The Hammer Falls Page 8

  He elbowed himself up into a sitting position. “Lady, looks to me like you got a mind to fuck my brains out.”

  “Is that so? Aren’t you a little full of yourself?” A small mouth quirked a half grin.

  “Introductions aren’t usually made in the buff.”

  “I’m not in the buff.” She sat down on the bed with the strong, smooth grace possessed only by bodies honed for decades. A swath of silky thigh lay revealed all the way to the crease of her hip. Her face was a little too angular to be beautiful, her eyes a little too sharp to be warm, but there was no question about the temperature of other parts.

  “You sure as hell are buff under there,” he said.

  “Well, we’re used to our bodies on display, aren’t we, people like us. Our bodies are our livelihood, aren’t they? Meat for the masses.” The lean of her shoulder accentuated one flawless breast and mostly exposed the other one. “And some of us have more to offer than others.”

  He hadn’t gotten laid in months, training hard for his bout with Gaston. There just hadn’t been time. Not that he hadn’t tried to coax Lilly into the sack, but that had gone strangely awry. Now, this Jocie, he couldn’t take his eyes off her, and neither could his dick. It started to thicken against his leg. He sat up and threw his feet over the side of the bed.

  “Look—” he began.

  Then a knock came at the door. “Hey, Jocasta, you in there?” Tina’s voice, strangely emphasizing the name.

  Jocie’s eyes narrowed. “What do you want?”

  “I heard Lex is looking for you.”

  Jocie called back, “Tell him to keep fucking looking and mind your own business!”

  The door cracked open and Tina’s face appeared. “Wow, you work fast. Come to think of it, Jocasta, we just passed a dumpster that would be perfect for you to suck cock behind.”

  Jocie jumped to her feet, pulling her robe tighter around her. “You are such a fucking...urchin! I’ll bet you know all the dumpsters!”

  Horace watched this interplay with growing amusement.

  “Besides,” Tina said, “you don’t wanna fuck this guy. He’s so old, his heart’s liable to explode.” She made an explosive gesture with her fingers. “Coitus interruptus.” She faced out into the hallway. “Oh, I think I hear Lex coming now.”

  Without ruffling another feather, Jocie turned to Horace. “Perhaps we can have a private conversation sometime soon.”

  Tina slid the door open for her. Jocie breezed from the room without another look at Tina. Tina slid into the room, closed the door behind her, and faced Horace squarely. The beginnings of his hard-on melted away, and he picked up his towel and wrapped himself in it.

  “What, are you suddenly shy now?” she said. “Old school coming out?”

  “You’re starting to piss me off, little girl.”

  Her brow furrowed. “Fuck you, Humbert. You don’t want any piece of that.” She thumbed over her shoulder. “I was just saving you more drama than you need.”

  “Who’s Lex?”

  “The sawmill sound down the hall. Her husband. He’s been Trask’s number one for the last six months, and he flaunts it around this place like he’s the Second Coming. I call her Octopussy. She doesn’t have nearly as many orifices as she wants.”

  “And how does Lex feel about this?”

  “He likes having the hottest woman on the train, but he’s too dense to realize he’s in what you might call an open relationship. Plus he’s mean and thinks he’s on the way up. Challenging Hammer Harkness might be just the ticket he’s looking for.”

  Horace nodded, but Jocie was hardly the hottest woman on this train. And something had felt nonkosher for a reason. “Thanks for the heads-up, kid. I appreciate it. But don’t ever just walk into my room again. For your own safety.”

  “You’re welcome. But don’t ever call me kid again. For your own safety.”

  “Deal.”

  “Deal.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Horace slept the sleep of someone six-months-in-the-ground. If he hadn’t been in a locked room, he might have had to fight off buzzards trying to eat his liver.

  The road train lay quiet, stationary, the power plant spooled down. Traffic noises and sunlight filtered through the blinds he didn’t remember closing.

  His shoulder seethed with a burning ache. In retrospect, having the paramedic stitch him up might not have been the wisest course of action. If any bits of clothing remained inside the wound, he was in for a screaming infection and might end up in the hospital anyway.

  He pulled out his other set of clothes and got dressed. The sleeve of his leather jacket was, as predicted, stiff with dried blood, so he left it off. Sighing at the loss, he looked at himself in the mirror and considered raking a razor across his skull, then decided it would be best to let his hair and beard grow out and obscure his tattoos.

  Midmorning sunlight painted rails on the bed. Through the open window wafted the smell of...breakfast. Bacon, eggs, toast, sausage, a glorious explosion of smoked meat and grease. What an incredible luxury, that much real meat. Just what his heart needed. He peeked outside.

  A brown field stretched into the distance, a failed crop of something that had withered to ankle-high. A huge billboard beside the field read “PROPERTY OF AGRIMAX.”

  Around the road train at this roadside picnic stop, a smattering of other vehicles, mainly transports, lay quiescent. Across the field on a gravel road, a horse trotted along ahead of an Amish carriage.

  The train’s second car opened into a broad awning sheltering several retractable picnic tables where a couple dozen people sat at breakfast. A broad grill belched swirls of steam and smoke, with a short, stocky brunette working it like an Olympic short-order cook.

  When Horace approached the tables, heads turned. “Morning,” he said.

  Some of them returned the gesture, others simply nodded. Seated beside a man almost as large as Horace, Jocie’s flinty eyes slithered up and down his body as she smiled at him. The man beside her let the surprise on his face hang out like a flasher’s genitalia. He leaned over and said to her, “What the fuck is Hammer Harkness doing here?”

  Jocie whispered back, “He got on board last night, sweetie. Now don’t be rude.”

  Trask stood up and gestured Horace over. Horace joined him.

  Trask said to the woman doing the cooking, “Bunny, a plate for our new guest.”

  The woman turned around, drank Horace in with one glance, and grinned. Black jack-ins embedded behind each ear peeked through shoulder-cut, mousy brown hair. She looked like the middle-aged-spinster-cat-lady-next-door, but she had a kind smile and eyes that glinted with strange lights.

  She scooped a huge mound of scrambled eggs out of an enormous, cast-iron skillet, loaded him up with at least ten slices of thick-cut bacon that smelled maple-cured, and four pieces of thick, multi-grain toast slathered in butter. “I’m Bunny,” she said. “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Harkness.”

  “Horace. My friends call me Hark.” He offered his free hand, and she shook it.

  “My god,” she said, marveling at Horace’s hands and forearms. “Are those real?”

  “They’re not cybernetics, if that’s what you’re asking,” Horace said. He knocked on his forearm with an equally hard knuckle. “Gene mods.”

  She blinked once, eyes going blank for a split second, then focused on him again. “Ah, Horace The Hammer Harkness.”

  “One and the same.”

  “I get it now. The Thunder Hammer.”

  “My signature move.”

  “You’ll have to forgive my momentary ignorance,” she said. “I just drive the train.”

  She had strong hands, firm hands, tattoos across her knuckles, and she held onto his just a little too long. He winked at her. She blushed and turned back toward the grill, giving him a better look at the hardware behind her ears.

  Trask wiped his mouth with a linen napkin. “Bunny’s what you might call our engineer.”

&
nbsp; Bunny’s eyes flickered as if reading something only she could see, and her ears flushed pink. “Impressive record, Mr. Harkness. And that Maximus photo spread. Ooo la la.”

  For a moment Horace wondered how she suddenly knew about the twenty-year-old promo spread of him flexing with and without a Speedo... “Ah, implants,” he said, a smile of understanding spreading across his face. “At least you picked the good ones.”

  “The net never forgets,” she said with a sly little smile.

  Horace sat down at the table with Trask and happened to catch Tina’s eye at the corner of the far table, chomping on a piece of bacon like she had a tapeworm.

  “Whuh?” she said with her mouth full.

  Trask sipped steaming coffee from a cracked porcelain cup.

  Horace took it all in, and it all felt familiar, comfortable. Like hanging out with a large extended family, complete with internecine dramas, friendships, stories, passions, and even, he suspected, enemies. “You’ve got a good operation here, Mr. Trask.”

  Bunny brought him a cup and offered to pour. He accepted it with thanks.

  A pair of hot eyes awled into him, and he caught Jocie’s husband staring at him. Horace eased back, narrowed his eyes, and held the gaze, for several seconds, for half a minute, for a minute, each passing second stoking the fire of challenge in the other man’s gaze. Finally Horace winked at him, and the man looked away with a scowl.

  Horace stood up and addressed the tables. “Time to cut through a little bullshit before it gets too deep. You all know who I am. Mr. Trask here was nice enough to let me travel with you for a while. But I don’t have any plans to get back in the pit anytime soon. I’m not after anyone’s bunk.” Several of the other fighters relaxed a bit at this. “I’ve worked the minors and outfits like this one for years. Anybody looking for a light sparring partner, you just got to ask.”

  “Mighty big of you,” Jocie’s husband grumbled.

  “Lex!” Trask said, “Show a little respect.”

  Lex stood, fists on the tabletop. “To what? A half-eaten piece of meat?” He stepped away from the table, snatched Jocie’s arm, and dragged her after him. She stumbled and protested, trying to pry his fingers loose, but had no choice but to follow.

  “Who shit on his toothbrush?” someone mumbled after Lex and Jocie had gone. Laughter rippled around the tables.

  Trask put his hands on his hips and surveyed his fighters. “You all know The Hammer here. And you all got a lot of potential. You are all supreme badasses in training. But they call our outfit the minors for a reason. Hammer here, he’s going to show you how to make the big time. You gotta learn to work the crowd. You gotta learn showmanship. Be the difference between a neighborhood butcher and an all-star chef with his own show.”

  Horace said, “I’m here to help you fellas out.”

  Several of the fighters nodded with appreciation.

  Trask said, “Right, then. First class starts in the gym in two hours.”

  Horace’s eyes bulged.

  An endless ribbon of concrete spooled out behind the road train. Even though it was designed to travel long distances without a break, the next few days were slated to be one stop after another. Half a day in each of several cities, Toledo, Cleveland, Buffalo, and finally Albany, where a full card of matches was scheduled in a local arena, Trask’s fighters versus another stable calling themselves the Death Dealers.

  This East Coast circuit was unfamiliar to Horace. He had spent most of his career in the west and bouncing around the Pacific Rim, so he didn’t recognize any of the names from either of these stables. Such was the minors.

  He lay in his berth thinking about what he could possibly teach these guys. He racked his brain, but exhaustion lay over him like a lead apron. In his early years, a number of mentors had dealt out their wisdom from the ranks of pro wrestling and MMA leagues. Pit fighting had been a unique fusion of those sports with the advent of regeneration technology. They had all made it up as they went, the fighters, the promoters.

  Horace listened to his heart beating, wondering when it might run down like an antique grandfather clock. A little catch in the gears and he would just...stop. He had stopped before, twenty-seven times—from blades, axes, trauma, blood loss—like going to sleep, but there wasn’t any dreaming. And the waking up was like being dragged out of a box full of nails scraping across his mind, harsh and cold and then there he was, back among the living, with billions of programmed molecular-scale protein machines teeming through his body, rebuilding him with flawless precision, better than his body could rebuild itself.

  But after last night, it was like he had fallen into a deep, black funk that could not be assuaged. The sound of Thea Striker’s wounded screams echoed in the coliseum tunnels of his memory. A sense of lonesomeness washed over him, like a man stuck in the middle of a freezing river with a mile to either bank, adrift in a current he could not see. His whole life, he’d been a man who clutched his destiny in both fists, but this sense of being not only adrift, but relying on the help of others, and moreover, putting those others in jeopardy, scared him more than any pit fighter with a vibro-axe. With the price on his head, he felt like a grenade ready to go off in somebody else’s lap.

  When moods hit him like this, his first impulse was usually to go find the closest strip club. And that was where he’d met Lilly, her enormous brown eyes like those of a doe. Her smell, the feel of her skin, her high, firm breasts like half grapefruits, her ass grinding on him and the hot crucible nestled between taut buttocks, and then that one flabbergasting night that had set him all but off the rails. The aching almostness of it. His list of sexual notches was high-powered and well into the triple digits, but he had never made a serious run at a stripper. Jack had once warned him from his own experience: You think after spending hours having to give a bunch of yay-hoos their little thrills, she’s gonna want to come home and do anything for you, amigo?

  But he hadn’t felt that kind of real spark since Amanda. She had disappeared so completely that her absence left an echo shaped like her in his life, an echo so profound her name felt hallowed. Only two women had ever truly touched him. One was alive—as far as he knew—and the other was dead—as far as he knew.

  Maybe he just needed to get laid. In the light of day and the knowledge of her entanglements, putting Jocie’s ankles up around his ears didn’t seem like nearly as attractive a diversion as it had last night. Lex was a killer, no question—not that Horace feared him even a little—but a guy like that was prone to rampage, and when a guy like that lost control, even bystanders got hurt.

  In light of that, along with the fact that Horace’s impulse to bed every buxom female in sight had diminished somewhat by the time the Big Five-O arrived, he thought it best to keep it in his pants when she was around.

  He climbed out of bed with a snort of profanity.

  Out in the hallway, he passed Tina’s open door, where she sat in her berth with her sneakers up against the window, reading an old-fashioned paper book. Today, she looked like a polka-dot rainbow had exploded, complete with glittering holograms of shifting star fields on her clothes that moved as her body shifted.

  Without turning, she said “Ready for your seminar, Spartacus?”

  “Going stir crazy thinking about it. Needed to stretch my legs.” Then he saw the old holo-poster on Tina’s wall. His woman of wonder, in three dimensions and bigger than life, fist raised, blue eyes burning into him, titanium tiara glinting, and those lips he had never forgotten smiling fiercely. Words stumbled in his throat.

  She caught the direction of his gaze. “You a fan, too?”

  He coughed before his eyes could tear up. “Yeah. She was a goddess. Tried to kill me once.”

  “My dad was a huge fan. He met her once at a promo event when I was in diapers. I was maybe ten when he told me about it, but even then I could see he was smitten.”

  Horace couldn’t tear his gaze away. “She had that effect.”

  “We watched a few
of her old fights together. She used that lasso like no one I’ve ever heard of.” She shrugged. “Anyway, tough-babe role models are hard to come by.”

  “You could do worse than learning from a woman like Amanda.”

  “You sound like you knew her.”

  “Like I said, she tried to kill me once.”

  Tina looked at him a long time, searching, reading him.

  Horace scratched his stubble and peeled his eyes away from the poster. There was that old ache again.

  She returned her attention to her book. “The gym is two cars up.”

  Pumping iron was almost as effective as sex for relieving pent-up angst. Maybe he could occupy himself with that. He thanked her and went forward.

  At the front of the car was a sliding door leading to the next car. Like a passenger train, a rubberized canvas boot enclosed the gap between cars. The next car resembled the last, a long row of berths. The next car opened into a gym, complete with weight machines, cardio trainers, a heavy bag, speed bag, and black, polymer striking dummies. The impulse to work up a good sweat, something that often helped lube his thinking process, jumped to mind, but then his heart seemed to sidestep, and he thought it best to take things easy for now.

  Two fighters were taking turns on the bench press, pumping great stacks of iron plates. The air smelled of sweat, vinyl, metal, and muscle ointment.

  The fighters’ expressions burned with fierce determination and the concentration required to squeeze every last gram of strength-building from their workouts. Not the time for chitchat. He simply nodded to them and passed by. What the hell could he possibly have to teach them? He was The Hammer, and that was all.

  The next car forward was another set of sleeping berths. The one ahead of that housed enormous industrial refrigerators, interspersed with a fully functional galley, everything looking as if it was fashioned from great blocks of stainless steel and chrome. A dishwasher large enough for him to sleep in churned and rumbled as he passed.

  Beyond the galley lay an infirmary, complete with examination table and medical equipment that was new about the time fuzz had first appeared around his willie.