The Hunt for Reduk Topa

by Barry J. Hutchison

  “Mech? Come on, man, stop messing around!” Cal cried. Again, partly. This time, he made it all the way to the, “Come on, man,” part before Mech swung with a hammer-strike, forcing Cal to scramble out of his way.

  “Stay still, you little fonk,” Mech grunted, twisting his upper half and gearing up for another attack.

  Springing to his feet, Cal made a run for the mouth of the passageway, grabbed Floora, and dashed madly into the wider clearing at the heart of the maze.

  He wasn’t sure what he’d been hoping to find there. A weapon, maybe. A couple of chairs and a reasonable conversation, perhaps.

  Instead, he found bones. Lots more bones, scattered in piles, and forming the walls of a vaguely hexagonal space.

  No, not a space, Cal realized.

  An arena.

  There were four exits, including the one they’d just entered through. Cal started for one of the others at full-speed, zigging and zagging in case Mech opened fire.

  “You know this guy?” Floora asked, her voice an urgent hiss in Cal’s ear.

  “Yeah, we’re friends.”

  “You don’t look like friends.”

  “It’s a love-hate thing,” Cal explained, then he staggered to a stop as a metal doorway rose from the ground, blocking the exit ahead.

  “Shizz,” he spat, turning toward one of the other doors. He was halfway to it when another door shot up and slammed into place.

  There was a clang from the third exit as it, too, was blocked. Cal turned back to the way he’d come in, just in time to see Mech stepping into the arena. A fourth barrier locked in position at the cyborg’s back, trapping everyone in together.

  The clearing was maybe fifty feet from any one side to the one directly across from it. Wide enough to dodge for a while, but not enough to avoid fighting forever.

  Aside from Cal, Floora, and Mech, the only occupants of the arena were six Hovercams, a few dozen buzzerflies, and enough bones to rebuild all the dinosaurs at twice their original scale.

  “You’re going down, Topa!” Mech barked. “You’re gonna pay for your crimes.”

  Floora let out a little gasp of shock. “Wait. He called you Topa! You told me you weren’t Topa!”

  “I’m not Topa!” Cal assured her. “He must be under some kind of, I don’t know, mind control. The tour guide guy said that’s what they did to the Hunters.”

  Mech clanked toward them, slowly at first, but rapidly picking up speed. He powered ahead like a locomotive, his leg-pistons hissing as they propelled him along. Cal had never seen him move so fast, and barely had time to leap clear.

  The process of slowing and stopping didn’t take Mech nearly as long as Cal would have liked. For a semi-indestructible walking tank, he was more agile than he looked.

  “Look, Mech, I don’t know exactly what they’ve done to you, but you need to listen to me,” Cal told him, backing away with his hands raised. “I’m not who you think I am. I’m your friend. I’m Cal. Ring any bells?”

  Whirring, Mech grabbed a bone from a pile and tossed it at Cal. It clonked off the edge of his forehead, staggering him back a few paces.

  “Ow! Jesus! You almost put my eye out with that—”

  A metal fist came scything toward him. Cal dived clear, but it was messy and awkward. He hit the ground badly, sending Floora flapping into the air.

  Cal barely had a moment to pull himself together before a foot came down, forcing him to fumble into a roll again.

  Breathless, he somehow made it back to his feet, shrugging off his backpack as he put some distance between himself and Mech.

  “Open that up,” he ordered, tossing the bag so it landed near Floora. “He wants a fight? I’ll give him a fight.” He spat out a wad of mushed-up bone dust and pointed to the bag. “Find me that fonking spoon.”

  While Floora unfastened the bag and rummaged inside, Mech advanced. It was a slower, more controlled advance than last time, but no less frightening. Cal had never really noticed quite how big Mech was before. Sure, he’d known he was well-built—literally, in fact—but he hadn’t quite appreciated just how colossal the cyborg was.

  This might require both spoons.

  Mech launched himself forward, his rocket boosters launching him six feet into the air, and scattering a little rabble of buzzerflies that had been dancing around overhead.

  Cal ducked and rolled beneath him, avoiding being crushed, but opening himself up to a light toasting from Mech’s fiery rocket feet.

  Bouncing up, Cal grabbed the bone Mech had tossed and swished it experimentally. It was the length of a broadsword, and several times as thick. It ended in a grizzled knot of black sinew at the end, and whummed menacingly as Cal swung it around.

  “OK, you metal fonk. You really want to do this? Fine, let’s do—”

  Mech didn’t wait around to be told. He broke into a clanking run, arms raised, fingers splayed at Cal’s head height.

  At the very last moment, Cal ducked, turned, and hammered the bone against Mech’s back. The end that made contact shattered on impact, spraying thousands of jagged calcium-enriched fragments out in an arc, and sending vibrations of pain racing up Cal’s arms and through his own skeleton.

  He briefly regarded the now foot-long sliver of pointed bone he held, muttered a solitary, “Fonk,” and then a metal foot slammed into his stomach, lifted him off the ground, and deposited him unceremoniously some fifteen feet away.

  Meanwhile, Floora was half-buried in the bag. She wasn’t sure Cal had been serious about the spoon, but she was determined to find it, just in case. As she rummaged, she tossed out all the rest of the stuff. The rope. The straw. The yogurt. She disregarded it all as she searched for—

  Aha!

  “Got it!” she cried, thrusting the Swiss Army Spoon above her head. “Catch!”

  She threw it to Cal. He sat up in time for it to hit him on the forehead, knocking him over again.

  “Oops. Sorry!” Floora called.

  “Is the whole fonking world against me?” Cal grumbled, rolling onto his front and stretching to retrieve the—for want of a better word—weapon.

  He stood as Mech launched into another charge, and fiddled frantically with the tool.

  BOING! A set of tweezers popped out.

  No good.

  BDING! Some kind of bottle opener.

  Nope.

  SPROING! A can opener.

  Still not the spoon.

  Wait.

  Even better.

  Cal brandished the can opener like a sword, holding it at arm’s length in front of him, his weight resting on his front foot.

  “Come on, you fonking robot. Let’s see what you’ve got!”

  Mech’s features twisted in rage.

  “I ain’t…”

  His fists clenched.

  “…a fonking…”

  His foot found the yogurt pouch, exploding the contents onto the ground.

  Mech’s expression became one of panic as he lost his footing, skidded on for a few feet, then crashed down onto the arena floor. A sound like a high-speed car impact reverberated around the arena walls, shaking the bones and agitating the creatures living inside them.

  Even the buzzerflies seemed disturbed by the sound. They flapped around more vigorously, the air crackling around them. A few of them dive-bombed Cal, but he swatted them away with the back of his glove.

  Mech had landed on his front. Cal was quietly hoping that he’d somehow knocked himself unconscious, but no such luck. The cyborg rolled over onto his back immediately.

  That was the bad news.

  The good news was that part of him stayed behind when he moved. Wires hung loosely from his open arm socket, and from the shoulder of the detached arm that lay on the ground beside him.

  Cal raised his eyes to the heavens. “Way to go, Loren.”

  He approached Mech, passing the can opener from hand to hand. “Well, well, well. It looks like the big guy is down,” Cal said.

  With a foot, he tur
ned the dial on Mech’s chest to divert all his power to his processors, rendering him immobile.

  “I guess you aren’t so tough, after all.”

  To Cal’s surprise, Mech’s intact arm caught him by the ankle.

  “But… but the dial!” Cal protested, and then he went from a standing position to a moving one at quite a high speed.

  He was swung up above Mech, then slammed down onto the ground. The force of the impact sent the can opener tumbling out of his hand, knocked the wind out of him and, worse…

  “You made me bithe my thonking thongue!”

  Still lying flat, Mech swung again. Cal wailed as he was propelled backward in a neat parabolic curve. He grabbed at the air, trying to find purchase. Unsurprisingly, he failed, and was stopped by the ground, instead.

  That one hurt.

  Granted, the first one had hurt, too. In hindsight, though, that had just been a taster for what was about to come. A chance to warm-up before the main, bone-crunching event. The second impact doubled-down on his suffering, making his head swim, his insides throb, and his hands tingle with electricity.

  “Wait, what?” he slurred.

  His hands.

  A banshee-like screech cut through the ringing in his ears. Cal blinked away the checkerboard of colors to see Floora flying at Mech, gouging at his face with the can opener as he lay on the ground.

  “Leave him alone!”

  Mech released his grip on Cal’s ankle and swung a punch at the Floomfle. It clipped her on the legs, spinning her out of the air.

  His hands.

  Cal looked down at the palms of his gloves. Five buzzerflies, three in one hand, two in the other.

  Long shot, he thought, but as no other shots from closer distances seemed about to present themselves, he went for it.

  Clambering forward, he belly-flopped on top of the fallen Mech. “This is for my tongue!” he said, then he jammed both handfuls of buzzerflies into Mech’s exposed wiring.

  For a moment, nothing happened. Cal was juuuust beginning to feel like an idiot for believing the plan might actually work when Mech’s body flopped violently beneath him, bucking him off.

  Cal landed beside Floora, slid a few inches on his face, then struggled onto his knees. He checked the palms of his gloves.

  Empty.

  Sparks flew from Mech’s arm socket. He thrashed around, his metal torso crackling, his eyes rolling back in his head.

  “Jesus. OK, that’s enough,” he called to the buzzerflies. Smoke poured from the thin gap around Mech’s chest dial.

  “Stop. That’s enough,” Cal yelped, diving and shoving a hand up inside the arm socket.

  Mech’s other arm reached across and clamped down on Cal’s wrist. His eyes swam in their sockets, before finally finding their focus.

  “Cal?” he wheezed. Something inside him went pop. “The fonk are you dooooinggg…?”

  His voice became an electronic hum.

  His face went limp. His grip slackened. His arm dropped.

  And Mech fell silent.

  Cal held his breath.

  “Mech?” he whispered. “Hey. Mech.”

  He gave the cyborg a shove.

  “Hey, ya big lunk. Wake up.”

  “Do we really want him to wake up?” Floora asked.

  “This wasn’t supposed to happen,” Cal said. “I thought the shock would just buy us some time, not kill him.”

  “He did just try to kill us,” Floora pointed out.

  “He wasn’t himself,” Cal retorted. “Mech? Jesus. Come on, you damn robot. Rise and shine.”

  Cal shoved him again, more violently this time, but eliciting the same lack of response as before.

  Something appeared in the air right in front of Cal’s face. It was a large red cross, the edges shimmering slightly like it wasn’t quite in focus.

  “Aaaaand Pulverizor is down!” announced the voice of the Host, booming around the arena as if from thin air. “The first of our new Hunters has been defeated. Find out what Reduk Topa does next… after these important messages.”

  A short musical sting blasted out, then silence returned.

  Around the arena, all four doors dropped, clearing the way to the exit.

  “We should go,” said Floora, stuffing the equipment back in the bag. “We have to keep running.”

  “I can’t just leave him,” Cal said.

  “Well, you sure as shizz can’t carry him,” Floora pointed out. “The network will retrieve him.”

  “I don’t want the damn network to retrieve him!” Cal said. “He’s not theirs to retrieve!”

  From the mouth of one of the exit corridors came a low, threatening growl.

  “Sloorgs,” Floora whispered. “We have to go.”

  Cal winced as his gaze went from the solitary Sloorg to the motionless cyborg.

  “Fonk,” he said, then he placed a hand on Mech’s chest. “We’ll come back for you, big guy.”

  Grabbing the backpack and the Floomfle, he stood up.

  “Don’t go anywhere.”

  Thirty-One

  King Floomf of the Floomfles sat in his favorite armchair, dipping half a sandwich into a bowl of soup, moving it to his mouth, and then getting most of the soupy parts stuck in his beard.

  He chewed noisily on the soggy bite of sandwich. The baker, Flourflum, had made the bread himself. It was thick and soft, a most wonderful shade of puce, and slightly burnt around the crust. Just the way he liked it.

  The filling was a salad of vegetables from the Royal Gardens, seasoned with a pinch of cave salt and just the faintest dusting of powdered flurg fat, then smeared liberally in Nutella. Technically, it wasn’t Nutella, but the taste and consistency were more or less identical.

  King Floomf brought the sandwich to the soup again, then the soup to his beard. He took another bite and chewed thoughtlessly, both his hand and mouth operating on an auto-pilot that required very little input from his brain.

  This allowed him to focus the rest of his attention on the television in the corner of the room, and the drama that was unfolding before his eyes.

  He watched, wide-eyed, as two figures collided on screen, then he laughed uproariously at the sight of them. He shook so much that the soup sloshed up the sides of the bowl and onto the tray he had balanced on his legs. He didn’t notice.

  “Oh, such a naughty puppet!” he chuckled, then he erupted into laughter again as the Puppetopia cast pulled off a series of well-rehearsed set-piece routine involving two umbrellas and a roller skate.

  He knew how it ended, of course. He’d seen this episode a hundred times, thanks to Viaview On Demand. Still, it never got old.

  A hammering at his front door made him jump, just as he was delivering another cargo of soupy bread to his mouth. This resulted in eighty percent of the soup ending up in his beard, ten percent in his eyebrows, and the rest down the side of his armchair along with what was left of the sandwich.

  The hammering came again, more urgent this time.

  “Alright, alright,” King Floomf muttered.

  He set the tray on the arm of the chair, got himself up after three aborted attempts, then did his best to wipe the soup out of his facial hair. The effect was that the dark orange mess just below his mouth was distributed more evenly around the rest of the beard, turning even more of it the color of sickly carrots.

  The thumping on the door came once more, this time shaking it in its frame. King Floomf picked a piece of sandwich from one of his teeth, explored the rest of them with his tongue, then cleared his throat.

  “Come.”

  The door flew open, and three Floomfles tried simultaneously to pass through one small door, with utterly predictable results.

  “Your Maj—” began an ashen-faced footman, before he hissed at the two Floomfles on either side of him. “Get off! I go in first!”

  “We’re supposed to announce you,” said one of the others. He blasted on a horn, emitting a sound like a farm animal breaking wind.
/>   “Yeah, we go first,” agreed his companion, before closing his eyes and smashing two cymbals together.

  The footman, well and truly jammed in the doorway, decided to stop pushing. They all stood there, stuck fast, while the King glared at them.

  “Was there a point to all this?” King Floomf wondered. “I was having lunch.”

  “The Hunt, Your Majesty,” said the footman. His eyes flicked to the TV, where the Puppetopia puppets were chasing each other in circles while dressed as fruit pies. “Have you been watching The Hunt?”

  “Bits of it,” said King Floomf. He shifted uneasily. “I mean, I’m not a big fan. Not really my thing.”

  With a grunt of effort, the footman forced his way into the room. The other two Floomfles landed behind him with a crash and a honk.

  Hurrying past the King, the footman crossed to the television and tapped the screen several times, flicking through the channels.

  “I was watching that!” King Floomf protested. “It was just getting to the big song number.”

  “You’ll want to see this, Your Majesty,” the footman insisted.

  He skipped on through the channels, then stopped and tapped back one. “Here it is.”

  The footman stepped back, his eyes darting anxiously from the screen to King Floomf and back again.

  “What is that? Is that the robot that was here earlier?” asked the King, rising from his throne. “It looks similar.”

  “I think it is, sir. But that’s not the problem,” said the footman. “Watch.”

  There was a scream from the TV. The cameras followed the flight of a humanoid male as a kick launched him through the air.

  It cut to an overhead shot just as he crunched down onto the ground. King Floomf took a step closer to the screen, peering at it along the length of his nose.

  “And that’s the chap. The mouthy one. Those are the people who came here!”

  “Yes, sir, but that’s not it, either.”

  King Floomf sighed, irritably. “Then what am I supposed to be looking at?”

  The image changed again. A short, wide-eyed figure popped her head out of a bag just long enough to be caught in close-up.

  Had King Floomf still been eating his sandwich at that point, he’d have slowly stopped chewing, and a partially masticated lump of it would’ve fallen out of his mouth and onto the floor.