Shadowrun: Crimson

by Kevin R. Czarnecki

  “Maybe. Probably. Eventually.”

  “Hmm. Well, when you do, stop being a stranger. You can start all over if you want, but don’t leave everything behind, yeah? Family is about all you and me have.”

  “For the lucky ones, family is enough.”

  Chapter 9

  Friends, Favors, Revelations, and Revolutions

  I returned to the warren to hear the roars of debate echoing through the old tunnels. I ran, reaching the audience hall to find Needles and Barnes in the middle of the chamber, surrounded by most of the pack. The division between the forty or so ghouls was clear, each standing on the side they favored. Right now the numbers seemed pretty even.

  “You’d have us squatting in sub-human filth for the rest of our lives!” Barnes shouted. “We’ll rot down here, feeding on bugs and cowering in the shadow of Lone Star flunkies! And for what?” His side of the room roared its approval.

  “You want to live like a man, again, Barnes?” Needles asked. “You remember what it was like. Some of the people here never had the opportunity you and I had. I want give them that chance.”

  “At what? To ape being human? All you offer are human morals, which don’t make allowances for cannibalism! Survival is about adaptation, and you don’t seem to have any conception of what you’ve become, let alone how to lead others in the same position!”

  “Don’t question my leadership, Barnes!” Needles said. “I encourage anyone to come to me with their problems, but this is complete bullshit. You haven’t been here for more than a few years. You weren’t even a ghoul before that! If you can’t cut it accepting what you are, keep those problems to yourself, or take them elsewhere.”

  “I cannot accept my nature? I happily prepare the meat for our packmates. I have embraced my nature more than you could know. I would embrace it more, if you did not keep us chained with ethics we’ve evolved beyond!”

  “We can not walk among men again if we see them as no more than food!”

  “Strange you would say that when you and your favorites always keep the best for themselves.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Barnes reached back and a ghoul handed him a wine bottle. I recognized it all too well. “Seems your little whore spent some time enjoying the finer things. Tell me, when do I get to put a little color back in my cheeks?” His crowd rumbled. “When do we get our turn? When do we get our share?!”

  Barnes raised his arms, fingers splayed and claws sharp, and his side roared again, some snarling and gnashing their teeth. Looking between the groups, now, I could see that the mothers, most of the sentient ones, and the children were on Needles’ side. Barnes had convinced most of the savage ghouls, or the ones who embraced their homicidal instincts, that they were being cheated.

  Barnes tossed the bottle at Needles, who looked at it with confusion. Pretty had been telling the truth: he knew nothing about this. Barnes looked around to gauge the attitude of the room and spotted me. His smile turned cruel.

  “Tell me, Needles, how much did we spend on that wine? Or pulling your vampire friend out of the drink? What was in it for the rest of us? Maybe you can explain why you and your favorites have dined on the sweetest flesh while the rest of us waste away on this mutant shit?”

  Needles set the bottle down. His eyes were hard. “I didn’t know about this, Barnes. I haven’t tasted a human in three years.”

  Barnes threw up his hands in exasperation, as though talking to a particularly slow child. “You can do whatever you want, Needles, but you’ve got no right to tell us how to live our lives!”

  Needles shook his head. “We don’t have much choice, Barnes. You want to bring those damn Stars down on our heads, picking off innocents?”

  “No one is innocent, least of all a pack of cannibals. It’s what we are, Needles, much as you want to avoid that inconvenient truth. We have moved up the food chain. A human might call me a monster. I say I am evolved! Some of us don’t have our heads buried up our asses, still clinging to delusions of humanity.

  Needles’s eyes narrowed. He flexed his clawed hands and spread his feet into a stable stance. A fighter’s stance.

  “If you’re nothing more than a monster, Barnes, then you must be put down like one…”

  Barnes slid a scalpel out of one sleeve and grasped the cleaver at his waist. Both sides hissed and snarled, advancing closer to the middle of the room. The children retreated to the far side, terror obvious in their pale eyes. For them, the astral was awash in color and intention, hate and fear they could see and smell and feel.

  “Stop!”

  Everyone looked at me, and the hissing stopped like the sizzle of a bomb fuse. Arms raised, palms open, I moved to the middle of the room. I knew I was at a disadvantage in my clothes, a suited man amidst rag-clad families, but I had no time to change.

  “This is insane! You’re going to fight over who gets to be leader? There’s only forty or so ghouls here! That’s including the children!” I turned to Barnes. “You want to make these children into killers, is that it?”

  He grimaced. “It’s what they are. It’s what we all are, even you.”

  I turned to Needles. “And you want to have this fight here, amidst the civilians of the pack?”

  Needles glanced back to see the half-dozen children huddled together. His scowl relaxed, but he was still ready to fight. “I’m not being presented with a lot of choices, Red.”

  I looked at both sides again. The ghouls were all angry, but it didn’t seem like they were particularly enthusiastic about fighting members of their own community. Maybe this could all get talked down, but it was looking less and less likely. Besides, the seeds of discontent had been sown. There would always be a rift, now. Maybe it was just time to break ties. I turned to Barnes.

  “You want to be top dog, Barnes? You think you’ve got the chops for it?”

  He turned up his chin. “Look behind me, fang-boy. I’ve already got enough ghouls here to make a pack.”

  “Well if it’s so goddamned awful here, then you should just leave. The Noose is still full of places to hide out and stay clean. You want to be a pack, then go be a damn pack, but don’t you dare try to force anyone to come along.”

  Barnes scowled. “Why should I leave them here to languish under this tyrant?”

  “Because it’s their choice to stay, just as it’s your choice to leave. And anyone else’s. It was a human decision you made to become a leader. So let them be human enough to choose to follow you.”

  Barnes glared at me for a moment. “What if I feel like taking over here?”

  I stared back at him. “Then I’ll kill you.”

  He laughed, but I kept staring.

  “Just you, Barnes. The rest can rip me apart, but you’ll still be dead. Better that than you in charge, here.”

  We traded glares for a few moments, and I could almost see him calculating. He knew I could take him down, survive the onslaught of all his ghouls just long enough to deliver a killing blow. And the potent combination of a predator’s mindset with a self-considered genius’s ambition gave him a powerful survival instinct.

  He looked back and forth to his side of ghouls, gesturing for them to back down. Throwing one last contemptuous stare at me and Needles, he spat on the floor, then strode out of the room with most of his ghouls in tow.

  “How many went with him in the end?”

  “Fifteen.” Needles rubbed his hands over his face, exhaustion, and worse, resignation showing with frightening ease on his lined face. Sometimes I forgot just how old he really was.

  “Well, that’s not so bad, right?”

  He fixed me with a tired, incredulous look. “Those were fifteen of my fighters and workers, Red. Fifteen. That’s almost half. I’ve been left with a handful of sentient ghouls, most of them only partially so, capable of providing security. The rest are children and non-combatants. I’ve been left with the vulnerable ones. We also just lost our resident doctor and food specialist. And to top i
t all off, they have a grudge against us, and will probably go out and draw far more attention to the few surviving ghouls out here than we need.”

  He slumped in his chair. I couldn’t bear to see him like this, bereft of hope. I’d made the wrong move. The more I thought about it, the more I realized it was a far larger problem being without them than with them.

  “It could have been much worse,” I told him. “What if it had come to fighting? You’d have lost a bunch of the loyal ones, and the surviving separatists would have gone on making trouble. You were going to lose Barnes one way or another. We can be thankful that it didn’t get any worse than that.”

  “Worse?! We’re sitting ducks now! Some bugs come crawling in here, and they’ll have us all for dinner! Lone Star could waltz in any time it wants! All we have is an undermanned warren defended by children!”

  I kept my gaze steady. “You want to leave, I’m sure we can find a way.”

  He fell back into his chair. “There is no other way. No other place. The world is full of ghouls, Red, make no mistake. You want me to take these people to Asamando? Maybe we can petition for membership to live in the jungle, like fucking Caribbean cannibal tribes. Maybe I could bring these little savages into the Tamanous family, huh? They could bring up their children in the company of chop-shop docs and murderers, like your friend Jones.”

  “Jones is no friend of mine.”

  He pulled out the bottle angrily. “Then where the frag did this come from?!”

  I looked at it steadily, weighing my options. I hated to have Needles think less of me, but this was Pretty’s home. She’d have to deal with the long-term repercussions of this, maybe at the hands of angry or jealous packmates. I was still the outsider.

  “I’m sorry, Needles.”

  “Sorry?!”

  “Look, it’s not as though Barnes wouldn’t have thrown his little revolution without it!”

  “It made for one hell of a trump card, though!”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Nothing! There’s nothing you can say to me right now. All your talk of self-control, releasing those Stars when…I hungered for them, Rick. I wanted to taste them. I’ve wanted it for so long, now. Sometimes I think I’d rather starve for a month and get a single taste of human flesh. But I held it together, knowing I had to set an example. It helped that I knew someone else who knew what it was like to hold off and find a moral way of feeding. And then I find you like to indulge in this shit!”

  I almost told him outright that it was Pretty who did it, or that it was his urging that had led her to buy it. His friendship and respect meant everything to me. But he looked ready to cry, and that was something I just wasn’t ready for. And I wasn’t going to sell her out.

  “I guess I’m just not the man you thought I was.”

  “I guess not.”

  The silence weighed on us, the moment stretching out, but there was nothing left to say. I left.

  I sat on my perch above the ruins once again, taking deep, cleansing breaths. The late fall air betrayed the snow that was bound to fall in the next few days, but I didn’t care how cold I was. My hair whipped about in the wind as I let my gaze slip into the astral.

  The eddies and swirls of mana were weak here. I hadn’t been taking the time to note my surroundings. Even though I could fight off Strain-III infection with chemical showers, my own regeneration and staying in the necessarily-clean warrens, I still spent most of my magical time in the cleanest areas, meditating and focusing inward to build up my mystical potential. I had thought I was far weaker than before, but as I studied the stunted magical energies of Chicago, I wondered what I might be capable of outside the city.

  My gaze followed the slight glow of a line of power leading downtown. Historically, Chicago had been a hotspot for mystic energy, with several ley lines intersecting here. I always thought that was why the bugs favored it so much. It was almost certainly why the Strain-III was still alive. I could see the strange discoloration of bacterial infection all over the line, like blotches in a polluted stream. They choked it, feeding on it and growing stronger.

  Experimental counter-agents Ares had dumped on the areas had given the lines a chance to grow back, but not enough to matter. The clouds of bacteria were visible in the astral, errant puffs of death for me and mine. It was fortunate they tended to group together in avoidable chunks.

  That was partly how Needles and his pack had survived here for so long. With their dual-natured sight they could see the outbreaks, avoid the thickest clouds. Needles’s know-how in medical technologies and procedure ensured they could treat early stages of affliction and prevent new ones. He’d chosen the site for the warren because it had fewer ventilation points, and he’d installed filters to keep them safe. It was one of the more menial, but no less important jobs to keep the warren as sterile as possible, stained but scrubbed.

  Now I sat high enough to be almost safe. I studied the ley line again, trying to taste its echoes of power. They still stank of the bugs. Maybe they always would, after the taint such a huge hive would have left. Maybe they always had.

  I felt her first, materializing beside me. Menerytheria was always brave to come out here like this. The clouds would eat her up faster than any of us, and there would be no way of stopping the spread by any conventional means, only passing through solid matter and letting the bacteria’s physical form stick to the wall. But passing through a cloud completely? Suicide.

  I glanced sidelong at her. She was perched beside me, trying to look like she wasn’t watching me. Her movements seemed akin to Pretty’s when the young ghoul had her sassy act going on. I didn’t like what that portended.

  “Enjoying the view?” I asked.

  She didn’t respond, only checked her liquid nails and hummed to herself.

  “Something I can do for you?”

  She seemed to sigh a little at that, but kept playing coy.

  It was times like these that I wondered what spirits normally felt. Were they capable of being smitten while they were bound to someone? Was that, perhaps, the one emotion they could keep to themselves? How long had she been harboring feelings toward me? While she was my ally, or had they arisen as she combed the depths of the Chicago River searching for my body?

  It didn’t matter right now. I was in no mood for the additional complications of an unwanted romance. I was grateful to be rid of our connection in that moment, because I knew that thought would have brought her to tears all over again.

  “Why did you leave Needles the way you did?”

  Her words startled me out of my reverie. I turned to face her. She was maintaining her aloof posture, but her words still sounded the same as usual. I guess she’d only been watching Pretty, not listening. Thank goodness.

  “He and I are having our disagreements. Every friendship does.”

  “Wasn’t it Pretty’s bottle of blood?”

  “Just how do you get to know so much?”

  “I’m never very far from you, Rick.”

  I sighed, rubbing my temples. My life was anything but ordinary. An ex-ally spirit for a stalker, living beyond the walls of a ruined city with killer bacterial clouds, bug spirits, and bandits, in the company of a gang of ghouls with their own sets of problems. Oh, and fresh out of hibernation vampire spike baby from the last century. At least I couldn’t say I was bored.

  “Look, Mene, I don’t want to—”

  “What did you just call me?”

  What?”

  “You called me ‘Mene.’”

  “Yeah, for short.”

  “What’s wrong with the name you gave me?”

  “Nothing. It’s just long, to keep you safe so no one stumbles across it. I just called you ‘Mene’ in shorthand.”

  “My name is too long now?!” She seemed on the verge of panic.

  “No! People give friends nicknames, special little mini-names because we spend so much time around them.”

  “Even special friends?”
r />   “I… suppose so.”

  She squealed with delight and threw her arms around me, knocking me on my back. I was glad I was out of my suit. I started to push her off, but at that point, I was just too damn tired to bother. As she snuggled into me, I sighed and let her, running my hands through her liquid hair and turning my head to the side to watch the deadly clouds below.

  I woke up the next evening in a quiet corner of the warren. I’d chosen the spot to stay out of the way, both to lower my profile and keep out of Needles’s path. My Meta-Link was blinking, and I put on my AR glasses to find a message in my inbox. Slim’s profile pic came up, and I opened it.

  Red,

  I didn’t want to wake you up, but can you make another meet today? I’ve included the whole briefing for you if you think you can be ready and at the meeting point by nine p.m.

  It was seven right now. I checked the attached address and knew I could make it with time to spare, if I hurried. I clicked the link to continue.

  This is your contact.

  The three-dimensional form appeared to the left like last time: a tallish man with scraggly dark gray hair and stubble, an earring, and a cigarette. He was dressed in the same worn but wearable style as my own synth-leather and jeans, so at least I could fit in easily. He was skinny, datajack at his temple, cybereyes, but realistic ones. And I could just make out the dedicated chipslot right behind the datajack. Either he liked his skillwires, or he was a chiphead. Those could change the game a little bit, one way or another.

  Alan Ranes, age 36, occupation according to NooseNet is fence and Johnson, but word on the blogs is that he designs his own jobs. Comes up with the plan, finds the time tables for guards, passcodes, the works, and sells the whole package for a percentage of the take. He cut out the middleman by becoming his own fence. Since we’ve lost Edgar, we could really use a guy like this. He already has your picture, so he’ll find you there.