VI. ...and Circuses

VI

…and Circuses
The Offset

 

Alic decided that you’re never quite as aware of your lungs as you are when each breath could be their last. The copper taste in his mouth was either from blood or the rush of adrenaline he felt as he climbed for his life. In all likelihood, it was both.

 

Here in the Deck, a term Soldiers had come to use over the years, every move was life or death. Its eleven walls seemed to close in on him as he scaled a cliff slippery with moss. He felt like every time he had faced certain death, he had managed to grab a hold of some strain of good luck and escape with his life. He was now a man fearing that strain’s end, a termination that would result in his very public execution.

 

      As he worried about all the ways he could abruptly meet his end, some small part of his consciousness noted with disgust the hover pods that floated just beyond the arena’s perimeter. They were too far away to make out individual faces, but he knew enough about ICEW’s marketing techniques to know that many of the onlookers would be far younger than his nineteen years. He could understand why full-grown adults would be allowed to watch, but children were too young for this. They shouldn’t watch real men die and then go home to supper like nothing had happened.

 

      He sprinted as far as he could from the cliff’s edge in an attempt to duck out of sight. The Deck was littered with wide-open fields placed in a seemingly random pattern. Braving them was a death sentence for anyone running from men with high-powered rifles and the best training money could buy.

 

Branches and leaves slapped at his face and body as he worked his way through the suddenly dense foliage before him. He had just climbed out of a field with waist-high stalks of wheat. He shook his head in frustration. Everything about this place was transplanted and alien, himself not least of all.

 

      With death staved off, at least momentarily, he allowed his mind to begin formulating again, hoping against all hope for a strategy for four against one. The odds were impossible. He could hear Coach Landry’s voice calling out back at camp, a million years ago, “Alright boys, this one’s done. Back to your sides. We’re going to run this one again.” The Offsetting had at least been one on one and even then he had barely outmaneuvered his counterpart.

 

He had known, of course, that it was a possibility. Someone had to be that unlucky eleventh. But as he had been led to the entry tube that would propel him into the Deck by three ICEW guards, all he could think about was the horror stories he had heard before. Soldiers in the same Army who had accidentally attacked each other as they landed. Nervous combatants so keyed up by the possibility that they acted without thinking. He remembered having shuddered at the thought.

 

      The irony was that those with unforgiving trigger fingers and firearms were actually at a disadvantage in this regard to him with his more restrained combat knife. Ten times out of eleven anyway. When the man you tumbled into straight out of the gate was a disoriented Soldier like you with different colors, everything flipped. Try as he might to focus, his mind insisted on recalling and digesting those first terrifying moments of the War.

 

      What he remembered most clearly was the Soldier’s hands. He’d never be sure whether it was adrenaline or fear or a trick of his eyes, but he could swear he had seen them shaking. In that split-second moment between life and death, his focus had been on the man’s trembling hands. It seemed foolish now, looking back. It was only as he processed that they were reaching for the rifle that had tumbled away upon his entry into the arena that he finally reacted.

 

      Relying more on his days hunting in the mountains than his days in training camp, Alic had simultaneously unsheathed his knife and dove toward the rifle lying on the ground. Using all of his raw animal strength, he pried the rifle from the Soldier’s grip and dispatched of him quickly. He had stood dazed above the man’s corpse, barely aware of the events that had just transpired. How long had passed? Thirty seconds? Five minutes? An hour? Time had stopped making sense. The man was his first kill. Human, anyway. If he was lucky, it wouldn’t be his last.

 

      “Sorry, brother. It was you or me.”

 

      The words still floated in his mind even now. They were almost foreign, words spoken by someone from long ago who was completely removed from all of this. Alic wished he could kill that man. He deserved to die, to rot here on the Hendecagon floor with the others. They would all die, one way or another.

 

      Alic sighed a deep and desperate breath. His exhaustion was getting to him. His thoughts weren’t making any sense. The War had been raging for what he guessed to be around six hours. Of course, time was impossible to discern here, as the climate was entirely artificial. He’d already been plunged into darkness twice since he’d started. Hours in here felt like days had outside. He’d heard that before, in camp, but it only now made any real sense to him.

 

      He had to rest. Both mentally and physically, he was at the end of what he could manage. Adrenaline and instinct could only take him so far. He rushed to the nearest climbable tree and made his way up its trunk. It was a pine tree, like from back home. He ached to be back there. The smell of the forest early in the morning. The soft whisper of the wind through the grass. Laying on some riverside, drowning in sunlight with the occasional sip of chilled water. Despite his troubles back home, he had had the perfect life. He only now realized it, far too late. What a foolish, simple idiot he had been.

 

He cursed the stubborn tree as he labored up its trunk. If he never climbed again, it would be far too soon. His fingers were marred by blood, tree sap and scratches. From here, he could see all around him. He convinced himself that the branches offered a limited amount of cover from hungry eyes.

 

 His senses were still on high alert, but he resolved to give his weary body some rest before he decided what to do next. He had used this same technique hundreds of times when he went on long hunting trips into the forest for food back home. He slowly closed his eyes and forced his breathing to become even.

 

      When he opened them a moment later, it was to the loud din of the disapproving crowd. They were voicing their displeasure at the War having been stalled. He wanted to shout at them that they should order another apple juice or cognac or whatever other rare drinks they could think of. It was only a man’s life in the balance. His life.

 

     He blinked hard, trying to bring his eyes back into focus, before he realized it had become dark all around him. He wasn’t sure if it was because he’d been out for so long or if the Deck had dimmed its lights, but either way, he suddenly felt very blind and very vulnerable. He had to get to a better location. He had just begun to move to relocate when he heard the rustling of leaves from off to his left.

 

      This was it. The last few moments of his life were occurring and slipping away, second by second. He wondered if food would taste better if he had it or if it’d turn to ash in his mouth as he imagined. He kept absolutely still, trying to will his body to come to a soft, undetectable silence. He waited, along with the crowds, almost as one of them, to find out what his fate would be.

 

      The night had become graveyard quiet. He remembered hearing that the Deck would mute crowd noise to minimize any interference or unfair advantage, had been trained to listen for the sudden absence of sound, but now, all he could focus on was the patch of black where the noise had originated from. In it lied his death or nothing.

 

      After an eternity, he saw the Soldier’s head bobbing through the trees. Only one. A scout? Alic tried desperately to recall his training and perhaps deduce what the Soldier was thinking but the Pacific Kingdom trained on such a high level that any similarities in their training and his would practically be coincidental. At this point, it was just a matter of survival in the wild. The Solder held a handgun and what appeared to be a large clearing knife for branches and combatants, whichever its sharp edge found first. He would walk nearby soon but not close enough to attack him from where Alic stayed hidden.

 

      He was safe if he didn’t movie. He knew that and his self-preservation begged to let the Soldier pass. Alic knew better. He’d never have a better chance than this one on one opportunity. No matter the risk, it would only be more dangerous later. He couldn’t outlast them. It had to be now.

 

      Careful to measure every motion he made, Alic climbed down the trunk of his sanctuary tree and crouched as he made his way toward the steadily-moving figure, his eyes continuing to track him. He briefly considered rushing the Soldier but instead decided to rely on his hunting experience. He bent over and picked up two jagged rocks from the forest floor. Creeping as close as he dared, he waited for the perfect moment and struck.

 

      The first rock struck the Soldier in the back of his unprotected head, causing him to double over in pain as his clamped hand filled with blood in the dark. The second flew over his head into the brush off to his left and, as he had hoped, drew the wild handgun fire of his disoriented enemy.

 

      His footsteps as he ran toward the reeling figure were masked by the gunfire. He wondered if he would ever forget the sound of his knife entering the man’s heart through his back. With a desperate relief, he laid the man’s body down and ensured that he was dead.

 

      Only three left. Only three left. Only three left.

 

      He allowed himself a forbidden moment of hope, a feeling of optimistic victory he hadn’t experienced since the Offsetting. Maybe this was his destiny. Maybe this is what he was supposed to do. After all, he shouldn’t have made it as far as he had. By all rights, he should have been the first casualty of the War moments after he entered it. Yet here he stood. Didn’t it have to mean something?

 

      With a renewed sense of purpose and a sudden vulnerability that he had more than nothing to lose now, he made his way back toward his tree in order to scout the area and determine his next move. He had made it a few steps when the hidden Soldier dropped directly onto his shoulders and brought him crashing to the ground.

 

      In a confused daze, Alic thrashed beneath the man’s weight, fighting to turn on to his back to no avail. The Soldier had his knee planted firmly between his shoulders and was gradually increasing the pressure on his spine. He fought to turn and look at his enemy, but the Soldier’s gloved hand shoved his face back into the forest floor. He felt the man’s weight shift as he bent over to bring his mouth down close to Alic’s still-ringing ears.

 

      “You weren’t supposed to be able to kill him, you know. He was out in the open to draw you out. I wasn’t a hundred yards away from him the entire time. He finds you, he keeps you at bay, then me and my buddies come in and help finish you off. But it didn’t happen that way, did it?” The man was binding his hands behind his back as he spoke. “That little rock trick of yours, nine times out of ten, no way it confuses a man like my brother over there. You got lucky, kid.”

 

      He pulled Alic up to his knees, hands still bound, and leaned over to take out his captive’s combat knife from its holster on his vest. “This has a lot of blood on it from men that I operated with. You’ve done a lot of damage. That ends now.”

 

      Alic was glad the sun had started shining again. He didn’t want to die alone in the dark, despite the fact he had been alone now for hours. This man, his executioner, would be the last man he ever knew. He wished he could call the forest beautiful, as it would have been fitting, but instead he just thought of home. He tried to recall exactly how it smelled.

 

      “I’d wait for my friends, but I think it’s about time for a, what do you call it, say, a ‘cessation of hostilities’.” Alic felt the point of the knife behind his left ear, the man’s bloody sleeve filling his nose with the aroma of death. “You don’t get the last words, kid. I do. Something my father told me people used to say.”

 

      The Soldier sliced across his neck in one swift motion, pushing Alic over into the dirt and plunging the knife into the dirt beside him.

     “War is hell.”