Borderlands: Unconquered (22 page)

Only she couldn’t reach the gate. Her hands were free, but her ankles were locked into a long chain attached to an iron pole in the middle of her cage. She’d tried the chains over and over, never got any give in them.

Cursing in frustration, she turned away from the gate, walked back to the fence. There was no way under the fence—the links extended
under her too, beneath a covering of dirt. And there was no way over it.

She had one hope, which was chained up on that slab of stone out there.

•  •  •

Roland had moved the outrunner back from the edge of the bluff, and now he and Mordecai lay flat on the verge, peering out over the shallow valley and the small, open-air, oblong coliseum almost directly below. The ramshackle arena was so close
that if Roland were to back up, take a run and a long jump, he might be able to jump onto the top of its curved outer wall.

Mordecai stared at the arena, roughly built of random slabs of thin metal, with wooden posts at intervals, wooden bleachers. “Looks like they went to the Rust Commons, scavenged some junk, and built that piece-of-crap coliseum in no time.”

“Using mostly slave labor—yeah.
You think that’s Brick down there?” Roland asked. There was a good deal of dust blowing by, and he wasn’t quite sure. But it looked like his old “friend” Brick, chained up in the middle of the killing ground.

“Looks like him,” Mordecai said. “And that’s gotta be Gynella’s little pets yelling at him from the cheap seats. I can smell ’em from here. And there’s her banner. And—hey! Is that
Daphne
?”

There was a small dark woman in a sort of cage, half hidden by the nearer wall of the coliseum—shadow draped her, making it hard to be certain. “Might be her. I’m not sure. Wait—Gumble had a sniper rifle in the outrunner. It’s got a scope on it.”

He got up, trotted to the outrunner, got the sniper rifle, a loaded Atlas GGN350 Long Cyclops, and brought it back to the cliff. He lay down, got
the rifle in position, and looked through the scope.

At just that moment, the shackles around Brick’s neck, unlocked by a remote-control device
controlled by Runch, fell away, clanking to the ground. And Brick was free . . . free to die.

But to die fighting—that was a beautiful thing.

•  •  •

Gynella’s pavilion had been removed from the coliseum’s killing field, and a wooden post stood in
its place. Daphne didn’t like the look of that post.

She turned at a clattering sound and saw a bald, hunchbacked woman in dirty gray armor and bullet-scarred leggings unlocking the back gate of the cage. The hunchback’s name was Pestra, Daphne knew—part of Gynella’s women’s retinue. Instead of hair and eyebrows, Pestra had tattoos representing permed hair and arching eyebrows, the
appearance
of hair tattooed on her head.

She walked slowly toward Daphne, her steel boots thumping the ground.

Maybe this was the moment. Pestra would have to unlock her shackles—she had that pistol in her hand, but it wasn’t pointed at Daphne . . .

“I can see it in your eyes, what you’re thinking,” Pestra said, in a low, dull voice. She made a low sound,
hur, hur, hur
, and after a moment Daphne decided
it was this woman’s version of laughter. “I see you’re gonna try’n jump me. But see . . .” She stopped just out of reach and aimed the pistol. “Not going to happen.”

She fired, and the pistol hissed. Daphne felt a small, fierce, stinging pain just over her sternum,
and she looked down to see a dart sticking there. She plucked it out, but the drug was already in her.

Was it the drug that Gynella
used on her men? Would it work on her? Would Gynella turn her inside out?

A tide of sickly greenness washed over Daphne, thick and cold, and she fell to her knees. She could see her own hands spasmodically clutching the air in front of her—they looked green. Everything looked green.

She tried to lift her arms—they were too heavy to lift.

The hunchbacked woman unlocked the shackles at Daphne’s
ankles, but Daphne couldn’t make a move against her. She could barely keep on breathing.

Pestra took Daphne by the neck and dragged her to the door of the cage. Daphne was distantly aware of the Psychos in the audience clapping, hooting, demanding they be given their chance at her.

A green blur, a change of position, then Daphne saw the darkening sky, starting to show a few stars overhead, as
she was dragged by the neck across the ground. She had difficulty breathing, but it didn’t seem to matter.

Harder to breathe; harder yet. Time slipped into green ooze, and she must’ve lost consciousness for a few minutes. She wallowed in a toxic green
sea . . . until suddenly light stabbed through. Her eyes popped open, and she gasped, sucking in air. She was awake and found she was lying on
her back in the middle of the coliseum. She struggled to move and managed to sit up. The paralysis drug was wearing off; the greenness was draining away, and true colors were slowly returning. She looked behind her—the motion hurt a little, because of a tight metal shackle around her neck. It was attached to a chain that reached two meters before connecting with a steel pin in a wooden post.

Head throbbing, Daphne turned to look at Brick and was surprised to see he didn’t have his shackles on anymore. He was standing on that flat stone, staring past her, at something beyond.

The crowd roared—and Daphne
knew.

She looked anyway and saw the Goliath come through a wide rusty metal gate opening at the other end of the arena.

The Goliath was big, towering over any ordinary man, and must
have outweighed Brick, she guessed, by about double. The Goliath had once been an ex-con, brought to this planet like so many others to work in penal servitude, then abandoned by the Dahl Corporation. Now he’d mutated, twisted by Eridium radiation and experimental steroids, into this obscenely muscular, oversized hulk with a swag belly and arms like tree trunks and a strangely small head. The Goliath’s
head
was quite disproportionately small compared with his body, the entire skull encased in a crude gray metal, flat-topped helmet completely concealing his face. He wore a vest that was too small for the enormous barrel of his torso, brown leather trousers on rather squat legs, big rubbery boots. He didn’t seem to be wearing a shield—probably usually didn’t need one. Most bullets would be like
mosquito bites to a Goliath, so long as that head was armored.

She could feel the ground shaking with each of the Goliath’s thumping steps as it stumped toward Brick.

The Goliath shook his massive fists at Brick, rumbly voice coming muffled but audible through the helmet: “Get ready for . . . HURT!”—and the crowd went wild with sadistic delight.

“Brick!” Daphne hissed, as Brick stalked toward
the Goliath. “Brick—how about if you just smash down that wooden post, set me free, carry me out of here! You can dodge past the Goliath! Bash the gate down! Let’s just get outta here!”

Brick looked at her, eyebrows bobbing in surprise at her suggestion. “Run?
Me?
”

“Brick—you’ve been injured, weakened, and he’s . . . big. Very, very big. And I’ve heard those things can change and get
bigger
.”

“I will set you free,” Brick said, nodding. “As soon as I kill this big slob over here.”

Daphne groaned. Brick marched past her, toward the Goliath.

The Goliath threw his head back, pounded his fists on his chest, and roared, “ALWAYS KILL! GET READY FOR HURT!”

Not particularly articulate, is he?
thought Daphne torpidly.

Brick responded with his own bellowed declaration of destruction as he
leaned forward and rushed toward the Goliath. “You . . . better . . . RUN!”

Then Brick was upon the Goliath, ducking under the swing of the mutant’s enormous right fist, slamming his own gloved, studded fists hard into the Goliath’s belly, a left and a right blur-fast, deep into that swag belly.

The Goliath roared and took one staggering step back. “Ouch!” he yelled. “A little hurt!”

A wave
of laughter swept over the crowd.

Brick kept coming with freight-train force, hitting the Goliath with a tackle around the knees, and the huge mutant fell over, facedown, his helmet ringing on the ground like a badly made bell.

The Psychos came to their feet in the bleachers, jumping up and down in outraged excitement.

Brick squirmed free of the Goliath’s legs, was up, turning and jumping,
body-slamming on the Goliath just as the mutant got to his hands and knees.

The Goliath grunted as Brick knocked him flat again.

Daphne grinned, thinking maybe Brick was going to win after all. Feeling the paralysis dissipate a little more with each passing second, she looked around for Gynella and spotted the General Goddess in a special, decorated viewing box, with her banner hanging in front
of it, in the lowest row of the coliseum. She saw Presta standing protectively behind Gynella on one side, Broomy on another. Runch was standing on the field, just beside his Goddess’s coliseum box, in case anyone should rush her. He had the rocket launcher in his hand and seemed impatient to use it.

Daphne heard an
oof
and a grunt of pain from Brick, turned to see the Goliath had turned the
tables on Brick, slammed him to the ground, was now getting up and looming over him. Brick looked as if he was wheezing, breath knocked out of him.

Oh shit,
Daphne thought.

She stood up, took a deep breath, and yelled, at the top of her lungs, “Hey, Goliath! Hey, dumbass!
Hey, bucket head!
Over here!”

The Goliath lifted his head and turned to see who was shouting at him.

He stared at Daphne.
She blew him a kiss.

The crowd roared at that.

But in distracting the mutant she’d given Brick
a chance to get to his feet, and when the Goliath turned back around, he was met by Brick jumping up and smashing his mailed fist hard into the giant’s crotch.

The Goliath howled in pain and bent double—and Brick cracked him with an uppercut to the chin.

The Goliath staggered back, three steps. Then
got his feet under him and rushed at Brick, shouting, “Deathtastic! And DIE!”

And he clapped his fists together—with Brick’s head in between. The double impact was an ugly sound to hear.

Brick yelled in pain and fury and quivered.

Daphne knew what was coming. Brick was going into his
berserk
state. She’d seen it when they were defending the mine by Jawbone Ridge.

Brick’s muscles seemed to
flex to twice their previous size, the veins standing out, his face going mottled, his teeth clenching, his eyes crazy wild.

“Rauugh!”
Brick thundered. “BLOOD!”

And he hit the Goliath with a rushing shoulder slam, powering into the big mutant’s belly with such force the Goliath backpedaled five times and went over backward.

“BLOOOOOD!” Brick howled, and rushed toward the fallen Goliath, who
proved surprisingly agile. The Goliath rolled, got to his feet, turned—

And was met by the still-berserker Brick
leaping up to smash a fist into that helmet, just under the chin.

The helmet cracked down the middle and flew off the Goliath’s head, spinning away in two halves.

The giant’s exposed face was blanched, emaciated, flattened by the helmet—and as Daphne watched, aghast, the Goliath’s
head began to quiver within itself, like an egg with an infant reptile breaking out of it. Brick was hauling back for another powerful punch, but the Goliath planted those big hands on Brick’s shoulders, held him at arm’s length, as the mutant transformation was completed.

Daphne had heard of the phenomenon—the most perverse aspect of the Goliath’s mutation. The Goliath’s entire body swelled
up; it grew—as if the giant were trying to show that its “berserk” was more berserk than Brick’s—increasing in size, more than doubling its heft, somehow expanding its physical mass, and rapidly changing color, turning bright glossy red, head to toe, the veins standing out on its scarlet body.

Brick took an unsteady step back, unsure of what was happening. He watched in puzzled fascination.

But the head changed even more drastically.

Its mouth opened wide, wider, wider . . .
impossibly
wide. And something wriggled within it, the
skull itself trying to break free from the sheath of skin and tissue. Some of the crowd gasped, some cheered, others fell gapingly silent, as the impossible elasticity of the Goliath’s mouth allowed it to vomit forth the Goliath’s skull.

That’s how it looked
to Daphne, as if the Goliath was vomiting out its own skull.

The skull, complete with eyes and tongue, came squirming out of the mouth like a profane birth, blood dripping from it, blood spurting from the nose—and the nose was now on the back of the head, as if the skin of the face and scalp and neck was part of a hoodie that had been pushed back.

The skull popped completely free and swayed
like a cobra on the spine, which seemed to have a life of its own.

All the time the bright red body was still swelling, veins distending till they seemed about to explode from interior pressure, most of its clothing ripped away from it, torn apart from within.

The skull waved this way and that on the flexible, bloody spine, and it looked at Brick with its lidless eyes. The mouth opened, and
the bloody skull tried to speak. But all that emerged from its clacking jaws was a burbling sound.

Then this doubled and doubly hideous Goliath charged Brick, swinging massive bright red arms—they were even more massive now, after this metamorphosis—and although Brick made
a powerful defensive move with his forearms to block, the Goliath’s blows smashed him off his feet, flipped him to the side.
Brick rolled over onto his back, stunned, blood bubbling from his mouth.

Daphne groaned.

The Goliath’s skull, like a sick joke on a jack-in-the-box children’s toy, bobbled on its neck as it tried to speak. “Gubble . . . blooble . . .”

The enormous red mutant turned and stalked toward Daphne, and she thought,
This is it, it’s going to rip my legs off and dance in what’s left of me.