by Logan Jacobs
“You still hungry, Aurora?” I asked as I began to jerk the wheel left and right to put us into a serpentine pattern that I hoped made it harder for us to be hit.
“Always, sugar,” she answered with a devilish edge to her voice.
“Consider it snack time,” I hissed. Small arms fire tore into the door, and I saw it bulge inward like pimples where my legs were.
Without another word she opened the door, veiled herself, and was gone in a blaze of purple-black dark matter. One second she hung out of her open door with the wind whipping at her hair and cloak, and then she shimmered out of existence, as if reality had just swallowed her up.
I put the truck into a wide arc as I scanned the walls for another way out. Having no clue how many of the Biker Boys were left outside, I didn’t want to go back the way we had come, so I had to find another exit. We had surprise and some firepower on our side, but that edge would soon dull as the Biker Boys realized we were trapped and concentrated their efforts.
The heavy machine gun started to home in on us, as the Biker Boys who manned it began to anticipate my evasive maneuvers. Then its stream of ballistic carnage stopped just as it would have cut across the cab of the truck. Out of the corner of my eye I saw blue wisps of life force flow out of a Biker Boy’s open mouth and knew that Aurora was chowing down. I couldn’t spend time worrying about her though, because an explosion rocked the side of the truck.
“Marc!” PoLarr yelled. “They have RPGs! I’m on it!”
In the side-view mirror I saw her jump into the air assisted by her jetpack into a high parabolic arc until she almost touched the roof of the cavern a hundred feet above us. With her duster flowing around her like carrion bird wings, she landed in the group of Biker Boys with the RPG. I couldn’t hear her shots over the din, but I watched in awe as she danced among them, a leather clad spectre of full-bore death.
Nova climbed up into the passenger seat, then changed the ammo belt on her machine cannon.
“We need to get out of this cavern,” Nova said through gritted teeth as bullets tore into the padding of her chair. Pissed, she shoved her torso, and her gun out of the window and began to return fire. “Taste retribution, heathens!”
“That’s my girl,” I muttered to myself and reached over my head with my left hand to where my modified Eradicator sat in its rack. I’d placed it so that the pistol grip pointed toward the roof of the truck instead of down at the floor so that I could grab it easily. The stripped down carbine came free of the rack with a twist of my wrist and I brought it down so that the barrel rested on the window frame of the truck. My thumb flicked the ambidextrous fire selector to full auto and I felt the Ar’Gwyn course through my nerve endings like liquid metal. The rifle became an extension of my body and, like Aurora, it was hungry for souls. I eagerly obliged.
I squeezed off three fast, multi-round bursts and Biker Boys fell on either side of PoLarr as she danced her own ballet of carnage. My right had kept the wheel moving in tight arcs. Despite all of my teams efforts, and they were as deadly as they had always been, we were running out of room and time.
That’s when I saw it. A large, semi-circular opening in the rock a hundred yards to my left. Unfortunately, the Biker Boys had surmised that I would be looking for an exit and about fifty of the scummy desert rat fuckers had amassed at the opening. They’d pulled a bunch of vehicles with them to block the exit and were taking cover behind the blockade where they concentrated fire on our truck. Bullets pinged and zinged off the armor like an angry xylophone.
I turned the wheel hard and aimed at the front of the truck straight at the opening fifty yards away.
“PoLarr! Aurora! Time to blow this popsicle stand!” I yelled into the comm-link. To my left I saw PoLarr dispose of two more Biker Boys at point blank range, trigger a burst from her jet pack, and fly into the air. Nova ducked back into the truck and a moment later Aurora appeared practically in her lap.
“PoLarr is all aboard, Havak,” Tempest said in my ear. “I hope you have a plan, because I just ran out of ammo for the machine gun up here.”
“Tempest,” I grinned even though I knew she couldn’t see me, “even when I don’t have a plan, I always have a plan.”
“What?” She replied. “That… that doesn’t make any sense.”
“Just go with it, sugar,” Aurora said before she looked at me. “So, what is the plan?”
“Tempest,” I said as I shifted one last time. “Hit them with the grenade launcher on my mark. Aurora, throw up a dark matter battering ram on the front of the truck. Now!”
Above me I heard the THUMP-THUMP-THUMP of the grenade launcher, and a second later the barricade was rocked by three massive explosions. Dark matter formed around the front of the truck just as we smashed into the smoking, flame engulfed metal of the barricade.
Metal shrieked as it was torn apart, and we plunged into the flame and smoke.
“Hit the tunnel with three more, Tempest!” I yelled and kept my foot pressed into the floorboards.
We came through the wreckage and were once again in the narrow confines of a tunnel. The grenade launcher belched again, and I saw the explosions behind us as the grenades hit the roof of the tunnel which triggered a cave in.
“Hold on!” I yelled as the truck smashed into what looked like solid rock just in front of us.
I thought we were about to be crash test dummies, but the rocks were actually nothing but wood and plaster painted to look like the inside of the mountain. We burst through in a cloud of brown dust into the blazing desert sun.
I kept the pedal down until we were at least a mile from the tunnel but a glance backward showed that there was nothing but empty desert behind us. A shimmering oasis loomed ahead.
“Havak,” Tempest said arrogantly through the comm-link, “you are certainly not boring. That was something else.”
“Oh, get used to it, Tempest,” Nova chuckled from the back seat. Her face was covered in dust and smears of dirt like warpaint. “That was relatively tame.”
“Ole Marc here makes mayhem seem mundane, sugar,” Aurora added as she readjusted herself in her chainmail bikini which had started to ride up uncomfortably, I imagined. Lucky chainmail.
“Come out to the desert, we’ll have a few laughs,” PoLarr said in the comm.
“Nice, PoLarr,” I commended her. “What can I say, guys? I like to keep everyone on their toes.”
“Please, you have racked up a staggering amount of frequent fly by the seat of your pants miles,” PoLarr joked. That one silenced everyone for a second.
“That was a stretch,” I finally said.
“It was way funnier in my head,” PoLarr admitted.
“They can’t all be winners,” I commented. “Sometimes it's a numbers game.”
“God, what the hell are they yammering on about?” Tempest asked, exasperated.
“We often do not know, Tempest,” Nova said and rubbed some dirt from her forehead. “Just laugh and smile. It usually makes it stop.”
“Hey, sugars, you all might want to look up ahead of us,” Aurora said as she peered through the windshield. I’d been wrapped up in the conversation with my sexy as all get out alliance mates that I hadn’t been paying attention to the road. Or, the stretch of hard-packed desert that passed for a road.
A small, two story building grew on the horizon in front of us. As we got closer more details emerged through the shimmering, mirage like heat waves that rose from the sun baked ground. The building was made from some sort of dark tan adobe material and bleached gray wood with a shale roof. It was fairly large and rectangular and reminded me of a warehouse in an industrial district. A tall, neon sign was posted atop a fifty foot high pole that read: CHECKPOINT ROADHOUSE.
I slowed the truck as we got closer and pulled it in to one of eleven pre-marked parking spots. There were no other vehicles in the small parking lot.
Nova and Aurora looked at me and shrugged.
“I am tired of being in this rolling s
weat box,” Nova said as she pulled the latch to open the passenger door. “Hopefully the inside will have air conditioning and cold beverages of high alcohol content.”
“Amen to that, sugar,” Aurora added, and they hopped out of the truck.
“Hold up,” I cautioned as I opened my own door. I took a quick second to reload the Eradicator and slung it over my shoulder, and I climbed down from the cab of the truck.
I stretched my back and patted some dust from my jacket. Nova and Aurora walked around the front of the truck to join me as Tempest and PoLarr jumped down from their positions on the trailer. They had moved their goggles on their foreheads, and they both looked like adorable reverse dirt racoons. We all made quick eye contact and then began to walk toward the doors of the joint as a group like some post-armageddon posse. In my mind we looked awesome.
As we approached the front, the air in front of us shimmered, and Tyche’s hologram suddenly appeared. He looked out of place in his immaculately white suit.
“Welcome, Team Havak,” he intoned in his crisp, British accent. He had a smile on his face, but his voice didn’t match his perfect, white toothed, grin. There was a disappointed edge to it that I wasn’t sure anyone but me picked up on. “You are the first ones to reach the checkpoint in the Passage of Pain. You will be allowed to refuel, resupply, rest, and leave ahead of the other racers in the morning. Congratulations.”
Then he shimmered back out of existence.
“Well, yay us,” I said, walked up the few squat steps and pushed open the doors.
The inside of the building was just like a hundred roadhouses I’d frequented on a hundred highways that crisscrossed the United States. It was kind of also just like the Roadhouse in the movie Roadhouse, just sans Patrick Swayze, which was a shame. Sawdust covered the worn wooden plank floor where a dozen small tables had been set up randomly. A square bar took up the majority of one wall and was stocked with just about every kind of booze one could wish to consume. A squat Telecultis stood behind the bar and absently polished glasses with a clean dish towel.
“Hey, youse guys,” he said in a thick Long Island accent. Telecultises were a race of beings that emitted a chemical that allowed them to pull various memories from your brain and could adapt themselves accordingly to make whoever it was more comfortable. They typically were bartenders, cab drivers, and various other hospitality professionals. For whatever reason they all sounded like my mom’s cousin Jimmy who was from Long Island. “Take a load off and have a seat wherever you want. You gotta leave the heaters at the door though. No firearms, no fighting, no fucking with the other teams. Got it?”
“I’ll take them from you, Champion Havak,” I heard a familiar voice.
“Brek-Taup?” I asked as I turned and looked into the massive, square, red brick chest of my bouncer buddy from The Into The Breach Tavern. Brek stood well over six feet tall and was made from red bricks. He looked just like a chimney on two legs. Brek had a big smile on his face and orange flame glowed from deep inside of him. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Decided to pick up a little side work,” he replied. We all handed out weapons over to him, and he placed them in a high-tech weapons locker near the front door. “Mom wants a new television. You know how it goes.”
“That I do, buddy,” I nodded and patted him on his coarse shoulder. “Good to see you.”
“You too,” he smiled and little tendrils of smoke floated up from the corners of his mouth. “Y'all have a seat, take a load off, and relax. But you know, no fighting.”
“We’ll be as timid as field mice,” I reassured him with a grin.
“Ha, not likely,” he chuckled and motioned for us to come in.
My team and I walked down the few steps and chose a table that backed up against the far wall. Before any of us could sit, there was a squeal from above us. There were several guest rooms that inhabited the second floor of the joint, and an open hallway was exposed to the entire room like some old-fashioned western saloon. Artemis, dressed in a cracked leather and canvas version of her normal jumpsuit, stood at the top of the stairs. Instead of running down the stairs, she vaulted the banister, and dropped the ten feet to the floor of the roadhouse, landing in a classic superhero pose. She ran over to us and jumped into my arms and kissed me full on the mouth.
“This is so exciting I might just urinate myself,” she geeked out between kisses.
“Please don’t,” I laughed. “I didn’t pack a change of clothes.”
“I am excited almost beyond rational comprehension of stimuli,” she said in a rush as she unwrapped her legs from around my waist and stood up. “It’s so cool to see you all during a match.”
“You are a sight for sore eyes, that is for sure,” I grinned and kissed her on the cheek as we all sat around the round bar table.
“Do you need an ocular wash?” Artemis said as she went into triage nurse mode. “Were you not wearing your goggles? Did you get sand in them?”
“No, Artie, it was an expression,” I laughed.
“That is a very odd expression,” she said, her face scrunched up in confusion. “But I will rotation with it.”
Just then a waiter-bot arrived with a tray full of drinks.
“Um, we didn’t order anything yet,” Tempest commented suspiciously.
“That was me,” Brek-Taup called from the door. “I know what you all drink.”
“Brek,” Tempest said and saluted the big brick bounder, “you are a gentleman and a scholar. Thank you.”
The waiter-bot set the drinks down and then sputtered away.
Everyone grabbed their normal drink. A pint glass full of the black elixir of life known as Guinness Stout filled my hand. A creamy layer of rich foam sat on top of the glass an inch thick. I held up my glass for a toast.
“To Team Havak,” I said proudly. “Kicking ass and taking names from one end of the galaxy to another.”
Everyone chuckled, clinked glasses, and drank deep. The delightfully bitter beverage cascaded over my taste buds and into the pit of my belly where it ignited a warm glow that spread throughout the rest of my body. It was like drinking a contented sigh.
“We should not get cocky,” Nova added as she set down her large mug of Paladinian mead.
“I know,” I said and wiped the foam mustache from my upper lip. “But let’s enjoy the brief moment of calm while we can. How the hell did we end up coming in first?”
“You guys were on your way to being dead last,” Artemis said excitedly as she sipped from a tall Long Island Iced Tea, her favorite alcoholic beverage. My baby went big, or she went home. “Then you entered the cavern which, as you discovered, was home to a rather large Cruxian Biker Boy base. Emphasis on the ‘was’.”
“Dumb luck, that,” I said in a somewhat passable impression of John Goodman from Raising Arizona, an often overlooked Cohen Brothers screwball comedy from the Eighties. My buddies and I went through a stretch in high school where we had become obsessed with it for some reason and watched it almost every day for six months.
PoLarr raised her hand while she sucked on the neck of a Tartaran beer bottle, and we high fived quietly.
“That shortcut through the mountain range put you far out in front,” Artemis said.
“How many teams are left, sugar?” Aurora asked. “It was a bit crazy at the start of the race.”
“You can say that again,” she bubbled. “Great strategy by the way.”
“I know,” I remarked cockily. Artie gave me a seductive glance. She loved my arrogant scoundrel self, and he was in full force after the triumph of the morning.
“Three of the teams didn’t make it into mile one of the race,” Artemis said. “At last check, the rest of the teams are all still in the running. So, nine including Team Havak.”
The waiter-bot returned and set down baskets of food in front of all of us. I was going to complain that we hadn’t ordered, and then the smell of the food hit my nostrils, and the complaint died in my throat. Th
e baskets were full of bright pink thick cut french fry looking wedges that smelled of delicious fry oil and a giant sandwich that closely resembled a half-pound cheeseburger dripping with cheese and grease. Only, the meat was fire engine red, and the cheese navy blue. My stomach took the reins of my brain, and before I knew it I was shoveling fries and burger into my mouth at a frenetic pace. They tasted as good as they smelled. The fries were crisp and perfectly salted and the burger was better than even the finest Kobe beef. Before I knew it, the whole thing was gone.
I burped loudly and sat back in my chair. The rest of the team had eaten just as fast and looked food drunk as they reclined in their own chairs.
“That tasted as good as an orgasm feels,” Tempest commented. “And that is freaking amazing.”
“Sugar, I like the way you think,” Aurora smiled and wiped her full, sensual lips with a napkin.
As I leaned back in my seat and felt the tension of the day finally begin to recede the doors opened and another alliance walked in. There were four of them and they looked battered, bruised, and worse for wear.
The leader was a slender humanoid female alien with bird-like feathers for hair and mottled blue jay skin. She was clad in red leather and had a long gash on her forehead that was crusted in dried purple blood.
Immediately behind her was a squat, blowfish alien with his arm in a makeshift sling. He wore modified army fatigues and carried a gnarly looking double-barrelled shotgun in the crook of his good arm.
Next was a Roswell alien whose sex I couldn’t determine. They stood a little over five feet tall, had translucent pale green skin, huge black eyes, and slender arms that were too long for their body. Roswell had on a shiny, patent leather outfit that looked sprayed on and was covered in pistols like they were a bandito from a western.
Bringing up the rear was a tall, wide, black fur covered alien dressed in hides. It didn’t have any weapons that I could see but its heavily muscled arms were tipped with sharp, talon-like claws.
Brek intercepted them, and they chatted for a few minutes. Eventually the lot of them turned over their weapons, walked in, and practically collapsed at a table on the opposite side of the bar from us.