One of them, a female warrior with bowling ball-sized shoulders, brought a stone hammer down on the cockpit, fighting to get her way inside. We windmilled the mech’s arms, trying like hell to dislodge the attackers.
The female warrior brought her hammer back, and I brought the mech to a sudden stop. The movement sent the female warrior and the other barbarians soaring into the trees where their bodies hit the thick trunks and broke apart. Those that survived were either trampled under the mech’s oversized feet or machine-gunned by our cannons.
“We got company!” Jezzy screamed.
Peripherally I saw movement through the trees. Something large and shiny was using the trunks for cover, closing in on us.
“THE OPERATORS!” she yelled.
There was a sudden burst of static. I reached up and tapped a button for our communications link, the commlink. A familiar voice echoed.
“Give up while you’re ahead, Deus,” Simeon said from the link speakers.
“At least you got my name right this time, douchebag,” I replied.
“We’ll go easy on you,” he said with a snicker. “After all, both of you are cripples.”
I looked back at Jezzy, and there was fire in her eyes. “I soooooo wanna kick this guy’s ass,” she said.
Before I could respond—
CRACK-BOOM!
An explosion struck a nearby tree. The blast severed the tree halfway up, sending the top portion of its trunk and crown crashing down. Pure reflex was the only thing that saved us. I anticipated the angle of the falling tree and slid our mech out of the way at the last second.
“What the hell?!” Jezzy yelled. “They said the operators couldn’t hit us with live ammo!”
I glanced back. “Yep. But nobody said anything about using the trees!”
The air filled with missiles and rockets and soon the trees were bursting apart and raining down all over us. We bobbed and weaved, the ground shaking as the trees crashed down to the right and left.
Our mech shot forward, jumping up onto a fallen tree, using it as a springboard. Before we could leap into the air, however, I turned to see a metallic hand punch our turret—
BOOM!
The blow sent our mech crashing down to the forest floor.
We quickly recovered, and my eyes strayed to the viewscreen. I could see Simeon behind the controls of the mech that had sucker punched us. He was pushing his machine up onto the trunk of an enormous tree. Then he reached down and pried one of the other weapons I’d seen attached to the side of the operators’ mechs, an oversized hammer with a spike protruding from the end of it.
Simeon pulled the hammer loose and swung the thing at the nearby trees like a mechanized Thor. Trunks splintered, and the trees began toppling. I powered our mech into a roll, barely avoiding the falling timber and Simeon’s machine that flew through the air and slammed to the ground out in front of us.
Our mech crabbed back and Simeon replaced the hammer with a fifteen-foot section of fallen tree that his mech held like a baseball bat.
“That is not cool!” Jezzy shouted.
Music started piping through the commlink. Not our music, but older tunes that I assumed were being programmed by Simeon. A singer’s voice echoed, and I listened to the words, to the man singing “The party’s over, it’s time to call it a day … the party’s over, the candles flicker and dim ...”
Simeon laughed as the music amped. Then he swung the tree at us, barely missing the top of the turret. We dove laterally, and shimmied up a fallen tree and then dropped twenty feet to the ground.
If it wasn’t for the alien-alloyed panels Richter had grafted onto the mech; we’d never have been able to survive the drop. The alloy helped cushion the blow as we turned to see Simeon making a beeline toward us.
“SHOOT IT DOWN!” I cried out.
“I CAN’T FIRE ON HIM!” Jezzy replied.
“THE TREES! SHOOT AT THE TREES!”
Jezzy unleashed a flurry of rockets that set several fir trees on fire. Smoke filled the forest as Simeon’s mech wheeled around. It rampaged forward, and I brought our mech down and then launched it into the air.
Simeon’s mech flew by underneath of us. We landed and darted through the smoke. Another mech appeared in front of us, and Jezzy threw an elbow that—
WHACK!
Clipped the other mech, sending it pinwheeling back into the brush. The other operators were directly behind the fallen one.
My eyes roamed up to see Baila behind the next closest mech. Even behind the cockpit, she looked breathtaking. I froze.
“I knew you had the hots for her!” Jezzy shouted.
Baila stared at me and then her face screwed up in a snarl. She threw a mech punch that hammered our turret. So much for her being the nice one of the bunch.
I monkeyed the controls, but the impact knocked us back and down over a rock ledge. The sound of metal screeching against rock echoed as we slid down an embankment. My teddy bear went flying against the cockpit as the CD player began skipping. My eyes hopped to the view screen, and I saw the other operators jumping down after us.
They fired a rocket at the trees at the bottom of the embankment.
I shoved the mech into a drift-slide, able to slip ride under the falling trees at the last second.
The mech’s turret groaned, and the engine complained as I maneuvered us back on our feet. We forged through the trees and then downhill and through a dry stream bed that was filled with boulders. Following the course of the stream bed uphill, I could see that the top was cluttered by a windfall and an immense jumble of even larger stones.
Jezzy shouted and pointed, and I looked up to see another mech dropping down in front of us. It was the machine piloted by the two Asian women, Ren and Sato. I grabbed my teddy bear and sat him on my lap and then the other mech rushed us.
Ren and Sato dropped their mech low. Suddenly, I remembered the footage Dexter had let me watch. I recalled how they liked to attack low, so I dropped our mech into a crouch and then hit the engine’s turbo. This rocketed our mech ten feet up into the air, allowing us to soar right over Ren and Sato.
We hit the ground, and I threw out a back leg that connected with the backside of their turret. This knocked them back, but they quickly recovered and began hurling boulders at us. One of the rocks pinged off our cockpit, nearly cracking it.
Jezzy shouted for me to get running, to hit the area near the windfall and I knew she was right. Ren and Sato continued to fire rocks at us as our mech picked its way up toward the immense jumble of stones.
My eyes enlarged when I saw the placement of the rocks, the angle at which they were positioned. The wheels in my mind were turning.
“I’ve got an idea,” I said.
“Already on it,” Jezzy said. This is what I loved most about working with her, the fact that she was often able to read my mind. I’d never admit it to her of course, but she was always several steps ahead of me.
Jezzy fired several rockets that blasted apart the windfall, sending a rockslide directly toward us and the other mechs that were right on our ass.
We jumped over the rockslide, and I watched the debris nearly wipe out the other operators. All of their mechs were still standing, but they’d fallen behind us.
“Good work, Jezz!”
“I learned from the best!”
“Thanks!” I said.
“I didn’t mean you!”
A nervous smile played at the edges of my lips. We careened through the forest and were soon moving through the treeline, six miles away from the golden flag. We danced over several small brooks and scrambled over a boulder-strewn field. I could see in the viewscreen that the barbarians and Romans were chasing us. It looked as if they’d teamed up against a common enemy.
There was a grassy ridgeline in front of us that we tromped up. We stopped occasionally and fired back into our pursuers. The rockets thudded into the ground, dropping Romans and barbarians by the dozens, but they still kept coming.
I looked up. There were twenty-eight minutes remaining on the timer. We crested the ridge, and I spotted a form up near the top of a hillock, what looked like a crude stone structure or fort. I zoomed in on the viewscreen to see the golden flag flying from top of the fort. All we had to do was cross a section of lowlands and then sprint up toward the fort, and we’d win!
There was another burst of static from the speakers tethered to the communications link.
“You think you’ve won,” Simeon growled, “but the party’s over and a new one’s just about to get started.”
There was a surge of light across the horizon, and everything began to flicker and flash, almost like a retro DVD that was skipping.
“Danny … what’s happening?” Jezzy asked.
Whatever was happening, I knew it wasn’t good. I thought about what Vidmark had said, about how the operators had been given the ability to alter the training conditions one time. That’s what Simeon was doing, I figured. He knew that we were in the lead and he was changing things up on us.
“I – I think they’re calling an audible,” I said.
Before Jezzy could respond, everything began to dematerialize. I could literally see through my hand, and the mech and then the music on the CD player began to rewind eerily. The ground opened up under us, and we were sucked down into a darkened pit.
32
I couldn’t see anything for several minutes, but it appeared as if our mech was stationary and everything on the outside was rushing past. Then there was an explosion and a white light strobed. We were pulled through a funnel and emerged through a wall of gel out onto a never-ending plain of gray ash that bisected two flat bodies of water.
My ears thrummed, and stars filled my eyes. We sat in silence for several seconds. I looked at the timer on my head up display which blinked 27:22 and began counting down. Looking outside, I stared up at the sky. Black flurries fell from it, coating the cockpit. The terrain around us appeared to be made of crushed and level stone, and there was what looked like a forest at the end of the plain and beyond that, rugged peaks and what might be a volcano. For all intents and purposes, it looked like an alien world to me.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“You mean when.”
I looked back. “We’re on Earth, Danny.”
“Somehow it doesn’t look like what I remember.”
Jezzy pointed to the viewscreen which was filled with pages of information.
“That’s because you weren’t around sixty-six million years ago.”
I blinked. “Come again?”
She pointed at the viewscreen “They changed it up like Vidmark said they would,” Jezzy said. “I bet one of the other operators was scared we were gonna win, and they did something.”
“They sent us into another time loop,” I replied breathlessly.
“Back to the ‘K-T Extinction,’” Jezzy said, reading from her viewscreen.
“That doesn’t sound good at all.”
“It’s not,” she answered, reading from the viewscreen. “We are smack dab in the middle of the event, an asteroid strike that probably released the same amount of energy as billions of atomic bombs.”
“Alrighty then.”
“The strike allegedly killed seventy-five percent of all living things on the Earth with global firestorms, soot clouds that blocked out the sun, and toxic gas clouds—”
“Killed off everything as in the dinosaurs, right?”
She looked up. “Yeah. How’d you know?”
I pointed.
Just ahead of us was an enormous, terrified-looking creature that streaked past our mech.
My jaw dropped. “Was that … a friggin’ T-Rex?” I whispered.
“A very frightened T-Rex.”
“What the hell scares a T-Rex?”
Suddenly, I saw shapes toiling in the forest at the end of the gray plain. I checked the map on my viewscreen and the area all around us was filled with misshapen forms along with the red dots signifying the other operators and the golden flag. The map showed that the flag was located at the base of the volcano, seven miles away. We had roughly twenty minutes to get there before the others did.
“We’ve got echoes, Danny,” Jezzy said.
“Bad guys?” I asked.
“Yeppers.”
“How many?”
“Um … all of them,” she said.
I activated the exterior lights on the mech and bit back a scream. I knew at that moment what had terrified the T-Rex. At the other end of the plain were monstrous creatures the size of elephants. The things stood on two powerful legs, but they had tails like scorpions, spindle-thin arms that were studded with dagger-like, white quills, and narrow skulls that resembled the head on an ax. The alien beasts’ exoskeletons were black and shiny and made them appear more mechanical than biological.
“What are those?” Jezzy asked.
“I’m guessing those may be the things that actually killed off the dinosaurs.”
I noted on the map that the other operators were already on the move, so I pushed our mech into a mad dash.
“You think they’ll let us through?” I asked.
“Doubtful,” came Jezzy’s reply.
Objects began pelting the cockpit. The hatchet-faced monsters were firing the quills from their hands. I swerved left and right to avoid the quill, but there were too many of them.
“Ha! They can’t make it through the cockpit!” I shouted.
WHUNK!
One of the quills penetrated the cockpit glass, coming within a few inches of stabbing into my forehead. Holy crap!
“Let ‘em have it!” I screamed.
The cannons on the mech spit fire. A wall of lead dropped the monsters in front of me. Alien body parts filled the air along with great gouts of yellow and green blood, but as soon as the monstrous bodies hit the ground, they split open to reveal dozens of scorpion-like creatures the size of small dogs cocooned inside.
I stared at the things, absolutely shocked. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Leathery wings erupted from the sides of these things as they took to the air and began bombarding us. Jezzy continued to fire the cannons and rockets, carving a path through the aliens. One of the larger creatures jumped at me, and I sidestepped the beast and brought the mech’s clawed foot down on its head, splitting it open like a ripe melon.
I lowered the mech’s shoulder and Jezzy fired a rocket that shrieked into the belly of another alien, then passed through its back and continued on into eight more before exploding in an eruption of blood and bone. This pushed the hordes back, and I steamrolled into them.
I dropped the mech into a low, combat run, and Jezzy fired point-blank into the creatures, decapitating and gutting scores of them. More of the beasts came at us, monstrous things flapping their wings, their mouths open to reveal knife-like teeth.
Jezzy strafed the hordes, bullets, and rockets from the mech’s cannons exploding their bodies, turning the corpses into bone-confetti. I could hear their shrieks which sounded like pieces of metal being rubbed together, as they were swept aside by our attack. Finally, we’d carved a hole through the massing aliens and took off into the forest. We slashed past the silhouettes of dinosaurs of various shapes and sizes which were beating a hasty retreat away from the firefight.
The map revealed that the other operators were just up ahead. I looked up to see that there was indeed a volcano off in the distance.
“That volcano thingie’s erupting!” Jezzy shouted.
“How do you know?!”
“Because the air is literally filled with burning debris!”
I looked through the cockpit, and suddenly it looked like the sky was on fire. It was like something out of the Old Testament, fire, and brimstone and all that. I moved the mech evasively, but the fireballs slammed down all over the place.
The molten debris whacked against the turret and cockpit in a flash the tr
ees on the outside began to go up in flames. Visibility, already poor, became much worse. I shoved the controls down, and the mech galloped through a wall of fire. We could see the alien beasts in the background. Some of them made it through the flames while others were on fire, running around like ambulatory torches.
“Nineteen minutes!” Jezzy said.
“How far?”
“Four and a half miles.”
I surveyed the map and amped the mech’s engine. The machine ran forward through the woods, gliding past pillars of flame, the outside world enveloped in a shroud of soot and smoke from the wildfires. We came up fast on the other mechs, and I spotted the first one through a gap in the trees.
“We need to go around,” I said.
“No time!” Jezzy shouted back.
I prayed that the legs Richter had given the mech would come through once more. I pressed the controls down and gave the mech as much juice as I could.
We rocketed out of the trees and surprised two of the other mechs, the ones piloted by Baila, and Dru and Billy. Their turrets spun, and I locked eyes with Baila. Instead of hesitating this time, I ran our mech directly at her—
WHACK!
Sideswiping Baila, sending her mech crashing to the ground.
“That’s for Mister Berenstain!” I shouted at her.
We bounded past Dru and Billy. I could see them reacting in the viewscreen, but our mech was smaller and nimbler. The legs Richter had bolted on were a definite advantage, and in several seconds, several hundred yards separated us.
Our mech blitzed forward across a reef of gravel that spooled to the edge of the volcano. With all the flaming debris crashing down and the blackened, sooty sky eerily backlit by the reds and oranges spewing from the mouth of the volcano, the entire area resembled one of the lower levels of hell.
I could barely see the other two mechs up ahead, what I assumed were Simeon and Ren and Sato. They were spidering up the side of the volcano headed for what our map said was the location of the flag.
Fourteen minutes.
That’s how long we had to cover two miles and defeat the other mechs.
“Got any bright ideas?” I asked.
“I think that given our present situation, the best course of action is to ram it down their throat,” Jezzy said.
Seppukarian_NEW WORLD DISORDER Page 20