Ted Kosmatka - The Games

The old man’s voice came through his earpiece loud and clear.

He brought the rifle up to his cheek but couldn’t make the barrel stand still. His arms shook, and a runnel of sweat ran into one eye, blearing away the vision. He wiped his eye with the flat of a hand and swung the barrel back around, trying to steady it. The gladiator was out now, clinging to the swaying web like something out of a child’s nightmare.

“Shoot the damned thing now!” the voice screamed in his ear.

The guard tried to hold the creature in his gun sight, but the dark shape kept moving; he saw people at the end of his gun.

“You fucking idiot!” the voice came again. “Shoot the thing now. Now!”

He pulled the trigger.

The shot went high. Throngs of people had been pushing toward the exits, but now the crowd behind the gladiator parted in a new direction, and he tried not to imagine where that bullet had gone. What it had hit.

The shining black creature turned toward him, fixing him with eyes like gray, iridescent headlights. Its leathery wings came loose from its back, stretching, and he recognized it suddenly for what it was.

He felt his bladder loosen as warmth spread down his pant leg. His mother hadn’t raised any fools; he knew what he was looking at.

The demon—that’s all it could be, after all—began to crawl toward him across the web, its mouth leering like a jack-o’-lantern.

He pointed the rifle, squeezed again. The shot was wide, off to the left. He squeezed again, and again, and the tip of the gun was shaking so badly he didn’t know where the shots went. The crowd was screeching now. There are people behind it. People .

The demon kept coming.

He fired again and again. He backed up, and his legs smacked into the stands, spilling him into the front row. The gun clattered from his grip. Ten-thousand-dollar seats. I can’t afford these seats . He tried to get to his feet, but his legs jellied. The demon’s eyes bore into him as its leathery wings unfurled completely, lifting it into the air, thrusting it toward him with a single powerful flap. Coming at him. Eyes getting bigger.

“Oh, Jesus,” he heard himself say.

The demon’s jack-o’-lantern jaws came open.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and—” He fumbled for the gun, found the stock, pulled it toward him.

The eyes were huge now, streaking toward him.

I’m going to die , he had time to know. And then he knew no more.

THE STRENGTH went out of Silas’s legs, and he sat.

The hotel room receded around him, but the TV commentator’s terrifled voice was clear as a bell in his head, “—descended into total chaos. People are running for the exits.”

Silas closed his eyes, and the commentator continued, “The United States’s gladiator has gone on a rampage; dozens have been killed. I want to advise everyone that the evacuation needs to be orderly. Please, people are being trampled, so please evacuate in an orderly manner. We can all—” And then the announcer’s voice cut off as if he, too, had decided it was best to abandon his conspicuous post near the lip of the arena and head for the exits, order be damned.

Or at least Silas hoped that’s what happened.

On the screen, the gladiator swooped low over the fleeing crowd. Its huge wings gnashed at the air. People scrambled away in panic, climbing over one another, climbing over seats, knocking one another down. The camera followed the gladiator’s slow upward climb into the night sky. It crested the lip of the arena, banked to the left, flapping hard … and then the image changed, going to static. After two seconds, the static was replaced by commercials.

For a moment his mind wouldn’t compute. For a span of several more seconds he simply stood, staring at the commercial without comprehension.

Vidonia touched his arm, bringing him back, and when he looked down at her, there were tears in her eyes.

“All those people,” she said.

He collapsed onto the bed, rubbing the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, trying to push away the images that had collected there. It was like Tay all over again, only it was worse, somehow, because these people couldn’t have been expected to know what might happen. This had all started with Tay. The signs had been there, and they’d been ignored. That’s what really happened. There was blood on his hands. First Tay, and now the innocent people in the arena.

“How many?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “They were all running. I saw people fall, and it was like the crowd just swallowed them up. I don’t know, Silas.”

He looked up at the white ceiling—the plaster topography of some flash-frozen seascape, the surface of an alien world. A place far away from here.

He felt her weight shift to the bed next to him. “What do we do?”

Silas tried to think of an answer to that question, but none seemed right. No answer he came up with could help.

Part of the problem was that now, looking back, the whole tragedy seemed so damned inevitable. It was as if it had been fated from the start, part of some larger plan that he couldn’t comprehend. His mind twisted with possibilities.

“There is time,” he said.

“Time for what?”

He sat up suddenly. “We’re lucky we didn’t go to the party.”

“What are you talking about?”

He turned toward her then, and said, “Everything centers on one person. All of this flows back to him.”

“Baskov?”

“No.”

“Silas—”

“Think about it for a minute. It’s obvious none of this happened by chance. The wings, the nocturnal vision, the teeth. They were all tools. It all fits now. It finally makes sense. What next? Where is that last piece?”

“I don’t understand.”

Silas, a man who had inherited only tools from his father, understood perfectly well. He climbed to his feet. He felt as if he’d only touched the surface of some broad, cold sea. Did he really want to jump in? Did he really want to know?

He began gathering his clothes from the floor.

At that moment, on the dresser, his phone began to ring.

The first of many times it would ring that night, he knew. He went to turn it off but checked the number first. His sister.

He hit the button. “Hey, Ashley, I can’t tal—”

“They went to the Games!” His sister shouted through the phone. She sounded hysterical.

“What?”

“Jeff and Eric. They went to Phoenix. They’re there. They’re at the Games!”

“They’re not supposed to be here!”

“I know.”

“I told you not—”

“And I told them, but he wanted to go so bad.”

“Why didn’t you listen?”

“They’d been planning it for months.… We thought you were just being paranoid.… We didn’t understand, thought it wouldn’t matter.”

“Where are they?”

“I don’t know, I keep calling and there’s no answer.” Ashley broke into sobs.

“Listen, don’t panic. It’s going to be fine.” Silas made a writing motion to Vidonia, and she grabbed a pen off the dresser. “What’s Jeff’s number?”

His sister rattled off the number while Silas repeated and Vidonia wrote.

“Okay, listen, I’m sure they’re fine. I’ll get hold of them and make sure they’re safe. Just relax. I’ll get back to you as soon as they’re safe.”

“Thank you, Silas.”

“No problem. You’ll hear from me soon.”

He slid his phone closed and turned to Vidonia. “We’ve got to get to the car.”

The crowd. Police dogs strained against their leads. The protesters fought and kicked and bit and lost. Lost hope, lost teeth, lost eyes. Bled lives onto white concrete stairs .