Arena

by Logan Jacobs

  “Come now, Flemgar, ole chum,” Dark Shadow said in a surprising British accent. “The Earth Human makes a very valid point. I do prefer not to die today if you don’t mind. So, if we could all carry on as we were and what not.”

  Flemgar was not happy, but he eventually holstered his gun and seemed to ease off the aggro for the moment. “Fine,” he spat, “but this ain’t over by a longshot, dry skin.”

  He turned and stormed off toward one of the Greek style buildings that was in ruins, the back two thirds completely reduced to rubble. Flemgar was headed toward the nearest corner of the building that housed a stairwell. All that was left was the central, marble staircase structure with an iron railing that went up seven stories. The stair switchbacks led to a small landing where each floor used to be.

  As I walked over with the other three aliens, I could see that they had been fortifying the bottom entrance to the stairs. There was enough of the marble wall there to shore up the entire first flight of stairs. If that could be accomplished, all we’d have to do is head up a couple of flights, lie low, and wait until the Trial’s time ran out. If some baddies did show up, we’d have the high ground and could pick them off as they came.

  So far it looked like they had managed to fill in three of the sides fairly well with rubble, pieces of metal, and anything else they could find. The stairs themselves were still completely open.

  Flemgar and Tree Stump went off together to scrounge for larger pieces of metal. BirdMan grabbed a large spool of fine copper-colored wire and started to wrap it around the stair railing.

  “I was going to go off on a jaunt to see if I could come up with a big enough piece of wood or metal or something that would help us seal off the steps,” Dark Shadow said in a perfect British cadence, he sounded just like a British Lieutenant out of central casting for a World War Two movie.

  “I’ll tag along,” I said warmly as I tried to ingratiate myself. “I have a good eye for finding junk.”

  “Bravo, old boy,” he quipped. “Say, you’re that new Champion, the one from Earth aren’t you?”

  “That would be me,” I answered simply. I wanted to see how he was going to react before I gave him any more emotion or insight.

  “Jolly good show there during Paradise Run, I must say,” he rattled off. “Dolemidian Lure-Arachnids are scarier than my mother-in-law before coffee.”

  “Indubitably,” I replied, just a touch giddy. I’d been waiting since I was five years old to get to use that word in an actual conversation. We began to search through the ruins of the building. Most of it was just useless bric-à-brac, oval plastic shells that looked like personal computers, paperwork written on thick parchment, the remains of what must have been a food court, and a caved-in parking garage that actually had a few slim, sleek, oval-shaped automobiles made from a brilliantly shiny gold metal.

  Dark Shadow and I hit the parking garage and found the cars unlocked. We quickly gathered anything of use we could find.

  “So,” I started while we were going through the fourth car, “what do you make of all this?”

  “More than likely I expect we will all be dead or in terrible agony sometime in the next ten to fifteen minutes,” he declared as if it was a regular occurrence. “There is something truly awful on the other side of that barrier, and we are dressed in the last stand uniform of their longest living survivors.”

  “Yeah, my thoughts too,” I said as those thoughts got a little clearer in my head. “Probably shouldn't waste too much time here. Let’s finish up with this and head back.”

  So far we’d managed to snag two spare tires, a roll of duct tape, and a couple of chocolate bars that we ate immediately. When we got back to the “base,” the clock in the sky read twenty minutes left. I had a feeling that things were about to get a lot more interesting.

  Flemgar, BirdMan, and Tree Stump had managed to rig the beginnings of a barricade across the first level of stairs.

  “Thought maybe you’d ditched us, Dry Skin,” Flemgar sneered when we arrived.

  “Nah.” I smirked. “I’m like a bad rash, just keep popping up when you least expect it.”

  He glared at me in response, and I knew I could trust him about as far as I could throw his slimy ass body.

  “Good show, old boy!” Dark Shadow said excitedly. “Our feathered friend here has managed to lace the railing with enough wire that I think we could shore up the sides here.”

  I looked over, and sure enough, the stair railing on either side of the steps was full of the wire. I was hit with an idea.

  “Normally, I’d agree with you, buddy,” I started as I realized I didn’t have anyone else’s name other than Flemgar’s. “If we had more time. I would say that we could use the tires we got to block off the front and then backfill with rubble and rocks. Should make it just about impossible for anyone to get up the first flight.”

  “Yes, He Who Yells Leroy Jenkins,” Tree Stump added with his lovemaking baritone, “that is an acceptable plan. We shall accommodate.”

  The big clock hit the fifteen-minute mark and changed color to an angry blood red. A klaxon horn rang out, and the rhythmic beating on the energy shield got exponentially angrier.

  “I’m gonna run up top and see if I can make out what is going on,” I called over my shoulder as I hit the stairs two at a time. At first, I was content with just walking up the flights, but the higher I got the more my stomach twisted in knots. In the words of my favorite Corellian smuggler, I was starting to have a bad feeling about this and I began to jog and then run up the steps.

  I hit the top floor landing almost going full speed, my legs burned like they were filled with acid, and bellied up the waist-high retaining wall.

  “Oh, fuck,” I uttered as the bottom dropped out of my twisted gut.

  From this high up, I could see the entire dome that sat over the center of the city. At every spot where it hadn’t slammed down in the middle of a building, I could see creatures pressed up against the green energy barrier. I couldn’t make out much from this distance so I triggered my zoom. Three times magnification isn’t much, but it was enough for me to realize that we were probably very screwed.

  The things I saw as they threw themselves at the barrier could only be described as, well, space cyber-zombies. The blue-skinned aliens that I assumed had once been not undead were humanoid in size and body type, but that was all I could make out because they were all in various states of decomposition that made any further observations impossible. Rotted flesh hung off their limbs in drab chunks and tears. Others were missing limbs or intestines or other vital bits.

  The cyber part came in because they were all part machine in some way, shape, or form with glowing bio-mechanical technology fused to their bodies and looked like a mash-up of the Borg from Star Trek The Next Generation and The Walking Dead. They gnashed their broken teeth and hammered against the energy shield.

  They were also stacked hundreds deep. I turned and look all around and sure enough, we were like a lighthouse surrounded by a sea of nightmare cyber-zombies.

  As I looked around, I noticed the building that housed the energy shield generator only three blocks over. Our stairway’s orientation must have kept the bright green that shot into the sky from our vision.

  I noticed two other Champions on the roof of the building. They stood in front of the field generator as the bright beam shot up and out to create the dome. They were clearly agitated. I couldn’t hear them, but from the looks of it, they were trying to figure out the controls. I shifted over to the corner of the landing so I could get a better angle on the generator. I couldn't make out much from the distance, but there were several dials and levers and a large vertical gauge along the right side. Now, I knew why the Champions were agitated. It only had maybe ten percent left at the bottom.

  “Oh, double fuck,” I uttered nervously. Then I remembered the little green orb in my fanny pack. I reached back and pulled it out. It glowed from within the exact same shade of green as the
shield. I looked back at the generator and sure enough, there was an orb-shaped hole just above the fuel level gauge. If I hauled ass, I thought I could just make it in time before the power ran out and this whole day would be utterly FUBAR’d.

  That’s when I noticed the two Champions on the roof had started shoving each other. Stress had apparently gotten the better of them and the shoving ended with both of them drawing their energy weapons. They fired and while both scored direct hits, nothing happened to them. The energy just rolled off them like rain from a freshly waxed car.

  This confused them, but they still kept firing. One of the blasts hit the generator, and that did have an effect. The green energy sank into the generator slowly. It crackled and popped and left a dark black scorch mark just before the generator imploded in a ball of black smoke and the shield melted from the top down. I leaned over the inside railing.

  “Hey, guys!” I yelled urgently. “How’s the barricade coming?”

  “We are just about finished,” Dark Shadow yelled up in his pleasant British cadence.

  “Well, the barrier just went down, so...” I trailed off as I looked back. The energy wall finally disappeared and the first round of cyber-zombies began to pour into the city. “You might want to hurry and get up here.”

  Just then, as if on cue, an unholy, undead moan rose into the sky. It was the kind of sound that grabbed you by the balls with icy fingers, squeezed tight, and wouldn’t let go.

  We could see the intergalactic undead horde flood into the city. The moaning was soon mixed with the high-pitched death screams of the living as the zombies found their first victims.

  The moaning was now all around us. It was unnerving.

  “Let’s head to the second floor, we’ll have a better vantage point,” I yelled as I descended the stairs.

  We stood in a rough line across the second-floor landing as the first of the zombies crashed against our makeshift barrier. While they were fast, they didn’t know how to climb the wall and soon bottlenecked while trying to get in.

  I pulled the trigger, and the green blob of energy flew out and hit the nearest zombie with a splat. When the smoke cleared, nearly half of its head had been taken off. The zombie fell like a marionette with the strings cut.

  “Yup, headshot,” I yelled at everyone. “Let’em have it!”

  And we did. For a good three minutes, I pulled the trigger on the little pistol as fast as I could until my finger was sore and aching. The four of us must have put down close to a hundred zombies each, but it did as much good as pissing in the wind. I was about to switch hands to start firing with my left as green mist floated from the barrel of the gun when I noticed that the zombies we killed had stacked at the base of the barricade. The ones at the front of the pack were pushed up against them.

  Some got crushed by the weight of the hoard pressing against them and fell next to the ones that had already stacked up. Eventually, enough bodies had been stacked to create a makeshift zombie ramp. One intrepid zombie managed to get up on top and walk all the way to the wall we had created so that his head and shoulders poked over. An energy blast from behind me took its head off, and it fell to give the zombie behind it an extra six inches in height. I realized that if this kept up, eventually they’d just be able to walk right over the wall.

  “Time to move, guys,” I yelled. “We need a higher vantage, plus we kill any more of these suckers and they’re going to get over the barricade.”

  I turned and went up the stairs again until I got to the landing and what had once been the fourth floor. The others followed, and we all took a beat to catch our breaths. The last five minutes had been nothing but pandemonium.

  “How much longer do you figure we have left before those vile undead louts get through the barrier?” Dark Shadows asked, his voice slightly more worried than before.

  “Maybe five minutes,” I answered as I tried to do some simple math in my head. “Give or take.”

  “And we’ve got...” Dark Shadow paused as he looked up at the digital clock, “... ten more to go until the trial is over.”

  “Does He Who Yells Leroy Jenkins think that Leroy Jenkins will be able to help us?” Tree Stump asked, his low voice brought even lower by fatigue and fear.

  “Not sure, dude,” I answered as honestly as I could. “He’s kind of a one-trick pony.”

  There were now five zombies pressed against our barrier that now came up to their sternum. The weight behind them became so strong that they got crushed from the force of it. I could hear the bones break in their rib cages like dry twigs wrapped in cellophane. They didn’t register any pain. Instead, their mouths just kept clacking shut, and the endless moaning continued. One of the torsos pitched forward, and the cyber-zombie was able to grab onto the rocks and rubble we’d backfilled the steps with. The damn thing started to pull itself across, strips of flesh and muscle tore as the upper half separated from the lower, and it made slow progress hand over hand. Eventually, it yanked itself from the trapped confines of its hips and legs, a trail of guts and intestines drug behind it like some kind of disgusting wedding dress train of viscera.

  For dead things, they sure weren't totally stupid. The second the first one began to pull itself across, three others copied and followed suit.

  “You gotta be fucking kidding me!” I muttered just before I blew its head off. “I think it’s time to head for the top landing, see how many we can knock off from up there. You guys go on ahead, I’ll catch up in a second.”

  “Right on, and cheerio!” Dark Shadow exclaimed and led BirdMan, Flemgar, and Tree Stump up the steps.

  I fired off a few more quick shots at the crawling zombies and started up behind them. In between the third and fourth landings, I noticed that one of the structural support beams was exposed. If I could find a way to take that out, I could send it crashing down which would cause a flight of stairs to collapse.

  Then I remembered my two green power orbs. I was no expert on alien science, but glowing battery things always blew up in the movies, so I grabbed one and wedged it into the exposed beam. With any luck, the ensuing explosion would be big enough to bring that particular section of the stairway down. I wouldn’t be able to see that part of the beam from the upper landing. Either I took out the support beam now from right here and somehow climb to the higher landing and we’d be home free, or the zombies would get over the barrier in three minutes and we’d all be dead.

  I smelled gasoline, which I’d thought very weird, before I was blindsided by my old buddy Flemgar. With a bubbly roar he slammed into me and drove us right at the edge of the railing. Just as my back hit the retaining wall, Flemgar jammed his forearm under my chin and tried to use it to bend my head back and flip me over the side to a violent robot zombie hybrid doom... which brings us up to speed.

  From my particular Pez-dispenser-like vantage point, I could see the digital display in the sky hit the three-minute mark. As long as the barrier held, and I could hold off Flemgar for a hundred and eighty more seconds, we would be in the clear.

  That is exactly when the cyber-zombies crested the wall and began to walk up the steps.

  Their moaning took on a new and frenzied pitch, the noise an inhuman, soul-wrenching wail from the bowels of hell.

  I used Flemgar’s natural sliminess to twist away from his forearm. That move pulled him right into my shoulder so that I could slam it into his sternum as I pushed off the retaining wall with my legs. The force drove Flemgar back a few feet.

  “Are you fucking nuts?” I shouted at him. “You’re going to get us both killed, you idiot!”

  “As long as you go first, Dry Skin,” he replied with a sneer as he unsheathed one of the ceremonial knives.

  “Son of a bitch,” I muttered

  He lunged at me and slashed with the knife, but I rolled out of the way at the last moment. I wanted to take out my own knife but my hands were all tangled and the only thing close was my fanny pack. I grabbed the first thing that filled my hand and brand
ished… the signal flare.

  Flemgar laughed. I had just enough time to twist the cap off before he lunged at me again. The Krav Maga took over, and I was able to parry the knife with the flare. The blade of the knife raked across the ignition surface and the flare burst to life, a two foot, white-hot magnesium flame. Flemgar recoiled instinctively and spun to see the mass of zombies halfway up the second flight of stairs.

  His eyes darted frantically and settled on the green energy orb. Flemgar sprang into action and yanked the orb from where I’d lodged it in the pillar before he bolted up the steps.

  “You moron!” I yelled as I took off after him. The cyber-zombies had just reached the second-floor landing and were only about twenty feet behind me.

  I tossed the flare up to the landing, loosed a few more energy bolts at the nearest zombies, and took the stairs three at a time. I was just about to launch up the final step when I spotted a slimy smear on my left, and the smell of gasoline assaulted my nose. Instead of coming up the last step upright, I tucked into a roll just as Flemgar’s knife cut the air where my head would have been.

  I came out of the roll in a crouch to face Flemgar. His momentum had swung him around too far, and his foot slipped in a smear of his own goo. He twirled like a cartoon character, his arms pinwheeled in the air as he attempted to regain his balance on the top step. I saw that he’d shoved the orb into his unbuttoned tunic shirt and it now adhered to his belly under a layer of his slime.

  The zombies had advanced onto the second-floor landing, and when they saw Flemgar at the top of the steps, they rushed toward the stairs.

  Flemgar heard the wailing, but he ignored it as he lunged for me again. I dodged, stepping to the left, and his knife darted harmlessly past me.

  Then I drove my knee into his crotch.

  “Second time’s the charm, right?” I said as I shoved Flemgar backward down the steps. He rolled ass over end and crashed into the horde of cyber-zombies who set upon him immediately. Despite his struggles to break free, they had a hold of him. One zombie opened its mouth impossibly wide and sank its rotten teeth into his shoulder, but he elbowed it aside and pulled his other knife, eyes still locked on me.