The Games

The jaws worked, muscle bulging all the way across the top of its head. Almost like a row of wire cutters, Vidonia had said.

There was a loud pinging sound, then the line snapped away like a broken guitar string.

“Holy fuck,” Vidonia said.

The gladiator changed its position slightly and wrapped its mouth around another wire. Another ping. A hole was forming.

Silas knew suddenly what he was looking at. The end of everything. The abyss.

The men with icing cannons sprinted along the rim of the arena, lugging the heavy equipment on their shoulders, trying to get into a position to fire.

The men stopped. One of them aimed, fired. But the cloud of ice dissipated twenty-five feet short of the gladiator. On the opposite side of the arena, another of the men let loose a stream of ice, but it, too, wafted harmlessly down through the netting. A third man fired, but by then Silas could tell it was a lost cause. The gladiator was too close to the center of the net. The icers wouldn’t reach. His eyes searched the periphery for the gleam of chrome that he’d noticed earlier.

“Shoot the rifle,” he yelled at the screen.

But the movements of the guard in the chrome helmet were disjointed, first carrying him in one direction, then the other. At one moment he held his rifle high against his chest; at the next, it was forgotten and pointed at his feet. He stopped, raised the gun, then lowered it again, looking around in confusion at the sea of nervous faces.

Another ping. Three wires broken.

Beside him, Vidonia whispered, “This can’t be happening.”

The gladiator stuck its head through the opening.

And now, finally, the crowd reacted.

People fled their seats en masse, piling in a human crush toward the exits. Screams filled the arena, drowning out the voice of the commentator asking for calm. The aisles and doorways clogged, becoming impassable, crushing death traps, and people clambered upward over rows of seats in their effort to get away.

The arena was in panic.

Clinging to the net, the creature shifted.

The hole was still too small to admit the wide girth of the gladiator’s shoulders. Its head pulled back beneath the mesh, moving to wrap its mouth around a fourth wire. A fourth ping.

“Shoot it, goddamn you!” Silas screamed. “Shoot it, shoot it, shoot it!”

“DON’T SHOOT,” Baskov was yelling into the radio transmitter in his hand. “I repeat, do not shoot until I give the order.” People in the skybox stared at him, but he no longer cared. Things had gotten way out of hand, true. There was no covering it up now. But he didn’t want that idiot guard getting an itchy trigger finger and destroying their investment. Too much was riding on this. If the gladiator was killed, there would be no second round, no medal, no victory; the biosynthetic portion of the Olympics would move to a different country of venue during the next games, taking all those billions of investment dollars along with it. That would not do. Losing was not an option. Baskov still had full confidence that a nonlethal method of containment could be employed. Their gladiator had to live to fight in the finals, after all.

“Tell those icers to crawl out on the web,” he spoke into his two-way. “Have them move within range.”

The chrome helmet stopped bobbing.

“Tell them, damn it!”

And then the guard in the chrome helmet was running along the walkway at the edge of the arena. He stopped at the nearest man with an ice cannon strapped to his back. Baskov hit the zoom on the window, and the face beneath the chrome expanded on the surface of the glass. The face was young, more boy than man, really, and Baskov guessed him to be nineteen or twenty. The jaw worked up and down as he explained what Baskov wanted. The old man didn’t need to hear the young guard’s voice to know he was scared shitless.

The gladiator was still hanging upside down by its hands and feet, but it was moving now, repositioning itself at a different angle to the hole.

“Hurry the fuck up,” Baskov yelled into the radio.

The young guard jumped at the voice in his ear and then pointed out along the net. The man with the icer on his back took a long look toward the beast hanging under the mesh before nodding his understanding. He tightened the straps of his pack and stepped up on the ledge. Getting to his knees, he leaned forward and grasped the netting with both hands. Then he moved his weight out on the wires and began to inch forward toward the center, toward the creature, one hand at a time. One knee at a time.

On the opposite side of the arena, the other icers saw what he was doing and followed suit, stepping up to the ledge, then carefully out onto the mesh.

At first the gladiator took little notice of the men inching toward it, but as they began to close the distance, it must have felt their vibrations in the wires. The dark head pivoted around to look at them. It blinked twice, and then it placed its mouth gently on another cable.

Faster, c’mon, Baskov thought. Faster.

The first icer was halfway across now, nearly within range. He quickened his pace as if sensing the urgency.

Black jaws clenched, bulging. Another ping, this time followed by the rasp of wire against wire. The entire structure shook and then began slowly to sag.

The hole in the center of the net expanded as the meshwork of cables separated. Lines pulled apart. The gladiator swung along the underside like a spider whose web had broken one too many strands—like a creature that had been designed to climb along just such a web. The wires bobbed and jumped with the weight of its passing, throwing the icers loose and sending them screaming to the floor forty feet below. They struck the floor with snapping thuds, their screams cut off, throwing up clouds of sawdust.

The gladiator reached through the hole, pulling up and out. First its arms, then its wings and torso, and finally its legs.

It was free.

Baskov’s eyes went wide. “Shoot it!” Baskov yelled into the radio. “Shoot the damned thing now!”

DOWN IN the arena, the guard flinched.

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.