by Logan Jacobs
I swung my arms back and forth across my chest as I tried to loosen my muscles. “This is crazy, this is crazy,” I murmured under my breath to try to distract myself. If I let my mind focus on the insanity of the situation, I was pretty sure I was going to go Looney Tunes, so I took a few steps back, ran toward the dais, jumped up, grabbed on, and used my legs to push against the structure. That gave me just enough leverage to get my arm over the lip. Once there, a few more pushes with the awesome traction on my new alien boots and I rolled over onto the top of the thing.
I stood up and brushed myself off. “And boom goes the dynamite, Havak,” I said, pleased with myself.
I looked over the little stone altar that held the disc. It was made from white granite, polished to a mirror like finish, and gold engravings covered the surface. The information disk was a stark contrast to the primitive design of the altar and pedestal. It was roughly the size of a large frisbee, made from tooled aluminum and covered in blinking lights and circuitry.
I looked around the chamber then back at the stone altar.
“Come on you, Ape,” I said out loud, “you wanna’ live forever?” I reached down and picked up the disk.
Everything seemed to remain normal. I waited a full five minutes, just standing there, waiting for who knows what to happen.
“Alright, Havak, let’s blow this popcorn stand,” I said and slowly lowered myself from the dais. My movements were getting more and more labored as the adrenaline faded and soreness set in. I was beginning to agree with Grizz and Artemis that I seriously needed to work on my conditioning.
I did not want to go back through the chamber of a thousand horrors so I started looking around the room for another way out. All I could find was the skylight about two hundred feet up in the domed ceiling. I was sure there were clues hidden in the hieroglyphs that covered the walls, but I hated puzzle games. That was the whole reason I never jumped on board the Tomb Raider bandwagon. Also, I sucked at them.
At a loss, I began to study the disk. It didn’t have any external buttons or switches, and I couldn’t make any sense out of the patterns of flashing lights. Eventually, I just started tossing it into the air to amuse myself. On one of the tosses, it flattened out just a bit on descent, and the lights began flashing in a different sequence. I held it horizontally and tossed it up and that produced nothing, so I started to spin it on my middle finger like a basketball. I’d taken up Frolf, or Frisbee golf, in my late teens when a girl I had a crush on told me that’s what her hobby was. I soon lost interest in the girl but found out I was not only pretty good at Frolf, but that I loved to play. I actually won a couple of tournaments, but I hadn’t played seriously in a few years because of work.
As the disk spun on my finger, the lights all aligned and it rose an inch off my hand, spinning on its own, hovering in mid-air in front of my face.
“All right, baby,” I said, excited that something seemed to be happening, “show daddy the way outta’ this place.”
The disk spun faster and faster until it was a shiny blur. I noticed that the hieroglyphs on the walls were glowing with orange-red light, and the room grew brighter and brighter. The disk suddenly let out a deep sonic thud that shook the entire room. It stopped spinning and fell to the floor with a clang.
I reached down and grabbed it. As I stood up, I saw that the orange-red light had gotten even brighter and that heat waves were now cascading from the walls. The dais began to sink into the floor as it felt like the entire mountain started to rumble.
I started to back away from the center of the room, instinctively toward the only way out I knew, toward the hallway as the pillar I stood on sank farther and farther into the floor, eventually sinking from sight completely.
As it did, the rumbling abruptly stopped, and all was very still and very quiet.
Then molten lava geysered up from where the dais had been, spitting up toward the skylight in a solid eight-foot diameter column of red-hot magma. It was then I realized that it wasn’t a skylight, but the mouth of the volcano which would make the room I was standing in ground zero for an eruption.
The lava spray hit the hole in the ceiling, forcing a jet of molten rock out into the air outside. What didn’t fit began to cascade down the smooth domed ceiling back into the room. Another rumble rocked the volcano and more lava poured out of the hole, sending a wave of magma six foot high in my direction.
“Oh, fuck,” I had time to yell before I turned around and hauled ass down the hallway.
A fresh dump of adrenaline hit my system, and the soreness in my muscles disappeared as I became hyper-aware of everything around me. I only had maybe two seconds before I was going to be back in the cave of brutal insect death and needed to figure out what the fuck I was going to do.
When I hit the stairs that descended into the cave, waves of heat licking at my heels, I still had no idea. I held the disk in my left hand and the chainsaw sword in my right as I took the stairs two at a time. The ‘lures’ all came to vibrant attention as they sensed prey in the room. I was moving too fast for their hypnosis or mesmerism or whatever it is they used to work. I pressed the button on the handle to turn the sword back into a chainsaw on a chain and began spinning it at my side, letting it twirl faster and faster.
My right foot hit the floor of the cave as I pressed the fire button on the handle, and the chainsaw roared to life. Its high pitched engine wailed with anger, as blue orange flame engulfed the blade in a blazing fury, and I screamed at the top of my lungs, “Lerooooy Jeeeeeeenkiiiins!”
I swung the flaming chainsaw across my body at the nearest ‘lure’ as its arms and sinewy claws dripped with purple folds of skin as it lurched for me. The chainsaw smashed into where the shoulder would have been. The ‘lure’ cleaved in two and burst into flame at the same time. From below the surface at my feet, I could hear and feel the spider creature scream in pain as the fire consumed the lure. I glanced down just long enough to see it try to retract the ‘lure’ but that only made it worse. Once below the surface, the lure burned even brighter, and the spider creature danced about in agony then exploded in a mass of putrid green exoskeleton.
“Hail to the king, baby!” I yelled, a snarl on my lips. These freaky asshole arachnids had tried to seduce me with pretty naked ladies. That was a dick move, and I was pissed.
I spun the chainsaw faster and faster as I continued to run through the room cutting through the spider ‘lures’ with a vengeance. For a moment, I lost myself in a berserker battle rage, concerned with nothing but the all-consuming need to exterminate every spider creature I saw, regardless of the danger or risk. I let the momentum of the chainsaw spin me this way and that as I attacked any ‘lure’ that caught my attention, a whirling dervish of death. I came to a sliding stop at the front of the room where I had entered not thirty minutes before just as the chainsaw on a chain ran out of gas and the blade sputtered to a stop.
I looked back at the cave. It was an abattoir of spider parts and guts. Under the surface, I could just make out several of the creatures careening off each other consumed in flames, their legs danced jigs of excruciating pain, and their shrieks were music to my ears. I must have gotten lost in the adrenal time distortion because I could have sworn I’d been slaughtering spiders for an hour, but in reality, it had only been about twenty seconds.
Lava exploded into the cave and flowed down the stairs like a raging red-hot river to consume everything in its path.
I toggled the switch and the chainsaw on a chain went back into being a chainsaw sword and I slung it across my back again, turned, and ran down the hallway eager to escape to the jungle. I emerged where I had come in and found myself suddenly on the edge of a cliff. The jungle was a good fifty feet below me and tilted. I looked up and saw that the volcano had shifted under its own explosive and destructive power, now leaning to the left as ash, rock, flammable gases, and lava shot from its top. The once blue sky was blotted out with noxious clouds that rippled with static electricity.
For a brief second, I was afraid this might just be the end.
“No!” I yelled out at the jungle, “I am not dying in a damn cave on a beach on the other side of the damn universe.”
I saw the kiosk standing like a silent spectator on the beach, the ocean a tempest behind it, about fifty yards to my left and slightly below me.
Just then another quake hit the volcano, and it tilted backward. I caught myself before I would have fallen back down into the hallway to a fiery molten rock death. A crack in the earth opened up and half the burning jungle fell in, black volcanic rock taking its place as tectonic plates shifted, and the island started to sink into the ocean.
I looked at the destruction and chaos all around me, took a deep breath, and jumped from my perch. I hit the steep angle of the side of the volcano legs already in motion as gravity took over and shoved me down toward the jagged angles of rock below. Just before I was going to run over the rocks, I jumped, flew through the air, and hit the dirt just beyond the rocks in a roll.
I used the force of the roll to come back up on my feet in a full out sprint. The kiosk had slid down the sand as the island came untethered and the beach sank back into the cliffs. The ocean threatened to swallow it up before I even got close. My legs pumped harder, burning to stop but I wouldn’t let them.
I switched the disk into my right hand, holding it in a reverse grip, my wrist bent backward, my thumb tucked into a groove on the disk’s underside.
My gaze was locked on the kiosk. Laser focused. Do or die. Life or death.
The ground twenty feet in front of me just disappeared as it fell into nothingness. I ran faster. I hit the edge and sailed into the air. My thumb and index finger triggered my ocular zoom one last time, then the slot on the kiosk filled my vision.
I took a breath, as the end of the world screamed all around, and flung the disk at the kiosk.
It left my hand wobbly and unsteady, and I was sure that this was going to be it for me. Dead on an alien world while everyone on my planet suffered a terrible fate that was not their own fault. Then its internal stabilizer kicked in and it righted itself. It flew true, like a prayer of the righteous, into the slot on the kiosk just as it sank below the surface of the boiling water.
I had just enough time to pump my arm in victory before I lost my footing and fell into a lake of hissing lava.
Chapter Eleven
Instead of landing face first in a pool of white-hot magma, I found myself dumped unceremoniously in the teleport tube back in the gym. My face ended up smushed into the opaque plastic with my legs all akimbo above me. Grizz and Artemis, who had been pacing near the tube, rushed over. Artemis tapped a button, and the front melted open as I slid out onto the floor of the gym with my jumpsuit smoldering.
“I feel terrible,” I murmured. My lungs felt like they were the insides of a McRib. “Are my eyebrows gone? I feel like my eyebrows are gone.”
“Your eyebrows are fine,” Artemis said as she pulled up my vitals on her jumpsuit’s LED screen. Then she smacked me in the arm several times. “You are a big dumb, dumb idiot who is dumb!”
“Ow,” I yelped. Then I reached up and kissed her. The tension flowed out of her as she leaned in and wrapped her arms around me. Her hair smelled like some kind of summer fresh shampoo which, compared to the air I had been breathing for the last five minutes, was absolute heaven.
“Why am I an idiot?” I asked as the kiss broke.
“Human,” Grizz said as he came over and knelt beside Artemis. “By the Sword of Fate, I truly cannot believe you are alive. That was either the most outstanding display of bravery or the most reckless act of thoughtless stupidity I have ever seen.”
“I like the former, myself,” I slurred as Artemis shot me up with a dose of Blue Betty with a fancy pneumatic syringe. I coughed once, and my lungs and throat felt as good as new. Artemis helped me up and got me over to the chair.
“I don’t know who Betty is,” I said as the chemicals hit my system full force, “but I’m going to kiss her right in the mouth.”
“Betty was a three hundred-year-old seven hundred pound Oogla slug,” Grizz remarked with a grimace.
“That changes nothing,” I retorted as I took the chainsaw sword off my back and handed it to Artemis.
“I would very much like to keep this please,” I uttered as I lowered myself onto the very comfy chair. “Okay, what did I do this time?”
“One, you blew up the island,” Grizz answered as he stood above me, his arms crossed. “No one has ever done that before.”
“That’s kinda cool,” I said nonchalantly. “Had no idea it was actually an island.”
“I thought you were going to die at least four times,” Artemis admitted sheepishly, “before you even made it off the beach.”
“Ouch, that bad, huh?” I winced.
“I was going to have her sedated at one point,” Grizz divulged. Artemis got up and stood toe to toe with him, her eyes blazing as she stuck her finger in his face.
“Look here, Mister,” she said with barely contained anger, her words slightly over-enunciated and clipped. “I have been in this body for twenty-four hours dealing with the garbage fire known as human feelings! They are a nightmare, Grizz! A nightmare! You should try downloading your entire consciousness into a strange body full of unfamiliar chemical reactions and see how you like it!”
“I, I,” Grizz stammered, his eyes wide and unsure, “beg your pardon, Artemis. I cannot begin to fathom the struggles you have just described so vehemently.”
“Okay,” Artemis barked, “pardon is given.” She met his eyes. “This time.” She turned and walked back to her computer console. “I’ll sedate you, ya big overgrown light show,” she muttered, not quite under her breath.
Grizz looked at me for advice, and I just shrugged as if to say “Chicks, whaddya gonna do?”
“When you walked into the chamber with the Dolemidian Lure Arachnids, I may have gotten a touch anxious,” she explained. Her anger had started to fade, but she was still clearly annoyed. “Anxiety is a horrible emotion. What purpose does it serve? There is no logical reason to worry about something you have no control over. It is about as useful as a shoe oval club.”
“A what?” I uttered. That one stumped me.
“Shoe oval?” she asked as if I should know what she was talking about. “The sport with the men who are the size of Grizz moving an oval-shaped, air-filled calfskin up and down a field while trying to maim one another.”
“Oh, football,” I answered, finally getting it. “Useless as a football bat.”
“Yes,” she said with a sigh. “I’m sorry. To both of you. Emotions are exhausting. Fun, at times, but mostly exhausting.”
She let out a big breath.
“I must admit that I too got a touch concerned when you entered the cave, Havak,” Grizz added, his voice softer than usual. “It is quite different spectating the Crucible as opposed to being a Champion. The rush and the fear are still there even though you are powerless to do anything about it.”
“That is why I got so worried,” Artemis added, her hands by her face as they animatedly gesticulated to emphasize her words. “Dolemidian Lure Arachnids are crazy deadly! No one has ever survived that cave. In fact, few even find it. You’re supposed to fight the Cruxian Biker Boys, climb to the top of the mountain, and activate the dais which would then bring you the disc and then you’d run to the kiosk and put it in.”
“What would have been the fun in that?” I quipped. “Um, you guys weren’t kidding about that whole muscle memory, conditioning thing. It was like, I don’t know, my muscles didn’t want to listen to the signals coming from my brain. It was weird.”
“We will work on getting your muscles used to the rigors of combat,” Grizz said confidently. “That is the easy part. It is much harder to shape the mind. I was skeptical of your choices of combat upgrades, but after seeing your sword work in the cave, I must ad
mit you chose very wisely, human. Was Leroy Jenkins a warrior deity called upon for sheer berserker insanity?”
“Yes,” I lied. “Yes, he was.”
“By the Great Sword’s Blade, it was magnificent.” Grizz smiled, and for once, it wasn’t scary.
“Thanks, Grizz,” I said, just a bit pleased with myself. I couldn’t explain why really, but dammit if I didn’t want to make the seven-foot tall fashion challenged space barbarian proud.
“Do not get arrogant, human,” Grizz said as his smile morphed back into his patented scowl. “You are still abysmally weak with tiny hands. I believe I shall say a small prayer to Leroy Jenkins before I cycle off. Powerful gods are always good to have on your side, alive or not.”
Grizz walked off, lost in holographic thought. He unsheathed his sword and began to slash at the surrounding air.
“I don’t have tiny hands,” I said to myself as I looked at my hands. Great, now I had a hand complex.
“I feel bad that I yelled at Grizz,” Artemis said regretfully. “I did not consider how hard this might be for him.”
“What do you mean?”
“Fifty years ago, Grizz was a magnificent Champion, Marc,” she explained, “one of the fiercest the Crucible of Carnage has ever seen. For twenty years, he won prize after prize for his homeworld which had been barely out of a mystical Stone Age when he arrived here. He was unexpectedly defeated by a young upstart.”
“What happened to his people?” I asked.
“The Acherons took pity on them because of the great valor Grizz had shown over the years,” she replied, a forlorn look on her face. “Grizz didn't earn enough technology to bring total peace and prosperity to his world. He felt as if he failed them.”
“Damn,” was all I could manage at the moment. Going from Stone Age to Space Age must have caused a fair amount of turmoil.
“I believe Grizz wishes to redeem himself through training you, Marc,” she said reverently. “He was no less anxious than I was.”
The computer beeped, and the display on the wall filled with numbers and graphs.