Slingers (5 page)

TO THE SLAUGHTER

It takes him less than two hours to find the boy.

Kem thought it would be a real mystery in need of solving simply to locate the kid who’d slipped him that macabre pleading message. The boy was obviously a vagrant. Kem had heard about the squatters in Ghost Ring, of course. He’d never been there. He doubted anyone involved with the games had, particularly slingers.

He thought he’d have to comb the entire city. He thought he’d have to stalk through seedy, darkened parts of the station known only as folklore in his circle. He thought he’d have to question shady characters and maybe even crack a few skulls (gallantly, of course).

All he had to do was give the boy’s description to the Sling City’s central desk.

They told Kem exactly where to find the kid.

It’s not really a morgue. It’s classified as a medical cold storage unit, and it’s really just a cramped V-shaped room in the back of one of the infirmaries with half-a-dozen narrow drawers.

The boy’s body is in one of them.

People die in Sling City. They have accidents. They have natural causes. They overdose. Until recently, however, there have only been two confirmed murders in the station’s history.

Now there’ve been three.

The med tech who escorts Kem inside the cold storage unit is a young guy, probably an intern. It’s late and no one else is on-duty at this hour. He’s also definitely a big fan and shocked to see a star slinger in his infirmary.

The tech makes nervous small talk Kem doesn’t really hear as he opens one of the drawers and reels out the thin steel slab concealed behind it.

No one should ever have to see a dead child. It’s a wholly unnatural sight that, whatever the cause of death, speaks of an evil world that would allow such a thing.

No one should carry that memory through his or her life.

The boy looks like a doll gone horribly wrong, as if its maker suffered a tremendous loss halfway through the process and poured all of their pain and loss into the cold, colorless, tragic visage presented to Kem as if on an altar.

There’s a knife wound in his side, just a small reddish sliver that seems so innocuous, even in such a sacrificial location. His nothing of a neck and even sparser wrists are horribly bruised.

Other than that the boy simply looks sad, forgotten and alone.

“What happened to him?”

“Uh,” the tech stammers. “Just what you see.”

“What do I see?”

The tech fumbles for an index card-sized medical chart slotted into place on the front of the drawer.

“He was stabbed between his third and fourth ribs there. The knife was a dagger, double-edged. It pierced his heart. He would’ve lost consciousness right away, died almost instantly.”

“What about these marks?” Kem waves his hand over the grotesque bruising. “What are they?”

“Restraint marks, I’d say. There’re traces of leather around his neck and wrists. Probably somebody tied him up with...like, belts or something.”

“Or whips,” Kem says without hesitation, remembering the shockers pursuing the boy through the crowd at the departure gate, the looks on their faces and in their eyes.

Just as he knew he would yield while he was hanging from the deadway, Kem knows he’ll kill at least two men before he leaves Sling City for the final time.

“Did you know him?” the tech is asking him. “There’s no name on his chart.”

“No, I didn’t know him.”

No name. The thought curdles every pulsing thing in Kem’s gut.

“Mister Carbassa?”

“Yeah?”

“This is probably the wrong time and all, but I don’t imagine I’ll get to meet you again before I rotate back to Earth. So, uh, could I possibly have your autograph, sir?”

The tech holds out a facecard. Kem looks down. It’s in better condition, but it’s the same one shoved into his hand by an unnamed little boy right before he left Sling City to received Nico’s remains in a tube.

The same one the boy used to plead with his hero to save him.

For the second time in as many days Kem begins to weep.

TO BE CONTINUED...

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Matt Wallace is a novelist, screenwriter, and the award-winning author of over one hundred short stories. He spent ten years traveling the western hemisphere as a professional wrestler and combat instructor before retiring to write full-time. He now lives and works in Los Angeles.

Visit
matt-wallace.com
to find out more.