The seven-foot tall bear with sky blue fur emerged from one of the theatre entrances. Its face was frozen in a broad grin over its glassy, unseeing eyes. The creature looked like someone wearing an overstuffed mascot costume but it moved with robotic stiffness. Thao and Layla regarded the giant teddy for several seconds. It straightened one arm and with a hiss, three long, razor sharp talons emerged from the end of its arm. Still smiling, it stumbled toward them.
“Of course, this was too easy.” Layla said.
Without hesitation, Layla opened fire. The withering blast shredded through the bear’s face, tearing it completely off. Thick, white stuffing filled the air. Staggering forward, the bear swung but Layla blocked its claws with her mechanical arm. The claws clattered off the pale grey plates of ceramic armour. Stiffening its other arm, the bear unsheathed three more claws from its left paw.
“I love you!” The bear said.
The bear swiped at Layla with the other three talons. Layla was forced to leap backwards as the claws sliced through the air with surprising speed.
“L-Layla!” Thao said.
Thao raised his new pistol and flicked a switch off on the side of the weapon, arming it without thinking. The movement wasn’t that instinctual, he was no expert, but he at least apparently knew a little bit about handling a gun from his former, unremembered life. He fired twice into the side of the faceless teddy bear’s head. The bullets punched through the material harmlessly and out the other side.
“Aim lower! Aim for its endoskeleton!” Layla said.
Levelling the P90 at the bear’s chest, Layla fired on full auto and riddled it with holes. The faceless bear jerked back as round after round drilled into the mechanical body controlling it under all the stuffing. Thao joined in, unloading into the centre of the bear’s body.
Layla grabbed the bear around its shoulder, her mechanical fingers digging deep into its blue felt. Once she had a proper grip she wrenched down, tearing the bear’s right arm entirely off its body. It ripped free with an explosion of sparks, the fur pulling open with a zipping sound. Without eyes, the bear seemed to stare at its wiggling limb in Layla’s grip for several seconds.
“I’ve got an ouchie.” The bear said.
One-armed, the bear came around with its remaining talons. Layla danced backward but the tips of its claws nicked her right forearm, drawing blood.
“Damn it!” Layla said.
Layla pulled one of the weapon crate’s thermite grenades out of her vest webbing. Pulling the pin, she flicked away the spoon that ran down the side of the black cylinder and then hammered a red button exposed by the spoon. The one-armed bear lunged at Layla again. Layla shoved the grenade deep into its stuffing through the tears on its chest. Kicking it into the entryway of another movie theatre, Layla sprung backward and ran.
“Move!” Layla said.
Thao and Layla sprinted down the hallway to the usher’s stand before dropping to the carpet. Thao shielded his head, still holding his pistol in one hand. There was a fiery, superheated flash that blew out of the theatre entryway, scorching the walls and turning the nearest cardboard stands to dust. The concussive blast echoed down the corridor.
Thao and Layla climbed onto their feet. Flames covered the entryway and were spreading to the ceiling. After a few moments, a much skinnier figure staggered out of the inferno. It was skeletal with its right shoulder ending in a jagged stump, human-sized but with an elongated and misshapen skull. The last of its burning stuffing fell away, turning to smoke. Its eyes glowed red.
“I love you.” The robot croaked in the same cheery voice.
“Let’s just be friends.” Layla said.
Taking aim at the robot’s face, Layla unloaded a burst through the endoskeleton’s glowing eye sockets until bullets blasted through the back of its skull. The bear’s endoskeleton finally tumbled stiffly to the floor, deactivated. After it died, a high-pitched beeping from back down the burning corridor caught Thao’s attention.
“What is that?” Thao said.
“No, no no!” Layla said.
The noise built toward a crescendo. Layla started to run back down the hallway toward the source of the noise but she was too late. There was another bright flash from the weapon crate Layla had been checking out before the bear appeared. The contents heated up and started to melt together. Some of the remaining ammunition inside the crate cooked off and exploded. Bullets drilled into the ceiling directly above the crate. Layla shielded her face and stumbled back, waiting until the fireworks show was over.
“Shit! All the weapon caches, they have a self-destruct switch so contestants can take what they can carry and destroy the rest so none of the other teams can use it.” Layla said, “The blast must have set it off-, shit! I wasn’t done going through all that!”
“It could have been worse.” Thao said, “We could have ended up with three of those bear-things and no weapons.”
“Guess that’s true.” Layla said, “Told you I was good at that game.”
With Thao’s new pistol, the grenades and enough ammo to keep them in the game, the two of them were better off than they had been before entering the mall but not by much. They left the theatre and returned to the main body of the mall. Below, the ground floor was still covered in the black, burning substance. The flames were guttering but letting off a noxious smoke. There was nothing but a blackened wasteland with remains of the tarry substance left behind in the areas that had already burnt out.
“It looks too sticky and dangerous to get through, there must be another way out of here.” Thao said.
Chapter Eleven.
“Do you ever feel like no one really gets you? Do you avoid relationships because you prefer the feeling of being alone, but wish you weren’t also lonely? Do you have such high standards that the only person who could possibly meet them-, is you?”
Two identical men watch a beautiful sunset over the ocean, sitting on a dune above the beach. Their arms are wrapped around one another’s shoulders.
A woman and a man who could pass for twins, dressed identically, enjoy a candlelit dinner in a five-star restaurant.
Three women, differentiated only by hair colour, walk arm in arm through a park filled with autumn leaves.
“Thanks to new changes in legislation, the cloning of fully grown, living adults with full memory and sensory input is now possible. All it takes is a small sample of your hair or saliva, six-to-eight weeks for delivery, and a full brain upload, and you could be whisked away by your ideal partner. Minor cosmetic changes, gender reassignment, or personality tweaks are also possible during the cloning process.”
“SelfLove² - Go Fuck Yourself.”
Runner sprinted across the tops of some buildings on the far side of the arena. Thick cracks covered the rooftops and some sections had collapsed into yawning gaps. Sprinting to the edge of one office building, Runner set his foot and sprung forward, sailing into open space above an alley that seemed to be a dizzying distance below. He landed easily, taking the impact with his legs and rolling across the next roof.
Racing and leaping over the buildings, taking advantage of every curve of the architecture, made Runner feel freer than a bird. Since he’d been in prison he’d been denied that feeling of freedom for a long time. On the outside, in another life, he’d been part of a whole gang of free runners who’d tried to avoid the war for the city streets by taking control of the rooftops instead. He was also a drug dealer and a thief, who’d been locked up after dropping a rival off the side of a skyscraper and onto a family of four in a minivan below.
Dark and rangy, Runner had an athletic build and a shaved head that was glowing with a healthy sheen of sweat in the dim twilight. He wore baggy cargo pants and a webbed combat vest. The young man had been given a grappling gun as both a weapon and mode of transportation at the start of the game, an oversized pistol which looked like a sawn-off shotgun with a seashell-shaped attachment. He raised the grappling gun and fired without breaking his stride. I
t let out a low thump and a thin, nanofilament rope hissed out of the muzzle on the tail of a short harpoon. There were small wings folded down the sides of the harpoon which would spring outward to anchor the grappling hook when it hit, if need be. The harpoon struck the corner of the nearest skyscraper and the rope pulled taunt. Runner leapt out into open space, a strap attached to the gun wrapped around his wrist, and swung around in a wide circle. It carried him between buildings that were much further apart than he could jump. Runner hit a button on the hilt before he landed and the grappling harpoon released, the rope winding back into the weapon. He landed lightly again, rolling across the rooftop and springing back to his feet.
A bleeping on Runner’s wrist stopped his forward momentum and he staggered to a stop. The proximity alert on his kill switch was going. Seconds counted down from one minute, warning Runner that he had gotten too far away from his partner again. Rolling his eyes, Runner doubled back across the rooftop that he’d landed on.
The map didn’t tell him where his partner was so Runner just returned the way he’d come. He stepped off the edge of the rooftop and let himself drop onto a large sign, jutting alongside the arch of a subway station. Vaulting off it, Runner made his way down like a gymnast until he was racing along a narrow wall separating the street from the ramp of a parking garage.
Breathing hard, Runner’s partner, T-Bone West, came hurtling down the street as fast as his stout legs could take him. He was racing the proximity alarm as well, making sure he was within range of Runner before the counter reached zero. Letting the clock run out would trigger both of their kill switches.
T-Bone was a complete physical opposite to Runner’s lean and rangy build. He was enormously obese and his whole body rippled with every step. Sweat poured off his fat face and across his multiple chins. He was wearing a tracksuit and gold chains over body armour, barely covering his swollen stomach, and carrying a Pancor Jackhammer combat shotgun. Spotting Runner watching him from the wall above, his face twisted in anger. He slowed down as the screen on his wrist stopped counting.
“Goddamn, dawg, I told you not to fucking do that! I fucking told you not to fucking do that again!” T-Bone said, What you think you’re doing sitting up on that wall like you think you’re fucking Batman or something? Bullshit, just because you’ve got that weird-ass rope-gun, fuck.”
“Keep up.” Runner said.
“Man, keep up, fuck you, nigga, if it wasn’t for these kill switches I’d put my foot up your ass, motherfucker.” T-Bone said.
T-Bone struggled to breathe as he let the Jackhammer hang off its strap and put his hands on his knees, bending at the waist. That was the irony and the joke played on Runner by the Slayerz producers. They’d given Runner back his freedom to race across the rooftops again, even giving him the perfect tool to do so. But they’d also anchored him to the ground by giving him a partner who could never keep up at the pace he really wanted to move. By the same token, T-Bone was frustrated with Runner’s tendency to run ahead and flirt with death every time he moved out of the proximity for their two bracelets. If they hadn’t been joined together, and Runner had been on the ground instead of a couple of metres out of T-Bone’s reach, they might have started fighting.
“Behold, for He is coming!” A deep and powerful voice rumbled out of the shadows.
“What the fuck?” Runner said.
Automatic gunfire raked the wall between Runner and T-Bone. Runner almost fell backward, only his excellent sense of balance saving him from a nasty fall as concrete dust filled the air. T-Bone waddled away, still breathing hard, and struggled to raise his shotgun.
“The Lord is coming from His place of dwelling!” The voice continued, “Come to punish the inhabitants of earth for their inequities! The earth will reveal the blood that has been shed upon her, and reveal the bodies of the slain to those who would bear witness!”
“Shit, it’s the crazies! Priest and Santa Muerte!” Runner said.
Runner went to take off. He couldn’t just abandon T-Bone, however. He would be too exposed and if T-Bone was killed their mutual kill switches meant it would be the end of Runner as well. Across the street, Priest emerged from the shadows of an abandoned store.
“Rejoice before the Lord because He is coming, coming to judge the world in righteousness and in faithfulness.” Priest said, “The Lord preserves all who love Him, but all the wicked He will destroy.”
With an M4 rifle pressed to his shoulder, Priest fired another couple of short bursts that tore through the air between Runner and T-Bone. More holes were drilled into the wall behind T-Bone, driving the two men apart. T-Bone wrestled the Pancor Jackhammer to his shoulder and fired, a couple of blasts thundering out of the weapon and shattering a storefront near Priest. Priest circled away from the blasts but kept firing. He seemed more interested in shepherding the other team and keeping them off-balance than actually hitting them.
Priest was dressed all in loose-fitting black except for his saintly white collar, a rectangle of it showing at his throat. He was a short but heavily muscled man, his head shaved and his face covered in a pair of ritualistic scars. A Catholic cross was cut into his left cheek while a three-pronged pitchfork was branded across the right side of his face, starting on his forehead so the handle cut through his eyebrow and continued down beside the right side of his nose.
“Move your fat ass!” Runner yelled to his partner.
Without any other weapon, Runner fired his grappling gun. Its small harpoon hissed across the street toward Priest. The squat, powerfully built man turned out of its path just enough to avoid being hit, moving lightly like a boxer. The grappling gun hit the building behind Priest and the rope snapped up like a tightrope.
Before Runner could hit the button to release the hook Priest lashed out and grabbed the rope, wrapping his arm around it and giving it a hard yank. Runner was pulled off the wall and tumbled to the sidewalk. He managed to right himself in mid-air and not land on his face, keeping a hold of his weapon. Hitting the button, Runner made the rope retract. The harpoon whipped loose around Priest, moving across the street and back into Runner’s gun.
Laughing, Santa Muerte circled into the street and started firing. Her white dress swirling around her, the cult leader unloaded with twin .45 handguns thundering. Bullets screamed off the sidewalk and the wall behind Runner and T-Bone, sending both of them scattering backward. T-Bone’s Jackhammer roared but he was panicked and firing wildly. Muerte babbled in such rapid Spanish Runner, who spoke a little Español himself, was sure even most fluent speakers would struggle to follow her.
“Fucking crazies! What the fuck, man!” T-Bone yelled.
“Come on!” Runner said.
Runner grabbed his partner by the shoulder and yanked him backward. He couldn’t actually move the big man under his own power but it convinced T-Bone to get to his feet and stumble down the sidewalk. They headed for the entrance to the nearby abandoned subway station.
Under a hail of gunfire, the two men staggered inside the subway station while the glass doors and windows imploded. T-Bone was slow and lumbering, and a couple of bullets slammed him in the back of his body armour. The fat man sprawled across the floor then struggled to pick himself up with Runner helping. Now, the two men realised if they didn’t work together they would die.
The subway station was dark and in ruins. The building consisted of a large entry hall with cracked skylights in the ceiling, a couple of small, looted stores, and short tunnels that led off in all four directions. In the centre of the room was a massive gap surrounded on all sides by glass railings and with escalators leading down to the subway platforms. The lower level was flooded. It was like the bottom of the building had fallen out and filled up with filthy, grey water through which only parts of the platforms could be seen. There was no escape down there unless Runner and T-Bone were able to hold their breath for an impossible amount of time to make it through the flooded train tunnels. T-Bone backed up with his Pancor Jackhammer raised.
He was still breathing too hard to aim straight. Sweat poured down his face.
“This is bullshit, motherfucker! Got these two total fucking psychos on our ass, you don’t even have a real fucking gun! We was set up, dawg, we was fucking set up!” T-Bone yelled.
“Keep moving down that way, I’ll try to-, like, draw them off.” Runner said.
Runner shoved his partner toward one of the other exits and fired his grappling gun into the ceiling above the sunken section of the subway, leaping onto one of the railings. Looking down at the flooded platforms, he saw movement in the water. One of the great white sharks from the central lake had somehow gotten inside or been placed there. Its fin cut through the water, looping around the escalators and swimming off toward the far end of the tracks to lie in wait. The rope grew taut and in spite of the circling shark Runner swung out over the expanse. Tucking his feet up, he landed on the railing on the other side of the station and retracted his grappling gun’s rope. He balanced for a moment and then dropped to the floor, moving toward cover.
“Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man his blood be shed.” Priest’s voice rang across the cavernous space, “For in God’s image he made mankind. Those who plough iniquity and sow trouble, reap the same! By the blast of God they perish and by the breath of His anger they are consumed.”
Sticking to the shadows, Runner readied his shot. Once Priest appeared in the main walkway then Runner would hit him and drag him toward the flooded section. If he was lucky, Priest would drop right into the jaws of the great white shark below. A figure in a white dress moved, ghostlike, through the hall behind Runner. Santa Muerte was almost totally silent but a giggle gave her away.
Runner spun around, raising his weapon, but the woman fired first with her .45 Colts. The bullets were stopped by Runner’s body armour but the blows hurled him backward. Crashing into the glass barricade behind him, Runner shattered it and tumbled into the flooded section below. Santa Muerte raised one of her smoking guns to her forehead, its barrel and hilt beautifully decorated.
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