter how far they walked, the next Base never seemed to appear any bigger to Asa. In his
hungry delirium, his thoughts turned to the outside world, and to history. He had once read a letter written by George Washington that was written as he reflected about an upcoming battle with the British. The quote had moved Asa, and he had unintentionally committed it to memory from reading it over and over again. Washington had written: “The reflection upon my situation, and that of this army, produces many an uneasy hour, when all around me are wrapped in sleep. Few people know the predicament we are in, on a thousand accounts; fewer still will believe, if any disaster happens to these lines, from what cause it flows.” Thinking of the outside world, and of the non-mutated humans caring for those inflicted by the Wolf Flu, Asa could relate with General Washington. Few knew the despair he felt. Few knew the Academy existed, and few would ever know if he died here in this underground arena. He looked at Gabby, her bloody stump, and the pale faces of his fellow teammates. He looked at the distance he still had to travel, and at the surrounding jungle. Even though his teammates surrounded him, he felt incredibly alone.
The difference between Washington and I is that he was engaged in cause of his own choosing. I was kidnapped. I was brought here by force, and am here so that I might be trained to murder and help murder for the worst organization in the history of mankind.
Asa was beginning to become emotional with these thoughts, but he didn’t share his feelings with his teammates. They were too hungry to bother them with such things. Asa suspected Bruce had lost another ten pounds this morning.
Keeping his thoughts to himself, Asa thought, they can’t break me. I won’t work for them. I’m going to remain mentally intact, and leave this organization at the first opportunity. I am not a monster.
When he thought this, he was still ignorant as to what the Task’s food source was. He also underestimated his own will to survive and the immoral things he would be willing to do to compete in the Task.
