Knockout King!
by Graham Murray
SMASHWORDS EDITION
Copyright© 2011, Graham Murray
Published by Living Books USA
Cover design by author
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RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under
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unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part
of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
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This book is purely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons whether living or deceased, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Dedicated to the memory of HOANG NGUYEN and other victims of the mindless street game of “Knockout”.
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Knockout King!
Stanley stroked his father’s face and then stood up. There was not much more he could do here. The doctors and nurses at St. Louis Memorial Hospital were doing all they could. Stanley would just have to wait and see if his father would pull through.
He looked down at the elderly man in the bed. Like himself, Stanley’s father was not a small man and at the age of sixty, had been unable to defend himself against his attackers. His jaw had been broken from the first knockout punch. After that, the gang had set about kicking and punching him as he lay on the ground, unconscious and defenceless.
That may have been a mercy, thought Stanley. At least his father had not been conscious when the gang had beaten and kicked his frail and aging body. Both of his eyes were swollen shut, each bruised the colour of a starling’s wing. His lips were split and still weeping blood in places. One of his arms was in a cast, the fall having broken his wrist in several paces. One of his kidneys had also been quite badly bruised, but Stanley had been assured by the doctors that this would heal over time. There was also a small hairline fracture behind his left ear where a youth’s boot had made contact.
It had been a particularly brutal attack and had taken place in broad daylight, making it all the more heinous. One witnesses said that she had seen four or five kids - which she guessed to be between twelve and seventeen years old - approach Stanley’s father as he was closing his store for the evening. The biggest member, a male teenager, had broken from the gang, walked up to him and without so much as a word, had brutally punched the old man in the face.
There had been no provocation, no conversation . . . nothing. The boy had simply lashed out and punched Stanley’s father for no apparent reason. And then the rest of the gang had closed in on him like vultures around a carcass and had began punching and kicking him.
“They were laughing while they were beating him,” said another witness, a terrified old lady who had been watching from her apartment across the street. “It was unbelievable. Like it was some sort of game. I have never seen anything like it in my seventy years.”
Yet another witness, who had been walking some distance behind the youths, said that she just assumed that they were going to the mall, or perhaps the movies. They seemed quite happy and did not appear to be any kind of ‘gang’. They were smartly dressed in regular, fashionable clothing. They were just regular youths, or at least appeared that way. She too had placed their ages between about eleven and seventeen. It was horrible to watch, she said, especially as nobody came to help the old man, she added morosely. Everyone was too scared. After all, how do you approach a gang of violent youths these days? They may have been armed with knives, clubs and maybe even guns. The world has gone crazy.