The creature in the pit raised its head as if it could understand Chiba’s words. The lenses on the helmet prevented Fix from seeing its eyes, but he knew if he could there would be nothing there but hatred. He knew that his own eyes were probably filled with different emotions. Need. Desperation.
And fear.
“Yeah,” he murmured. “Yeah, I’m in.”
5
The prep work for the event took weeks.
During that time Chiba provided Fix with the best trainers, the best sports medicine people, the best food and every luxury Fix might want. Fix turned down the prostitutes and the AI sexbots. He trained and trained, and recorded long videos for each of his kids to try and tell him the things a father would. He repeatedly requested the chance to view any video files of the “tests” conducted with the creature that involved combat, whether against humans or animals. Chiba refused on the grounds that it would “pollute the integrity of the event.”
With each day Fix felt his tension growing. He slept badly and had to eat antacids by the handful to keep from throwing up his guts. The doctors gave him shots of vitamins and they monitored his health, often offering sleeping pills, dream gas, or medical sex therapy, but Fix bulled through without any of that. This was going to be tough enough without his brain being fogged. After a while, though, he forced himself to try and get more sleep, to meditate, to eat a saner diet of protein-rich foods.
The weeks melted down to days and then hours.
On the morning of the bout, Hogarth Fix woke from a terrible dream of running through a jungle being hunted by something that he could not see. Something that filled the air with flashes of red that tore through flesh and bone and stone and trees. He ran past the bodies of every soldier he had ever known, and although many had died on worlds or moons far away from Gameworld, their bodies were all in the dream, freshly killed, slaughtered, skinned, hung up like deer carcasses after a hunt. The invisible thing pursued him all the way into a trap—a cave filled with the skulls and spines of all of those dead. A mountain of them. Fix fell to his knees and looked around at the walls, seeing trophies hung there. The skulls of the great hunting cats, cave bears, elephants, alligators. And more—dinosaurs and other creatures Fix had only ever seen in museums. All dead. All conquered. He sank to his knees.
A sound made him turn, and behind him, in the cave’s mouth, a massive form was appearing out of nowhere. At first there was only a shimmer and then it appeared. Monstrously tall, massively built, heavily armored. Dreadlocks whipped back and forth as the creature looked around its trophy room. It was much bigger than the thing in the pit. Impossibly tall. It raised one arm, fist closed, and a set of three wicked metal blades sprang from sheaths built into the gauntlets. There were smears of fresh blood on those blades. Fix looked down at his own stomach and saw that his shirt and flesh were torn. His guts slid out and flopped wetly to the ground between his knees.
Fix screamed himself awake.
In a happy, chirpy voice the AI system said, “Good morning, Hogarth. It’s fight day. Would you like scrambled eggs and coffee?”
6
Fight day.
There had been a lot of matches at Gameworld since Fix agreed to this fight. Humans against humans, humans against transgenic animals, teams against teams. Fix had watched them all, trying to prepare his mind for this. As if that was even possible.
He was going to fight an alien.
Yeah, history.
Shit.
He stood in a shower hot enough to boil a lobster. He lost it in there, too. Weeping and pounding his fist on the wall.
Chiba called him a warrior. Sure. Fix had known a lot of them. Only the fools went into battle without fear, and they were usually the first ones to fall. Most good soldiers were like him. Professional, yes; capable, to be sure; but human. They hid their fear because fear is both personal and contagious. They carved religious symbols into their gear. They wore religious medals or good luck charms. They wrote out death letters. Some took pictures of their loved ones with them; others refused to even name their wives or husbands or children for fear it would jinx them. Some took confession and others let hot showers wash their tears away in hopes that it cleansed them of excess fear.
Then they got ready for war.
With Hogarth Fix the ritual was all about being quiet. He toweled off and dressed in fighting trunks. He said nothing at all to the corner man who wrapped the tapes around his hands. Before the match he sat on a stool in the locker room, not praying, not thinking, just letting a silence fill him inside. He meditated, drifting right below the surface of wakefulness while his preconceptions dropped like pebbles to the bottom of his pool of awareness. When he heard the game bell, Fix stood and looked into the mirror, into the eyes of the scarred and ugly man who stared back at him. Into dead eyes that told him nothing and would betray nothing to his opponent. There was no hate in those eyes. No judgment, no anger. There was nothing, not even a mirror for the enemy to see his own strengths and weaknesses.
He stood up, turned, and walked out to the war.
7
The crowd was enormous. Every seat was taken and there were people standing in the aisles and crowding the balconies. The bleachers for the fighters were filled with past champions, each of them wearing their victory belts and sashes. Fix saw their eyes, saw the resentment, let it slide off of him. He knew that there were better fighters among them. Stronger, younger, faster, more talented. That was what it was. Chiba had picked him. Over the last few weeks Fix had gone through the agony of doubt, wondering if Chiba could be trusted, wondering if the promoter had picked him as an appetizer, intending Fix to be killed in order to show how tough the alien was. Probably. That was okay. Chiba still wanted a good fight. A long fight. Only record-keepers and trivia freaks ever really wanted a fight to end in the shortest time. Fans wanted to see the competitors fight it out all the way to the final bell. They wanted to see something.
They wanted a war.
That’s what Chiba had to want, too. A big, showy fight that commentators could dissect on news programs all over the solar system. A fight that would show human ingenuity and skill against something beyond all human experience, but which would end with the human—with Fix—dead on the deck. Dead or crippled, but the loser either way. That way the ticket or logon price for the next bout would be higher, and there would be no end to the list of fighters who would want to be the one who not only fought an alien, but defeated it. A victory by the next guy was the only possible bigger fight news.
Chiba walked into the center of the pentangle in a blood-red sequined suit, his massive bulk seeming to fill the place. There was a lot of yelling, a lot of rabble rousing. The din became one vast homogenous roar, like white noise turned high. Fix tuned it out. It was irrelevant and therefore a distraction, if he allowed it to be such.
When his name was called, he walked out onto the floor and did what he was expected to do. He raised his arms and danced on the balls of his feet, turning this way and that, grinning like an ape so that every camera could get a good shot. Looking mean. Acting the part.
“And facing our champion, Hogarth Fix, today is a new fighter. New to Gameworld, new to the pentangle, new to our kind of fighting,” bellowed Chiba, and a pregnant hush dropped heavily over the chamber. “I can guarantee you, my friends, that this is a fight like nothing you’ve ever seen. Like nothing anyone’s ever seen. You are about to witness a fight between one of the toughest men who I’ve had the privilege to know and an opponent so strange, so rare, so new that none of us know what’s going to happen in the next three minutes. I don’t know his name but once you take a look at him you’ll understand why we all call him the Nightmare Kid!”
With that a section of the pentangle floor hissed open and a big metal cylinder rose into sight. It was opaque and painted with images from a couple hundred years’ worth of horror stories. The cylinder turned slowly so everyone could see. Bug-eyed aliens, lumbering moon-beasts, spiders from Mar
s, space invaders, bat-winged monstrosities, and more. The creatures of books, comics, and film. Fix recognized some of them and others he didn’t.
Then the revolving cylinder dropped back down, revealing the figure of the hideous creature standing there, wrists and ankles secured by heavy shackles attached to retractable steel cables. The monster was dressed in black trunks now, but the torn netting was still there. And now he wore no helmet.
Fix could feel a cold hand of terror reach past his professional calm and clamp icy fingers around his heart. That face.
Dear god, that face.
It was every bit the nightmare promised by its nickname. Not even vaguely human, with spiked mandibles that were like some parasitic monster, or a spider, or a crustacean. It hissed at the crowd, and the spiked corners of its lips peeled back to reveal sharp, deadly teeth.
There was one long, lingering moment when all sound in the room suddenly died as the people stared at the thing. This wasn’t a publicity stunt and it wasn’t transgenics, and everyone seemed to grasp that all at once.
And then the crowd went absolutely wild.
Forty guards with shock rods came trotting out of a side corridor and surrounded the pentangle. The creature turned its head to watch them and there was hatred and something else in its eyes. Not fear, Fix thought, but a wariness. The kind that comes from experience. It remembered those shock rods and seemed to understand the odds against it. Forty big men in full riot gear. A moment later a ceiling vent opened and a turbo-cannon dropped into sight, its laser sight finding and locking onto the Nightmare Kid. The creature looked down at the spot where the laser sight hovered and then he looked at Chiba, who stood a few yards away.
“That’s right, you little cockroach,” murmured Chiba in a voice only Fix and the creature could hear. “You try any of your tricks and you’ll get worse than you got downstairs.”
The crowd had gone insane. Local and long-range cameras swiveled into position. A senior tech gave Chiba the thumbs up. “All of the subscribers are logged in, boss. We are live from Neptune to Mother Earth.”
Chiba returned the nod and amped up the wattage on his grin.
“Are you ready for blood?” he roared to the crowd.
Their response shook the whole place. Everyone was cheering, even the fighters on the bench.
“Then let’s put three minutes on the clock,” bellowed Chiba, and a large digital display showed the time in seconds. It was a more dramatic countdown. Two hundred and forty.
Chiba stepped off of the pentangle and took position behind six of the biggest guards.
“Shackles off!” he yelled and the bonds disengaged on ankles and wrists and were whipped out of sight beneath the floor, which closed over them.
The monster stood his ground, looking around, cautious, adjusting what he had experienced so far to what was happening now. Fix could understand it and even follow the obvious logic. He had been captured, overpowered, poked and prodded, been given opportunities to fight and had won each time. Maybe Chiba had tried to tame him with the shock rods and other tools. If so, Fix did not believe it had been a successful attempt. Now it was in a protected enclosure with another possible enemy. Even if it did not know what Gameworld was, it could put two and two together. This was a fight.
It turned toward Fix.
On impulse, Fix raised his left arm, fist clenched. It was a salute but also a test.
The creature considered him, then it, too, raised its arm. Fix saw a tiny twitch of its right shoulder before it raised its left. That was very interesting. Did that mean it was right-handed? Did it mean that it was conditioned to salute, and to do it with its right? If so, why did it use its left? In straight imitation?
Maybe.
Fix was right-handed, too.
Chiba yelled out the Japanese word to begin, “Hajime!”
The clock started. The crowd roared.
The creature instantly shifted its stance, feet wide, knees bent, body leaning forward, the muscles of chest and shoulders and biceps tensing. Making a show of it as it let out a terrifying, challenging roar.
The movement was tribal and ritualistic.
And telling.
Then it attacked.
The monster was fast. Good lord it was fast. For all its size and bulk, it seemed to turn into a blur as it came straight at him, claws slashing toward Fix’s throat.
The claws cut only air though.
Fix saw the muscles tense in the creature’s thighs and calves, read the coiled power, knew the lunge was coming. Nothing moves without some kind of tell. Not even the greatest fighters in history. The body is an interconnected series of tightly meshed ligaments and muscles, bones and moveable flesh. When one part of the body moves there is always a compensating flex or shift. The best fighters can minimize this so that they appear to go from zero to full speed without any intermediate process of acceleration. Fix was good at that.
He was even better at reading it.
The Nightmare Kid tore through the spot where Fix had been, but Fix was moving with light, quick steps on an oblique angle. He moved like a fencer, like a tennis player, his weight balanced on the springy balls of his feet, knees bent to act like shock absorbers, everything else loose so as not to drain energy.
The alien whipped around and tried it again, relying on his speed and greater reach to end the fight quickly.
The tips of those nails brushed across Fix’s hip and there was a sudden flash of heat. The monster was faster even than he looked, and those nails were scalpel sharp. The creature howled in triumph, owning the moment of first blood. He reared back and bellowed at the crowd.
Fix darted in and to the right and punched him on the outside of the thigh, driving a corkscrew knuckle punch at the juncture of two big muscles. The creature hissed and dropped to one knee but slashed again to chase Fix away from a combination off of that hit.
The crowd screamed.
The Nightmare Kid got back to his feet, chest heaving. Was he angry that his moment of triumph had been spoiled? Fix thought so. Interesting. Very interesting.
The creature leaped at him, getting great height and distance for his bulk, and Fix had to twist away from him, but once more those claws drew lines of fire, this time along Fix’s upper back.
Fix immediately countered with a sideways lunge and punch, hitting exactly the same spot. Harder. The creature’s knee hit the deck and it launched again from there, trying to slash its opponent’s legs out. Fix slap-parried the thing’s wrists and hit him with two fast left jabs in the side of the face.
That became the rhythm. The monster tried a dozen different angles of attack, relying on its enormous power, speed, and reach, each time trying to deliver a crippling blow. Each time Fix read the thing’s body language and moved with the attack. Those claws, though, found him time and again. Never deeply, but enough to hurt. Fix had to force the pain and the fear that it brought back down to the bottom of his pond of mental stillness.
Each time the Nightmare Kid attacked, though, Fix counterattacked with a left-hand punch, often striking the same spot on the monster’s leg. The monster was starting to limp, but it was clearly no slave to pain. It seemed to eat the pain and use it to fuel another attack, and another. If it was tiring, it did not show.
The clock said one hundred and two.
It felt like hours.
Out of the corner of his eye, Fix saw an aide hand a small communicator to Chiba, who covered one ear and listened. Fix saw Chiba’s brows knit with some kind of consternation. There was no time to observe more, though, because the alien nearly killed him with a double high slash followed by a savage kick that Fix almost, but not quite, evaded. Instead the kick propelled him into the air, and the monster dove forward to be under him when he fell. A nice trick. Like a cat might do.
Fix tucked and turned and came down feet first, stamping down onto the monster’s arms and missing the claws by inches. Fix pitched forward and rolled, came out of it without rising and spun on the flo
or, sweeping the monster as it charged after. The Nightmare Kid fell hard and lay stunned, but Fix wasn’t fooled. The landing wasn’t hard enough to do that much damage. It was a trick and Fix wasn’t buying. Instead he backed up and began circling, waiting for the creature to stop playing and rise.
It did, but when it was halfway up Fix attacked, punching it once more in the leg, pivoting backward off the impact so that he was chest to back with it, and then laying into the thing with some hardcore neighborhood work. He drove solid punches into kidneys—if it had kidneys—ribs, under the shoulder blades, into the vulnerable soft spots below the armpits. He worked it fast and hard, torquing his body for maximum power and then bailing fast by skipping backward.
The creature went down onto both knees and for a moment it looked like it was truly dazed.
But it got back to its feet once more and began stalking Fix.
There was something different in its eyes now. Fix wanted to call it a loss of confidence, but that was probably only partly true. It had the muscle and stamina to win this. Fix was breathing heavy and there was still a million years to the end of those three goddamn minutes. Fix was bleeding from a dozen shallow cuts. The alien didn’t even look bruised.
It limped, though. There was that.
Seventy-three seconds on the clock.
Christ. Might as well be forever.
Chiba was on the far side of the pentangle and Fix frowned as he saw the big man moving away, heading toward his private elevator, his six men surrounding him. Some of the crowd were looking at Chiba, others were talking on private communicators. More than half the crowd was no longer looking at the fight.
The Nightmare Kid did not seem to notice any of this. Instead he lunged in again and this time his claws tore into Fix’s left forearm, detonating white-hot agony. Fix kicked it in the knee and backpedaled to safety. His arm was hurt, the fingers sluggish, blood welling thickly from two deep cuts.
PREDATOR IF IT BLEEDS Page 35