Half of Hutchins’ skull exploded with a spray of red and grey, and white triangles of bone. The man fell back, dying suddenly. The kill switch on his arm started to sing as brains leaked down the nearest slab of wreckage. Drago looked around with annoyance seemingly more so than anything else, even as his sleeve screamed and needles entered his skin. Seeing Layla so close his face almost seemed to light up.
Drago started to bring his M32 around to bear but stopped and tossed it aside instead. Instead, he raised his fists. Muscles bunched in his arms and chest until his whole body started to contort from the drugs.
“For you, I use these.” Drago said.
“Hold this.” Layla said.
Layla passed her P90 off to Thao. She rolled her neck, shifting her scarred shoulder, and raised both hands in front of her. Thao looked from his partner to the other, hulking and now drug-crazed contestant.
“Wait-, what? Are you kidding me?” Thao said.
The camera drones circled overhead as Layla and the big Russian rushed at each other. Drago let out a bearlike roar as the drugs took over. He lurched at Layla with a huge swing but Layla avoided it easily. She jabbed with her right hand and then punched Drago in the jaw with her left. The thick bone broke with a crack as his head whiplashed around but Drago recovered and surprised Layla with his new speed. He punched Layla across the right side of her face, driving the soldier back. Both regarded one another for a few moments, swiping at their mouths. Drago gargled then spat out a broken tooth.
“Finish you!” Drago said.
Drago’s voice was hardly even human anymore. He ran at Layla with hands gnarled, trying to get a grip on her. She weaved around him, rattled from the single drug-fuelled punch that Drago had landed but still faster than him. Jabbing fast with her right hand, Layla created an opening and threw her slightly slower but more powerful mechanical left fist into Drago’s side. She hit like a sledgehammer, pounding through Drago’s body armour. Drago started spitting blood but kept coming, lashing out wildly and forcing Layla to block. His fist bounced off Layla’s mechanical arm, breaking his fingers. The Russian kept grinning through bloodstained teeth and throwing punches.
Shoving away one of Drago’s blows with her left forearm, Layla chopped the edge of her right hand into Drago’s throat. While Drago was distracted momentarily, Layla kicked at one of Drago’s legs. The mechanics in her left leg locked up, giving more power to the kick, and Drago’s leg snapped completely in two with a wet crunch. Unsupported on his right side, Drago tumbled sideways. Snarling, he tried to stand back up with his left leg but Layla smacked him back down, punching with her right fist before gripping the top of Drago’s head with her left hand.
“Kung Fu Grip, bitch.” Layla said.
Layla closed her hand around Drago’s head. Thick fingers pierced the sides of Drago’s skull and let out a sickening cracking noise before Layla ripped the top completely off, exposing brain. Head crushed, Drago toppled over and died on top of the wreckage.
“What the-, fuck? What the actual hell, Layla?” Thao said.
“Grab Hutchins’ gun, they’re both going to be short of ammo but it should help.” Layla said.
Shaking off her daze, Layla picked up Drago’s M32 grenade launcher before checking the drum. The fight with Drago had broken open her stapled facial wounds yet again. Blood leaked down the side of the face from the grisly gashes. Thao was still holding Layla’s P90 for her.
Thao did as he was told and recovered the gun that had belonged to Wolf Hutchins. He checked the man for ammunition. The camera drones hovered high overhead. Two of them split away now that the fight was finished, and Thao waited on an update to confirm their victory. He allowed himself a long sigh of relief. He wasn’t sure what had happened to the lunatic with the prosthetic arm, Baxter Webley, but none of the other contestants were particularly close by. With Drago and Hutchins dead, more weapons and now even answers about who he really was, they might actually be able to take it easy for a short while. Thao also hoped he’d never have to watch someone die with his own eyes again, certainly not the way Drago Vorobyov had just been killed. He was sick to the pit of his stomach as well as relieved.
Suddenly, the screens on Thao and Layla’s forearms blared with music. A voice that Thao didn’t recognise at first accompanied it, not the voice of one of the two commentators who’d been announcing things throughout the game. After a moment, he recognised it as the sunny voice of the blonde Slayerz host who’d introduced them all at the start of the game.
“Congratulations to our remaining teams! We’re down to only five duos, and a half, which means it’s time to enter our endgame!” The Slayerz host said, “And this year-, in a Slayerz first, we are introducing some surprise new contestants into the mix! Bring on the Slayerz ringers!”
In the direct centre of the arena, the top floors of the control building were lighting up. Spotlights fired up on the rooftop and painted the murky, late afternoon sky. Thao and Layla could see what was unfolding on their screens but they stumbled across the wreckage trying to get a better look in person.
In the central crater, the grey building jutted upward like a shaft. Seven figures could barely be seen, silhouetted and enhanced by the spotlights at their backs on the rooftop. Circling drones got a closer look at the ringers and that vision was relayed onto the screens on Thao and Layla’s sleeves.
“What’s happening?” Thao said.
“I don’t know, the only thing I can think of is-, when they promised us an Abomination Round.” Layla said, “But those aren’t Abominations, they’re just human beings.”
“That’s right, just when some might be getting concerned about us running short of contestants, we have three new teams to introduce to the arena!” The host said, “They’ve been watching, and waiting, itching to get into the carnage themselves. Once our ringers enter the arena there can still only be one team to leave. However, they must eliminate all original teams before being allowed to turn on each other. The same rules regarding kill switches, map updates and drops still apply, so let’s meet our ringers!”
“There’s seven of them, not six, how’s that supposed to work?” Layla said.
“Guess we’ll find out.” Thao said.
“Ladies first, our first ringer team are a couple of hungry man-chasers, but the men won’t like what they do if they catch them! Two warrior women in the front lines of a war on the male gender!” The host said, “Cassidy Crusher and Maryanne Mauler were a women’s wrestling tag team before taking their act on the road in a cross-country killing spree that between them racked up eighteen murders, two dozen brutal beatings and one really lousy discount circumcision!”
The two women sneered and mugged for the cameras hovering over them. The first, Crusher, was shorter and heavier with closely cropped dark hair. Her arms were exposed by her body armour and vest, flexing as she stretched a large, sledgehammer-shaped axe over her head. Mauler was taller and slimmer but still heavily muscled, with blonde hair tied back in a ponytail. She was carrying an old fashioned, side-loaded machine gun. Both women had their share of tattoos and scars, and wore bloodthirsty expression on their faces.
“In another Slayerz first, our second ringer team doesn’t have two members but three! These triplets are the Huey, Dewey, and Louie of mass murder. The Tanner triplets were raised on a tightly knit white supremacist compound and share the closest bond there is, blood. Between the three of them they’ve spilled plenty of it! The Tanners set the mass shooting record for September of last year with a final score of sixty two kills in a single shooting.”
The triplets, in spite of their crimes, still looked like little more than teenagers. Blonde and stringy but hard muscled, like kids who’d grown up on a farm. They were laughing and wrestling with each other as the cameras turned on them, two guys and one girl. All three wore body armour under matching blue overalls with red trucker caps.
“Yeehaw, like shooting fish in a barrel!” One of the triplets yelled.
The final team were both masked. The first was clad in a hulking and intimidating suit of armour while the other one was wearing what looked like a metallic hockey mask with two long, tall ears attached.
“Finally, representing our troops, two men that have given more than their share for our country, Private Donny Kohler and Jackrabbit Slim!” The host said.
“Oh, shit, I’ve heard of that guy, Donny Kohler.” Layla said, as the host continued to babble, “He was part of another unit taken out in an Abomination attack, like mine. Only when the Abomination attacked he was manning a truck-mounted flamethrower, and the Abomination caused the fire to backdraft and blow the fuel tank. Kohler got third degree burns over something like ninety percent of his body, roasted off his nose, ears, fingers and-, you know, his pecker. Had to be placed in some kind of life support suit when they shipped him back stateside, that must be what the armour he’s wearing is. He decided to start getting his thrills by building a homemade flamethrower and burning women alive in his basement.”
“Jesus, what are they doing to us? This-, this isn’t fair!” Thao said.
“Fair has got nothing to do with ratings.” Layla turned to their camera drones, circling above, “Seriously? Sticking in a bunch of new contestants this late in the game? You couldn’t think of anything better? That’s like the ultimate reality TV cliché!”
On the rooftop, Kohler raised both arms and twin jets of fire roared from flamethrower jets attached to both of his wrists. Every inch of the man was covered with black and grey armour, his face hidden behind a narrow visor. Beside Kohler, Jackrabbit Slim was much leaner but more than seven foot tall. Part of that height was due to two long, bladelike prostheses that had replaced Jackrabbit’s lower legs below the knees. Jackrabbit Slim was carrying a mismatched pair of guns, a stubby and compact Heckler & Koch MP5K and a bulky Desert Eagle pistol. Across the roof, the Tanner triplets all bristled with stubby guns, leering and trying to look intimidating with their gap-toothed grins. Crusher and Mauler in the middle of the rooftop just looked impatient to get started.
“If you look at your maps, you’ll see more weapon and medical drops are going live now! You’ll need them.” The host said, “Let the endgame begin, and remember, the team that slays together, stays together!”
The ringers all split up and headed for different points of the rooftop. The camera drones followed their progress from overhead in the darkening sky. The teams stuck together but didn’t slow down as they approached the edges, looking like suicidal lemmings. It was only once they leapt off that Thao and Layla realised the ringers were wearing parachutes. The Tanner triplets pitched themselves clear of the building first, hollering as they plummeted into open space before their parachutes erupted and pulled them up. They sailed over the shark-infested water toward the shoreline of ruins, south of Thao and Layla’s position. The two wrestlers ran for the far side of the roof, headed for the other side of the lake.
Donny Kohler was the only ringer not wearing a chute. His partner, Jackrabbit, sprung into the nothingness and his parachute unravelled to carry him across the arena. Kohler, however, had a bulky jetpack mounted to the tanks on his back that were also connected to his flamethrowers. The boosters flared and picked Kohler up, catapulting him into the air. He streaked like a comet after Jackrabbit, the two of them headed for the top of the arena closer to where Thao and Layla were now. A new update appeared on the list of names they’d been checking since the beginning of the game.
Baxter Webley / Reaper
Billy Blight / Wing Chun
Church Harper / Jeannie St Sunshine
Donna Pardee / Raptor Rawlins
Drago Vorobyov / Wolf Hutchins
Drake Mooney / Billy-Bob Boomer
Francois Connard / Neena Twist
Jacob Schmidt / Pedro de la Mar
Layla Jackson / Thao Seong
Q. Chrissie / Maurice Lester
Santa Muerte / Priest
T-Bone West / Runner
Titama / Anaconda
Ursula Paxton / Dogboy
Yoyo Yokatomi / Mark Rizzio
RINGERS
Cassidy Crusher / Maryanne Mauler
Donny Kohler / Jackrabbit Slim
Luke Tanner / Lonny Tanner / Lorelai Tanner
“What do we do now?” Thao said.
“Keep fighting.” Layla said.
Chapter Fifteen.
“Getting ready to purchase your dream house? However, with property at such a premium it can be a struggle to find a suitable plot of land in the right location that will fit the home you want to build. Have you considered non-Euclidean Architecture?”
“Thanks to advances in the architectural sciences, non-Euclidean architects can design and build you a home with all the amenities you require on any plot of land you desire! Even if that means your new house is many times bigger on the inside than the available dimensions on the outside, anything is possible. This is achieved by folding the local space and time in on itself in a variety of Contemporary, Colonial, Mediterranean, Neoclassical, or other styles. But don’t just take our word for it, let’s speak to some of our satisfied customers.”
A middle-aged couple sit in their modern and sparklingly clean kitchen, glasses of white wine resting at their elbows.
“I insisted we have a bedroom that faced both east and west to capture the best sunlight through the day but they told us it just wasn’t possible.” The man says, “We were almost ready to give up until we talked to non-Euclidean Architecture.”
“And the way time occasionally folds back in on itself means sometimes we get three-day weekends!” The woman says.
A pretty, dark-haired woman folds laundry in her living room, a broad grin plastered across her face. The rear wall of the living area slips in and out of focus as the camera tries to make sense of angles that don’t quite make match and induce a vague sense of nausea.
“We love our new home from non-Euclidean Architecture, especially my oldest son, Carter! He’s turned into quite the little explorer since we discovered all those recursive hallways and shifting numbers of upstairs bathrooms.” She says, “Sometimes he’ll disappear for days at a time but he always comes back, talking about ‘mirror selves’ and the ‘black goat with a thousand young’, such an imagination! We hope he’s going to take a real interest in non-Euclidean architecture when it comes time to pick a college. And the future-echoes of the other children my husband and I are apparently going to have seem to just love it too!”
A smiling man stands in front of his home, holding a garden hose. One side of the house is bathed in moonlight as the rest of the domicile and the yard is clearly in sunlight. Water drains backwards into the nozzle of his hose, dewatering the garden bed next to him.
“Tcefrep s’ti, ti evol tsuj ew tub stnemtsujda emos nekat sah emoh naedilcuE-non ruo!” He says, “Dedeen ew ezis eht fo driht a saw tcirtsid loohcs tneced a ni ytic eht raen dnif dluoc ew dnal ylno eht tub. Sdik eht rof dray gib a dna, egarag rac-owt a htiw emoh moordeb-ruof a dedeen ew os ylimaf gib a gnivah no dennalp ew. Detnaw ew tahw yltcaxe wenk ew emoh tsrif ruo rof yenom hguone pu devas yllanif I dna efiw ym nehw.”
“Don’t let anything, including the laws of physics, stand between you and your perfect home. Let non-Euclidean Architecture be the doorway to a whole new realm of possibilities.”
“New friends!” Yoyo said.
“Slow down, I told you!” Mark Rizzio said.
Yoyo hurried through the broken streets with her massive mech running beside her. Rizzio was still on his feet in spite of his shattered kneecap but he trailed behind Yoyo and the mech, and was limping hard. They had made it to a medical drop and his leg was strapped and bolted together, moving stiffly. Painkillers made the whole limb numb and able to be used even as bone shifted around like jigsaw pieces.
An abandoned parachute billowed and flapped down the street. It was the same wide avenue where Thao and Layla had fought Donna Pardee and Raptor earlier in the game. The booby-trapped bus Thao
had accidentally brought down like a giant pendulum was still lying sprawled across the road. Yoyo stopped, spiked bat swinging at her side. The olive mech, Puppy, tilted its head toward Yoyo quizzically as she studied the surrounding buildings. The road was littered with thick fissures and abandoned cars as well as the broken bus but as they continued the mech made its way over the uneven ground easily. Two more parachutes were caught on some ruins further down the road, billowing like sheets.
Rizzio came lurching up behind Yoyo, breathing hard. His leg might not have been hurting him but because it was so numb Rizzio felt like he was dragging a twenty-kilo weight along behind him with every step.
“Wait, stop! We could walk right into an ambush.” Rizzio said.
“Puppy will protect us! Puppy can take on anyone!” Yoyo said.
After the mech had carried Rizzio to the medical drop the girl had helped patch him up. Yoyo was impossible to control though, it was almost as if she didn’t understand the game was life or death. Rizzio had screamed at her to get it through her head but she had just brushed him off.
“This tin can piece of shit’s aiming computer is off or something! It couldn’t hit them back there, and it couldn’t save my fucking knee!” Rizzio said, “We should back up to one of the weapon drops and set up our own fucking ambush. Are you even listening to me, you crazy bitch?”
Yoyo’s eyes narrowed, “I told you, Puppy doesn’t like when people are mean to me.” She said.
Several cracks of gunfire interrupted the tension between the two of them, from one of the Tanner triplets shooting at the pair. A bullet cut through one of Yoyo’s pigtails, trimming black hairs from her head. She whipped around, swinging her bat to her shoulder. Barrels beginning to whirl, Puppy moved to cover her and opened fire. Rounds railed across the wreckage. Several previously unbroken windows imploded and concrete dust filled the air.
The shots had some from Luke Tanner, the tallest, rawboned triplet who was carrying an AKM assault rifle. Stock still folded, Luke switched the gun to full auto and unleashed a tearing burst that chattered off the mech’s armour while ignoring the bullets that were howling all around him.
Serial Escalation Page 18
