One of the scruffy men stepped forward. It became obvious that this man was the group’s leader. He walked with a certain kind of unearned confidence in his posture, an exaggerated machismo that having been faked for so long had become an indelible part of his personality. Roland knew the type well. It was the manner of a person who had risen above his peers through bluff and bluster. It was counterfeit poise, easily adopted and just as easily shattered.
The leader spoke, confirming all of Roland’s suspicions. “Well hello there, Tank. We heard’a you! You're the big bad fixer out here, huh?” He looked over at his crew. All shifted nervously from foot to foot, sporting wary smiles and grumbling unconvincing chuckles. “Well I guess they got the ‘big’ part right! Shit!” Some more laughter from the pushers followed that. It was a common sequence. The leader’s affected confidence would bolster the rest of them. As long as the leader could keep faking it, the others would hold the line well enough. “You sure fill up the space all right!”
“I eat a good breakfast every day,” Roland returned affably. Calling Roland ‘big’ insulted the very nature of understatement. Standing seven and a half feet tall and tipping a livestock scale at almost a thousand pounds, Roland Tankowicz left ‘big’ far behind. Unbeknownst to this group of not-so-stalwart men-of-action, he was also the last surviving member of a top-secret military war-fighter enhancement project. This gang of thugs probably assumed they were dealing with a mutant, possibly some new kind of steroid-freak, or perhaps a heavily augmented human. None of which would have made him impervious to their weapons, and thus they felt up to the challenge of facing him. The Dockside hospitals and morgue did plenty of business catering to all the people suffering from similar misconceptions. This common tactical blunder revealed several important things about the gang.
“You guys are new in town, I can see that,” Roland continued. “Heard about the shake-up we’ve been going through?” He rubbed his hands together briskly. “Bet you see the chance to carve yourself a piece of the pie now that the big gangs are all pushed out, don’t you?”
“Something like that, yeah,” the leader replied. His face sagged in worn crags, his eyes hollow and red-rimmed. Roland recognized the signs of a drug dealer too fond of dipping into his own product. “No Combine, no Dwarf, no cops. Dockside seems like a nice place to settle down. That a problem, Tank?”
“Not really. Except you boys haven’t checked in with the guild yet, and you’ve been breaking some of our new Dockside rules. I’ve been hired to help you guys learn the ropes and to prevent the sort of misunderstandings that could result in fatalities. It’s just one of the many services I provide.”
“So you mean we gotta join your gang to play ball here?”
Roland stifled a sigh. Drug dealers had to be the dumbest of all the criminal classes in New Boston. “No. You don’t have to join anything. But you do have to register with the guild and follow the rules if you want to play in our sandbox. The rules keep things from getting out of hand, and they keep Uptown from looking too hard at what we have going on down here. Stick with the rules, and everybody gets to make money. Step out of line, and I send you packing.”
The leader scowled, and a few of the guns wavered. “Now wait a minute—”
Roland interrupted him. “For instance, you have been selling blaze cut with firizene. Two people are dead and one is a vegetable because whatever back-alley dipshit you have doing the cut is a goddamn moron. In Dockside, the chemists’ guild takes product quality very seriously. If you register, they will make the services of competent chemists available to you for a nominal fee.”
“Nominal fee!” Now the leader was just plain indignant. “Just you wait a fucking—”
Roland’s voice smashed through his objections like a runaway truck. “Furthermore, you have been selling inside the residential zones. This is also off-limits. You will restrict your activities to the designated entertainment zones. If people want your product, they can find you there. The guild can set you up with a protected storefront when you register if you like. For a nominal fee, of course.”
The leader positively vibrated with rage at this point. Once he felt confident Roland had finished, he spoke through gritted teeth. “Listen, you fucking piece of shit. I did not come here to join a goddamn union, or get told what I can and can’t do. I got six guns here that say I can do whatever the fuck I want and putting a big-ass freak like you in the dirt is what I want to do right now. Your fucking guild have a rule for that, asshole?”
“Would you believe they do?” The big man smiled like a hyena. It was a wry, angry grin that made the pusher sick to his stomach. The set of Tank’s lantern jaw and the flare of his pug nose told the tale of a man who wanted what was coming. The giant fairly laughed at the leader’s affected menace and mocked him on top of it. “The rule for those stupid unfortunate idiots who want to try me on is this...” The big man stood straight and adjusted the lapels of his jacket before finishing the thought. “Go ahead and try.”
Too late, the leader began to realize this man courted violence, and likely thrived on it. To his everlasting chagrin, the aspiring drug lord found himself in a situation he simply did not have the tools to manage. His woefully underdeveloped repertoire of skills had only the one solution for such an impasse. Fully aware that the resolve of his gang was already shaky, the leader opened fire first. His hand-me-down Taurus PT-5 spat hypersonic ceramic beads from the barrel as fast as desperate fingers could pull the trigger. His boys followed suit, and the alley exploded with the thunder of gunfire and the lightning of muzzle flashes.
Smoke, fire, and sparks obscured all traces of the fixer, engulfing the massive man in a shroud of white and orange haze. The drug dealers were undisciplined shooters, their shots spraying wildly, and a disappointing proportion even missed the target entirely. This offended Roland as both a fixer and a marksman. Considering the short range and prodigious girth of the man they aimed to kill, missing should have been impossible.
As the fusillade washed harmlessly off his armored chest, Roland sighed. His body was a technological marvel built to wage war against exotic enemies on far away planets. Proof against virtually any man-portable weapons a street thug was likely to possess, Roland could withstand a thousand guns like these without flinching. He had always fancied himself a warrior, or more explicitly a soldier. Swatting these flies did not satisfy his need for battle. It was pest control at best and the thought of pulping these fools did not excite him in the least.
Thus, he waited. The ceramic rain of incoming projectiles soon fizzled into a sporadic drizzle. When it petered out to nothing, and he was confident that their weapons had run dry, the big man stepped forward to move clear of the smoke and let the crew of doomed criminals get a good look at their handiwork.
The guns had shredded the linen suit from his chest, leaving a wide expanse of lumpy matte-black muscle exposed. His pectorals, swollen and enormous, writhed under his thick dermal armor like live creatures as he tore the last smoldering scraps of his ruined jacket from his body. His shoulders, arms, and back bulged in a caricature of human anatomy. The muscles rolled beneath the ebony surface, overlarge and exaggerated, enhanced to an obscene degree. Drug dealers made for poor biotechnologists and they lacked any ability to comprehend what they saw. Namely, they saw a fully techno-organic war machine built to fight entire armies on planets across the galaxy. If they looked especially close, they might have recognized an angry and dangerous old soldier beneath the dull black sheen of that armored skin. The act of exerting control over their own bladders precluded them from looking closely, and they missed that key piece of information.
One thing they were able to comprehend was just how tragically they had screwed up. The entire gang inhaled sharply in a collective gasp of surprise and horror. Their barrage had done nothing at all to the inhuman giant. A hundred rounds of concentrated gunfire had accomplished the laudable goal of ruining his outfit and little else. The leader saw panic overcome his men
, and felt it wash over himself as well. His mind, which had never been impressive even on its best day, tried to shut down as his experience and intellect failed to categorize the information being relayed by his bloodshot eyes.
“What the...” he stammered, even his words failing him in this moment.
The noise that came from the giant could not accurately be called ‘speaking.’ The growl rumbled forth full of a menace so pure it rendered the words themselves almost unintelligible. The threat in his voice struck like a physical blow. It both pressed and oppressed, a solid wall of malice that left absolutely no doubt at all as to his meaning and intentions.
“Okay, assholes. You made your choice. Now you will get the fuck out of my town. Immediately. If you ever show up here again, I will kill you without reason or warning. The rules here are simple and fair. You chose stupid, so you can go. You have one hour to clear Dockside. My people will be watching. Now leave!”
The gang froze. Roland loomed between them and their escape route, and as a whole they were too frightened to pass the giant with his still-smoking chest. They looked to their leader for guidance but found him frozen in terror, the same as they were.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, you guys.” The big man no longer sounded homicidal. He sounded exasperated. As if the existential dread they all felt was somehow unwarranted and not the result of witnessing something that should have been impossible. The big bald head shook ruefully, and he stepped aside, leaving enough room to pass with a wide berth. “Just go.”
Three of the dealers bolted immediately. They zoomed past Roland without a second look on feet made fleet by a combination of fear and relief. Two of the group remained still, waiting for guidance from their leader. The three leftover men stood frozen with terror, too shocked to deviate from a familiar pattern.
Roland raised an eyebrow. “Yes?”
The leader whispered, “What the hell are you?” It was a question magnificent for its stupidity. Even if he possessed the mental facility to understand the answer, the knowledge would do nothing to improve his situation.
“A very good reason to consider a career change,” the big man quipped. “Try barber college or something.”
Eyes blinked at the poor joke, as if they might take his suggestion literally.
Roland decided that he was never going to understand humor. He threw a perfunctory wave to the alley entrance. “Just fucking go.”
The leader went. His flight was undignified and humiliating, yet he did not care. He put his head down and ran like he had never run from anything before. Dockside could keep its freaks and its rules. The Earth was a big place, and he would find another area to set up shop. Preferably a place where they did not have giant invulnerable enforcers to harass him.
Roland watched the last of the dealers run away like whipped dogs. Three decades of slapping thugs around made him nearly prescient about their behavior. At this point, he could predict their movements better than anyone. This pathetic group would not be back anytime soon. They were drug pushers in the old model, little more than opportunistic parasites. Roland had no love for the drug trade, neither did he personally care what chemicals people put in their own body on their own time and money. Drugs were simply part of life here and Dockside had rules about that sort of thing now. He appreciated this. It appealed to his sense of order.
It also appealed to his sense of justice, warped though it may be. Old-model pushers who liked to hook kids or harass honest folks were bad for the town and bad for business. Since that breed of criminal was no longer tolerated in Dockside, this crowd had to go. It had not always been that way, but times were changing and Dockside with them. Everything was changing if he thought about it. Even himself. There was a time not so long ago when Roland would have killed the whole crew on general principle. These days he was trying to be more evolved, and thus he satisfied himself with less homicidal conflict resolution techniques. He still felt nothing about it either way. Killing a gaggle of drug pushers was not something he was likely to ever get conflicted over. Nevertheless, he was at least attempting to better himself, for Lucia’s sake if not his own.
As if on cue, his comm chimed in his ear with Lucia’s personal code.
“Go for Tank,” he responded.
“Meet me at Hideaway, Roland. Something big is going down. Rodney has Mindy all bent out of shape over it.”
“Do I have time to stop for a change of clothes?”
“For the love of...!” Her frustration did not sound feigned. “Have you ever even tried to duck?”
“Not my style.”
“Fine. Be there in an hour. I’ll pull Mindy and put her on overwatch.”
“Roger that, boss.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Kitty did not know what had her boss so riled up, but she was happy when Rodney decided to close early. Already looking forward to getting home and out of her work clothes, the pink-haired woman rushed through the last of her bar clean-up duties. Even the most casual observer would notice her interests centered more upon leaving work and finding her way into a hot bath than they did getting the bar to any condition resembling ‘clean.’ Kitty was perfectly happy to settle on a finished product that could be described as ‘nominally sanitary.’ It was not as if her customers would notice or care either way.
Her hopes of a clean getaway shattered like one of the bar’s cheap wine glasses when Kitty heard the first thuds of Tank’s knocking. She jumped at the sound, which interrupted her in the process of wiping the bar down with a muddy rag. Startled into irritation, she blew an angry sigh. Knocking on a door was not complicated, yet when Tank came by it always sounded like he was kicking the thing in.
Barney dropped his broom, harrumphed, and clumped over to the door to investigate. The towering bouncer was a great guy, but not bright in any classical sense of the word. There was no question as to who was banging away on that poor innocent portal. Who else would pound on a thick metal blast door so hard the wall vibrated like that? The answer was obvious. Yet true to his nature, Barney was going to check it first, anyway. Kitty whispered a silent prayer that Barney would just let the fixer in without incident. Tank hurt people who got in his way, and Barney was getting a little long in the tooth for that sort of interaction. She did not want to see the poor guy get thrashed by Tank or his little partner tonight.
A sound like distant thunder rumbled behind the door, another sure sign that Tank had arrived. The man had a voice tailor-made to horrify. It was a deep and gravelly bass rumble that could be felt in the chest when merely talking. When angry, Tank’s bellowing could shake the rafters. It was a distinctive sound, and it made her heart jump in a most unpleasant fashion.
The door slid open, and a giant stomped inside. Kitty’s breath caught in her chest, just as it always did when the fixer came in. His physical presence turned any room into a claustrophobic coffin. It felt inadequate to call him ‘big.’ Most folks considered Barney big, and Tank made him look like a child. Mook was enormous, but even Mook looked a little thin next to Tank.
Roland’s gray wool flat cap nearly brushed the ceiling, and he had to navigate carefully around the red tube lights hanging there. His width forced him to turn at an angle as he passed through the door. His arms were thick, his back was wide, and his neck nearly nonexistent. A square bald head stuck out from the collar of a white dress shirt, tiny black eyes darting about underneath heavy brows. A mouth set in a perpetual frown grimaced under a flat pug nose, framed by an enormous slab of a jaw.
Taken as a whole, Tank was not an attractive individual. His appearance came across as misshapen. He was human, obviously. Yet Kitty found it impossible to shake the notion that he was also somehow very alien, too. She accepted this as unlikely. Despite all the shortcomings of her formal education, Kitty knew all about men and Tank was definitely one of those.
Like so other many men she had known, the addition of a significant other had gone a long way to improving his appearance. Tank wore suits now, which represen
ted quite a shift. Kitty had grown accustomed to seeing him in old army-surplus jackets and plain black or gray fatigues. Since meeting Lucia Ribiero, his wardrobe had improved by leaps and bounds. Tonight he wore a brown jacket and slacks, but no tie. Kitty wondered how he would even wear one with that non-neck of his. On any other man, the ensemble would have been a reasonably nice, if not a little boring, outfit. Though Kitty could not help but think Tank just looked like a gorilla had been stuffed into a suit and taught to walk upright.
Behind the big fixer came the woman herself. Lucia Ribiero entered the bar dressed in blue pants, a black shirt, and a look of deep concentration. She wore her hair short and was fond of dyeing a single magenta stripe into the front of it. She had a pretty face, too. Intense brown eyes and flawless skin framed by features both classic and regal. While not as improbably proportioned as Mindy, Lucia’s body was compact, curvy, and athletic. More than that, her body seemed to vibrate with kinetic intensity. She moved like her joints were made of coiled springs and only self-control kept her from exploding into action at any given moment. Kitty had sufficient confidence to acknowledge she might be a touch jealous of Lucia in an otherwise benign sort of way. Men lusted for Kitty, which she understood. Men mostly feared Tank, and this also made perfect sense. Lucia, however, commanded respect on a level foreign to the young girl just getting by as a bartender. Kitty could only wish she knew how to do that.
What Kitty had gleaned from the goons and scum around the bar boiled down to ‘Ms. Ribiero’ being a nice enough lady but pure murder in a fight. Watching Barney limp slightly behind the pair supported this, but she also remembered what Mindy had said. Violence was not the only arena in which Lucia Ribiero excelled. Something about the woman’s poise and mystique told Kitty to watch herself around Lucia Ribiero. She trusted her instincts.
Dead Man Dreaming Page 4