The Games

Slowly, it extended one taloned hand and touched the goat’s furry coat with its palm, almost a caress. The goat shrieked in fear and pulled away while the creature cocked its head in the other direction.

Much later, in the report he would have to write anyway, Silas would not be able to recount what happened next except to say that in one moment the gladiator was sitting near its potential prey, and in the next, after a flash of motion, the goat was somehow partially disassembled in the gladiator’s bloody hands. Bright loops of intestine spilled out from the forward half of the goat as the gladiator raised the carcass up and bit off the head in a single crunch of bone.

It happened so fast.

Silas watched in silence as the creature fed. Minutes later, he was the first to speak. “Well, that was—”

The gladiator’s growl stopped him in mid-sentence. Its head snapped up as if offended by the interruption. An instant later, the uneaten portion of the goat slammed against the bars, splattering blood and bowels over him and those with the misfortune of standing too close to him.

Vidonia turned without a word and walked out. As Silas looked down at his fouled lab coat, the creature reared its head back and howled. To Silas, the howl sounded very much like laughter.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Her voice carried accusation in it, and something else. He tried to gauge her. They sat at the picnic tables just outside the lab, pushing food around on their plates.

He’d known there was something brewing beneath the surface for several weeks now. It was in the tone of her voice when she spoke of the project. It was in her careful choice of wording. Most of all, it was in the things she didn’t say. Is she finally going to let it show? Is she finally going to say it?

They’d been talking for ten minutes now, circling the real point with their conversation. The wind had turned cold, and Silas raised his collar against the chill on his neck. Perhaps a lunch outside on the picnic tables hadn’t been such a good idea, after all.

“What are you getting at?” he asked. He was tired of avoidance.

“I’m saying that it’s too bad it has to end up as so much pulpy sawdust at the bottom of the arena,” Vidonia said.

Silas studied her face.

“I’m saying that it’s too bad it has to die,” she said.

“It’s why it’s here in the first place.”

“I know. That doesn’t make it less of a stupid waste.”

“You have a problem with the gladiator competition?”

“Yes,” she said, without hesitation.

Silas looked at her.

“This is your project,” she said. “I understand that. But I don’t understand the kind of man that destroys his creations.”

“I don’t destroy them.”

“Yes, you do.”

“The competition does that.”

“And your project is part of that competition.”

“Without the competition, those creations you speak so highly of wouldn’t exist at all.”

“That creature you’ve made is like nothing else that has come before. It’s unique and should be studied, not thrown away in blood sport.”

“You are studying it.”

“For what? Even the winners usually die of their injuries. And the ones that don’t die are just put down later. There are no old gladiators.” She looked away into the wind, a soft expression on a sharp profile. She took a slow sip of her Coke. “All this talent, all this scientific knowledge, and all we can think to do with it is to build a better killer.”

Several wasps hovered in slow circles over the picnic table, attracted by the food and moving sluggishly in the cold air. He swatted at one that came too close and missed, sending it spinning in a wash of air. “Have you ever heard of the pit bull terrier?” he asked finally.

“What?”

“The pit bull terrier?”

“Some kind of dog?” she said. She seemed irritated by the off-subject question.

“I didn’t think you would have. It was finally outlawed about ten years ago, after decades of bans and regulation. Even back when they’d still been legal to own, insurance liability made it impractical to do so. Fanciers strove for years to rehabilitate the breed’s image, but too late, and with too little consistency, and the breed died of its own bad reputation.”

“So they’re extinct?”

“The breed is extinct. The genes no doubt still live on in mixed-breeds and family pets all over the place—it’s hard to regulate that stuff, after all—but there’s no AKC recognition, and the moment you call a dog a pit bull, it’s illegal. So maybe you call it something else, give it a new name. Or maybe you don’t call it anything. But still, the breed—that old name—is dead.”

“What does that have to do with the gladiator competition?”

“More than you might think. Pit bulls came from London originally—the inadvertent hybrids of bull-baiting dogs and early proto-terriers. The combination was deadly. The original baiters were used to fatigue cattle into submission for slaughter. These dogs had big, musclebound heads, and their instinct was to attack livestock—clamp their jaws onto a bull’s face and then not let go, no matter what.”

“Charming practice,” Vidonia said.

“And a dangerous occupation, it turns out. If the dog’s hold slipped, it faced the bull’s hooves, so the dogs with the strongest bites tended to survive the longest, leave the most offspring, you get the picture.”

Vidonia nodded.

“Multiply that by a few hundred years, and you get some pretty tough dogs. They’d hang on until the bull was a bloody mess.”

“Disgusting.”

“Maybe, but a lot of practices were disgusting before modern refrigeration. At one time, it was the preferred method of slaughter.”

“What on earth for?”

“The adrenaline altered the meat. Some thought a baited bull tasted better, and they believed the meat lasted longer before spoilage set in.”

“Did it?”

“I have no idea.”

“Do you have a point?”

“Bull-baiters were aggressive but only toward livestock. They couldn’t care less about people or other dogs. This wasn’t true of the earliest terriers. These dogs were territorial and protective. They were basically mean- bastard little dogs, but they were too small to do much damage.”

“Okay.”

“The accidental crosses between these two breeds proved as worthless to butchers as they were unstoppable in the fighting pits. These so-called pit bulls had the vise grip jaws of their baiting ancestors, but the new hybrids ignored cattle in favor of other dogs. Like the bull-baiters, if they got their teeth in, you couldn’t shake them loose. The early pit bulls actually brought about the extinction of several other ancient strains of fighting dog in Western Europe. Classic Darwinism; no other dog could compete.”

“I’m supposed to be impressed by this?”

“In the archives here at the compound, there is an old recording of an illegal pit fight. The handlers in this fight had trouble keeping the dogs apart long enough to start the contest. The dogs craved it. They lived for it. It was barbaric. It was grisly. But no more so than what happens