by John Helfers
He gimped his way closer to the table, enjoying the growing look of fear on the faces of each the four suits sitting there as they realized that help would not soon be coming. He grunted along on his good leg, favoring his battered knee, and he reached into the fraying pocket of his torn and tattered jacket, fished out a packet of paper, and pitched it into the middle of the table.
The men recoiled as if he’d tossed them a grenade. Then one of them leaned forward and peered at the bound-up papers through tight, beady eyes set deep into his hatchet-shaped face framed by a haircut that cost more than the dwarf made in a week.
“Real money,” the dwarf said. “The stuff we used to use before electronic transfer. Before trusting the corp banks was mandatory.”
“Is it real?” a white-haired man at the table said. The dwarf heard the telltale click-wheeze of the man’s cybernetic lungs. The man stared at the money as if it might sprout legs and fangs and attack.
The dwarf laughed. “Probably not, but then what is?”
He hopped up onto the only empty chair at the table and stood on it. His eyes still barely came to the level of the men staring at him. He flicked his chin at the man stroking his pianist’s fingers along a large tray of thick, colored chips.
“That’s a hundred thousand nuyen.” The dwarf waved a thick hand at the decaying paper. “Count it if you like.”
The man’s pencil-thin moustache peeled back in a sneer. “That won’t be necessary.”
The dwarf smirked at that. He reached out for the chips, but the hatchet-faced man slapped a hand on the felt between the banker and the cash.
“This is a private game,” the man said.
The dwarf stuck out his bottom lip at that and gazed out the high windows overlooking the sparkling Chicago skyline—or what was left of it. The space where the Sears Tower had once stood still gaped like a missing tooth.
“So it is,” the dwarf said. “And it’s being held in a private club.” He smiled at that. “And yet here I stand.”
The white-haired man coughed, then spoke. “Subhuman species are not permitted in the club.”
“The club? Is that what you’re calling it these days? Short for the Policlub, eh?” He looked at his own stunted height, then gave the men a knowing wink. “Pardon the pun.”
“Humanis is a charitable organization devoted to protecting the rights of a humanity besieged on all sides,” the banker said, a hint of amusement in his voice.
“Or so your commercials claim,” the dwarf said as he doffed his grimy baseball cap. Nanite-inked tattoos snaked and danced beneath the skin of his bald scalp, forming hypnotic shapes like a living screensaver trapped inside his skull.
He leaned forward and put two hammer-like fists on the table. His braided beard, streaked through with gray, grazed the green felt.
“Let’s not mince words. We’re worldly souls. You’re bigots. Wealthy ones too. You get nasty people to do terrible things to people like me, and you pay them well for it because it keeps your hands clean.”
A small gun appeared in hand of the fourth man at the table, the one who’d been silent until now. He looked young and strong, although the dwarf was sure he’d been surgically sculpted that way. He could smell the bioengineered pheromones wafting off the man, designed to tell everyone within range who the big dog at the table must be.
Despite all that, he held the gun like a little boy.
“I’m not afraid of you,” the man with the gun said through rows of perfectly straight teeth.
The dwarf laughed. “Go ahead, boy. Pull that trigger. Give it your best shot.”
The man hesitated. A bead of sweat ran from his temple.
The dwarf leaned farther over the table, nearly crawling on to it. He pointed right at the center of his forehead.
“Go ahead and shoot, son.” The dwarf’s voice dripped with contempt. “I can take it. Or when you went in for all that cosmetic surgery did they remove your balls because you were clearly never going to need them?”
The gun barked in the man’s hand, nearly leaping from his fingers. The bullet zipped high over the dwarf’s head and crashed into chandelier overhead. Flying shards of crystal rained down and sliced into the dwarf’s exposed skin.
The dwarf pushed himself back to stand on his chair. He reached up and picked out the bits of crystal still embedded in his skull.
The white-haired man with the plastic lungs gasped. “Lucky Wurfel,” he said. “You’re supposed to be dead.”
A rivulet of blood trickled down the side of the dwarf’s head. He snorted at that. “No such luck.”
“Lucky?” The man with the gun had lost his expensive cool. His hands shook so hard that he dropped the weapon on the table. It went off again.
This time, the bullet tore through Lucky’s jacket and creased his ribs. He grunted in pain and grabbed at his side. When he pulled his hand away, crimson coated his palm.
“Oh, my God!” the gun-dropper said. “I’m—I’m….”
“Sorry?” Lucky said as he straightened back up.
The man scowled at the dwarf. He glanced at the gun again, and his fingers twitched.
Lucky nodded. “I didn’t think so.” He pointed at the man with the chips again. “Deal me in.”
“So we can play against a dwarf named Lucky? I don’t think so.”
“You got something against free money?”
“I don’t want you taking mine.”
The white-haired man interrupted. “The nickname’s meant to be ironic, like calling a fat man ‘Slim.’ This son of a bitch has the worst possible luck.”
“Huh.” The hatchet-faced man gave Lucky a look like he was sizing him up for a body bag. “Seems that would have killed a ‘normal’ man by now.”
Lucky grunted at the man’s racism. “Dying’s easy. Living with pricks like you around, that’s the real challenge.”
The hatchet-faced man shifted in his seat but refused to meet Lucky’s eyes. The dwarf stared at him for a moment, then turned back to the banker. “So,” he said, “do you want my money or not?”
“Why do you want to play?” the gunman said. “I mean, you’re going to lose, right? What’s the point?”
“Because I want to tell you a story,” the dwarf said. “And interrupting a game of cards is rude. “
The white-haired man nodded at the banker. The man reached out and scooped up the packet of bills. Without counting the money, he pulled 100,000 nuyen worth of chips from the tray in front of him and pushed them across the table toward the dwarf.
Lucky swept the chips into a pile in front of him. Then he looked each of the men—every one of whom hated him and anyone like him, he knew—and grinned.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s play.”
The hatchet-faced man dealt. Lucky spotted him slipping cards from the bottom of the deck as he went, but he didn’t bother to say anything. He knew he was going to lose, after all. He expected it. The game meant nothing.
“So,” the white-haired man said. “What’s your story?”
“Yeah,” the too-handsome man with the gun still sitting in front of him said. “You’re about to pay us a lot of money to listen, so out with it.”
Lucky gathered in his cards and looked at them. They read 2, 3, 4, 5, 7. All of them were clubs, with the exception of the 7, which was a spade. He put the cards down in front of him and tossed a 1,000 nuyen chip into the center of the table.
“I wasn’t always the unluckiest dwarf you’ll ever meet. Well, I mean most people. I suspect idiots like you don’t run into a whole lot of dwarves in your corporate boardrooms.
“I was one of the first dwarves ever born. When I came out of my momma, imagine what a surprise that must have been. At first they must have just thought I was a little small. Maybe just a bit behind the growth curve. By the time I got to school, though, they must have had their suspicions. I know when I finally went off to middle school, for sure, they had more than guesses that I was a, well—”
&nbs
p; “Freak.” The man with the gun sneered at Lucky.
The dwarf shrugged it off. “Maybe. Hell, probably. They even talked with some doctors about how to surgically lengthen my not-so-long bones.
“After they talked with enough specialists, though, they realized that they didn’t have some kind of genetic anomaly on their hands, but a child in the vanguard of a new resurgence of an ancient race.”
Lucky held up his hands to stave off the scoffing.
“Save it. You think I’m a freak of nature, and I think you’re a murderous bunch of assholes. Maybe we’re both right, but that’s not the point of the story. So, if you’ll let me go on?”
The others looked to the white-haired man, who nodded his assent.
“Back in those days, there weren’t a whole lot of things a dwarf could do. I didn’t fancy joining the circus, thank you, so I had to forge a new destiny for myself. When I was eighteen, the computers all crashed, and my identity was lost. I took that as a sign and never registered with the rebooted systems. Instead, I slipped into the shadows, and I’ve never come out since.
“The year I turned twenty-eight, I was a hardcore shadowrunner. That was back in ’39, back when it all went bad. I lost a lot of friends in the riots on the Night of Rage.”
Lucky stopped for a moment and gazed up at the spot where the Sears Tower had once stood. Although it had been gone for so long, it still felt like someone had cut off one of his limbs. When he got this close to it, it almost seemed like he could still feel it out there, teeming with thousands of lives.
He didn’t bother drawing any cards. He just kept the ones he’d been dealt. Still, he called every bet and every raise.
“My parents worked downtown, right near the Sears Tower. They died the day it went down. I was somewhere off in Manhattan, still trying to help clean up, to make a difference after the riots.”
The banker threw down the winning hand and raked in the chips. The deal passed to the white-haired man, and the cards came sliding across the felt again. Lucky didn’t even bother to look at his cards this time. He kept playing mechanically while he talked.
“As you might imagine, all that made me pretty mad. I was a real revolutionary for a while there. I cut off all contact with humans.
“As far as I was concerned, you guys were the enemy. A dead-end branch on the evolutionary path to the top of the food chain. If I’d have had my way, I’d have pushed all the resurgent races into havens on the West Coast and then nuked the rest of the continent until it was a sheet of glowing, green glass.”
Lucky paused for a moment to relish the looks on the faces of the men staring at him. They were used to being the haters, not the hated, and the swap in positions discomforted them.
“Instead, after a lot of soul searching and no little amount of beer, I decided to switch tactics. Instead of doing runs for anyone with enough credits to spare, I swore I would only take on contracts for missions that would help the resurgents and do something to keep disasters like the Sears Tower from ever happening again.
“I specialized in curses.”
The breath in the white-haired man’s plastic lungs caught. Lucky was sure he was the only one who noticed, as it came at the end of another hand. The gunman won this time, and after raking in his winnings he started to deal as well.
“Magic came back along with the metahumans, as I’m sure pisses every one of you off to this day. You probably think the only kind of magic is eeeevil magic, but you’re as wrong about that as you are about everything else.
“Magic is a tool. It doesn’t tell you how to use it. You just pick it up and do what comes naturally.
“If you have a chainsaw, for instance, you might start knocking down trees. Paul Bunyan might hate the chainsaw, but every other lumberjack around loves it.
“If you decide to use it for something more, ah, antisocial, though—like knocking off heads instead—then you’re the evil one. The murderous urges come from inside you. The chainsaw is innocent.”
The gunman shook his head. “But that’s not true. Magic doesn’t work that way. You just mentioned curses.”
“Yes,” the banker chipped in. “Aren’t you supposed to be cursed?”
Lucky tapped his temple with a thick index finger. “Exactly,” he said. “Magic can be bad, just like people can be bad. Curses are bad, but they’re not the worst.”
The dwarf called the bet and raised it again. He waited for play to continue, but the hatchet-faced man held up his hand for it to stop.
“What is it then?”
“What?”
“The worst sort of magic. Does it have anything to do with something that causes perfectly normal women to give birth to genetic freaks?”
“Do you know to keep an asshole in suspense?”
The man shook his head.
“I’ll tell you later. Now see that raise or fold.”
The man tossed in his chips, and Lucky began speaking again.
“I got sent on one of my last missions back in ’45. I wound up at a secret base up in northern Michigan, near Sioux St. Marie. The scientists there had located a cursed artifact of some sort or another and were trying to weaponize it.”
The gunman scoffed. “Are you telling me that some of those damned elves were trying to figure out a way to throw the evil eye at a whole city at once?’
Lucky waited for the man to stop chuckling at himself. Then he started in.
“Ever read The Lord of the Rings?” he asked.
The gunman shrugged and shook his head. The hatchet-faced man and the banker followed suit. Only the white-haired man seemed prepared to admit he’d ever even heard of the books.
“I’ve seen the movies,” he said. “The trideo remakes, not the originals.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” the gunman said. “The ones with the dwarves in them.” He glanced at Lucky as the others nodded in recognition at last. “I’ll bet those are your favorites.”
“In The Lord of the Rings, there’s this dark lord named Sauron—”
“As in ‘the Sons of Sauron.’” The white-haired man glared at Lucky. “Who did you say you worked with again?”
“I didn’t,” said Lucky. “But I try to avoid those pro-metahuman wackos whenever I can. Their agenda is almost as stupid as the crap you Humanis idiots spout.”
The gunman started to say something, but Lucky cut him off. “That’s not what I’m trying to get at here. This Sauron—the one in the book—he had a ring of power. The ring of power. It corrupted anyone who touched it. Drove them mad.”
“Including him?”
“He lost it.”
“How’d that happen?”
“Just go back to school, learn how to read, and then open the fucking book. That’s not my story here.”
Lucky waited for a moment for the gunman to sit back in his chair and shut up.
“All right. Imagine—now, I know that’s hard for calcified brains like the ones you guys tote around in your skulls—but imagine, if you will, what would happen if you could take that cursed ring and atomize it.”
“Atom-what?” The hatchet-faced man scowled.
“Grind it up into a fine dust and then mix it with an aerosol spray,” the white-haired man said.
“I see someone paid attention in chemistry class,” Lucky said. “Now, imagine if you did that with the One Ring. If you could grind it up and aerosolize it, think about how many people you could corrupt at once. And they’d never stand a chance of not getting infected by it.”
“That’s insane,” the banker said. “Nothing like that’s ever been done before.”
“Insane,” the dwarf said, “but not impossible. In any case, that’s what these scientists had set out to do.”
“Are you saying they had the One Ring? I thought those books were supposed to be fiction.”
Lucky gestured at himself. “Do I look like fiction?” Instead of waiting for an answer, he just shook his head. “No, there’s no such thing as the One Ring, but the sc
ientists up there near the Soo Locks didn’t need an artifact like that. Instead, they had something else.”
“Which was?”
“Ever hear of the Edmund Fitzgerald?”
The men at the table stared at him with blank looks.
“Nobody listens to the classics anymore,” Lucky said. “The Edmund Fitzgerald was the most massive ship to ever sail the Great Lakes. It went down in a storm in 1975, almost a hundred years back. Twenty-nine men died.”
“So what does an ancient wreck have to do with anything?”
“The Edmund Fitzgerald didn’t go down due to mechanical failure or due to the storm. It went down because it was cursed.”
“Bullshit.” The hatchet-faced man cleared his throat and spat on the floor. “That’s too early. Before the aberrations began.”
“Back in the ‘good ol’ days,’ right?” Lucky shook his head. “You Humanis schmucks never get it, do you? Magic isn’t something wrong with the world. It’s the natural way of things. It waxes and wanes through the centuries like the moon in the sky.
“Just like during a new moon, though, even when you can’t see magic, it’s still there. It’s just waiting for its time to shine again.”
“That’s just a bunch of Sixth World crap,” the banker said. “The same foolishness street shamans and other charlatans have been spouting forever.”
Lucky smiled. “Believe what you like.” He gestured at himself. “I think the facts are on my side.”
“So what sank the Edmund Fitzgerald? The One Ring? Or was it made of white gold this time?”
Lucky shook his head. “A sailor on the ship had been having an affair with a Chippewa woman, the daughter of the Bad River band’s chief. When she dumped him for another man, he stole something from her home, an ancient spear that had been part of the band’s history ever since they’d taken that name.
“‘Bad River.’ Makes you wonder what must have happened for a whole band to get slapped with that name.”
“No,” the gunman said. He had his hands flat on the table before him, framing his still-smoking gun. The fingers of his right hand twitched toward it. “I don’t wonder. I don’t care.”