by Logan Jacobs
I’d thought we were headed in the general direction of my apartment but I couldn't see any of the usual landmarks. My sense of direction was pretty good from the years of truck driving in areas where GPS would shit the bed. Rural New England was pretty rough on things like Google Maps and Waze with all the granite and trees. Nova had provided enough of a distraction while we were walking that I must have missed a turn or two to get us back to our neighborhood.
My inner Magellan said we needed to double back a few blocks and head east, or whatever passed for east on this hodge-podge planet.
“Don’t worry, sweet cheeks, I’ll get us back,” I said, took her hand, and began to walk back the way we had come. I realized quickly that I didn’t need to worry about us bothering anyone with our PDA because there was scarcely anyone on the narrow streets.
“If you call me that again, I will crush you with these sweet cheeks,” Nova said playfully… sort of.
“Well now I just want to call you that again,” I noted mischievously.
“I know,” Nova shot back just as mischievously. “Why don’t you wait until we get to the apartment?”
“Deal,” I said as we came to the street I wanted us to double back on. Only, it was now blocked off by a large garbage truck that didn’t even leave enough room for us to squeeze by.
“Huh,” I uttered as a slow, sinking feeling began in my gut. “Okay, well we can cut over to the next street which should take us directly back to the Breach. Not really the right direction but at least we’ll be able to get a cab from there.”
“You lead, I follow,” Nova replied and squeezed my hand. “But please lead us out of whatever part of town this is because it smells.”
Once she mentioned it, I noticed she was right. It had that wet garbage three-day-old pee smell that the danker parts of big cities always seemed to have. I’d spent time in New York, Boston, and Philly and that was the one thing they all shared. Apparently it was universal.
“As you wish,” I chimed. I could see why Westly used it so much in Princess Bride. Three little words could convey a lot of different things.
Inadvertently, the pace of both of our strides had picked up, and we made fast time over to the next block. That low feeling in my gut intensified as I saw that that street too was now blocked by several construction vehicles that definitely hadn’t been there fifteen minutes ago. That’s when I noticed another smell, that of a rat.
Nova and I let go of each other’s hands at the same time. I glanced down at her and saw the recognition in her eyes as well. We both began to roll our muscles and flex our hands subtly, instinctively preparing for action.
We cut down a short alley that I was pretty sure would lead us to a five point intersection of streets that would give us a few options for how to get out of this clearly dangerous part of the city.
As we emerged from the alley, whatever thought I had of us walking back to the Breach and having a nice laugh about getting lost like a bunch of noobs vanished. The sight that greeted us as we walked out into the middle of the five way intersection was like a scene out of a Warriors reboot set in space.
Each of the five streets had about ten alien goons a piece. They stood at the entrance to each avenue of escape and they all looked like they came from different gangs. One group of ten had what looked like black and white painted faces only it wasn’t paint and each of them carried long wooden clubs that I swear looked just like baseball bats. Hell, they even all wore caps that reminded me of my well broken in fitted 1908 Yankees hat back on Earth.
The next group was a touch more intimidating. It was lead by the Cougar goon from Zaa. The one who didn’t fall to his death after he tried to attack Artemis and I when I threw a shoe at him. He had a motley clowder of flea-bitten and mangy fur balls behind him. They smiled dangerous fang filled grins and made a big production out of flicking their claws in and out like switchblades. The claws glinted in the pale artificial light cast from the streetlamps and made skint-skint noises as they went in and out that set my teeth on edge.
The third group was a pack of dirty rats. Literally. They were all about four feet tall, dressed like chimney sweeps from Mary Poppins, and the end of their tails that they whipped back and forth with audible cracks were covered in mean looking spikes. They made up quite a mischief that I could tell was bent on murder.
I didn’t even know what the hell the creatures were that filled the mouth of street four. Five feet tall humans who wore cockroach costumes? At least that was what I told myself they were because the alternative, that they were five feet tall cockroaches that walked on two legs with membrane-like wings that fluttered behind them that made a sound like snapped twigs and had three foot lengths of thick chains that dangled from their top sets of appendages of which they had six, was entirely too terrifying.
The fifth and final street held, and I shit you not, a flock of people sized pigeons who wore tracksuits and gold chains. They were dusty, dirty, and I could see mites crawl through their mottled feathers. They didn’t have wings per se, but rather long arms with filthy feathers that draped off them like a Sixties fringe jacket that ended in human like hands. Those hands held a type of nunchaku weapon made from wire and pipes.
Nova and I did a slow circle to take them all in and to look for any way out of this obvious trap. I didn’t see any. Which meant the only way out was through. And after these vermin had fucked with my night, I was fine with that.
“Hey, Red?” I tossed over to Nova as we pushed our backs against one another and made the slow circle to look at all the various bad guys. “You ready for another leap of faith?”
“With you by my side, Havak,” she shot back. Her voice full of violent glee. “It’s a no brainer.”
“Okay, good, ‘cause I’m about to pick a fight,” I replied. My own voice edged with brutal determination.
“Get to it then because I’m getting tired of just looking at them,” she said, and I heard her knuckles pop as her hands formed tight fists at her side.
“Well, I see you all got the memo, thanks for meeting on such short notice!” I yelled out to them as my own fists clenched, and I shifted slowly to a fighting stance.
“You and your little bitch are dead,” Cougar-man yelled back.
“Hopefully not screaming like a little bitch like your brother.” I answered. It had the desired outcome as Cougar yowled in rage and ran toward us. That created a wave like effect as the rest of gangs all rushed us.
“Let’s dance,” I muttered as my fists reared back, and our back-alley battle royale brawl began.
Chapter Eleven
My fist connected solidly with Cougar’s chin as he ran full force into it. He’d been so rage-blinded by my comment about his dead brother that he hadn’t even bothered to protect himself, and thanks to the good ole law of conservation of energy, the combined total of his forward momentum and my furious punch, which I’d had plenty of time to wind up on and throw with my hips, had the effect of knocking the son of a bitch clear off his feet and back a yard to land flat on his back with a thud.
Cougar’s skull cracked loudly on the pavement, and the rest of the rushing vermin halted their advance all at once and just stared at us.
I flicked my nose twice in quick succession like Bruce Lee and spit on the ground.
“Let’s fuck these assholes up, Red,” I sneered, and we launched into action.
I felt my synapses light up as my nanochip sent light speed fast signals to my muscles which had had several weeks now to get used to the Krav Maga upgrade I had downloaded.
I ducked inside the swipe of a bat that was meant for my head and used my right hand to catch the arm of the Baseball Fury, what I’d dubbed the black and white skinned humanoids in my head, and swing it downward as I brought my right knee up and into his chest as hard as I could. I heard his breastbone crack just before I brought my left elbow down with all my weight on the back of his neck.
His body went limp, and I assumed it hit the ground, but
I was already on to the next closest bad guy. I twisted my hip and drove up with my right fist and caught a rat bastard who’d jumped at me with a massive upper cut that sent the rodent over my left shoulder into a few pidgeon goombas.
I looked up as my combat situational awareness senses roared to life. Nova was about two feet to my right in a classic boxer’s stance. She threw big haymaker punches that broke through whatever measly defense her attackers could mount to send them sprawling to the ground. She took a fair number of blows herself but her dense molecules were evolutionarily bred for hand to hand combat, and several of her attackers broke their hands when they actually connected with her. Their cries of pain and surprise were like music to my ears.
While we were both clearly more skilled than these douche nozzles, the sheer number of them was about to overrun us. Unlike in kung fu movies, the bad guys didn’t all wait their turn for you to kick their ever loving asses in a fight. They tended to all gang up to make it impossible to get any room to fight and then crush you amid a barrage of fists and feet, and in this case tails, beaks, cockroach wings, and claws.
We had about half a second before that happened by my estimation.
“Nova!” I yelled as I hip tossed a stray cat into a roach dude. “We need some breathing room.”
“Aye!” She brought her arms in front of her face, and I felt the air vibrate the moment before she released a blast. Just before the shockwave leveled a twenty foot circumference around us I grabbed a roach guy and used it as a shield. It’s armor like body, which was skin crawlingly gross, did what I hoped and kept my insides from being turned to jelly as Nova released her blast.
What I hadn’t counted on was roach dude extending his wings. The shockwave hit us and sent us into the air. I heard the sick crunch as roach dude’s exoskeleton cracked, and his gooey insides began to leak over my hands. His arms and legs all twitched just as we crashed into a balcony on one of the nearby buildings.
I threw roach dude’s dead carcass off me which trailed thick ropes of brown green guts, as I got to my feet.
“Yuck!” I yelled in disgust and looked down at Nova.
The blast was a small one by her standards so she was still on her feet and had some energy reserves left, but we were also still fresh off a match with no real rest to speak of. The concussive force had leveled maybe about twenty or so of the bad guys, which was awesome, but what wasn’t awesome was that there were still about thirty or so left.
And they were pissed.
From my vantage point, I could see that even if we had managed to get through one of the group of jackasses all five streets were blocked with some form of trash, abandoned cars, dumpsters, etcetera so that we were boxed in no matter what.
“Oh boy,” I muttered and then had an idea. I glanced up and realized all the buildings in this part of town were densely packed and roughly three to four stories tall like Hell’s Kitchen on the lower west side of Manhattan. “Shit, if it's good enough for Spidey it’s good enough for me. Nova! Get up here.”
Nova looked up, and without hesitation took three bounding strides toward my building, pushed off the hood of a broken down hover car and jumped at the same time as she loosed a very tiny blast near her feet. Artemis had come up with the idea that maybe Nova could use a small controlled blast to help propel herself into the air. Nova had practiced the skill, and the blast tossed her into the air like she’d jumped on a trampoline. I barely moved out of the way as she smashed right through the concrete half wall that made up the balcony to land next to me.
“You called?” She casually brushed the dust off her shoulder and joined me as I looked back down on the gaggle of goons as they realized their prey was no longer caught in their foolproof trap. Cougar had apparently woken up from the KO shot I’d given him and pointed up at us.
“Get’em!” he roared, and the remaining bad guys hauled ass and stormed the first floor of the building.
“That didn’t take long,” I said as Nova and I burst into the tiny apartment that the balcony belonged to. An aging alien couple sat with TV dinners in front of them on cheap plastic trays as we tore through their living room.
“Sorry,” I tossed over my shoulder as we ran out the door, into the hallway, and then into the stairwell just in time to see the first five or so goons do the same only two floors below.
“Only way out is up?” I asked to no one as Nova and I took the stairs two at a time and shot out the roof access at the same time. A sea of roofs stretched out before us for as far as the eye could see full of clothes lines, satellite dishes and I swore I saw a bird coop full of doves a couple of roofs over. I took a quick glance around and tried to get my bearings. Little blue lines suddenly appeared in my vision that lead in a hundred directions but showed clear ways across the buildings. The parkour mod had obviously fired up.
“You seeing what I’m seeing?” I asked Nova.
“I think so,” she replied out of breath.
“How much gas you got in the tank?”
“Enough, Marc,” she said with determination. “Don’t worry about me.”
I heard the pound of paws and claws on the stairs behind us as they got closer and louder.
“Let’s do this,” I said and we took off.
I consciously stopped thinking and just let instinct take over. I’d learned that little trick while playing this game called Mirror’s Edge. It was a run of the mill dystopian future game with free running elements, and every time I thought too hard about what I was doing my character would fall to her doom. But if I just trusted my fingers to pound out the right combo of buttons, I did great.
Hopefully that concept worked the same in real life because if one of us fell now, there would be no respawn from the last save point.
We’d be dead.
Nova and I ran over the rooftop in the same general direction. She had to approach obstacles from a different perspective than I did due to her increased molecular mass but we both vaulted, sprang, jumped, slid, and generally flew over the city scape and put a bit of distance between us and our pursuers who had a harder time.
Well, except for the fucking mangy cats. They not only kept pace with us but had started to gain. I’d expected to see the goomba pigeons, but I guessed they couldn’t fly. I was on a slightly higher roof than Nova as we made our way toward what I hoped was the part of the city with the Hall of Champions, and I trusted my internal compass to not lead me astray. I saw a flea ridden cat goon as it bounded up a fire escape in front of Nova. Because of the angle she couldn’t see over the lip of the building as she approached the edge. She was going to have to leap across the seven foot gap between buildings but cat goon had positioned himself to cut her off and probably cause her to fall to a painful landing.
I was half a floor higher as I sprinted down a horizontal gutter pipe. I didn’t like the blue line I saw in my vision as the only way to stop the cat goon but it was the only way to help Nova.
Just as she hit the edge of her building I leaped from the gutter, tucked my legs up into my chest, and fell like a cannonball. Cat goon sprang from his hiding place at the same time, and I hit cat goon mid leap with my knees. Our velocity drove us across the seven foot gap but gravity drove us down a floor, and we smashed through a window into the next building.
All my force rammed cat goon into the floor, and he yelped in severe pain as I heard his spine break while I tucked, rolled, and came up still in motion in the hallway of a low rent industrial building. The hall ended in another window, and I pumped my legs toward it. Above me, I heard the heavy thuds of Nova’s footfalls and knew we were both headed in the same direction.
As the window got closer, I could see a squat single story warehouse building across another six-foot gap. I sucked in a big lungful of air and matched my feet with the rhythm of Nova’s. Just before I hit the window, I jumped up, kicked off the wall to give myself a little height, and burst through yet another window. I was pretty sure I’d be finding glass in all sorts of interesting
places if we got out of this mess in one piece.
Nova and I matched speed in midair as we both flew toward the warehouse roof. Adrenaline did its herky-jerky time thing, and we seemed to float for a moment, suspended in midair, and I looked over at her. She looked at me at the same moment, and we both smiled. Yes, we were in a massive street fight and parkouring our asses off over a dangerous alien city, but fuck if this wasn’t kind a fun.
Then the moment ended, time sped back up to normal, and we crashed hard into the roof of the warehouse. Unfortunately, instead of it withstanding our combined weight and momentum, it crumbled like soggy crackers, and we smashed through it at breakneck speed.
Wood and plaster fell around us, and a bunch of crates broke our fall. Well, they broke Nova’s fall. I kinda bounced off one and careened into a pile of trash.
“Fuck that hurt!” I shouted as I got up and noticed a piece of jagged metal stuck in my upper arm. “Nova!”
“Here!” she shouted, and I rushed over to the broken crates. Nova stood and shook packing peanuts out of her hair. She was covered in dust, bright pink styrofoam bits, and sweat, but she still looked drop dead gorgeous. I was pretty sure I looked like death warmed over and in need of a tetanus shot.
As I approached her, she saw the metal in my arm, and before I could complain, she reached out and yanked it free. Searing pain shot up my arm as she ripped a strip of cloth from her shirt, wrapped it around my upper arm, and then tied it. Very tight.
“Combat medic boost at work,” she said as she double knotted the bandage. “I know it’s tight, but we need to stop the bleeding.”
“I... know,” I said as the knowledge came into my brain from the nanochip. “Well, that was a surprise, huh?”
“Yes,” Nova answered, and I could see that she was about to peg empty on her gas tank. The warehouse wasn’t an ideal place to make a stand but it would have to do because I didn’t think she could run anymore.
