Chain Gang All Stars

Hass Omaha was alive in her hands as she swung at the air, using her shoulders and back to pull the hammer slowly, methodically. Its face was wide and blunt, its handle two feet long, ending in an angry point that could punch through bone, skin, and some metals, as Thurwar had proven in her matches against Kenny Da Doggone Demi-Demon Fletch and Sarah Go. The back of the hammer scorpioned to a point.

After wielding the hammer for a year, Thurwar had wrapped Hass’s handle in treated bolt leather that kept it from growing slick with palm sweat. The hammer was a part of her, and she’d sung a March song she’d picked up from another Link, one who’d sing before each match, as she’d hugged the material around the rod.

There were six guards around Thurwar. While the guards treated most of the other Links like rag dolls or slaughterhouse cattle, they treated Thurwar like an aging parent, with careful distance and even, sometimes, glimpses of deference.

She looked at the young lips of the guard to her left. His hand fidgeted around his baton. She could tell he wanted to say something. Because the fear she felt was beginning to bore her, she spoke.

“How’s your day going?” she asked him.

His mouth splintered into a nervous, toothy smile that quickly simmered to a detached smirk. “Very well, ma’am.”

“Quit that, Rogers,” the lead guard said. “She needs to focus,” he added chivalrously.

“It’s fine,” Thurwar said, thinking about how lax the men were with her. She was completely unlocked from herself. A single green line on her wrists. This slim freedom was as untethered as any Link could be. She could move her arms and theoretically go up to four hundred yards away from one of the central Anchor points in the facility. In some sick irony, the deadlier she proved herself to be, the fewer precautions the men and women who shuffled her between performances took with her. Often it seemed that they wanted to align themselves with her. Her success, she knew, legitimized something in their minds. She killed, they loved her better, and she hated them more deeply. She took a breath. They were just people, and people were all the same. “Everybody just wants to be happy.” This she’d heard from a brilliant woman she’d shared a cell with when she was in prison. Everybody was looking for the same thing in a lot of different ways.

“What do you wanna ask?” Thurwar said.

“Well,” the guard began, “how do you feel right now? Like right now. What’s it like?”

Thurwar took a moment to consider him. He was thin and young, not just her jailer but her executioner, and he didn’t even realize it. She was relieved that she felt no urge of violence toward him. There was a time, a long time, before she’d met Staxxx, when she was regularly seized by sudden, deep urges to destroy others. She felt the urge to destroy herself, of course, more constantly.

“Have you—have you ever ridden a bike really fast down a hill?”

“Uh-huh,” he said. She could see how he would frame this story to his friends.

“I mean as fast as you can.” He’d explain her in superlatives. The most confident, the calmest, the smoothest skin, the strongest, the coolest, the coldest. The greatest, maybe second-greatest, Link of all time.

“And maybe while you’re riding, you try to brake, and you realize the brakes are cut. Has that ever happened to you?” she asked, looking at each of the men around her. They took her words in, thinking about them, trying to appreciate the moment, her attention.

“No. But sure. I get it,” he said.

“That’s actually happened to me,” another man said shyly. “Not on a super-big hill, but a kinda big hill. When I was a kid. Whatever. Yeah.”

“That panic, that you can only know when you’re going down at speed. You know what I’m talking about.” All of the men nodded. She lowered her voice and watched them draw closer. “When any mistake might turn your insides to your outsides and it’s almost like your soul knows in advance and starts peeling away. You know that feeling?”

When it was like this, when the stakes were low, when she didn’t care, Thurwar remembered how to hold an audience. The men nodded so hard their helmets rattled around their heads.

“Well, it’s nothing like that,” Thurwar said, and looked away.

The young guard’s chin dropped as though he was about to say something else, but it snapped back up as he thought better of it.

The gate in front of her disappeared. The people roared. There was no music; Thurwar had decided against the tradition, citing it as “a distraction of comfort in a comfortless world” to her corrections officer/agent.

She was now officially the third-longest-lasting participant of the CAPE program ever, and since Sunset had died, she was the closest Link on the Circuit to that universal goal, freedom. Freedom, for Thurwar, was a ridiculous possibility. One that had been so far away for so long that she hadn’t had to imagine it. Now it bore down on her like a train.

She was an icon in the hard action-sports world. She knew because Micky Wright regularly asked her how it felt to be an icon in the hard action-sports world. The question used to make her stomach lurch. She’d become something of a sex symbol. “What’s it like to be the hottest fucking woman on the planet?” Micky Wright had asked after she’d crushed the skull of a woman from Tennessee, who’d cried the first half of a desperate request before the hammer fell: “Ple—” A pathetic final syllable. And Thurwar had been disgusted with herself for having enjoyed hearing it. It had been her third fight. And it had garnered the biggest crowd in the history of action-sports. A record held until her next fight. She’d gone from nobody to legend. She was the woman who’d won the hammer.

After her early success, Thurwar had shaved her head bald. She took the advice of Melody Bishop, thinking it would dim her celebrity, and also, hair was a liability on the grounds. But the shaved head, like the hammer, had only made her more iconic. In the crowds now, half the women had shaved heads. Among the fans, the “LT” cut was only legitimate if you did it yourself, as she had. It had to look like it was done with a knife, as Thurwar’s was.

She couldn’t escape it, her fame. She read less and less of her fan mail now, the vast majority of it from men telling her that her brown skin was delicious, that if she just removed the shoulder armor her strikes would be even deadlier, telling her how she should handle Staxxx when they were together in bed.

Thurwar had once loved the unfiltered adoration, loved pleasing her fans. If she was honest, she still did, even as she hated it. She loved not being the weak one. The person whom the world knew as “Thurwar” was all she’d known for so long. And so she continued. She was still continuing. Every day she woke up ashamed that she had continued for this long, but having Staxxx in her life, having something real to hold on to, made it easier to let go of her fans, her fame, all the pretty decorations that obscured the fact that the state was trying to kill her and that even though she was ashamed of her life and did not think she deserved to live, she would not let them.

It was all death, slow or fast. Painful or sudden. Nothing more. The culture of Chain-Gang was death.

And that was something she’d understood when she’d signed the papers. She had wanted to end her sad, wretched life. But now she had Staxxx, she had her Chain, and it felt as though she couldn’t just leave. And so she continued in a world where death found everyone but her.

Four months before, out at Camp, a Link on her Chain, Gunny Puddles, had mutilated another Link, then whipped out his dick and urinated on the body while the HMCs circled him like fireflies. “Welcome to the big leagues, kid,” Puddles had said after he zipped his pants back up. Thurwar had watched it happen. Puddles had killed a Rookie who’d tried to establish himself as someone not to be fucked with, but in doing so had fucked with the wrong Link. Thurwar had seen so much on the Circuit that she watched the murder with an ease, even a casual interest, as she spooned hot dinner into her mouth, Staxxx beside her.

Sunset had watched it happen too. He’d leveled a mild protest. Gunny had told him to fuck off. Sunset had laughed, but only because Staxxx and Thurwar had already picked up their weapons to defend him and he was tired and ready for his freedom.

—

Now Thurwar walked out to the light and a chorus of screams.

Thur-war

Thur-war

Thur-war

An orb floated in front of her mouth and she said nothing. It had been many months since she’d had any last words. For some time she had pretended, performed a character who maybe wanted this life. Wanted to exist and thrive. But now, even with Staxxx in her life, the shame of her existence made the BattleGround anything but jubilant. So she chose silence. She chose silence because she could not say to the people she was ashamed of her success, of the very fact of her continued existence.

“There she is, with thirty-two wins, twenty-three closed-casket finishes. The deadliest woman on the planet, Loreeeeettaaaaaaa,” Micky Wright screamed, “Thurwar!”

Thurwar lowered herself to the dark platform. Her left knee, her problem knee, creaked and she breathed in the pain as she kneeled into the Keep. “Stoic as ever!” Micky Wright said from his broadcast space on the grounds. “Have you ever seen a more focused killing machine?”

The crowd bellowed in response.

Most humans never felt this, Thurwar knew. This electricity. This concentration of attention. This collective solidarity in the name of her perseverance. She let the energy run through her body. She let herself enjoy it despite all the shame. It was the now, and now was all there was on the grounds.

“And fighting today in her record fifth Question Match!” Wright continued. Her magcuffs engaged red beneath the skin as she waited. “She’s always been a woman of action!” Wright tried to make drama out of her absolute refusal to be dramatic. And, of course, he succeeded. Louder, louder.

Normally she’d have been going through some specific mental notes on her opponent, their weapon and temperament. But this was a Question Match. All she could do was consider her fundamentals, remember not to resist the pain in her knee. To move quickly, efficiently. To swing through and never at.

“Her opponent?” Wright asked the world, and the Jumbotron flashed to an image of a giant slot machine, the three reels spinning. Anticipation spilled over the arena.

No one had ever gone into the unknown as many times and walked back out. Maybe it was that Thurwar knew that so much of her power was in her preparation; she’d elected to be eligible for yet another Question Match because she wanted the person on the other side to have a chance. Or maybe she wanted to prove that she, not Bishop, not Sun, was the greatest Link of all time.

The first reel stalled and stopped on the letters CCNA.[*1] The people were largely unimpressed. CCNA was one of the larger networks, so that alone told them nothing. They waited as the second reel slowed and froze on a large V with a snake slithering up one of its halves. This they loved.

The Velmont Vipers were a Chain that had originated in a corrections facility in Velmont, Indiana, and had, for a time, produced some incredibly beloved Links—Ray “Lefty” Peterson, Tito “Turnup” Marcon, and Jane Marshall, all deceased. They’d done well enough that fans tended to think of the Viper Chain as ripe with potential. Two of Thurwar’s most memorable wins had been against Viper Links. Who could forget the marathon match against Udine “Ulcer” Potly or her mangling of Falcon Winston Eaton? This was a rare chance for vengeance in the name of Viper. The people hoarsed their throats waiting for the final reel to stop.

All this was for show, of course. Whoever was going to face Thurwar and Hass Omaha was already waiting on the other side of the gated tunnel.

Thurwar looked up at the Jumbotron. Now, she thought.

The reel stopped and landed on the face of a boy Thurwar had never seen before. She frowned. The audience, the vehement patrons of hard action-sports, gasped, then laughed sheepishly and nervously, then roared anew.

“Well,” Wright said, “what a way to get that cherry popped!” The gate opposite Thurwar ascended. A skinny pair of legs in jeans walked out. The boy wore no shirt, so the two Ms tattooed in blue on his back were plain for everyone to see. He held a cooking pot in his hands. Thurwar noticed, and briefly appreciated, the singed bottom of the pot. Had a producer grabbed it from his home, expecting to be reimbursed after the weaponing ceremony? Or had they taken the time to hold the pot over a burner until the dark rings on its bottom allowed for a perverse sense of authenticity?

The boy’s eyes gave her nothing. He blinked as he stepped forward, looking out at the crowds, who cheered and cursed him. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, what a baby! Let’s welcome him!” Micky Wright screamed from the box. “Please tell us your name, sir.”

“Tim,” he said. He visibly startled at the magnitude of his voice through the speakers. The orb he spoke into moved closer to his face. You could see a rash of pimples on his forehead on the Jumbotron.

“Full name, please,” Wright said, rolling his eyes deliberately for the cameras.

“I’m Tim Jaret,” the boy said.[*2]

“Tim Jaret, Tim Jaret. Let’s call you Teacup for now.” Micky Wright brought his hand to his mouth and leaned to one side as if he were telling a secret and not booming over the speakers. “Because he looks like he might break in half if you dropped him.” The audience laughed. Wright continued. “But seriously, Teacup, why are you here today? How’d you get into so much trouble?”

“I killed my mom and pop,” Teacup said. The crowd booed, screamed at him. They loved their mothers and fathers.

“A problem child. We’ve seen those before,” Wright said. “But I’ve heard you’re something of a special case.”

“I ain’t special,” Teacup said. He didn’t seem to know where to look while he spoke, so he stared across the field at Micky Wright’s box. Wright stared back at him.

“But you are,” Wright snapped. “At sixteen years and one hundred and twenty-two days old, you are officially the youngest Link ever! Congratulations!”

Teacup said nothing.

Wright continued. “And why did you—”

“Stop.” Her voice carried and stilled the crowd. Wright smiled at her with hate in his eyes.

“Oh! Miss Thurwar has some—”

“Do not say anything else,” Thurwar said, looking across at Teacup. “You kneel down and don’t say a single other thing.” Was it cruel to cut this boy’s life even shorter? She had been Teacup. And with each word he spoke she was thinking of the past, which was even worse than thinking of the future there on the BattleGround.

Micky Wright pouted. “I guess if Mama says,” he said, feigning amusement. “Why don’t you head over to that pad there.” Teacup looked at Thurwar and obeyed. She thought she saw a brief smile on his face but figured there was no reason for that. When she looked up at the Jumbotron, the camera had already shifted to her. She seemed stiff, angry. She took a breath and checked to see if she had relaxed. She hadn’t. Finally, she turned away and focused on her opponent, the young man named Tim, whom she would soon kill.

*1 Corrections Corporation of North America (CCNA) is the largest private prison corporation in the world. Cofounded by Tomas Wesplat, Berto Rants, and T. Ron Kutto, with multiple facilities across the country, CCNA consistently generates billions in annual revenue.

*2 Murderer, murderer.

It didn’t feel good. Or it did and it didn’t. Always felt alone. Never not been alone. Finished the job, get all the way alone. Already no friends, now no parents.

I took a gun and pointed it. Mom and Pop. Popped and Popped. Dead and Dead. Thought it would feel better. But all the pain still the same.

Then they said, “He’s an adult.” He scares people. Well, everything scares him. Especially himself.

Maybe this will feel good. At least it’s an end. The youngest Link ever.