I Am Alive (23 page)

“We don’t have time, Decca,” Leo screams. “I am going to be out of gas very soon. You have to open the cage from the inside.”

“What do you mean open it from inside?”

“It’s how it opens manually,” explains Leo, sounding disappointed with himself. “From the inside. There is a lever that you have to pull from the inside.”

I turn back and look between the bars of the cage. I see the lever inside of the cage. How am I going to do this?

Staring at my iAm, I see Timmy dancing polka with Faustina. When the camera closes in, it says the words, “from inside.” Timmy winks at me. He looks so happy with my misery. The screen shows the subtitles of the phrase in other languages.

I look at the audience standing behind the bulletproof glass in the Zeppelins, not knowing what I am looking for. Maybe I am looking for humanity in their eyes, some evidence that shows they are not robots. That they still have some of that something that makes us human, whatever that is. Although most of them are laughing, voting, and betting, I do see little faces here and there. Those who feel confused about this. Those who have that inner voice troubling them from the inside. The problem is that they do nothing. They don’t want to oppose the Summit. I think this is the greatest mistake of all, wanting so bad to be part of the crowd, whatever the price is.

“How are you going to close the cage on the Carnivore when I trap it inside?” I ask Leo, trying not to think about what could happen to me when I am in the cage with it.

“You just open the cage, get back on top through the shaft, and leave the rest to me,” says Leo. “You can do it, Decca. You can do it. This is the last day and the last game. If you pull it off, you’ll be the first one to outlive the games. You’ll be a Ten!”

I drop myself like a sack of potatoes into the cage, and the audience goes crazy. Every bad thought, every shred of fear, every negative comment, I just kill it with an imaginary gun and puff the smoke off the end of the barrel. As I stand inside of the cage, Carnivore roars at me from outside. It must be enticed by the amount of meat behind the bars, including me. I step forward and grab the lever, while staring at Carnivore one more time, up close and personal. The flashes of the cameras coming from the Zeppelins above me are blinding, even in daylight. Every flash cuts through the air, as if I am a celebrity being chased by the paparazzi. Is this how the Nines feel? Chased everywhere? No privacy? Every time they bleed does the audience feel better?

The flashes of the cameras might make a celebrity out of me in this bleeding daylight, where man has nothing to be entertained with but the misery of another.

The flashes don’t bother Carnivore. It is hungry. It’s natural and animalistic. It wants to feed. Come to think of it, it is no different from those in the Zeppelins. The only difference I can think of is that it has no rank, which makes us both Monsters.

“Are you the one who killed Woo?” I whisper through the bars. I wonder what will happen if I cut through Carnivore. Will I find a set of wires and metal bones?

I take a deep, deep, deep breath and pull the lever. The cage opens.

“Open Sesame,” I mumble.

Carnivore comes running, wilder, fiercer, and hungrier than ever.

I trot back and try to jump up, reaching for the small opening I came down from. It’s absurd how it suddenly seems too high. I can’t get a grip on the bars at the top to pull myself up through the opening. I pound on the inner bars of the cage as hard as I can, to let Leo know that the cage is now open.

Leo is trying to slow down as much as possible, to allow Carnivore to leap into the cage.

“Jump up!” Leo screams from inside. “Why can’t I see you on top of the cage?”

I guess his rear-view mirror covers only the roof. How am I going to explain that I have miscalculated things? The cage’s roof is too high. Like many other things, it’s easier to get in than to get out.

I run from the middle of the cage to one side, and start climbing up the bars with my bare feet and hands.

Flash. Flash. Flash.

The audience in the Zeppelins must be labeling me today’s favorite dish.

Climb, Decca, climb!

Carnivore is panting at the threshold of the cage. Seeing it this close pumps panic through my body. I let go of the bars, and fall down onto my back again.

Carnivore is looking straight at me. So close. It’s pawing at the edge of the cage. Why am I paralyzed? I don’t know. The piece of meat lies right next to me. All I can think of is to pull it up and throw it out of the cage at the beast, so it forgets about me. Its paws reach for the cage. Before it has the chance to leap in, Leo takes a hard turn and Carnivore slips out again.

I throw the meat out of the cage. It flies in the air like a heavy pie. Carnivore doesn’t bother looking at it, or running back to catch it. It wants me. Only me.

Running to the side again, I climb the bars on all fours like a monkey one more time. When I reach the top of the barred cage, the opening is too far in the middle, so I have to climb the cage’s ceiling, again, like a monkey, but upside down. Gymnastics wasn’t my favorite class in school, but neither was math, which I ended up studying and passing. Math is horrible. I can’t imagine there is anything else to teach beyond 2 + 2 = 4. That’s all math is about. The rest is some complex gibberish that the average girl never uses. Ask Carnivore. It’ll tell you how much math sucks.

Carnivore jumps into the cage while I am hanging upside down like an amateur spider. It lashes out at me with its paws from down there, trying to reach me. I am amazed that the cage’s ceiling is so high, even for it.

Show me how you can climb the bars like a monkey now, you heavy miserable white creature!

Although its paws can’t reach for me, it slashes through my hair, scraping a big chunk of it away. I pull myself flat to the bars of the ceiling while reaching for the opening.

What’s with everyone in this world tearing at my hair? I am not just dying. It’s even worse. I am balding in here.

“Thanks.” I grin at Carnivore. “How’d you like it if I rip out your white fur?”

The audience in the Zeppelin right above me claps and laughs. Such an awkward position for me to watch the Zeppelins from.

“We love you!” a couple of kids say behind the glass, as if I were the clown in the circus, pulling my latest tiger trick.

“Go get a life!” I scream at them. “Go fall in love. Break your heart. Meet somebody. Go live, instead of watching live video games of people being killed!” The kids are taken aback.

Finally, I reach the opening and pull myself up. Carnivore slashes one last time. Once I am up, I discover that he slashed at my right arm. It hurts like hell, but I don’t want to look at the wound. I’ll consider it Carnivore’s signature on my body.

I pound on the roof for Leo to take notice.

“Thank God!” he yells. “You jump out of the Super-V now. I’ll take it from here.”

How is he going to take it from here? He can’t pull the cage shut from where he is driving. What keeps Carnivore in the cage is me. As long as I am standing on top of the cage, it thinks it can get me. If I jump out, it will jump out too and hunt me. I can’t leave. I have to stay here, until we find a way to kill it.

When I raise my head, gazing in front of me, I see one of the steep cliffs up front. One of those cliffs Leo used to kill the other tiger, making it chase us and steering the wheel back at the very last minute. It won’t work now because Carnivore is inside the cage.

Leo is speeding up toward the cliff.

“Jump, Decca,” Leo shouts. “Jump!”

Now I know what Leo is thinking. He is on some kind of crazy suicide mission, driving with the Carnivore in the cage over the cliff, ready to die with it to save me.

No!

“Don’t do it, Leo,” I scream, trying to crawl back to him.

“I am just dropping it off the cliff,” explains Leo. “I can steer the wheel and turn around in the last second after it’s thrown out of the cage and off the cliff. Trust me.”

“No!”

“I just can’t do it when you’re still up there. Jump off the Super-V, Decca.”

We’re getting closer and closer to the edge. The stupid Carnivore is still trying to reach for me from inside, not knowing what is about to happen to it.

“We can do this,” Leo insists. “Don’t mess this up by staying with me. If I die it won’t matter, because you will survive the games. Don’t you give up at the last second.”

So close to the edge.

Even the Zeppelins are slowing down. I can’t imagine what is scaring them, when they’re flying in the air. Dumb audience.

Watching the edge of the cliff approaching, I crawl back into the passenger’s seat. Sometimes my stubbornness is my only friend.

When Leo sees me back in the seat next to him, his eyes widen with anger. But it’s too late. I can see the hollow void leading all the way down over the cliff.

“Leo!”

He steers the wheel with all his might to the right, and hits the brakes so the Super-V slows down a little. I hear the sound of Carnivore banging heavily against the bars of the inside of the cage in the back. It’s a mix of roaring and moaning. I think it fell out of the cage, and off the cliff.

The Super-V stops sideways at the last minute, with Leo’s window overlooking the cliff. I hear the audience hail in the iAm, which I can hear now in the absence of the roaring of the Super-V, Carnivore, and the wind.

Leo looks back at me from the window overlooking the cliff. He shrugs.

“How close are we?” I ask.

“Right on the edge of the cliff,” he says. “Right on the edge, Decca.”

“So we made it?” I say, feeling like I’m finally waking up from a nightmare. “So let’s go.” I reach for Leo’s hand.

He pulls away. “You go first, Decca,” he says.

“What’s wrong, Leo?”

“Listen to me carefully,” he says. “There are things that I need to say to you before—”

“Before what?” I gasp.

“Just listen.” Leo is panting. Is he hurt? What is it? “You always ask me why I am here. You always say it doesn’t make sense. You’re right.”

“I don’t want to know now, Leo,” I interrupt. “Just take my hand, and let’s get out of the Super-V.”

“I can’t,” he says, looking at his left leg. Oh my God. It’s stuck in the bent metal of the side of the vehicle. How did I not notice this? He can’t pull his leg out. If he does, the wound will get bigger and bigger, and cut through his thigh. “Just listen to me,” he insists.

“Leo—”

“Just listen. You have to know the truth.” He tries to shift his weight, as he aches from the pain in his leg. The Super-V shakes and slides a little closer to the edge of the cliff. We’re going to fall from the cliff because of the shifting mud if we don’t get out soon. “I was sent here for you. That’s the reason why I am back in the games.”

“What? Me? Why?”

“I was sent here to protect you, and keep you alive,” he pants. “My mission was to either get you to survive and win the games, thus stay alive, or if I fail at that, I have been ordered to keep you alive in the battlefields by not saying I am alive.”

“Mission?” I mutter, my hands falling on my lap. Leo is here to protect me. What about how I felt about him? Was he just acting? “I don’t understand. Who sent you?” I say.

“Wolf, the leader of the Breakfast Club, sent me,” says Leo, trying to avoid my eyes.

“The Breakfast Club?” I swallow hard. “Why? Why me?”

“I don’t know,” says Leo. “I was sent to help you win the games, or find the Rabbit Hole and escape. At all costs, I had to keep you alive until they contact you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I removed the receptor from you yesterday.”

“Why?”

“Those were my orders. First of all, to disconnect you from being tracked by the Summit. Second, to make you remember your skills.”

“My skills?”

“I don’t know. That was my mission.”

“So the Breakfast Club sent you to save me when it was my time to enter the games? How did they know that I was going to be outranked?”

“They didn’t. But it was a possibility. They said you might find a way to enter the games to save a friend of yours who actually taught you all the skills you’re remembering since the removal of the receptor.”

“You know about that?”

“Yes. So I convinced Xitler that I wanted to be forgiven by the Summit, and came back.”

“What if I hadn’t been outranked?”

“I would have been stuck playing the games alone,” Leo says with that toothache-like smile.

“It doesn’t look like you could have survived,” I say. “Not without me.”

“You’re right.” He laughs, then winces, reaching for his leg. ”You made it, Decca. They were right about you.”

The mud shifts underneath the Super-V again, and Leo’s side slides lower toward the cliff.

“It’s time for you to get out, Decca,” says Leo.

“Not without you,” I insist.

“My leg is stuck in the metal of the Super-V. Besides, our weight is what’s slightly keeping the balance. Once one of us steps outside the weight will shift, and the car will fall from the cliff. Only one can survive this.”

“We can jump out together.”

“I can’t, goddamit!” Leo yells at me. He wants me to leave. He believes I am more important than he is. Although I want to ask about this mission thing, I don’t think it’s the right time. Leo has been here for me all through the games. He might be some kind of guardian sent to save me in this crazy and unbelievable story of his, but I can count on what I feel for him to be genuine and true.

“How about the kiss?” I ask.

“Not again, Decca,” he says. “Time is running out.”

“Did you kiss me in the dome?” I want to know.

“You’re about to die, Decca. And all you want to know is whether I kissed you in the dome?”

“Yes,” I say. “I know we kissed before you sedated me, so I take it that it was all business on your side, trying to save me. I know we kissed before we were going to die in the Super-V minutes ago, so I might believe it was a last kiss before dying thing. I know that everything you have done for me might have been part of the mission you were sent for, pretty soldier. But when I think about the dome, you had already saved me. You weren’t afraid of anything. You knew that your actions would be caught on live TV. You did it without letting me know. I understand why now. Because you thought you shouldn’t. You believed you were my guardian, sent for me on a mission, following your leader’s orders. So did you kiss me in the dome or not?” I have to admit, I think kissing me in the dome was a little weird on his part — if it actually happened. But it’s the only way I can make sure that what I think he feels for me is true.