“You can have the sword,” I told her flatly.
Ella scowled at me but then sheathed her sword, deactivated the nano shield arm, and tossed the cylinder to the cat woman. She caught it and twisted it onto her metal cap, and the nanobots transformed into her missing right hand.
“It feels so real.” She flexed the new hand. She even had metal claws that matched those on her left hand.
I tossed Ella the laser sword prosthetic, then attached the gun arm to my stump.
Congratulations, Warrior!
You’ve discovered a Laser Gun Nano Arm!
Activate with a thought.
This could get tricky. I wondered if the arm would suddenly fire laser bullets out of one of the fingers if I thought about it, and thinking about it made me paranoid that it would happen. To be safe, I pointed my arm at the back wall and mentally willed the hand to work.
No bullets erupted from the fingers, but a gun barrel did suddenly appear on the back of the metal hand. A pad glowed in the center of my hand, and when I made a fist and pressed against it with my fingers, a single laser bullet erupted from the barrel.
“Neat,” I said and mentally willed the gun to turn back into a hand.
The cat woman practiced mentally conjuring and deactivating the shield. While she did that, I got a much better look at her. The first thing that got my attention was her eyes. They were big round feline eyes with vertical irises, and a beautiful jade green. Aside from the eyes, claws, tail, and the velvety short fur on her hands and feet, she was more humanoid than feline.
She wore a tight bodysuit that clung to her body like a wet T-shirt, accentuating every curve of her lithe frame. She was barefoot, which made sense since she had claws. Her perky ears were placed high on the sides of her head, like little satellite dishes, and they moved independently of one another sometimes. She had a little button of a nose, and a big mouth with the tips of pointy canines protruding a little over her soft pink lips. She was long, sleek, and powerful, and despite the innocent way she looked, I knew what she was capable of.
When she caught me staring, I introduced myself and asked her name.
“Purshia,” was all that she said.
“That’s funny.”
“Why is my name humorous?” Purshia asked.
“Oh, it’s just that on my world we have creatures that kind of resemble you, and they purr.”
“What does it mean to purr?”
“It’s a sound they make,” I said. “But I’m not making fun of you. I like your name. It’s pretty.”
She offered me a strange smile, but not an unpleasant one.
“So why couldn’t we see you before?” Ella asked. “We searched the entire cave.”
“I was clinging to the ceiling, and I can blend in with my surroundings when I need to.”
“That’s cool,” I said.
“Sounds useful.” Ella offered me a devilish grin. “Why don’t you go keep watch for a while, Purshia? Harry and I have some unfinished business.”
“What unfinished business?” she asked.
“We need to mate.”
“Sorry, babe.” I glanced at the hag’s corpse. “But dead aliens that smell like garbage are kind of a turn off where I’m from. I think we need to move on. This cave is ruined now.”
“It does smell pretty bad,” said Purshia.
“Fine,” said Ella with mounting frustration. “Let’s get moving then, before the sun goes down.”
“Oh, we’re not on a planet,” said Purshia. “That isn’t a real sun.”
“It’s not?” I glanced out the cave mouth. “Then what is it? Where are we?”
“On a ship or a space station I imagine,” she said, like it was no big deal.
“What do you mean, we’re on a ship?” I glanced at Ella to see if she was as surprised as I was.
She wasn’t surprised at all.
“Didn’t you see the supply crates drop out of the sky?” Ella asked me. “I saw a door open up there, then the crate fell out and the parachute opened. That’s when I got your attention.”
“No, I didn’t see a door in the sky.”
“It’s not a sky,” Purshia reminded me. “It’s probably just a giant hologram.”
“How can we be in a ship?”
“Doesn’t your kind have space flight?” Ella asked me.
“Yeah, but we haven’t gotten out of our solar system with a manned vehicle. Hell, we’ve only put people on our planet’s moon.”
The girls glanced at each other, then burst out laughing.
“Your people are so behind that it confuses the mind,” said Ella.
“Yeah,” Purshia added. “I thought the grays only took people from advanced civilizations.”
“We are advanced.”
Another laugh from the girls.
“Do your people know about the Vorgon?” Ella asked.
“On earth we have legends about little green men and gray aliens, but there is a lot of speculation surrounding their existence. They’ve never made contact. Not publicly anyway.”
“So strange.” Ella shook her head in disbelief. “I thought the Vorgon had gathered every planet into their empire.”
“My mind is kind of blown right now. Are you telling me that you two were already aware of each other’s worlds?”
“We’re aware of many worlds, although I’ve never been off-planet,” Ella said.
“I have.” Purshia crossed her arms and cocked a hip, looking proud and cute as hell. “I’m a pilot. Mostly garbage barges, mining freighters, and big commercial stuff like that, but I can fly just about anything. I was actually going for my ATR-450 test before those bastards beamed me here, wherever the hell here is.”
I had a lot to learn, but we couldn’t just sit around in that stinking cave all day.
“Let’s talk more about this later,” I said. “I’ve got about a million questions, but we’ve got to find another shelter before the fake sun goes down.”
It had been a while since I drank the water running down the wall, and luckily I felt fine. The trickling spring water had been spared the hag’s vomitus splatter, so I moved over to the wall to fill up my belly before we hit the dusty trail.
Purshia came up beside me and lapped the water directly from the wall, and we laughed together at the absurdity of it. Once Ella had drunk her fill, we enabled our nano arms and emerged from the cave.
The sham sun was dropping close to the distant mountains, which, I realized, were probably holograms too. But it gave me a point of reference, so I mentally noted that direction as west.
I stopped outside the mouth of the cave to watch and listen. Purshia did the same, and since her eyes, ears, and nose were most definitely better than mine, I waited until she glanced at me and nodded the “all clear.”
We moved like a well-oiled machine once we got going. It seemed both women had some sort of military training or hunting experience, because they knew how to take turns on point and hold a position while others passed. I felt comfortable with them, and it was the first time I’d had that experience since I arrived.
It took us less than half an hour to find a new place. The new cave was almost identical to the last one, and I began to think that the grays had designed the arena with such shelter in mind. I also assumed that being the dicks they were, they had only added a few caves, just to watch everyone fight over them.
I had two bad-ass bitches with me, and if the grays wanted to see someone defend their damn cave, they had better stay tuned, because I was tired, I was god knows where, and I was hungry. Not to mention I’d had my freaking arm chopped in two, and we had more than a dozen other players and all manner of weird alien predators after us.
Needless to say it had been an awful fucking day, and I was ready for some sleep.
“This cave looks just like the last one,” Ella noted as we explored it.
“Apparently the grays just used copy and paste,” I said, and surprisingly, neither of the women asked me
what I meant.
I guessed some things were universal.
“When’s the last time you two slept, and how much sleep do you require?”
“Oh, I require ten hours,” said Purshia.
“How many hours make up one of your planet’s days?” I asked.
“Forty,” she said with a delightful smile and clapped her hands, then spun whimsically. She was the fidgety type, but at least her fiddling was graceful. “But I slept right after the fighting began on the hill.”
“What?” Had I heard her right? “How the hell did you sleep?”
“Simple.” She twirled again and spread her arms. “I dug a deep and cozy hole, pulled fallen branches and moss over the hole, and snored away. I’m very clever, and as clever as I am, I knew everyone would be tired and hungry after all that fighting. And they were. Just like you. But I was fresh and awake before I met you.”
“And you had an ugly alien… what did you call it, Harry?” Ella asked.
“A hag.”
“Right,” said the blue-skinned bombshell. “You had an alien hag after you when we met.”
“I was luring her into the cave,” said Purshia. She licked her metal hand and rubbed it with the left.
“Sure you were.”
“The point is that Purshia is fresh,” I said and nodded toward Ella. “What about you?”
She fanned herself and put the back of her real hand to her forehead. “I am sooo tired. I need to be ravished and put to bed.”
“Nice try.” I chuckled “When’s the last time you slept?”
Her shoulders dropped. “I was abducted in my sleep.”
“That settles it!” I said and laid my head on my rolled up shirt with a contented sigh. I took the sheriff’s badge off and pinned it to my white T-shirt, then I tapped it twice for good luck and was out like a light.
When I awoke I still felt groggy, and I was super freaking confused. Then I remembered everything that had happened.
I took my cellphone out to check the time. It still had a 74 percent charge, and it was working.
It was 7:00 at night, and it was the day after I had been abducted. I’d missed an appointment with my dentist, and I wondered what Jake and Marge were thinking back on Earth.
I rubbed my eyes. Lightning flashed, illuminating the cave for a millisecond. In that moment I saw Ella crouched by the entrance. I considered going back to sleep, but I figured it was my turn to keep watch.
My body protested when I sat up. I’d been sleeping on semi-flat stone, but there were bumps and edges, and the knotted muscles in my back might as well have been a roadmap for the floor.
Water trickled down the wall in this cave, as it had in the last. I stretched and yawned, then went over to it. I knelt and filled my hands and splashed some on my face before taking a big drink. My stomach growled. Drinking the water was painful, but I knew that it would help with the hunger.
When I joined Ella, standing watch at the entrance, she gestured for me to squat with her. My knees didn’t like it, but I did it anyway.
“Where’s Purshia?” I asked. “She run off with my shield arm?”
“No, she is close enough to hear you,” Ella told me flatly.
“I knew she was.” I made a lame attempt to cover up. “I was just joking. Do they have jokes in your world?”
“Have you ever heard me make a joke?”
“I don’t think so. But the fact that you know what a joke is means you know what jokes are.”
“Are you sure you are fully awake?”
“Yeah, why?” I blearily wondered what the hell we’d just been talking about. Man, I needed coffee. Oh yeah, jokes. “How long was I out? I didn’t check the time before falling asleep.”
“You were not out.” Ella frowned. “You were sleeping. Or do humans’ spirits travel in their sleep, like the Tarkannians?”
“‘How long was I out’ means how long was I sleeping,” I said. “I guess the nanobots can’t translate slang so well. Cheap fucking grays.”
“Then you were ‘out’ for three hours.”
“How long is that on your world?”
“We use the moons to keep time, for time is fluid and ever changing. But going by your conversation with Purshia, I estimate you slept four hours in Earth time.”
“Hmm,” I said. “Drop dead sexy and smart? My mother warned me about women like you.”
“She did?” Ella said with a grin that made my dick fall in love with her.
“Nah. I’m just playing. Actually, I’m flirting. Do they have flirting on your world?”
She nodded, and her gaze moved down my body slowly, then back up.
“I’ll take that as a yes.” I tried not to talk directly at her, super self-conscious about morning breath. “Any chance either of you two found any berries or roots, maybe a cheeseburger or two?”
“What is a cheeseburger?” she asked, and I made a mental note.
Dear me,
If you ever somehow, some way get a chance to cook Ella a cheeseburger, do that shit!
Yours truly,
Me
“They’re only the best damn finger food in the universe,” I said, and to accentuate the point, my stomach growled like that of a horny yeti.
“Are they made of meat?”
“Oh yeah.” I salivated over the memories of my favorite burger from a joint in town: flame broiled soft-as-a-titty buns, eight ounces of USDA certified beef, smoked for two hours and tossed on the grill to finish, smothered in mayo, ketchup, mustard, onions, tomatoes, and god almighty, don’t forget the bacon! Bacon piled to the ceiling. Bacon under the lettuce and over the lettuce. Bacon on the fries. Bacon on the pickle. Throw that pickle on top—
“Harry?”
I snapped out of it. “What the hell happened? Did I fall asleep?”
“Harry.” She looked concerned. “Who is bacon. Is she a female?”
I rubbed my eyes. “No, bacon is food. Was I calling out for bacon in my sleep?”
“You kept calling for bacon, and once in a while you would add, ‘No more pizza, free the people!’”
“Once in a while?” I said. “How long was I out?”
“Ah,” she said with a smile that somehow made her more beautiful. “You mean how long were you sleeping. Just a little while. Look, Purshia is back.”
It took a little while, and I wondered how Ella had sensed her, but sure enough Purshia bounded around the corner to the entrance on all fours with a long snake in her mouth.
She spit it out at my feet and stood proudly. “The little gizrock tried to bite me, but the shield stopped it, and I smashed its head with a rock.”
A single drop of blood dripped from her right canine tooth, and I don’t know why, but it was super freaking sexy.
Maybe I was thinking with my stomach, but when she picked it up and ambled into the cave on two feet, I followed.
“Do we have a way to cook it?” I asked, wishing like hell I still smoked so I’d had a lighter on me when I was abducted.
Purshia gave me an empathetic look and pulled a knife from her belt. “You cook your food?”
“Yeah, don’t you?”
She shook her head.
“What about you?” I yelled to Ella. “You cook your food?”
She sauntered back into the dark cave, and the moonlight revealed a silhouette from a dream. I gulped, and not because I was hungry.
“Yes, I usually cook my food. But you shouldn’t yell like that.”
“Right. I know. I’m sorry.” I rubbed my grainy eyes again. “I don’t know if it’s interstellar jetlag or what, but I feel like my dick has been kicked through the dirt for about a week.”
“Your dick?” Ella arched a brow.
“Fuck this.” I headed for the door. “I need food. We all need food and fire. The game masters know that, and I’m going to sit out there until I see another crate drop!”
I marched out of the cave, found a suitable tree that hung above the entrance, and climbed int
o its gnarled boughs.
I was determined not to leave until I saw a damned supply crate.
A big red moon that I hadn’t seen before slowly floated across a star-filled sky, and I wondered if they were copies of real stars somewhere or if the game masters just programmed in a random pattern.
The world around me was so convincing that I found it hard to believe I was on a ship. From our cave to the other side of the arena looked to be about seven to ten miles, and I wondered how long was the ship it was inside? Or was I still strapped on a table under those bright lights and being uploaded like Neo to the alien Matrix?
I really had no way of knowing.
When I set aside sudden mental illness, brain trauma, a bad acid trip, and it all being a dream, I came to the conclusion that this must be real.
I was really in a gladiator arena.
I was really on an alien spaceship.
I was really fighting for my life in a game that allowed for only one winner.
I was really fucked.
None of that shit, Harry. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
I tried to listen to the more optimistic part of my brain. But when you’re tired and hungry, it’s really, really hard.
“You want some company?”
I was so startled by her unexpected appearance, I didn’t know whether to fall out of the tree or fart in fear, so I did neither.
“Ella,” I said as she climbed up. “I thought I heard you.”
“No you didn’t.” She laughed teasingly. “In my village I am sometimes called Lightfoot. No one ever hears me coming.”
I couldn’t decide if that was creepy or reassuring, but what came out of my mouth was, “That’s what she said.”
“That’s what who said?” Ella asked as she got comfortable on the branch next to me.
“It’s a joke. Whenever anyone says anything with even the most remote sexual connotation, you usually add, ‘That’s what she said,’ and it will be funny.”
“It will? Why?” she asked with a scrunched nose.
“I don’t know. It just is. Humor is a mystery.”
Warwick: Galactic Arena Page 4
