The air in the tent smelled of blood, sweat, and beer. A margarita vendor circulated through the stands, a ten-gallon plastic tank on his back with a hose and dispensing gun in hand, and twin holsters full of plastic cups on his hips. As the bouts passed, one by one, the crowd grew ever more raucous.
In the interval before the main event, a scuffle broke out in one of the opposite bleachers. Harsh words and shoving became clutching hands and torn collars, until finally two burly men were whaling on each other, scattering the people around them. Security rushed to the scene, tased them both, and dragged them outside.
The main event featured two heavyweights, and they started with long weapons: one a spear, and the other a trident. The trident man’s face was drawn from a horror novel. Gleaming titanium tusks, ten centimeters long, had been implanted in his jaw, with matching horns jutting from his brutish forehead. His face had been painted or tattooed scarlet, and the only thing that would have further completed the look was a forked tail. He wielded his trident with a vicious stabbing style that looked more dangerous than it actually was. The other fighter was one of the Good Guys, blond and wholesome, with gleaming breastplate and a smile like a toothpaste model. But he moved like a pit fighter, bore the determination of a pit fighter, and the way he handled his spear bore the marks of training in Japanese spear technique. A Knight and a Demon. Good versus Evil. A story to be told.
They thrust and swung and strained, batting away each other’s attacks, the Demon trying to snare his opponent’s weapon with the trident, the Knight swinging his bladed spear like an extra-long sword, slashing at the Demon’s face.
Cheers rose and fell. The trident pierced a calf. The spear slashed off two of the Demon’s gauntleted fingers. Blood flowed. Cheers exploded in a frenzy as the fighters attacked, straining at each other, muscle to muscle. Then Round One ended, and trainers rushed in to slap synth-skin bandages over gaping wounds, staunch blood flow, give the fighters a quick drink, and retrieve the Demon’s fingers.
The Demon snorted and spat blood. The Knight sweated and gritted his teeth.
When the horn sounded again, they launched themselves at each other with fresh ferocity. Another round of all-out slashing, straining, screaming mayhem drove the crowd to even greater heights of frenzy, shrieking themselves hoarse.
Horace felt it rising, that exquisite, juicy pulse, and yearned for it to be pouring into him.
When the second round ended, blood poured from between the Knight’s breastplate and backplate. The trident thrust had been too quick to see how deeply the point had gone, but the display screens replayed it over and over again between rounds. The Demon had gained advantage, but his strength had been spent. He could barely lift his weapon.
Pit girls circled inside the cage with their Round Three placards, wearing nothing but glitter and G-strings. The tumult of the crowd did not subside this time but continued to build with anticipation of the final round. The bleachers rocked with stomping feet. Three thousand fans sounded like ten thousand.
When the fighters went at each other again, the crowd thundered like crashing surf.
The Knight charged, using the spear shaft like a quarterstaff. Then suddenly he pulled the spear shaft apart, revealing a blade hidden in a secret sheath. The Knight stabbed the blade down into the Demon’s neck, just above the breastplate. The Demon roared and blood spurted. Then the Demon head-butted the Knight with his fearsome horns and tore a gruesome gash in the Knight’s face, from the bridge of his nose to the bottom of his jaw.
The two staggered away from each other. Blood-smeared teeth gleamed through the gash in the Knight’s cheek.
The crowd descended into screaming madness.
The Demon swung weakly at the Knight, but the Knight staggered back out of range. The Demon sank to his knees, blood pouring from his mouth. The Knight charged forward, and with a kick to the Demon’s chest, laid him flat on his back on the blood-spattered clay. Another kick sent the trident spinning away.
The Knight staggered, struggled to stay straight, but raised his arms to the crowd. In that moment of triumph, Horace saw something else in the Knight’s eyes: the hunger.
The Demon’s hands went limp.
Screaming with triumph, the Knight reached down and grabbed one of the Demon’s horns in one hand, clutching his spear in the other. He raised the spear, preparing to stab again, and turned to the crowd.
The crowd was chanting: “KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL!” Beer flew from outflung cups. In a crowd like this, comprised of mostly poor people, human life meant nothing because they viewed their own lives as worthless: a dollar a dozen, bought and paid for by the gross, by corporations whose sole purpose was the exploitation of resources. With their worthlessness proven to them over and over again, they believed it in their bones with the certainty of gravity. Watching enough blood spilled, they could begin to forget their cruel lot, the hand they were forced to play by circumstance of birth or the whims of luck. Being forced into indentured servitude in company towns across the Old Rust Belt was preferable to an axe in the guts—at least most days. What did that mean, then, for the fighters who gave them the blood they wanted?
The Knight milked the crowd for almost a minute, egging them on to greater frenzy, pantomiming a death thrust, taunting his barely conscious opponent.
In the wild light of the Knight’s eyes, Horace sensed the madness creeping from the crowd, seeping into what had been, up to now, a hard-fought, professional bout, a fair victory. In seconds, the Knight would turn from fighter into murderer, so drunk with the rush of blood and cheers and victory that he all he could think of was drinking more of the fire hose of rage and excitement, gulping it down, bathing in it.
“Don’t do it, kid,” Horace muttered where no one could hear but himself.
Then the Knight stabbed again into the Demon’s throat, through it, into the clay below, grinding back and forth through gristle and bone, slicing and tearing through spine, muscles, arteries. When he finished, the Demon’s head lay half-severed, blood fountaining out of the hideous injury.
Some people sat down, pale and sickened, while those around them continued their cheering rampage.
And then the Knight collapsed as well.
The crowd oscillated from shock and revulsion to bloodthirsty glee.
Medtechs rushed into the cage.
Horace crossed his arms and shook his head. Injuries like the Demon’s were almost impossible to regenerate. No one had yet successfully reattached a severed head, and there was little holding the Demon’s head to his body. It was in the minors like this that most deaths happened. Organizations like Death Match Unlimited couldn’t afford for their gods to fall. What had happened just now would get the victor kicked out of the major leagues for life. But not here. And for the Knight, he had broken the spell of the story, ruined the illusion. Heroes did not kill like that.
The announcer’s voice came over the speakers. “Resurrection Watch is now underway for Asmodeus! Have you ever seen an ending like that! Have you ever seen a finish like that! Regenecorp physicians are even now struggling to restore The Demon’s life.”
Above the crowd on the massive screens:
RESURRECTION WATCH: ODDS OF SUCCESSFUL RESURRECTION 1:98 AGAINST.
PLACE YOUR BETS NOW IN ACCOUNT DM99938732. BETTING WINDOW CLOSES IN 2:00.
The timer started counting down the seconds. Some of the crowd was already threading toward the exits, others madly texting into their netlinks.
With a sick taste in his mouth, Horace returned to the train.
Halfway there, his netlink buzzed in his pocket with a message from Jack, a simple news headline from the Las Vegas Gold Standard:
LOCAL DANCER AND TWO CHILDREN MISSING
CHAPTER TWELVE
Horace shuffled into the train in a daze, glancing over and over at the screen of his netlink. The only image in his mind was what men like the Russians would do to a woman like Lilly; the scars, both physical and mental, they would take
glee in inflicting. Her two children, tossed into a shipping container and locked in the dark until they died of thirst. And all to take revenge on Horace, whom the children had never even met.
He kept muttering “sonofabitch, sonofabitch” over and over.
He entered his berth and slammed the door behind him.
What could he do? What could he do?
Call them right now?
No, not yet. He had to know whether the Russians had her. First he had to know.
A second after he slammed the door of his berth behind him, he whisked it open again and dashed out, almost tripping over Tina, who was returning to her own berth. Sensing a middle finger extend behind him, he ignored it like a charging rhinoceros.
His hand was quivering like a leaf when he knocked on Bunny’s compartment door and went inside without listening for a response. She reclined in a chair, her eyes fluttering over internal readouts and menus he could not see.
After a few moments, she levered herself up on an elbow. “Who the—oh, Mr. Harkness. Am I going to have to start locking my door?”
He held up the netlink she had given him. “Is this thing untraceable? Untrackable?”
“I told you it was.”
“Because I’m just about to call fucking Satan himself. If I do, can he trace it back here? Can he trace it back here?”
“I would say no. Well, probably not.”
“Goddammit! Can he or can’t he?”
“Look, Mr. Harkness, in the slicing business, there are no absolutes, or if there are, they last about a week until someone finds a workaround. It’s a constant arms race, a playing field that changes from minute to minute. I cannot guarantee that Satan doesn’t have some hotshot slicer who can put me to shame. But like I told you, it’s running on a pirated piggyback signal, which takes world-class slicers to trace, and even then it takes time.”
“How much time?”
“I could not say. A minute? Maybe two?”
“Are you willing to bet your life on that?”
She swallowed hard, took a deep breath. “Yes.”
“Can you put an app on here that watchdogs spybots? Lets me know if they’re getting close?”
She nodded. “It’ll take me until tomorrow to put together.”
“If I’m still alive in the morning, I would appreciate it, sister.”
He returned to his berth, his fingers stroking the netlink’s smooth contours in his pocket. Lilly’s voice kept echoing through his head:
Hammer, I wasn’t very nice the last time I saw you, and I’m sorry.
Call me.
We should stop pretending.
He called Dmitri’s number. Dmitri was in the grave by now, but they would have held on to his netlink.
On the fifth chime, someone answered on audio only and rumbled something in guttural Russian.
Horace said, “This is Hammer. I want to speak to Yvgeny Mogilevich. Right fucking now.”
The audio went muffled.
The next voice spewed Russian invective.
“Save it, fuck face,” Horace said. “You’re not going to scare me.”
“You got a lot of fucking balls, Hammer,” the voice said, but it was not a compliment.
“What do you want from me?” Horace said.
“Simple. I want your balls stuffed in your mouth and your head over my fucking fireplace. Nothing less will satisfy me. The question is not, you live or die, but how you die. And who dies with you. She is very beautiful. I see why you like her. We are not cutting yet.”
“Let her go!”
The voice laughed. “Predictable. I start cutting and send you some nice video. You come to me then?”
“Let me talk to her.”
“You don’t give me orders. I give them to you. You come back to Vegas. You come to me. I kill you with pliers and blow torch, feed you to my dogs. But I let your whore and her kids go. You don’t come, maybe I start on boy first, turn him into girl.”
“Let me talk to her.”
“You come back to Vegas by tomorrow night, I don’t start cutting.”
Horace glanced at the connection timer, which was rapidly approaching two minutes, and disconnected.
For a while he sat there drowning in helplessness and impotent rage, squeezing the netlink until the plastic started to creak. He put it down and clutched his hands.
He was not cut out for this. He was not a secret agent or an action-film hero. He was just a palooka who knew how to put on a good show. How could he hope to go into the monsters’ very lair, save not only Lilly but also her kids, and kill Yvgeny Mogilevich? Then again, how could he be sure they actually had Lilly? She may have decided to disappear at Horace’s advice. The Russians knew Horace cared about her. Of course they would say they had her, anything to get him to give himself over to them. How could he be sure? He couldn’t, unless he saw her or heard her voice.
A string of profanity slow-dripped from his lips.
Life was so much simpler when he had nobody to worry about but himself, when he was responsible for no one but himself. But at the same time, perhaps part of him had been waiting his whole life for someone to fight for, to protect. In this case, however, she hadn’t wanted his protection, hadn’t wanted him to fight for her, had turned him a chilled shoulder at every turn of her high heel. Except once, that little glimmer that sat there in the corner of his head like an ember that wouldn’t go out.
We should stop pretending.
Call me.
“Knock knock,” came a sultry voice from the door.
He hadn’t closed it.
Jocie stood in the doorway wearing a silk robe, this one so white and sheer that the dark circles of her nipples shone through, small and delicate and upright. Long, lithe legs went all the way up and disappeared just barely in time.
He stood up. “Now is not a good time.”
She stepped inside and closed the door behind her. “When would be a good time?”
“How about when you don’t belong to somebody else?”
“I don’t belong to anybody,” she said breezily.
“I think Lex would beg to differ.”
She shrugged. “He’s already asleep. The night is too young for some people.” She had a body fit for sculpture and oil painting. Trouble was, she knew it. A long finger slid between the white silken folds, parting them ever so slightly to bare the flesh all the way to her belly button.
He was ill-prepared to guess whether there was any other scrap of garment at all under there. “So what is it, the sex or the drama that gets you off?”
She scowled and crossed her arms.
“If you weren’t married to a stone-cold killer, I’d throw you down on this bed, turn your world inside out, and send you packing in the morning.”
She scoffed. “You’re afraid of him!”
“Not even a little bit. I’ve seen a hundred just like him rise and fall. Most of them got back up again. And I’ve seen more just like you. Here’s the thing: I got my own drama to contend with. There’s no pussy in the world worth the drama you’re toting around.”
Anger flared in her eyes, and the smooth planes of her cheeks flushed red.
He stepped toward her and started herding her toward the door. “Goodnight, Jocie.”
Her anger subsided into a petulant pout, and the robe came open just enough to reveal that she was, in fact, naked underneath. But she held her ground inside his room. “Goddamn, can’t a girl have any fun? You can’t even give her a drink?”
“I got nothing to drink. Good night, Jocie.” He took her by the shoulders, intending to gently guide her toward the door, but she stumbled somehow and fell. Her head struck the edge of the door, and she went down the rest of the way with a further cry of pain.
He reached down to help her, and she screeched, “Don’t you fucking touch me!”
Her voice echoed down the hallway.
She elbowed herself up and felt gingerly over her head and face. “Get the fuck away from me!
”
He stepped back.
Tina’s voice came into the hallway, “What the hell—?”
“He tried to hurt me!” Jocie cried.
Tina knelt in the hallway and helped Jocie to her feet.
Lex’s voice boomed in the hallway. “What the fuck!”
Horace turned the moment over and over in his mind. He was strong as an elephant but had long mastered the excess, especially around women a third of his mass. She had all the grace and body control of a trained dancer. There was no way she just “stumbled.” But as heavy footsteps thumped down the hall, there was nothing he could say that would make any difference in what happened next.
“Baby, are you okay?” Lex growled as he looked past her at Horace.
“He tried to hurt me, baby,” Jocie said.
A blip of logic never once crossed Lex’s face, not a single thought about why his wife was already in Horace’s room, all but naked. He charged into the room with murder in his eyes, bowling Jocie and Tina over.
Horace clenched his iron-hard fists and met him. He caught Lex’s first blows on each arm, and countered with a knee to the gut that luffed Lex’s sails. But Lex came back with a flurry of strikes and blocks, almost kung-fu style, driving Horace back until they crashed onto the Murphy bed. The bed had no choice but to succumb to three hundred kilos of straining muscle. Amid wood splintering and a shriek of protesting metal, it collapsed.
Fists rained down onto Hammer’s head.
Lex had his own biological weapons, spiky bone protrusions that emerged when he clenched his fists. The spikes tore gouges in Horace’s cheek and skull. Blood flowed into his ear. His mixed martial arts training took over and he heaved Lex up, sliding, writhing, and finally flinging the other man to the side in a wrestling-style reversal.
Tina was in the hallway yelling. Her jackboots retreated down the hallway.
Jocie was giggling.
Horace turned his own massive, hardened fists against Lex, hammering his skull, his back.
Using his own shoulder as a fulcrum, Lex executed a perfect jujitsu throw, snatching Horace’s arm and levering him. Horace’s feet went high and slammed into the wall in the cramped compartment, and the rest of him crashed onto his back, hard, the remains of the bed frame jamming into his spine.
The Hammer Falls Page 12