Page 4 of Thawed Gladiator: Victor

Chapter Four

Maya

The phone rings at 2 AM because, of course, it does. Only one person calls at this hour, and only when he’s in trouble. My finger hovers over the decline button, but twenty-eight years of conditioning is hard to break.

“What is it this time, Dad?”

“Maya, baby, thank god.” Franky’s voice carries that familiar edge of panic that used to wake me in the middle of the night when I was ten, telling me to pack quickly—we had to move right now. “I really need your help.”

I can hear traffic sounds and his labored breathing. He’s outside somewhere, not at home.

“I need you to listen carefully,” he says, voice dropping to a harsh whisper. “I’m at a gas station payphone. My cell might be tracked. I just saw the news at Murphy’s Bar—they found a body at a storage facility outside of town. A guy named Keller. The one I’ve been… I’ve been working with on something big. And there’s a black SUV… it’s gone now, but I could swear it was following me.”

Pressing my fingertips against my temples, I fight back the flood of memories—sitting on the school steps two hours after play practice ended, having watched other kids leave with their parents while my dad never showed. Moving six times in two years because the rent money always seemed to find its way to a poker table instead of the landlord.

“No.” The word comes out firm, as I’ve practiced it in my head. “Whatever scheme you’ve gotten yourself into—”

“Baby, please—this is different. I’m in real trouble.”

“Like when you borrowed from my college fund? Or when you sold the car I bought with my after-school job money while I was at fight camp?” The old bitterness rises like bile. “Or maybe like when you got in so deep with loan sharks that they threatened to kill you unless I threw my championship fight? The fight that ended my career and destroyed my reputation?”

“Maya, someone died.”

The words hit like a sucker punch. My father’s done a lot of stupid things, but this… “What did you do?”

“It wasn’t my fault! I swear!” His voice cracks with genuine terror. “This guy Keller hired me a couple of weeks ago to help with some special cargo. Real hush-hush, needed someone who could handle unusual situations discreetly. Said he was left with some, uh… rare goods, when the guy who hired him, I think his name was Roth, got thrown in jail.”

As he pauses, I know without a doubt he’s figuring out how much of the truth to tell me.

“The way he talked, I don’t think Roth exactly told him he could have what’s in the pod. Well,” he chuckles nervously, “possession is nine-tenths, right? Keller said he needed help and would pay me well. You know how I am with opportunities—”

“Dad.” The headache intensifies. “What. Did. You. Do?”

“We were moving this pod thing from a storage facility. Maya, it was like something from a sci-fi movie. Had a guy inside, frozen or something. Keller seemed nervous, like he wasn’t even sure what he was supposed to do with him. Said he wanted to keep him plugged in at the storage unit and lie low for a couple of weeks until the news settled down.”

I rub the back of my neck as I wait for my dad to get to the point. It does nothing to calm me.

“Everything was fine until Keller said an app on his phone showed the power went out at the storage unit. He freaked out, called me in the middle of the night, and said we had to move everything right away.”

My hand shoots to my throat—and not in a cool, dramatic way. No, I’m full-on pearl-clutching. Fantastic. My father has turned me into a walking cliché.

“He picked me up in a van and we drove miles out of the city to this remote storage place. The pod was easy to move. It has these collapsible wheels under it like an ambulance stretcher. Which was a good thing because it weighed a ton. We had just gotten the pod loaded into the van when Keller jumped out the back, then he must have slipped or something, because the next thing I knew, he fell and hit his head on the loading dock.”

My legs give out, and I sink onto the bed. “Please tell me you called an ambulance.”

“I panicked! There was all this classified equipment, the guy in the pod was thawing, and though there wasn’t any blood, Keller wasn’t breathing. We were the only ones there, miles out of town. I just… dragged Keller into the storage shed, grabbed what I could, locked the door, and ran.”

“And I assume grabbing what you could included whatever was in the secret, hush-hush sci-fi pod.” It’s a statement, not a question. I know my father too well.

The silence stretches between us, filled with echoes of every other time he’s run from his problems. Every missed birthday. Every empty promise. Every middle-of-the-night escape.

“Where are you?”

“Friend’s cabin near Lake Tahoe. But Maya, that’s not even the craziest part. The guy in the pod? Hewoke up. I recorded his speech. Google says some of it is gibberish, some is Latin. And he’s built like a heavyweight fighter.”

I put two and two together, and maybe it adds up to twenty-two instead of four, but if you’re alive on planet Earth you’ve heard about the fourteen gladiators from 82 AD who were found frozen in ice at the bottom of the sea. News about them being thawed and brought back to life has been the only thing on the news since one of the gladiators was attacked in the Roman Colosseum by some bad guys.

“He was frozen? He speaks Latin? Keller must have had one of those gladiators.” My voice has risen to a hysterical pitch because those ancient Romans are more famous than all the A-list movie stars rolled into one.

---