Gunwitch: Rebirth

by Niall Teasdale

  Stacey rushed a little to catch up; the guy had long legs. She came to a sudden stop when she found him just standing there, looking down at her and smiling. ‘I-is something wrong?’ she asked.

  ‘Not a thing,’ he told her.

  And then a hand clamped over her mouth from behind.

  ~~~

  They had injected her with something and she woke up with her mouth taped over and a bag over her head. It felt like her wrists and ankles were wrapped in tape too: she could barely move. Fear began to gnaw at her stomach almost immediately, but the drug was still dulling her senses and it all seemed kind of distant. And she could hear voices.

  ‘This is the best you could do?’

  ‘You wanted something fast. You can have fast or you can have a choice. She looks pretty strong.’

  Stacey recognised neither of the men speaking, but she guessed that they were discussing her.

  ‘She isn’t exactly the kind of thing we’re generally looking for, is she? Our customers–’

  ‘She’s what we could get. You want her or not? I can find another buyer for her no trouble at all.’

  She was being sold?! Who was the buyer? She could think of exactly one reason for someone to be buying teenage girls and the fear became terror and pushed past the doping. Stacey began to struggle.

  ‘Now she’s woken up,’ the salesman said, sounding disgusted. ‘Look, you want her or not? I’ll have to drug her again if not.’

  There was a short pause and Stacey found herself pausing too, waiting for the reply. ‘We’ll take her. We need someone for tonight.’

  Hands grabbed Stacey’s arms, lifting her to be slung over a shoulder. It was a very broad shoulder and she began kicking and screaming as best she could, but her captor did not seem to care in the slightest.

  ~~~

  Whoever the people were who had, apparently, bought her, they were a weird bunch. Most of them looked like someone had inflated their muscles with a pneumatic pump, possibly sucking their brains out in the same process. A few of them were not nearly so pumped up and some of those wore lab coats. Stacey had no idea what they wanted her for, but they had chained her to the floor in the middle of some sort of concrete-lined basement room. It was quite a large room, probably the whole floor area of one of the apartment blocks, or something like that. From the looks of it, the chain and metal collar were a permanent fixture so they had done this before. Whatever this was.

  One of the men in the lab coats walked across the room toward her. He had a smile on his face which Stacey did not like. ‘I’m sure you’re wondering,’ he said, ‘why we got you here. Perhaps you’re imagining some perverted sexual activity is in your future.’ He watched as Stacey slowly shook her head. ‘No?’

  ‘I-I’m not g-good at imagining p-perv–’

  ‘Ah, a good, Christian girl. Perhaps this will be a more interesting experiment than I’d imagined.’

  ‘Experiment?’

  ‘Yes. We normally use men, rather larger men than you. If you survive the injection, the effects should be most interesting. And before you say “injection” in that faltering little voice, yes, we are going to inject you with a new drug we’re formulating. It will, if it’s right this time, turn you into a frothing-at-the-mouth killing machine. You’ll want to bite our heads off.’ He laughed at the expression of horror on her face. ‘We may even let you try to kill someone.’ He looked around at one of the huge bruisers who was walking over, cradling a syringe in his huge palms. ‘One of them. Even with snakebite in you, I don’t think you’ll have much chance.’

  ‘I think,’ said a voice from somewhere at the back of the room, ‘that that is the worst display of macho posturing I have ever heard.’ Both Stacey and the scientist-type stared, wide-eyed, as a woman walked out of the shadows toward them. Even the gorilla with the syringe stopped and looked on dumbly. It might have been the outfit: corset, stupidly short skirt, and high-heeled boots which seemed to be composed entirely of straps. Plus, even in the dimly lit cellar, the woman was wearing wrap-around sunglasses. The woman stopped, cocked a hip, and said, ‘Haven’t you boys ever heard of girl power?’

  ‘Who are you, girl?’ the scientist asked. ‘You’ve made a huge mistake coming here.’

  ‘I’m just an interested party,’ the woman replied. ‘I’m interested in you getting your operation out of Queens.’

  The scientist laughed. ‘Don’t kill her. We’ll have two test subjects for the new batch.’

  And then the woman in the corset was moving. To Stacey, it was as though a pair of pistols just appeared in her hands and she began firing almost at random. There was so little sound. Stacey had always thought that guns were loud. She was used to hunting rifles and they were loud, but these pistols seemed to make little noise. The bullets hissed as they flew through the air, striking target after target. And then, just as suddenly, there was silence, and none of the men in the room were moving.

  The woman moved her pistols back and there were two solid-sounding clicks. ‘Just wait there,’ she said. ‘I’ll be back for you.’ Then she marched off toward a door in the side of the room.

  Stacey waited. There was not much else she could do. She heard gunshots, which could not have come from the woman’s pistols, and sounds like shattering glass. And then, once again, silence. Stacey began to wonder whether the woman had, in fact, decided to leave her there, chained to the floor, but then she emerged from the side rooms, marching straight toward Stacey and raising one of her pistols.

  ‘What are you doing?!’ Stacey shrieked, rearing back.

  ‘Good girl.’ A bullet from this pistol slammed into the chain near its base and Stacey found herself sprawling backward. ‘Come on. We need to leave. There’s a fire in their lab.’

  Stacey gathered up her chain and got to her feet. ‘M-my stuff. Coat and bag. It’s all I have.’

  ‘There’s a coat and rucksack under the table over there.’ The woman pointed and Stacey squinted, unable to see anything in the shadows. ‘Get a move on. I don’t know when the LIPD will notice the smoke.’

  Sure enough, in the shadow under the table, Stacey found her worldly possessions. She struggled into her jacket, grabbed her bag, and then had to hurry to follow her rescuer out of the basement and out into an alley. She followed for half a block through the twisting back alleyways until the woman stopped and turned around.

  ‘Okay, if you head up that way, you’ll get out onto Bleaker Avenue. You can get home from there, right?’

  Stacey stared at her for a second. ‘I don’t have anywhere to go. A-and there’s this.’ She lifted the chain still padlocked around her neck and her rescuer sagged visibly.

  ‘Oh, for the love of… All right. Okay. You can stay with me tonight. I’ll get that chain off you and you can stay with me. There’s a hostel not far from my place that’ll take you. What’s your name?’

  ‘Stacey. Stacey Templeton.’

  ‘Right. I’m Louise. Get a move on, Stacey.’ The strange woman set off at a brisk pace and Stacey struggled after her. ‘Do you like dogs?’

  ‘Uh… Yes.’

  ‘Good. You don’t snore, do you?’

  ‘Uh… Well, I don’t really know…’

  ‘Fine. But if you do, you’re sleeping in the bathroom.’

  ~~~

  Mickey seemed to think Stacey was okay and Annette was starting to trust the dog’s instincts when it came to people. Mickey seemed to have people analysis software as good as her own, maybe better.

  Stacey obviously thought Mickey was adorable, which at least proved she had a good eye for dogs: Mickey was adorable. She fussed over him while Annette divested herself of her arming pod and then sat on the bed to unstrap her boots.

  ‘I take it you’re new in town?’ Annette asked.

  ‘They let me in from the Rock Way this afternoon,’ Stacey replied. ‘I didn’t really know where to go and this guy offered to take me to one of the shelters…’

  ‘Huh. They really need to get a better
system for handling immigrants. The guy you met would be one of the local Frankies. They hang around looking for lost newcomers.’

  ‘Frankies?’

  ‘Short for “Frankenstein.” You’re actually sort of lucky. A lot of the people they grab end up as involuntary organ donors.’

  ‘O-oh.’

  ‘Instead, it seems, they sold you to a Juicer gang that I’ve been trying to track down all week. You know, if you can afford a lottery ticket, it might be a good investment. Your luck seems to be running pretty well today.’ Annette held up a hand as Stacey opened her mouth. ‘They’re called Juicers because most of them are on a synthetic steroid, which is why they look like bodybuilders who didn’t know when to stop. They make a few other drugs too.’

  ‘They said it was called, uh, snakebite.’

  ‘Yeah, well, hopefully that’s the last we’ll see of it. Now, come here and let me have a look at that lock.’

  ‘You’re not going to shoot it off, are you?’

  Annette smirked. ‘I could probably make that shot, but I have a “no gunfire in my rooms” policy. I should be able to pick the lock.’ She slipped her glasses off as she turned away to get her kit and Stacey was kneeling beside the bed by the time Annette turned back. It made the sudden recoil more obvious and Annette’s stomach lurched, even though she should be used to the reaction now.

  Stacey’s eyes widened in horror, but the reason for it suddenly changed as she put her hand over her mouth. ‘Oh God! Sorry. I shouldn’t have… It’s just a shock. What happened? How did you lose them?’

  Annette managed a smile and beckoned Stacey closer so that she could get at the padlock on her collar. ‘I didn’t exactly lose them. I had it done on purpose. It’s part of a cybernetic weapons system with my backpack and pistols. It lets me do things… Well, that most people can’t.’

  ‘Like seeing in the dark?’

  ‘Like seeing in the dark. I designed the whole system, built most of it. I wasn’t going to test it out on someone else and possibly leave them blind.’

  Stacey’s expression turned quizzical. ‘You designed all that and you live in… Um, you live here?’

  ‘You can say it. I live in this dump because…’ Annette paused and looked at Stacey for a second. ‘Look, I’m here illegally. I’m basically running from some people who probably want me dead. There’s not much I can do here without someone working it out, so I live here and, just in case the outfit wasn’t a giveaway, I work on my back.’

  ‘Oh. I won’t say anything. To anyone. You saved my life… Anyway, I don’t know what I’m going to do either. I might end up–’

  ‘If I see you down on the avenue, I’ll drag you to the cops myself. No one your age should be doing that. You have options. The hostel should be able to set you up on some courses at the local college. You can get a job in one of the factories, maybe in an office in Sky City. You could be a waitress.’

  ‘So could you.’

  ‘They don’t want cyborgs serving customers around here.’ There was a click and Annette smiled as the lock gave in. ‘There we go. Now, go use the bathroom. Wash up and stuff. I think we should get some sleep, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s been a long day… Uh, there’s only one bed.’

  ‘It’s just about wide enough for two.’ Annette raised an eyebrow. ‘I only sleep with women if I’m paid to, Stacey. You’re quite safe.’

  Stacey managed a half-grin as she got up and got rid of her collar. ‘What if you snore?’

  ‘I don’t, cheeky. And if I do, I do it really cutely. Get moving.’

  1/3/2117.

  ‘Okay,’ Annette said, ‘you just walk in there and introduce yourself.’

  Stacey looked across the short stretch of lawn in front of a building which looked vaguely like it might once have been a school. One of the few buildings in the area to survive the rebuilding it seemed, it housed the Mary Louise Hostel which Annette had brought her to.

  ‘Uh, you aren’t going to come in with me?’ Stacey asked.

  ‘They would almost certainly want to ask me questions I’d prefer not to answer.’

  ‘Oh… Okay. Well, you can count on me. I won’t be saying anything to anyone about… uh, what didn’t happen last night. To me. Or any weird guys in lab coats. Or–’

  ‘I get it, Stacey,’ Annette said, grinning. ‘I hope you have a good life. Or a better one anyway.’

  ‘I promise. I’ll make it work.’ Stacey started walking toward the door of the shelter.

  Annette watched her go, a smile creeping over her face. She knew what her sudden good humour was about. She had not even considered picking up her pistol that morning, though a little of that was Stacey being there. Well, all of it was. Annette had stopped a new drug from hitting the streets and saved Stacey. She had joined the SAU originally to do good, to help save her city, and her city had turned out to be not quite what she had thought it was. But she still had the urge to help and now she was back to doing it.

  Turning to head toward the avenue, Annette walked off with a spring in her step. Okay, so her life was hardly perfect. In fact, her life sucked to a fairly large extent. But she had a way of making things a little bit more tolerable now. Between Mickey and a little vigilantism, maybe the mornings would be a little brighter from now on.

  3/3/2117.

  Stacey had been at the hostel for all of two days, and already she was making friends and set to start secretarial courses. It was all looking good.

  Her room-mate was nice. That was just a plus really, but it was a big plus. Stacey felt like she could tell Connie more or less anything, and Connie had already figured out there was more to Stacey’s story than she was telling. Stacey had said that one of the Frankies had tried to kidnap her, mostly because she had been talking about how scary it was trying to find the hostel. Trying to keep it all a secret was far harder than Stacey had imagined it would be. Hence the story she was spinning now, after lights out.

  ‘Well, no, you’re right. He didn’t just try to grab me. He got me, but I was rescued.’

  Connie, on the bunk above Stacey, in the dark and unwilling to sleep before she had heard what had really happened, nodded. ‘I knew you couldn’t’ve got away from them. Taking people off the street is what they do. Who rescued you?’

  ‘I don’t know. She–’

  ‘It was a woman?’

  ‘Uh-huh. Girl power, you know? She came in and… It was like magic, Connie. One minute she was just standing there, and the next she had these guns in her hands and the men around us were dropping like flies.’

  ‘You’re saying you were rescued by a witch with a pair of guns?’

  ‘No, of course not. There’s no such thing as witches. It just seemed like magic. But…’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘Well… She never missed. There must’ve been a dozen of them and poof! In like a second, they were all down. It wasn’t really magic. I don’t believe in magic. But it sure seemed like it at the time.’

  5/3/2117.

  ‘There’s a rumour doing the rounds,’ Jenny said as Annette and Mickey arrived at their pitch.

  ‘There are usually several,’ Annette replied. Mickey settled into his preferred spot, against the wall behind where Annette generally stood.

  ‘This one says that a bunch of Juicers met an unfortunate end, along with their drug lab.’

  ‘Oh? Couldn’t have happened to nicer people.’

  ‘They’re saying that a witch with a pair of pistols took them out.’

  Annette raised an eyebrow. ‘A witch? Some people will believe anything. It’ll be ghosts, zombies, and vampires next.’

  ‘Huh. Just be careful, hun. The Lip around here seem to be okay with you… helping out, but if the Juicers find out it was–’ Jenny stopped as she spotted something further up the avenue. ‘Looks like this is my ride. Just think about what I said, okay?’

  Annette’s eyes followed Jenny’s gaze as the redhead stepped closer to the kerb. There was a black tow
n car gliding toward them, its occupant hidden behind tinted windows. ‘I’ll think about it,’ Annette said. ‘You be careful yourself.’

  ‘Always am, hun. Always am.’ The car stopped beside Jenny, its electric motors virtually silent, and the passenger window wound down. Jenny smiled, opened the door, and climbed in. The car was moving off almost before she had the door closed.

  Annette’s attention shifted to Mickey, however. Her scruffy dog was almost flattened against the sidewalk, his body tense, and he was growling. Annette frowned. ‘Sarah, what do we know about the guy in the black car?’

  ‘Uh… Not much,’ Sarah replied. ‘Jenny says he’s got this pale and handsome thing going. He’s loaded too. Lives out in some big place in Greenland. He’s been coming by and picking Jenny up… Must be about two weeks. He’s got a few weird kinks, I think, but he pays well.’

  ‘Mickey doesn’t seem to like that car.’

  ‘Oh. Do you think it might be trouble?’

  ‘I think I’ll try to find out.’

  ~~~

  Annette spotted the uniform first, but her eyes magnified the image as soon as she focused on the approaching figure. She smiled and waited.

  ‘Officer Clement,’ Annette said as he got closer. ‘How nice to see you.’

  Clement’s eyes narrowed a little. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Who says I want something?’

  ‘Your tone does. I haven’t been on the streets that long, but I have got a sister. I know that tone.’

  Annette grinned at him. ‘Okay, I’ve got a favour to ask. It’s kind of a big one…’

  ‘Louise, you stopped me getting shot a while back. I think I owe you one favour.’

  ‘Okay. There’s a car, plate number AQ two seven five. I was wondering whether you could find out who owns it?’

  ‘Does he owe you money?’

  Annette shook her head. ‘No. It’s just… Well, Mickey doesn’t like him.’

  Clement looked at the grey mutt by the wall. Mickey lifted his head but did not offer any further comment. ‘Well, if Mickey doesn’t like him… I can get it. I’ll put it down as a suspicious vehicle. We run plenty of those around here.’