The Second Adventure: A Cat Called Britain (A Caper in Time Part 1)
by Evan Forman and Michael Robertson - 22.12.14
John
Boss strode out into the spotlight, his arms spread wide to
greet the baying of all who had come to watch him die. That was
as much as he'd gathered from a day of leering keepers and elves
in suits, who'd pointed at him in his cage and smiled as they
smashed their fists against their palms in demonstration of
tonight's result. Huge spotlights around the roof illuminated a
ring of red and white on the black cloud above and swept over
the audience. This time, John had been jabbed and prodded into
entering the arena from the gladiator's gates where Bo Krodah
had come through; and they'd rolled out a red carpet from the
door to a podium in his half of the ring (again, divided by a
wall of thorns). The circles of seats were almost bursting with
hungry spectators, and black boxes with glass eyes swept around
on cranes and fixed their gaze on The Enemy.
John knew the steps now, and without the disturbance of chemical
injections he felt almost at ease as he jumped up onto the
circular platform and graciously bowed to the tidal wave of
booing and chanting from every direction. There was a quiet
utterance from the announcer's booth, and the crowd sunk into an
unsettling silence.
He watched through the bars as the massive doors on the other
side of the arena rumbled open, trying to catch a glimpse of his
opponent in the shadowy tunnel. He wondered what could be
walking, crawling, or slithering out of there that would warrant
this level of circumstance, of pin-drop quiet anticipation.
Out of the shadows came a young boy, with curly blonde hair and
a monastic white robe. He was followed in formation by a whole
flock of little elvin children who pattered out of the gate in
pairs and split off to join opposite ends of two rows of green
and gold faces and bright eyes, and another two rows of older
men behind them. Whatever they were for, he quickly ruled out
'blood sacrifice', for them anyway. These were elvin children,
they would live to watch death's thrills from up in the front
seats another day. Maybe this was the first deathmatch they've
ever seen. Maybe it wasn't.
A conductor in a tuxedo positioned himself in front of the choir
and gave an orderly bow to the audience. From the speakers
above, two trumpets played a few entangled notes of militaristic
fanfare as, starting in dots and following in huddled masses,
the crowd stood up and pressed their right hands to their
hearts.
The conductor raised his arms and drew the low swooping song out
of the silence. The pride of an empire was given rumbling voice
by the block of male tenors at the back and their stone
expressions. Most of the eighty thousand mouths of the crowd
moved quietly together, filling the arena with a quiet hum,
tears trickling down a few faces. Then came the angelic choir
boys and girls who lifted the song up out of low thunderclouds
and up to the heavens, to the god who watched over this nation.
John felt sick despite the translucent sheet of goosebumps that
had fallen on his skin.
Every light centred on one point, behind the choir and - steel
hand against hollow black chest - Boss' real competitor ascended
from the opened hole in the ground.
About fifteen or twenty feet tall, it looked like one of the
police officers or their weapons, an angular, armoured body with
a curved mask of black glass where a face should be. A plague of
applause swept over the people as the music came to its
extravagant conclusion. The conductor bowed and some of the
audience cheered and applauded, smiling as a group of children
walked over to the metal creature to accept an oversized bouquet
of fake flowers, which it laid gently in their arms with one
hand. The creature applauded and the crowd followed like circus
seals as the choir filled out of the amphitheatre.
"What's in there? Is it some kind of enchanted golem?"
These were the questions that thrashed about in John's mind,
before the machine looked down at him with the reflective void
where its eyes should have been.
Then began the familiar countdown.
"DIECH!"
The machine did not move, never removing it's gaze from John.
"NEU! OCHED! CAESHED!"
Boss didn't want to provoke the steel giant, so didn't move from
his podium while scanning the arena around them; this time
dotted with various small items and props: a belt of some
strange metal capsules, a section of brick wall.
"CAI! COEG! CAITHER!"
Did this machine analyse tactics in the same way Krodah might
have? Boss tried to remain as still as possible while bracing
himself to sprint over the barrier as soon as it came down.
"TRÉ! DÉ! OIN!"
John fell forward one step but quickly reeled himself back. The
barrier hadn't come down.
On the other side of the wall of spikes, the machine calmly
straightened itself up.
And then it flew.
Boss jumped backwards off the podium and hid behind it as a
cloud of sand devoured the ring, the glow of white-hot fire from
the creature's feet was the only thing he could see through the
murk.
It rose up over the barrier and cast millions of shadows of
grains of dust beneath. The roaring mechanisms cut dead, Boss
shielded his eye and sprinted off to the side just as the great
silver beast slammed down onto the wooden podium, flattening it
completely.
Boss stopped just short of slamming into the stone wall of the
pit and waved away the fading dust in the air to reveal the
machine giant raising its open palm to him. The creature's steel
skin unravelled in shifting plates and the dust began to buzz.
An array of crackling silver dishes inside the hand made a noise
that grew higher and higher in pitch.
Before John had even time to make two bounds, the tension
released in an electric pulse which exploded in his ears and
sent him falling on his face. He didn't hear what happened next,
only felt in his chest the thumping of his heart and the
colossal footsteps that shook the earth rumbling through his
skeleton. A woman's muffled voice rang out through the
amphitheatre, and a screen erected above the top seats displayed
a crowd of green silhouettes dispersing, holding their ears and
running away from a giant. The acute ringing pain in his ears
was distracted only by the low thuds and heavy groans of the
monster's artificial joints, lifting and striking down like
hammers of vengeful gods or short-tempered oafs trying to smack
an insect on a table.
John saw the blurred poles slip down into nothingness, he ran
away and out of the stinging cloud and finally was able to fill
up his heaving lungs. He could just about hear the wonder of the
audience, like he was hearing them from under water, but slowly
rising. A dark, electric voice boomed out something in Elvish
from the cloud, and the machine strode into the clear air;
without distraction, without instinct, without emotion.
Boss swiped one of the items off the ground as he ran past it, a
belt of metal canisters about the size of his fist. A yellow
band around each displayed an image of a hand pulling the pin on
top, but no text of any language.
A panel below the machine's head opened up, and its featureless
glass face ducked down into its chest to be replaced by what
Boss immediately recognised to be some kind of turret. He pulled
the pin off the grenade and threw it at the machine, which
swatted the capsule back to him as it exploded in a burst of
smoke. The audience laughed as John ran out of the cloud. Just
as he was able to open his eye, the sand floor in front of him
was torn apart as the turret started firing. He darted back into
the smoke and felt his way to the shadowy mass of a little
concrete bunker just outside the bulk of the cloud - surely a
trap, but the only chance Boss had - all while the woman's
upbeat voice narrated the machine's functions to the crowd.
He slammed the squeaky, rust-brown door behind him, a few last
bullets thudding against the other side. The bunker was
completely dark and empty except for the vibrations of colossal
footsteps. The crowd chanted as light flooded the little room,
which was being lifted up by fingers dug under the sand.
The metal creature lifted the structure high above its head,
parading it to the applauding crowd as John ran to the other end
of the aren- the spinning barrier was up again,
"choreographed, this time", and John darted over behind a
2-metre high section of brick wall.
Trying to catch his breath and running out of options, he looked
up at one of the two large screens, which was now displaying the
arena from the machine's point of view. John could see the
machine dropping the bunker back down on the ground, and turning
its attention back to him. A line swept across the screen and
the dull-coloured world turned bright blue, except for a
human-shaped mass of red and yellow pressed against a ghostly,
transparent wall. A crosshair closed in just beside his right
foot, and he froze still as he felt the warmth of a beam of red
light cutting through the stone. He watched the view on the
screen as the beam melted his outline into the bricks, burning
the hairs off his arms and tracing over the bend of his
shoulder. "Look at the screen, the beam leaves a red trail,
the only thing redder on that screen than me. Heat visio-"
he stopped mid-thought.
"Oh. Oh, that's wonderful."
After a few moments, the beam reached the bottom of Boss' other
foot, and quickly swept across where the wall met the sand. The
screen changed again to some silhouettes of what looked like
rioters throwing objects at a line of police huddled behind the
machine. It raised one of its feet towards the crowd and as it
did, its physical counterpart in the arena turned on one of its
rockets just enough to start another storm. It grew in intensity
as some of the crowd's projectiles were blown back on
themselves, causing them to disperse. The brick wall was blown
over - as it was likely designed to - leaving only the
Boss-shaped outline to shield him. The second the storm was
over, he took his mad gamble. He tore an empty pocket off his
bandolier and ventured his arm out from behind the wall, waving
the little piece of cloth like a surrender flag. Sure enough,
Boss heard the familiar sound of the machine's head being
replaced by its gun. The screen went back to a first-person
view, from an eye the machine must have had inside the circle of
barrels.
He ran out into the open, having pulled the pin on one grenade
and tearing off another with his teeth. One of them, he threw to
the ground in front of him to create an immediate cloud of
smoke. The other, he tossed to the machine's left side.
"HELLOOOOOOOO DRYADORA!" The crowd gasped and screamed as John
Boss emerged sprinting from the smoke with his collar held above
him like a trophy - having been cut on one side by a laser -
while being chased by a trail of bullets. "MY NAME IS JOHN BOSS!
AND FOR MY NEXT TRICK..." He sprinted up the angled wall of the
little prop bunker, using it like a ramp for him to leap up
towards the turret spewing hot lead, and just as an elf in a
booth hit the shocker button, he threw his collar into an
exposed gap in his electric opponent's neck.
The giant buzzed and popped, its arms limply clanging down to
its sides as its whole body shuddered. Sparks flew out of the
gaps between its various armoured plates, and the towering mass
collapsed backwards onto the sand. "So!" announced John Boss,
striding back onto the bunker's roof as if it were a stage.
"What did I win?" He grinned at the stunned crowd. A booming,
screeching, garbled voice declared something in Elvish and the
twitching machine clambered back upright.
The audience screamed with joy as their metal hero stood up
straight, despite the continued sparking and spasms, and began
spinning its turret.
The audience screamed as the rockets in their metal hero's feet
fizzled and exploded into life, and the turret began firing
indiscriminately.
John Boss saw his chance to escape, and leapt over onto the
machine's foot as it ascended past him. An announcer shouted
incoherently, barely audible over the circle of tens of
thousands of screaming people and the deafening roar of the gun
starting and stopping randomly. The people in the front rows
pressed against each other, fell over the seats, or got crushed
to death by the stampede as the jets of fire rose over the
barrier and incinerated everything below. Boss jumped from the
machine's toe and started hopping across the tops of seats in
what little space there was to move above the wild stampede of
terrified people huddling towards the aisles and crushing
together in the vomitoria. The mid-to-upper rows of the
amphitheatre were so densely packed as to form a near-solid mass
of hands and hats and faces, which Boss was more than happy to
clamber over, most people so afraid of him that they didn't try
to drag him down with them.
Finally, he reached the ring of white marble murals and
effortlessly clambered up a sculpture of a gladiator stabbing
his spear into a boar. He pulled himself up the guardrail of a
walkway above the colosseum's outer wall, and ran towards the
cable supporting the nearest beam of the raised red sails around
the top.
He puzzled over the panel of buttons and lights, when he felt a
pressure on the back of his head. "Satd!" commanded a voice
behind him. John slowly raised his hands and turned around to
face the police officer holding a handgun to his face.
John gave a friendly smile, just as the crowd started screaming
even louder, agonising, the flames had reached people. In a
panic, the officer turned his head away for just a second and
Boss grabbed his hand, raised it up and knocked him out with a
single, audibly satisfying punch. The officer fell to the ground
and John pressed the gun to the cable and shot it apart. The
beam fell down before stopping halfway with a metallic groan
from its neighbours, this was all Boss needed. He tossed the
empty gun aside and ran up the sloping beam, stopping at its tip
and looking down at the arena below. From here, he could hear
the terror of the people being engulfed in fire.
"Wait for it..." The machine edged closer to below
where Boss was standing, consuming a few more people every few
seconds. "Wait..."
He heard the sound of a door swinging open, boots against the
walkway, and guns being pointed at his back. He turned to them,
and they shouted at him, gesturing to come down. "It it's all
right by you gentlemen, I have a show to keep on the road."
John Boss fell backwards off the beam, somersaulting to face the
ground, and grabbed the back of the machine's turret head. He
grunted as he slammed into the creature's back, having hit with
just enough downward force to tip it over. The rocket fire
claimed a few more as the colossus fell backwards, careering
back into the actual arena. Boss let go and dropped to the sand
as the machine flew into the wall of hungry spikes and became
entangled, chunks of metal being shot out the other side at
fatal speeds and a shower of fuel ignited mid air as the entire
machine exploded violently. The rockets cut out, and the
creature's metallic screeching faded as the spikes became
clogged up.
As the dust settled, dozens of armoured police officers poured
out of one of the gates, surrounding Boss with rifles trained on
every part of his body, but staying a good distance away. He
gave no resistance to his arrest, just smiling a little at the
orange glow from the machine's wreckage. "Well," he said as the
handcuffs clicked around his wrists and chemicals subdued him.
"You wanted a show."