Arena 4 Read online

  Chapter One

  My name is Marc Caleb Havak, I am Earth’s chosen champion in an intergalactic battle royale known as the Crucible of Carnage, and I was hauling ass through a blasted deathscape of a deserted fallout city with a mob of angry muties hot on my tail.

  The alien city was a burnt-out shell of some long forgotten former glory that had seen its last glimmering day centuries before. Now it was a skyscraper cemetery full of the bones of blasted-out buildings that lay like corpses made of steel and concrete. The air was dusty and dry and smelled of ancient soot from the nuclear holocaust that had once blown through the metropolis like a radiation-filled hurricane. A bright orange sun burned low on the horizon as dusk fell. The sky was streaked with nicotine brown stains of clouds that hung low and barely moved in the weak breeze that blew in from a gray foam ocean. The whole city was little more than a radiation sick wheeze in the chest of a soon to be dead planet.

  My legs pistoned like the cylinders of a nitro-fueled muscle car as I sprinted across what had once been a city park but was now little more than hard packed dirt with patches of dry, brittle, tan grass. Thirty feet behind me was a mob of Morlock muties hell-bent on eating me for dinner.

  Raw, like sushi.

  Needless to say, I did not intend on being a Marc flavored spicy tuna roll.

  “You might want to hurry a bit there, Marc,” Artemis’ voice said in my ear through the comm-link. “Remember how much is riding on this little training exercise.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I responded. “Trust me, I know.”

  “Grizz’s Gauntlet suffers no fools, human,” Grizz said over the comm-link. His gruff, booming voice was like thunder in my ear.

  “Did you actually name this weird Running Man inspired nightmare?” I asked him as I continued to run.

  “Indeed I did,” he said proudly. “You shall each have to survive a gauntlet consisting of all of your other alliance mates. If you survive them all, and the hungry mutants, you win. All of you will have to take your turn in… The Gauntlet.”

  “What exactly do we win again?” I grinned. I knew the answer, I just wanted to hear my holographic trainer say it.

  “The dumb wager that you idiots set up,” he groaned.

  “Oh?” I chucked. “And what is that, pray tell?”

  “If you emerge victorious, your alliance mates will have to succumb to your every wish for an evening,” Grizz recited with a sour voice. “Lose, and you shall be at their mercy, and as I have said before, I have no idea why you proposed such a--”

  “Because I have the perfect reward for when I win.” I said through heaving breaths.

  “And you won’t even toss me a femur,” Artemis pouted. “I really wanna know what you have planned for the girls when you beat them.”

  “It’s ‘throw me a bone,’” I laughed at my perfectly bio-engineered and very beautiful assistant, “but I gotta concentrate now, so I can win.”

  All sorts of interesting scenarios played through my brain, and I put on a burst of extra speed. I sure as shit didn’t intend to let the muties get their malformed, grubby paws on me, or get my butt kicked by my beautiful alliance mates. I was going to win dammit. And they would all have to do exactly what I commanded.

  For a whole 24 hours of pure bliss.

  “Ha ha ha,” I laughed maniacally.

  “Hey Marc, I think you may want to stop laughing and thrash tootsies, because the mutants are getting close,” Artemis said. Artemis V-Five was an incredibly advanced AI program that had been downloaded into a genetically enhanced bioengineered human body to act as my attaché, assistant trainer, doctor, and all around jack-of-all-trades when I first got to the Crucible.

  “Beat feet, Artie,” I corrected gently. She’d been a “human” for about four months and was still figuring out the joys of English idioms. “And, thanks.”

  I glanced behind me. As per usual, Artie was right. The muties were gaining on me.

  The freaky looking mutants were, or had once been anyway, bipedal humanoids who stood about five and a half feet tall with broad shoulders, long arms, and short stumpy legs. Their skin was fish-belly pale and they had large, oversized, bulbous eyes with giant green-black pupils set in platter like bat-faces. They wore tattered remains of clothes that were little more than rags that barely covered their rather grotesque private parts. Unfortunately, I’d gotten a really good look when they burst out of a sewer pipe three blocks ago as I was making my way through a back alley toward the large central spire of a building in the center of the city that looked like an iron cadaver of the Space Needle in Seattle.

  “Ugh, mutant alien cannibal junk,” I shuddered to myself. “Blech.”

  Thankfully, the muties weren’t the smartest, and I was able to stay ahead of them. They were, however, persistent.

  And there were a lot of them.

  And they seemed to not get tired.

  If I could get through the park, I was positive I could lose them in the twisted metal remains of the city. The Parkour mod that was loaded into a nano chip in my cerebral cortex would help me make sure of that. Once I was past the husk of a once majestic marble fountain I would be into the streets and could use the Parkour to take to the rooftops until I made it to the sky needle.

  Unfortunately, three of the ugly brutes leaped out from a hidden hole in the bottom of the fountain just as I passed by. They sprung into the air on their stubby but powerful legs like they had been bounced off an Olympic trampoline and flew right into my path. I very much wished that I had my trusty Space Viking Axes, or SVAs for short, but the only weapons I had were my fists, my rapier-like wit, and, in the words of Paul Stanley, my love gun, which, while formidable, wasn’t going to help me out of this mess.

  The three muties had hoped to ambush me and keep me busy while their pals closed the distance, and I was overrun, which is when they were probably going to eat me. Not wanting to be a weird Morlock appetizer I didn’t slow down one bit.

  I dodged to my right as the nearest mutie tried to grab a hold of me and I stepped up onto the raised wall of the fountain, kicked off the central sculpture, and reversed direction while I brought my tightly balled right fist into the face of the mutie before he knew what hit him. Gravity, plus my momentum, equaled my fist plowing into his face like a pile driver, and the mutie’s head snapped back as blood sprayed from his already smushed nose.

  As my feet hit the ground, I let my knees buckle and I tucked into a tight roll as a mutie arm attempted to get me in a headlock. The other mutie had tried to rush me while his buddy went for the headlock, and I came out of the roll with both hands over my face as I drove my right elbow into the rushing mutie’s jaw. He, and yes, I had unfortunately seen a close-up view of his male parts and pieces as I came out of the roll, practically jackknifed backwards and then crumpled to the dirt. I felt a thick, meaty hand slap down on my shoulder with an iron-like grip. These bastards were strong.

  “Gah,” I yelped as the mutie tried to put me into a brute force Vulcan nerve pinch. My Krav Maga mod fired on all cylinders, and without missing a beat I spun into the grip and used my left hand to wrap up the mutie’s arm as I yanked upward. Our height difference gave me leverage, and I heard the mutie’s shoulder joint pop loudly. It yowled in pain just before I headbutted it. The hard bone of my forehead smashed into the soft cartilage of its nose, and I heard the satisfying crunch as the yowling ended in a wet gurgle. My right foot hooked behind the mutie’s leg, and I kept my forward momentum going and let the brute fall to the ground. My right foot shot out like a cobra as I twisted the already useless arm in my grip and kicked the mutie in the head. The gurgling stopped.

  “Tunnel Snakes rule,” I said to the broken mutie thugs.

  The whole scuffle had lasted maybe five seconds, but it had let the
mob close the distance to twenty feet, which was entirely too close for my comfort.

  I dropped the mutie’s limp limb and put on the afterburners.

  Thirty feet later, I ducked into what was left of a narrow alley between two buildings. I did a quick wall run, coiled my leg muscles, and then kicked off. I leaped from wall to wall like a human pinball before I was able to grab the top lip of the building and pull myself the rest of the way up. I glanced down and watched the mob of Morlocks rush into the alley expecting me to be there. The fugly little suckers began to grunt in utter confusion and then started to fight with each other. Somehow their burrito on legs had just gotten away, and they were not happy about it.

  I took a deep breath before I grinned to myself, tossed the muties a little salute wave, turned, and began to run across the rooftop. Little blue lines that showed various paths across the roofs, streets, and buildings overlayed my vision. Some glowed brighter than others as I ran which highlighted the more aggressive routes. It could be overwhelming but I was well used to my Parkour mod by now. It had helped save my bacon on many occasions.

  I couldn’t go as fast as I had on the ground level. The rooftops were treacherous, filled with holes, debris, or just plain not there. At one point I had to dance like a tightrope walker across a thin metal beam that was all that was left of one roof. It stretched across close to fifty feet of open-air five stories up. I’d thought about trying to take is slow, but I had to trust that my feet knew where to fall and I hit it close to a full out run.

  “Just don’t look down, dummy,” I said to myself as I ran out onto the six-inch wide metal beam. I kept my eyes straight ahead. Once I was past this circus trick that would have given Barnum and Bailey an ulcer I would be at the sky needle. Almost home free.

  I did an excellent job of staying focused as my feet flew true and I almost seemed to float across the expanse of sky as if I were the son of Nazareth about to go sailing. Then someone yelled my name.

  “Havak!” A husky voice yelled from below me. Every fiber of my brain cried out for me not to look. Then I looked anyway.

  Look was a strong word. I glanced. Literally, just a tiny little glance down to where the voice had come from. But, that was all it took. My foot missed the beam by a good three inches, and I pitched forward into nothing.

  I cried out despite myself as I tumbled into the open air. I’d been going at a pretty good clip, and my forward momentum managed to carry me the six feet that I’d had left to reach the other building. Unfortunately, it was two stories down, and I crashed through the dirty remains of a window.

  I braced myself for impact and prepared to come up in a roll once I’d cleared the window. Adrenaline coursed through my veins like a close friend. In addition to my various combat modifications and upgrades, I’d gotten very used to large amounts of the life-saving fight-or-flight chemical thrumming in my brain. That night in the Blackhawk helicopter so many nights ago when a very observant Marine officer had told me to take a deep breath to help the tunnel vision I’d had from the big adrenaline dump after I’d been scooped up by a Marine protection detail and thrown into the aircraft to meet the President of the United States seemed like forever ago. I was so used to the rush of sweet, sweet epinephrine as it surged through my body that I hardly even noticed the weird way the chemical played with time perception, gave me tunnel vision, or made my fingers tingle. In fact, I had gotten to like those things. They were a warm blanket when shit hit the fan, and I needed to get my ass out of the fire.

  As I careened through the air, time did its weird slow down fast forward thing as a fresh burst of adrenaline surged across my neurotransmitters. Kind of like Neo in Bullet Time I looked up and saw the owner of the husky, not unsexy, mysterious voice duck back from the window they’d been in a few stories up. If I lived through this fall, I had a hunch things were going to get a lot more interesting before I was safe and sound back at the gym in the Hall of Champions.

  Just before I hit the window, I pulled my body into a ball and covered my face with my arms. Time returned to normal, glass shattered, and I hit the floor three feet inside the window frame. As I said, I expected to roll away the momentum my speed and gravity had built up, but instead, I crashed through the rotted floor in a cloud of ancient concrete dust.

  “Balls!” I uttered before I bounced off a wall and an old piece of art deco office furniture broke my fall. Or, more accurately, just broke as I crashed to the ground. “Ow.”

  I groaned as I slowly got up and dusted myself off. My light body armor that looked like a cool futuristic mix of football pads and motocross body protection took most of the damage from the fall but it still knocked the air out of me. There would be a decent sized bruise on my back when this was all said and done, but I could already feel the slight itch deep in the muscle as my regen mod kicked in and began to heal my body. It wasn’t as awesome or fast as Wolverine or Deadpool, but it was no slouch either.

  I glanced around to take stock of where I’d finally landed. I was in what looked like some kind of office that had once been in the sky needle. There were desks, rotted office chairs, and the shells of long-dead computer terminals all around me. Footfalls thudded above me as someone lumbered up a flight of stairs. Below me, there was a loud crash and the familiar grunts and chuffs of the muties as they broke into one of the lower floors. They must have seen me fly through the air without the greatest of ease and still thought I would make a tasty snack.

  There was a door that hung crookedly from its hinges that lead to a dark stairwell or a long hallway on the other side of the room that disappeared in the lightless interior of the building. Which way to go? My brain spun with the possibilities of what dangers could lie down either path. Precious seconds ticked by. My Great Uncle Joe had once given me a piece of advice that had gotten my ass out of the fire on so many occasions I couldn’t even begin to count them all.

  “Marc,” he’d said in his deep, pleasant voice, “indecision kills. Sometimes you just have to make up your mind one way or the other and deal with whatever consequences come your way. ‘Cause if you don’t, someone or something will make the decision for you. You can always fix a bad choice. You can’t fix the choice you don’t make.”

  With his voice echoing in the fabric of my memory, I chose the stairwell and ran toward it. On the other side of the door was a dimly lit concrete and metal staircase that went up or down. Up was where I’d heard the heavy footfalls and where the mysteriously distracting voice had been. Down, well down was a mob of hungry rejects from an H.G. Wells novel. Up it was.

  I took the stairs two at a time and hoped that none of them would give out under my feet and I’d go tumbling to my doom. The regen mod, in addition to fixing the damage, also helped my muscles from getting fatigued as quickly. I’d gotten in pretty damn good shape since becoming Earth’s champion. Apparently fighting for your life was a fantastic workout, but even with that, I would never have been able to sprint up the ten flights of stairs in less than twenty seconds. My lungs had just begun to burn from the exertion when the stairs ended, and I crashed through the door into a large open-air landing that was about a quarter of the way up the height of the hundred plus story sky needle.

  The sight that greeted me made me stop dead in my tracks.

  “Oh, boy,” I muttered as I sucked air into my lungs in great heaving breaths.

  “Howdy, sugar,” a gorgeous woman with pale white skin that was covered with light blue geometric tribal tattoos grinned like a cat about to eat a canary.

  And I was the canary.

  Her silvery hair blew around her sultry face even though there was no breeze at all. She looked a little like a cross between a young Helen Mirren and Jennifer Lawrence. In other words, hot as hell. She stood twenty feet from me on the other side of the landing in a loose fighting stance. The woman was clad in a tight black corset that pushed her large, soft breasts up and out in a way that made my loins stir even amid the danger. She also wore thigh-high boots, tight, barel
y booty covering boy shorts and mid-bicep length black gloves. The whole outfit was finished off with a dark black cloak that had a blood red satin lining that seemed to flow and curl around her body as if it had a mind of its own. Her purple eyes practically glowed as she gazed at me hungrily.

  This was Aurora Starfall, the last princess of the lost planet of Starfall. She held the spirit of a Shriike, a soul-sucking space vampire, within her body and was one of the deadliest women I had ever met. Aurora was one of my alliance mates, a lover, and a friend. Right now, however, she was going to kick my ass.

  Well, she was going to try.

  The stakes were high, since no one wanted to be a 24 hour slave to the person who beat them in this training exercise.

  “Hey, Aurora,” I said with a grin.

  “Have a nice trip?” Aurora quipped with a slightly evil smile.

  “Ha ha,” I laughed sarcastically. “You’re lucky I didn’t break my neck.”

  “Oh, sugar,” she started, “your neck will be the least of your worries. I have so many wonderful little things I will command you to do when you lose.”

  “Ha!” I retorted with a grin. “Well, when I win I’ve got three words for you: Slutty French Maid Outfit.”

  “That’s four words,” she pointed out, “and I don’t know what that means.” Without another word, she closed the distance between us preternaturally fast. Her fists flew around my head in a white blur.

  I’d caught a slight shift in her body weight just before she danced toward me so I was able to prepare myself for the attack. Aurora usually used a series of dark matter energy blasts from a distance instead of close up fighting, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t just as deadly with her feet and fists. The martial art that she employed was native to her homeworld and was a cross between Silat, ballet, and Wing Chun which meant it was just about all I could do to block the flurry of blows that came my way.

  My own Krav Maga mod was no slouch though, and after I’d taken several glancing blows to my shoulders and head, I’d moved Aurora into position. I ducked under a spinning roundhouse kick and came up behind the five foot five-inch dynamo with the Sixties Playmate body to put her into a rear naked choke hold.