“Ooh, hard lines there!” announced the Loudmouth. “So close, and yet so... dead!”
The audience laughed again, appreciating what, for them, was about as close to a wry play on words as they were ever likely to get.
“You know what we say…” crackled the voice. The audience joined in and helped him deliver his much-loved, if grammatically questionable, catchphrase. “If you get slayed, you don’t get paid!”
A chant rose up from one end of the arena, and quickly down both sides until it reached the opposite end. “Hook, hook, give him the hook! Hook, hook, give him the hook!”
The officials ran into the arena's central court again, caught the now very much dead member of the public by the arms and legs, and carried him back to the sidelines, dragging his distended innards along with him.
A hook was buried in his back. A chain rattled. The body was heaved up onto the fence, and the chant became another round of boorish cheers, whistles and foot-stamps.
“Aaaaaaand now,” the Loudmouth blasted. “The maaaaaiiin event. The moment we have all been waiting for.”
From somewhere beyond the circle of light came the revving of an engine. The cheering reached fever pitch, before quickly dropping into a hushed, awe-struck murmur.
“The one.”
The revving got louder.
“The only.”
The engine roared like a wild animal.
“Tor von Haff!”
That did it. If the stadium had had a roof, it would have been blown off by the sheer force and volume of the cheering that followed. A smoke-spewing motorcycle was vomited from the darkness. It flew several feet through the air, landed on its back wheel, then paraded around in a circle with its front wheel raised.
On the bike's back sat something that looked like a highly-evolved warthog. It was all hair and tusks and beard and anger. Tor Von Haff's skin was rough and oily, his eyes two bulging nodules above an atrocity of a nose. He hissed and spat at the adoring crowd, which only seemed to make them love him, all the more.
The voice on the speaker system gave the crowd a minute or more to enjoy the show, then shouted them down.
“We're not here to admire this fine specimen, folks, we're here to do righteous battle! Who among you will dare face Tor in the arena? Who among you is strong enough, bold enough... insane enough to face one of the famous von Haff brothers in one-on-one, you-against-him, no-holds-barred combat?”
The cheering of the crowd became far less enthusiastic. Everyone looked at everyone else, waiting to see who would try their luck.
No one moved. Fighting the Castrator was one thing. Taking on a von Haff? Well, that was something else, entirely.
“Remember, folks, there is a prize of two-hundred-and-fifty thousand credits on offer to anyone who can survive just two minutes in the arena with Tor. We don't expect you to beat this guy - we're not crazy - just stay alive for two short minutes. That's all, and the money is yours.”
A few men in the audience stroked their chins and nodded, making a show of considering this, mostly for the benefit of their dates. Still none of them made any move to volunteer.
“Seriously?” said the Loudmouth voice. “Nobody is willing to step into the arena with my man Tor? Come on, there must be somebody with nothing to live for.”
A figure vaulted the fence, and a drone-light immediately circled to shine a spot on him. “I'll do it,” he said, in a voice like grinding glass.
“Aaaalllllllright! Finally!” hollered the voice. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have ourselves a volunteer! Well done, Mr...?”
The volunteer removed his long coat, folded it neatly, then set it on the ground.
“Deadman.”
“Ha! Seriously?”
Dan took off his hat and placed it on top of his coat.
“Seriously.”
“That is awesome,” said the announced. “And, well, I hate to tell you, but I suspect that name is going to become pretty appropriate within the next ninety seconds, or so.”
Tor von Haff revved his engine. Dan shrugged. “We’ll see.”
A couple of officials wheeled in a metal rack. It held a variety of swords, axes, some sort of power tool and a large hook on a short chain.
“Challenger!” boomed the voice on the speakers, as the drone buzzed past over Dan’s head. The crowd joined in the chant, once more. “Choose your weapon!”
Von Haff opened up his throttle, driving the crowd wild with the throaty roar of his engine. Dan looked at the weapons on offer on the rack, then waved his woman’s hand. “I’m fine.”
“Haha! Uh… what?” said the Loudmouth.
Dan looked up at the drone. “I don’t need a weapon.”
The crowd let out a collective, “Oooh!” that sounded equal parts impressed and sarcastic.
“But… you do. You need a weapon,” the amplified voice insisted. “We want a show, Mr Deadman! We want you to have at least a fighting chance, and you’re not going to beat the mighty Tor von Haff with your bare hands.”
Dan nodded very deliberately, just once, in the direction of the biker. “Yes,” he said. “I am.”
The crowd laughed at that. They liked this plucky newcomer. His agonizing death and subsequent dismemberment was going to be a blast.
Dan cricked his neck. “Can we get a move on?” he said. “I’m kind of in a rush here.”
“That is unfortunate for you,” said von Haff, his voice a guttural ejection of partially-formed consonants and vowels. “I vill be in no rush to kill you. But you vill vish I vas, so you’re suffering vould be—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Dan grunted. He made a winding motion with an index finger. “Let’s just hurry this up.”
“Uh, yeah,” said the Loudmouth voice, sounding less certain than he had all night. He’d been hoping the main event might drag on for a minute or so before von Haff lopped the dude’s head off, but this would be over in seconds, and that meant a disappointing finish to what had been an otherwise excellent derby.
He rallied and tried to inject some enthusiasm into his delivery, but it was apparent his heart wasn’t quite in it. “Here goes, ladies and gents, the big one. The main event. Tor von Haff versus, uh, Deady ‘The Soon-to-be Dead Man’ Deadman.”
There was cheering. There was always cheering. But the audience seemed to have picked up on the announcer’s concerns, and it was a much more muted level of cheering than normal.
Tor, on the other hand, was raring to go. He reached over his shoulder and pulled a saw-like sword from the sheath on his back. As he gave it a flick, a motor in the blade began to hum, and the saw teeth became a fast-moving blur.
“Fighters, take your places!” the announced instructed.
Before the sentence had even finished, von Haff pulled a wheelie and roared off towards the far end of the arena. Dropping back onto two wheels, he skidded around so he was directly facing Dan, and raised his weapon in the air.
“And there’s the sign to let us know that von Haff is ready! Hell, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him look quite so ready, before. He’s going to show this cocky upstart just who’s top dog around here. Make him suffer, Tor! Drag that shizz out!”
Please he added, silently. He was in no mood to handle complaints and refund requests.
“Challenger, are you ready?” the announced asked.
“Sure, whatever,” said Dan. He scowled in irritation. “Does it always take this long?”
That did it. Von Haff’s roar was audible even over that of his bike’s engine. Twisting his throttle, he powered towards Dan, dirt spraying behind him, the cheering of the crowd driving him on.
Dan waited.
Von Haff raised his weapon and swished it around above his head. With the beard and the tusks and the bulging, boggle-eyes, it was hard to read the guy’s expression with any degree of accuracy, but ‘unfriendly’ was a pretty safe bet.
The crowd was bouncing with excitement now, all slightly out of time so it gave the effect of a long, wrigg
ling snake circling the stadium. The announcer was saying something, but it was impossible to hear him over the whooping and hollering and general frenzy.
Dan waited. As the bike closed in, he counted backwards in his head.
Three.
Two.
One.
And then the bike was there, dead ahead, all smoke and noise and spinning wheels. Von Haff drew back his blade to swing, just as Dan dropped to one knee, twisted, and shoved the woman’s arm through the bike’s front spokes.
Quite a lot of things happened, all at the same time. Most of them thanks to physics.
The bone in Dan’s arm wasn’t strong enough to jam the bike’s spokes, but the metal bar was more than up to the job. As a result, the bike stopped, very abruptly. Or the front of the bike stopped, very abruptly, at least. The back of the bike didn’t.
Likewise, Tor von Haff didn’t stop, either. If anything, he seemed to speed up as the rear end of the bike flipped over and hurled its rider, head first, onto the ground, before hammering down on top of him.
The bike’s engine buzzed angrily for a second or two, then fell silent. The crowd followed suit, a hush descending as they watched Dan wrench his arm free of the motorcycle’s front wheel.
“Shizz. Still there,” he grunted, looking the arm over. It was in bad shape – flatter in some parts than it should be, but bulging in places where it definitely should not – but still attached. He’d been hoping to kill two birds with one stone, but no such luck.
“Now, then… Tor, was it?” Dan said, kicking the bike sideways and catching the fallen rider by the shoulder. “I’m going to have to ask you a few questions.”
He turned von Haff over. A worryingly large piece of the guy’s brain stayed behind on the large rock he had smashed into. The rest of his brain was mostly visible through a hole in his skull, where a flap of bone hung open like an access hatch. Tor’s eyes were looking upwards at it, wide, bulging and largely lifeless.
“Muuuhhhh,” he babbled through his fat, blubbery lips. “Nnngg.”
“Aw, crap,” Dan muttered. He scooped up the largest chunk of brain and tried to squeeze it back inside Tor’s head. “Come on, don’t you fonking die on me, you lowlife piece of shizz.”
Von Haff gurgled. His brain slopped sideways onto the ground, his eyes rolled back, and the rest of him realized there was very little point in continuing.
“No, no, no, no,” Dan groaned, fumbling for the brain scraps again. He dropped them even before he’d finished scooping them up. Clearly, there was no point. His lead – his only lead – was very definitely dead.
Cursing himself, Dan stood up, dragging his woman’s arm with him. It was limp and heavy, the fingers barely responding. Suddenly, the whole arm-in-spokes thing didn’t seem like such a good idea.
Nearby, someone in the audience began to clap, slowly at first, but getting faster. Someone else joined in. A whoop rose up from someone else.
“Hol-eeeee shizz!” said the announcer. He was doing his best to sound excited, but there were some shocked and disbelieving undertones to it that were hard to miss. “Ladies and gentlemen, I… I don’t quite believe what I’m seeing here. Tor von Haff is down. The, uh, the challenger has… Well, he’s won. He’s won.”
The clapping became hollering, the hollering became cheers and whistling and the stamping of feet. Dan didn’t hear it, or if he did, he didn’t let on.
OK, so his lead was a literal dead end, but that didn’t mean there was nothing to find out from him. Squatting, Dan began rummaging in the pockets of the dead man’s biker jacket. For some reason, the crowd seemed to approve. Their cheering took on all new levels of euphoria. Even the announcer seemed to find his mojo again.
“Unbelievable! Incredible! Wow, folks, my eyes cannot believe what they’re seeing right now!”
It was an unusual reaction to someone rummaging through a dead man’s pockets.
Too unusual, Dan realized, but just a little too late. The curved blade of a sword stabbed through him from behind, tore through his guts, and erupted through his stomach in a spray of black, sticky blood.
“Ladies and gentlemen, let’s hear it for our surprise guest star!” the Loudmouth boomed. “Vextor von Haff!”
Dan stared down at the blade through his stomach, and listened to the animal-like snorting of the man behind him. “Well now,” he mumbled, something not unlike a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “Thank fonk for that.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The sword withdrew with an oily-sounding shunk that was audible even over the din of the crowd.
Aware that taking a blade through the guts was one thing, but that the next strike might very well take his head off, Dan sprung to his feet, spun around, and crunched a right hook across what turned out to be the sturdiest face he had ever hit.
Vextor von Haff was clearly the bigger of the von Haff brothers. His tusk-like bottom teeth curved all the way up to his eye level, but jutted out at a shallow angle so he wasn’t constantly in danger of poking both eyes out.
He had the same beard as his brother, but longer and stragglier. His skin was a mess of weeping boils and oozing sores, and something had clearly attempted to bite his nose off at some point in the dim and distant past. Possibly himself, Dan reckoned. He looked the type.
Vextor’s expressions were as hard to read as Tor’s had been, but there was definitely a look of shock as Dan’s fist connected with his jaw. Not shock at being hit – and definitely not pain – but a sort of bewildered surprise that the guy he’d just impaled on a four foot long piece of pointy metal was still able to throw a punch, at all.
“Vot is this?” Vextor demanded, looking Dan up and down.
Dan hit him again, harder this time. He’d held back a little, last time, worried he might kill this one, too. That, however, now seemed unlikely.
The second punch turned Vextor’s head an inch to his right. Perhaps less. While his head barely moved, though, his face shifted around a lot. The raised eyebrow – singular – became a steep-sided letter V above his globular eyeballs. His tusks angled further outwards as his bottom lip curved up into a snarl, squeezing trickles of pus from the boils on his cheeks.
The older – and only remaining – von Haff hissed angrily and drove a battering-ram foot into Dan’s chest that knocked him back several paces. The roaring of the crowd became distant background noise as Dan saw Vextor lumber into a run, his sword arcing above his head, then swinging sharply down.
CLANG! Dan blocked the blade with his woman’s arm, then fired a kick at von Haff’s kneecap. The bigger man didn’t flinch, and Dan felt pain explode behind his eyes as the handle of the sword was smashed against the side of his head.
He staggered, off balance, and was in the process of reaching for Mindy when he remembered she was back at Nedran’s. He’d gone back for the car, but hadn’t taken the gun. Stupid. Stupid mistake.
The sword whummed in a wide horizontal swing towards him. He managed to get the woman’s arm in front of it, and the blade sparked as it cleaved through the flesh until it struck the Durium rod.
Roaring, Vextor swung the sword up and over his head, then down towards Dan’s. Dan got his arm up in time to block the attack, but Vextor hacked and chopped, again and again, until the vibration was about to make Dan’s teeth shake themselves out of their sockets.
He dodged the next strike and spun, smashing his metal-rod forearm across the back of von Haff’s skull with an ever-so-slightly damp sounding thack.
That got his attention. Vextor’s fist was a mallet-strike across Dan’s cheek. It split the thin, weakened skin and Dan’s head was filled with a sound like rushing water. “Hey, watch the face,” Dan growled.
He ducked another sword strike and hurled himself at Vextor’s legs, driving his shoulder into them, just above the knees. Von Haff started to topple, but scraped together just enough time to stab the sword through Dan’s back again.
Dan threw himself sideways, his body wrench
ing the sword from Vextor’s grip. They both hit the ground, but Dan was the first to get back to his feet. He drove the heel of his boot into Von Haff’s elbow as he tried to get up, knocking him back down into the dirt.
If the announcer or crowd were still making noise, Dan couldn’t hear them. There was just the whooshing inside his head, and the growling of Vextor on the ground. With some difficulty, Dan managed to remove the sword from his torso. He took it by the handle and weighed it up.
“Nice. I can see why you like it,” he said. He turned the sword so the tip of the pointed blade hovered just inches from Vextor’s battle-scarred snout. “Now, I’m going to ask you some questions. And you’re going to answer. Understand?”
Vextor spat on the ground at Dan’s feet. “Guess not,” said Dan, then he stabbed the sword downwards, forcing it deep into Vextor’s thigh. Vextor opened his mouth wide, as if to scream, but no sound emerged.
Yanking the sword free, Dan tapped the flat side of the bloodied blade against one of Vextor’s tusks. It emitted a note that was oddly melodious.
“Understand?” Dan asked again. Vextor glowered at him, but this time, didn’t spit. “Good boy,” said Dan. “Now, I’m looking for a girl. Name’s Nona. Pretty sure you know her.”
“I don’t know vot you’re talking about,” Vextor hissed.
The sword tore into his other leg, and this time Von Haff was unable to contain a short, guttural yelp of pain.
“Maybe you’ve forgotten,” said Dan. He twisted the sword. “Let’s see if we can’t remind you.”
“W-wait. Wait!”
Dan let his weight rest on the sword for a moment, then whipped it free. “Something coming back to you?” he asked. He pressed the tip of the blade against Vextor’s upper arm. “Or do you need me to jog your memory again?”
Von Haff glanced around him. The audience was almost completely silent now, watching events unfold in shocked fascination. Even the announcer had given up trying to lift the mood, and was either lost for words or had turned off his microphone.
Dial D for Deadman: A Space Team Universe Novel (Dan Deadman Space Detective Book 1) Page 14