The Hammer Falls Page 9

  Passing through the lounge car, complete with 3-D screen, couches, and bar, he finally reached the front car. Below his feet, the massive power plant rumbled and whined, pulsing power back into each car’s drive wheels. From the doorway he found himself in a narrow hallway that apparently stretched to the driver’s compartment, snaking behind Trask’s compartment. Snoring reverberated from behind an opaque window that read “Norman Trask, Promoter.”

  His mind wandered to unfamiliar sorts of tactical thinking. Intimately familiar with how to fight one-on-one in the pit, how to use the open space, how to crowd the fence, how to give himself more options while limiting his opponents’, he now found himself gauging the possibility of combat in the cramped spaces of this enormous vehicle, what corners would be most advantageous to fight around when Russian thugs stormed the train. Jesus and Thor, he was getting jumpy. All this elaborate planning meant nothing if the Russians simply taped a few blocks of Nitrex to the hull and keyed the detonator from a distance.

  The hallway ended in the plastic door to what had to be the driver’s compartment. He knocked.

  “It’s open!” came Bunny’s voice.

  He pushed it open and suddenly felt like he’d stepped into a box of Valentine candy. It was a small cabin, with a bunk bed draped in pink and crimson sheets, a pink leather chair, photographs of a much younger Bunny and a couple of little girls. Pink and crimson carpet slathered the textured floor. The front of the compartment was all windshield and control panel with a chair for the driver, which now sat empty. The road train’s AI was in control, but it would be Bunny’s job to oversee it. At the sight of him, Bunny jumped so high she almost bumped her head on the ceiling. The air in her cabin smelled of cinnamon and cardamom.

  “Why, Mr. Harkness,” she said, “what are you doing here?” Her gaze scrambled around the room like a startled house cat. She snatched up some scattered laundry, empty coffee mugs, and a half-empty bag of pork rinds and tossed them into the front seat.

  “I got lost.”

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Harkness?” Her cheeks flushed like polished apples.

  “Call me Hark.” He felt suddenly at a loss as to why he was there at all. Yearning for human contact? Maybe the lonesomeness had overtaken him. He normally had no problem ingratiating himself among other fighters. They all spoke the same language, one of physical prowess, of spots, of choreography, of weapons, of ways to work the crowds that went beyond simple blood sport.

  But something was different now. Something had shifted, as if he were no longer one of them, when even three days ago he had been in his element. Then again, maybe they were all as green and stupid and clueless as he used to be. All of them were full of spunk and fire to be sure, but did they really have what it took to do anything but die a fool’s death?

  “A seat maybe?” Bunny said. Something in her eyes made him sit down in the pink vinyl kitchen chair she offered. She was perhaps a couple of years younger than him, with a look in her eyes that bespoke volumes of checkered history, the same kind of world-weariness that he felt in his bones made her look older than she was.

  “So what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” he said.

  She chuckled. “Want some tea?”

  He chuckled himself. “Guys like me don’t drink tea.”

  “Who says?”

  “I got an image to maintain.”

  “Well, I don’t have any blood to drink.”

  “Beer?”

  “Don’t drink.”

  “What do you do to relax?”

  She flushed again. “I can’t tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a secret.”

  “You on the lam?”

  She rubbed the tattoos on her knuckles, nervously scratched around the implants behind her ears. “Are you?”

  “Sounds like a story.”

  “Aren’t they all. Everybody’s got them. Sordid, tragic, lonely stories. Exciting, exultant, romantic stories. All depends on what you like. So, are you?”

  He ignored her question a second time. “You don’t look like the kind of person who drives a school bus.”

  “We all have surprises, don’t we? You seem to want to talk, but you’re not saying much of anything.” There was nothing accusatory in her voice, only openness, a bit of warmth and curiosity, but also guardedness.

  Horace clasped his hands between his knees, leaned on his elbows. “You’re right. Maybe next time.” He stood up and departed, feeling like a complete fool.

  Horace prowled the narrow halls of the road train, trying to grasp niggling threads of something he could show these fighters. The reverence in the eyes of some of them this morning said they would listen to him. Others were just curious. All of them would likely do just about anything to walk his path, even if it meant crashing back into the minors as he had done. Some fighters went out on top, retired at the top of their game. He was not one of those.

  When Trask’s voice came over the PA system, directing everyone to gather in the gym, he retreated to his berth, where the pressure of doing something he had never done before weighed on him with more force than Andre the Titan’s boot. He had his own prestige to uphold. He owed these people something for taking him in, even if they didn’t know it.

  Tina finally came to retrieve him. “They’re waiting for you, O Great Sage on the Mountain.”

  He took a deep breath and stood, then froze.

  She turned to go, then saw he wasn’t following. “What is it?”

  “I have no idea what the hell I’m going to say.”

  “Since when does Hammer Harkness get stage fright?”

  “Since I’ve never done anything like this before.”

  Tina rolled her eyes. “Look, none of these Neanderthals are expecting you to dispense wisdom from on high. Considering they aren’t great philosophers and deep thinkers, they wouldn’t respond to that anyway.”

  “Hey, those are my people you’re running down.”

  “I didn’t say they’re stupid. I’m saying they’re instinctual. They don’t think. They just do. Sound like anyone you know?”

  He cracked a half-smile. “Maybe.”

  “Don’t tell me I don’t know my shit or these fighters. Just go talk to them. Answer questions. Lecture them and they’ll fall asleep.”

  He thought about this for a moment, then said, “Right. Just gonna talk. Let’s go.” His voice was firm, but flop sweat soaked his armpits.

  In the gym, twenty steely-eyed badasses, lounging on benches, leaning on equipment, fixed their collective gaze upon him. Lex sat on a weight bench on the opposite side of the car. Jocie stood behind him, kneading his meaty shoulders, but her eyes were fixed on Horace, simmering with dangerous wanton heat.

  “First of all,” he said, “I got no idea what to say to you guys. I’m a fighter, not a teacher. But first I got to thank you all and Mr. Trask for letting me ride along. This is all I got right now to repay you, so here we are.” He started pacing back and forth, his brain beginning to click. “I look at all of you and I see myself and those Badass Mother Fuckers—” he enunciated each word, “—I knew when I was your age. Gaston Rousseau. Sirius Rush. Ted Zombie. The Hangman. The Highlander. Andre the Titan. Those guys were hungry. Deadly. There were also a dozen other guys you probably haven’t heard of because they died early and didn’t resurrect. Hell, even the women were stone killers. Titania. Gladiatrix Jones.” He paused and then chuckled ruefully. “Then again, maybe you don’t want me to start talking too much. I’ll start reminiscing like some old geezer, and we’ll be here all day.”

  Laughter rippled around the group.

  Jocie’s smoldering gaze was hot on his skin. If Lex happened to catch sight of it, the rest of this little meeting would not go well. That woman was napalm.

  “I’m just going to start spouting what I know,” he said. “There’s no particular rhyme or reason to it. It’s just shit I know in my bones.

  “Rule one: don’t be
a dick. To anybody. Well, except your mortal enemies. That always makes good drama if you do it where there are cameras to see. Even if you’re building a Villain persona, you treat your fans like they’re gold, because without them, you’re nothing. Plain and simple. If the fans don’t scrape the bottoms of their pockets for every thin dollar to come and see you fight, no promoter in his right mind will keep you on board. You might as well be picking fights on street corners.”

  Trask leaned against the far wall, chewing an unlit cigar. “Amen to that!”

  “Maybe I can put Rule One a different way,” Horace said. “Remember the crowd. The crowd is your ticket. You win the crowd—learn how to work them, give them what they want—and they’re yours, whether you’re a Hero or Villain.”

  “But how do we do that?” one of the fighters said.

  “First, you have to be a great fighter. Mr. Trask here has that covered. He’s a damn good judge of fighters, always has been. So he sees something in you, even if you haven’t hit the big time yet.” These men had the physiques, hard muscles, a variety of weight classes, and they had the looks. Not all of them were chiseled Adonises, but any one of them had the potential to break out, hit the big time if they could win bouts and keep coming back.

  “You got to have your own techniques, your own shtick. Use that to make your persona. It all goes back to Rule One: remember the crowd. Whatever you’re going to do, do it with flair. Do it with drama. In the early days, we were trying to figure this shit out, asking fans what they wanted to see. Most of them just said, ‘Fights I enjoy,’ or ‘If the crowd was into it, it was a good match.’ What do they enjoy? They honestly don’t know. But here’s what we figured out they were saying. They want a story. They want to see a real-life epic battle acted out before their eyes. They want to see gods butt heads. And the stories have to be simple. The pit is not the place to act out plays of moral ambiguity.”

  “Oh, the irony!” Tina said from behind him, where she stood with her arms crossed.

  Everyone laughed at that.

  “She’s right,” Horace said, “but it’s true. The world is an overactive bowel where people most often have to choose what flavor of shit sandwich they prefer to eat. Watching us kill each other lets them think the universe makes sense. The Hero wins, they get to cheer for the triumph of Good over Evil. The Villain wins, they get to hate that motherfucker, and then pay to see him get his ass kicked next time. And if the Hero doesn’t resurrect, they get to hate that Villain all the more.”

  Around the group, he saw lights of recognition flickering in their eyes.

  “The thing with storytellers is they got to have charm, charisma. Even Villains got charisma. Unfortunately, that’s not something you can teach. You either got some, or you don’t. On the other hand, if you got some, and I can see by looking around that Mr. Trask is a good judge of that, too, you can learn a few things that will give you a popularity boost. I see a lot of raw potential in this room.”

  Horace heard something from Lex’s side of the room that sounded like a scoffing, “Fuck you.”

  Trask jumped forward. “You stow that shit, Lex. This man has more experience in his fucking pinky toe than you’ll have in ten years. If you survive that long.”

  Horace ignored Lex’s sneer as much he ignored Jocie licking her lips and looking at Horace’s crotch.

  And then something clicked in Horace’s brain. He stood taller, ceased pacing, and squared to face them. “How many of you have died?”

  Silence fell.

  “Even once?”

  No one answered, and the silence hung over them all like a shroud of uncertainty.

  “That’s what I thought,” he said. “‘How do I become one of the great ones?’ is this huge complicated question. Charisma, character, fighting ability. All that. But here’s something me and a few other guys figured out early on, and most of us went on and had great careers. The ones who never figured it out, didn’t.” He let this hang over them for a moment and smiled as he realized he was working them like a crowd.

  “Fear of death,” he said.

  He paused again, surveying their faces, all focused on him. “Human beings, I don’t care how badass you think you are, are afraid of dying. Self-preservation trumps all. It makes you flinch. It makes you hesitate. It makes you scared. It makes you not charge in when there’s a chance that ender will put you in mortal danger. Nobody likes a draw.

  “When me and those early fighters took death by the nut sack, we could accomplish anything, come back from anything. We might die, sure, but we were going to come back. That’s a threshold a lot of new guys don’t see until it’s too late and their careers are already over. So we got this regeneration technology, right, but you gotta trust it completely. Knowing in your brain that it’s there is not enough. You gotta trust in your gut that it’s gonna work. That is what a lot of guys don’t get. Most of them have to die a few times to figure that out. If you don’t trust it completely, the fear will get you.

  “Regenites have been around for forty years. Hell, the wounds they can regenerate have gotten way more serious than when we first started out. Still can’t fix a decapitation or catastrophic brain trauma, but who wants to be a vegetable anyway?

  “Hell, dying sucks, but sometimes it’s easier than living. You embrace the dying part, and you’ll get that ender shot the other guy was too scared to take. Do it now, while everybody else is still worrying about how to use a vibro-axe without slicing off their own face. You’ll be way ahead of everybody else at this level.”

  Around the group, gazes turned inward and thoughtful. He was making sense to them, and Trask was standing in the back, nodding with appreciation.

  Trask started to applaud.

  One by one, the other fighters joined in, smiles and earnestness spreading around the room.

  Except for Lex, who stood with his arms crossed. He happened to glance at Jocie and the lust-filled gaze she was showering upon Horace. Lex seized her arm and growled something Horace couldn’t hear. Jocie gasped in pain, and her expression turned to fear like a dash of ice water. But just as quickly she composed herself, stroked Lex’s face with a sensuous touch, and purred reassurance at him.

  As the other fighters were coming forward to shake Horace’s hand and introduce themselves, Lex shouldered past Trask out of the car, dragging Jocie behind him.

  CHAPTER NINE

  When they pulled into Toledo, Trask’s showmanship opened up like a music box, and so did the road train. It made a half-moon in the middle of an old parking lot, where tufts of grass poked through the pavement like the claws of Mother Nature trying to prise a hole.

  The roofs of the cars raised into great, garishly painted signs and flashing lights of muscled heroes, larger than life, determined in the midst of battle or exultant in victory. Panels on the sides retracted and red-and-white striped awnings extended. Holo-posters gleamed and moved in the kind of 3-D realism that would have been unbelievable when Horace was a kid.

  This parking lot lay next to a shopping mall just as run-down as the rest of the town. The mall itself was a blockish, beige behemoth, uninteresting in every possible way. The store signs were stained with dark gray streaks from decades of pollution and acid rain. The immense parking lot consisted of tracts of weathered, cracked concrete patched by random scabs of black asphalt. The afternoon sun screamed down at them, and any hint of a breeze faded like a smoker’s last gasp.

  Above the distant dozen or so buildings that comprised Toledo’s skyline, specks of aircraft floated and arced. They were too distant for Horace to discern if they were police or media, manned or drones. But he had to make sure to stay out of their sight. The last thing he needed was for his face to appear on some local news feed.

  The crowds came, and Trask kicked off the event with a blast from a miniature Civil War replica cannon. The strange, random novelty of it delighted the crowds. When was the last time anyone had seen a 200-year-old cannon fired?

  Horace hid in his be
rth, wishing he was out there, shaking hands and signing autographs for beaming faces. The parking lot filled with scooters and bicycles, even a few small cars.

  He had started out in a stable much like Trask’s, one that had hit it big in that inexplicable way some small-timers suddenly stumble into. The Oakland Buccaneers eventually became the multinational, billion-dollar corporation Death Match Unlimited, complete with its own space-plane courtesy of Virgin Galactic and a playground in a Dubai strato-scraper. As regenite technology grew more widespread, enterprising fight promoters found ways to push the envelope of what was possible. The chances of successful resurrection steadily increased. And with the sanction of the government and full support of the government’s corporate sponsors, Death Match Unlimited had become a worldwide sensation, with Hammer Harkness and others like him forming the groundswell of a new sport.

  He had never been one to hog the limelight—there was enough for everyone—but god, it was better than sex sometimes. That pulsing sensation of being the It Man, the all-there-is, the pinnacle. But his pinnacle had come about fifteen years ago, and it was a long way down. Has-beens tended to burn up on re-entry.

  So he sat on a fold-out stool in his darkening berth, listening to the chatter of the crowd outside as the setting sun splashed him with horizontal lines, the laughter of happy people.

  “We are the gods among men,” he said to no one in particular.

  “Waxing philosophical now, Socrates?”

  He started, almost falling off his chair.

  Tina laughed from the doorway, arms crossed, dark hair in a bun with a couple of lacquered sticks like knitting needles. “Got to be careful. I’m a ninja.”

  “You’re a pain in the glutes is what you are.”

  “Aw, don’t be sore. Want a beer?”

  “Are you even old enough to drink?”

  “Fuck you, Moses. Is that a yes?”

  “Have a seat.”

  She dragged a chair around from her room with a six-pack of brown bottles, sat down, and put her black jackboots up on the bed. “So, seriously, I am, in fact, a ninja.”