Arena 5

by Logan Jacobs

  Nova came again as well, and all of her stomach muscles clenched so hard that I thought she might pass out. Then, it was over, and I collapsed on top of her.

  We shimmied up to the top of the bed and dragged the mass of wrinkled covers over us. Nova nuzzled into my neck as I put my arm around her, our bodies still intertwined.

  “Remind me to save you more often,” Nova muttered, her eyelids heavy and satiated.

  “As you wish,” I whispered back to her as we drifted off to blissful sleep.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The next morning the wind blew ocre dust across the line of vehicles stretched out under the already blazing hot red sun. The sky was a clear purple canvas without a cloud in sight. The desert wastes, filled with rocks and canyons, lay stretched before the vehicles like some post-apocalyptic nightmare hellscape full of certain death.

  The Behemoth was in the exact middle of the line of vehicles with two on our left and two on our right. Vex was on his sleek dirt-bike crotch rocket chopper on the far right.

  Next to him was some kind of monster truck beast with wheels as big as I was that had tread as thick as my arm. A huge oversized engine poked out of the top of the hood with exhaust ports sticking out from either size of the big block, supercharged engine. The top part was a modified pickup truck thing that had two aliens in the cab and a pair of them positioned on the back flatbed.

  The driver was a three armed, bright yellow alien clad like some kind of barbarian of the great wastes. His co-pilot was a very round alien with red skin and porcupine quills for hair. I had no idea what the ones in the back actually looked like because they had on some sort of rubberized body suits that even covered their heads. Huge, oversized goggles sat where their eyes should have been. One stood by a quiver full of long, explosive tipped pole-spears and the other was behind the controls of an automatic, belt fed, double-barrelled shotgun.

  Immediately to our left was a Nineteen Fifties inspired hot-rod painted with bright blue flames down the body of the three person car. It looked similar to a Thirties Ford with a giant flat-head V-12 engine bolted to the front end that gleamed shiny and chrome in the morning light. Its chunky wheels were on souped up suspension rods and were more than likely puncture proof. Where the trunk should have been was a small platform and roll bar.

  Standing on the platform was a cyborg whole entire body, breasts and all, except for her very human looking face was all complex robotic parts. She was tethered to the back of the car with two bungee cords as she stood on the back platform. In her hands was a massive crossbow made from scrap metal that fired two foot long steel bolts which looked like sharpened rebar. Inside the cab behind the wheel was a dead ringer for the character Blaster from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Sitting next to him was a dead ringer for Master from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. They looked over at me and growled.

  I waved back, since I knew that pissed everyone off.

  Next to that was bar the strangest looking vehicle I’d seen in this Fury Road meets Cannonball Run race we’d been in for the last few days. I looked like some kind of moon vehicle thought up in the Seventies, a series of connected spheres on eight sets of bulbous tires, but covered in sharp metal spikes and with a giant backhoe crane on the end. I had no idea how many were on the team that operated the caterpillar murder ball thingy because it had no windows that I could see.

  My team and I were all in our positions. Me behind the wheel, Tempest riding shotgun with her shotgun. Aurora behind the controls of the machine guns and able to throw up shields if and when needed. Nova and PoLarr bringing up the rear at the quad-harpoon cannons. We were well rested, fed, and feeling fucking great if I did say so myself.

  “Welcome, welcome, welcome, megaverse!” Chi-Cheshire’s feline face said from up in the sky. “This is it, folks. It’s down to the final five teams. Only three will survive on this fifty mile sprint through the open wastes with Nomads, Biker Boys, and Road Rats all wanting revenge for their defeats over the last few days. Ending with a run through Gore Gorge. Enjoy this Hell on Wheels!”

  On that we all started our engines. The sound was deafening, full of the threat of power and violence.

  “Go!” Chi-Cheshire shouted from the heavens, and I hit the gas. Unlike last time I couldn't afford to let the pack pull ahead of me. This was going to be a battle royale.

  “Nova! PoLarr!” I said into the comm-link. “Make sure to let me know if anyone is on our six. Feel free to blast them. How many explosive harpoons do we have?”

  “Exactly four,” PoLarr answered.

  “Use ‘em wisely,” I commanded. “Maybe save one in case we need it down the road.”

  The Hot-Rod and Monster Truck lurched forward and accelerated quickly both heading off in a V pattern from the Behemoth. They clearly wanted some room between us. Vex gunned his bike and shot off like a comet and soon disappeared into a cloud of dust.

  That left freaky Spiky-Caterpillar who decided it was now or never if he wanted to attack us. It matched our speed and started to ram into the driver’s side. The spikes all over its body sparked off our armor.

  I didn’t have to tell Aurora to let loose with the machine gun. The guns roared and bullets pinged off the tough hide of the Spiky-Caterpillar. Some ricocheted into the door and left smoking holes in the metal of the doorframe by my head.

  “Ease off, Aurora,” I shouted into the comm. “That thing’s hide is too tough for the bullets. They’re bouncing around. I almost got an extra hole in my head.”

  “Sorry, sugar,” Aurora answered. “It’s too close for the grenades.”

  “Looks like we’ll just play a little bumper cars here for a bit,” I said through gritted teeth and yanked the wheel hard to the left. The Behemoth smashed into the lighter eight-axled truck, and it had to turn away.

  I shifted and gave the beast more gas.

  Spiky-Caterpillar matched our speed but kept its distance. I watched as a small alien came out of a hatch near the crane. It crawled up the big arm with sticky hands and feet, twisted a few bolts and then pulled a lever.

  “Shit, I don't like the looks of that,” I said.

  Tempest crawled out of her seat, pulled herself through the open passenger window, rested her shotgun on top of the hood of the cab, and fired three fast bursts. She’d apparently loaded the gun with bolo-rounds because I watched as the crawly aliens arm came off at the shoulder. He wailed in pain and then another of the bolo rounds sliced the top of his head off. But he’d accomplished whatever it was he had set out to do, because the scoop part of the back-hoe flattened and began to spin like a buzz saw.

  “Crap,” I muttered.

  “Sorry I didn’t catch him sooner,” Tempest said as she crawled back into the truck and began to reload the shotgun.

  “You did good,” I reassured her.

  From the back of the Behemoth’s trailer I heard the heavy chug-chug-chug of Nova’s machine cannon. I watched as the bright red tracer rounds bit into the dirt around the Spikey-Catapillar’s wheels and then stitched into them. The wheels didn’t go flat but chunks began to fly out of the solid rubber. It lurched but still kept moving forward and then veered right at us again.

  As it smashed into us, the buzzsaw shot out on the crane arm and tried to slice at our tires. A shower of sparks flew as the buzzsaw hit the heavy chains that hung down like curtains to protect our wheels. The wheels themselves were armored and puncture resistant, but I doubted they could take the teeth of the buzzsaw for long. We were too early in this sprint to lose our tires.

  “Marc, do you want me to throw up a shield around the tires?” Aurora breathed heavily into the comm.

  “Not yet,” I shot back. “Save your strength for now. Keep an eye on them though.”

  Nova still kept trying to shoot at the Caterpillar's tires, but she had to be very careful with her shots. They were back in ricochet range and whatever the armor on the thing was it sure was strong.

  “PoLarr!” I yelled. “Load up a cable harpoon. I
’ve got an idea.”

  “On it,” she responded like the seasoned soldier that she was.

  “When you’re ready, see if you can spear the back end,” I shouted over the roar of the Behemoth’s engines. I’d kept the truck at about seventy but was soon going to let her stretch her legs a bit.

  “Firing now,” PoLarr said into the comm, and I watched in the side-view mirror as a long, barbed, harpoon shot from the back of the trailer with a thick metal cable spooling out behind it and slammed into the last armor bubble of the Spiky-Caterpillar. “Bullseye!”

  “Hold on everyone,” I said, pressed the button on the gear shifter that would engage the massive supercharger on the hood of the Behemoth, and slammed the gas pedal into the floorboard.

  The Behemoth jumped and bucked like a branded Brahma bull and g-forces pushed us all back into our seats. The speedometer shot to over a hundred and twenty miles an hour in the space of four seconds.

  The Spiky-Caterpillar couldn’t keep up, and it lost ground until the harpoon cable had played all the way out and the tension flipped the car around a hundred and eight degrees so that it was now dragging behind the Behemoth backwards.

  I could see it dragging across the desert behind us like a marlin on a fishing line. The buzzsaw tried to angle backwards, but it didn't have enough range of motion to cut the harpoon line.

  The Behemoth’s engines whined from the strain. I cut the super-charger and began to swing the truck in long, wide arcs. The Caterpillar tried to counter my movements but couldn't keep up and got whipped out far to the right of the truck like a water skier outside the wake. It hit the end of the cable and got flung back the other direction so hard it came off its wheels and began to roll.

  “PoLarr,” I said into the comm, “release the cable and hit that fucker with a high-ex harpoon.”

  “With pleasure,” she said manically.

  In the sideview I watched the cable fly off the back of the truck, and the Caterpillar kept rolling, sending up spumes of brown splashes of sand all around it. There was a WHOMP of compressed air, and I saw the six foot long harpoon shoot from the back of the trailer and hit the Caterpillar mid flip. It went up in a big orange ball of flame that sent spikes flying everywhere. The buzzsaw flew and slammed into the back of the trailer four feet below PoLarr.

  “Whoa! What an end for Team Eekboor!” Chi-Cheshire boomed from the sky above us. Apparently he was acting as a play-by-play announcer for this last leg of the race. “Four teams left! Who is next to succumb to the Hell Highway!”

  “Stay frosty, everyone,” I said into the comms. “I think that was just the beginning.”

  Up ahead and closing in fast, I could see the Hot-Rod and the Monster truck. They were still hell bent for leather but were now swarmed with a mob of Biker Boys and Road Rats in pursuit vehicles. Crossbow-Cyborg had her hands full warding off two fast little interceptor cars that were trying to run them off the road.

  Monster truck swiped a bunch of Biker Boys who flew off their bikes in a tangle of limbs. The rest of the Biker Boys began to lob improvised Molotov cocktails at Monster truck.

  And that’s what we were driving into.

  I’d hoped that maybe the Road Rats and Biker Boys would be too busy with the other two cars, there was still no sign of Vex which was equally worrisome and relieving, to notice us. But we were kinda hard not to notice. A twin V-12 eighteen wheeler bristling with armor and weapons tended to attract attention.

  Soon we were swarmed with our own Road Rats and Biker Boys, oh, and the lancers on the back of the Monster Truck were trying to blow up the front of the truck.

  “Everyone hold on,” I cried as I yanked the wheel hard to the right just as an explosive lance hit the ground in front of us. The explosion rocked the front of the truck up, and I heard metal grind but we still kept moving. The tachometer started creeping toward the red but I couldn’t ease off the gas or we’d be overrun.

  “Keep it below a hundred if you can,” Tempest said and yanked up on the access panel in the floor of the back of the truck. “I’m going to go see if I can repair the crank shaft. We’re grinding metal, and if I don’t, we’re gonna blow the cams. Man, I like this mechanic mod. Pretty damn cool.”

  “Try not to get killed,” I yelled back at her.

  “You too,” she shot back before her head disappeared and then she crawled into the maintenance shaft that led to the engines. It was insane what she was trying to do, but I didn’t have any better ideas.

  I saw a few blasts of dark matter hit one of the Road Rat’s little interceptor cars and sent it flying into the air then the staccato of the machine guns kept several of the bikers from closing in on us. I wanted to keep them away for as long as I could because once a few of them actually got on board we’d somehow have to fight them off while going seventy miles an hour.

  Monster Truck wasn’t done with me and had zoomed in on the left, but there were two of the Road Rat interceptors in between us lobbying gas filled bottles at the truck. Bright blue flame splashed over the flat bed and engulfed one of the lancers. He, she, or it, flailed its arms wildly, grabbed one of the lances then jumped off the back of the truck. The lancer flew through the air like a person shaped meteor, blue flame trailing behind him like a shooting star, and crashed head first into an interceptor. The car burst into flames and careened off wildly, taking out a bunch of Biker Boys when it finally exploded.

  Shrapnel from the explosion tore through the cab of the truck and sliced into my thigh.

  “Ah, fuck!” I yelled as I yanked the still sizzling triangular piece of metal out of the meat of my leg. It had been hot enough that it cauterized the wound but it hurt like a mother fucker.

  “You okay, Marc?” PoLarr asked. I could hear her Equalizers booming through the comm-link. It sounded like glorious music.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I grumbled. “I’m fine. Caught some shrapnel in my leg but the regen mod is already stitching it up.”

  Just then, three crossbow bolts sank into the front fender of the truck. I whipped my head around and saw the Hot-Rod weaving back and forth ahead of us. I grabbed the modified Eradicator from its rack above my head with my left hand, rested the barrel on the doorframe and squeezed off a long full-auto burst from the carbine. The bullets caught a few Biker Boys in the back and then pinged off the side of the Hot-Rod.

  “See how you assholes like being shot at,” I sneered and pulled the trigger again. Sparks flew as the rounds hit the Cyber-babe in the back. She fell to her knees, and I allowed myself a moment of arrogant victory. Which faded fast when she stood up and glared at me as if I was a cheating spouse. And I’d fucked her sister. In our bed.

  Cyber-babe pulled the string back on the crossbow and reloaded it with three nasty looking bolts. She aimed at my head one handed and that hand didn’t waver a bit. Just as she pulled the trigger I swerved the truck and had to hop out of the driver’s chair momentarily. I dropped the Eradicator into the cab as I had to use my left hand to steer while I deftly switched feet on the gas. The crossbow bolts had hit the driver’s door and poked in almost a foot. I pulled my Equalizer and fired at where the hinges of the door were and then again at the door latch. The door flew off the cab and spun away behind us. Hot desert air rushed into the cab as I once again got completely behind the wheel.

  “Never liked that door anyway,” I joked to myself and holstered the pistol. With my left hand I pulled the carbine out of the floorboards and sat it across my lap. “How you doing down there, Tempest? I could sure use you riding shotgun again. See what I did there… ‘cause you have a shotgun?”

  “You’re a real comedian there, Havak,” she said back cockily, but I could hear amusement in her voice. “Don’t quit your dayjob though. And yeah, I’m almost set here. If you would stop swerving all over the goddamn place, I’d have been done sooner.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry I’m having to evade a horde of angry wasteland motorists hellbent on killing us,” I snarked.

  “You two sound like
an old married couple,” PoLarr chuckled.

  “But the sex is way better!” Tempest laughed.

  I shifted into a higher gear and gave it a little more gas. The grinding had stopped thankfully and the tachometer was down to a manageable level, no longer in the red zone.

  Two more Road Rat interceptor cars zoomed in from my blindspots and cozied up the trailer of the truck to match our speed. I wiggled the steering wheel back and forth, but they had been watching my moves and matched the motion of the truck perfectly.

  I saw Nova in the sideview mirror work to get an angle on the one on the left, but she was pinned down by a volley of explosive slingshot blasts.

  A gaggle of Biker Boys flitted around the back of the truck like two-wheeled gnats. Each bike had two Biker Boys on them, one driver and a passenger sitting behind the driver but facing backwards. The passengers had wrist mounted sling shots and fired on Nova relentlessly to keep her from getting a firing angle on the Road Rat cars. Whatever it was they put in the slingshots exploded in tiny bursts of red smoke and flame when they struck the side of the vehicle.

  My attention was drawn back to the interceptor vehicles sidled up to the truck as hatches in the roofs of the cars slid back, and a Road Rat appeared in the top of each one. They had what looked like scuba tanks strapped to their backs with garden hoses stretched down each arm that ended in a blowtorch nozzle with a flickering flame on the tip. They raised their arms and streams of flame shot out fifteen feet along the side of the truck and up toward the cab.

  I could feel the intense head on the side of my face and had to flinch away. As I did, I saw the one on the left side aim toward the front tires.

  “Shit,” I muttered. They were going to try to turn the tires into burning piles of melted rubber. I had no idea how flameproof the big, all terrain desert tires were.

  “Done,” I heard Tempest say in the comm. “Headed back up, Havak.”

  “Change of plan,” I said back as another stream of fire shot across the front of the truck. “Sneak back and take out these fucking flame throwers, will ya.”