Slingers by Wallace Matt

Author:Wallace, Matt [Wallace, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: EMP
Published: 2014-02-19T08:00:00+00:00

THE LAMB & THE HERALD

Jeremy goes to take his second bite of the candy apple Mister Galeel bought him at a stand in Roll Call and stops when he sees its caramel coating is now sprinkled red.

When the red begins to drip down the apple Jeremy knows instantly it’s blood.

He’s only ten years old, but he’s seen a lot of blood.

Mister Galeel is a journalist. Years ago he wrote a story about Jeremy after Jeremy was born because he was the first baby ever born in Sling City. His parents weren’t VIP’s or bleacher bums or perma-fans, though. They weren’t city workers or part of the games. They certainly weren’t slingers.

No, his mother was a squatter living in G-Ring. She didn’t know who his father was.

Jeremy was born in steel squalor and when word got around it made everybody interested in the squatters and G-Ring again and Mister Galeel won a big prize for his story, and his story was picked up by media outlets all over the world and for a moment everyone knew baby Jeremy’s name.

Oh, it was a big deal for a goodly while. Jeremy’s mother was given gifts, money, offers to leave the station and return to Earth.

And she might have, maybe, if all the gifts and all the money she received hadn’t bought her enough of her special medicine to kill her.

That story never got written for some reason.

After she died people just kind of lost interest in Jeremy, and in the squatters again, and in G-Ring.

So Jeremy grew up there, raised by the village as they say.

Now Mister Galeel is back and he’s writing a new story about the squatters, about G-Ring, and about the things the shock cops have been doing there in the past few months. He wanted to begin with Jeremy, he said, as a way to say sorry for leaving him years ago.

Or rather, Mister Galeel was going to write that story.

Jeremy looks up from his soiled apple at Mister Galeel, and the man had been typing something on his little pad a second before and now he’s stopped. He’s still holding the pad. In fact, his hands are holding it so tight his brown skin is turning white around it. And his eyes are wide open, except he’s not really looking at anything.

That’s because there’s a shiny blade poking through his chest and a very big, very ugly shock cop standing behind him.

He’s not the first person Jeremy has seen stabbed. He’s not the first person Jeremy has seen die.

He is the first person Jeremy has seen murdered in cold blood.

Mister Galeel bought him the apple and then they’d gone somewhere quiet away from Roll Call to talk. Jeremy asked if they were going back to G-Ring and Mister Galeel said no, that it wasn’t safe.

It turns out the secluded spot he chose wasn’t any safer.

Now there’s another shock cop with his gloved hands on Jeremy’s shoulders and it’s not the first time he’s been grabbed, either. He’s not

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