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HENTY’S FIST 1: GAUNTLET RUN birth of superhero
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“Wild but exciting. A grand job with plenty of irony.”
New York Times on André Jute
“The fast lane just got faster!”
Dr Benjamin Pitman on Dakota Franklin
"Totally convincing fiction."
Colonel Jonathan Alford, Director, Institute for Strategic Studies/BBC World at One on Andrew McCoy
HENTY’S FIST 1: GAUNTLET RUN
birth of superhero
The Gauntlet Run is the toughest race ever run by man: across America with every man’s hand turned against you from the statue of Liberty to the old US Mint in San Francisco. There the prize awaits you: $10 million and a full and free Presidential Pardon.
The Runner is marked for all to see by an indestructible Fist, keyed to his metabolism. If the Fist is removed without the key from the Mint in San Francisco, he dies. Between the Runner and the key stand the ruthless bounty hunters, the Syndicate’s lethal odds fixers, the sinister Organ Bank chasers, the Humble & Poor Hunt, the US Air Force, and mobs of good citizens, all turned into bloodthirsty savages by the magnificent prize for tearing the Fist from the Runner — and the Presidential license that nothing done to the Runner shall be illegal.
Henty needs two million dollars to send her son Petey to the Artie stericlinic for treatment that will save his life. The care of The Caring Society is exhausted, her chicken farm already carries a second mortgage. Hopeless. But beautiful young Texas widows don’t just give up. There is still the Gauntlet Run. To qualify, you have to be a criminal — so Henty robs a bank...
No woman has ever Run the Gauntlet. No Runner has ever survived the Gauntlet.
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HENTY’S FIST 1: GAUNTLET RUN
birth of superhero
André Jute • Dakota Franklin • Andrew McCoy
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CoolMain Press
HENTY’S FIST 1: GAUNTLET RUN
birth of superhero
Copyright © 2012, 2013 André Jute, Dakota Franklin, Andrew McCoy
The authors have asserted their moral right
First published by CoolMain Press 2012, 2013
https://www.coolmainpress.com.
Editor: Lisa Penington
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means without the written permission of the publisher.
HENTY’S FIST 1: GAUNTLET RUN
birth of superhero
André Jute • Dakota Franklin • Andrew McCoy
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CHAPTER 1
Time and again the history of the west proves that women can endure hardship better than men. — Michael Davie
The operating table and what was visible of the small body on it were intensely lit but immediately beyond the central glare the surgeons and nurses were in shadow and in the viewing gallery it was pitch dark. One half of the polished glass infuriatingly reflected Henty’s face. The other half she could see through. Not that she wanted to look at the unspeakable things they were doing to Petey but she forced herself. If he could bear up bravely to the prospect of yet another operation, the least she could do was to look.
The chief surgeon threw a piece of Petey’s flesh in the bin — like a butcher trimming fat from steak, thought Henty — and said something to his assistant before heading for the sterilock, his arms already coming out of his smock.
Henty stayed in the observation gallery only long enough to be certain they were putting Petey together again, that they hadn’t lost him under the anesthetic. Henty had seen enough of hospitals to know that the calm tenor of the operating theatre would not be rippled because they lost one nine-year-old. They probably lost twenty or thirty people in that theatre every week. It was in the “Permanent” wing of the hospital. Henty grimaced for the twentieth time at the gravedigger’s humor, or insensitivity that had promoted the choice of so inappropriate a euphemism for “incurable”. Henty saw the second surgeon tell the anesthetist to take Petey down. She left the gallery quickly.
The chief surgeon was in the shower when she got to the locker-room next to scrubbing-up. His golf clubs stood in the corner. He came out of the shower. Henty politely turned her back to him. “Well?” he said.
“You’re the doctor.” She could almost feel him shrug irritably. He didn’t say anything. “Dammit, he’s only nine!”
“Yeah.”
“It didn’t work?”
“It worked all right. But there are new complications.”
Henty sighed. Always new complications. “You mean another operation?”
“No. Henty, can’t you give up?” The surgeon came and massaged her shoulders.
“No. He’s all I got.”
“Uh-huh. He’s got a year.
Henty sagged and he held her by her shoulders for a moment, then turned to his golf clubs. Henty held on to the wash basin, then, seeing a shoe stand, sat down on it. “You don’t pull any punches, do you?”
The surgeon looked at his feet. “Bastards will steal your clubs right out of your car in the basement.” He hefted the bag over his shoulder. “Strangers I lie to, it’s easier. Friends I tell the truth, get it over with. There’s nothing more we can do for him except to give him a quick way out.”
“No!o!o!o!o!” Without knowing it, Henty was shaking him by the lapels of his jacket.
Gently he disengaged her hands. “Don’t be in such a hurry to decide. It’s his pain, not yours.” Henty reached out a hand to touch him as he turned away again, then jerked her hand back. “Please, isn’t there anything you can do?”
He sighed deeply, took one more step, then turned decisively to her. “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this, but there’s a long shot. The—”
“You can save him! Fantastic!”
“Not me. The man I studied under now has a stericlinic at Athabasca in the Arctic Circle. Mostly he handles bad radiation cases. But he’s been trying his treatment on a few kids with a better than even success rate. I only heard about it last week.”
“Hey, that’s the best news I've heard in a long time!” Henty threw her arms around the surgeon and kissed him on both cheeks.
“Linda sends you her love too,” he said drily.
“Yeah, Right, and this one is for her.” She kissed him on the mouth.
They stood there grinning like teenagers caught necking behind the clubhouse. Then Henty resolutely pulled the strap to heft the golf clubs up on his shoulder and pushed him from the locker, saying, “Save some for Linda.”
The bad news came a week later.
Petey was still in pain: they were keeping it down but Henty was watching carefully to make sure they didn’t turn him into a junkie. Chris and Linda — she'd been a nurse before she married Chris — had told her how tempting it is for the nursing staff to make life easy for themselves by doping up the patients, even more so when they could rationalize their actions as making life more tolerable for the poor unfortunates.
Petey was so determined to be cheerful that she had a hard time not bursting into tears every time she saw his young face strained by lines of pain.
The smile slid from her face as she came out of his room to the insistent broadcast announcement that this was the last warning, all visitors must now leave or be penalized. A woman of about fifty with pink hair and a pink dress was standing in the passage, waiting for Henty. The woman held a clipboard in her hand and one foot encased in a pink oxford up against the wall. She was totally at ease but Henty stiffened when she saw her, t
hen looked expectant.
“You've been here often enough to know better than to overstay official visiting hours,” the woman reprimanded her primly.
“Sorry,” Henty said contritely. “I’ll try to do better.”
“You don’t know how fortunate your kid is to find a bed here. There’s not a hospital for two hundred miles where the waiting list is less than three years.”
Henty felt like saying. All right, all right, don’t rub it in! Instead, she swallowed and said, for Petey. “I know and we’re very grateful. You got news from upstairs?”
The pink woman pursed her lips as if faced with an impertinent, curious child. “The Administrator decided resources do not presently permit us to send you son to the Arctic Circle.”
For a long moment Henty was too stunned to say anything and when she recovered her breath all she could manage was, weakly, “But...when?”
The pink woman was shocked. “We don’t question The Caring Society’s decisions!”
“Petey’s got less than a year to live,” Henty insisted. “If he doesn’t go soon, he’ll die!”
“Don’t you understand?” snapped the pink woman irritably. “Your son has worn out the care of The Caring Society.”
“His name is Petey. Would it hurt you to say it?”
The pink woman looked as if she'd just won a big bet on the week’s Gauntlet Runner. “He’s holding up a bed that’s needed for somebody else,” she said silkily, spitefully.
“You mean, the sooner he dies, the better?”
“The President told us: People are our most plentiful asset.”
Henty pulled herself together. Arguing with this harpy would get her nowhere. “What’s the appeals procedure?”
“There isn’t one.” The pink woman savored the words. “The Administrator’s decision is final. Good citizens don’t question the decisions of The Caring Society. It always does what’s best for people. For all the people.”
“Can I speak to the Administrator please?”
“Under no circumstances,” said the pink lady with obvious satisfaction and turned on her heel.
“Hey!”
The pink woman turned impatiently, rejection pursing her mouth. “What is it now?”
“You really should change your dressmaker. That dress looks like a prison warder’s uniform.”
On the pink woman’s scrawny bosom her pink and blue badge of office glinted: around the outside the words The Caring Society, across the middle her rank: Supervisor. She glared venom at Henty, then spun and stalked off, her hard heels beating an echoing tattoo in the hospital corridor.
Henty’s shoulders drooped. “Oh damn,” she said. “Damn. Damn. Damn!” She beat her forehead against the wall three times to the rhythm of the curses.
CHAPTER 2
Henty’s bank manager was a professionally jolly fat man. Usually she didn’t mind him, even though he was a groper and a pain. Henty believed in live and let live.
But today he was deciding not to let Petey live. She knew it by the way he refused to meet her eyes and kept punching at the terminal keyboard and studying the screen long after he knew everything he needed to know.
“We can’t extend our limit,” he said at long last.
“What about the farm?”
“There’s already a second mortgage on it.”
“Well—”
“And you already owe the hospital another $85,000.”
“How do you know that?”
He punched some buttons and watched the screen. “The normal way. Their computer told our computer.”
“That’s illegal, sharing memory banks.”
The fat man smiled grimly. “Most people think so. But it’s legal for the government and for government-sponsored or -guaranteed organizations. All the banks are guaranteed by the government, so we can find out anything we want to know about you.” Now he was staring hungrily at her.
“What about the hospital giving out infor—”
“They’re in The Caring Society, so it’s legal for them. There’s almost nobody it’s illegal for.”
“I got to have the money. Petey’s dying.”
His eyes slid over her like eels in a tank. “You’re overextended right now. Can you meet the note due day after tomorrow?”
Henty just shook her head. He knew she didn’t have the money, just as well as she did.
“See?” He snapped his terminal off. “Sorry,” He grunted as he struggled out of his chair. Henty couldn’t remember him ever standing up before. It was respect for the soon-dead.
Henty backed out of his office. At the door she stopped. “Please, isn’t—”
The bank manager shook his head, his eyes on her breasts, and sat down. Her audience with him was over.
In the main hall of the bank, Henty paused to look at it, really to look — for the first time in years. When she was a little girl, there had been counters with customers on one side and clerks on the other side. Now there were only desks at which clerks talked on the phone or communed with their terminals. Through a haze of tears, Henty saw the open door of the vault in the far wall.
Petey would die because she was the only who cared whether he lived or died and she couldn’t raise the money to keep him alive. “I wish Pop were alive,” Henty said aloud. That gave her an idea and she almost ran out of the bank to her decrepit old truck.
CHAPTER 3
Henty skidded the truck to a halt outside the feed battery that served all the co-ops. As she jumped out, Old Sam. her helper, looked out from under his hat where he was dozing in the shade of the hopper.
“Oh, it’s you. What’s the hurry? The chickens aren’t going anywhere. How’s Petey?” He settled his hat back over his eyes.
“Dying.” She watched him for reaction. Nothing. She prodded him with her boot.
“I heard you,” he complained without taking his hat out of his eyes. “But what can I say to that? It’s not polite to mention such things.”
“Where did Pop keep the shotgun?”
He took the hat off to squint up at her. “Drugs would be less noisy and a lot kinder.”
“Not that. The bank is going to foreclose in three days.”
“That’s different. It’s in the box under your grandma’s milk churn. Shells too.”
“Thanks.”
“A pleasure. Anything to help.” Old Sam settled his hat back over his eyes. Henty was halfway to the truck when his brain caught up with his mouth. He shot up like red ants were invading his pants. “Goddammit, you don’t! Standing up to the sheriff’s bailiff with a gun is a hanging offence.”
Henty couldn’t suppress a smile but was careful to wipe it before turning to him. “I’m not that stupid. Sam, while I’m away, visit Petey in hospital, okay? And tell him I’m doing it for him.”
“Sure. Always did like the boy. But what are you going to do with your daddy’s shotgun?”
Henty smiled and shot off in the truck. In the mirror she could see Old Sam, taking off his hat and pulling at his lower lip as he stared after her. He was a good man and the new owners wouldn’t be able to manage without him spannering the hopper.
Unless they mechanized everything, even the hopper... The half smile fell from her face. She stopped the truck between the sprawling old frame house her great-grandfather had built and the dairy her grandfather had built and which was still in use when she had been a little girl, before agribiz put any herd smaller than ten thousand cows in milk out of “the biz” as the agriweeklies called it. She took a step towards the dairy, hesitated, turned and went into the house. The next time she passed through here — if ever — it would belong to someone else. Agribiz would put a bulldozer through it the day after the bank sold them the land.
She wandered up to a small room under the eaves. A doll in a blue dress sat on a table. She hugged it to her.
“Cindy. Oh Cindy, how I wish I was six again!” Through the haze again over her eyes, she saw her golden mother giving her the doll, her father
in the background stepping back from lighting the candles on the cake, using the same match on his pipe.
Hurriedly she put the doll down and stumbled from the room and down the stairs.
Petey’s room. Comics. Model aeroplanes, one a model of the plane his father flew in the war from which he never returned. How brave he had looked in his uniform, how hard she had tried not to let the fear in her heart show on her face. Petey had been so small, he didn’t even remember what his father looked like and the 3-D personrep on his bedside bureau showed only a handsome young man, nothing of the essential decency and strength.
Henty had to push hard at the door of her parents’ bedroom. It was dusty; the old four-poster covered with cobwebs, an unused room in a too-large house. The last time she had been in it, her mother was dead and her father said as they stood beside the body. “Death can be beautiful.” He had squeezed her hand and walked out and shot himself with his shotgun. After the bodies were removed, she had closed the door and never entered the room until today.
In her own, smaller bedroom, she stood just inside the door. She looked at the double-bed in which Petey was conceived because she and Jake had not had the money for a honeymoon away and were too proud to accept one as a gift from Pop. She smiled wryly at that young pride. She wasn’t all that much older but now she would do anything for money. Anything.
Where she was going, she would need nothing from this room.
Through the window she saw Old Sam running up the dusty road. He had finally worked out her intention. She walked resolutely from the house, steeling herself not to look back. She passed the truck and went into the disused dairy. In here everything was covered with a layer of dust but she ignored that and hefted the heavy creamer from the wooden box on which it stood. The shotgun was inside the box, with cleaning equipment. And shells.
She took everything and carried it out to the truck. The shotgun she rested in the passenger foot well. The cleaning cotton and rod she put on the seat next to her
She drove out of the yard just as Old Sam came running up. He was puffing and his face was contorted with the urgency of stopping her.