“I’m coming into some money,” Dan said, relieved to finally be able to get down to business. “I’ll be able to pay down some of what I owe.”
Dehog’s face, which had brightened through the first part of Dan’s sentence, darkened again. “You will be able to? Uh-oh. Alarm bells are ringing. Hear that? Ting-ting-ting-ting. I think what you’re telling me is that you’re not here to pay us now.”
“Tomorrow,” Dan said. “I’ll have the money tomorrow.”
The gangster’s spines quivered. His voice, when it emerged, was flat and controlled. “Tomorrow.” He sighed. “Remember what I said about promises, Mr Deadman? ‘A promise…?’”
Dan puffed out his cheeks. “Is a wish your heart makes? I don’t know. I wasn’t really listening.”
Dehog’s eyes became glassy and cold. “Arka.”
“A promise made is a debt unpaid.”
“A promise made is a debt unpaid, Mr Deadman.” He retrieved the notebook from the desk. “Let’s see, were we coming to visit you so that your debt could continue to remain unpaid?”
Dehog clicked his tongue against those pointed teeth as he read the notes written in the margins of his list. “No. No, it looks like we’re at cross-purposes.”
Taking out his pencil again, he turned it around and used the eraser on the end to remove the tick he’d written there just moments before. “Oh. Oh, now that is disappointing,” he said. “A to-done undone. I do hate it when that happens.”
He nodded, just a fraction, and something hard and heavy hit Dan across the back of the head. Light exploded behind his eyes and he staggered forwards. Another blow came out of nowhere, hammering against his eye socket and spinning him all the way around.
Dan’s instincts screamed at him to put his hands up, but he fought against them. Fighting back was a bad idea. Even if he took out Arka and the other two, Shornack had an endless supply of grunts, an assortment of industrial power tools, and a terrifyingly creative imagination. There wasn’t a whole lot she could do to him, but – much as he hated to admit it – he had others to think about, and whatever she did to them, she would take an enormous amount of pleasure in making him watch.
And so, he let Arka hit him again – an elbow this time, that caught him in the throat. If he’d needed to breathe, that might have been a problem. His vision began to clear just in time to see the Symmorium’s scarred snout snapping towards him. Arka’s height advantage meant the headbutt hit Dan above the nose, which was good, but it hit like a battering ram, rattling his brain around in his skull. Which was less good.
Dan tried to angle himself to make his torso a more appealing target. His body, for the most part, didn’t feel pain, and anything that got too badly damaged could always be replaced. But the Symmorium clearly knew enough about him to focus on the head, and when a downward-angled left hook caught him across the cheek, Dan’s sense of balance abandoned him, and he sunk to his knees on the floor.
Dehog’s face emerged from the brain-fog and appeared in front of him. Dan blinked, trying to stop the guy drifting in and out of focus.
“Learning is a gift, Mr Deadman,” Dehog said. “Even when pain is your teacher.”
“Where’d you get that one? From a t-shirt?” Dan asked, his jaw grinding together unpleasantly as he slurred the words out.
Dehog’s quills bristled. He stepped back and nodded up to the towering Arka. “Continue the lesson.”
Dan tried to relax. Bracing himself would only make it worse, he knew. Best to try to roll with the punches and minimize the damage.
The next blow was interrupted by a voice from the door.
“Boss-boss.”
A flash of irritation troubled Dehog’s face. He turned to the door. “I told you not to call me…”
His voice tailed off. Dan looked up at Arka’s fist, which had drawn back to prepare for another hammer-strike, but hadn’t yet moved to deliver it. The moment of respite was nice. He tried to enjoy it while it lasted.
“Who’s the girl?” Dehog asked.
Dan felt something cold slither in the pit of his stomach.
No.
Oh no.
“I caught her trying to climb-climb through the window.”
Oh no.
Ollie.
“A thief? Trying to break in and steal from Shornack? Wow. That’s ambitious. I love it!” said Dehog. “You know what I always say about ambition?”
The knot in Dan’s gut tightened when he heard the voice.
“No.”
Definitely Ollie.
“Ambition is about believing in yourself, even when no-one else in the world does,” Dehog said, rhyming it off like a message in a greetings card. “Makes you think that, doesn’t it?”
There was a pause for a moment, then Ollie spoke again. “Does it? About what?”
Dehog smiled, but it was the smile of someone tired of having to suffer fools. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. He gestured to the robo-brain, then to Arka. “You. Kill her. You. Knock him around a bit more. I want to make sure we leave an impression.”
“You got it, boss,” said Arka, who knew better than to take Dehog’s ‘no labels’ schtick at face value. His face twisted in glee as he brought his fist down again. To his surprise, this time Deadman blocked it.
“Sorry,” Dan said, sounding genuinely pained about the situation. “Didn’t expect her to follow me.”
He brought his other arm up sharply between the Symmorium’s legs driving a forearm strike into where he hoped the thug’s balls would be. From the reaction, it was mission accomplished. With a grunt, he slammed his elbow into the inside of Arka’s knee, buckling the leg outwards.
Dan rose quickly as the Symmorium dropped. The top of his head met the tip of Arka’s snout. The thug squealed as pain went off like a bomb blast in the cluster of nerves that were gathered there and he staggered backwards towards the desk, forcing Dehog to jump clear.
Spinning, Dan started lumbering in Ollie’s direction, the beating he had taken making his head spin and turning every step into a game of chance.
When Ollie had first arrived, she’d had a necklace – some kind of magical Malwhere amulet that had protected her from harm. Its power had blown one of Shornack’s Igneon Enforcers to pieces, but the necklace was gone now, and so she was completely helpless in the grip of the brain-bot. Dan had to reach her before it was too late.
But then, all of a sudden, it was too late. A long sliver of a blade slid from the mechanoid’s arm.
Ollie screamed.
There was a loud bang.
Dan threw up his hands to protect himself as several thousand pieces of scrap metal and glass came whistling past. He looked up again in time to see a substantial amount of brain matter go splat against the ‘A mind stretched by new experiences can never go back to its old shape’ poster, which actually felt like quite a fitting end.
Silence descended. Or near-silence, at least, punctuated only by the wheezing of Arka and the dripping of the robo-thing’s brain mush.
Ollie stood near the doorway in a state of mute shock. She gaped at her hands as if she didn’t quite recognize them, turning them over and back so she could examine them from both sides.
“Um… Was that me?”
“You blew up another one,” said Dan, looking more than a little shocked himself. “You blew up another one of Shornack’s guys.” He frowned, as the obvious question formed in his head. “How did you do that?”
“I don’t know,” Ollie admitted. “Sort of… pktchow. You know what I mean? Like… katchoom! Like roooosh—”
Dan sighed and spoke over her before she could finish the sound effect. “Well, let’s not get too bogged down in the science, shall we?”
He turned to Dehog, his mind racing as he tried to figure out what to say, or what best course of action to take. He needn’t have bothered. Dehog was bent backwards across the desk, a large serrated cog embedded halfway through his forehead. A variety of other metal parts had either buried
themselves in the Enforcer’s torso, or punched straight through it. Dan and Ollie both watched as Dehog’s body slid sideways, then fell face-first to the floor, forcing the cog right out through the back of his spiny skull.
There was silence again. Proper silence this time. The brain had stopped dripping. Arka had stopped wheezing, too, thanks to the lengthy piece of robot shrapnel that was jutting out of his windpipe.
Dan had his fair share of lacerations and piercings, too, although nothing anywhere vital. He plucked the worst of them out, then let them fall to the floor with a series of clunks.
“Well,” he said, once that was done. He turned to Ollie and gestured to the bodies. “This is a problem.”
Ollie cast her eye across the room. “Is it?”
“Yes. Yes, it is,” said Dan. “You’ve now killed… what? Four of Shornack’s guys. That’s problematic.”
“They were trying to hurt you,” Ollie pointed out.
“So? They rough me up a little, makes them feel good about themselves and stops them paying the office a visit when I’m not around. I pay down my debt tomorrow, and everything just cruises along without any issues. Everyone’s happy.”
He jabbed a finger in Ollie’s direction. “You shouldn’t have come after me. This is nothing to do with you.”
“I heard you go out. I wanted to make sure you were OK.”
Dan’s face screwed up in anger, but he managed to hit some kind of release valve and most of his rage ejected out through his nostrils as a long sigh. “That’s not your job,” he said. “Everything was going just fine until you turned up.”
“I was just trying to help,” Ollie said.
“Well you didn’t. You made it worse,” Dan said. He gestured to her hands, which she still held raised. “And do me a favor? Point those somewhere else until you work out how to use them.”
Ollie let her hands drop, but looked down at them by her side. “How did I do that? How did I make that metal man explode?”
Dan shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine,” he said, gesturing towards the door. “For now, let’s just get out of here and…”
He stopped talking when a siren wailed from just outside. It was quickly joined by another, then another. Colored lights licked across the ceiling beside the window.
“Aw shizz. You’ve got to be kidding me,” Dan whispered, darting over to beside the window. Six Tribunal hover vehicles glided to a stop in the street below. Distant sirens indicated more were on the way.
“Hey, isn’t that those police guys?” Ollie asked, appearing silently at Dan’s side and almost making him jump out of his skin.
“Don’t sneak up on me like that,” Dan snapped. “And yes. It’s the Tribunal.”
“That’s good,” said Ollie, although the expression on Dan’s face quickly made her doubt it. “Right?”
“Shornack has half the Tribunal on her payroll,” he explained. “Dehog must’ve pressed an alarm button or something while he was dying. They ain’t here to help us, they’re here to kill us.”
“Oh,” said Ollie. She thought about this for a moment. “What, even me?”
“Even you, kid,” Dan confirmed. He watched the officers fan out around the building. A moment later, there came the crash of a door being smashed off its hinges.
Without looking, Dan pointed towards a narrow door in one corner of the room. “Closet,” he said. “Go in and wait until the coast’s clear. No matter what you hear, don’t come out until you’re sure the place is empty, OK?”
“But what if…?”
“No matter what you hear,” Dan repeated. “Go. Closet. Now.”
Ollie did as she was told and scurried over to the door. “What about you?” she asked, holding the door half open. “You’ll be OK, right?”
“I’ll be OK.”
“Promise?”
Dan glanced out at the street below as more Tribunal cars arrived. “You know what they say about promises?” he asked.
Ollie wrinkled her nose. “No. What?”
Dan shrugged. “Fonk knows. Wasn’t really listening. They’re worth two in a bush, maybe? Just shut the door and shut your mouth,” he said, turning and cracking his knuckles. “And leave the rest to me.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Dan stood at the top of the staircase, listening to the officers approaching. There was no attempt at stealth or secrecy. No effort to hide their approach. Instead, emboldened by the sheer weight of their numbers and the weapons they almost certainly carried, they swarmed up through the building, their jackboots creaking out a chorus on the steps.
Shock and awe. It was a tactic Dan knew only too well, and one he’d employed himself back when he’d been wearing that same uniform. A lot of armed men making a lot of noise. Most days, that was all it took to get the job done.
Most days.
But not today.
Dan placed one hand on the stairwell railing, and jumped. He landed on the steps one level below, more or less exactly in the middle of the Tribunal squad. Technically, he landed on two Tribunal grunts and they landed on the steps, but it wasn’t really the time to split hairs.
Heads, yes. Hairs, no.
The tone of the men’s shouts changed from angry and in charge to angry and clueless as to what the fonk was happening right now.
Shock and awe, Dan thought. Never failed.
A nose exploded beneath his knuckles. Testicles pancaked against the sole of his boot. He caught a wrist before a shock-rod could crack against his skull, and twisted until something inside went snap.
They were wearing armor, of course, but one of the few advantages of having been inside the stuff himself meant he was painfully aware of every weak spot and flaw. He knew, for example, that bringing a knee up just here would crack a couple of ribs, or that a solid uppercut to the chest would force the rigid edge of the armor plating up into the windpipe with enough force to make breathing nothing more than a fond memory for the next few minutes.
Dan whirled around in all the chaos, punching, kicking and gouging, dropping the officers one by one. Most of them had guns, but this close up they couldn’t use them, so they became more of a hindrance than a help.
One of the grunts had figured this out, and was backing away, taking aim as he retreated down the steps. Dan ducked, and another officer lost his head as a kill-shot found the wrong target.
A knife slid between Dan’s ribs to the left of his chest. It wasn’t a standard issue Tribunal weapon, but most of the street-level grunts carried one. Dan saw the sneer of satisfaction on the officer’s face, then watched it become a flicker of doubt as Dan wrenched the knife free again without any obvious ill-effects. After cracking the former owner across the bridge of the nose with the hilt in an attempt to teach him not to be so careless with it, Dan hurled the knife at the gunman. It caught him on the neck before he could line up a second shot. He fired wildly as he fell backwards, blood fountaining from the wound.
Two of the shots went wide and punched holes in the staircase above. A third and fourth managed to take out three Tribunal grunts between them, and Dan sensed panic take hold and start to spread through the squad like wildfire.
He dropped another one with two solid punches to the head. There were only four left standing now, at least one of them nursing a broken bone. All four of them were trying to get away from him, tripping and stumbling up the stairs, which was exactly the direction Dan didn’t want them to go.
He couldn’t catch all of them, so he began to hurry down the steps instead, trying to lure them after him, or at least keep them away from Ollie’s hiding place.
Dan had just turned onto the bottom set of steps when he met the riot squad coming the other way. Unlike the standard armor, the riot squad’s outfit was almost impenetrable. Add in their full-face helmet and blast proof visor, the flickering blue ion shields that seemed to grow organically from the wrist of one arm, and the sonically charged batons they carried, and these guys became a force to be reckoned with. And one tha
t, if you did reckon with them, would almost certainly club you to death.
Going low, Dan took the legs out from under one of the riot officers. He’d hoped for the others to be taken down in a sort of domino effect, but they were either too well-trained or too damn lucky for that. As the first trooper fell, a blast of concentrated sound caught Dan on the side of the head. It was barely a glancing blow, but enough to make his stomach flip and his legs turn to damp sand.
An ion shield hit him with the force of a charging grimtork – a mostly docile creature with a top running speed of sixty miles an hour, and a body weight equivalent to three small family cars. Dan hit the wall, lost his footing, and tumbled down the steps.
The riot squad, like police officers the galaxy over, took the opportunity to stick the boot in whenever it was presented. As Dan slid gracelessly down the stairs, kicks and punches and thwacks from batons helped him on his way. He landed in a tangled heap of coat tails and limbs at the bottom of the steps, and had barely pulled himself upright when another shield-charge sent him staggering into the bar area and crashing through a table.
An upturned chair smashed between him and the floor, and Dan snatched up a piece of the broken wood. A sonic blast screamed at him, but he rolled clumsily clear. Fumbling to his feet, he dodged behind the shield of one of the grunts, and stabbed the pointed tip of the wood into the guy’s wrist. The officer wailed inside his helmet as the shiv stuck all the way through his arm, and Dan tore the man’s shield generator free.
Spinning in a semi-circle, Dan used the flickering blue energy shield to knock another of the grunts aside. He charged towards one of the others, shield raised. A sonic shot caught him side-on, and this time it was no mere glancing blow.
Up became down and left became right and everything that was inside Dan seemed to be trying to force its way outside. And vice versa.
His eyes rolled backwards. His tongue unfurled. Two trickles of black, treacle-like blood oozed from his nostrils. Dan’s brain told him he should really have a quick lie down, blissfully unaware that he was already face down on the floor with a boot pressed against the back of his head and another playing xylophone on his ribcage.
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