Page 18 of Reaper
“Huh.That’s like, two first names.Or two last names.Kinda cool.”Pete unclipped a radio from his belt and pushed the mic.“Contestant number three is Murray James.”He turned back to me.“Go on through, Murray.And good luck.”
I pulled the door open and was hit with a wall of sound that Phil Spector would be proud of.I stepped out onto a friggin’ basketball court, or at least an open area the right size for one, with at least a thousand seats arranged on risers around the sides.The first row was on a platform at least ten feet high, I guess to keep the spectators from getting too splattered, and there were several rows between that and a set of luxury boxes nestled atop the bleachers.With thick Plexiglass between the floor and the crowd, it looked like a weird mix between a hockey rink and a grass tennis court, only without the grass.The floor was covered in several inches of sand, but I could feel the wood underneath, and if I scraped my foot across, some of the painted lines became visible.
Where the fuck am I?Some kind of basketball bunker?I didn’t have long to wonder because as soon as I stopped blinking away the brilliance of the stadium lights overhead, a voice boomed out over the public address system in a kind of hillbilly Michael Buffer impersonation.
“And our final competitor in our opening bout, the Mysterious Mangler, Murrrrrrrrrray JAMES!!!!”
He did his best, but we were the popcorn and hot dog match, so the applause was tepid to be generous.I looked across the sand at my competition, but without my Sight, I had no idea what kind of paras they were.They both wore collars identical to mine, but they were both also much bigger than me.Like, alotbigger.Not taller, but bigger.One guy was maybe six feet tall, but he had to go three hundred fifty pounds, and he looked like a reject from a biker movie casting call.He had a big gut, sleeves of tattoos running down both arms, and a nasty grin on his face.A long scar ran from the side of his jaw all the way up to his eyebrow, and I could tell from the way he eyed me and the other fighter that he was used to fighting, and used to winning.
The other guy was packed with muscle, but it looked more like gym muscle than ass-kicking muscle.He had the face of a man who hasn’t been punched nearly as much as he deserved, and the smirk of one who deserved a lot of punching.I made a quick calculation that he was very much not the threat and hoped Biker Bob made the same assessment.If the dangerous guy went after the easy target first, I might be able to take him down while he was preoccupied.
The ring announcer spoke again.“The rules for the opening bout are simple—there is to be no magic, no shifting, and no weapons other than those provided to our combatants.Everything else is fair game.The contestants will fight until both opponents are incapacitated or unconscious.May the best man win!”
A bell rang, and Biker Trash walked in my direction like he had all the time in the world.Great, he’d also decided that Gym Muscles wasn’t a threat, which meant he wanted to get the heavy lifting out of the way first, meaning me.I didn’t like that idea, so I charged Gym Rat, leaving Biker Boy to whip his head from side to side in confusion.No magic didn’t mean I wasn’t still stronger than a human, and my speed also was unaffected.I reached Gymkata in two seconds flat, but when I threw a punch that should have sent him straight to Dreamland, my first connected with nothing but air.
A grenade exploded in my left ear, and I fell to the sand.I rolled over and scrambled to my feet to see Gymbo looking at me.“You don’t get to attack a prince of the Summer Court that easily,” he said with a shit-eating grin.
“You’re Oberon’s kid?”I asked.“Lemme guess.Your mother’s a human and you don’t get to go visit Daddy in the Summer Palace because Titania said she’d feed you your own dick if she ever laid eyes on you?”The Summer Queen is not known for her patience with Oberon’s philandering.She doesn’t actually give a shit if he screws around—one less thing she has to put up with—but she doesn’t want to be reminded of it.
Gymbo stopped smiling and sprang at me.And I don’t mean he charged me, or even pounced or leapt at me, all things you can do in a fight if you know what you’re doing.No, he literally sprang at me.Like a front handspring.He jumped up, bounced on his hands, and flung himself at me.It confused me enough for half a second that he almost nailed me, but I instinctively stepped to the left and snapped a side kick into his ribs with my right boot.He folded over like a cheap suit and dropped to the sand, gasping and puking a little.I took one step closer, slammed my elbow into the base of his skull, and dropped him.
One down.Unfortunately, he was the easy one, and Biker Billy was still heading my way, doing the slow slasher walk like he was a maskless villain in an 80s horror movie.I just sat down on Gymbo’s back, folded my arms over my chest, and waited.That did the trick, annoying Biker Benji enough that he put his head down and charged.
Pro tip: never take your eyes off your opponent in a fight if you can help it.If you drop your head and go at somebody like you’re a pissed off rhinoceros, one of two things is going to happen.Either you’re going to impale your opponent with your skull, which is way less effective than pro wrestling would lead you to believe, or the guy you’re fighting is going to do something very unpleasant to you.
Now I’ve been a lover of American football ever since I moved to Charlotte, and part of me wishes I’d had the chance to play the game in school.After all, officially sanctioned extreme violence is kinda my whole job description.So I stepped to the side and kicked Biker Brent right in the forehead.
In the movie in my mind, that would have snapped his body upright and reversed all his momentum into a massive flip that landed him on his back, out cold.Then I’d get to go backstage with Pete and maybe get some more sesame chicken, which was pretty good for what was effectively prison food.Way better than Cambodia, let me tell you.
Unfortunately, reality didn’t green light the movie in my mind, and while Biker Brian did stand straight up, he stopped in an upright position, turned to me, and grinned.Let me repeat: I kicked this motherfucker right in the noggin with a size eleven Doc Marten, and he stood there smiling at me.
“Fuck.”That was the most eloquent thing I could come up with, and apparently the crowd agreed with me, as they all let out a collective “OOOOOOHHHH” before transitioning into a resounding chant of “You fucked up!”I couldn’t disagree.
Biker Bastard stepped toward me and snapped out a jab with his left.I got my guard up, but blocking a punch with your forearm bonessucks.It sucks less than blocking it with your face, but it still sucks.I leaned my head back so the follow-up right whizzed an inch in front of my face, and I barreled into him, hoping to knock him off-balance and try to trap him into an armbar, a leg hold, or something that I might have learned by osmosis watching MMA clips on YouTube.
Gimme a break.When you’re super-strong, heal from practically anything, and can throw fireballs, you tend to slack off on your hand-to-hand training.
And when you slam your body into a guy who outweighs you by well over a hundred pounds, a guy who knows how to brawl and may be even stronger than you are, well, things don’t end well for you.And they didn’t.Biker Bro wrapped his arms around me in a massive bear hug and started to squeeze.I’d always thought this was a bullshit move, just something wrestlers on TV did to take a break, but when my vision started to sparkle, I realized that I couldn’t draw a decent breath.If I didn’t do something, and soon, I was going to pass the fuck out.I didn’t know if they executed the losers of these preliminary bouts, but I figured probably not.Otherwise we’d have found a lot more bodies.
But I knew that if I lost, I wouldn’t be moving up the card, and if they tossed me out now, I had no idea where I was, or if I could get back in.So I couldn’t afford to lose.I slammed my forehead into Biker Bro’s, but he just smiled up at me, the trickle of blood running down his face seeming to make his grip even tighter.So I did what I do best when the feces has well and truly impacted the oscillator.
I cheated.
Yeah, I know.No rules other than no magic, no weapons, and no shifting, but biting a guy’s nose off still felt like cheating.I still did it, and I’d do it again if I had to, but I did feel a little bit bad about it.I leaned down as far as I could, opened my mouth wide, and bit that biker’s nose clean off.Well, not really “clean” off because getting through the ridge of cartilage at the top of the nose was really tough, and the side bits were really kinda chewy.But after a little pulling, twisting, and tearing, I got his nose.
That didn’t officially end the fight, but it sure took all the fight out of Biker Beastie.He dropped me like a hot potato and staggered back, his hands flying to his face and high-pitched screams coming from his mouth.There was an odd, wet whistling sound with every breath he drew in, and he fell to the sand, gushing blood, snot, and tears in nearly equal amounts.
I spit the nose out onto the sand, looked up into the stands and shouted out, “Is that incapacitated enough for you, bitches?Do I fucking win yet?”
14
Pete led me down the hall, but this time instead of turning left to go back to my cell, he led me to the right for about fifty yards then stopped before a slightly cleaner, but still reinforced metal door.“Winners get upgrades, so you get a better room now.”
“What do the losers get?”I asked, wondering if the answer was a slit throat and dumped on a golf course.I had no idea if either of the men I’d beaten were shifters, and in the heat of battle, I hadn’t cared.But I knew I left them alive, and there hadn’t been nearly enough bodies showing up for these assholes to be killing everyone who’d lost a fight, so I really didn’t know what they did with the losers.
“Every fighter has a bad day, or a bad fight.If you’re in a higher tier and you lose, you get dropped down a level,” Pete said.
“So the guy who used to be in this room…”
