“Yeah. I have a son. A daughter, too.”
“Wow.”
“Look, it’s not something you tell customers, you know? But I’m not at work now and—”
“No, it’s not that.” His chest felt like Gaston had just punched him again. He hoped she didn’t hear the weakness in his voice. “How old is he?”
She hesitated.
“Come on, tell me about him.”
“He’s thirteen. And he’s the most awesome kid, and...I don’t know, I...I’ve been there with him for four days solid, and I’m just so tired and...Cassie is staying with my mom, but...I’m just so tired. And I’m scared. And you don’t want to hear this shit from me and—”
“Lilly.”
“—got your big comeback and—”
“Lilly. What’s his name?”
“His name? His name is James. Jimmy.”
“What’s the problem with him?”
“I...I can’t even say it. Something with his bones. He got in a fight at school, and some kid broke his arm in three places, and they found something with his bones. It’s like they’re soft or something, not enough calcium. Before he was born I couldn’t afford the gene tests and—”
“He’s gonna be okay though, right?” Through the silence for five labored heartbeats, ten, her face slowly collapsed, eyes squeezing shut. “Aw, darlin’.” He sighed and reached out to put his arm around her.
She sniffled it away. “I gotta go. I’m sorry. You take care of yourself.” She spun and walked off across the concrete.
“Hey, wait! Listen!”
She kept going, shaking her head.
He scanned the limousines again, half-expecting a Russian to jump out and nab her. Picking her up and carrying her inside for her own safety wouldn’t work. Eventually she disappeared around the corner of the coliseum.
CHAPTER THREE
Heading down the hallway toward his dressing room, clenching his fists, he stomped hard enough to crack floor tiles. He rounded a corner as the Fight Doctor came out of Gaston’s dressing room. The Fight Doctor looked like a cat caught with a paw in the birdcage.
Horace flipped him the bird.
The Fight Doctor spun and hurried away.
Horace stopped and watched him go. What the hell was that all about? It was well past time for the pre-fight checks.
The intercom dinged and called out the fighters for the sixth bout.
Fuck, he still had to finish prepping, so he hurried to his dressing room. Standing at the mirror in his dressing room, he was shaving the last of the salt-and-pepper stubble from his skull when the screen announced that The Wrecker had successfully resurrected.
“Good boy.”
The camera flicked around to happy faces everywhere, and applause rippled through the crowd, except those who had bet against it.
Horace stretched and paced and swung his arms. They felt so heavy, and not just from the thick slabs of muscle he’d spent decades and hundreds of thousands of dollars building. The minutes ticked by. He watched bits of the matches. The fighters ground through battle after battle.
“No, kid, you’re telegraphing the spot,” he said. “You gotta make it look natural.”
“Are you gonna fall for that head-fake again?”
Pummeling, slashing, gouging, hacking, roaring their gore-spattered triumphs and screaming their agonies to the chorused thunder of the crowd.
“Oooo, didn’t see that razor-whip coming.”
“Watch the upper cut with that spiked gauntlet.”
His advice fell only upon the deaf ears of the 3-D screen.
Maybe Gaston had the right idea. Maybe Horace would take him up on his offer—if he survived tonight. He could teach the next generation about not only how to kill and not be killed, but also how to feed the crowd what they wanted and let the crowd feed it back.
It was a skill the great ones had. A great fighter could walk out there and suck up the vibration of the crowd like a man thirsting in the desert, take that energy, manipulate it, make the crowd feel it, take them up, take them up still further into a frenzy of roaring bloodlust. It was how stars were made.
The dressing room PA dinged, followed by the pit captain’s voice, “Hammer to Tunnel One. Freak to Tunnel Two.”
Horace took a deep breath and let it out. He pulled out his netlink again and thumbed an icon. Jack McTierney’s face appeared on the screen. He hoped Jack was home watching the show, not drunk in a strip club somewhere. Private investigator friends could be useful in a lot of ways. It was time to call in one last favor.
All that remained of his life now was one last supercharge of Go Juice and the tunnel walk.
The Hammer walked alone down the concrete tunnel toward the rising wall of sound. He stopped behind the black-and-crimson curtain emblazoned with the Death Match Unlimited logo, and he heard it begin. His theme song. He breathed deep and let it wash through him.
The opening guitar riff of “Thunderstruck” tore through the Coliseum. He liked the old AC/DC version better, but the bigwigs had commissioned the cover by Death Tread. Rock n’ roll wasn’t just great-grandpa’s music anymore.
The crowd came alive.
He counted the seconds, waiting for his moment.
The music rose, then exploded. “THUN-DER!”
He charged through the curtain.
The crowd went wild.
He threw his arms high as he strode down the long ramp toward the pit.
“THUN-DER!”
A forest of hands reached toward him and he touched every single one, smiling, shaking, meeting their eyes as if they were long-lost friends. A lump formed in his throat.
“THUN-DER!”
There was no drug, no sex, no experience that compared to the juice generated by seventy-thousand fans screaming his name.
“THUN-DER!”
The energy of the crowd washed over him, and every pain and sorrow he had ever felt in his life disappeared in the tumult. His knees were made of steel, his back rod-straight, his shoulders well-oiled pistons. His tattoos burned blue.
“THUN-DER!”
The drums sounded like twin cannons. On the screens, his face blazed forty feet high.
“THUN-DER!”
Fans chanted “Hammer Time!” and raised their hands into the Thunder Hammer. Two young women flashed their breasts as he passed. Three boys nearby saw this, cheered, and flashed theirs too.
“THUN-DER!”
Pyrotechnics blazed and crackled in time with the music, in time with his footsteps, in time with his heartbeat.
“THUN-DER!”
He strode through the gate into the pit, returning the Thunder Hammer to the crowd. Regenecorp and other sponsorship logos stippled the blood-stained floor of black chain-link octagon.
“THUN-DER!”
He threw back his head and roared into the searchlight-dappled sky. Shotgun microphones caught his voice and amplified it to the voice of a god. Throughout the multitudes, netshades fixed on him, drank in the image of him, catching stills and short clips, and enhancing the real events with data and stories from his past, fight records, trivia. The social media networks, he knew, were gushing with images of him.
“THUN-DER!”
The announcer’s deep tones bellowed over the noise of the crowd. “And now, our main event of the evening. In the red corner, hailing from the independent city of Las Vegas, weighing in at 168.7 kilos, standing 210.4 centimeters, with a record of 287 victories, 192 confirmed kills, 78 losses, and 27 resurrections, Hooorrrr-uuuus THE HAM-MER HAAAARK-NEEEESSSSS!”
As the stadium exploded into frenzy around him, he knelt, humbly, in the center of the pit, and let it fill him. He took a long deep breath, then another. The floor here was pale, dry clay, soaked and splattered with the blood and fluids of eighteen other men. He ran his fingers through the coarse powder. The air smelled of earth and ozone, blood and sweat, a touch of urine from the evacuated bladders of slain fighters.
He wondered if Amanda would be waiting for hi
m, assuming there was actually a fucking white light to be found at the end of all this bullshit, along with the son he had never met. He thought about Lilly and the dozens of times she’d writhed naked in his lap under neon bar lights, never once exposing herself.
He knelt there until Gaston’s thick-laced, black boots kicked up puffs of dust in his field of vision.
While the announcer called out Gaston’s statistics, Gaston paid his homage to the fans with his Freak Dance, which looked like nothing Horace had seen anywhere else: part rooster, part gorilla, part Shaolin monk.
When it was over, Horace met Gaston’s gaze. The friendly camaraderie was gone; now there was only ferocity and determination. There was a lot of money at stake.
Horace smiled grimly. “Let’s get it on, stubby.”
“Bring it, cupcake,” Gaston said, but before they turned away, Horace caught a strange look in his eye.
The pit gate swung closed, and a horn blared through the stadium at 180 decibels, initiating Round One.
The two fighters lunged at each other. Without weapons, Horace had the advantage of longer reach and fists augmented with hardened plates, the perfect biological hammers, but Gaston was too smart to come into range of those weapons. The Freak’s style was to bounce and dart and roll, always striking from surprise and misdirection. Horace had a few tricks of his own, but his style was to charge in headlong, absorb what damage he needed to until he pummeled his opponents into paste.
They feinted and struck, lunged and blocked. Two minutes in, Horace’s breath was growing ragged, and he could feel his heart laboring even through the veil of Go Juice. Round One was just for feeling the opponent out, wearing him down. They were both heavily armored, and besides, it was bad form for the main event to end too quickly. Neither of them was even close to done with this crowd.
His lungs began to burn, and he started counting the seconds to the end of the round. Gaston was giving him no quarter. The Freak had thirty years of pit experience, too, plus a healthy ticker. Fists and spiked boots came at him, but Horace gave it back. Twice his fists fell like piledrivers, smashing Gaston to the earth, and only Gaston’s nimbleness kept him out of Horace’s deadly grasp.
Finally the horn sounded, and Horace staggered to his corner, gasping, spasms of pain shooting through his left shoulder. A trainer swabbed the blood from his face, applied styptics to the cuts, and poured water and electrolytes into his mouth. A bevy of pit girls carried the next round’s weapons into the ring and presented them: Horace’s vibro-cleaver and Gaston’s kukri. Another brought out the platter-sized bucklers painted with each fighter’s personal logo.
Horace took the electrolyte bottle from the trainer’s hand and guzzled it. The next horn was going to come far too soon. The strength began to drain out of his knees.
“You okay, Hammer?” the trainer asked blithely.
“Peachy.”
The horn sounded.
Horace picked up the buckler in his left hand and the vibro-cleaver in his right. He snapped the cleaver’s switch. The ultrasonic vibrations would have turned any dog within a hundred meters into a whimpering wreck, but Horace just felt a faint buzz. The weapon’s edge was now a molecular-scale electric carving knife, capable, with sufficient effort, of splitting ceramic armor, to say nothing of going through flesh and bone like cotton candy.
Horace met the coiled knot of straining muscle in the middle of the pit, swinging, blocking, dodging, hacking. The crowd surged and cheered with each blow. The clang of metal echoed with the fans. Gaston’s kukri licked and slashed. Horace swung the cleaver, but each blow went further and further astray. He met Gaston’s gaze, and the ferocity in The Freak’s eyes softened.
Horace swore something vile at him and redoubled his attack, but it was no good. He missed, badly, and flung himself off balance.
This was it. Against an opponent like Gaston, this was an ender.
Gaston’s boot glanced off the back of Horace’s head. Horace sprawled onto his face, his vision going dark. He blindly swung the edge of his buckler behind him and followed with the cleaver, but Gaston was not there. Horace’s vision returned just in time for what felt like a hairy tree trunk to encircle his neck from behind.
His hand weapons skittered onto the clay as he grabbed Gaston’s chokehold with both fists to prevent Gaston from snapping his neck. Attacking the chokehold with the vibro-cleaver put him in peril of slicing half his own face off.
A sputtering surge of strength, and he was able to face his opponent. They went down onto the earth, straining, grunting, gasping. The reversal had been too easy.
Then he was able to get the fingers of his left hand into the crease at the top of Gaston’s breastplate.
Horace’s right-hand squeezed Gaston’s carotid artery, and Gaston’s fingers dug into Horace’s trachea.
Their eyes met.
Gaston nodded almost imperceptibly, his face turning purple. He knew about the blade in Horace’s bracer. As this sank into Horace’s addled brain, his grip must have slackened, giving Gaston an opening to punch him in the ear, hard. Adrenaline surged.
They clinched again, straining.
Horace touched a pad on his left bracer. The punch-dagger sprang out and speared up into Gaston’s throat, through his tongue and palate and up into his medulla oblongata. His eyes spasmed in different directions, and his body went as limp as a chunk of sirloin.
A lump of sadness choked off the rest of Horace’s breath and he collapsed onto the pit floor on top of his friend. It was never easy. Never.
The crowd went berserk in a tumult of noise.
The Fight Judge came into the ring to help Horace to his feet, and the medical techs whisked in to cart Gaston away for Resurrection Watch. Horace sagged against the Fight Judge, raising his good arm to the crowd, basking in the chant of “Ham-mer! Ham-mer!”
By god, he was going to walk out of here.
The announcer’s booming voice proclaimed him the victor, but he could hardly hear it through the roaring in his ears.
He collapsed halfway to the dressing room.
Horace awoke slowly to the sounds he knew so well. Biometrics, respirators, all beeping and whooshing and cold. He pulled aside the oxygen mask and looked around. Gaston lay on a bed nearby.
He was breathing.
A sigh of relief washed out of Horace’s chest, and he wiped his face with a heavy hand. The contusions Gaston had given him had healed. He stood up, testing his own weight. The clock on the wall told him he’d been unconscious for about an hour. After this length of time, the regenites had already repaired Gaston’s nervous system. The bone would take longer. He would be on soft food for a few days.
Horace stood over him, laying a hand on his chest. An oxygen mask covered Gaston’s face, and all the tubes from the treatment were still attached like octopus tentacles.
A flood of anger washed through him. Anger and shame. After all he’d done, all the training, all the doping, all the hardship and discipline, all the money he had borrowed from the wrong people—for which he must soon answer—Gaston had beaten him. Hands down. They both knew it. And they always would.
And worse, Gaston had given Horace the victory. In all his years, he had never taken charity from anyone. He was the fucking Hammer. The Hammer did for himself. He didn’t need anyone.
What gave Gaston the right to just do that?
How the hell could The Hammer stage a Big Comeback and have it just handed to him? He hadn’t earned it.
And now he knew the truth: he really, truly did not have the juice anymore.
Gaston’s eyes fluttered open. A gravelly ghost of a voice, thick from the injuries to his mouth, said, “Now there’s...the ugliest motherfucker...”
“Why’d you do it?”
“Talked to Fight Doctor... Told me...about your heart.”
“You got kids for Chrissakes!”
“Can’t work for me...if you’re fucking dead, eh, dumbass....”
Horace cracked a half smi
le, but it felt false. “Like I would work for a stubby fucker like you.”
But Gaston had faded away again.
Horace wobbled back to his dressing room, his stomach a sick morass that had nothing to do with injuries. He had won. He was a rich man. But he had to find Dmitri. Back in his dressing room, he gathered up his equipment.
His netlink pinged a waiting message from Jack:
FOUND THE KID. WASNT TO HARD. THEY GOIN 2 DSCHRGE HIM 2MRW WITH NO TREATMENT.
At the end of the message was a large dollar figure, almost as much as what Horace had earned tonight.
“Fuck!” His heart fell to somewhere near his feet. He sat down on the prep table and rested his forehead in his hands. “Fuck.”
A long black limousine hovered near the rear entrance. He walked up to it, each step feeling like he had just run ten miles. The weight of what he had just done dragged at his feet as if he were walking to the gallows.
There would be no coming back this time.
A man got out of the limousine, an ex-pit fighter almost as big as Horace.
Horace said, “Hey, you Joey Luca?”
The man nodded grimly and shoved Horace up against the car, frisking him for weapons.
“What, you don’t trust me?”
When Luca was satisfied, the door opened and Dmitri’s voice wafted out with a cloud of marijuana smoke. “Get in.”
Horace squeezed in and sat across from him and two of the pit girls from the show.
One of them had her hand in Dmitri’s unbuttoned pants. “Hey, Hammer,” she purred.
Luca shouldered in beside him, a hulking mass like a planetoid, complete with its own gravitational field.
“Hell of a fight, Hammer,” Dmitri said, blowing another lungful of smoke. “Didn’t think you’d show.”
“Told you I would.” Horace’s brain whirled, spun, cranked, tightened like a spring waiting to explode.
“Maybe now we don’t have to put pieces of you and Daisy in a barrel under the new stadium. Business is so much easier when everyone does what they’re supposed to.”
“I’ve never been much for ‘supposed to.’ Wouldn’t be here if I had.”
Dmitri smiled like a crocodile and shifted in his seat while the pit girl’s hand shifted in his crotch. He cried out in sudden pain and backhanded her across the nose. She cried out and cowered away from him. “Stupid sow! Trim your fucking nails!” Blubbering sobs muffled her reply as she dabbed at a spot of blood under one nostril.
The Hammer Falls Page 3