by J. N. Chaney
My stomach tilted inside my gut. I felt like I had been hit by a two hundred and fifty-pound brawler. I knew I had heard him right. I just couldn’t believe it. There were whispers and rumors of course that some of the top-level fights were fixed. I had yet to experience this firsthand, let alone by one of the most respected and powerful men in the industry.
I looked at Jonny. The old man had a dangerous look in his eye. He didn’t say anything yet. I’d been with Jonny for enough years to know we were thinking the same thing. What would happen if we refused?
“I know, I know.” Mr. Dell lifted his hands, palms facing toward us. “It’s a big thing to ask, and it’s blindsided you. You’re going to have to trust me on this one. It’s going to sting to have to go down, but we can make it look good. You’ll go down in the last round, and you won’t get up. In a few years, you’ll fight your way back to another title shot, and we’ll make sure you win then. You have my word on that. Right now, the money is too good to have you win. You’re heavily favored in this fight and me, and a few of my colleagues have money that you’ll go down. You will go down, Dean.”
Along with the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, a cold sweat broke out over my brow, and a wave of anger washed over my entire body. I’d spent my life getting to this point in my career. I’d put my body through hell and fought my way to the top. Taking a dive would not only go against everything I stood for, it would be throwing away years of hard work.
“We appreciate your request, Mr. Dell,” Jonny said.
“It wasn’t a request,” Mr. Dell answered.
“Okay.” Jonny met Mr. Dell’s gaze head-on, not combative yet unwilling to be intimidated either. “I understand your position. If we were to feel strongly otherwise, that Dean can win this fight, could there be another way to work this out? Maybe you could move your money over to betting on him.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Mr. Dell said, losing his cool, pleasant personality. It was as if a switch had been flipped. Instead of the congenial smile that graced his lips a moment before, a snarl escaped his throat. “You go down in the tenth round. That’s all there is to it. You will go down. If you decide anything otherwise, things won’t go well for you.”
I didn’t like the way he was talking to the man who had been like a father to me. Anyone else and I would have stepped in right there and then. They’d be talking to Jonny through a mouthful of broken teeth and a splintered jaw.
Instead of violence, I took a step toward Mr. Dell, clenching my fists. In the short time I’d known him, I’d lost all respect for the man.
“May I have a moment to speak with my gladiator?” Jonny asked politely. He placed a hand on my shoulder. “You have to understand adrenaline is flowing freely right now.”
Mr. Dell stared into my eyes. He must have finally realized that an animal lived inside of me. He took a step back and nodded. “You two take whatever time you need. My mind isn’t going to change. You go down, or you two are finished. It’s as simple as that. Make the right decision for not only you but for your families right now. Your time will come to hold the belt. Tonight is just not that night.”
Jonny’s grip on my shoulder tightened to hold me in place. I could rip free from his hold if I wanted, but I was still having a hard time processing the turn of events the night had taken.
Mr. Dell left the room.
A second later, our trainer and security staff reentered.
“We just need a moment, fellas,” Jonny said with a smile. He guided me to the restroom in the rear of the locker room. It was all white tile and bright lights.
“Is this guy serious?” I said once we were safely out of earshot. “I can’t believe what he just asked us to do. No, not even asked. I can’t believe what he just told us we were going to do. I was about to lay him out right there.”
“Hey, you forget about that right now,” Jonny said, holding my stare. He spoke in a tone just above a whisper. “You go down just like he said. You hear me? You go down in the tenth.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. The same man that had pushed me to break through my limits every day, the same man who was always in my corner in and out of the ring was telling me to lose the fight.
“What? No,” I said, shaking my head. “We’re not going to let him take from us everything we’ve worked so hard for all these years: all the fights, all the sacrifice. No way. He can lose his money. I’m not going down. I don’t go down, and if I do go down, I don’t stay down. You taught me that.”
“This isn’t about fighting anymore,” Jonny said, clenching his teeth. There was a pain in his eyes I’d only ever seen once before. “This is about living and dying, Dean. This is about surviving. We go against Mr. Dell, and we’re dead men.”
“We’ll go public with his threat,” I said, refusing to believe the only option we had was losing or death. “We’ll tell everyone who will listen. We’ll expose him.”
“No one’s going to listen to dead men,” Jonny said, firmly taking me by my shoulder. “Even if we could spread the word before he got to us, he and his friends own half the reporters in the city. They’ll bury our story, and then they’ll bury our bodies. This isn’t about us anymore, Dean. Think of Natalie. Think of the baby she’s holding in her belly.”
“I am thinking about them,” I said, refusing to give in to Jonny’s advice. “This is why I’m going to win tonight. I’m going to win for them, for you, Jonny. We both came from nothing, and we have the chance to do something great tonight. Mr. Dell is every single bully who threatened me growing up. He’s every single person who told us we were nothing. We don’t give in to them, Jonny. That’s not who we are.”
“You’re not going to listen to me, are you?” Jonny’s face told me he already knew the answer. “If I can’t change your mind, maybe she can. At the very least, you need to talk to her about this. You two are a team, even more so than you and I. Promise me you’ll talk to her about it before you go through with it.”
I looked at the clock on the wall of the bathroom. It read sixteen minutes until I was supposed to be walking to the ring.
“I’ll talk to her,” I agreed, seeing the wisdom in Jonny’s words. “I’ll talk to her.”
“Good. I’ll go get her,” Jonny said with a hint of relief in his voice. Apparently, he thought Natalie was going to talk me into throwing the fight. I knew better. She was more of a warrior than I was.
Jonny practically ran from the bathroom on his way to the next room to go get my wife. She usually gave me space before the fight to get my head right. In the last few minutes before I was to head to the ring, she would come in and tell me exactly what I needed to know.
This varied from fight to fight. Sometimes it was a kiss and telling me that no matter what happened, we were in this together. Sometimes it was a wink, and she’d tell me to go kick my opponent’s ass. Whatever she decided on, it was always just what I needed to hear.
She was amazing like that. It was like words of encouragement were her superpower.
I took the few minutes I was alone to walk over to the mirror and look at myself. Clean shaven with a short buzz and Mohawk made me an intimidating figure. Forget about the muscles rippling over my body. Heck, I wouldn’t want to get in the ring with me. I stared into the mirror for a moment longer, still realizing I was in a dream. I begged my unconscious mind to wake up. I didn’t want to see what came next.
7
“Hey, you. You okay?” I woke to Ricky shaking my arm. “I heard you moaning something.”
It took me a minute to realize I was out of my nightmare and in the makeshift tent erected for our quarters. Or maybe I was only escaping one nightmare to live in another.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I lied, pushing my long hair out of my face. “What time you get in last night? I didn’t hear you.”
“Oh, yeah.” Ricky yawned and stretched his arms over his head. “It was the early hours of the morning. I’m not sure. I had a late night with Arun.”
> I swung into a sitting position in our bunk bed. We shared a tiny tent barely large enough to hold our bunk bed and meager belongings. The tent was pushed up against the side of the overturned Orion.
“You’re not a liar, but you do have problems relating the truth.” I looked over at Ricky with a raised brow. “You had a date with Arun?”
“First of many, my friend, first of many,” Ricky said, practically beaming with happiness. “She needed my mechanical skills working on a section of the interface that will get Iris’ long-range scanners up and running.”
“That doesn’t sound like a date,” I scoffed. “That sounds like you’re a mechanic and she asked you to do a job.”
“Let’s not split hairs here.” Ricky shrugged on his dirty sleeveless shirt. His head popped out the top. “All I know is that when Arun needs help, she’s calling me and she stuck around for a bit once I started working. Don’t worry. You’ll be invited to the wedding. I’ll need someone to hold the rings.”
I couldn’t help but crack a smile. The best part was that Ricky was dead serious. Maybe somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew he was being ridiculous, but maybe we could all use a little more of his brand of humor if we were going to get through this alive.
I busied myself getting dressed in my boots, cargo pants, and shirt. With the heat of the dual suns overhead, I decided to rip the sleeves off of my long sleeve shirt, mirroring Ricky’s move. It would be another day of manual labor on the wall.
“I can’t wait to shower tomorrow,” Ricky said as we exited our tent into the cool morning air. “I feel like I have a layer of grime over me right now.”
Water was still being rationed. However, with less than three thousand people to care for now, we had more than we needed. We had all the water we could drink, but showers were spread out to every other day and only a quick five minutes at that.
In space, the main water supply had been poisoned, making it difficult to allow showers for any of our one hundred thousand colonists. With our numbers cut down by ninety-seven percent, we could afford ourselves some luxuries with the reserve water supply.
Ricky and I crossed the short patch of ground in the tent city erected outside of the Orion. We made it to the showering tent to wash our faces and brush our teeth. The men’s room had been a maelstrom of activity while we were in space. There had been men at the locker section to our left, in the showers to our right, and waiting in line to use the sink in front of us.
The bathroom was a ghost town now. It was a fraction of the size. Dark green tent walls provided shelter for a line of toilet stalls on the left, showers on the right, and three portable sinks in front of us. A single elderly man stood at the sink brushing his teeth. He nodded to us as we approached.
A silver lining in the Orion accident was that the ship was equipped with everything we needed to survive. Sure, we lost half the ship in the crash, but things like portable sinks, tents—everything a new colony would need to live while they erected a proper town—were stored on multiple levels.
This fact, coupled with the idea that we had supplies enough to provide for one hundred thousand, meant that even with the loss of fifty percent of our ships, we had more than we needed.
“Weird, right?” Ricky asked as we found our own sinks.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“I mean, I remember thinking that there were way too many guys having to use the same restroom on our level while we traveled in space.” Ricky splashed water on his face. “I remember wishing there weren’t so many guys trying to cram into such a small space. Be careful what you wish for, I guess.”
I worked my hair into a ponytail behind me. I went through the mechanical routine of brushing my teeth and washing my face, all the while thinking about Ricky’s words.
He was right. The saying the grass is always greener on the other side came to mind. There were a few times when we traveled through space that I wished the Orion hadn’t been so full. This was what the opposite end of the spectrum looked like.
The older man to my right wasn’t full-on staring, but he tried to sneak in a glance at me every time he thought I was too busy to notice. Through my peripheral vision, I caught him squinting at me.
“Can I help you with something?” I asked, turning to him. Already I had a good idea why he was looking at me like that. It was something that happened to me less and less through the years but still came up every now and again. Usually, I ignored it and moved on. I don’t know what came over me. Maybe it was the dream I had just woken from, maybe it was something else.
“Sorry, sorry to bother you,” he said, clearing his throat. “You just bear a striking resemblance to a gladiator I used to watch. I followed the sport religiously back on Earth.”
“I’m just a mechanic,” I said with a shrug.
“Of course,” he said with a bob of his head. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry,” I told him.
He gave me a polite smile and walked away.
“Man, this other guy people keep thinking you are must be your doppelganger,” Ricky said, slapping me on my back. “Didn’t that Warlord leader back on Earth think you were the same guy?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” I said, heading out of the bathroom with Ricky, back to our tent to deposit our toiletries and then to breakfast. “You never followed the gladiator fights?”
“Oh, you know, I bet on them, sure, but it really wasn’t my thing,” Ricky said with a shrug. “I’m more of a dice or card kind of guy.”
“Right,” I said as we made our way to the cafeteria tent.
The twin suns of the planet were just making their ascent to take their places in the sky and blaze their wrath down on us. All around the outside of the Orion, colonists were making their way either out of their tents or descending from the levels of the Orion, where they chose to sleep.
Not everyone felt comfortable on the ground floor in a tent. A large number of the colonists had chosen to sleep in the Orion. Despite their rooms being turned on their sides, they were willing to accept the discomfort if it meant having walls around them.
I understood that. I had been tempted to stay in my old room back on the Orion. If it hadn’t been so far from the food and a bathroom that wasn’t sideways, I might have.
One of the cafeterias on the Orion had been powered and was up and running. It was decided the food would be cooked there and run down to the cafeteria tent below.
I wasn’t part of the team tasked with righting the cafeteria level, so all the refrigerated and frozen lockers stood upright, but I had heard a group of mechanics complaining about how much work it had been unhooking and figuring out how to reconnect all the ovens and stoves used for cooking.
Ricky and I entered the long cafeteria tent to the smell of bacon and eggs. One thing I knew about life was that whatever position you found yourself in, bacon could be the healing balm for a lot of it. We fell in along a table where we were ladled a spoonful of steaming eggs onto a plate and two pieces of bacon.
To drink, we had an option of water or coffee. It wasn’t much, but only a few days after crash landing on an alien planet, people were coming together. Everyone was finding a way to pitch in.
Everyone’s helping fine right now, but I wonder how they’d feel if they knew the truth, I thought to myself. I wonder what they’d say if they knew the Orion was sabotaged and there was an ancient alien-made door on the planet leading to who knows what.
We sat in silence, eating our breakfast in two chairs facing one another. There were no tables yet. Compared to everything else going on, tables for eating didn’t seem like a top priority at the moment.
My mind wandered to the alien door we had found. It was obvious it was made by someone or something else, but who? What was behind it? Should we be doing more than just having Iris monitor it? What could we do? We were barely surviving ourselves.
“You look lost in your own head,” Boss Creed said, pulling up a chair beside us. “And
I don’t think I’ve ever heard Ricky so quiet.”
“Moufful,” Ricky said, pointing to his packed lips dripping with bacon grease.
“I see,” Boss Creed said.
He looked better. When we lost Ira the day before, I knew he was in a tough spot, mostly because Boss Creed was the type of leader who would blame himself for something like that, even if it was entirely out of his control.
“There’s going to be a service this morning for everyone who knew Ira,” Boss Creed said in a matter-of-fact tone. “If you two would like to attend.”
“I’ll be there,” Ricky said, swallowing a mouthful of food.
“I’ll come too,” I said.
“Thank you.” Boss Creed exhaled loudly as if he were holding his breath until the conversation was over.
The dark green tent flaps to the cafeteria opened. In walked Captain Harold along with a pair of suits.
8
Captain Harold strode to the center of the cafeteria flanked by his suits carrying pulse rifles. He wore the same dark blue uniform and black tactical armor. A blaster rested on his hip.
“Good morning,” he said in a loud voice as he looked around the room.
With shifts working around the clock to get the wall and essential living functions back online, a series of mumbled responses were returned to him as a few hundred colonists looked to one another for answers.
Captain Harold found an empty chair and used it to stand on. He looked over the egg and bacon eaters with a measured stare.
“For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Captain Ezra Harold. I’m in charge of the Civil Authority Division while we’re here,” he said, taking a moment to pause and let his words sink in. “It’s come to my attention that we are severely undermanned at the moment. Only eleven Civil Authority Officers stand and protect our encampment. I’d like to see that number tripled at the very least.”
