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Copyright 1994 by Daniel Keys Moran.
All rights reserved.
I, Daniel Keys Moran, "The Author," hereby release this text
as freeware. It may be transmitted as a text file
anywhere in this or any other dimension, without reservation,
so long as the story text is not altered IN ANY WAY.
No fee may be charged for such transmission, save handling fees
comparable to those charged for shareware programs.
THIS WORK MAY NOT BE PRINTED OR PUBLISHED IN A BOOK, MAGAZINE,
ELECTRONIC OR CD-ROM STORY COLLECTION, OR VIA ANY OTHER MEDIUM NOW
EXISTING OR WHICH MAY IN THE FUTURE COME INTO EXISTENCE, WITHOUT
WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM THE AUTHOR. THIS WORK IS LICENSED FOR READING
PURPOSES ONLY. ALL OTHER RIGHTS ARE RESERVED BY THE AUTHOR.
DESCRIPTION: This first appeared in Aboriginal SF, a couple of years back.
It's the opening (which you may find difficult to believe,
once you finish it) to a novel called "Sharp Teeth."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
GIVEN THE GAME
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dawn of the last day was clear.
The sun lifted up over the hills to the east just before seven A.M. Down
on the beach, Costigan knelt in the sand with the sun to his back, his shadow
striking out over the ocean in the long low light of morning.
When he had finished praying, Costigan rose, picked up his weapons, and
began dressing. The forest here reached down toward the beach; a strip of
sand fifty meters wide separated the water and the trees. Costigan glanced
briefly at the locator; his opponent was still two squares away on the grid.
The opponent -- Costigan thought it was probably the Latino named Roseleaf --
would be here within an hour at the outside.
He made the rounds of his booby traps, and prepared to wait.
It was the last day, and finally, thank God finally, the Game was nearly
over.
* * *
In the darkness near Tau Ceti God heard their distant prayers, the music
of the water creatures. It listened to their exquisite pain, to the tales
they sang of death in the nets, death brought by the water-fouling, weapon-
carrying, net-wielding land creatures.
The Game was well under way at Tau Ceti. The natives were a squat, slow-
moving race with little natural propensity toward violence. God hardly cared;
they were Players nonetheless, and if the being who won the Game at Tau Ceti
was less formidable than the victors of other Games, so be it. The Game had
been old when God was young, in a time when the universe itself had been
hotter and smaller; God had Played many thousands of species, and Its early
rages at Games that went poorly had long since vanished.
God was old, and It handled disappointment well.
The Game at Tau Ceti would finish itself. Late in 1962, God ignited the
fusion fires in Its belly, and began the long journey to the water world
called Earth.
* * *
The Line was silent.
It hardly mattered; for months now Costigan had hardly noticed the Line
when it did speak to him. The voice of God had been growing quieter for a
long time now. Costigan didn't know for sure how long. His sense of time had
vanished -- well, some time ago.
He sat up in the top of a redwood. Roseleaf -- or D'Amato, if D'Amato had
survived, which Costigan did not think likely -- would be coming by either
plane or helicopter; nothing else moved as fast as the locator said his
opponent was coming. Costigan had prepared for that eventuality; he was set
up with a marksman's rifle and heat-seeking anti-aircraft artillery he'd
taken from March Air Force Base after killing Gifford Kirkwood there. He
didn't really think God was going to let him blow his opponent out of the
air, but it was worth his while to make the attempt.
Costigan waited. When the blip that was the sole remaining human being on
Earth entered the locator's central square, he dropped the locator, let it
fall like a stone to the forest's floor, thirty meters below. The opponent
had entered the arena, and would not leave it again unless Costigan was dead.
At close range the locator was useless; dead weight. Let it go.
Let it go.
* * *
It was, the government said, an alien ship. That was during the first
week, while the ship was still outside the orbit of Jupiter, decelerating
toward an Earth orbit. Humanity wondered at God's approach, that first week,
until the relativistic effects of God's long journey had shrunk to the point
that God and humanity experienced time at the same speed.
And God Spoke.
* * *
The last thing that Martin Costigan remembered from the world before the
Game was a live broadcast where two evangelists were arguing over whether the
aliens -- if they were aliens -- had souls. If they had souls, the
evangelists wondered, were the souls of the same type as human souls? Could
they be saved in Jesus as a human could?
And on and on.
Martin Costigan was drinking coffee and thinking quite calmly that if the
likes of the two on his television screen were allowed to have souls then he,
for one, was not going to disqualify <anything> out of hand, when the Line
came bursting down into his skull.
He crawled back to consciousness slowly. He lay face down on the living
room rug. The back of his skull throbbed as though it had been split by a
cleaver. Without shifting position he reached up with his right hand and
touched the back of his head. There was no blood, no wound; just hair that
had not been cut recently enough.
He sat up slowly, numb with shock. He watched the television screen for a
moment without comprehension. One of the evangelists, the short, rather
chubby one, had the older silver-haired one down on the floor and was
methodically bashing his brains out against the cement of the sound stage.
Off-camera Martin heard the sound of gunshots, and a dull roaring mob sound
that was quickly replaced by individual screams.
There was sound upstairs, and Martin turned away from the television
screen. He heard his wife's footstep on the stairs, and suddenly understood
the scene on the television. With the old reflexes he found the nearest
weapon, picked up their coffee table and threw it at Caroline as she entered
the living room. She was carrying their .38 revolver; she managed two shots
before the coffee table crushed her.
Neither of the shots struck Martin. He took the revolver from Caroline's
outstretched hand, and went back upstairs. The twins, Tina and Sharon, were
fighting in bed. Both of them had nasty scratches but did not seem to have
harmed one another otherwise. Martin shoved them apart, shot Tina in the
forehead as she lay on the bed, and then shot Sharon twice in the chest as
she was picking up a stuffed animal to throw at him.
Then he went into his son's bedroom and killed Timmy. Timmy did better
than the twins; he struck Martin with a baseball bat as Martin entered his
bedroom. It left a nasty bruise the next day. Martin took the baseball bat
away from his son and beat him to death with it.
Martin stood over the broken, almost unrecognizable shape of his child,
and for the first time there came a voice over the Line, and the voice was
God and God shouted in terror and death and insanity, and in the madness of
Its words It said, \Well done.\
* * *
At first Costigan was not certain whether the sound was real or merely
imagination. He brought his binoculars to his eyes and scanned the treetops
to the south, the direction from which the locator had said his opponent was
coming.
Southwest; a glint of metal in the sun. He must have been following the
coast, as close to the sacred water as Instinct would let him get. He was
surrendering any real chance of surprising Costigan in exchange for assurance
that he would still be able to <find> Costigan if his plane failed and he had
to make a landing before he arrived. That was a very real possibility. The
Game was twelve years old, and finding anything that still worked after
twelve years of utter neglect was rare.
Except weapons. Where there had been people, weapons had been cared for.
Costigan followed the glint of light as it approached. Cessna, he noted,
a single-engine Cessna 182; not military aircraft after all. That did not
surprise him; the Cessna was one of the most trustworthy planes ever built.
It looked as though the plane was going to pass within a kilometer of
Costigan's tree. Costigan lifted the rocket launcher to his shoulder and
activated the sights. A flashing red dot followed the Cessna for a moment on
the display and then stabilized. In the lower right hand corner of the
display, the words Locked On flashed bright green. Costigan tried to pull the
trigger. Nothing. His finger would not move. God was not going to let things
end so simply; Costigan had not expected It to. He sighed, touched the
snapclasp that held the rocket launcher's restraining strap around his
shoulders, and dropped the launcher to the forest floor.
Let it go.
The Cessna buzzed north, losing altitude. Costigan estimated; two
kilometers to landing. Yes. He was going to use the airstrip that the
National Guard had built just before the Game began.
He climbed methodically down the tree, to the leaf-strewn floor of the
forest. It was Autumn, and getting chilly. Costigan wished it were Winter.
People made bad decisions when they were cold.
He checked his weapons one more time before heading north.
* * *
The first year following God's arrival was easily the worst.
Costigan could not even guess how many people died that year. At its end
only a fraction of a percent of the humans on Earth were still alive; two
million people, maybe three. The cities died within days; within the first
week they were pits of disease that only the suicidal entered. Bodies rotted
everywhere. Why nobody set the bombs off was anybody's guess; Costigan did
not know. Perhaps God had prevented it. Perhaps, Costigan thought once, and
smiled his only smile of the twelve years of the Game, perhaps they had
simply been lucky.
Surviving the first year <was> largely a matter of luck. Costigan lived in
a small mountain village on the west slopes of the California Rockies. His
nearest neighbors were over two kilometers away. He had time to prepare
before those who survived the first couple of days came hunting. He was
different, he understood; a human with the force of will to control the
Instinct to the degree that he could wait, and force the others to come
to him, to fight on his territory.
He was the only vet within forty kilometers who had actually seen combat.
It gave him an edge; that and great luck let him survive the first year.
And he learned.
* * *
The lake, less than a kilometer south of the National Guard airstrip, was
new; it had not been there only a few months prior. By now Costigan no longer
found the appearance of one of the salt water lakes anything to remark upon.
If the lakes had any relevance to the Game, he was unable to determine what
it might be. It had been many years since he had given it any thought.
The machines that built them were slick, steel-gray, almost living. They
could not truly be alive in any animal sense; Costigan had never felt the
desire to kill one.
Costigan detoured, avoided the lake without anything approaching a
conscious decision.
* * *
It was during the second year of the Game that the locators appeared.
Costigan awoke in the middle of the night after something set off one of his
perimeter warnings. The locator was sitting next to his H&K 91. The first
time he saw it he knew how to use it.
He had killed over a thousand people by that time; others who had
survived this long had compiled similar records. Humans were becoming scarce.
The wildlife population was exploding. By the end of the second year,
Costigan thought there were probably more deer than humans left on the face
of the Earth.
The locators speeded things up. Within the immediate surroundings they
were useless; inside a circle of three kilometers or so they no longer
tracked. Outside three kilometers but within, Costigan guessed, a hundred and
fifty, they gave an accurate placement of all living humans. The first time
he had used the locator, there had been four humans within eighty kilometers
distance. Costigan tracked them down and killed them, and each time God spoke
through the Line, and said \Well done.\
Never again were there that many humans within range of the locator at
once.
Summer came again, and then Winter, and the Game continued. Three and a
half years into the game Costigan realized that he had not seen a woman in
almost two dozen kills. He tried to remember what that woman had looked like,
and could not. He could not remember Caroline's face either, when he tried,
or the faces of any of the women he had known and loved from before. He
entered a small town after the locator told him it was empty, and entered the
remains of a small liquor store. Most of the liquor and all of the food was
gone. There were three skeletons within. Costigan ignored them and searched
through the piles of garbage until he found what he wanted. It was an old
magazine, a news magazine or something like it, from before. He opened it and
leafed through it, read the pages and looked at the pictures of the men and
women. There was a fashion pictorial near the center of the magazine, and one
of the models, a slim, dark-haired girl, stirred the remote awareness of
desire within Costigan, and before he realized what he was doing he flung the
magazine away from himself, unslung his H&K 91 and fired into the magazine,
held down the trigger until the H&K's entire clip had been expended.
Without pause he yanked the ammo clip out of the H&K and replaced it with
a fresh clip, and ran out of the liquor store, and ran until he had left the
town entirely, with tears streaming silently down his face the entire time.
* * *
Costigan lay flat on his belly, in the brown grass at the edge of the
airfield. The Cessna was down, engine killed, parked by the fuel pumps. With
the binoculars Costigan scanned the air field, the Guards barracks buildings,
the administration buildings. There was nothing.
He lowered the binoculars slowly, thoughtfully.
Once, for a brief while, when the Game had slowed unacceptably, the Line
had answered questions. There were less than a thousand humans still alive
then, all men. Costigan did not know how the others had used their time with
God, and did not care; he spent his studying the competition. He had learned
everything that God was willing or able to tell him about his opponents. If
the one called Roseleaf had flown the Cessna in, then he would be dug in down
at the beach, with the water at his back, with a couple of mines planted in
the sand for good measure. If D'Amato had won their battle then D'Amato would
be....
Costigan frowned, and crawled swiftly backward through the grass, into
the cover of trees. He brought himself to his feet, and began circling the
buildings. At one point the tree cover moved to within eighty meters of the
Cessna and the fuel pumps. He pulled the pin from a therm grenade and without
pause threw sidehanded. Two seconds later the grenade went off in an airburst
five meters above its target.
The Cessna went up immediately, burning. The flames took a moment to
spread to the fuel tanks. The tanks must have been dry, or nearly so, after
twelve years; the explosion was modest. It took out the barracks immediately,
and the firestorm that followed razed the administration buildings within
minutes.
Costigan waited, without hope, until the entire airport had burned to the
ground. It was mid-afternoon by then. Only after he was sure, when he was
certain that he had not killed anyone, when the \Well done\ came not, did he
leave the airport, and go down to the beach.
* * *
The final years were strange, grim and meaningless beyond any words
Costigan could find to describe them. It surprised him sometimes how good he
had become at killing; in boot his DI had called him a collection of parts
that didn't work too well alone and even worse all at once.
Much of it was luck, always luck. In any contest where two men sought to
kill each other, one or neither would survive; strictly by the odds the
chances were a little worse than two to one against Costigan on any
particular occasion. But the population base that he started from was huge;
simply by the odds some had to win, and win, and win.
Most of it was skill. Those who survived were masters of death, the lords
of shadow. As time progressed, the Game became less hunting, and more a
matter of art; it ceased to be slaying and became the Kill.
After the first five years Costigan stopped thinking about it. Sometime
in the eighth year he stopped thinking.
Let it go.
At the end of the decade Costigan encountered his first samurai. He lost
some of the muscle from his left bicep that time; he was so sure the samurai
was dead after taking an entire stomachful of armor-piercing slugs that he
hesitated slightly to check his locator before re-loading. It took an entire
second clip from the H&K 91 before the samurai stopped moving. The circle was
shrinking; in the following year Costigan killed Orientals and Europeans and
Latinos with increasing regularity. He thought there was probably nobody left
on the other continents. He thought sometimes that God was bringing his
opponents to him, because he alone was able to wait for them, to deny the
need to kill long enough.
Just long enough.
* * *
Now it was the last day, and the Line was silent; God absent.
Costigan made his way cautiously, carefully, wearily, down to the edge of
the beach. The beach looked deserted, utterly empty. Costigan ghosted along
the edge of the tree line, examining the sand, for one kilometer, two....
<There>. Costigan could not have explained to anyone, even himself, how
he knew that that faint rise in the sand, no different in shape from any other
patch of sand on the beach, held a human being. He felt it. He unslung his
H&K, leaned it carefully against the side of a fir pine. He took an
incendiary and a frag grenade from his dwindling supply, pulled the pins and
lobbed them, one after the other. He had his H&K 91 in hand and was charging
across the sand the instant the fragmentation burst subsided. He fired as he
ran, used a clip and reloaded, and then he was there. The sand had baked into
glass from the therm grenade; the frag and his bullets had shattered the
glass into tiny shards. Costigan plunged his hands into the fragments of sand
glass, which was already assuming a dark red shade, found the form of a man,
and yanked him up, into the air.
Costigan stared in disbelief. Wearing oxygen gear, with his hands cuffed
behind his back, was the freshly-dead body of the Italian Jorgi D'Amato. He
hardly had time to comprehend this when the a sledgehammer smashed into his
hunched back, sent him rolling across the sand. He continued rolling, over
the edge of the dry sand and down an incline toward the holy water. He
scrambled desperately to a halt before he touched the water, filled with a
primitive terror, and ran, crouched low, as automatic fire continued to
strike around him. He reached the relative safety of a low outcropping of
rock, jutting up out of the water, and let gravity take him to the ground in
the shortest possible route. He struck the rock hard.
He took stock of his situation. Roseleaf, of course. Peering over the
edge of his meager cover he saw nothing up on the beach but D'Amato's
remains. Each breath was torture; even impact resistant outer wear was not
meant to stop heavy-duty slugs for long. Something had gone through, or else
the impact had shoved a rib splinter into a lung; perhaps both. Costigan
could feel blood in his lungs.
"Corst-ah-gahn!"
Roseleaf was speaking. In twelve years Costigan could not recall that
having happened; could not recall an attempt at communication.
"This is Rosslifi, Corst-ah-gahn. Surrender!" The voice came from-there.
North and east, 150 meters. Heavy copse of trees. "Surrender ahnd I will let
you live!" Costigan estimated the probable drop for firing from this
distance. "I cahn do this, you have seen it in Damato. The Game, Corst-ah-
gahn, that is all the aly-an cares about. Surrender and I will win and you
cahn continue to live!"
Three and a half clips were left to Costigan. Call it five seconds, he
thought clinically. He pulled the half clip out of the H&K 91 and replaced it
with a full clip. "Corst-ah-gahn! Do...."
Costigan fired, the entire clip. Pull clip load and fire pull clip load
and fire pull clip and *load.*
He was up and running. He had half a clip left. Roseleaf was not
returning fire, and he reached the safety of the trees. Breathing was fire,
and he kept running through the trees, flipped the switch on the H&K to
single-shot to conserve ammunition.
Something struck him as he was approaching the spot where Roseleaf had
been, slammed him back into the trees. He staggered to his feet again, moved
to the right. His left elbow was smashed. There was a flicker of movement
ahead, and he fired a single round toward it. He kept moving, found himself
in a clearing suddenly, and reversed direction in panic. Automatic fire
crashed through the clearing, missing him, and he kept moving, back toward
the beach. He saw something brown and gray, moving parallel to him, and he
cut through brush, went charging after the elusive form, and once again had a
brief glimpse of the figure. Then the form was gone, and in the afterimage on
his retina Costigan saw Roseleaf, a small man, smaller than Costigan had
imagined, a 1,100 rounds-per-minute MAC-10 clutched in his right hand. He was
holding his neck with his left hand, and a dark familiar stain was flooding
down over his left shoulder.
Costigan followed him, close on his trail. The form appeared and vanished
and appeared again, and vanished. Costigan turned the select switch to full
auto and fired everything he had left to the last spot he had seen a flash of
brown-gray camouflage clothing.
Abruptly there was silence. Costigan was counting, one, two, th--
Roseleaf was behind him. Costigan knew without knowing how. He dropped,
and fire traced through the air over his head. He rolled to the side, arms
over his neck and skull, and the fire struck him again and again, smashing
his legs and ribs. The last thing he remembered was reaching for a grenade.
One of the grenades came free, and he pulled the pin one-handed and threw
without the faintest idea where he was throwing.
He was caught in his own blast.
* * *
Blood in his mouth.
His legs were numb, though he could still move them slightly. He crawled,
with the one arm that he could get to work, pushing and pulling himself along
the ground. There was a prone gray form, blasted cleanly out of the cover of
the woods, back out onto the sand. Costigan moved forward, pushed Roseleaf
over onto his back and looked at the man's face. His left eye was missing and
he was bleeding from a nick that he had taken in the side of his neck, but he
was still breathing. Costigan reached for his knife; gone. He could not
remember what had happened to it. He searched around in the sand until he
found a fair-sized stone. He brought the rock up with all the grace with
which Cain must have killed Abel, and brought it down again and again until
Roseleaf's brains were spread across the sand.
Costigan dropped the stone, and propped himself up against the bole of a
tree. The Game was over.
* * *
The voice of God said softly, distantly, \Well done.\
Costigan nodded. He was having trouble breathing. The numbness was
creeping up into his chest. His legs would not move at all now.
There was silence again over the Line, and then the voice said gently,
\How do you feel?\
At first Costigan could not comprehend the question. Then he answered
with the only answer he had. \Death. I am all death.\
There was a distinct flavor of approval. \Will you join Us now?\
Costigan did not answer. The world was very quiet. It was a calm Autumn
day, still warm. The air smelled very nice, like pines, when the wind did not
blow him the scent of Roseleaf's blood. And the ocean was blue, and serene.
The ocean was stirring.
Costigan stared down at the water. It was heaving, rippling in a thousand
sharp waves. The shapes were almost insectile as they came up out of the
water, smooth gray, encased in alien metal.
\God,\ he whispered into the Line, \why?\
\What damage was due them? They did not understand, so We did not Play
them. They could not have competed, so We did not allow it. Unlike you,
unlike Us. They are not Players, they do not understand the Game. You were
like Us as children, Players of wondrous potential. Should We *not* have
Played you?
\But <why> --\
There was a flicker of a smile in the back of Costigan's mind, the taste
of primordial anger and ancient amusement, followed by a brief flash of God's
countenance, of rows upon rows of crystalline sharp teeth. \Now they have
hands,\ said God. \Now they will learn to Play. And when they have practiced
long enough, We will return for them. And give them the Game.\
Darkness descended upon Costigan. \Death is not a game. Death is not...\
\All things are the Game. Join Us. Let it go.\
Costigan released his body.
Behind him the dolphins were coming up out of the ocean.
END OF "GIVEN THE GAME."
