Pit Fighters

  3. Side Gig

  By Rick Griffin

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2020 Rick Griffin

  Paris opened his eyes. Logan’s large deer snout came into focus not an inch away from his face, huffing stale air into his nostrils. Paris would have backed up, but he was already maximally dented into a thin stretcher.

  “He’s alive!” Logan announced and backed away with a grin over his dumb muzzle. Paris still couldn’t make out the ceiling, but Kinny the opossum came into view, hovering over him to check.

  “Logan? Kinny?” Paris whispered hoarsely, his face hurting as it moved, “what happened?”

  “You should have seen yourself,” Kinny said, his exclamatory remark delivered in the same dry tone as everything else he said. “You became some kinda mindless berserker bunny, throwing Santiago around the ring like a helium balloon, only to pass out after you finished.”

  “Really?” Paris asked.

  “No you idiot, Santiago hit you so hard he cracked your skull.”

  Paris blinked. It took a moment for Kinny’s sarcasm to register as a joke and not some kind of cruel prank.

  “…so I lost,” Paris said.

  “He remembers!” Logan exclaimed with a clasp of his thick palms, “that’s a good sign!”

  Paris didn’t remember much except Santiago’s fist closing in on his face while he stood there like a moron, but he didn’t want to rain on Logan’s enjoyable time.

  “Yes you lost,” Kinny reiterated. “And you had to forfeit on the loser’s bracket by default.”

  “What?!” Paris exclaimed, trying to sit up but his everything still aching.

  “Don’t worry,” Logan said, pressing hard hoof-like fingers to Paris’s chest, laying him back straight against the cot. “Dyna said he wouldn’t penalize you for it.”

  “So you’re now one win, one loss,” Kinny said.

  “I…”

  Paris pushed past Logan and sat up. His arm jerked back, connected to an IV and heart monitor behind Kinny. The room they stood in had white linoleum floors.

  “I’m in the hospital?!” Paris exclaimed.

  “That’s where people go when they get injured.” Logan stretched back Paris’s eyelid and squinted. “We sure there’s no brain damage?”

  “No, no no!” Paris rose up despite the crackling feeling all around his head. “I can’t be here! They tack the bill to my contract debt!”

  “He remembers how things work! No brain damage.”

  “They can’t let you die when there’s so much more value to extract,” Kinny said. “Not that they wouldn’t, just not in this case.”

  Paris huffed and jerked the IV and monitor straps off his arm and chest. The monitor started making an eeeeeeee noise as the pulse flatlined, followed by an alert flashing.

  The entire area around Paris's face felt like he’d laid on it wrong and all the pins and needles returned in waves instead of all at once. He entered the closet-like bathroom a few feet away and checked under his violet cheek fur—yeah, it looked like they’d sewn his face back on, though Biomender Gel had already diminished the scars. Nevertheless, that he still had any feeling at all was a marvel.

  He hoped nobody was about to show him a playback of the fight. He already knew if he’d suffered that kind of injury out on the streets, he’d be wearing a Phantom of the Opera half-mask for the rest of his life.

  This could not have been cheap.

  “I’m not letting them rack up any more than I need,” Paris announced as he left the bathroom. “I can’t stay here.”

  “Oh, now he forgot that you do eventually leave the hospital.” Logan reached at the foot of the bed and checked his medical chart. Paris snatched it away.

  “No, I mean under contract. I have to stop my debt from accumulating. I don’t want to be here forever!” He turned back for the bathroom again, but noticed on the table a small, pineapple-laden basket.

  “What’s this?” Paris asked, approaching it.

  Logan winced. “Santiago said he was super sorry.”

  A little card hung off the basket with blue yarn. The little cartoon hippo on the front sat upon a broken chair, with Pobody’s Nerfect printed underneath. When he opened the card, it played a tinny, faltering single line of Ode To Joy. In sloppy script, the inside read, “sorry for breaking your face — Santiago.”

  “How thoughtful,” Paris said, taking on Kinny’s flat tone.

  Kinny shrugged. “Well, at the price of fruit today…”

  Paris picked up said fruit and turned over the rest of the basket, revealing nothing. “It’s a single pineapple.”

  “Still!” Kinny said. “A pineapple.”

  “You might wanna eat that within the next day or two cause we don’t have space in the Green room minifridge,” Logan said.

  “We have a minifridge?” Paris asked with a tilt of his long ears.

  “It doesn’t have any coolant if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  Right then, the door opened and a rotund and prickly nurse entered, turning off the alarm. “Oh!” She said, noticing Paris standing at the other end of the room “Thank goodness, I’d thought for a second we’d lost another.”

  “Lost another?!” Paris exclaimed, thoughts running through scenarios in which he’d broken his neck and died, or worse!

  “Yes!” The hedgehog nurse reached into her medical apron and pulled out a clipboard with an inch-thick stack of paper attached, approximately seven million yellow tabs sticking out the side. “So many of the fighters who wake up in here leave without filling out the proper paperwork.” She handed it over to Paris.

  Paris sighed and pulled up a chair.

  —

  Paris, back on his bunk, cradled the pineapple on his lap. He’d pulled out his duffel bag, a copy of his contract removed. Kinny sat at the console with the copy, looking back and forth between it and the computer screen, tapping away at a calculator the entire time.

  Despite his win that morning, Paris was growing nervous about all this Pit Fighter stuff again—the hospital bill turned out to be three thousand drachs. Less than if they didn’t have access to Biomender, but not a paltry sum either. And that was his third fight ever! How did anyone ever stay afloat with these kinds of expenses all laid at the fighters’ feet?

  Logan waved to get Paris’s attention and tapped at a black cube hidden in the corner. The thing was shorter than the length of Logan’s shin.

  “I guess we have a minifridge,” Paris said.

  “Don’t open it unless you have to,” Logan said, rapping on it.

  “Why not?”

  “Taten’s keeping his insulin in there.”

  Paris blinked. He didn’t want to think about how much worse things would be if he had ongoing medical needs, so he turned to the opossum. “Kinny, you have that yet?”

  “One sec,” Kinny tapped between the calculator and his spreadsheet, then pivoted his butt on the seat to face Paris, one leg crossed over the other. “So, based on the amount of debt you have, which is about ninety thousand drachs…”

  Paris winced at the number again.

  “…the average amount of spending based on your weight class, and assuming nothing goes too wrong on the way—which you shouldn't but I needed to make this easier to calculate—you can expect to buy out your contract before the fifteen-year term is up if you make it to Silver rank. And that’d be around year fourteen.”

  “How far is Silver?” Paris shrank, knowing he wouldn’t like the answer.

  “It goes: green, blue, violet, red, yellow, iron, steel, chrome, copper, bronze, silver, gold, platinum.”

  Paris went over those on his fingers, then ran out of fingers just before Kinny reached the appropriate level. “So uh… eleven ranks…”

  And he had barely made an adequate showing in Green! "The only way out was up," but years? And not even that many less than his total contact term!

  “…are you sure about the expenses?” Paris asked.

  Kinny nodded.

  “What if I didn’t spend so much in the company store?”

  “You can’t avoid it; they're locked up your debt here.”

  “I can live cheap!” Paris said, knowing full well his mother was the only force in his life that contributed to his frugality.

  “Even so. Let’s take food. The minimum price of a meal in the cafeteria is four drachs. You want to eat three times a day, that’s twelve drachs per day. Over a fifteen-year contract term that’s 67,700 drachs. And that’s if you only ever eat that same slop that I did, which I think I’d rather die than eat that stuff for a week straight, much less a year.”

  Paris couldn’t argue with that. “Yeah, but, the contract already covers boarding—”

  “Which goes up if you want to make more income. Each rank puts fighters in better boarding and adds another five hundred drachs per year to your debt, so if you gained one rank per year that’s another 33,000 drachs by the eleventh year. And then we get into the other debts. The average amount spent on medical expenses by any fighter is at least one thousand drachs per month.”

  “Per month!?” Paris exclaimed.

  “It’s a fighting sport, please try to keep up. Fighters are responsible for their own purchases of Biomender Gel, which if you’ve seen the commissary prices, you’d better hope that one of those containers lasts you a while. I mean, you could forego Biomender, but then you wouldn’t be earning income over the weeks it might take to heal naturally. And ‘forego’ isn’t a realistic option because the company can force you to purchase if you’re too far behind on your required fights. And that’s assuming only the occasional incursion into the hospital, which as you’ve noticed already put you three months behind in medical expenses. Fifteen years, that’s about 180,000 drachs if we’re being optimistic.”

  Paris’s pineapple dropped to the concrete floor, bounced once and rolled along to a stop against Logan’s hooves.

  “Shall I go on?” Kinny gestured to his spreadsheet. “I have all the minimum expected numbers right here.”

  “No…” Paris slumped and laid back on his pillow.

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed about,” Kinny said, tapping at the screen to close his programs. “The fifteen-year contract term is not an accident. The company wants as many of your prime years as they can squeeze out of you.”

  Even if Paris worked his tail off to get up to Silver rank and clear his total debt, he’d be thirty-four. Practically an old rabbit! A geezer! That was most of his life right there, falling out like sands through an hourglass. He could have been continuing college but no, he was a dummy entranced by the glamor.

  “Then why does anyone take the contract at all?” Paris asked. “Logan’s still here!”

  “If you’re a bum like Logan, it’s still a good deal,” Kinny explained. Logan either didn’t notice the jab or just thought it accurate and continued to smile. “You accumulate debt, sure, but it’s like having a fifteen-year bar tab. So long as you’re under contract you don’t have to worry about earning money or paying it back or anything, you can just let it keep growing.”

  “Until time’s up and you’re out on the street with no marketable skills and a negative balance in your account,” Paris said.

  “Right, so the other option is to never leave,” Kinny said. “Keep renewing your contract for as long as they’ll let you.”

  Logan’s smile grew wider.

  Paris rarely considered his life long-term; everything in school that interested him, he was no good at. For years the only thing that concerned him was chasing after some fantasy of settling down with some affable guy, even when St. Marten-Cristo didn’t openly approve of his kind of relationships. What would he do after that? He didn’t know. Just… hang around until he died, preferably from a mid-coital heart attack.

  But he hated being so trapped here. Even if he had no plans to go anywhere or do anything else with his life, was he supposed to just live with this mistake? Accept this was his life now until the day they decided “we don’t want a weakling rabbit anymore” and he was out and working crappy jobs for another fifteen years to pay off the rest of the debt? At which point, the day he turned fifty, he could finally start living his life again.

  Or… you could double up.

  It was the best idea that Paris’d had since he arrived.

  “What if I get a regular job?” Paris asked, sitting up. “They only make us fight twice a week, and that’s a lot of down time. I could double what they’re paying me here.”

  “That’ll be tricky,” Logan said.

  “Why?”

  “It’s part of the contract’s ‘public image’ clause,” Kinny said. “The company doesn’t like it if their fighters ‘look poor’.”

  “I am poor and they’re not helping!”

  “Outside of this building you’re not allowed to discuss terms of the contract, you must disclose to all potential employers that you have a previous contract with Pit Fighters. All your wages earned from any side jobs will go to the contract first.”

  Paris stood and paced in front of the opossum. “Listen—none of that matters too much, right? I mean, yeah I don’t get spending money outside company scrip perhaps, but I'll still pay off my contract faster.”

  “He has a point, Kinny,” Logan said, sitting on the minifridge. “Money is money. And he is a healthy young bunny, if not overtaxed in the muscle department.”

  “That’s just it! On-the-job strength training.” Paris said it like he was thinking about progressing in his fighting skills, but that was mostly to avoid disappointing Kinny.

  The opossum was a substantial help with getting Paris to get in the right headspace to fight, but it took just one punch to ground him. The best someone like Paris could hope for was to tread water. And grand plans Kinny had about reaching Silver rank—if Paris could do that, why worry about money at all?

  But he didn’t say it out loud. He rubbed at his face where the dissolving stitches still tingled.

  “I could get a job as a dock worker—”

  Kinny shook his head. “Can’t work at the docks. Too close to the ships. They worry you might try to stow away somewhere.”

  Paris huffed. “What if I trained to become a fighting instructor?”

  “The company has its own line of martial arts academies and you’d be competing.”

  Logan spoke up, “And they definitely don’t allow prostitution.”

  “I didn’t say I was gonna—” Paris clasped his paws over his face until he got his expression back to calm and proactive. “I mean, instead of going about this backwards, just tell me what they allow?”

  —

  Paris, lightly enrobed in his red delivery cap and tiny vest, struggled to push the enormous cardboard package up a set of stairs much steeper than they had any right to be. Throwing his back against the long flat side that read THIS SIDE UP, he struggled to take a breath. The box threatened to topple and crush him against the tiny steps, so he reeled again and shoved with his legs, which were fortunately his best feature. The package wobbled upright, then toppled and tipped back, tapping against the doorframe. Paris skipped around the iron railing to reach the doorbell and rang it.

  The door opened, and an enormous heavyset crocodile glanced at the package in front of him, now just leaning on the doorframe by its one corner. Paris ducked underneath, holding up the small tablet and a stylus.

  “Delivery for Sowe Haran, sign here,” he said.

  “Oh goodie,” the croc said, his voice more airy and jovial than Paris expected to come from his jagged teeth. He signed the tablet right away. “Oh, but I mean this to go in the garage, can you put it in there for me please?”

  Paris looked back out across the porch to the garage twenty feet away, up a driveway with an equally absurd incline as the front steps.

  “…yes, sir.” Paris sighed.

  Some time later, Paris huffed and heaved, and the package landed with a loud SLAP, its long side landing against the empty concrete floor of the garage interior. Then he looked down and noticed the THIS SIDE UP arrow was now upside down. He whistled all the way back to his delivery van.

  The electric vehicle started up, and Paris collapsed into the front seat. Then he sat up and looked into the bay in the back, noting again the sheer volume of cargo remaining.

  “Delivery by eight p.m. my tail,” he grumbled, “No wonder they always leave the ‘sorry we missed you’ sticker without even trying to knock…”

  With some trepidation in his muscles, he started the vehicle down to the next delivery…the very next house over. He then shut off the van and weakly checked the delivery roster on the tablet. This address had a lot of notes attached to it, and he didn’t have the time to read all of that. He tapped the checkbox and reached into the back to find the box.

  It was fortunately tiny and about the weight of a box of tissues. Paris sighed in relief, and ran up to the front door, finger jamming into the doorbell the moment he reached it.

  The door opened, and a very busty female fox in an open silk robe answered the door. She looked Paris up and down, and leaned against the doorframe with one exposed leg sliding all the way to the other corner.

  “Delivery for Lem Calor,” Paris said.

  “Oh, that must be for my husband,” she said. She bent her knee and lifted her leg far higher than required for any action. “I am so sorry, he is out of town for work and won’t be back until this weekend…”

  “That’s fine,” Paris said, checking the tablet again and holding it out to her. “You can sign for it.”

  “Hold on,” she said, standing straight and tall and letting her bust bounce around like a pair of overfilled water balloons. “Let me see if I have a pen, you can step inside if you like…”

 

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