Chapter 3
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A not-so-distant rumble of a souped-up 4 cylinder coming through the canyon prompted the seismic sensors of a sentinel to activate. The soft hum of electronic servos whirled away in short bursts, triggered by the hot-red heat signature thundering away down in the valley cleft, just below the sentinel’s mounting high in the bluffs of the Blood Rocks. Its red glowing sensors honed in on the signature as the servos turned to track along, and several clicks of the lens focused from infrared to a visible spectrum. With a short burst of lasers, a series of red lines passed over the bulky, and spikey behemoth driving down below. Just as quickly, the sentinels scanning system overheated, and its own burst of lasers had burnt itself out, but it was enough to gather information. As it cooled above, so below did the rig pull over, and the sentinel transmitted its gathered information.
“Man!” The punk’s high-pitched voice even grated on the Snaggeltooth’s steel nerves. “What the hell?!” he shielded his eyes to look up in to the bluffs. “Hey yo!” he yelled to get anyone’s attention, and he waited as his squirrelly voice echoed around to his own amusement. The only thing that answered back was the wind. “I saw that!”
The sentinel, now cool, focused in on its subject that just haphazardly looked around with no real focus.
“Yeah you! Hidin’ up there with that gravastar! Yeah! I saw you take a pot shot at me! Come on down here and 1 v 1 me, bro!” he shook a fist at the hills. “It’ll be bedlam, yo!” he started to run out of steam and things to say, and figuring no one was there at all, he turned to look at the Snaggeltooth. “Yeah, hehe, I heard lots about you…look at all the spikes on this thing!” he chuckled, proud of himself. “Yeah! It’s intense, hehe,” he said while looking at the two boomstick warheads sticking out from under the front bumper. “Oh man! Seriously?!” he knelt to the ground to peak underneath the rig. His eyes followed the warheads det-cord coiled all the way along the length of the rod to where the wires vanished into the undercarriage. “Looks like they’re all hooked up…”
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The radio in the rig squawked with cross-chat to grab the punk’s attention. “Anyone for Arena?” one voice grunted, then, a few seconds later, “You got my lance!” then another, “And my crossbow!” It almost sounded like a moment of fellowship, comrades in arms joining one another but, then, the grunted voice responded, “You want’em back? Come and get’em!”
The Arena. A twisted joke of a name saddled on the wasteland spoken only by those who’ve been in the grinder too long. Their minds wiped too many times in lost battles against the Ravagers. Minds too broken to tell reality from dreams, or a small skirmish from all-out war. To them, everyone was an enemy. You could tell them apart from the rest of everyone else by their death machines. The word “rig” was just not suitable for the terrifying creations dredged up from the depths of their waking nightmares. You could lean up against a normal rig without a care but lean up against one of these death machines and you were liable to lose a limb. Those that looked at the wasteland like an arena were not the type to be trifled with, and the Steppenwolfs had such people in mind when they designed the Snaggeltooth.
“Yeah…let’s see what this thing can really do…”
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Metal blasted across the front of the rig with a screech as he plowed head long through the mayhem. The punk had followed the radio chatter to a place known as The Factory, a smaller section of a much larger and sprawling industrial complex. No one used it for manufacturing anymore, on account of the massive chemical dump positioned just behind the main building, but today it found its use in a skirmish over scraps. The punk planted the pedal to the metal and shift the gears into the floor, and he ground those gears like there was no tomorrow. It was, like he was fond of saying, bedlam all around the outside of the Snaggeltooth. There was no telling who was fighting for who, and none of that even mattered to the punk who was just out on a joyride. A thunderous rumble pounded on the roof of the rig as he managed to glimpse the sight of its source, a kaiju.
Monsters of weaponry, machines of death, mayhem, metal — twisted metal in maximum overdrive! All of it overwhelmed the punk and, as he came around a blind corner, he had no time to react to the rig right in front of him. The Snaggeltooths boomsticks connected and the punk only heard a fraction of the noise as the blast deafened him on the spot. Blinded by the light, he steered wildly left and right and, then, just as his vision cleared, a severed head slammed down onto the bars of the windshield. Blood splattering through onto the glass.
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