Standing outside the door to “The Slaughterhouse,” I felt the first real stirrings of anxiety in my stomach. Sure, it had sounded good when I’d first thought about it, but now that I was actually here, it was starting to feel like a very dumb idea.
The Slaughterhouse was the name of a gym that had a really strong team of guys who all trained together. It was perhaps one of the best training camps in the entire Northeast, and it was located only a few miles from my apartment.
When their gym first opened, Quarry Davenport had actually gotten my cell number and tried to talk me into leaving Coach Jansen and coming to fight for them instead. Quarry was a big name in MMA. He’d been in the first sanctioned fights that had taken place in the eighties and everyone loved his go-for-broke style. Since then, he’d started training other fighters and he’d amassed a nice little crew.
I’d been tempted to give The Slaughterhouse a shot on a few different occasions.
Sometimes when Coach Jansen had really been giving me a hard time during training or pulling one of his mind games, I’d thought about just going down and checking the place out.
Especially because they were quickly growing to become a real name among MMA insiders, and Quarry Davenport was supposedly close friends with Drew Ellis from the UFF.
But my loyalty had always held me back.
Now it had been a couple of years since Quarry had asked me to join his crew, and they were very much established. One of their current members was a belt holder in the heavyweight division, and they had two big-time contenders in the light heavyweight division. I wasn’t even in the UFF yet, so I was nothing compared to their top guys.
Standing outside, trying to plan my next move, imagining how I’d sell myself to the guy who had once wanted me on his team—I could hear the sounds of cheering from inside the gym.
The windows were blocked so you couldn’t see into the place, and the door was locked. It had the feel of an underground fight club, and the rumors said that in many ways that’s exactly what The Slaughterhouse was.
I’d heard stories of their legendary training sessions; people fighting without headgear or protective equipment during practices. There were other stories about Quarry’s insane training methods, but whatever he was doing seemed to be working. His team included some of the best in the world, and he was just minutes away from where I lived.
So what was I waiting for?
I knocked on the door, but perhaps too softly, because nobody answered. And then a little voice inside my head told me to leave—leave and go back to Coach Jansen and tell him that I was wrong. Tell him that I would accept his decision to wait another year, if that’s what he truly believed was best.
But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bring myself to swallow my pride and run back to him with my tail between my legs.
Instead I pounded on the door to The Slaughterhouse gym even harder than before. For some reason, just before the door opened, I had a vivid image of greyhounds racing around a track, chasing that little white rabbit they could never hope to catch.
The door swung open and standing there was one of the biggest human beings I’d ever seen. He was over seven feet tall, black, with a shaved head and biceps bigger than my leg. “Who the fuck are you?” he said, looking me up and down with disgust.
“I’m a fighter. I’m here to talk to Quarry.”
The big guy grinned. “Oh, yeah?”
Behind him, I could see a crowd of guys in shorts and t-shirts watching two men in a cage. The two men were clearly fighting and every so often the crowd around them would erupt with cheers or instruction.
“I can come back tomorrow.”
“What’s your name, son?”
“Justin Brown.”
“Oh, yeah? I heard of you.” He smiled and reached out his hand. “Come on in, Quarry’s just reffing this fight right here.”
I walked inside and the guy shut the door behind us with a solid thunk.
“What’s your name?” I asked him.
“Everybody just calls me Z.”
“Hey, Z. Good to meet you, man. You a fighter?”
“Retired. I used to fight overseas, did a lot of stuff. Broke my neck during a kickboxing match in the Netherlands and then I came back home and started helping Quarry out at the gym.”
“Shit, that’s intense,” I said, studying him as he towered over me.
“Yeah, man. This life isn’t for the faint of heart, but you know that already, don’t you?” Just as he said that, both of us looked up at the cage in time to see one of the fighters knock the other one out with a vicious left hook.
“Oh, shit,” Z said, grimacing.