Arena 5

by Logan Jacobs

  I hit the gas and fell in line behind the alien Escalade. The thugs leaned out the doorway and tried to shoot at me but I kept moving back and forth so that they couldn’t get a good angle.

  “Anytime now, Artie,” I said into the comm.

  “Sorry, Marc,” she panted. “That road above you is causing too much interference. You need to get out from under it.”

  “Okay,” I said back. If I cut to my right I’d get stitched with bullets and there was a solid row of buildings on my left with no side streets or alleys. “Shit.”

  Then my back window blew inward in a shower of pebbled glass. I looked in the rearview and saw another of the black SUVs behind me. An alien thug hung out the window. He hung on with two spider-leg looking arms that poked out of his back and held a shotgun in his other two hands. Another blast from the shotgun boomed, and I heard it ping and ricochet off my side panel. They were going for my tires, so I had to do something and do it fast. I got the vibe that these dudes didn’t like strangers in their part of town, and we would not be having a polite discussion once they stopped my car.

  I looked up ahead and saw a possible way out. It was an insane, probably never work, way out, but it was all I had. A hundred yards to my right, protruding from the sidewalk into the street and surrounded by orange safety cones, was the beginnings of a metal scaffolding that had a flat piece of sheet metal lying horizontal from the second floor of the building down to the street level. It must have been to move stuff into and out of the second floor of the building it was in front of. I saw a van full of large computer equipment parked to the side of it and a bunch of burly aliens in matching overalls as they muscled the stuff out of the truck.

  “Here goes nothing,” I whispered, swerved to the right, and punched the gas so hard I thought I was going to put it through the floorboard.

  The Road Rager’s engine screamed like a barbarian battle cry and shot forward so hard I was pushed back in my seat. The speedometer’s numbers flashed until they raced over two hundred miles an hour in the span of about four seconds.

  My move shocked the thugs in the SUVs and they couldn’t keep up. Their shots hit the ground in my wake.

  I gripped the wheel tight and said a silent prayer to any alien deity that happened to be listening as the Road Rager hit the metal ramp at two hundred fifty miles an hour.

  Then I was airborne.

  The Road Rager took to the sky and defied gravity by sheer force of raw, fuel injected torque. I sailed up and up and watched the buildings fly by on either side of me in slow motion.

  “There you are!” Artie squealed in my ear. “Oh, wait, why are you flying?”

  My vision lit up as the map in my brain came into focus, and I saw a green line that snaked through several streets and alleys and led right to the bright blue blip that was the Behemoth.

  “Traffic was bad,” I said and clenched my muscles involuntarily as gravity finally took over and the car nosed over the top of the big arc it had been on. I really hoped there was something for me to land on not too far down. As my hood hit a downward angle I was headed for the roof of a long, thin, two story hangar-like building twenty feet below me. “Please have a strong roof. Please have a strong roof.”

  A bone jarring jolt shot through my body as the Road Rager crashed into the roof of the building. Thankfully, I didn’t crash through it. The car’s alien suspension miraculously didn’t snap in half, and I soon found myself roaring down the roof of the building.

  “Yes!” I cried in spite of myself. “I’m not dead!”

  The front end of the Road Rager was crumpled and dented, the hand drawn firebird looked a little like an accordian, but the engine and drivetrain seemed to be fine.

  I checked my position on the map in my head and saw that the building I was now racing down cut across ten full city blocks and would take me right to where the Behemoth was.

  “Um, Marc,” Artie said in my ear again. “Where are you?”

  “I’m on top of a building,” I answered.

  “Okay, okay, alright,” Artie stammered, shocked. “We can work with this. You’ve been weirder places. How are you going to get down?”

  “One thing at a time, Artie,” I said. “But, could you maybe find a place for me to get off this thing?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she responded. The Road Rager, or I guess I could say the Roof Racer, tore down the roof of the building. Alien birds squawked and gawked at me as I disturbed their previously serene perches while I weaved around exhaust pipes, chimneys, and large air conditioning units. I glanced in the rearview and noticed that the roof behind me had started to crack and crumble from the strain of almost a ton of steel flying across it at seventy miles an hour.

  “And maybe, quickly,” I gasped. “The roof road I’m on is starting to give way.”

  “Okay,” Artie replied, determined. “If you angle to your right in two hundred feet, there is a parking structure across a small alley and ten feet down. I’ll tell you when to turn.”

  “You sure?” I asked. I couldn’t see shit on either side of the building.

  “Do you trust me?” She replied simply.

  “Always,” I whispered and meant it.

  “Now,” she breathed into the comm.

  Without hesitation I turned the wheel to the right and gave the car a little extra bit of gas. The roof behind me had started to collapse completely. A chasm of black abyss opened up hot on my rear tires. Just as I crashed through the small retaining wall of the roof, the abyss nipped on my tail, and then I sailed through the air again.

  Artie hadn’t been wrong. Across a short space was the top floor of a parking structure. My tires squealed loudly as the Road Rager bounced down on the soothe concrete of the parking structure. Once again the suspension held, and I whipped the car around in a tight donut to stop my forward momentum and to keep from crashing into the wall.

  “Okay,” Artie said, all business, “now get down to street level. You’re only half a mile away from the truck and two miles from the hospital.”

  “Yeah, we need you, like, yesterday,” Tempest said. “We are surrounded by cops and they are not interested in peaceful negotiations.”

  “On my way,” I said and flew down the down ramp of the parking structure. There were two fast hair pin turns to keep going down, and I yanked on the parking brake to send the car into a short drift slide before shooting down the last ramp and then out onto the street. I caught some air as I came out of the structure and then went into a wild fishtail until I brought the car back under control.

  I sped through two stop lights, horns cried out and cars slammed on the brakes, but I went by without getting creamed. Before I knew it, I came into a town square like opening between the buildings. There was a small pond in the middle of a large park that made up a four block square courtyard. I saw the Behemoth on the southeast corner of the square. Ahead of it were four cop cruisers who had blocked the road. All the cops were positioned behind their car with weapons drawn. Three of the drone-copters hovered overhead.

  On top of the truck Nova was at the duel machine guns while PoLarr sat at the controls for the quad-harpoons and had them yanked around to point up at the copters.

  “Hey guys,” I said as I let the car roll to a stop at an intersection. “Sorry I’m late.”

  “Better late than never,” Tempest replied.

  “How come you haven’t let loose with the machine guns, Nova?” I asked. The cops had proven to be not much better than the thugs, and I didn't know why she hadn’t taken them out.

  “The park is crawling with civilians,” Nova replied.

  “Ah, yeah,” I said and nodded even though she couldn't see me. “I got you.”

  Miraculously, I hadn't been noticed yet. I turned the car up the street and made my way around the park so that I pulled down the road behind the cops whose attention were all on the Behemoth.

  When I was fifty feet away from them I laid on my horn.

  The cops nearly came out of th
eir skin and turned toward me.

  “Now I see why Fallon does that all the time,” I muttered to myself. The look of surprise on the cop’s faces was priceless. “That’s fun.”

  I stared at them through the windshield. I gunned the engine in time with a taunting eyebrow raise. The lead cop’s face turned bright red, and his eyeballs actually bulged out of his skull like some kind of Looney Toons cartoon. He yelled, froth flying from his lips, and the cops scrambled to get into their cars. I began backing up slowly to draw them in, and they took the bait.

  The cruisers pulled out of the blockade they’d formed and whipped around to chase me down. I could tell they expected me to pull another Rockford maneuver, but instead I threw the car into first and put the hammer down.

  “Punch it, Tempest!” I yelled.

  I got another satisfying look of surprise from the cops as the prey suddenly became the predator and I flew down the street straight for them. They scattered in a panic. Two of them crashed into each other. Steam poured from wrecked engines. One yanked the wheel so hard they flew into a bunch of trees at the edge of the park.

  The Behemoth picked up speed fast, I could hear both engines growling furiously as they worked overtime, and then smashed into the back of two more of the cruisers. They spun wildly out of control, their tires shredded from the impact.

  I whipped the wheel around and flew around the back of the truck then up onto the sidewalk until I pulled in front of the bellowing Behemoth. I waved at Tempest who shot me a quick salute.

  “Okay, kiddies,” I said into the comm. “I’m tired of this particular game. Let’s deliver these supplies and get the fuck out of this two bit burg.”

  “After you, oh, fearless leader,” Tempest said.

  “Aurora,” I said into the comm, “how about you crawl into the truck and get those supplies ready to ‘deliver’ when we get to the hospital. And by ‘deliver’ I mean toss out the back. Tyche never said we had to actually stop.”

  “Oh, I felt what you were putting down, sugar,” Aurora replied. “I’m on it.”

  I saw the route light green in my head as we swung onto the final stretch of road which actually dead ended at the entrance to the hospital a quarter mile away. It actually had the word HOSPITAL spelled out in giant red letters on a big marquee by the entrance.

  Halfway down the road three of the drone-copters hovered inches from the ground. These had guns protruding from under the cockpits instead of bullhorns.

  “Um, Marc?” Artie said in the comm.

  “Yeah, yeah, I see it,” I said, frustrated. “Screw it, can’t stop now. Aurora, slight change in plans. Do you have enough juice to shield the front of the truck for a bit?”

  “Sugar, I ain’t been doing nothing but sitting on my sexy ass this whole trip,” she drawled. “And I’m good at multitasking.”

  “Here we go,” I threw the car into drive and punched the gas again for the last quarter mile of chaos.

  “Right behind you,” Tempest growled.

  The car muscled down the stretch of street. The copters didn’t flinch. They opened up with the guns under the cockpit. Chunks of pavement flew all around the Road Rager as I swerved left and right. Eventually they zeroed in on me and my windshield shattered. I had been expecting it though and kept myself hunkered down close to the dash. With my right hand I shoved the remains of the windshield off the car, then pulled my Eradicator and emptied it at the copters. They dodged easily which I had also expected, so while they were occupied I pushed down on the gas again, threw open my door and swung out onto the back of the car as it raced down the street at over a hundred miles an hour.

  Wind whipped my hair as I balanced like a maniac surfer riding a seven hundred and fifty horsepower wave, reloaded the Equalizer, and just before the Road Rager crashed into the copter I jumped off the back of the car, spun in midair and blew out the gas tanks.

  “Shield!” I yelled as I sailed through the air. A second later a black-purple sphere formed around me just as the car exploded along with the drone-copters.

  My shield sphere bounced off the hood of the Behemoth and went up and over. I hadn’t quite thought all of this plan through. Then, the next thing I knew Nova had her arms wrapped around the ball of dark energy as she caught me. I watched as she let loose one of her controlled concussive blasts, which she had gotten much more precise with over the last few months of training, and we came to a somewhat cushioned fall on the ground.

  The Behemoth went into a powerslide and came to rest parallel to the entrance of the hospital. The back opened and Aurora shoved the pallet of medical supplies onto the ground. Three green scrub clad aliens raced our front to grab them and immediately drug them inside.

  The dark energy shield had popped when we landed, and Nova picked herself up and grabbed me by the arm to haul me to my feet. I could see the exertion on her face and how hard it had been to time that fall just right but she was still on her feet and we ran toward the truck.

  Tempest opened the driver side door and helped me get Nova into the back seat of the cab.

  “You drive, you maniac,” Tempest said and climbed into the passenger seat.

  “Sure thing,” I winced as I sat in the driver's chair which was still warm from Tempest’s butt. I giggled to myself which made me wince again. Nova and I had landed pretty hard, and I could feel my back muscles as the bruises began to form. My regen mod would take care of them but it was going to take a little time.

  More cop cars zoomed around the corner at the far end of the street we had just come down and made a bee line for us. My guess was they wanted payback.

  I closed the trucks door, shoved the beast into gear, and stomped on the gas. We lurched forward, building speed quickly.

  “PoLarr, you wanna give them a little goodbye?” I asked into the comm.

  “Sure thing,” she responded, and I heard her stomp up to the machine gun turret. A moment later and there were four loud thumps in quick succession as she fired the grenade launcher mounted under the guns.

  The high explosive grenades landed in the middle of the street right next to the copter wreckage and exploded in big balls of flame. Windows in buildings shattered but thankfully all the pedestrians had taken cover when the shooting started.

  I didn’t wait around long enough to see the reaction of the cops. The green arrow in my head showed that we were close to one of the entrance/exit gates of the walled-in city-state.

  The Behemoth roared and sneered as I worked her through the gears. Two turns later and the gate was up ahead. They’d attempted a half-assed barrier with several wooden barricades, and I just smiled and pressed the gas a little harder.

  Security guards dove out of the way as the Behemoth smashed the barricade into splinters, and we burst out into the bright red sunlight of the desert wastes. Elysia began to fade in a cloud of our dust behind us.

  “Say goodbye to heaven, everyone,” I murmured and stretched my back. “Next stop, hell.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Well, well, well, what an exciting match it has been so far, folks!” Chi-Cheshire’s forty foot feline face boomed from up in the purple sky above us as we drove the Behemoth into the first parking space in front of the next checkpoint roadhouse. “And the first to arrive at the last checkpoint is none other than fan favorite, Team Havak! What a surprise! Given that they started later than all the other teams this is an exciting development!”

  The Behemoth rolled to a slow stop with a loud hiss of air breaks, and we got out. Nova and I moved a little slower than the rest. My back had gotten very stiff during the last few miles, and she was still recovering from her shock blast. But we were still on our feet and had our heads held high.

  As he had at the other checkpoints, Tyche appeared before the front door of the roadhouse, as crisp and British as usual.

  “Team Havak,” he said and looked us up and down, “you are the first to arrive. You shall get the most rest before the final leg of the race tomorrow, as well as b
etter accommodations, and meals of your choosing. Tomorrow all the remaining teams will start at the same time, so enjoy your extra rest and meals. By the looks of you, you shall need it.”

  “Ah, we’ve been worse,” I said back.

  “I have no doubt,” he replied. “Enjoy your rest, in the morning the remaining teams will all start at the same time for a final sprint to the finish. Only the top three will survive the match. Have a nice night, and we shall see you all in the morning.”

  His hologram pixelated and faded from view. I shrugged and walked into the roadhouse.

  “Champion Havak! Holy shit!” Brek-Taup yelled and gave me a big hug. It was slightly uncomfortably, like being hugged by a smoke stack, and I was covered in red dust when he let me go, but it was good regardless. “I can’t believe you guys went from last to first. That’s nuts! I got you the best table.”

  He pointed to a large booth in the back. This roadhouse was nicer than the other few had been. The wooden floors were stained and polished, there wasn’t any sawdust on the floor, and the tables and booths had plush seats. Three large chandeliers illuminated the place in a warm, inviting orange glow. Artie stood at the booth and gave us all a big hug in turn when we sat. She hugged me last and longest, and I was thankful for it. Her very touch seemed to melt away some of the pain in my back.

  “Is your regen mod having a hard time with your injuries?” she asked.

  “Yeah, a little, it’s better now that I’m not stuck in the same position,” I groaned and stretched. I was very sore, but already getting better. “If Nova hadn’t caught me, I might be a lot worse for wear.”

  “I’m sorry, sugar,” Aurora said. “I was working blind in the back of the truck. I should have had a better handle on the shield.”

  “Stop,” I said. “You did great, Aurora. You all did. As always. Why do you think I do all the crazy shit that I do? Huh?”

  “You’ve suffered too many head injuries?” Tempest asked sincerely.