A Return To Tradition.

Society was starting to decay around me. It had no doubt started years before but it was only now starting to affect me. I had lost my job 6 months ago, before my wife took my kids to live with her black, transgender  yoga teacher. When I told her that money didn't matter and that we would be better off long term, she laughed. It turns out her lover Helios X5 is a multi millionaire. He invested heavily in city properties burnt out in the race wars of 2025. Each tower block. And there were five in all. Had been transformed into living pods for the Hong Kong Chinese who arrived in the UK in large numbers back in 23. So now my wife had taken my kids to live with this slum lord. She told me that she would be given a family pod like the other hundred men and women in Helios X5s harem. Visiting rights were denied me. I was banned. Facial recognition software would Xray any disguise. My only hope would be to broker a peace deal but I was just a loser to Helios X5. A joke.

My house where I had lived since the break up with my wife, was a run down derelict workshop. CNC latches stood around gathering dust. I used candles and managed to piggy back an extension cable for my electric. The cable ran from next door and I had wifi once I got the code. No one cared. After the race wars people were either rich or poor. No inbetween.

Most of my friends had pretended to be liberals when the time came. Keeping their jobs and families intact. I had joined the wrong side in their minds. This had left me a fugitive running through the ruins at night. My only concern was.my front door holding out and my cold water main not freezing. Everything else was baubles.

I mainly ate factory waste from the big supermarket provider. I would raid the skips at night and find the necessary vitamins in fruit and veg. No one ate real meat anymore apart from the super rich and their groupies. Cannibalism wasn't unknown although it was frowned upon by my ethnic tribe. Like rape. Murder. Child slavery. My people took pride in not succumbing to the easy spoils. Murder was the only sin that had any leeway. It was too late in the day to become a victim now. Many rival gangs roamed the cities warscape and the most successful had no moral code. I pulled the skewered rat from the fire and bit off a small morsel of charred flesh. My only hope, I thought, was winning The Winter Games.

I had been accepted by email about a month ago. I went to the old toilet paper warehouse on sixth for induction, Monday to Friday. Heart monitors. Psychological exams. Political truth tests. Training with weapons, Evasion training, Homicidal driving tests through crowds, represented here by traffic cones. Lying on these tests or not giving a hundred percent was impossible. Most people got weeded out because they were opportunists who didn't want to kill. They just wanted the freebies. I wanted to kill. That's why I was made the leader of the other whites. If we made it we would all be rich. All five of us. I didn't like to think about winning. I liked to see myself as already dead. It was the only sane path I could imagine. As the odds on being dead in a few weeks time were high. Of course I wanted to be redeemed. I wanted to go and scoop up my kids and shower them with toys. I didn't want them to see my head on a spike on TV covered in spit and bird shit. I wanted to win.

One day we were training in knife fighting and a young buck who wanted to be leader slashed the palm of my hand. It was raised to protect my face. It was the one day I didn't have my chain mail gloves on made out of ring pulls. The cut cost me dear. When he saw that he wounded me, he punched me in the face, and then rubbed my hand against the dirty floor, guaranteeing infection. I watched the hand turn blue over the proceeding days, and lost my position as leader. This meant I had to follow the orders of a much younger man. I couldn't complain. These were the rules. We were not.savages like some of the other teams. I picked up my axe and went to the back of the queue. We would soon be going out into the ruins of the city. Competing with thirty other ethic groups. Or teams. For one prize. Our lives.