Mook took one lumbering step forward to and swung his club-like fist in a looping overhand right, aiming for Roland’s head. Mook was nearly as big as Roland, but his knotted arms were longer, almost gorilla-like, which gave him a distinct reach advantage. Roland considered letting the punch land for a moment, betting his skull was tougher than that fist, but then thought better of it. He had seen Mook in action once or twice, and he didn’t feel good enough about that bet to roll the dice right now.
Roland ducked the ponderous blow and thundered a right hook to Mook’s ribs. He only used a fraction of his available power, not wanting to punch a hole right through his opponent. The solidity and implacability of the gray-skinned behemoth surprised Roland. Mook’s body was far more dense than he had originally thought. The black fist drove against Mook with enough force to shift a car, but the towering mutant only exhaled a heavy puff of breath and swung at Roland with his left.
Roland had returned to a high boxer’s guard and took the blow on his right forearm. It felt like a tree had fallen on him. Roland grinned, enjoying a real workout for the first time in a good long while, and countered with a straight left aimed for Mook’s square, oversized chin. Like two pieces of industrial machinery, Roland’s wrecking-ball mitt made solid contact on the lumbering giant’s cinder-block jaw. This time the cyborg put some real power into the blow and felt the teeth click shut and the heavy head snap back. Mook staggered a step, glassy eyed and wobbling.
Roland pressed this advantage by landing two more straights, sending Mook flailing backwards into the scrambling Garibaldis, scattering the brothers. Despite the repeated blows, Mook refused to go down. He tried to catch his footing and square up with Roland again, but Roland was not having it. A big right boot collided with the mutant’s sternum carrying enough force to hurl the poor thug into and through the exterior wall.
Mook smashed a ten-foot hole through the Hideaway and landed in a boneless heap across the sidewalk, six feet to the right of the door. His limbs were all bent at unnatural angles and his breathing came in ragged gasps. Anyone who cared to make the observation would concur that were many broken things inside of Mook, and Roland instantly regretted his kick.
Too hard. Roland thought to himself. Dial it down.
Mook was just a poor dumb guy that only had one way to make a living. He wasn’t a killer or anything awful; just a better-than-average street heavy good for scaring deadbeats and junkies into paying their bills on time. Roland didn’t feel good about hurting him, but a fight’s a fight, and Roland couldn’t afford to dance all night.
He whirled to check on Lucia. He could not decide if he was pleased or horrified to see her dealing with three of the Dwarf’s thugs without much noticeable difficulty.
She was moving with fluid grace in and out of the way of their clumsy blows and attempts to grapple. Periodically, an elbow or a foot would snake out to break a nose or smash a groin. What made her task problematic was not her skill, but her mass. All three of the men had at least a hundred pounds on her, so despite outclassing her opposition in technical proficiency, she could not inflict much damage. She was fast and well trained, but just too small to put them down with anything close to efficiency. The agile woman was grinding them down one small injury at a time though, and would finish them off eventually. It was the only viable tactical option for the 130-lb woman: a version of hyper-velocity ‘death by a thousand cuts.’
Realizing that she did not need immediate assistance, Roland had time to deal with the Garibaldis. Mook’s unceremonious exit had scattered them like cockroaches, but they were professionals and they were already regaining their feet and weapons.
Nico Garibaldi was the first to get up and with practiced ease he sent three beads into Roland’s left knee before Roland was on top of him. He probably assumed that Roland was wearing body armor and hoped that the knee would be an unarmored spot to shoot. It was as good an assumption as any, just dead wrong.
Roland clamped his hand over the top of Nico’s head, engulfing it in a black fist and pulling the screaming man into the air. Nico slapped and punched at the massive forearm with one hand and emptied the HVB into Roland’s chest with the other.
He felt the hits from Chico Garibaldi’s HVB bouncing off his back while he held Nico’s thrashing body off the ground. He felt a freezing, detached rage building inside him, and he knew exactly where it came from.
To say that Roland did not like the Garibaldis would be a catastrophic understatement. The twin assassins were not like poor Mook. They were professional murderers. But even that wasn’t all that reprehensible in Dockside. Killing was as viable a trade as any other in this part of town. But the Garibaldis were a special case. They took pride in their work and in their lack of discretion. They did not care who the target was, where the target was, or how old the target was. Once the money changed hands, they did the job without question. Roland had seen what happened when the Garibaldis did a job, and the aftermath always reminded him of when he’d wake up after being blacked out by the Golem. When Roland saw the Garibaldis, he saw what his former masters had wanted him to be. What they MADE him be.
He turned, a savage snarl on his lips, and with more strength than was strictly necessary hurled Nico at Chico.
Roland suspected that his own neurological augmentations were inferior to Lucia’s, but his dilated sense of time was sufficient to see the flash of flame and gas from Chico’s last shot exit from Nico’s back while he was still mid-flight. Blood and bone arced from the exit wound as the bead tore through the body with terrible ease, trailing smoke.
Chico’s face went from grim determination to stark horror in slow motion as he registered what was happening. Nico’s lifeless corpse struck his brother with enough force to pitch him over backwards and drive him into the ground. Roland spared them a quick glance and then remembered to check on Lucia. She had put one of her antagonists down somehow, and the two remaining heavies were very much the worse for wear. She looked tired though, and Roland left the surviving Garibaldi for a moment dispatch the thugs with stiff-yet-merciful blows.
Lucia’s eyes were wide and her pulse was chattering in her veins. Her breathing was deep and rapid, and Roland recognized the signs of impending neurological overload.
“Lucia.” He pitched his voice in a slow, soft baritone It the most soothing tone he could muster, “You need to relax. Remember? Go slow. Slow down Lucia.”
Her eyes met his, panicky. He continued, “Slow down. Relax. Breathe.” She relaxed, tension visibly leaving the muscles of her jaw and neck. Her pupils returned to a more acceptable diameter, and her breathing slowed.
“There you go. Perfect. Just go slow. Breathe in for a count of four, then breathe out for a four-count. That’s right.” It was called ‘combat breathing’ and it had been helping soldiers with panic since the twentieth century. She was calming down, and Roland was just assessing the room when her eyes went wide again and she dived into his arms.
Romantic implications were abandoned when Roland felt the searing heat and thunderclap impact characteristic of every time he got shot in the head. Goddamn Chico Garibaldi had recovered and was emptying a twenty-five-round bead magazine directly into the back of the big cyborg. Where the burning projectiles struck his back, there was a staccato tattoo of mild stings. His head, on the other hand, had much less armor. Every so often there would be a flash of white-hot agony as a bead would crease the skin of his scalp and rattle off his reinforced skull. It would leave a nasty rend in the skin for several hours before his nanobots could repair the mesh. Thankfully, his skull held up.
There was nothing Roland could do with that much gunfire coming his way but wrap his arms around Lucia and cover as much of her body with his. Fortunately for her, she was easy to envelop.
Roland waited until he heard the click of an empty magazine and then stood. His coat, entirely shredded by the barrage, fell from his body in smoking tatters. He shrugged out of the hanging rags and tore the undignified remains o
f his shirt away. He turned slowly and faced Chico.
Chico got his first good look at the most feared fixer in Dockside, and he did not know what to make of what he saw. Bare-chested, Roland was a seven and a half foot black mass of writhing muscles and simian proportions. He stared down at the assassin from his full height. The scowling bald head was still smoking from a dozen direct hits, and the looming giant glowered at the stupefied killer with heavy brow furrowed and teeth showing. It was a face that told Chico that he was a dead man. The mouth tightened into a grim flat line and the eyes neither flared nor blazed, as the stories so often alluded to in these moments. They were flat black hollows, betraying no hint of emotion.
Roland had no emotions when it came to Chico Garibaldi. Roland was not emotionless: He had felt real terror when he thought Lucia might get shot, for instance. But then again, Lucia was a person, and Chico was just a monster who killed for fun and profit. He was just meat for the grinder as far as Roland was concerned, because Roland liked killing monsters. Every time he ended someone like Chico, he felt like it erased one innocent that had died because of him. It was all he felt he could do to even the score.
Roland had killed hundreds of people in his career, and the worst of them had been better men than Chico Garibaldi. Roland knew he could tear the tiny man apart and still sleep like a baby that night. For his part, Chico realized for the first time since the fight began that Roland was going to kill him, and there was nothing that could be done about it.
Chico sprinted for the door, his dead twin all but forgotten, and made it about two steps before a black vice clamped on the back of his neck and threw him across that room. His brief flight was terminated in abrupt fashion by the bar that had previously been serving drunk revelers. He struck with his right shoulder and his humerus snapped like a dry twig. His head bounced off the fake wood paneling with a dull thud and spots danced across his vision.
The concussion disconnected him from the pain of his broken arm, and with rubber legs he tried to stand, more from reflex than any real sense of purpose. He didn’t see the blow that collapsed his ribs, but the stabbing fire of a punctured lung brought his situation into stark focus as his legs turned back to formless jelly. He slumped against the bar, hacking agonized coughs that sprayed foamy blood onto his coveralls.
“Roland, stop!” he heard the woman say, “Please!”
The gigantic black blur that took up Chico’s field of vision paused. He heard the monster rumble calmly, firmly, “He’s a killer, you know. He’s killed women, children, innocents. He tried to kill us tonight. He’ll try again, Lucia. This is just how it goes, here.”
“Well, I’m not from here,” Chico was losing consciousness, and the voices sounded like they were coming from inside a tunnel, “Just leave him. Let’s just go. Please.” She was pleading. Chico, having grown up in the slums and alleys of New Boston’s underworld, was confused on a very primal level.
A woman he was supposed to kidnap, was pleading with a man he tried to kill, so that he could live. Chico was briefly cognizant enough to appreciate the irony of his situation. Then he fell asleep.
Chapter Ten
Roland and Lucia exited Hideaway and moved onto the main street, colloquially called ‘the Drag.’ Their first concern was getting off the street and getting under cover. It was a nine block walk back to his apartment, and they must have cut a bizarre figure to anyone who saw them. Roland was shirtless, but the contrast between his nominally Caucasian face and matte black skin below the neckline, coupled with the dim and oddly colored lights of the Drag, made it look like he was some sort of pro wrestler in a tight black shirt walking with his latest girlfriend. Or at least that’s what they hoped it looked like as they quickly covered the distance between Hideaway and Roland’s apartment.
Lucia was tight-lipped and frazzled, and Roland was a grim, brooding scowl with legs. A twinge of guilt had led Roland to call an ambulance for Mook, and he was irritated that Chico would also get medical attention as a result. Roland had refrained from finishing Chico off for Lucia’s sake, but leaving a live enemy behind was not his style. It chaffed at him, and he wasn’t sure if he was bothered by the strategic blunder of having a pissed off Garibaldi to deal with at a later date, or if it was how easy it would have been to make the kill.
The failures of the previous generations of military cyborgs were not lost on him. Currently, he just wasn’t entirely sure if he wasn’t eventually going to become an amoral murder-bot as well. The look in Lucia’s eyes and the tone of her voice had been shocking. It felt weird. Bad weird. He didn’t want to be an amoral murder-bot, but some people needed to be murdered, right? The Garibaldi brothers positively begged to be disposed of. Killing people like Chico made the world a better place, didn’t it?
He didn’t typically move in the rarified social circles that exposed him to the type of scrutiny Lucia had viewed him with. He had been playing by Dockside rules for so long, he had forgotten there were other ways to do things. He wasn’t sure he was going to like ‘other ways to do things.’ But it was obvious that Lucia needed him to play by some different rules. He figured he could try, for Don’s sake. He owed it to the old bastard to get his daughter through this without her thinking her old man had built a monster.
Lucia, for her own sake, was still trying to come to terms with her own issues. Roland’s moral crisis was a distant second on her list of concerns because she had just been in a downtown bar brawl complete with gunmen, mutants, and a bionic midget. Literally twenty-four hours ago, she was avoiding going to a happy hour networking event because that dipshit Kyle Birdman was going to be there and she couldn’t take his clumsy, patronizing advances any more. Now she was fleeing a crime scene with giant cyborg, leaving at least one corpse behind her. All because she was an accomplice, and an illegally augmented combatant. She was going to need a minute to get a hold of all of that. Considering the three androids and the superhuman kidnapper she had escaped earlier that same goddamn evening, as well as her kidnapped father, this was shaping up to be the worst day of her life. It was just barely eleven-thirty when she checked her watch. There was still a whole half-hour for things to get worse.
The scrap in Hideaway had been yet another bit of craziness that she just wasn't ready for. She had hurt one of the men she fought seriously, and she knew she should feel badly about that, but she found that she just couldn’t bring herself to give a shit. Crouching under Roland during Chico’s final barrage had been terrifying, though. She had never been shot at before, and just knowing that someone nine feet away was making a deliberate and concerted effort to kill Roland and get at her had shattered a lot of naïve rich-girl illusions. She felt every round hit the big man’s back and watched the beads stripe his scalp with yellow fire. She had never felt so small and helpless, and she hated it. She grimly resolved herself to never feel that way again. She was sketchy on exactly how this would be accomplished, but the resolve was there. That would have to do for now.
She looked over at her companion. She was simultaneously fascinated and horrified by him. He was quite literally, her father’s greatest creation. A blend of man and machine so perfect, his very existence was a contradiction. He was obviously a weapon. It felt wrong to dehumanize him like that, but ninety percent of him was built specifically for war. She thought of an old saying her Dad often used to express disbelief: “… and if my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a wagon.” Well, big guy, she thought, if ninety percent of you was made to be a wagon… you are pretty much a wagon. Her father had taken a man and put him inside a weapon so perfectly that neither realized that one was the other. Roland is a hell of a wagon, she thought irreverently.
As a teenager, she had ‘borrowed’ her father’s AeroClast TDI and taken it out for a flight over Lake Winnipesaukee. She took it with every intention of going slowly and avoiding any dramatic bursts of exuberance. It was just supposed to be a dawn jaunt over the lake in an expensive toy.
She remembered that flight. Just
touching the throttle on that thing was like hopping on Satan’s back and slapping him in the testicles. She had wanted to be good, but the car just plain refused to go slow. It was impossible to fly that machine in a restrained manner because it wasn’t designed for that. It was designed to operate at the ragged edge of sanity. That day was the first and only time she had ever been arrested.
That’s what she imagined it felt like to be Roland all the time. A man in a hot-rod car trying like hell to drive it slowly. It had to be maddening.
Still, she hadn’t been ready to watch him beat that guy in the bar to death. She was no fool. She was aware that she wasn’t back in Cambridge anymore. She understood that this was his world, and that he was the one who knew how things worked here. She was merely a guest in Dockside, a tourist. It would be difficult, but she committed herself to not judging his warlike manner too harshly. She could learn a lot about her own augmentations by watching how he handled all of his, which she had to admit were far more extreme.
She wasn’t sure she was ever going to be able to kill though. Roland made it look easy. She didn’t want that sort of thing to ever become easy. Pretending that his casual reference to killing didn’t make her uneasy was just lying to herself. She walked in studied quiet while she tried to sort it all out in her head.
Roland broke the silence first, “How are you holding up? Your turbo-drive kicked in pretty hard back there. Any side effects?”
She started to shake her head, then nodded instead. There was no sense in lying. “Yeah. I’m having hard time calming my heartbeat. My head hurts too.” She smiled weakly, “Not sure if that’s a normal reaction to a gunfight in an underground nightclub or if it’s the stuff dad put in my head, though.”
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