Arena Book 2

by Logan Jacobs

  At that moment, two of the gross roach dudes fluttered through the roof hole on their disgusting wings to flank us. I didn’t think they could really fly with them. More like jump far. They were gross but given the right amount of force their shells cracked pretty easily. Nova couldn’t run but I was willing to bet the farm that she could still bug stomp pretty well. I was just about to say as much when Cougar, two mangy cats, a goomba pigeon, and three rat bastards poured into the warehouse and surrounded us.

  I swallowed hard. This was not good since both Nova and I were running on empty. I could feel my muscles weigh heavy as I held up my fists, and my legs screamed at me to sit down.

  Nova moved closer to me so that we were shoulder to shoulder. If we were going to go down, we were going down swinging.

  Cougar sauntered forward, his claws already out for blood.

  “Now,” he said with violent intent, “you are going to pay for killing my brother. I’m going to strip the flesh from your bones--”

  And that’s when the hissing blade of a red hot electroblade shot from his chest, and the rest of what he was going to say died like he did. A second later, some type of projectile flew up into the air, and the room became one big strobe effect as sparks flew from the bank of lights above us.

  The next few seconds were a whip-cut flash of blood, screams, and chaos. I made out the silhouette of the electro-blade as it seemed to dance with a will of its own from goon to goon. It sizzled as it sliced through two of the rat bastards, and the third squealed as his tail flew into the air, and he bolted. I swore I saw a flash of dark fur and glint of golden eyes but then the lights sparked again and more darkness fell.

  There was a panicked cooing then a burst of feathers and the sound of a wailing cat.

  The roach dudes decided it was time to bug out, and they attempted to jump back up through the hole in the ceiling but just as they got six feet in the air, I turned and faced Nova who held her clasped cupped hands down by her bent knees. I put my right foot into her hands, and as I pushed off with all I had, she launched me into the air. I grabbed the back of each roach dude at the height of my upward motion and brought them back down to the ground hard. My right knee crushed one with a squish of brown green guts while Nova literally put her foot through the chest of the other one.

  I heard a familiar click and turned just in time to see a rat bastard with a small snub-nosed pistol in his hands pointed right at Nova and I.

  “Fuck you,” he squeeked as his finger tightened on the trigger, and I closed my eyes. I expected there to be a burst of pain in my gut as a bullet or laser tore into me. After a heartbeat, I opened them again because my gut felt fine.

  That’s when I saw Fallon pull her smoking electro-blade from the rat’s skull, flick the off switch, and sheath it on her back. Nova and I stared at her as my mouth hung open and I was, for one of the first times in my life, speechless.

  “What’s the matter, Marc?” Fallon purred, clearly pleased. “Cat got your tongue?”

  Chapter Twelve

  “Well don’t just stand there like that, you’ll catch flies.” Fallon smirked as she stepped over the dead bodies that littered the floor of the warehouse. “Plus, we need to get out of here. There are still a few Opposers out there.”

  “Opposers?” I asked as I started to regain my composure after watching the ninja-cat silently dispose of five baddies without them even knowing what the hell had hit them. Oh, and she’d come out of fucking nowhere.

  “The black and white fellows with the bats,” she replied as she stepped over a puddle of roach dude guts.

  “Oh, right, the Frank Gorshin looking dudes,” I acknowledged. “I was calling them Baseball Furies in my head because of… you know what? Nevermind. Story for another time. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  “Marc?” Nova sighed next to me and as I turned to look at her, her knees buckled, and she stumbled into a support beam. “Leave me here. I’ll draw them in and then trigger a blast. I have enough for one last big one. It will give you time to get away.”

  “You shut your sexy mouth,” I groaned. “I don’t leave anyone behind. Ever. Come on, get up, knight.”

  I grabbed her arm and threw it over my shoulder and hefted her up. I thought I was going to burst a vein from the strain. It was like squatting a VW Bug. It still boggled my mind that someone who was as fit as Nova could weigh like four bazillion pounds. Stupid dense molecules.

  “This way,” Fallon purred and darted off toward a doorway near the back of the warehouse. “I have an idea.”

  “She has an idea,” I echoed to Nova, and we began to shuffle our way to the door. It led to the warehouse’s loading dock where there was a hoverbike with a sleek sidecar attached to it. It reminded me of the twin pod cloud car fighters from Bespin in Empire Strikes Back crossed with a Ducati crotch-rocket motorcycle. A leather clad rat guy sat at the controls. He had on motorcross style body gear, a sleek, rat head shaped helmet, and two vibra-blade swords strapped to his back.

  When I saw him, I instantly brought my hands up and was ready to launch a flying roundhouse kick at his beady little face, but then I saw Fallon go up to him and whisper into his ear. The rodent nodded, flicked closed the windshield on his helmet and revved the hoverbike’s engine. It gave a throaty roar that spoke of speed and power.

  “This is Baba-Tadao,” she said with an almost reverent tone. “I trust him with my life and have for most of my life. He will transport Nova to your friends at the Hall of Champions in one piece. The side car has minor regen pod functions that will help her until they get to their destination.”

  “If anything happens to her, or this is some kind of trick, there is nothing on this world or any other that will keep me from killing you,” I said quietly as I held Fallon’s gaze.

  “I know, Marc Havak,” she said quietly back. Her eyes never wavered. “You have my word, which I do not give often for the very reason that I never break it.”

  “Can I sit down now please?” Nova asked, her voice little more than a croak. She was far more drained than I’d ever seen her.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I answered and helped her into the pod. The memory foam interior cradled her lightly and would act as both roll cage and seat belt if the pod crashed. “Here you go, Nova.”

  “Okay, I’m going to go to sleep now, good night,” she said, closed her eyes, and started to snore quietly. It was sad and adorable all at the same time, and I felt my heart break just a little. I bent in and kissed her on the forehead.

  “Night, Nova. Sleep tight. See you in a bit,” I whispered and then closed the pod’s canopy and stepped back.

  Fallon gave the motocross rat a slight nod and with a rev of the bike’s incredibly powerful engine they shot off into the night. I watched the bright blue light of the bike’s propulsion jets as it zoomed up and around the corner and then was gone.

  A crash came from inside the warehouse that drew our attention back to our still precarious situation.

  “I hope you have some fight left in you, Marc,” Fallon gibed as I could see her lithe muscles begin to coil in anticipation. She had on tight lycra workout shorts, an equally tight lycra midriff tank top, black dance slipper like ankle boots, her electro-sword, and that was it. Her tawny fur was slick and seemed to shimmer. Her ears flicked this way and that as they took in every sound, and her tail swished in tight little arcs close to her body. “Because we have three blocks to navigate before we are safe, and by my count, there are seven Opposers still standing. Irrus promised them a million credits each for your head.”

  “Oh, is that all?” I quipped as I felt none of the confidence I tried to convey. I was battered, bruised, and tired as hell. Part of me just wanted to lay down right here and let the Opposers have their prize. But another part of me, the part that lay deep down in my chest, still burned. That part screamed at me to keep going. To fight. My Uncle Joe had called it my “never quit”. It had gotten me in equal parts trouble and saved my ass since I was five. “What
are you waiting for, let’s go?”

  The smile she shot me scared and aroused me. It was a grin that would have made the Cheshire cat from Alice in Wonderland eat his own heart out with envy.

  “Keep up,” she purred and leapt four feet to grab onto a metal ladder and swung up onto the first landing of a fire escape for the residential building on the other side of the alley.

  “Balls,” I uttered as my parkour mod fired back up, and the now familiar blue line overlaid on my vision. I pumped my legs hard as I leapt from the loading dock, kicked off the building wall and grabbed the bottom rung of the ladder. I then used my momentum to do a kipping pullup, hook my leg over the railing, and pull myself onto the landing.

  I was about to say something witty to Fallon, but when I turned to her, I saw that she was already halfway up the fire escape and headed for the roof.

  “Great, more roofs, awesome,” I said to myself and began to sprint up the metal steps behind her.

  Thankfully, she had decided to wait for me at the top.

  “Just a hop, skip, and a jump, and we’ll be on my turf,” she said as we looked out over the roofs. “If the Opposers set one foot there, they’ll get ripped to shreds.”

  “Okay, hopscotch, let’s do this then,” I urged.

  She winked at me and then took off. Parkour mod be damned, it was all I could do to keep up.

  Fallon moved like, well, a cat. Her feet barely seemed to touch the ground, and she leapt from perch to perch as if gravity didn’t exist. We covered the few blocks to what she said was her ‘turf’ fairly quickly and without any opposition. I leapt from a second story landing, caught myself on a horizontal pole with laundry hanging from it, swung off it, slid down a diagonal rain gutter, and landed at the mouth of an alley next to a rather smelly dumpster.

  I’d lost Fallon for a second as she had leapt a few steps ahead of me, but I didn’t see her anywhere.

  “Almost home free,” she whispered next to my left ear, and I almost jumped out of my skin.

  “Stop doing that!” I whisper yelled. “How do you do that?”

  “I never sneak and tell,” she answered with a smile that I watched fade from her face to be replaced by an angry sneer.

  I glanced back out at what had been just a minute ago a completely empty street. Now, the seven Opposers stood in the center. They clanked their bats on the pavement and looked very pissed off.

  “I take it that this is not good?” I asked almost rhetorically.

  “No,” Fallon hissed. “We are still three blocks from my place, and they know we are here.”

  “What if we asked them very nicely if we can go on our merry way?” I threw out.

  “One, Irrus has paid them a lot of money to bring you down,” she said as her eyes clocked each of them. “Two, we trespassed on their turf while getting from the warehouse to here. Even if Irrus weren’t paying them they’d have to fight us to keep face.”

  “Oh, well that sucks.”

  I took stock of our surroundings, and we seemed to be in a rather slummy part of the city, like something out of West Side Story but, you know, on an alien planet in a galaxy far, far away.

  “You’re the top cat in town, you’re the gold medal kid,” I hummed. For all his man of the fifties machismo, my Great Uncle Joe loved musicals. While Saturday nights were all about James Bond and John Wayne, Sunday’s after church were reserved for West Side Story, Bye, Bye, Birdie, and Oliver!

  “Why are you singing?” Fallon said and looked at me like I was out of my damn mind.

  “When you’re a jet, you’re a jet all the way,” I replied and without a second thought rushed out into the street.

  “Marc!” I heard her yell behind me, but I kept on straight for what I assumed was the head Opposer. It was late, and I was tired of sneaking and running.

  One way or the other this was ending right here and now.

  The lead Opposer smile-sneered at me, raised his bat, and came out to meet me. I picked up the pace a bit to get inside the range of the bat but this apparently wasn’t his first street brawl because he planted his feet and swung from down low, like a golfer, in a hope to connect with my chin.

  My Krav Maga senses saw the attack a second before he launched it, and I hit the ground in a shoulder roll a hair's breadth before the bat would have sent my head over the fences. The roll took me right to his feet, and as I came up on my haunches, I drove my elbow through his knee joint. It popped with a very satisfying crack, and the Opposer screamed in pain. He tried to bring the bat down on my skull, but since he was off balance and without a knee, the blow had no power. I wrested the bat from his grip as I came up from my crouch, and that’s when I felt a pain in my lower back that sent me reeling forward.

  I spun as I stepped to see another Opposer just a foot or so away, his bat held two handed and close to his shoulder as he advanced on me. A flicker of motion in my periphery told me another one was on my left, and they were going to attack at the same time. This was bad. I could tell my muscles were beyond fatigued, and my reflexes were slow as molasses. I was going to get hit, and it was going to hurt. The Krav whispered in the back of my brain, and I lowered my bat, tossed it to the ground in front of me, and held my hands out in a ‘hey, fellas, let’s all calm down’ gesture.

  The Opposers hesitated for a second, apparently not ready for me to surrender, and looked down at the bat as it clanked on the ground loudly. As soon as their eyes shifted, I moved.

  I shot my left arm out in a hammer strike that smashed one of the Opposer’s nose to mush. Blood, dark maroon for a change, shot out from his face, and he gurgled in pain. His hands flew to the mass of cartilage that was his now broken nose, and he dropped his own bat. I caught it mid fall with my right hand that was on its way up in an uppercut to his solar plexus. His dank breath rushed from him, he crumpled and, I came around with a brutal left that knocked his ass out.

  His buddy had recovered from my diversion and swung wildly at me. I had enough time to bring up my right hand which held the dropped bat so his blow glanced off. It still hit with teeth jarring force, and I felt the shock travel up my arm. I stepped forward as his momentum carried his black and white cookie face past me which gave me time to do a fast dive roll. He spun on me, but his face fell as he watched me come out of the roll on my feet and turn to meet him with the other bat held in my left hand.

  I twirled them quickly, like I would have done with my SVAs, and I felt the Glima, the Viking fighting mod, course through my veins, and the beginning of a berserker rage turned my vision to red. I’d had it with these assholes.

  I don’t remember much from the next thirty seconds except for flashes of screams, limbs snapping, and blood flying. When the red finally faded from my vision, I saw Fallon faced off against what I assumed were the last of the Opposers. She parried a blow with her electro-sword as her tail caught the other bat in mid strike. She jumped and did a Wing Chun meets Black Widow mid-air spin strike thing that skewered one Opposer while it smashed the other one's skull in. She landed on her feet in a feline crouch as the two bodies fell to either side of her.

  I walk-limped, my lower back screaming in pain as the adrenaline began to fade, and met up with her as she stood and sheathed her sword. I could see blood as it streamed down the side of her mouth, and there was a nasty gash on her left rib that had matted the fur.

  Without a word, we took two steps forward stepped up onto the curb, and the fight was over.

  “Come on, Marc, just a little further,” Fallon sighed, and I could see that the battle had taken it out of her as well.

  We walked through the streets of what I had at first thought was an inner-city slum. But as we made our way down the narrow avenue, I could tell it was just very old. The buildings had all seen much better days but there were little touches here and there that let me know that the inhabitants took care of their homes. A Flower pot with bright red, blue, and green blooms on one window sill, a garden carved out of the concrete in an alcove, and a mag
nificent mural painting on the wall of a little bodega type shop.

  Finally we came to a squat, run down, boarded window shanty house. Shutters hung on broken hinges from the windows. Tar shingles fluttered on the roof. Trash blew in the breeze on the dead grass of the tiny yard.

  Fallon descended a small stairwell to a basement door, purred into what looked like a doorbell at head level and turned back to me.

  “Well, come on in, I won’t bite,” she beckoned. “Unless you’re into that kind of thing.”

  And with that she opened the door and walked in.

  “Said the cat to the mouse,” I said under my breath and followed her.

  I had prepared myself for a dirty litter box interior but what I saw nearly knocked my very sweaty socks off.

  It looked like a magnificent bedouin retreat. Multicolored muslin hung from an ornate crystal chandelier that cast a warm, cozy glow over the interior to create a desert oasis tent vibe. Thick patterned rugs covered every inch of the floor, and gigantic plush pillows were strewn everywhere and served as couches. A giant, knee-level table sat under the chandelier. It was covered in delicate carvings of stylized cats. Armoires filled with crystal glasses lined one wall, and there were two tent like hallways that led off from the main room.

  “I never get tired of that reaction,” Fallon chuckled as she pulled a decanter full of dark amber liquid and two thick glasses from the armoire and languidly sat on the pillows around the table. She patted a pile of pillows across the corner of the table from her and without needing to be asked twice my legs walked me over, and I plopped down like a sack of rocks. The pillows were downy soft, and I could almost hear my tired muscles moan in pleasure.

  “I worked hard to make the exterior of this building as uninviting as possible,” she said as she poured three fingers of the liquid into each glass. “This is my den, and when I get to come here, I do so to relax completely. That doesn’t happen when there is a constant knocking on the door.”