Serial Escalation

by Sean E. Britten

  “For the lonely shopper on a budget, check out our range of lightly used porno droids. Unlike less reputable dealers, all orifices on our used models have been thoroughly sterilised and inspected for sharp edges or loose wiring. Ass man or boob man? Rifle through our barrel of salvageable parts for the bits that really matter to you!”

  “Plug and Play, just plug it in! Ask about our try before you buy in-store policy!”

  Yoyo Yokatomi skipped down the middle of the ruined city street, singing to herself in Japanese. The wickedly modified bat she’d been given at the start of the game, a metal club covered in spikes and thorny buzzsaw blades, was propped against her shoulder. Much more cautiously, her partner Mark Rizzio followed. A shotgun was pressed to his shoulder and he was dressed in a dark suit and tie. Compared to most of the other contestants they were outgunned. Having seen the weapon minigame on the map, which Layla and Thao had turned down, they were headed for the icon instead. They’d already passed the bodies of Donna Pardee and Raptor Rawlins, and the broken bus Thao had accidentally brought down.

  “Would you cut that shit out?” Rizzio said, “Keep your fucking eyes open.”

  “Aye-aye, eyes, aye.” Yoyo said.

  Yoyo saluted with her razor-tipped bat and giggled. Long, black pigtails jiggled behind her head. Dressed in a bright yellow schoolgirl uniform, Yoyo stood out amongst the drab city ruins like a spotlight. Rizzio was a thickly muscular man with a flat, scarred face and a head covered in stubble.

  “You’re one sick puppy, you know that?” Rizzio said.

  Yoyo shrugged and went back to singing, “Kokorozashi o hata shite, itsu no hi ni ka kaeran! Yama wa aoki furusato, mizu wa kiyoki furusato.” She chimed.

  “Crazy whore.” Rizzio shook his head.

  The entrance to the minigame was through an old clothing store. Yoyo and Rizzio made their way around upturned racks of clothing and broken mannequins. The rear wall of the store, past the dressing rooms, had opened up to reveal a long, metal hallway that clearly wasn’t part of the building’s original design. The corridor was featureless and coldly lit.

  “Hold up.” Rizzio said, “We don’t know anything about this game, they’re always rigged. We should try to figure out what we’re dealing with.”

  Humming the same tune as before, Yoyo walked across the store. She wrenched the head off of one of the mannequins and carried it back with her to the dressing rooms. Lofting the head gently in the air, Yoyo grabbed her bat in both hands and sent the head sailing down the metal hallway. The mannequin head bounced off the floor and the surrounding walls hummed. A piercing blue light shot from the walls at the end of the hallway and closed in on the round object. The industrial laser carved the head in two and then disappeared. Smoking, the two halves of the mannequin head clattered to the floor.

  “Bitch, I got this.” Yoyo said.

  Stepping back, Yoyo handed her bat to Rizzio. She cracked her neck from side to side as she seemed to regard the metal corridor with a critical eye. Without hesitation, she started down the hallway before Rizzio could figure out what she was doing. He let out a short yell but couldn’t grab her with her bat occupying one hand and his shotgun in the other.

  As soon as Yoyo started down the hallway the walls started to hum. Cutting side to side, another blue laser started from the end of the corridor and whipped toward her. There was no track for the laser to follow, it just emanated from one wall and was absorbed by the other, but it stayed low. Yoyo danced from foot to foot and then cartwheeled over the laser as it got close enough. The laser dissipated but was replaced by two more glowing lines that started from the far end again and rocketed forward. Yoyo dived through the middle of the pair before they closed together like a pair of scissors, tumbling and rolling to her feet.

  “Watch out! Watch what you’re fucking doing!” Rizzio said.

  More lasers fired up and darted toward Yoyo from the end of the hallway. She let herself drop backward, catching herself just before hitting the ground. The lasers sizzled over Yoyo, only inches from the tip of her nose. Yoyo rolled upright again, still moving forward with every step. Three lasers fired toward her that were too low to go under, leaving only a narrow gap at the ceiling. Yoyo picked up speed and ran up the side of the wall, stretching across the ceiling so that she was only just touching the other side of the corridor. She seemed to hang in the air for a couple of seconds, just long enough for the lasers to pass underneath her, and then dropped, catlike, to the ground.

  Reaching the other end of the hall, Yoyo darted through the opening before any other lasers could fire up to cut her down. On the wall to her left was a large, red button. Yoyo hammered it and from inside the walls there was the subtle sound of machinery powering down. Elated, Yoyo bounced up and down while waving her arms like a cheerleader. Her short skirt furled around her thighs.

  “Woo! We’ve got spirit, yes we do! We’ve got spirit, how ‘bout you?” Yoyo yelled.

  “Fucking hell.” Rizzio said.

  Rizo started down the hallway, ready to leap backward to safety if the lasers started again but nothing happened. He reached the end and passed the bat back to Yoyo.

  “Now what?” Rizzio said.

  In the control room, Roland was perched over one of the workstations. He watched as Yoyo Yokatomi gymnastically defeated their boobytrapped laser hallway, grinning to himself. The blonde host had been watching as well and sidled up next to the head producer.

  “You were hoping Southpaw and Seong would be drawn to this one, weren’t you, sir?” The host said, “Doesn’t seem like it’ll be much of a challenge for these two.”

  “No, I guess not, but maybe they’ll surprise us?” Roland said.

  Yoyo and Rizzio moved around the corner into a large, white room with a high ceiling and bare walls. The only feature of the room was a man tied to a chair in the exact centre. Sweat poured down the man’s face. He was white and middle-aged, his blue eyes filled with desperation. His shoulders were bunched up with his arms strapped down to the back of the chair. His ankles were tied to the front legs of the chair as well, leaving him completely helpless.

  “Hey! Hey, please let me out of here! I can-, I can help you!” The man said, “I’m a technician on the show! I don’t know what happened, I got knocked out and woke up here!”

  “This man is indeed a technician on Slayerz, who was found selling secrets to a rival network.” A robotic voice, neither male nor female, echoed out of the walls, “We thought it was only appropriate that he get a firsthand look at what goes into the game. You came here for weapons, to earn them you have to go through him. Kill him, and a weapon that may help you win the game will be provided to you. However, you are free to turn around and walk away. He will be allowed to live and handed over to the proper authorities. Live or die, his life is in your hands.”

  “They can’t do that.” Rizzio said, “They’re only allowed to play games with us because we’re lifers or on death row anyway.”

  “Please! Please don’t hurt me! I have a wife and children!” The technician said, “You don’t have to do this!”

  “Boring.” Yoyo said.

  Hefting her bat, Yoyo swung at the screaming man. Sweat whiplashed off the man’s face in a cloud. The spikes on Yoyo’s bat tore holes in the man’s face but didn’t kill him outright. He let out a gagging noise, thrashing against his chair. Rizzio looked horrified and quickly backed away from his partner.

  Yoyo hit the tech again and again with several dull, wet cracks. Spikes and razor-edged buzzsaw blades drew sprays of bright scarlet that went arcing through the air. An eyeball popped out of its socket and hit the ground with a loud clacking sound. It rolled around Yoyo like a glass marble. Sparks spluttered out of the man’s head as Yoyo bashed in more of his skull, exposing bent sections of metal. Half the man’s face sloughed off, revealing a battered metal skull under the thin layer of fake flesh.

  “P-please! J-just a technician-, my wife is-, a t-t-technician, d-don’t h-hurt-, my c-children
.” The decoy robot said.

  The robot’s chin slumped to its chest. Yoyo pouted and prodded at the side of the decoy’s face that was still covered in false flesh. Rizzio was keeping his distance and his shotgun twitched so that it was between him and his partner.

  “Aw, no fun.” Yoyo said, “Is it out of batteries?”

  “What? Did you-, did you know he was a robot?” Rizzio said.

  “I thought you were the robot? And he was real?” Yoyo said.

  “Good job.” The genderless voice said, “You get what’s behind door number three.”

  In one corner of the room, a large door slid back into the wall. Yoyo gasped as a hulking figure stomped forward. It was an old military mech that walked on two enormous, birdlike legs. It had a bulbous body with a scratched olive paint job and an oval-shaped head placed off to one side. Most of its weapons had been removed but on the opposite side of the mech’s body from its head was a mounted minigun with six gaping barrels. Military insignia were still painted down the side of the mech making it look like a surplus piece of equipment.

  “Puppy!” Yoyo said.

  Yoyo ran and hugged the huge, eight-foot mech, her arms barely wrapping across its front. The mech turned its round head, multiple camera lenses whirring. Yoyo turned back on Rizzio.

  “Can we keep it? Can we, can we, can we?” Yoyo said.

  xXx

  In a former life, Titama was a leg-breaker for the Kiwi Mafia in Neo Francisco. Since New Zealand went underwater the New United States’ West Coast had been flooded with refugees. Most were good people, living in their own communities where they could hold to their own traditions and ways of life. Where there were poor and desperate people, however, there were always vices and crime.

  Traditional tribal tattoos covered the left side of Titama’s face, and were etched down her left arm and the rest of her left side. She was heavily muscled and dark-skinned. Thick, black hair was tied off behind her head. Before Slayerz, an illegal cloning operation had led to Titama killing seven people in one night, breaking ties with her crew, and being captured and sentenced to life in prison.

  Across the other side of the arena, Titama and her partner, Anaconda, emerged into the weak, grey sunlight. The two of them had been forced to swim further away from the central lake, up one flooded street, and then had taken shelter in a ruined school as they got dry. There were other teams nearby, Santa Muerte and Priest, T-Bone West and Runner, so the two of them were careful about revealing themselves. Anaconda, however, spotted a flapping white sail in the road ahead and started toward it.

  “That looks like a parachute!” Anaconda said, “I think it’s one of those food drops.”

  Like Thao, Anaconda couldn’t remember anything of his life before waking up in the room where Slayerz had been keeping him before the game. He was less concerned with figuring out who he was though than with staying alive.

  Carrying a heavy machine gun with an underslung box of ammunition, Anaconda hurried toward the parachute. Before the game, he had supposedly been a member of an anti-immigrant militia with a serpent theme. As long as his previous crimes were unremembered, however, he and Titama were getting along fine. Only slightly shorter than Titama, Anaconda was broader and just as heavily muscled. A green snake tattoo, its head starting on his right hand and the rest of its body winding up his arm and over his shoulders then down his left arm, moved with him as if it were alive as well.

  A hefty canvas bag was lying in the middle of the street and a small parachute attached to it caught the breeze, billowing and flapping. Titama checked the map on her forearm. Although it weighed a solid ten kilos or more, she swapped the sledgehammer she’d been given at the start of the game from hand to hand like it weighed almost nothing.

  “Wait, this bag, if it’s a drop it’s not showing up on the map.” Titama said.

  “So maybe we got to it first?” Anaconda said.

  “Or maybe it’s a bloody trap!” Titama said.

  She was too late as Anaconda pulled the bag away from the parachute and started to unzip it. A mechanical buzzing came from inside the bag.

  “What the hell?” Anaconda said.

  Small, spherical robots started to pour from the bag like beetles. They moved on the points of six triangular legs spaced evenly around their bodies. Letting out a yell of surprise, Anaconda grabbed his gun and moved backward before any of the little robots could reach him. One of the beetles closest to Anaconda let out a loud beep. Suddenly, it exploded, erupting in a burst of tiny shrapnel. It looked almost harmless, like a firecracker, but if the bot had been clinging to one of Anaconda’s arms or legs when it exploded it could have taken off a decent-sized chunk of flesh. The others swarmed out of the bag and moved across the ground toward Anaconda and Titama.

  “Damn it!” Titama said.

  Titama swung her sledgehammer down. The bots were a good deal faster than they looked across the cracked asphalt. Titama managed to crush several bots under the hammer then swept it through the swarm, damaging several more. The beetles beeped and exploded like miniature grenades.

  Staggering back, Titama and Anaconda moved away from the blasts. The beetles scuttled as if to surround them, evenly spaced legs chittering tirelessly. Anaconda stomped on several then jumped back before they could blow. Jamming his machine gun against his shoulder, he started to fire downward at the miniature robots. Several were blown backward but the horde that had poured out of the fake supply bag filled the gaps left by them quickly.

  “Run!” Titama said.

  Titama leapt over a line of the beatles. Anaconda followed her and the two of them took off running down the street, the beeping little robots following like a horde of mice.

  Chapter Eight.

  A golden retriever races through a house lit by sunshine chasing two giggling children. It rounds a kitchen table with claws skittering on the hardwood floor. A pink tongue lolls out of its grinning mouth.

  “We love our pets, and only want what’s best for them. If we could, we would probably take them everywhere with us! But what about when we go on holidays or away on business? Can you really just leave them in a filthy kennel, in the care of strangers? Surrounded by unfamiliar animals and disease?”

  Crammed into a suitcase-sized space, tinged in blue, the golden retriever tries to wriggle free. It barks in confusion. The two children and their parents stand around the container with one of the adults holding a remote control. With the press of a button, there is a bright, icy flash and the dog is frozen stiff.

  “Pawpsicles is cryogenic freezing for pets. Dogs, cats, iguanas, parrots, or any other furred, scaly or feathered friend! Freeze them solid and they’ll be exactly the way you left them when you get home and thaw them out! With an over eighty percent rate of survival just like the cryogenic tubes the off-world colonists use!”

  “Pawpsicles is not for use with children or for the storage of severed heads. Please check the website for our Kiddy Cooler and BrainFreeze ranges instead.”

  Layla cleaned herself up in the women’s bathroom off to one side of the library. Turning one of the taps, the pipes juddered but spat out some water. She used it to wash the blood off her face and neck around the stapled gashes but blood still stained the collar of her sleeveless military fatigues. There were paper towels left behind in one of the dispensers and she patted her face dry then made sure the cuts were no longer bleeding. Thao was standing guard outside the bathroom as Layla walked out. They returned to the main area of the library.

  Several small fires were still burning unchecked after the earlier explosion but the air was too damp for them to set the whole place alight. They built a makeshift fire pit in a tiled area off to one side of the room and filled it with damaged books and bits of the wooden furniture. Soon they had a fire going. It warmed away the last of their chills and helped dry their still-damp clothing.

  “Burning books, that doesn’t seem right.” Thao said.

  “They’re too damaged to read and they make
for good kindling.” Layla said, “This was all left to rot after the quake.”

  Layla took off her body armour and placed it to one side of the fire. Under the webbed body armour and fatigues Layla was wearing an olive tank top, wet and clinging to her surprisingly heavy chest. Without the vest, Thao could see more of her scarred shoulder where it met the grey military prosthesis. Most of the surrounding flesh didn’t even look like flesh anymore. It was seared and rubbery, covered in thick webs of scar tissue that had started to grow over the base of the mechanical limb. Thao’s eyes traced down her side as if trying to see through the skin.

  “See something you like, perv?” Layla said.

  “I’m-, I wasn’t-, I wasn’t looking at your-,” Thao said, “Sorry, I was looking at your-, arm and where it joins your shoulder. Before, when you flipped that table, that was-, amazing, but you couldn’t just do that with your arm alone. That’s just simple physics, you’d need an anchor of some kind and you-,”

  Layla was scowling but her face softened, “Military prostheses aren’t like civilian ones, you can’t just take one out and plug a new one into the socket.” She said, “Spine and both shoulders need to be reinforced to take the extra load so the whole arm doesn’t just rip free of the bone the first time I try to wipe my ass. We’re talking another thirty kilos of scrap metal in my back as well as hardened subcutaneous fibres. I’m a full three inches taller than I was before the attack, if you can believe that, and I have to maintain a certain level of muscle mass for balance. Then, in addition to my spine, down my left side and left leg there’s a kind of frame that locks up from my heel to my shoulder if I need to move something really heavy. Since the arm can’t be removed when they had me locked up they just had a locking mechanism around it to keep it shut off, keep the battery powered down.”