“Screen on!” Digger said, “Play the-, play the latest promos.”
The screen lit up with bright and violent colours, “Soldiers, lunatics and war criminals with abilities that border on the superhuman! This season, Slayerz has been given access to the deepest, darkest holes on earth in the hunt for fresh contestants. We’ll bring you thirty of the most dangerous individuals on the planet in a fight to the death! After the events of last season, the stakes have never been higher!”
Hearing the announcer talk, watching the flashes of violence and brutality on the screen, Digger felt a trickle of fear down his spine. It was chased away by a building rage. Bloodlust came clawing to life in his chest.
“Superhuman? They’re talking about bloody mutants and-, fuck knows what else!” Digger said, “Alright, bring it on then, freaks! I’ve had enough of your kind already, it’s fucking on!”
Chapter Three
Digger was already awake and working out when another pair of guards came to get him, two days later. The small apartment was still covered in torn bedding and food containers. The door slid open without warning and the two guards entered, one of them holding a black case.
“Put these on.” The first guard said.
The Slayerz guard heaved the case onto Digger’s bed. Both retreated to the doorway again with weapons raised. Digger walked out of the gym and opened the case. It contained his outfit for the show.
“What? Little privacy, ey?” Digger said.
The two guards didn’t move. Digger was reflected in the dark faceplates of their black helmets. Shrugging, the Australian started to strip and pull clothing out of the case. Inside were combat boots and desert fatigues along with black body armour and webbing. Digger pulled it on, strapping the armour around his chest, disappointed there were no holsters or weapons. Guns or whatever weapons they were getting were given just before The Gauntlet, Digger remembered. On each sleeve of the fatigues was the Australian flag, a red and black rectangle with a yellow circle in its centre above the stars of the Southern Cross in a field of blue. Digger rolled up his right sleeve to the elbow so he could see his bracelet and the wrist-mounted screen clearly. Turning to the guards, his scarred face pulled back in a grin as he modelled the new uniform.
“How do I look, lads?” Digger said.
“Like fresh meat.” One of the guards said.
The guard came forward as if to grab Digger. Before Digger realised what he was doing, the guard had jammed a small, gun-shaped object into Digger’s neck. A needle pierced the skin and injected him.
“Fuck’s sake, not again.” Digger said.
Digger started to pass out. He felt his legs crumble and landed on his knees. The second guard produced a cloth hood and shoved it roughly over Digger’s head, blinding him. Digger thrashed in protest but before he could pull the hood off the rest of his body went limp and he tumbled to the ground, unconscious.
xXx
A painful jolt roused Digger from his drug-induced haze. He awoke immediately, any lingering wooziness disappearing and leaving him completely alert. Digger found himself lying on something hard and he shot upright, clawing at the dark hood covering his face. As he took it off and his eyes adjusted to the light he saw a couple of gun barrels pointed at him from the ceiling.
“What the fuck?” Digger said.
While he had been unconscious, Digger had been moved to another, smaller room. It was clean and sterile, every surface made of metal including the cot he had been left lying on. It looked like a bunk onboard a ship.
The sentry gun on the ceiling waggled up and down, indicating to Digger that he should stand up. A camera lens was mounted next to the twin barrels of the gun. The whole arrangement was attached to a rail system on the ceiling that curved out of the bunk’s open doorway and into the corridor.
“Five more minutes, mum.” Digger said.
Digger started to lay back down, lacing his hands behind his head. The sentry gun swiveled to one side and fired, the blast echoing around the bunk. An electric stun round bounced off the walls like a rubber bullet. The gun aimed itself at Digger again and jerked upright more insistently. The message was pretty clear. Grunting, Digger pulled himself out of the lower of the two bunks and got to his feet. He was wearing the military fatigues, combat armour and webbing. Straightening, Digger could feel the floor vibrating through his boots. The vibrations must have been coming from distant and powerful engines, making Digger even more convinced he was on board some kind of ship. The sentry gun retreated into the hallway and jerked around again, leading Digger.
Digger followed the ceiling-mounted sentry gun as it rolled along on its rail, through several cramped, metal hallways clustered with grates and pipes. He passed sealed doorways and portholes with no sense of the outside world. Vibrations came and went in terms of intensity but they were always present underfoot.
Eventually, the sentry gun led Digger to a large and open space that looked like an empty hanger. Two enormous doors, supported by pneumatic arms as thick as oak trees, were closed overhead. The cavernous space looked very bare with no planes, crates, or any other supplies in sight. A large screen had been set up in the middle of the hanger and nothing else. Other figures, a motley collection of strange people in different kinds of clothing and armour who must have been other contestants, emerged from narrow doorways around the hanger.
“Continue forward, follow the markings on the floor to your assigned area to meet your partner.” A disembodied voice said, “Do not deviate or attack any of the other contestants or you will be shocked.”
Digger shuffled forward, looking down at the markings at his feet. Over the other side of the hanger was a woman with multiple arms radiating from her torso. Two long, mechanical arms extended from around behind her back while another two, child-size, were fitted through her customised armour under her breasts. Another man nearby could have used one of the woman’s extra arms. He was bearded and grizzled, his ruined right shoulder ending in a metal-capped stump. Next to him was a man in a bright yellow coat with reflective stripes, a firefighter’s coat, standing with a soldier with a badly burn-scarred face.
Digger felt a flush of formless disgust as he spotted his first mutant participant. The multi-armed woman was just an extreme body modder but this was the real deal. Usually called vampires, the mutant supersoldier was short but compactly muscled. His skin was smooth, unmarked white as pale as marble. The mutant’s eyes were protected by a pair of dark welding goggles. They weren’t true vampires, of course, but supersoldiers designed for night fighting, ideal nocturnal predators. The procedure left them as hairless albinos with super-sensitive sight and hearing as well as giving the mutants enormous strength. Digger’s mind flashed back to a memory of his squad being picked off one by one by a pack of them, until he got his hands around the leader’s throat and the only thing he remembered was squeezing and squeezing hard. It was all Digger could do not to cross the floor and make a repeat performance.
Before Digger could dwell on it, he was distracted by another mutant squeezing themselves through a doorway nearby. The second supersoldier barely fit through the narrow passage of the ship. Digger, no small man himself, would have only come up to mid-chest on the monster. Dressed in oversized black fatigues and armour with a Russian flag on his chest, the soldier had arms as thick as an average man’s torso hanging to either side. His boulder-shaped head was shaved bald and his ears jutted from it like miniature satellite dishes. Meeting Digger’s stare, the two held a gaze for several seconds.
“Fuck are you looking at, Shrek?” Digger said.
The enormous supersoldier grunted and turned away, indifferent. More contestants were gathering in the huge hanger. Looking around the room, Digger realised there was no sight of any of the human guards in their black armour and faceless masks, only the sentry guns in the doorways to keep the contestants in line. Every other season he’d seen, there were always guards watching the contestants during the intro when they got their weapons
.
“Dr Klou! Dr Klou, I can’t believe it!” A woman across the hanger yelled.
The woman was slight figured and pretty, in her early forties with thick red hair. She was wearing a white lab coat over a red top and black pants. The man she was shouting at looked around in disgust. He’d been doing his best to escape being noticed, and for good reason. Digger recognised him instantly. The other contestant was tall and narrow, in his late forties with dark hair and pale skin, stubbled cheeks. Like the woman he was also wearing a white lab coat over civilian clothes. By far his most distinctive feature, however, was his left arm. Klou’s left arm was slightly longer than his right arm and slightly thicker, and covered in black scales like a reptile. His hand was human in shape but each finger ended in a long, curving talon.
“Dr Hart, as you can see we are plainly on different sides of this fight.” Klou said with a German accent, “We would not be here at all if it was not for your incompetence.”
“Dr Klou, how can you say that to me? Please! Please, we have to think of a way out of this!” Dr Hart said.
“There is only one way I know of getting out of this game and I do not think you will like it.” Klou replied.
Klou and Hart’s respective partners watched the exchange between the two of them dispassionately. Hart had been paired with a statuesque woman with steel glittering at the end of her fingertips, probably some kind of assassin. Klou’s partner was a younger woman, barely out of her teens. White, gangly and underfed, the girl had one half of her head shaved and the other covered with long, blondish hair. Several large metal sockets, like giant headphone jacks, ran down the shaven, left-hand side of her skull.
“Oi, Klou! If anybody deserves to be here, it’s you, mate!” Digger yelled, “Fuck me, I saw the pictures of what your little experiments did to those women, you sick fuck! I’ll be coming for you!”
Klou sneered and turned away, joining what appeared to be his partner. The German scientist had been responsible for terrible experiments, trying to create an entirely inhuman breed of supersoldier during the African Bio-Wars. He was a war criminal of the worst sort and if Hart had worked alongside him then she was no better. His experiments had involved creating genetic monstrosities and implanting them in the wombs of unwilling women to grow them to term. Digger had been briefed on the results back when he was in the Australian SAS. The experiments had worked well, except for the women. There had been many attempts on Klou’s life during the Bio-Wars. One of those attempts had lost Klou his left arm which he had attempted to regrow using his own experiments, hence its scaly and monstrous appearance. He must have been captured recently, along with Dr Hart, and somehow they had ended up on Slayerz. In spite of his status as a war criminal, Klou had little fighting experience and with plenty of contestants likely to be gunning for him in the arena he probably wouldn’t last long.
Two squares were painted on the hanger floor in front of Digger, one with his name written in it. He was disappointed by the apparent lack of a weapon crate. Standing in his square, he glanced at the one he was partnered with in confusion.
“Homo Superior Number Eleven?” Digger read aloud.
All around him the other teams were gathering together at their squares. A few shouts of annoyance and recognition were grumbling across the hanger. Suddenly, Digger jerked as he realised someone was standing beside him.
“Where the bloody hell did you come from?” Digger said.
The boy standing beside Digger looked no more than fifteen or sixteen but even then small for his age, by far the youngest contestant in the room. Considering every contestant on the show was meant to be facing death row or serving a term of life imprisonment, Digger didn’t understand what the boy was doing there. He’d appeared from the same hallway as Digger, following the same painted line on the hanger floor. Short and scrawny, the boy was obviously malnourished which probably contributed to how young he appeared. Even his dark pants and webbed combat vest looked too big on him.
“What are you doing here, kid? Get lost on the way to school?” Digger said, “Homo Superior Number Eleven, that you? What’s that supposed to mean?”
The boy stared silently at the Australian with large, sad eyes. His skin was very dark, his cheeks hollow and head shaved and pitted, looking uneven. With a name like Homo Superior, Digger assumed he was from some kind of experiment. Maybe he didn’t have a real name, maybe he’d been grown in a tube like a meat clone from Long Pig. It would be just like Slayerz to pair Digger with some kind of mutant given his hated of them. Looking at the bony kid though, Digger didn’t feel any kind of anger. He was no supersoldier, that was for sure. If he was a failed experiment and therefore still human enough for tax purposes, then Digger figured he didn’t have anything to worry about.
“Alright, little mate, not much of a talker, ey?” Digger said, “Whatever’s going on I guess we’re in it together.”
The other teams of two, all fifteen of them, were gathered in their spaces. The screen in the middle of the hanger flared to life. An amused, female voice filtered through the speakers.
“Welcome to the twelfth season of America’s favourite bloodsport, Slayerz! You’ve all met your partners and now we’ll take a moment to introduce you to your fellow contestants.” The voice said, “As promised, this season the producers of Slayerz have delved into the depths of some of the deepest, dirtiest holes on the planet looking for war criminals, failed experiments, and superhuman genetic freaks. Our first contestant is all three, a creation of the short lived and quickly crushed Fourth Reich, the terror of Argentina known as Boche!”
Tall and ramrod straight, Boche was a literal Nazi superman and Digger’s blood started to boil at the sight of him. The ankle-length leather coat Boche was wearing, belted tight around his waist, made the Nazi look tall and willowy but he would be incredibly strong all the same. Blonde, almost colourless hair was slicked back against his scalp. Blue eyes glittered like chips of glass in his chiseled face. His partner, Uzi Kahneman, was introduced next. Shorter and scruffier than Boche, Uzi was an ex-Mossad agent caught running guns and drugs in the aftermath of the African Bio-Wars and abandoned by his people. Both he and Boche eyed each other with open hate and mistrust. They were linked, however, by their matching sleeves.
The screen went through the other teams quickly so no one at home would get bored. Digger was animated and itching to get into the fight but he tried to force himself to pay attention. The impossibly big man Digger had taunted before was a Russian supersoldier by the name of Dozer. He’d been engineered with subcutaneous ballistic armour and an incredible healing factor that that the screen claimed made him immune to bullets. Another freak, Bolt, had escaped Digger’s attention until he came up on the screen. Given a hyperactive metabolism and reaction times, Bolt had the ability to move at speeds far in excess of any normal human.
When they reached Digger and his partner on the list, Digger’s head went up. Since the boy wasn’t speaking, he definitely wanted to know more about his weird, little offsider. They started with the boy, Homo Superior No. 11.
“A street urchin from the rundown neighbourhoods of Jo’Burg, toward the tail end of the African Bio-Wars the contestant known only as Homo Superior Number Eleven volunteered for a series of experiments attempting to create the next stage in human evolution. No information exists on what the experiments involved, or just how successful they were. Eventually, however, Homo Superior Number Eleven decided to take an early exit from the experiment and destroy all records of what had taken place, including all the records of his original name and history. By burning down the hospital where the experiments were located, the young test experiment was responsible for the taking of so many innocent lives that South African authorities had no choice but to charge and try him as an adult.”
Scenes of carnage covered the screen. Covered in flames, an enormous hospital caved in on itself hurling smoke and embers into the air. It looked less like a normal fire and more like a bomb had hit it. The
screen switched to the boy’s mugshot. Short and scrawny, staring at the camera with sad eyes, the boy was wearing white hospital scrubs covered in soot with ‘Homo Superior No. 11’ stitched onto the breast.
“Previously a member of the Australian special forces, Digger Dundee saw ferocious fighting in some of the worst theatres of the African Bio-Wars. Unfortunately, when the mental strain became too much he turned those same fighting skills on his own side, killing four of his own squadmates and wounding several others. Rather than face justice-,” The screen continued.
“Oi, get it right! It wasn’t me or no mental scars that killed them! It was some fucking mutant, using my arse like a fucking meat puppet!” Digger yelled, “It took over my mind and used me to kill them!”
The female voice of the announcer continued, ignoring Digger if she was even able to hear him to begin with. It touched on Digger’s career as a mercenary before he ended up in Bangkok and was arrested. The other contestants ignored Digger’s outburst. The screen wrapped up and moved on to the other teams.
The multi-armed woman was Kali Badami, a cyborg body modder turned anti-corporation terrorist. Macbeth Madaki, a bio-warlord who had escaped justice until now, was also among the contestants. Both Dr Klou and Dr Hart had worked for him. Among the rest of the contestants were some other soldiers, a Chinese MMA fighter, a pyromaniac fireman, hitmen, and more freaks and criminals. In the end, a list appeared on the screen and then reappeared on the contestants’ forearms.
Boche / Uzi Kahneman
Bolt / DFN Jefferson
Dr Klou / Echo Three
Dozer / Taka
Homo Superior No. 11 / Digger Dundee
Juan Sanzeros / Ludd
Kali Badami / Tanai Den’atsu
L.L. Bitters / Rick O’Shae
Lyncher Lee / Frankie LaPalma
Macbeth Madaki / Junior Du Preez
Marcus Halligan / Luthor Crispee
Kill Switch: Final Season Page 3