Flotsam Prison Blues

by M. K. Gibson

  “We? Us?”

  “Father Grimm and I. The spooky dude in robes you saw me sitting with.”

  “What can you tell me about him?”

  “Only that he likes his privacy more than I do. If you want to know about him, you ask him. Only he isn’t as nice as I am.” I smiled.

  Abigail laughed a little. “Fair enough. OK Mr. Salem, you are off the hook for now,” she said, releasing my hand. “But I really want to do an exposé on you and your people one day. You’ll let me, won’t you?”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Do I need to give you the ‘I’ll blow your house up’ speech again?”

  “Fine, you win for now. But let me ask you one other important thing?”

  “OK, shoot.”

  “Would you like to go out sometime?” she asked bluntly. The empowered women of the eighties would be proud.

  “Why me?”

  “You are intriguing. I like that. And you can resist my feminine charms. Mostly. So I can’t have that. I have to eventually break you.” She smiled and looked at me like a cat does the mouse.

  Hell. My dating life was in the crapper, so why not?

  “Sure.”

  “Good. I already have your contact information. I’ll call you.”

  “I look forward to it. But you will have to excuse me; I have business with Ricky,” I said as I held up my drink. She held up her own and we had a small toast.

  “Slainte,” she said as she knocked back her whiskey. I drained my own drink and set down my glass. Then a thought occurred to me.

  “Slainte?” I asked.

  “It means ‘To your health’ in Gaelic,” she informed me.

  “I know. My father was Scot-Irish.”

  “So was my whole family,” she said, smiling. I smiled back, shook her hand goodbye, and walked away to meet back up with Grimm.

  Problem was, there was no more Ireland. The Emerald Isle was lost in the first Demon War during the Verdant Extermination when the people of Ireland, North and South, banded together to stop an invasion. When demons invading from Britain kept flooding in, the Irish detonated several low-yield nukes, paying the ultimate cost, but stopping the invading hordes as they did the Romans centuries before.

  Never piss off the Irish.

  So how did a seemingly young woman of this age know the expression? Eh, maybe I was just getting paranoid in my old age.

  It was time to see Ricky and get to the bottom of who was trying to kill me.

  Chapter Eleven

  Sympathy for the Devil

  Ricky chomped on a cigar and smiled at me. It was . . . unsettling. Not for any other reason than when Ricky smiled that way, it usually meant his mind was spinning in a thousand demented directions and only he knew the outcome. It probably also meant that he was thinking of a new way to screw with me.

  I needed better friends.

  From the overstuffed rolling chair, I kicked my feet up on the long rectangular table that was at the center of the control room adjacent to Ricky’s private office. The dark room was large and rectangular, glowing blue with ultra-def monitors everywhere. With the lights, you could make out the concrete walls, hanging power cables, and augmented octopuses. Oh, did I fail to mention that?

  Within specially designed water tanks were hundreds of genetically modified octopuses. Each was wired directly into one of the monitors, watching a feed from somewhere within New Golgotha or the Ultra Net. These lil’ bastards spent endless hours watching and searching, flipping channels and gathering anything useful. Their inputs and impressions were fed directly to the man in the central control chair. The Field.

  The Field was a cyborg with a neural link to his machines and octopuses. Through a series wet-wired brain implants, he saw what they saw. Yet he was also still capable of watching old pirated movies, playing video games from the 2000s, smoking like a chimney, and putting down energy drinks like a champ. If this had been the old world, he might have been called a nerd. But in this world—well, he was still a nerd. But a nerd who could find any piece of digital information floating out there.

  “So, tell me again what happened?” Ricky asked as he smoked his cigar and reclined in his chair.

  Sitting next to me, Grimm took point and clinically recounted the events that led us there. The rocket attack on the trans-kingdom, the stealing from my vaults, the modified Deep Ones and assassin attack at Vault 47. Grimm looked to me afterward, checking for accuracy.

  “Yeah, that’s about it. I mean, I would’ve told the story with dramatic flair and sound effects. Thrown in some titties for color.” I smirked. Grimm rolled his eyes and Ricky smiled.

  Grimm said, turning to Ricky, “Salem’s breast fixation and swearing aside, yes, those were the events that led us here.”

  Ricky pondered a moment, sitting back in his chair with his hands on top of his shaved head. Ricky was short but heavily muscled and was dressed as he normally was—dark gray, sleeveless work shirt with his name embroidered on a patch above the left pocket, heavy black jeans complete with a chain wallet, and big-ass motorcycle boots. And, of course, his ever present black-as-pitch sunglasses.

  Ricky leaned forward, putting his elbows on the heavy wooden table, and ashed his cigar in a heavy, angular crystal ashtray. “Well, sounds like you boys are just plain fucked.”

  “Gee. That was helpful,” I said, lighting a smoke of my own.

  “I am inclined to agree,” Grimm said, backing me up.

  Ricky shrugged. “Un-fuck your situation then.”

  “We’re trying. That’s why we’re here,” I said, staring at Ricky sternly. I could only hold that man’s look for a moment before I had to look away. There was too much power behind those sunglasses.

  I always needed to remember that Ricky was no man. And more importantly, I didn’t know what his end game was. I wasn’t stupid. I realized he had gently negotiated Grimm and me together to bring down Abraxas. After which Ricky’s bed-buddy, Lady Bathin, became Ars Goetia’s new archduchess.

  “With your permission, we would like The Field to take a look at my 1-D cameras,” I said. “I figured he would have the gear here to assemble the data streams and we could get a look at the thief who raided my vaults.”

  Ricky cocked his head to one side. “I don’t know. You could be biting off more than you can chew. You may just want to consider this a loss and move on. Besides, if I remember correctly, Vault 47 was where you kept your private and painful memories. If they’re gone, you can let go of the painful past and move on.”

  “Yeah, it was. But I don’t remember ever telling you that.”

  “Heh,” Ricky chuckled. “You didn’t.”

  Hell.

  Ricky stood up and made his way over to the wall and tapped a sequence on a panel I didn’t know was there. A section of wall revolved into a vintage 1950s cocktail bar. A no-shit, “Honey I’m home, where’s my martini” bar.

  “Well hell, if it’s happy hour, hook me up,” I told Ricky, who nodded and began mixing drinks. “So, will you help?”

  While shaking a whiskey sour for me and a martini for himself, Ricky gestured around the room in general. “This whole place, above and below, is a vault of my own, I guess. The consequences of my past are here.”

  “Does that mean you get why we’re here and why we need help?”

  Ricky sipped at his martini, thinking. He rubbed at his jaw and eventually smiled. “You’ll get help. But I see bad things coming your way if you go down this path.” Ricky tapped on the panel again and the bar swung back into its hidden hole in the wall. He made his way to the door, then stopped.

  “Field, give them all the assistance they need. Full access. I’ve got work to do.” And with that Ricky left the room with only the sweet stink of his expensive cigar lingering in the air for us to remember him by.

  “Got it, boss,” The Field said, holding his hand up, not looking up from his monitors and continuing to do, well, whatever the hell it was that he did all day.

  **************
**********

  Ricky walked down the hall leaving The Victim and The Smuggler with his aspect known as “The Field.” The entity known as Ricky came to his office door, the red door. The door swung open at his approach and glowed as it did only for him, submissive to the former Master of Hell.

  Ricky dropped heavily into his authentic Star Trek: The Next Generation captain’s chair. He put his feet up on his desk, and his heavy boot knocked over several day-old beer bottles, which clanked and fell to the ground.

  Ricky reached lazily over to his VidComm and punched out an ID number. The holo device projected the ultra-def real time image of the call’s recipient.

  “Everything is in motion. Ensure you do your part. EXACTLY as I’ve laid out,” Ricky said, and immediately canceled the call.

  Ricky reverted to his form as Lucifer Morningstar, First of the Fourteen, Child of Light, The Devil. Reclining in his chair, The Devil pulled out another cigar from his shirt pocket and lit it with the glowing tip of his left index finger. He waved his hand and the motion tracking software that ran his audio system played The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.”

  Lucifer smoked, smiled, and sang along.

  Chapter Twelve

  Demonic Hipster Douche

  The Field set up the equipment for my 1-Dimension cameras. While he did that, I kept looking for the hidden panel Ricky tapped to make that super-pimp wet bar come out.

  “It’s ready,” The Field announced. “Gimme the cameras.”

  “You could say ‘please,’ you know. It wouldn’t kill you.” I held out my hand to Father Grimm for my cameras. “Gimme.”

  “Say please.” Grimm said.

  “Please,” I said, and Grimm handed me the cameras. “See, Field, that wasn’t so hard.”

  The Field stomped over to me. He was built similar to Ricky. Short, stocky, and strong. He wore his ever present “Anti-Hero” baseball cap and his old world Oakley Blades sunglasses. Also like Ricky, he wore a sleeveless work shirt, and I could see that a tribal-style dragon tattoo wrapped up and down his right arm and into his clothing.

  I never realized how intimidating the guy could be. Usually he was plugged in, literally, to his cyber world and just consumed intelligence, along with mass amounts of nicotine and caffeine. The way he advanced on me was primal. The Field snatched the three cameras out of my hand like a viper.

  “Gimme the fucking cameras or I’ll break your goddamn arm.” His voice sounded like he gargled broken tequila bottles. He stomped back to his work table and paused. “Please.”

  “See, did that hurt?” I smirked.

  The Field took the cameras and jacked them into his master system. The room dimmed as all the octopuses’ monitors lowered their brightness levels. I looked around, taking it in. From The Field’s command chair, I could barely make out the glowing tip of his cigarette and his plugging a receiver cord into the back of his head.

  “Mood lighting?” I asked. In response, The Field tapped just one key on his holoboard, and that large wooden desk where Grimm and I sat began to glow a brilliant electric blue. Slowly, The Field began to run the 1-D cameras’ inputs and the table produced an ultra-def hologram floating in front of us.

  The first input was nothing more than a simple line segment. Hard as it is to imagine, no matter from what angle you tried to look at it, it was nothing more than an incomprehensible piece of data. But as the next two layers melded into each other, the view changed to the interior of Vault 47. Moving around the table, I could see every detail of every item.

  There was a moment, a brief one, when I was filled with a pang of regret and pain. Seeing the items whole again made me relive them. Two hundred short years flew by and each item in that vault was a reminder of a bad decision or an epic moment of stupidity. But now, it was all gone. Maybe Ricky was right. Maybe this was a good time to let it all go.

  “Fast forward this crap,” I told The Field, rubbing at my nose and eyes. Grimm laid a hand on my shoulder and then took it away before it got awkward. Grimm, for all his worldliness and commitment to whatever cause he was championing, never lacked compassion.

  Grimm told me once that humanity was his everlasting goal. And I admit, at first I assumed it was nothing more than a politician’s promise. But he’s proven that promise countless times. Just now, a simple hand on the shoulder meant the world to me.

  Hell. I needed to toughen up. These sentimental thoughts were becoming bad habits around him.

  “Get to the part where the prick who masterminded this shows up,” I said, lighting a smoke and avoiding eye contact with anyone.

  “Why do you think the mastermind him—or her—self would lead the raid on your vault?” Grimm asked. It was a fair question.

  “‘Cause whoever did it is arrogant and brash,” I said, watching the video feed stream by as The Field sped up the display.

  “Why do you believe that?” Grimm continued.

  “Mostly because I would have,” I said, puffing my smoke. “Whoever it was organized an attack on multiple vaults simultaneously. Which meant he or she studied me, knew my secrets, and struck all at once. And since Vault 47 was my special vault, said prick would have led the raid personally.”

  The video feed maintained its rapid viewing of an empty vault, when suddenly the image went blinding white. A moment later the holo-image showed hellion mutts and a couple of cyborg humans filtering in.

  The hellions located and destroyed my traditional surveillance cameras, along with the recorder data storage device, while the cyborgs started laying the plastic explosives on my display cases. They were rigging them to blow when I would eventually come to investigate.

  But they didn’t steal anything. They planted the booby trap and left.

  The cyborgs and the demons cleared out, leaving the vault empty. Then a single figure strode into the room. The hologram composite was a full 360-degree view of the room. From my perspective, he has his back to me, but I could tell he was a demon. You know, wings and scales and horns? Kind of a dead giveaway.

  The figure wore demonic casual clothing. A black criss-crossed wrapped shirt allowing freedom for his wings and leaving his arms bare. My guess was to show off his many silver bracelets and his emerald and white Denochian-script tattoos. He also wore a light brown leather pleated war skirt and a black knit ski hat with his long white hair hanging to the middle of his back. The hat was canted on the back of his head to accommodate his horns and probably to complete the look he was going for.

  Demon hipster douche.

  The Field touched the hologram image and rotated it, so the figure’s face was in view. He was snakelike with slits for a nose. The peculiar thing was, it looked like he was posing for the cameras that he shouldn’t know were there. He turned around and around, giving a full open look of himself.

  “Pause for a sec, please,” I asked The Field. He obliged me, pausing the image, then checked back on his main terminal. I lit a smoke and studied this prick.

  He was a demon, about six and a half feet tall, so a little below average for their kind. He had golden bronze scaled skin with hints of green. So he was a greed and envy mix. That ruled out pure-blood nobility. As the video feed continued, the demon walked about the vault looking at the preserved items and the explosives.

  “Grimm, you recognize this guy? I’m drawing a blank,” I asked.

  Grimm moved his battered gaucho stetson hat back a little and studied the holo-image intently. “No,” Grimm said, and inclined his chin back to the holo-image. I looked, and mystery dick was taking one damn item.

  Jensen’s arm. Still preserved in the mini-stasis case.

  “Who the hell is this guy?!” I growled. I brought my fists down hard on the table and the holo-image flickered.

  “His name is Andromalius,” The Field said as he resumed his position by the glowing table. When Grimm and I both looked perplexed, The Field shook his head. “While you two hens were clucking, I ran a facial recognition program and a background check
. Andromalius is a collector from Windy Spires, the upper northeast elite district of Ars Goetia. He is rich and apparently powerful.”

  “You got an address on this clown?”

  “Yup,” The Field said, tapping out commands on his holo-terminal. The video feed hologram on the table stopped and was replaced by an interactive digital map of New Golgotha. The map zoomed and twisted, settling on a location just outside of Windy Spires.

  “That is the location of his prime display museum.” A few command strokes and the map shifted slightly, revealing a well-fortified warehouse a couple of blocks away. “And this is his warehouse. And below that is his private vault.”

  I whistled. “Damn. How did you find this so fast?”

  The Field took the second smoke he bummed off me from behind his ear and lit it. “Because making the Ultra Net my bitch is what I was made to do.”

  “You do good work, my man,” I told him. The ever-stoic Grimm nodded in agreement.

  “Do you think you could assist us with another issue?” Father Grimm asked The Field.

  “Sadly, yes. Ricky said full access. I am at your disposal for now.”

  “Good. Salem, perhaps this is the time to discover the identity of the assassin and his contract out on you,” Grimm offered.

  “Yeah. Guess it is. Hey Field, you have a wireless short-range data port receiver in here?” I asked. The Field just stared at me as if to say “Bitch, please.” “Yeah yeah. OK, prepare to receive,” I told him. I mentally commanded my Collective to open a time-delay decay data port and transmit the fight Grimm and I recently had at the junkyard.

  “Got it. Bringing it up now.” The Field brought the feed up on the table’s holo-projector. It picked up right when I shot Legion in the knees, continued through Grimm running him over (always funny, by the way), and ended with his blowing his own head off.

  “He said his name was Legion and he was talking to someone named ‘Vox’. From the sound of it, ‘Vox’ was his boss,” I added.