Arena 4

by Logan Jacobs

  I bolted for the dressing room door where the President and Chaz had disappeared into a few minutes before.

  Both of them were in the tender embraces of two of the dancers. The rest of our Booby Bucks spread out all over the room as if someone had made it rain.

  “Hate to break up the party, but we need to go,” I urged and pulled Chaz out of the bosom of a stripper with a unicorn horn protruding from the center of her forehead.

  “Nonsense, Marc,” the President argued. “I haven’t had this much fun since I opened the Taj Mahal. Fantastic casino.”

  “Um, yeah, say, there is a casino I want to take you, so you can see how much better yours are than these lame alien ones,” I said trying to appeal to his vanity. Luckily, it worked.

  “Mine are always the best,” he replied as I waved bye to the dancers, and then we burst through the fire exit and out into a trash-strewn alley.

  I pulled a trash bin over and wedged it under the handle of the door. It wouldn’t stop them for good, but it would buy us some time.

  “How you feeling, Chaz?” I asked as I scanned the alley. So far we seemed to be alone.

  “Oh, much better, Marc, thank you for asking,” Chaz gushed and rubbed the back of his head. “Man, that hurt. Good thing it didn’t knock me out.”

  “Yeah, why is that, buddy?”

  “Well, my kind has like a panic room kind of failsafe when we get knocked out,” he explained. “We teleport automatically back to our home. That would have left you and the President ten miles from your apartment. No Bueno--”

  The rest of his sentence got cut off as a chunk of what looked like brick flew through the air and whacked him the head.

  “Peanut butter sandwiches,” he slurred and then disappeared in a cloud of foul smelling smoke.

  “That reminds me, I could eat,” the President said as if this was an average night out.

  I spun around and saw that the mouth of the alley was now full of five hover-bikes. Blinding shafts of bright white shot from their headlights as they revved their engines.

  “Who sucks ass now, Earth King?” One of the bikers yelled.

  “Well, shit,” I sighed. As per usual, I’d taken us from the frying pan and put us right into the fire.

  Chapter Twelve

  “We don’t want you, Havak,” the gruff voice from behind the bright lights of the hover-bikes said. “Hand over the blowhard and you can go back to being that silly backwater’s golden boy.”

  “Look here, you snowflake,” the POTUS yelled, and I nearly jumped out of my socks when he did. I thought he was still trying to figure out a way back into the nudie bar. “I’m going to come over there, and I’m going to show you how we do things in America!”

  “Um, sir, we aren’t in America,” I said as the bikes revved their engines again. “Maybe let me handle the talking, okay?”

  “Sure thing, Marc,” the POTUS nodded. “This is below me anyway. You’ll do great handling these guys. Because you are great. The greatest. Next to me of course. Now, can I go back inside?”

  “Uh, maybe? Why don’t you try knocking on it?” I said in the hopes that it would occupy him and keep him out of trouble while I tried to deal with the Space Hell’s Angels at the end of the alley.

  “Hey, guys, I’m sure we can work this out, right?” I implored as I began to walk slowly toward the lights.

  “Yeah, we can work this out,” the gruff voice responded. “We can work it out by you moving out of the flarn way and letting us teach your leader a thing or two about a thing or two.”

  “That’s like four things, guys,” I said and continued to walk. I didn’t know what I was going to do when I got down to them, but it was better than just standing there like an idiot with my thumb up my butt. “We got a strict two thing limit.”

  “Wait… what?” A gruff voice said quizzically. The owner of said voice sounded very tough and very stupid. “Oh, balls on this. Let’s get him.”

  The engines screamed and the lights shot forward.

  “That escalated quickly,” I uttered and watched the leading headlight get closer and closer at a breakneck pace. My mind screamed at me to move, but I had nowhere to go. If I turned tail and ran they’d overrun me in seconds. Plus, I hated running.

  My legs coiled under me as I crouched down slightly while never taking my eyes off the lead hover-bikes headlight. I held my breath for a brief second as the roar of the engines filled my ears. It was the sound of a thousand angry hornets.

  The light was almost on top of me when I exploded up and slightly forward while my right leg shot out into a perfectly executed leaping side kick.

  My Occuhancer adjusted the ambient light for me once I was above the cone of bright white from the hover-bike, and I watched as my combat booted foot hit the bulbous head of Gruff Voice.

  His neck snapped back painfully, and his forward momentum stopped very suddenly while the bike kept going for about ten feet until it crashed into the wall and burst into blue flame. Gruff Voice flew in the opposite direction, Newton’s third law of motion being what it was, with my boot print embedded in his forehead. His eyes were wide in shock. This was clearly not how he saw things going down. I saw that there were two more bikes that had flanked the leader and were slightly behind him as they zoomed down the alley.

  Gruff Voice’s feet touched the ground for a brief second which gave me enough resistance to push off his face one more time as I reversed my momentum and threw myself at the hover-bike on my left. I didn’t have time for any type of cool Krav Maga move, so I just threw my arms around the rider in a loose tackle.

  “Hey!” The rider yelled in surprise. My added weight knocked him completely off balance, and he overcorrected by jerking the handlebars all the way to the left. Unfortunately for him, there was a solid concrete wall there. My feet drug the ground, and I let go just before the hover-bike slammed into the side of the alley.

  I tumbled roughly and banged my shoulder hard on the ground before I came up in a crouch. The hover-bike rider that I’d shoved into the wall overcorrected again. Sparks flew as the bike scraped the side of the alley with the ear-tearing screech of metal and he yanked the handlebars to the right.

  And drove right into the hover-bike flying down the alley on the left. They crashed into a large dumpster with an audible gong that was very loud and echoed up and down the close confines of the alley.

  As did the riders’ wails of surprise and pain.

  They both cartwheeled into the air as the dumpster stopped the bikes under them. I watched as they ricocheted off each other and the right-hand wall of the alley and then the left-hand wall like some kind of pinball. They eventually came to rest in a tangle of funky angled arms and legs.

  “Hope you fellas have good health insurance,” I said and ran back down the alley to retrieve the President.

  I got to the little indention in the wall where the back door of the strip club was. The door was still closed with the trash can wedged under the handle. The POTUS was nowhere to be seen.

  “Son of a bitch!” I yelled and rubbed my head. “Now I know why the Secret Service dudes are always in a bad mood.”

  “Marc,” the President hollered at me from the other end of the alley, “quit playing with your alien buddies! I’m ready to go back to your apartment. This was incredibly fun. The best fun. Funniest of the funner, really. But there were more pictures to show you.”

  “You got it, sir,” I sighed with relief and jogged down to where he stood at the mouth of the alley. If I could get us a taxi, we could be home in ten minutes, and the Security-bots could take over. The President was fun to hang out with, but man was he a handful. Like wrangling a group of toddlers hopped up on Sour Patch Kids.

  “I like your commitment, Marc,” the President said as I reached him and gave him a quick once over. He was a little dirty, and had Booby Bucks stuck to the bottom of his shoe, but was otherwise okay. “Always training. Even when out for a night of fun. Tremendous. If I could hire you aga
in I would. In fact, I will. You’re hired.”

  “Uh, thanks, sir. Come on, let’s go,” I urged and motioned for him to follow me as I walked back out into the main boulevard of the Red-Light District.

  And right into the barrel of a large bore pistol pointed at my head.

  “Where do you think you’re go--” the fish alien who held the gun started to say. He didn’t get to finish because my hands flashed up almost of their own accord, muscle memory kicking in on pure survival instinct, and snatched the gun from his slimy, wet grip to end up in my right hand.

  “Anywhere we damn well please,” I answered and waved him off with the end of the gun. “Swim away now, little fishy.”

  The alien’s eyes went goldfish wide and unblinking as his brain caught up to what had just happened. His mouth opened and closed and made a damp popping sound. Without another word he turned and ran into the crowd of pedestrians.

  Once he was gone, I glanced down at the hand cannon in my right fist. The myriad of neon lights reflected brightly across its polished nickel plating. It was the size of a .357 magnum revolver but was surprisingly light. A whisper of recognition danced across the fog of my memory. An image of PoLarr as she studied a thick manual full of thousands of different types of firearms flickered across the movie screen of recollection in my brain. The Soul Gaze we had shared months ago made it so that PoLarr’s memories and experiences were like my own.

  I recognized the gun as a BlasTec MX-42 ionic pulse pistol. It was a semi-automatic single action handgun that fired concentrated bursts of ionic particles. With motions that felt like second nature even though I’d never held a gun like this before in my life, I brought it up in front of me and ejected the cylindrical magazine that protruded slightly from the butt of the gun. Scarlet light glowed from inside the magazine and I knew that it held twenty shots and was fully charged.

  I slammed it back home with a satisfying click, then racked the charging slide. A beep told me that the gun was now ready to rock-and-roll. There was a small thumb lever just behind the trigger guard that could move between LETHAL - MAIM - STUN. The surrounding street was full of innocent bystanders, well, maybe not so innocent, but that didn’t mean I wanted to run the risk of a shot going wild and killing some alien out to relieve some stress so I flicked the fire control to STUN.

  I caught movement from the corner of my eye that pulled me out of my gun appraisal and I barely managed to shove the President aside as a blast of green laser fire disintegrated a big chunk of the alley wall we had been in front of.

  “Thanks for the hug, Marc,” the President said and patted me on the back. “But you might want to turn around. It looks like there are a couple of thugs with guns after us. You’re welcome.”

  I spun around and sure as shit, he was right. Two squat, Dark Elf looking assholes with pistols in their hands advanced on us. They wore ugly sneers and clearly did not want to use non-violence to solve whatever issue that they had with us.

  “We gotta go, Mr. President,” I said as I gently shoved him in front of me. The Ar’Gwyn ignited in my nerve endings, and I lazily loosed two blasts of scarlet ion fire toward the two thugs. PoLarr had trained in a gun based martial art known as Ar’Gwyn practically since she could walk, and the Soul Gaze had given me all the skill and muscle memory of a decorated and deadly Val’Keerye warrior. I urged the POTUS ahead of me without waiting to see if my shots had flown true.

  I knew they had.

  The surprised grunts of the thugs from behind me let me know I hadn’t been wrong.

  The President had clearly been through some training as well because he hunched lower and moved quickly in front of me. I kept my left hand on his shoulder to direct him gently while my right came up high against my chest so that I could deploy the gun at a moment’s notice.

  We moved against the flow of traffic as I guided us into the throng of pedestrians in the street in the hopes that we could blend in. I wanted to get us across the boulevard to where there was a long line of parked hover-cars.

  Twenty feet later and I pulled us behind the front of a sleek, bright yellow sports hover-car so that I could get our bearings.

  No sooner had we found cover than a laser blast blew the side-view mirror into shards that dug into my back and neck. I shoved the POTUS further to the ground and moved us toward the back of the car. Laser blasts peppered the expensive looking vehicle and a small part of me felt bad for the owner. His car was going to be bright yellow Swiss cheese when this was all over.

  “Hey, Marc,” the President said calmly, “you might want to take out the sniper on the second floor across the street when you get the chance.”

  “Thanks, sir,” I grunted and pulled a nasty shard of glass out of my shoulder. The spot began to itch immediately as my cells started to stitch themselves back together. The regen mod was damn handy. The shard was a decent size, and I edged it over the hood of the car to try to see where the sniper was without giving him a Marc’s head sized target.

  The President hadn’t been wrong. Diagonally across from us and two floors up I could just make out the barrel of an assault rifle. I shot my hand over the hood and then brought it back just as fast. As I’d hoped, the sniper unleashed a few bursts of automatic fire into the hood of the car until his rifle ran dry. The second the sniper pulled it back to change mags, I popped up with the MX-42 in a two-handed combat grip, and put two rapid-fire double taps into the window. A second later the assault rifle tumbled out of the dark rectangle and clattered on the street.

  “Nice shooting,” the POTUS congratulated me.

  “Thank you, sir,” I said and motioned for him to move. He didn’t need much more guidance. Again, the thought struck me that he had done this a lot because his situational awareness was pretty fucking great.

  I started to rush us down the sidewalk, keeping close to the parked cars for whatever cover they could give. We’d made it maybe half a block when a small hover-van set down across the street in a whoosh of air brakes and exhaust. Pedestrians yelled in surprise and had to scatter out of the way.

  The door of the van opened and five goons wearing face masks that resembled some kind of alien skull poured out. They all held compact submachine guns. My internal gun index recognized them as Tartaran designed Ravagers. The guns fired 4.5mm caseless rounds and had double stacked mags that held seventy-five rounds each. I really wished that I had the Equalizer pistols PoLarr had gifted to me instead of an ion pulse pistol.

  “Oh, I don’t like the look of those idiots,” the President said. He’d spotted the van as soon as I did. “We should probably get off the street.”

  “Good idea,” I nodded.

  “I know.”

  Modesty wasn’t one of the President’s finer qualities, which, I actually kind of liked about the guy.

  I saw an open doorway that led into a dark stairwell just ahead of us on the left and aimed us right for it.

  Just before going through the door, I slid in front of the President and flipped the fire selector on the gun to LETHAL.

  “Stay close, Mr. President,” I shot back at him. He gave me two very campaign trail thumbs up.

  I took a deep breath, and we rushed into the doorway and up the stairs which led to the second floor of low-rent skid-row apartments above the storefronts. More than half of them were unoccupied, with trash and left behind furnishings littered all over the ground.

  I rushed us up one more flight of stairs until we reached the top landing. A long hallway led in both directions lined with small apartments. There was a loud bang and some kind of commotion from the far end of the hall. A moment later two of the Skull-Goons exited an elevator. They saw us and immediately opened fire.

  The caseless rounds flew at twelve hundred feet per second and stitched a wild line of holes in the wall around us.

  I kicked the nearest door which burst inward in a shower of wood splinters before I shoved the President inside.

  The apartment was small with a box like main living/kitch
en area and a narrow hallway, maybe six feet long, that lead to an oval shaped bedroom. Broken furniture was strewn all over the floor. I shoved what was left of the door closed and backed us toward the bedroom. I had no idea if there was another way out of the apartment but at least the hallway would act as a choke point.

  More bullets riddled the door, and the POTUS and I ducked back behind the bedroom wall. I stuck my hand around the corner and emptied the ion pistol’s clip in the hopes of hitting something. It wasn’t very Ar’Gwyn of me, but the sheer amount of adrenaline surging through my system made it a little tough to access PoLarr’s memories. I’d noticed it happening a little lately and wondered if we needed to do a recharge on the Soul Gaze. I made a mental note to ask her about it if and when the President and I got out of this mess.

  A second after the bullets tore the remains of the apartment door to shreds, I heard the two Skull-Goons rush in. I reversed my grip on the pistol so that I held the barrel in my right hand which turned it into a makeshift hammer and tried to slow my breathing.

  Blood pounded in my ears in a double bass cacophony. Over it I heard the slow, steady advance of the Skull-Goons. My eyes were glued on the empty space of the hallway just next to the wall.

  The dark cylinder shape of a submachine gun poked from the darkness, and I sprang like a cobra. I swung the butt of the gun around savagely, and it smashed into the skull mask before driving both my hands down to grab the sub-gun. I yanked it forward to pull the Skull-Goon off balance and then rushed him with my head down like he was a football tackle sled. The Ravager clattered to the ground as I shoved with all I had. The first Skull-Goon acted like a battering ram and shield in the narrow hallway.

  My knee pistoned up into the Skull-Goon’s crotch which caused him to buckle forward. As he did, I grabbed the second Skull-Goon’s head in both my hands and drove my thumbs into the eye holes of the mask. There was a sick squishing pop, and I felt hot blood splash out and onto my hands. The now blinded Skull-Goon shrieked in pain as he stumbled and fell to the floor.