by Lee Bond
Bolo grunted and went to work laying down call-rerouters. They’d let the man get this far, they were going to keep the situation self-contained. Especially if –as Trumann had so bluntly pointed out- Nickels started eating people. The last thing any one of them wanted was for emergency calls to reach local authorities.
Reywin flashed an update to everyone in the flier. Something was happening in the house. Her mouth a grim line of determination, Reywin brought them in closer.
xxx
Following Jimmy, Garth took a right at the bottom of the stairs. Judging from the intense quiet emanating from the room ahead, there were maybe six, seven guys around the corner, all thinking furiously about being invisible. Garth steeled himself for the inevitable.
The moment they came around the corner, someone whacked him on the side of the head with a baseball bat. He fell down with an obliging grunt of pain, gnashing his teeth as the bat smashed across the back of his skull two more times before the assailants switched. Jimmy screamed incoherently at the sudden escalation of violence.
The basement filled quickly with sounds of silent, desperate struggling as Jimmy fought to free himself. A faint cry brought an end to all noises except heavy breathing.
Rough hands grabbed Garth at the shoulders and feet. Playing possum, he opened his eyes a crack, flopping every now and then. Two gangsters hauled him up like a sack of potatoes and threw him into a chair. They started tying him down.
What Garth saw hardened his heart. The fools had signed their own death warrants.
They hadn’t gagged Jimmish. They’d slit his throat from ear to ear so deeply he was already dead. The expression of haunted betrayal on Jimmy’s face was all the accusation Garth needed.
Garth rarely allowed himself the luxury of getting angry. It was self-destructive and impractical. Since coming to Hospitalis, he had done everything in his power to keep from losing his cool because he was not in a friendly neck of the Universe and losing his shit had a tendency to cause major damage. However, what Jamal and Aaron had done was beyond limit. No one in the house would go unpunished.
The innocent, the weak, civilians -like Jimmy- needed to be spared the indignities of a harsh and cruel world so they could go on to forge a new path to a better age where men like him weren’t needed, to a time when men like him couldn’t even exist. The notion was an ember of white-hot rage burning in Garth’s guts. By the time the last knot was tied, he knew two things: prior to his being turned into a thirty thousand year old corpsicle, protecting the innocents had been more than a guideline; it’d been his reason for living. The second was that payment would be rendered, in full.
Hands as big as shovels slapped him ‘awake’. Garth opened his eyes blearily and drooled onto his shirt. He hoped the fuckers appreciated the lengths he was going to here. He was ruining a brand new shirt. He made a mental note to have the tailor make him a new Foreign Devil t-shirt.
“Wake him up.” One of the voices snapped.
From recordings lifted from Vernita’s proteus, the one talking was Vernita’s AfroEgyptian half-brother, Jamal; Aaron and Vernita were full siblings, and rather than kick Jamal out after his mother died, they’d accepted the younger man as a full relation. Of the two men, Jamal was the one with more authority and ranking in the Portsider organization because of tenure and his willingness to do dirty work without hesitation.
Garth pegged Jamal as the one responsible for Jimmy’s death, so he won the prize of paying up first. A tube of noxious chemical stimulant snapped open under his nose. Garth gagged loudly and opened his eyes.
There were eight thugs, all on the heavier side of the norm. Not as freaky as a God soldier, mind, but big enough to be a cause for alarm.
They milled around, nervously excited. Everybody was higher than a kite on whatever the whacky drug Portsiders favored. Maybe thanks to the drugs or just plain stupid dumbassery, none seemed the least bit worried they were hanging around the guy who’d done eight of them in before he’d even had a really decent meal.
Garth paid close attention to the boisterous, posturing thugs as they stalked around like lions, working themselves into frenzy. Unlike the other Portsiders he’d come across, these new friends weren’t packing heat. Their arms leaned towards knuckles, knives, batons and other silent weapons. Sissy toys.
Was it possible that they were all so stupid that not one of them had thought to pack a gun? Didn’t they realize a contestant was likely to be a master at hand-to-hand combat, even if he was ‘only’ an Offworlder?
Garth rolled his eyes up into their sockets, let a thick stream of bloody spittle trail weakly out of his mouth, and moaned. “What’s goin’ on?”
“Whofuck said you could talk?” One of the thugs demanded wildly, pupils a vanishing point in a sea of white. He slipped his knuckles on and drove a fist into Garth’s stomach, eliciting laughter from his buddies.
Garth regretted not taking the time to prepare a couple blood packets. They were obviously having a ton of fun, and would’ve appreciated the extra effort. Anyhow, he thought he was doing a pretty good job of acting. As long as they didn’t decide to go Reservoir Dog on his ass, everything would be copasetic. “I just … I just …”
The guy hit him again, this time in the chest. The room filled with laughter as he and the chair fell backwards. Garth toppled to the floor in a clatter. He got a good look into Jimmy’s soulless eyes and felt a twinge of guilt. The thugs righted his chair.
Jamal stepped out from behind the thugs, Aaron at his side. Their resemblance was much plainer to see in person than through the photographs on Vernita’s cheap prote. Both of the stocky, burly men carried a hint of their father in them, especially around the eyes. “This guy killed eight of ours?” Jamal demanded.
The thug nodded. “Uhuh.”
Jamal’s face was a thundercloud of anger and rage. Things weren’t going well for them. Hadn’t been, long enough for the Man to start asking rough questions. Drug shipments were late or never showed up, someone was skimming off the top more than usual and the Devil Nuts were actually trying to make a land grab. The way of things dictated that all problems could be solved with cash, so when Jimmish had come to them with the Mother of all inside tips, they’d leaped at the chance. A small bribe to someone in the Promotion Offices verified Garth Nickels as a clear contender for the Offworld Game
Under normal circumstances, they’d’ve gone straight to The Man with their connection. Things weren’t normal, though, so they’d done the only thing available: they’d wagered large. Their entire bankroll, plus most of the money in their tiny chapter’s kitty, on advance betting.
Hearing about Garth Nickels’ immigration had been devastating, financially and otherwise. With all the money gone and no chance of getting it back, their path had gone crystal; catch Garth, bring him to The Man and beg for forgiveness.
If they were lucky, The Man would ignore their misdeeds and let them live. If not… Jamal, who knew why The Man wanted Garth Nickels, doubted the night would end badly, but didn’t want to get ahead of the game. Things needed doing to even the score before the Man got His.
Sitting there, staring at Jamal, Aaron, and their drugged-up thugs, Garth thought on his plan.
Well, he called it a plan. It was dangerous -and probably wouldn’t work- but with only a few hours to spare, he’d found it surprisingly difficult to get hold of an army.
His plan, the whole entirety of it, called for moving as fast as he had during the fight with Injiri. Either he figured out how he’d been faster than lightning or he’d be found in a dumpster, head looking like a month old pumpkin.
In a plan chock full of ifs and maybes, the biggest concern lay with unspoken fears of doing ‘ex-dee’ wrong. A vague but irritatingly frustrating itch of doubt suggested that if he wasn’t in the right frame of mind when he tried to move that fast again, his night would end with a very loud bang and an awful lot of whimpering.
To prepare, he’d spent an hour working on a self-hypnotic tr
igger that could –if all was right with the world and Lady Luck still had the hots for him- drop his consciousness into a state similar to last time. If things went right and he didn’t wind up a red smear spread across a mile or two of pastoral suburbia, he’d do some fancy ass kicking. If he failed to get that mojo going altogether, he’d suffer through an ass whipping of his own until he could figure something else out.
Garth sat there projecting an image of pathetic terror for all he was worth, literally trying to pummel the Portsiders with his weakness. He shut his eyes the moment he saw the one who’d hit him before take a running start, knuckled hand windmilling crazily. Around him, laughter filled the basement.
The duronium-coated knuckles crashed painfully into his chest.
Garth threw his weight into the fall. “Please!” The trigger echoed loudly…
xxx
… someone smacked him on the back of the head, bringing him Out. It was his Father, upset. He’d done It wrong … again.
“Every time,” his father said, voice deep and rumbling, but always with a hint of the deep love he felt for his son, “every time you enter that way, you make a noise. A big, loud noise any one of us can hear, see, and feel. We’ll come running, if we can, to see what the hell’s going on. But that’s not the worst part, is it? We can always run away from prying eyes, but not what will follow us, right?”
Garth, a young boy barely out of diapers, nodded. Luckily, his dad’d knocked him Out quickly; the pressure of returning from a bad ex-dee trip felt a little bit like skinning his knees, only all over and all the way through. Dad said the older he got and the bigger he grew, the worse a messy ex-dee Out would be. It could kill him, Dad said, and maybe even a lot of people around him. “Nosir. The longer I do it wrong, the worse it gets when I come Out. I could die. The big bang.”
The big bang was a thing to avoid at all costs. The big bang was him, pulling ex-dee power Out with him and when it came Out, it blew up.
His Father nodded. Then he winked, and vanished, leaving in his wake such a gentle susurration of energies that there was hardly anything at all to see. As a matter of fact, the only way to see Kith Antal go ex-dee was with your own two eyes and up close. The burly man reappeared just as quickly, just as quietly, only now he held two sodas. “Now we try again. Except this time, if you do it wrong, I’m not helping.”
Garth took a sip from the soda, closed his eyes and started all over…
xxx
Reywin jerked her eyes away from the readouts along with the other two agents. All three blinked their eyes madly to clear them from painful starbursts and pinwheels. It took several long seconds, during which Reywin feared the condition was permanent. By the time everyone could see, the flier’s diagnostic programs announced the cause behind the surge; an ‘unspecified energy event’ similar an EMP had blown all the circuits.
“What the fuck?” the senior agent demanded, moving to check the onboard systems. “The fuck?”
Bolo pinched the bridge of his nose. “What was that?” he asked, accepting part of the workload from Reywin’s prote as they started booting the machinery up. If they were lucky, the surge had only flipped the internal breakers. If they were unlucky, most of their surveillance equipment was toast, putting their clandestine op in the toilet. They couldn’t very well track a guy with just their eyeballs and they sure as shit couldn’t requisition more. When –if- they came back in from the cold, there’d also be a ton of paperwork to explain where their old stuff had gone. “Reading power brown-outs across a ten-mile … what happened?”
Trumann flexed her jaw rhythmically as she tried to access the mini-relay on top of the house, cursing when it and every single piece of machinery –other than their ship, which had been to withstand that kind of blast- failed to respond. Everything was dead. Concern rose quickly in Trumann but she reminded herself that Rey was right: anyone dying in that house deserved it. So long as the Offworlder didn’t run out of the house screaming bloody murder, everything was still … fine, just … fine. “All right people, we’re going thermal. Internal cams, protes, and receivers are down for now.”
Everyone went back to their viewfinders to see what they could see.
xxx
… he knew this place, knew it like his own skin, his own thoughts. This place was somewhere he shouldn’t be, but there was nothing else for it. Vengeance was a bitch that needed paying. Even with his eyes closed against the painful luminescence filling this otherworldly domain, the enemies were marked by the dark blots their shadows cast on his mind. Garth moved through the crowd of stunned Latelians like a dream, moving with fast, deadly accuracy, leaving in his wake a wave of destruction that would sicken the flier crew. He was a living razor cutting his enemies down one by one until all save one –Garth was certain it was Jamal- was dead…
xxx
Finished, Garth braced himself for what would come next; going ‘ex-dee’ in any emotional state other than one of near-Zen perfection was an exercise in flirting with Death. Suffice to say, he’d failed in achieving that peace. In that other place, emotional state affected the waveform of existence, building up a powerful charge as surely as a generator built up power. Moving through that place while so spiritually encumbered guaranteed the imbalance upon exit would be colossal.
His eyes opened.
An angry God passing through the neighborhood on His way to somewhere more deity-friendly paused momentarily to smack some sense into the head of a stupid mortal messing with forces beyond his ken. Caught in the titanic grip of force, a once-distant concrete wall sped towards him at Mach speeds. The vaguely worrying possibility he might not survive a collision at such speeds was lessened by the fact that every available inch of his body had already been whacked with a big old hammer. As he flew through the air, he left a fair amount of blood standing in place.
For posterity, Garth discovered that hitting a wall wasn’t at all like in the movies. At no point did he leave a humorous Garth-shaped indentation in the wall. Neither did he stand up and dust himself off and look around for a cup of tea.
The reality, while far less exciting, was nevertheless intimately painful. He was fucked up, and good.
Garth lay there on the floor, vomiting up a mouthful of blood that joined the pool pouring freely from his eyes, ears, and nose. The agony crawling along his skin was exquisite, a firm reminder that Death waited in the wings, looking for him to be that goddamned stupid again. Wiping bloody tears away with the palms of his hands, Garth struggled to a seated position. Resting his back against the wall that’d almost finished the job he’d started on himself, he gingerly took stock of the situation by poking different areas very carefully.
First thing he noticed was the house lights were off, which was okay by him; he could see in the dark easily enough.
During the flight, his legs and arms had slammed into a couple hardware racks. One of his legs had bounced off a table saw. Luckily, nothing was broken, but the bruises were already the most fantastic shade of spoiled red. Based on the color of his arms and legs, checking out his back would only put him in a crabby mood, and there was an awful lot of serious stuff that needed doing before he could sulk.
After sitting there for a few more minutes of uninterrupted breathing, it dawned on Garth that he might have made a mistake of gargantuan proportions by rushing things. He was definitely more hurt than expected. It was this place, this god-forsaken Hospitalis. It made him anxious, it made him reckless. And he was dangerous to himself just as much as any outside threat.
Pushing off from the wall into a standing position, Garth surveyed the carnage.
It wasn’t pretty. Not as bad as what’d happened to Injiri, maybe, but the number of dead and the obvious agony they’d suffered more than made up for the lack of blood. All the men -except Jamal- looked like they’d been hit by a particularly pissed off Mack truck. Arms, legs and heads were broken at unnatural angles. A few of the dead men stared accusingly at Garth, looks which the ex-mercenary ignore
d with stoicism. They’d been prepared to kill him, which balanced those books quite nicely. Nudging a dead body out of the way with a foot, Garth headed into the bathroom he’d seen so he could wash off the drying blood. The lights flickered back on a few seconds later.
A shriek of outrage brought Garth hustling back into the other room, only half-rinsed. What an idiot! Fucking Hospitalis.
Vernita stood in the middle of the bloodshed, pale as a sheet and screaming bloody murder. She stumbled backwards to get away from the murderous Offworlder and tripped over Jimmy’s body. Collapsing into a pool of blood, Vernita gave out a final shriek of unholy terror before passing out on top of her dead husband.
“Well, that worked out.” Garth shook his head. Fucking Latelians.
What in the hell was he going to do with Vernita? If she hadn’t specifically demanded Jimmy’s death, she sure as shit hadn’t done anything to stop them from cutting the poor bastard’s throat.
Garth checked to see if she hadn’t died from fright before going upstairs and out to the cab.
The early morning air was nice and crisp on his battered skin. He retrieved his bag of goodies and then inspected the passenger van with his proteus. According to the readout, the vehicle was unregistered and transponder-free, making it impossible for law enforcement to track. Garth smiled. He loved free stuff. A few minutes work with encryption avatars stripped the van’s onboard computers of the locks and put new ones on. Shouldering his duffel bag, Garth made his way back down into the basement, ready for the grim work ahead.
The first thing Garth did was secure Vernita to Jimmy with a length of rope. It was the least thing she deserved short of actual murder. If the woman made it through to morning without losing her mind, her karma would be back on track. Unfortunately, it was evident Vernita was ex-Portsider so she’d be back in the mix by noon.