Running Red (13 page)

“Maybe he should have left you in the pit,” Tessa says. She says it just loud enough that only Leslie and I can hear it.

“Let him have her,” Auntie Alice says.

There is no love lost between us.

“Done,” says Denny. Gumm holds out his hand, only this time it is Denny who amends the rules. “On one condition.”

“And that is?”

“She’s my second rabbit. She makes it all three heats, she’s yours.”

“Done,” says Gumm. They shake. Each turns to the crowd. They join hands and raise them above their heads.

“Okay, okay, okay,” Denny says. “Let’s go to the races!”

The crowd cheers and applauds, but I’m not sure if they are truly that enthusiastic.

“We will meet in one hour at the Velodrome,” Auntie Alice says.

Leslie and Tessa turn and walk around the east side of the wrap-around porch. I follow. When we get out of sight of the others, I grab Leslie’s arm.

“What just happened out there?” I ask.

Leslie looks away. “You shouldn’t have said anything out there,” Leslie says.

“I am not his to keep or give,” I say.

Tessa is more direct. She slaps me across the face. I see tiny dots of blinking light. “You are part of the household now. You need to know your place.”

When I bring my head back around, Tessa glares at me. I ball my fists and get ready to swing on her when Auntie Alice appears in the kitchen door. Her icy eyes stop me, even though Tessa flinched. I want nothing more than to show her what rules I follow.

“I’d lay off of that behavior, Tessa,” Auntie Alice says. “Unless you want to be a rabbit, too.”

Tessa turns away angrily and storms pass Auntie Alice, who gives me her wickedly evil grin before she follows Tessa inside.

When I turn around, Leslie is wiping away tears from her eyes. I grab her by both arms and plead with her to tell me what is going on.

Leslie looks around her. She’s worried Auntie Alice is still behind the screen door, in the shadows but close enough to hear us talking. I give Leslie a gentle shake.

“Every month there is a race at the Velodrome,” Leslie says. Her voice is low, her eyes on the door. “Denny sends challenges to other tribes. If they accept, they come here and we have a race for dowries.”

“They race runners?”

“Sort of,” Leslie says.

“Leslie, please, you have to tell me what all of this means. What the hell is a rabbit?”

Leslie looks at the porch floor. Her tears fall in big drops. Leslie looks up at me. “Well, think about it. A runner won’t run if it doesn’t have something to latch onto, right? It’ll just stand there.”

“So they put people in with the runners and watch them chase them around the track?”

“Sort of,” Leslie says. “It’s more in the infield. See, Denny built an obstacle course. If the rabbit can make it five minutes in the Velodrome without getting latched, Denny lets him go free.”

“What about the dowries?”

“Denny and the tribe leader are betting their rabbits make it and the other tribe’s don’t. I don’t know about the other tribes, but the winner of ours gets a month in the house and some of the dowry for himself.”

“Are men the only ones chosen as rabbits?”

Leslie shakes her head. “No. There have been women on the field as well.”

“Were you ever a rabbit?”

Leslie shakes her head, horrified at the thought. “It’s why I agreed to be a wife. I have—what is it? An immune system?”

“Immunity,” I say. Score one for the lasting value of reality elimination shows. “Leslie, how old are you?”

“Denny says our age don’t matter anymore. He says time has died.”

“How old were you before that?”

“Almost twenty.”

Auntie Alice appears in the kitchen door’s screen. “Come along, ladies,” she says. “We have to get ready for the race.”

Leslie bows her head and goes inside. I start to follow her when Auntie Alice stops me. “Don’t get any ideas today, dear. This is how things are now.”

“They don’t have to be,” I think. I don’t say anything. I just nod.

She steps aside and I go in. Aubrey is there. He holds my old clothes. I guess a rabbit in a white cotton sundress just isn’t all that entertaining.

Eleven

Matt and I are put on an old piano-box carriage. It’s called that because the bed looks like an old-fashioned upright piano, only with the keys cut off and the legs removed and a bench put over its back. The wooden wheels are large, and come up just below my chin. The padded, leather bench seat has a fan back, although the leather is old and cracked. The cushion in the bench seat is worn; when I sit down the leather gives and breaks open.

I marvel at how small people must have been back in the day. Neither Matt nor I are large for our age, but we barely fit on the seat. In fact, we have to turn our legs in to rest our feet on the box’s floorboard, or one of our feet hangs over the side.

There are no horses. Several of the tent dwellers lift the harness beams and pull us across the field. Leslie and Tessa walk behind us. Tessa stops scratching at her arm when I turn and look at her. She covers the spot with her hand. I don’t have to see the pimples on the inside of her arm to know she has Balzini’s Rash. I wonder how long she’s known.
Matt and I are jostled as we ride. Occasionally I bang the bruise on the back of my leg. There is a searing, shooting pain pulsing in the fat of my calf, but I won’t show it. Besides, it’s not as bad as it was. It’s more of a dull throb.

I’m not certain where the carriage was last night, but I wasn’t exactly sightseeing as I tried to get away. I missed a lot of things. Out here in the daylight I see a large propane gas tank on the east side of the stadium. It is painted pink and has the face of a pig painted on one end.

“That’s Petunia,” Matt says. It’s the first thing he’s said since I was brought down the hill and put on the carriage.

“Pretty name for a pink pig,” I say.

“It’s full of propane. It powers the stadium.”

“Why does the stadium need power?”

We hit a rut and I’m bounced against him. Matt grabs me to keep me from falling off the bench seat. One of his hands hooks around my shoulder. His other hand has found one of my breasts. We sit like that, staring into each other’s eyes. To be honest, it’s a bit awkward, as his hand only has the three fingers now; the nub of his missing forefinger and thumb press into me and I can feel them move. I’m a bit embarrassed, not by his embrace, but that it has been so long since I’ve had this kind of physical contact. I can feel myself blushing.

The mood is interrupted when Tessa screams. It is an ear-piercing, blood-curdling scream. The carriage pullers stop abruptly and Matt and I are rocked forward. His hands go to the buckboard in front of us. I stiffen my legs against it and lean back.

Tessa is running across the field to the pool. Sledge and Jimmy the Scarecrow are leading the runners from the pool towards the stadium. It’s not the walking runners that have frightened her. It’s what she sees in the corner.

Bethany’s husk clutches the fence. Behind her, a runner has latched onto her neck, not with its teeth, but those black talons from inside its mouth. In the daylight, I see that they are real. Snaking out between them is a kind of proboscis, like a butterfly would have, and it is inserted into the side of Bethany’s throat.

The runners are mutating. Auntie Alice and Denny are probably aware of this but are keeping it a secret. Why, I can’t imagine, unless it’s to have some sort of advantage over their competitors in the race.

Tessa tries to pry Bethany’s fingers from the fence. She’s trying to rescue her, but it is far too late. In less than 48 hours, Bethany will be a compost pile, a breeding ground for fungal spores that will infect countless others besides Tessa. Maybe the terror she feels isn’t at the sight of what happened to her friend, but what will happen to her.

The latching probably happened earlier this morning, I think. It’s an odd circle of procreation. The fungus that drives the runners will survive, passed on to Bethany, who will now only live to carry it further. The runner will release her several hours from now and become one of those mossy humps where new spores of the fungus will sprout. Less than twenty-four hours later, Bethany will show the first signs of the infection: a belt of pimples over her belly. The fungus will spread quickly. I imagine she will be ripe for next month’s race.

The last I had heard, they were calling the fungus Balzini’s Moss, named after a type of carpenter ant that had originally introduced the fungus to its colony; later, Balzini got tagged with the rash when people started developing the pimples. In ants, it had thrived on the calcium in the ant’s muscles, which helped it learn how to control the ant’s movement.

Tessa falls against the fence, screaming, “No! No! No!” She shakes the fence, but Bethany doesn’t respond. She tries again to pry her fingers free. Shannon, the tired looking mother, hurries across the field. Behind her runs Dirks. Before Shannon can grab hold of Tessa, I yell out to her.

“She has Balzini’s Rash,” I cry.

Tessa looks up at me. Her eyes are wild with rage. “No I don’t, you bitch. They’re just mosquito bites.” She covers the spot on her arm with her hand again. She sobs and looks to Shannon for help. The tired mom and Dirks back away.
They stand there with their arms around each other watching Tessa sob.

“Get that wagon moving,” Sledge says.

The pullers lift the harness bars and rock us forward and back until the piano-box carriage rolls forward. We are back on our way. I want to ask Matt if he saw the change in the runner, but before I can, he turns to me and begins talking.

“Listen, Robbie, before we get there, there’s something you need to know. First off, Denny has designed some traps and surprises on the field. They are spring operated, never the same two months in a row. That way no one can train for the race.”

“Is that the worst?”

“No. Once we get out on the field, the people in the bleachers fight for their tribes by attacking the rabbits.”

“Guns? Bows?”

Matt shakes his head. “No. There’s no sport in that, is there?”

I can’t tell if he’s joking with me. “What do we do?” I ask.

“Keep moving. You have to survive five minutes. At the end of five minutes they’ll ring a bell or something.”

“What about the runners?”

“Handlers will come out with nets.”

“Nets?”

“You’ll see.”

I am overwhelmed. We are almost to the stadium. People are standing along the top, waving at us. This is real. I am about to be led into a coliseum to battle to the death like the gladiators used to for the Romans.

I suddenly hug Matt. His hands come around my back.

“I hated you when we first met,” I say in his ear.

“Why you gotta hate? I’m a lover.”

I laugh and bury my face against his neck. My eyes are wet. I feel broken, no longer that independent journeyer who has survived alone for over a year. Less than two days with civilization and I’m desperate to be part of a community.

But not at this cost.

There are loud cheers coming from the stands. As we go around the concrete walk and pass Petunia, I begin to hear boos. These are Gumm’s people. They hiss and flip us off and spit at us. It only stops when we enter a tunnel that will take us under the stadium and up onto the infield. The concrete tunnel reverberates from the stomping of feet above us. The passage thunders around us. A few moments later we are pulled out onto the infield. There is a mixture of cheers and boos.

All I can do is tremble.

The track towers around us. The once bright finish on the wood is weathered and gray. Wooden studs have been cut from long boards and attached along the sloping track in patchwork fashion. I think these are for climbing out of the infield. A metal pipe barrier runs along the top of the bike track, no doubt originally put up to keep fans from falling onto the track.

Large openings gape in several spots around the track where it has either caved in from neglect or was chopped away. I can only imagine what lies beneath them: spikes, toxic runners, and maybe even some mountain lion.

The infield is a nightmare of ramps and platforms. The tallest platform is a makeshift cage made of cyclone fencing. Coils of razor wire line the top edges. There is one large gate currently guarded by Sledge. Inside the cage is mixed group of runners representing both tribes. At some point, Sledge will release the pack of runners and they will swarm down upon us, hoping to latch.

We are at the far end of the giant, warped oval. The bleachers run around all four sides of the stadium, but the tribes have divided along the longer, opposite sides. There are small squads of guards in the end zone sections to keep the groups separated. The watchers sit closer to the track, staring at us through the gaps in the barrier made from pipes.

Scarecrow Jimmy walks out from behind a wooden column. “All right, you two,” he says. “Let’s get you ready.” He holds a hand up for me, but I ignore it. Matt hops down off the opposite side of the carriage. The people who pulled us in wheel the carriage back through the tunnel. A rolled up, segmented, corrugated door is brought back down behind them.