Arena

by Logan Jacobs

  Finally, I pulled out a belt made of the same material as the fabric under the vest. Attached to it were four magazine holders, stacked two deep, positioned right around where my kidneys would be. The holders each had a slightly curved but mostly rectangular magazine in them. I wrapped the belt around my waist, the buckle snapping together automatically as the belt tightened to fit my waist. I reached around with my right hand and put my palm on the top magazine. As soon as my hand hit it, it released from the belt. I brought it up to take a closer look. Inside, stacked three across, were cylindrical bullets that looked like slim cigarettes except they were dark red.

  I slammed the magazine into the empty receiver on the rifle and felt it click into place. There was no bolt pull, but I felt the gun come alive with a hum. I heard the mechanism activate, and there was a satisfying clack-thunk. A small readout on the top just above the pistol grip showed another one of the Roman numeral-looking symbols. I guessed it was about one-hundred-and-fifty. There was a small toggle switch near where my right thumb would rest on the pistol grip that glowed green as soon as the rifle was loaded. It had two positions, a symbol with a line through it, and then the symbol with no line through it. I kept it for the time being with the line through it.

  Satisfied, I let the rifle fall into place as I gave my armor one last thunk with my fist and saw Artemis staring at me.

  Her eyes were back to normal, and she had a mischievous look on her face.

  “How long have you been watching?” I asked, a little embarrassed. I felt like a kid playing dress up.

  “Since you loaded the rifle,” she answered in a low, throaty voice that I hadn’t heard before. “I am not sure exactly why, the hormone response in this body is quite something, but I am very hot and you look attractive as fornication right now.”

  “Fuck,” I corrected with a smile, “the correct use would be fuck for that type of slang.”

  “Well, fornicate – I mean, fuck me,” she quipped. As she rolled her eyes, she added, “Your language is so very very strange.”

  I gave her a tell-me-about-it shrug and walked over.

  “So, you were pretty intense there with the whole horror movie herky-jerk in front of the computers,” I said inquisitively. “What was that about?”

  “Sorry,” she answered as color splashed across her cheeks, “I have never interfaced optically in my human body. I have no idea what it looks like.”

  “Um, a little creepy,” I told her.

  “My brain is still an AI in some respects,” she explained, “and I have several bionic enhancements that allow me to retain my digital skill set. I was able to review the logs and records for every workstation here.”

  She got very quiet for a moment, her face a mask of dread.

  “Something very bad happened here, and if we aren’t careful, it’s going to happen to us too,” she said gravely.

  “That sounds, not good,” I gulped.

  “No,” she said, her voice full of concern. “It is not. The scientists at this installation were actually studying an ancient artifact found deep below the surface. The military engineers discovered it when they were tunneling to access the moon's core. It resembled a large stone chest, maybe three stories high, and had engraved glyphs that covered the entire surface. Neither the stone nor the glyphs matched any known substance or writing in five star systems. The scientists were using harmonic resonance to try to map the interior when the sonic waves triggered something. The chest opened and within three weeks every single man, woman, and child here was gone.”

  “Holy Jesus,” I blurted out. “Over seven thousand people just gone?”

  “They were gone,” she answered, as her face grew even darker. “... but, not gone.”

  I just stared at her, my brain couldn’t compute what she had just said.

  “The chest was some form of containment device, or prison that housed, for lack of a better term, demons.”

  “Demons?” I asked, positive I’d heard her wrong.

  “Yes.” She answered, all the color had left her face. “Ancient, horrible, malevolent demons that inhabited the bodies of the scientists and soldiers closest to the chest. The chest killed them instantly, but the bodies survived, and they became deformed, hellish, and deadly. From there they spread throughout the station, anyone killed by the creatures became a host for another demon. The Colonial Marines mounted a desperate retreat and held the demons at bay while a few people managed to matter transmit out. The last Marine sent his final transmission three days ago.”

  All I could do was stare at her in wide-eyed amazement.

  “That’s what that space battle was about.” She grabbed a few more water bottles as she talked. “Seti Beta Four’s two predominant nations fighting to keep the other one from getting to the moon.”

  She splashed water from one of the bottles on to her face as she ran her fingers through her hair. I could tell she was psyching herself up.

  “Here’s the situation, Marc Havak,” she said in her business-like tone as she opened the drawer on one of the desks and pulled out a medium sized pistol that in all honesty looked like a souped-up Nerf gun. She pulled the slide back just enough to check to see if there was a round in the chamber. “We have to get to that matter transmit unit. Now. The sun is almost gone, and they will come out at night. They don’t die easy, but if you can do enough damage to the host body, it will fall. Seems like the Marines had success with headshots and taking out their legs. You will not be able to operate the mat-trans, but I downloaded the instructions. So, you are going to have to escort me a little over one Earth mile to the building where the unit is.”

  “Oh, is that all?” I quipped as I tried to sound way more confident than I was. “Piece of cake.”

  “The rifle you hold in your hands is an R72 Eradicator,” she explained like she was a booth babe at an NRA convention. “It fires a three millimeter, kinetically charged incendiary round that travels at six thousand feet per second. It fires one thousand rounds per minute in full auto mode. The magazines hold one hundred and eighty rounds of caseless ammunition. The scope on the top will project a bright purple X on your target up to two hundred feet. It is an incredibly easy-to-handle weapon with a low learning curve.”

  She walked over to the door. I put my hand on the grip of the gun and joined her.

  “We will have one chance,” she said with determination.

  “No respawns,” I whispered under my breath.

  “No, Marc Havak, this is quite real,” Her eyes met mine, “If you die, I die. And if I die, you die.”

  I looked at her. A person who really wasn’t even a person, who I hadn’t known for more than two hours was putting her life in the hands of a truck driver. Fear boiled up in me like a raging tempest and just as it was about to boil over, I heard my great-uncle Joe’s voice in my head. Calm, sure, and purposeful. He recounted a saying that his Sergeant had uttered to them just as their Higgins boat was about to reach the shore at Normandy. It was a story I loved to hear him tell. While I’d heard him say the words a hundred times, it wasn’t until just now that I fully understood them.

  With his voice ringing in my mind, I turned to Artemis. “There is only one sure thing in this life and that is death.” My voice was steely, unwavering, as if he were speaking through me. “It will come for us all, eventually. And when that day comes there won’t be a thing any of us can do to stop it. So I guess it’s a damn good thing that day isn’t today.”

  I kicked the door open, grabbed Artemis by the hand, and walked out into the darkest night I had ever seen.

  “Stay close to me, no matter what,” I whispered over my shoulder to her. “Try to keep anything and everything off our six, and if it comes to it, run like hell.”

  My head felt like it was a swivel as my eyes tracked back and forth in front of us. Everything was eerily still and quiet. I tried to remember the best strategies for defeating Doom in Nightmare mode. All that came to mind was to keep moving always, conserve ammo
, and don’t die. I used to like to play that particular bit of ultra-violent entertainment while listening to some hard and heavy rock. Something about the beat of the drums and steady pounding of the bass, like a heartbeat, in most hard rock that got the blood pumping enough to make you feel invincible.

  As we made our way in a fast shuffle walk down the street, I could almost hear the low, steady thrum of the intro to some metal song as it played in my head like a war hymn.

  We’d made it maybe a quarter of a mile, and I had the briefest hope that maybe this wouldn’t be so bad when I heard wails that sounded like Hell incarnate.

  “Marc,” Artemis whispered close to my ear.

  “I know,” I responded, finishing her sentence, “here they come.”

  And come they did. Four crawled down the side of a building ahead of and to our right, arms and legs impossibly contorted like night terror insects. The demons had mutated the bodies into grotesque cadaver-like spectres, pale with arms too long for their bodies, the skin of their faces pulled back into a skeleton-like rictus, teeth cracked and broken, tongues black, and void socket eyes.

  The Eradicator came up to my shoulder almost of its own will, the purple X bright on the head of the closest demon. It opened its mouth to shriek torment, and I pulled the trigger. The gun kicked like a twenty-two and the bullets stitched magnesium-hot explosions on the surface of the building next to the demon. Just as it jumped, I corrected my aim, and the rounds tore the heinous things head off.

  I had a millisecond to bask in my first triumph before Artemis’ hand dug into my shoulder.

  “Havak!” she cried, and the night finally let slip the dogs of war.

  There were dozens of them in the street behind us, some walking on two feet with their claws dragging the ground, others on all fours like abhorrent crabs. The dozens were soon going to be hundreds.

  “Run!” I roared as I opened up with the Eradicator. It spat blazing hot six-thousand-feet-per-second retaliation at the oncoming demons. The fiery rounds knocked the closest demons back into their demented brethren, and the explosive bullets tore fist-sized chunks from their chests and legs until the gun clicked empty.

  Artemis was already five feet ahead of me, so I spun on my heel and hauled ass after her. She had her pistol in a two-handed grip and fired methodically, each shot hitting a demon in the head. I caught up to her just as I slammed a fresh clip into the Eradicator. She pointed up ahead to a tall building with a giant triangular satellite dish on top of it. I nodded in acknowledgement as I put the Eradicator back to work.

  Every time I pulled the trigger, The Eradicator vibrated in my hands as if it were alive, the loud, rapid-fire bursts sounded like the raging roar of some beast whose only purpose was to rip and tear and shred. I was more than happy to oblige and soon the rifle was empty again. I poured on as much speed as I could muster, flicked the empty magazine out of the gun, and slammed a new one home.

  Artemis was fast as hell, and I could tell she wasn’t going full out in order to stay with me. If I could hold the demons off for a few seconds Artemis could get a good lead, especially with her bionic speed, and maybe get out of this alive. I had just opened my mouth to tell her of my plan when the street in front of us filled with demons as they poured out of the buildings beside us.

  Artemis began to slow, if we stopped, we were dead, so I grabbed her hand and pulled her after me as we sprinted toward the beasts.

  I could feel her hesitation, but just before the demons were on top of us I fired half the clip into a sewer covering right in front of us. The explosive rounds tore a chunk out of the pavement and threw up a blast of shrapnel that knocked the closest demons back a few feet. Without a chance for a second thought Artemis and I jumped into the gaping hole in the ground.

  We dropped ten feet through our new exit into a sewer and landed in brackish, ankle-deep water. Artemis landed like a cat. I thudded down like a sack of potatoes and nearly twisted my ankle.

  It was a gamble going below, I had no way of knowing if there were more of the things down here or not, but I knew they were up there, so what was the worst that could happen?

  Artemis took a second to get her bearings, spotted a service door in the side of the tunnel up ahead, and ran toward it. She flew like an Olympic sprinter, her feet barely made a splash in the water as she closed the distance to the door in nothing flat.

  I heard the demons regroup outside the hole, fired a long burst from the Eradicator into it, then followed Artemis. I reached her just as she shot the lock off the door. We glanced at each other and nodded. She kicked the door in and I went through first, Eradicator at my shoulder hungry for targets.

  The door opened into a small stairwell that was clear of baddies and we hit the stairs in tandem. We’d made two flights when I heard the demons crash through the door at the bottom of the stairwell, so I blindly fired the rest of the clip over the railing into the stairwell below. Artemis shouldered her way through a door on the next landing, and we entered a large high-tech chamber with a huge disk in the center of the room surrounded by criss crossing spherical arches and complex electrical diode towers positioned around the disk.

  I closed the door behind us and slammed home my last magazine as sweat dripped down my face.

  “How long will it take you to get this funhouse ride up and running?” I asked breathlessly. Now that we had stopped for a moment I realized how out of shape I was. My lungs burned, and my legs felt like jelly. I looked down and noticed scratches all over my body armor, and the green light on my vest was down to about a quarter of what it once was.

  I wasn’t even aware that any of them had been that close.

  “Hey, Artemis,” I yelled to her as I pulled some heavy equipment down in front of the stairway door, “um, did you notice me getting manhandled by those freakshows?”

  Artemis pushed buttons and flicked switches on a huge power converter, just this side of frantic.

  “Uh,” she stammered, her voice going up an octave, “kinda?”

  I finished pushing whatever I could in front of the door just as one of them slammed into it with a clang. I backed up at a trot, The Eradicator held down at my hip in both hands, as I kept my eye on the door.

  “What do you mean, kinda?” I yelled over my shoulder as I slid behind a large electronics console at the edge of the circle. Artemis ran up next to me and began typing like our lives depended on it. The whine of the converters filled the room as power flowed into the machine, and the arches over the center of the circle began to move like a Newton’s cradle perpetual motion toy. The diodes hummed and then crackled to life, energy of some kind arched between them.

  “Well, yeah, they got really close out in the street before you shot out the sewer grate,” she said matter-of-factly, her hands a blur of motion.

  “Huh,” I uttered, “I could have sworn the closest they got was about ten feet away.”

  “Oh no, Marc Havak, you were close to dying several times,” she said offhandedly while she typed.

  I remembered what the Ranger had said to me about adrenaline fucking with your spatial awareness. Man, he hadn’t been kidding.

  “Good thing close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades,” I quipped with another of my great uncle Joe’s favorites.

  “Horseshoes would be ineffective and we do not have any hand grenades,” Artemis said earnestly.

  “It’d be a lot cooler if we did,” I drawled in my best McConaughey quote from Dazed and Confused.

  Artemis didn’t have a chance to respond, since the creatures began to bang on the door, harder and harder, and the equipment I’d shoved in front of it bounced with the force. Their snarls and wails were a like a demented symphony of the damned that was about to build to its crescendo.

  The Newton’s cradle spun faster and faster, the circles a blur, and energy arced and crackled from the diodes. I could smell ozone.

  “It’s started,” Artemis grunted with a sigh of exhaustion, “now it just needs time to char
ge before the gate opens.”

  The stairway door flew off its hinges and tumbled into the room as the demons crashed into the knocked over equipment. Thankfully, the doorway acted as a bit of choke point. Only a few could get in at a time as they scrambled over each other.

  The Eradicator’s purple sighting X blazed to life once more. I began to pull the trigger as slowly and smoothly as I could, in short three to five round bursts, as I took my time with each shot. Soon, the transport room was a charnel house of demon guts and cordite.

  I thought we might just have managed to pull this one out of the fire when one of the demons burst out of the floor at our feet and leapt at Artemis. I didn’t have time to think. I threw my body to the left and knocked her out of the way just as the demon crashed into me. It reeked of rancid hamburger and ancient death.

  We rolled onto the main surface of the transporter, and our momentum brought the creature around on top of me. Going on raw instinct, I jammed the Eradicator into its chest and pulled the trigger. The force of the rounds blew the demon off me and into the path of an arc of energy. The demon blew apart in a storm of gore.

  I rolled onto one knee and saw Artemis firing her pistol at almost point-blank range at an oncoming demon. That’s when I felt the hairs on my body stand on end and heard an unbearable tearing sound that brought everyone and everything in the room to its knees. It felt like all the air had been sucked out of the building, then my ears popped, and there was a flash of brilliant light. Behind me, the Newton cradle was gone, replaced by an undulating orb of inky blackness surrounded by a halo of pink light.