Warwick: Galactic Arena

by Michael James Ploof

  “Me too.” Purshia bit at one of her long claws. “Can I?”

  “Put those away, and you can,” I said with a chuckle.

  “Oh.” She giggled and retracted them.

  She wrapped a velvety hand around my shaft above Ella’s. I groaned, and she let out a long, high-pitched purr. Ella fished my churning balls out and juggled them like stress balls. I kissed Purshia, and her tongue excitedly explored mine. I felt Ella’s tongue on the soft skin of my sack, and cupped one of her big breasts.

  Ella’s soft warm tongue moved up my shaft as Purshia held it firmly around the base. Her small hand could barely wrap all the way around it, and the visual was hot as hell. When Ella reached the sensitive part under the head, my feet tingled like they had fallen asleep, and passion surged deep inside me.

  I watched Purshia feed Ella my manhood. The heat of her breath washed over it as she drew closer. Her beautiful dark blue lips wrapped around the head as she held eye contact with me.

  Then the fucking proximity alarm went off.

  “Son of a bitch!” I yelled when one of the thumbnail screens on my interface blinked.

  “Did I bite you?” Ella asked.

  “No, someone tripped the alarm. Defensive positions!”

  I stuffed myself back in my pants, which now felt like they were a size too small, enabled my nano shield with a growl, and pulled my sidearm.

  Whoever had interrupted the most erotic moment of my life was a dead man, plain and simple.

  I stalked to the mouth of the cave with a bad case of blue balls and kept an eye on the four screens in my field of view. I didn’t know what had set them off. Perhaps it had been a rodent.

  As I was wondering if I could rewind the video feed, one of the screens popped up and replayed the moment something had walked by. I looked closely, trying to make the thing out. All I saw was the head, and it looked like it belonged to a hairless ape.

  A hairless ape with two big horns, that is.

  “Back to live feed,” I said, and the cameras all returned to normal.

  I didn’t see anything for a long time, not on the screens or from the mouth of the cave. But then something came racing up the ridge.

  “They’re coming straight for the cave,” I said to the girls.

  “Who is?” Ella asked as she hurriedly dressed.

  “An ugly-ass alien with three apex predators following him like he’s their master.”

  “What? He’s controlling them?” Purshia asked as she ran to my side.

  “Looks that way. Let’s get to higher ground and see what happens when ape boy comes across one of our lizard monster crates.”

  We hurried out of the cave and climbed up on top, where, like at the previous one, a ridge was surrounded by a hedge of bushes. From our vantage point, we could see our opponents clearly. The horned ape was trailing the apex predators, and he was giving them verbal commands, which they followed. Ella whispered to me that we should open fire now, and I reminded her that unlike the laser gun, my sidearm didn’t have endless bullets.

  “Let’s see what happens,” I said. “Look, he’s almost to the case.”

  The apish alien stalked toward the box, stopped fifteen feet from it, and glanced around. He sniffed the air, and I told the girls to get down. I switched to one of the proximity cameras and saw him glance at the ridge we were on, then he looked back at the case.

  “Come on, take the bait, you bastard,” I said under my breath.

  “What’s happening?” Purshia hissed.

  “Shh,” Ella warned.

  Ape Boy finally approached the container. Behind him, the three Apex predators nipped at each other and mewled like demonic dogs.

  “Shut up, you beasts!” he growled, then his nano arm glowed, and the predators began acting like kids at church on their best behavior.

  “He’s got some kind of mind control nano arm,” I whispered. “It’s safe to look now, but stay low.”

  We watched expectantly as the ape kicked the case, waited, kicked it again, then waited some more. After some consideration, he finally knelt down and opened it.

  The lizard monster erupted like the face-hugger from Alien and landed right on Ape Boy’s ugly mug. Ape Boy staggered back, tripped over a rock, and went down hard on his back. He punched at his own face, but the face-hugger slithered right down his throat.

  I almost gagged, and Ella actually did.

  The lizard disappeared and Ape Boy grabbed his throat and choked himself, as if trying to stop it from going down into his stomach.

  “We should put him out of his misery,” said Purshia.

  “Wait. I want to see at what point the predators are released from his mental bondage.”

  It didn’t take long to find out.

  A few seconds after the lizard climbed down the poor bastard’s throat, his body began to expand.

  The brown pants he was wearing burst open, and the heavy fur vest wrapped around his torso popped apart too. Then his body exploded, and out of his ruined corpse crawled another one of those disgusting space spiders. I shuddered and thought, That could have been me or one of the girls. Man, I was so glad we’d been careful with those lizards.

  Apparently, Ape Boy hadn’t been the first player to get attacked by a lizard monster.

  Attention, Warriors!

  A player has died!

  12 Remain.

  The apex predators shook their heads as if awakening from a trance and immediately attacked the spider. A gnarly fight ensued, and by the time the spider was dead, so were two of the predators. The third was badly injured from spider venom.

  We made our way down the ridge, and Ella put six rounds in the predator’s head. The steaming pile of gore that had been Ape Boy was a rotten mess, and I held my breath as I searched the remains.

  “What are you looking for?” Purshia was plugging her nose and making exaggerated grossed-out faces.

  “This.” I picked up Ape Boy’s severed right arm.

  “The mind control arm. Smart,” said Ella.

  I detached the nano arm from the stump with a twist, and it promptly morphed into a cylinder. I stashed it in my pocket and joined the girls at the cave entrance. “We need to move our camp.”

  “You think he might have been a scout?” Ella asked.

  “You never know, but I’d rather play it safe. Let’s grab our stuff and get out of here.”

  We traveled for two hours to get to the western ridge. Most of our supplies fit in the big backpack, which I carried, and the rest we wrapped in the remains of my T-shirt. I still had the nano shield and my sidearm, Ella wore the nano gun, and Purshia scouted ahead with the laser sword disengaged. She jumped from tree to boulder to cliff face, and had I not known what to look for, I never would have seen her. The eyes gave it away though; every once in a while I caught the glimpse of those big green orbs.

  We heard distant gunfire and the occasional cry of random creatures as we scoured the western ridge, but we made it to our next camp unhindered.

  Rather than a cave, this time our camp presented itself in the form of a wide slab of rock inside a natural alcove high in the hills. It was deep enough to shelter us from the rain, but any fires we lit would be seen for miles. The weather was warm, however, and we only needed one for food. We could risk a fire before dark to cook a bunch of food packets.

  By the time the perimeter sensors were in place, Ella had a small fire going. We shielded it with our bodies and boiled six of the packets—two for each of us. We were down to eighteen. If we rationed them, we’d eat another six days.

  I was pretty confident we would see another supply crate. We were down to twelve players, including Ella, Purshia, and me. That left only nine other players for us to deal with. That also meant there would be less competition for the crates.

  I wondered if other players had teamed up, and I had to assume many of them had. If the grays had really gathered skilled warriors from the far corners of the galaxy, there were a lot of smart players ou
t there. And like us, they would have seen the advantage of teaming up.

  The only downside to that was that once our team won, we would be expected to continue fighting to the death.

  “There can only be one winner,” Gray had said.

  When it came down to it, I didn’t know what the hell I was going to do once it was just the three of us.

  Was there any chance the grays would let us finish as a team and then send us home? Or would they remain adamant about the one-winner rule? I could no sooner kill Ella and Purshia in cold blood than I could saw off my leg for no good reason.

  But if it came down to me or them, I wasn’t about to sacrifice myself.

  First we had to win, and I thought we had a pretty good chance. We’d acquired four nano arms, found supplies, and had killed numerous beasts together, all without serious injuries.

  As I watched the water boil, these thoughts ran through my mind on a maddening loop. I must have been wearing my emotions on my sleeve, because Ella glanced at me often and finally spoke up.

  “What are you worrying about?” she asked with a heavy blink of her beautiful alien orbs.

  I considered the contours of her blue face and smiled. “You’re beautiful, you know that?”

  “Yes,” she said matter-of-factly. “But many things are beautiful, Harry, and I had no control over whether I would be beautiful or not, so it isn’t an attribute that should be considered any part of my character.”

  “On my world, people are obsessed with beauty. They go to great lengths to change their appearance. Well, mostly women do.”

  “How?” she asked.

  “Makeup, plastic surgery, crash diets, Botox.”

  “What is makeup?”

  “It’s like paint for the face.”

  “My people wear war paint when we go into battle. I would wear it now, but I do not have my dyes.”

  “Earth women wear it all the time,” I said.

  “Strange,” she noted. “Is it because your women are always at war?”

  “No, they wear it for beauty, not war. Mostly men fight the wars on Earth.”

  “Is your planet invaded often?”

  “We’ve never been invaded by aliens, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Then who do you war with? Haven’t you tamed the wild beasts by now?”

  I sighed and pulled the boiling pot off the fire with my nano hand. “Each other,” I said at last.

  “That is so sad. Our people used to war with each other like that, but that was hundreds of years ago. Since the grays began trying to take over our world, we’ve been fighting them instead.”

  “Are the grays a problem throughout the galaxy?” I asked, totally amazed at the subject of our conversation.

  “Yes they are,” she said gravely. “That is why it was strange to hear they hadn’t made contact with your people. They infiltrate all worlds, and they steer the galaxy as they see fit. The grays, as you call them, are a patient race, a powerful race, and their technology is unsurpassed by any but the Binarions. But they were enslaved long ago, and now the grays control them too.”

  “What keeps the grays from conquering the entire galaxy?”

  “Oh, they are conquering it all,” she said. “But they are patient. It is said they are immortals. Part of their strategy is to create infighting. They pit worlds against worlds, kind of like they’re doing to all of us right now.”

  “They sound like cowards to me,” I said.

  She shrugged. “Even cowards can be conquerors.”

  “Only a coward would want to be a conqueror.”

  “Why do you say that?” She regarded me quizzically. “What if their goal is to make their world or the universe better?”

  “They would be madmen if they thought they could improve the world through warfare. Or the universe for that matter.”

  “Your thoughts are intriguing,” she said thoughtfully. “As for the grays, I don’t believe they want to improve anything. They are meddlers. In ancient times, my people called them the machine spirits. They are interdimensional beings, you see, and they like to influence others to build what they cannot.”

  “I think I saw a Joe Rogan podcast about something like that,” I said. “My people call them the machine elves. Some people think they’ve had a big influence in my people’s advancements in invention and technology.”

  “That sounds like the grays,” she said. “They dream it up, then they whisper their ideas and instructions into the minds of brilliant people.”

  “If that’s true, they’ve really amped shit up in the last one hundred and fifty years on my planet. We went from riding animals to going to the moon in rockets in less than a century.”

  “They’ve been increasing their initiative in recent generations,” she said with a grim nod.

  “What’s it mean?”

  “I do not know, Harry, but it cannot be good.”

  There were still a few hours of daylight left, and I wanted to get some rest so I’d be fresh for the night. I ate the contents of one of the packets, saving the other one for later, and stretched out on the blanket to get some shuteye.

  No sooner had my head hit the backpack than I was out cold.

  My dreams were jumbled and dark. I was beside my car with the lightbar flashing like a rave, puppet strings were attached to me, and looming figures were making me do things. Ella and Purshia were in the backseat.

  The puppet masters made me spread gas all over the hood, then I was lighting a match.

  I tossed it on the gas-soaked car.

  “Harry!”

  I woke with a start and grabbed Ella’s shoulders.

  “You were possessed by dream demons,” she told me. “You are safe now.”

  I sat up groggily and drank from the water container. “On my planet we call them nightmares.”

  “What did you dream about?”

  The camp was dark and quiet, and the twin moons had just begun to rise.

  “I don’t remember,” I said. “Is Purshia on lookout?”

  “Yes.” She laid her head back down.

  I realized she had been sleeping beside me. “Did she rest yet?”

  “For some time, yes. We just switched out.”

  I got up and stretched. It was dark on the ledge with no fire, but my eyes had already adjusted. I found my other food packet and tore it open. The food wasn’t even warm, but it was sustenance. I sat cross-legged beside Ella as I ate, and she watched me with a small grin.

  “What?” I asked as I fished the alien meat concoction out with a hooked finger.

  “I like you, Harry Warwick.”

  “I like you too,” I said.

  “It will be hard to kill you when it is just down to the three of us,” she added with a frown.

  I froze, staring at her.

  She stared back, unashamed.

  “You intend to kill us then?” I resumed eating. The food suddenly tasted like ash.

  “Don’t you intend to kill us?”

  “I asked you first.”

  “It is the only way,” she said self-defensively. “There can only be one winner.”

  “And what if there’s another way?” I watched her closely.

  She looked hopeful, but it wasn’t likely her people’s facial expressions meant the same thing humans’ did. Hell, sometimes human facial expressions meant different things in different countries.

  “If there was another way, I would take it,” she said.

  “Me too, and I intend to find one.”

  I brought up my interface and selected Kill Counter. There were only eleven players left, which meant someone must have died while I was sleeping.

  We were getting down to the wire, and I still had no idea what “the other way” was yet. One thing I knew for sure was that we had to get out of the arena. I had no idea what we would do after that.

  “Harry, Ella!” Purshia called from outside. “It’s the game master.”

  We hurried over to the ledge. High in
the sky was a huge hologram of Gray’s face. He was grinning wryly.

  “Greetings, warriors!” he said in a voice that belonged to Gargamel from the Smurfs. “You have survived where others have failed. Many of you have found supplies or created allegiances.”

  The girls and I glanced at each other apprehensively.

  “You have all excelled so far, and it has become clear the games have been too easy for you. Therefore we shall rise to the occasion and give you a challenge worthy of such great warriors. I give you the drogans of Torraminzer!”

  “The what of who?” I said as Gray disappeared with a cackle.

  “Oh no,” said Purshia.

  A portion of the sky opened up, confirming Purshia’s assessment that the sky wasn’t real, and we were indeed inside a fabricated world.

  But that realization didn’t disturb me half as much as what emerged.

  The beasts that appeared looked like dragons straight out of a fantasy movie… a really fucked up fantasy movie.

  They were far away, but I could see they had four wings, long sleek bodies, and tails with large feathers that trailed behind the magnificent creatures like silk ribbons, moving slowly like a snake under the influence of a charmer’s flute. The drogan’s heads were long and oval, and even from a distance I could see their horns.

  “We’re sitting ducks up here on this ridge,” I warned

  Twelve of the creatures emerged from the hole in the sky, which promptly closed and returned to its heavenly appearance.

  “There is no time to evacuate.” Ella activated her laser gun. It emerged from the back of her hand quickly, with only the faintest click of metal.

  Purshia’s laser sword flared to life with a thwoooom!

  The drogans split up into pairs, and two of them flew straight toward us.

  “Damn it!” I cursed.

  “Harry,” said Ella. “What about the other nano arm?

  “Oh shit, I forgot all about it.” I twisted off the shield arm and fished the other canister out of my pocket. I twisted the new nano arm into place, it clicked, and my interface flared to life.