Gauntlet Run: Birth of a Superhero by Andre Jute, Dakota Franklin, & Andrew McCoy
“What’s your offer?”
“You take your fall to our people where and when we say and your son gets ten per cent.”
“You want to pay me a million dollars for letting you kill me?” Henty kept her voice business-like.
“You got it in one, Sister. You gonna die anyway, so why not make it easy on yourself, huh?”
“That’s a million over and above the ten million?”
“No. That’s ten per cent of ten million. One million.”
Henty decided to return to the money after satisfying some other areas of curiosity. “Where will you want me to give myself up to you?”
“That’s it. You’re the first woman ever accepted to Run—”
“I haven’t been accepted yet.”
“You will be. We’re fixing it, okay? Now don’t interrupt me again. You’re the first woman ever to Run. So we reckon most punters will bet on you going down early. Maybe not even making Chicago. So we want you to hold out all the way to Nevada.”
“And what if a freelance gets me before then?”
The man from the Syndicate shrugged. “You can’t win ’em all. We’ll make a dollar wherever you go down but if you make Nevada, we hit the mother lode.”
Henty slid a letter across the table to him. “I need two million dollars to send my son to this clinic in the Arctic Circle for three years. That my price, win or lose, whether some freelance gets before Nevada or whether I turn myself over to you in Nevada.”
He sat back in his chair to consider her. But not for long. “You got it all wrong, Sister. You don’t make the terms. We do. Take it or leave it. First, if a freelance gets you before Nevada, you get nothing. Second, the flat rate for the job is ten per cent, one million bucks, capish? If we pay you more, every petty crim will think his price has gone up. You’ll spoil the market for us.”
“But you’re going to get ten million from the government for killing me. And you’re going to take billions in bets. What’s an extra million to you?”
“It’s not the million bucks. It’s the precedent we don’t want to set. You’re being stupid, throwing away your life for nothing. Take the million.”
“Sorry. It’s not enough.”
“The smaller outfits will offer you more, sure, but they won’t pay after they bag you.”
“Then I won’t make a deal with them. I’ll make my deal direct with the President of the United States. At the Mint in San Francisco.”
The man from the syndicate snapped his green alligator briefcase shut. Both his flunkies jumped to grab it. There was a brief struggle before one got it.
“Maybe you boys should take turns,” Henty suggested. They glared at her. Their Boss looked up from making a mark in a small green alligator bound book. “Don’t interfere! I make book with myself on who gets it how often.”
“Are you ahead?”
He scowled at her and stood. “If you change your mind about taking your fall with us, just tell the Administrator. He’ll call me.”
“You’re not planning to fix it so I don’t Run?” Henty asked anxiously.
“Nope, we’re already taking more money on you than on any Runner ever before. Either way we can’t lose. We just want to scoop the whole pot.”
Henty’s next visitor was from the Chaser Organ Bank. He was a pleasant enough appearing young man but he gave Henty the shivers before he even started his pitch.
“None of us want our existence to have been for nothing,” he said confidentially, earnestly, pulling the chair closer, leaning forward for emphasis. “You are uniquely in a situation to help your fellow man, and woman of course, by donating your organs to the—”
“That’s ghoulish. I’m not dead yet.”
“Well—”
Henty didn’t mind gangsters and tearjerkers telling her she was going to die but this man was trying to make a profit out of hypocrisy.
“How much?” she asked bluntly.
“We will give the remainder a decent burial without any charge whatsoever. The Chaser Bank is proud of—”
“The last Runner got a hundred thousand for his organs.”
The young banker looked pained. “It is of course a delicate matter. Fifty thousand.”
“I’m younger and you have a shortage of female donors for your organ bank. Quarter million.”
For a moment he looked as if he would argue, then he said “Done!” so explosively that she knew it was suppressed triumph. She could have held out for more. “How will you find the body?” she asked out of genuine curiosity.
He filled in the amount and pushed the clipboard at her.
“We already filled in your son Peter’s name as the beneficiary.”
She checked the amount, signed her name next to each of the penciled crosses and gave the clipboard back.
“We’ll know where you are.” With the contract signed and in his briefcase, his tone changed. Now he was gloating openly. “We’re in The Caring Society. We’ll have you on Watcheye every step of the way. Anyway, we got our own hunter. You see, too often we get the bodies in very ragged condition. We like to take care of our property in our own way.”
“Get out.”
“A pleasure to buy you,” he said as he backed out.
CHAPTER 9
That night, as she lay on the floor of her cell. doing her exercises — “Pull till it burns. Baby!” — she watched Gauntlet Runner on vidi. The week’s Runner had not lasted past Tuesday morning and all three channels were using the public service law and order hour from nine to ten to give her a big build-up. She saw herself being visited by the publisher, the man from the Syndicate and the man from the Chaser Bank but someone had decided to call the man from the Syndicate her “financial adviser” and their words were edited to support the lie. Henty snorted. One of the commercials for the Chaser exhorted women to follow Henty’s example.
“To rob banks?” Henty asked the vidi. She exercised until she couldn’t move another muscle. It was the only way she could sleep.
She didn’t want to die.
But she kept refusing all the offers from religious promoters to be a sponsored symbol of their particular — and some very peculiar — brands of salvation. One spot on Gauntlet Runner showed a Runner who stuck his Fist aloft like the statue of Liberty and declaimed, “We who are about to die, salute the True Cross.” A rerun of his exploits showed him smashing an old lady in the face in Chicago. He'd also hijacked a plane in Denver but on the way to SF a private pilot had shot the airliner down, killing everybody in it, including the Runner. The indestructible Fist survived, though someone else took it from the intrepid red baron not too long afterwards.
Henty knew little more about Imperial Rome than can be gleaned from old movies, but “We who are about to die” rang a bell with her: the only time the judge who sentenced her had ever come to life was while inveighing against the gladiatorial practices of the new age. And it wasn’t that she was letting pride come before Petey’s life. The reverends weren’t offering hard cash; instead they promised free tickets to their various mutually exclusive heavens. All of them had been inordinately shocked at her suggestion that they pay her for advertising their message.
CHAPTER 10
On Saturday, they fitted Henty with the Fist. First, the Administrator told the cameras a rehearsed speech about how the Fist was “society’s mark of her evil. And whoever shall cut it from her and carry it to the Mint shall earn ten million dollars and a full and free Presidential Pardon direct from the White House.”
Then they positioned her hand to clamp the Fist on.
“Hey! I’m a southpaw. If you clamp that thing on my left hand, I’ll be helpless. It’s my best hand.”
“Don’t be stupid,” the young doctor whispered urgently in her ear. “You can hit anything with it and you won’t feel a thing. If you let on, they’ll put it on your right hand. I’m trying to help you.”
Henty shut up.
They closed the form on her left hand and forearm. Ther
CHAPTER 11
Who runs the place? — John Gunther
The work of domestic progress is controlled by a score or two of individuals who have shown a capacity to manage it. The work of internal government has become the task of controlling these men, who are socially as remote as heathen gods, alone worth knowing but never known, and who could tell nothing of political value if one skinned them alive. Most have nothing to tell, but are forces as dumb as dynamos, absorbed in the development of power. — Henry Adams
The Gauntlet Run started from the Statue of Liberty.
In the beginning, they had sent the Runner off at noon but soon the crowds became unmanageable. Attempts to start the Run from some quiet, more easily controlled small town had met with fierce resistance and the toppling of one President.
Literally: the mob threw him from the roof of the Capitol Building in DC.
Of the other venues suggested as starting points, only Liberty Bell found popular approval and crowd control would have been even more difficult. Now, to make it easier for New York’s Finest, the Five Families charged by congress with keeping the Peace in the world’s most populous city, among the world’s most intransigent population, the Runner left in the early hours just before dawn when the metabolism of the metrops was sluggish.
“Listen,” said a grizzled capo in full bulletproof gear, clutching his gas helmet in the crook of his arm. “It’s especially bad because you’re a woman, see?”
Henty nodded. “I saw them from the chopper as they brought me in. I thought the idea of starting in the middle of the night was so they wouldn’t turn out.”
“It’s ’cos you’re a woman, see?”
She looked up at the monitors showing the restless crowds with them on Liberty Island and waiting for her on the Manhattan, Brooklyn and New Jersey banks of the Hudson.
“Really taking the city apart. Mayor’s been on phone twice already. Heads are going to roll,” the capo added darkly. Henty had to concentrate to understand him: to her Texas ears his English was a foreign dialect delivered machinegun-fast.
“As long as it isn’t my head,” Henty said brightly. “I need it to get to the Mint in San Francisco.”
The capo ignored the levity. “We gave them an extra ration of coke yesterday to keep them quiet but somebody must've slipped in some bad dope to het them up. There’s people don’t want you to get out of New York.”
“But not you?”
“We got a big contract with New Jersey to get you out of here alive. I can’t fail, I got a wife’n kids.”
“That bad, huh?” I really should stop feeling sorry for gangsters. Henty told herself. I have troubles of my own.
“Yah. But don’t worry; we’ll do the job we contracted. You just do as I tell you and do it quickly, huh?”
“Sure.”
“That’s what I like to hear.” He slapped Henty on the back and gave way to the vidirector who was hovering anxiously.
The vidirector put out a hand to steady Henty. “He doesn’t know his own strength,” he lisped admiringly. He pulled his glance back from the capo’s broad back. “Now, here’s how you stand, with the Fist up high, looking respectfully at the President, okay?”
He didn’t wait for her reply but hurried away to where a holograph was being flashed into a circle on the floor.
“No, no! That’s the president before last. The present Pressy is the one in the dark blue suit, in can 3C.”
A girl brought Henty a cup of soup and offered her a pill.
“Thanks. Just the soup.”
“You gonna need it.” The girl held out the pill.
“Never take them.”
“What’re you, some kind of a freak?”
“I guess so.”
The assistant stuffed the pill into her own mouth as if she feared Henty would change her mind. Immediately she seemed to grow three inches. “Don’t say I didn’t offer it to you.”
Henty was suddenly tired of all these people. “Go play out your fantasies somewhere else.” She turned to watch the President, the current one this time, walk out to his circle. She looked down to be sure she was standing in her own circle.
It was nearly time to go. She looked up fearfully at the monitor on the wall behind her. Outside the walls of Fort Wood there were fires on Liberty Island, and on both the New York and New Jersey shores, as the mob waiting for her became impatient and struck out at whatever was nearest. The absence of sound made the scenes of violence all the more frightening. The scene cut from a general view to the detail of a woman being raped; in the background two men were fighting with what looked like scythes. Henty wondered what New Yorkers could want with scythes.
“They doped my soup,” she said when the irrelevance of the thought to her present dilemma struck her. She would still have to pass through that ugly crowd.
CHAPTER 12
The master monitor flashed up Grover Cleveland’s dedication to the Statue, and a deep, meaningful voice read the words with feeling:
“We will not forget that Liberty has here made her home, nor shall her chosen altar be neglected.”
The President pointed a finger at her. Henty stiffened.
“You were an evil person. Now you are an evil symbol. The Nation will hunt you. If you survive the Gauntlet, you will get a new start with money and a free Presidential Pardon signed by me. Now raise the Fist that is the mark of your evil so that all the people may see it.”
Henty raised the Fist as she had been told. On the monitor she could see herself standing in front of the Statue of Liberty, her figure exactly the same shape as the great statue which had somehow become left-handed; the President was still pointing sternly at her. It was a viditrick, because they were deep in the bowels of old Fort Wood beneath the Statue of Liberty.
“Whoever will punish her evil against Society may bring that mark to the Mint in San Francisco,” the President continued. “And receive the new life of a cash start and a free Pardon signed by me at the White House.”
The President breathed deeply to expand his chest. He jerked the finger still pointed at Henty. “Nothing a citizen shall do to you will punishable as a crime. Now go and receive your punishment from the People of this great Nation!”
Henty realized this was it. The floor tilted to start her running. Her feet started moving as if of their own accord. As she ran out of the studio, a row of monitors lined the passage. On them the President said, “This is your President saying be good and goodbye for now.” Immediately a credit flashed up: A PUBLIC SERVICE PROGRAM SPONSOR THE CHASER ORGAN BANK.
On an angled runway, New York’s Finest awaited her. There was a huge reinforced glass structure standing on skirts of Lexan polycarbonate. The door stood open.
“It’ll survive anything short of an atomic hit,” the capo told Henty as she trotted past him.
The door slammed behind her. Henty faltered, then kept running as the glass cage moved to center itself over her, adjusting its speed to her pace.
Before her huge double doors swung open. The soldiers and button men of the Five Families had cleared the crowd back a hundred paces. A three-deep human chain held the mob there. The line surged forward, then was thrust back. Henty could almost feel their hatred reaching for her. Despite the protection of the glass walls, she shivered in fear. She looked over her shoulder but the big doors were just clanging shut. There would be no return to safety. She stumbled, heard the crowd roar, recovered her pace in the face of their bloodlust. One man vaulted right over the three-deep cordon of the Finest. He waved a placard. UNFAIR TO NOO YORK — WE WANT TO HUNT TOO. There was a zap of light from the cordon and the man with the placard fell.
The cordon broke and the crowd crashed over the bodies of what had moments ago been a human chain. Henty tried to
Henty reared away from them but there were more behind her, on her left, on her right.
“Just keep running.” The capo’s voice was in the capsule with her. “They can’t get in.”
Henty was still frightened almost witless but it was true. No matter on which side the mob was momentarily stronger, no matter how Henty cringed from some particularly hating, blood lusting face, the cube arranged itself dead center over her.
On one side a bunch of big men with long staves beat the mob back. When they cleared space along one side of the cube, some of them remained to hold the mob off while others came to run beside the glass wall. At a shouted command from their leader, they bent in unison to hook their fingers under the lexan skirts sealing the cube to the ground. Their intention was clear: they were going to overturn the glass cube and expose her to the crowd.
Henty screamed.
Almost immediately her fear turned to horror as bleeding fingers, palms, even forearms, popped into the cube to share her precious safe space with her .
“Don’t worry,” came the capo’s voice. “A million gravities hold your cage down.”
“Cage,” Henty gasped. She was an animal in a zoo, branded by the President himself as dangerous and to be hunted.
“They’re Hickorymen,” the capo’s voice explained. “They come back every Monday morning with the new recruits. It’s their religion, see. You gotta admire their discipline.”
“What about their stupidity in not learning from experience?” Henty shouted her outrage at the waste.
“Don’t shout. I can hear you fine.”
Henty looked up, wondering in which of the choppers he sat. Above the choppers circled the Air Force jets which kept the bounty hunters from bombing the Statue of Liberty the minute the President declared the Runner open game. Earlier in the year one dropped a tenmeg atomic device into her brazier but it failed to detonate. The crowd found a new interest and turned away from Henty.