by David Archer
GU: JUSTICE NET
Copyright © 2016 by Lone Stone Publishing
All right reserved.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
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Published by: David Archer and Abraham Falls
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PROLOGUE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
PROLOGUE
The door opened and the big black man looked up to see one of the guards standing there waiting for him.
“That time, is it?” Roscoe Pearson asked, and the guard only smiled and nodded. Roscoe stood up out of the recliner and walked to the door. “You know, you don’t have to show me the way. I done this enough times now, I know how to get there.”
“Yeah, probably,” the guard said. “They just like us to walk along with you, make sure you don’t get lost along the way. Besides, I’ve got money on you tonight. You’re not gonna disappoint me, are you?”
Roscoe laughed. “Sure as hell gonna try not to,” he said. “After forty-nine of these, I’m getting short. I make it through this one, I only got twenty more to go and I’m a free man.”
“Yeah, that’s why I bet on you. I think you’re going to make it.”
They were walking through a hallway that led to an elevator, and they stepped inside when they got there. The guard pushed a button and the elevator descended, then began moving sideways. The ride lasted only a few minutes, covering a couple of miles before it stopped and began to ascend once more.
The doors parted to reveal an open desert. Roscoe could see the tall fence that surrounded the area, a thousand feet on a side and more than twenty feet tall with razor wire covering the top five feet.
“Best of luck,” the guard said as Roscoe stepped out onto the sand. The doors closed and Roscoe began walking toward the center of the huge square. There were some scraggly trees and bushes scattered around inside the fence, and a few odd-looking shelters dotted it here and there, but Roscoe ignored them. He was headed for the very center, which was where the action would take place.
Something buzzed past his head and Roscoe smiled. The camera drone hovered just ahead of him, floating backward so that it could keep its lens focused on his face. Roscoe ignored it, keeping his eyes moving as he looked ahead for any surprises that might be waiting for him.
The camera drone rose up above and then moved away, and Roscoe continued his purposeful walk. He reached the center after a few minutes and looked around, but he was alone. That was normal, he knew; the other person within the fenced arena would be doing his best to stay out of sight until the last possible moment. That was completely understandable, Roscoe felt. After all, there weren’t very many people who would willingly rush into a situation that was likely to get them killed.
There was a rustling in some bushes about fifty yards away, and Roscoe broke into a grin. “Come on out,” he called. “You know the drill. We can do this the hard way or the easy way, all up to you. You want it over quick, you just come on out and I make it so it don’t even hurt.”
There was no answer. Another rustle of the bushes confirmed that someone was in them, and Roscoe shook his head. “Ain’t no point in trying to hide,” he said. “Let’s just get to it. Hell, you never know but what you might get lucky. Maybe you be the one to walk out of here instead of me.”
“Don’t you ever shut up?” The voice came from inside the bushes, and a moment later they parted as a man stepped out. He was taller than Roscoe by a couple of inches, but where Roscoe was thick and muscular, this man was thin and wiry. “That’s all I need, somebody like you trying to talk me to death.”
“Then let’s get to it, Wagner,” Roscoe said. “No more bullshit, no more talk. Come show me what you got.”
David Wagner walked slowly and confidently to where Roscoe was standing, stopping about eight feet away. “How many you killed already?”
“You gonna be number fifty,” Roscoe said. “How about you?”
“Thirteen, so far. I’ve only got six left to go, and I’m out of here.”
“Well, one of us gonna be closer to that in just a little while,” Roscoe said. “Just so’s you know, I’m planning on that being me.”
Wagner shrugged. “I guess we’re going to find out, aren’t we?”
He suddenly lunged at Roscoe, arms spread wide, but the second it took to cross the distance between them was enough for Roscoe to react. He grabbed Wagner’s left hand and pulled, throwing out his own right leg and tripping the man into a flip that landed him on his back. Wagner bounced up instantly, quickly rolling to his feet and spinning to face Roscoe again.
“Ain’t gonna be that easy,” Roscoe said. “Ain’t but one of us leaves here alive, and it’s gonna be me.”
“We’ll see about that,” said Wagner. He lunged again but spun himself at the last second, just as Roscoe was about to grab him once more, whirling around to came up behind Roscoe. He threw his left arm around Roscoe’s throat as he delivered a heavy punch into his kidneys.
Roscoe grunted but didn’t cave in. He began slamming his elbows backward, resisting the temptation to try to pry the man’s arm off his throat and concentrating on delivering all the punishment he could to Wagner’s ribs. He felt Wagner hunch over as he tried to lessen the impacts, and then Roscoe threw his head back as hard as he could.
The back of his head smashed into Wagner’s nose, and Roscoe felt hot blood splatter down his back. Wagner let go instinctively and staggered backward, but Roscoe wasn’t about to let him have a break. He spun and drove a fist into Wagner’s face, smashing the nose even further than his hard skull already had.
Wagner forced himself to open his eyes and began throwing punches of hi
s own. The two men pounded on each other for a couple of minutes, each of them delivering and taking extreme punishment. At last, Wagner managed to strike Roscoe’s left temple, and the heavily muscled man staggered back. The impact had rattled his brain, and he backpedaled as he tried to shake it off.
Wagner spun and delivered a roundhouse kick into Roscoe’s belly, but Roscoe had put enough distance between them that the kick didn’t have much force when it arrived. It did, however, put Wagner’s right foot into Roscoe’s hands, and he yanked with all his strength to draw Wagner closer.
Standing on one leg while your opponent holds the other is not a great way to fight, and Wagner learned that the hard way when his left leg collapsed beneath him. Roscoe continued pulling, dragging Wagner’s bare back across the sand and gravel that made up the floor of the arena. He was running backward, building all the momentum he could, and then he stopped and spun. Wagner was thrown into the air like a child being spun by a parent, and Roscoe rotated several times before finally letting go.
Wagner landed ten feet away, and his spine impacted on the stump of a bush that had been torn out at some point in the past. He grunted loudly as the breath was knocked out of him and his entire spine erupted in agony, but he still rolled over and began getting to his feet.
A camera drone flew by and Roscoe suddenly found himself wondering just how many people were watching this battle to the death. He imagined the crowd at the bar he used to frequent, gathered around the holo-display on the wall. How many of them, he wondered, had placed bets on him that night?
Half the continent away, the scene he envisioned was playing out in real life. More than two-dozen men and women were jumping up and down and screaming for Roscoe as he fought for his life. Most of them had known him before he was sentenced to Justice Net, and they knew just how tough a man he was.
In thousands of other bars were tens of thousands of other people who didn’t know Roscoe at all, but knew that he was the favorite to win this fight. They had their money down on him, both through the official betting channels and in side bets with their friends and coworkers. Roscoe Pearson had been sentenced to the maximum of seventy fights after confessing to the murders of three men who had raped and killed his fifteen-year-old daughter. Some technicality had kept them from being charged with the crime, and so Roscoe had taken justice into his own hands.
Since then, he had already been in this arena forty-nine times. Forty-nine other men who had also been sentenced to fight for their lives were thrown, one at a time, into the arena with him. One by one they had fallen, and only a couple of them had even come close to being able to beat Roscoe down.
Wagner was trying to be the one who finally accomplished it, getting to his feet as Roscoe made the mistake of letting his mind wander. He rushed Roscoe again, this time bending low and planning to drive his shoulder into Roscoe’s gut, but Roscoe reacted again. He swung his left arm low and brought it up, catching Wagner across his throat and causing the man to flip backward onto his butt. He landed hard, and simply sat there for a moment as the shock of pain ran up his tailbone and met the agony that was still radiating through his spine from the stump.
Wagner almost blacked out, but he kept his wits about him. He rolled quickly away from Roscoe and managed to get to his feet again, but he was beginning to feel wobbly. The toll of the battle was starting to tell on his body, and he wondered if he had finally met his match.
Roscoe didn’t give him time to rest. He launched himself into a run and rushed at the man, swinging his huge right fist with all the power of his body and driving it into that ruined nose. Blood sprayed anew, and Wagner let out a scream.
It was time to end it, Roscoe decided. He never liked the pain he had to inflict on his opponents, but it seemed that all of the men he faced in the Net had high survival instincts. None of them ever accepted the chance to go out quietly and painlessly, but always put up a fight, always thought they would be the one to end his winning streak.
Wagner staggered back from the blow and Roscoe rushed around him. He got an arm around Wagner’s throat and then threw his free hand up to press forward on his head. Wagner began striking at the arm, trying to get a grip on it to pull it away from his throat, but it was too late. Roscoe had forced Wagner’s throat into the vee of his elbow, and the sudden constriction of blood flow to Wagner’s brain was taking its toll quickly.
It takes only a few seconds, usually less than eight, for the pressure on the carotid and jugular to convince the brain that blood pressure has risen to dangerous levels. This causes the vasodilators to expand the blood vessels in the brain, which results in almost immediate cranial hypoxia. Without oxygen, the brain cannot function and goes to sleep.
In most fighting sports, such a chokehold is released as soon as the opponent loses consciousness, and they wake only seconds later. Roscoe, however, continued to hold the choke long past the point where Wagner slumped to the ground. He knelt behind the man and maintained pressure for almost five minutes, until the buzzer sounded that signified that David Wagner was dead.
Roscoe gently laid the man down on the ground and then sat back on his haunches as he waited for the guards to arrive. They always came, two of them on a little electric flatbed truck. They would throw the body on the back of the vehicle and then invite Roscoe to climb on for the ride back to the gate. They would drop him off at the elevator and then continue their grisly journey to the disposal facility. Men and women who died in Justice Net were never sent home to their families for burial; they were ground up and fed into the biogas generator that helped to provide power and heat for the barracks.
“I told you you’d be number fifty,” Roscoe said to the air around him. “I told you.”
The truck arrived a moment later and Roscoe climbed on beside Wagner’s body for the ride. When he stepped off at the elevator, the doors slid open and a smiling guard was waiting for him.
“There’s the man! You just made me twenty grand,” he said. “You can be sure I’ll be betting on you next week.”
Roscoe grinned and nodded but didn’t say anything. They rode back to the waiting room in silence, and Roscoe seemed relieved when the guard finally opened the door and let him step inside. He went straight to the bathroom and stripped as he ran the tub full of the hottest water he could get, then slipped into it and scrubbed the blood and gore and self-loathing away the best he could.
He dressed in the clean coveralls that had been left for him and sat down in the recliner to watch some video on the holo-display until they came to take him back out into the yard, but he didn’t get to even start one. The door opened and a different guard stood there.
“You Roscoe Pearson?”
“Yep,” Roscoe said. “You guys are pretty quick today.”
He was starting to get up from the chair when the guard stepped inside and pulled the door closed behind him. “It’s not time for you to go out yet,” he said. “I was told to come and talk to you about something.”
Roscoe tensed a bit, but didn’t let panic show on his face. “And what might that be?”
“We just got the word,” the guard said. “Newbie coming in tomorrow, and I guess he’s somebody special. Somebody in the Cage called down and asked us to pick someone to help this guy learn how to fight. He some sort of college professor, probably never been in a scrap in his entire life. Somebody big wants him to have the best chance possible of living through his sentence, and we all talked about it and decided you’d be the best one to teach him.”
“A college professor? You mean a teacher? What the hell he do to get sent here?”
The guard shrugged. “I don’t know. Word is, he might be completely innocent and just got smashed with a bunch of phonied-up evidence against him. All I know is somebody powerful wants him to learn how to fight, and learn quickly. They don’t tell us why.”
Roscoe studied the guard for a moment. “What’s in it for me?”
“Not a lot, I’m afraid. About all we can give you is a li
ttle more leeway on breaking rules, maybe we can arrange a little extra chow in your tray. Just think of it as doing something good for somebody.”
Roscoe stared at him for another thirty seconds, then slowly nodded his head. “I do it,” he said. “If this guy be innocent, then he deserve a chance to get out of here more than most of us. I’ll see if I can’t teach him a few things to keep him alive.”
The guard nodded and smiled. “Good man,” he said, and then he turned around and walked out the door.
“Professor, huh?” Roscoe said to the room. “Well, you about to become the student, and I be the teacher. Every day gonna be a new lesson, and then once a week, you’ll get to take a test and see what you learned. If you study hard, you might even live through the tests.”
ONE
“Professor,” asked Millie Bennett, “were there any specific causes of the Great Disaster that were directly relevant to the collapse of the United States of America? I mean, I know about the horrible economy and the prison overcrowding problem, those are established facts. What I'm wondering, though, is whether you have any idea about other primary causes of the collapse of the United States. Some writers claim that it was brought on primarily because of widespread conspiracy theories, where people believed that the government was being run by aliens or trying to enslave all the people. Do you agree?”
Carson Pace smiled at her as he stood at the lectern. At five foot nine with blond hair and blue eyes, he was one of the most popular professors at the university. “Millie, there were a number of causes, but it doesn't make any sense to believe that conspiracy theories, which most people didn't believe or accept at all, could really have had that much of an impact. There were plenty of real causes of economic and political collapse, and I can agree that the economy was in terrible shape. Millions of people were living below poverty level at a time when state governments were making it more and more difficult for people to qualify for any kind of assistance. That meant that people were watching their families go hungry, and it's interesting to note that a significant amount of minor crime was the direct result of these same people trying to find a way to put food on the table in front of their children.”