Ted Kosmatka - The Games

The door was ajar.

The creature pushed on the door, and it closed. It howled and struck the door, and it bounced open again, a slight gap. This time the gladiator curled its taloned fingers around the door and pulled.

The door swung open with a screech of tortured hinges.

For a moment, nothing moved.

Silence.

The creature ducked its head and moved inside. Silas screamed again, wordlessly.

Tay didn’t run. There was no place to go.

Silas watched it all. The creature moved forward deliberately, flinging a chair out of its way as it crossed the loft. Tay stood with his arms at his sides, motionless, back against the yellow wall. The gladiator gathered into a crouch.

There was a flash of silvery blackness, then red, in streaks on the window.

Silas’s screaming stopped. Silence.

Blood splashed the walls, ran in thick rivulets down the glass. A lump of raw flesh hit the ceiling, leaving a red smear on the white tile. The black shape shifted and bobbed in the window.

Silas stepped toward the gate.

“What are you doing?” Ben’s voice was hoarse.

Silas didn’t answer. He spun the locking mechanism, clicked the first tie open.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

He spun the second lock wide, lining up the ties. Ben rushed him, slamming the lock back home.

“You can’t do anything,” Ben said. “It’s too late.”

Silas shoved him away. “We have to do something.” He lined the ties up and opened the final lock. The door swung wide, and he stepped into the enclosure.

Ben surged in behind him, and the first punch landed against Silas’s cheekbone, spinning his head around. The second caught Silas under the chin before he could react, laying him out neatly in the straw. He saw the ceiling high above sliding away and felt himself being pulled by his feet. There was a click, and then people were yelling. Ben was sitting next to him on the floor.

“You never would have got me if I’d seen it coming,” Silas said.

“No one saw this coming,” Ben said.

LATER THAT night, Silas found Vidonia’s report on his desk. The blood work she’d promised the day before, in another age. She’d left it there while he went to the training exercise. It was the reason she hadn’t been there. The reason she’d missed what happened.

Silas sank into his chair. His hands were still shaking. He tried to read the words, but he couldn’t concentrate. He skimmed the abstract, flipped through graphs.

Vidonia was thorough, he’d give her that. She was what he’d hoped she’d be when he’d decided to bring her in: a fresh set of eyes. An unbiased observer.

She’d broken down the blood into its constituent parts.

The results were highlighted: percent Homo sapiens DNA, zero.

Nothing about the creature was human.

His eyes snagged on the conclusion, the final page, the last sentences.

The proband lacks normal mammalian hemoglobin. The oxygen-transport system utilized by its circulatory system is currently unknown to science .

Like everything else about it.

Rain came loose from the sky in billowing sheets. It drummed static on the hood of Silas’s darkened rain slicker, soaking his face, his feet, and drowning the voice of the priest who stood across the open grave. The rain allowed him a kind of solitude among the throng of mourners. It gave him separation. But it could do nothing about the children’s accusing eyes.

Tay had two sons. Neither had his features, but the older was formed like his father made over again: short, thick-limbed—a ten-year-old already hinting at a compact athleticism in his build. Their faces were red, their eyes swollen from crying. They stood against their mother’s side, each clutching a hand, looking with a desperate kind of horror into the pit they would lose their father into.

A black veil obscured Laura’s face. She’d stood tall and erect throughout much of the ceremony at the church, while the church choir sang, and the priest spoke his sad, pretty speeches, and her family had held her hands and hugged her—but now, here at the grave site, she was inconsolable.

Standing in the cemetery, watching your husband about to be lowered into the ground—every wife does that alone, no matter how many people are around her. Just as every son is alone in that moment.

A crowd of friends and family bore Laura up, physically clutching her by the shoulders to keep her from falling. Old women wept with her. Young women. Men. The crowd was large, and it huddled together in the rain—brothers and cousins and friends.

The priest began speaking again, and Laura’s legs straightened, a show of strength for the ceremony.

“Oh, Almighty God, we commend to Thee our brother, Tate.” The priest held his hands up in the rain. “That he may rise again in the beauty and love of Your eternal light. Receive him into the folds of Thy bountiful mercy.”

The priest lowered his hands and addressed the congregation. “The Lord’s ways are mysterious, and we must remember that each day of our lives is a gift.” The priest spoke for another minute while the rain fell.

When the priest finished his final benediction, they began lowering the coffin into the ground. Laura wailed, and her body slumped. The men behind her held her up as best they could.

“Ashes to ashes.” The priest bent to pick up a handful of dirt. He tossed it onto the lowering casket. The sons cried.

Silas moved away, pushing past Ben. He could bear it no more. Stepping through the crowd and into the open field of gravestones, he turned his head up to the sky and let the rain cool his hot face. He understood the kind of hole a father can leave behind. He’d spent his life trying to fill it.

“Silas.”

Silas kept walking.

“Silas.”

He stopped. He turned toward the voice. Vidonia moved toward him.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she said.

“My project. Everything that happens is my responsibility.”

She reached a hand out and placed it on his arm. “Your responsibility but not your fault. There’s a difference.”

“There’s no difference to Tay.”

“He knew the kind of job he had. He knew the danger. You couldn’t have done anything.”

“There are a hundred things I could have done.”

“And a dozen Tay could have done.”

“But here we are. Spare me your consolation; the widow needs it more than I do.”

“Silas—”

“Really,” he said, turning his back on her.

“Silas,” she called after him.

He walked away through the stones, trying not to read the engraved names as the thunder rolled.

The rain kept coming.

A limousine was pulling up the slope, and he recognized the front plate as the vehicle spilled along the narrow roadway. Moving to intercept, he stepped onto the glossy pavement in its path. The sleek black shape rolled to a stop a dozen feet before him. A door opened.

He didn’t bother to shake his slicker free of excess water before ducking inside. He closed the door behind him.

“We have to talk,” he said.

“I’m sorry about your loss,” Baskov said. He was opposite Silas, lounging back in the broad leather seats. An illegal cigar protruded from the thin, wet crease of his mouth. “I understand you two had been friends.”

“He was a colleague, but I liked him, yes. Everybody liked him.”

“Is this going to set back your training preparation?”

“He was our training preparation. What do you think?”

“I think maybe this gladiator doesn’t need much in the way of coaching.”

Silas felt his face flush. A man had died, and all Baskov cared about was the project schedule. “I think we may want to rethink the whole competition,” he said.