THE WAY OF DEATH
James Von Ohlen
© Among the Pines Publishing, 2014
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, businesses, characters and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, actual events or locales is purely coincidental.
Cover art by Greg Taylor.
Gregtaylorart.com
“THEY’RE all going to die soon if you don’t help them.”
Reiji motioned to the three men strewn about the room with the sword held firmly in his right hand. Pointing with it and keeping it at the ready. His bodyweight remained evenly distributed on the balls of his feet. Always ready for violence.
The overheard florescent lights flickered on and off with a buzz of angry insects, throwing odd shadows about the room that played tricks on his eyes. Giving three dimensions to two-dimensional stains and warping his perception of the space between him and the only other man in the room. The lights snapped on for an extended moment, showing pools of blood spreading from each of the three prone forms.
They lay where they’d fallen but a few seconds before. Planted where they fell after he had cut them down. Their blood fortuitously matched the accumulated layers of grime and filth in the sparsely furnished apartment. Whoever was unlucky enough to live here next might not even have to clean the place to hide the telltale signs of life ending violence.
A handful of stains on the floor and walls of a shitty, filthy apartment, looked up enviously at one splashed serenely on the ceiling. As if it were better than the others. Artistic to the minds of some, no doubt. A month from now, they would be the only signs that these three men, speeding towards the gates of hell if they weren’t already there, had ever lived.
An apartment, Reiji mused as he took in every detail around him. Calling it that was more than generous. Some would even blanch at the idea of putting a farm animal in this place. It was a hovel at best. Not really fit for human occupation. Just like the countless thousands of other identical units spreading for several blocks in every direction and dozens of floors above and below. Slums, true to the name in every way.
Even then, it was still a little nicer than some of the places Reiji had lived in. Sturdier, as it was newer. His had been little more than cardboard and caulk holding on for dear life with the occasional nail thrown in to act as a load-bearing point. If there had been another earthquake during his occupancy, he’d likely have found himself digging his way out of the ruins. He supposed it was possible that he might have been killed in the collapse, but he doubted the entire building weighed enough to crush a man.
“Fuck these cunts.” The other man spoke, virtually growling as he gestured with his own sword. A heavy thing made of melted down and recast rebar that he gripped tightly enough to show white knuckles. There were likely a dozen or so illegal forges running within a mile of the housing complex that would make a weapon like that for a few credits.
A good business that, Reiji thought. Easy money to be made. As long as you didn’t make the wrong kind of illegal weapons, or one of your blades wasn’t implicated in the murder of the wrong man. Then… then you might have a world of shit coming for you. From above and below both.
Central Security, the strong arm of Central Command, itself what passed for a government on Lexington, wouldn’t hesitate to kill you and shut down your forge in the one case. Someone’s friends might kill you and take over themselves in the other. Both were among the reasons he’d never taken that route himself. That, and collecting bounties was just more fun. A life without being paid to crack skulls?
That was no life.
Reiji’s foe tried to weave the crude weapon he held back and forth in front of himself. The muscles in his forearms were tense beneath the rolled up sleeves of his jacket, writhing like angry serpents below thin skin as he gripped his blade far too tightly. The motion was ragged and irregular. Intended either to attempt a defense or intimidate, it wasn’t clear. But he was failing at both.
The sword in the man’s hands was next to useless. Good for intimidating the plebes and even cutting a man very slightly before the heft of the thing broke his bones. But not much worth beyond that. Especially not against a man like Reiji.
He’d cleared the room of the first three men in a scant two and a half seconds. Three if he counted the time it took to kick in the door and reach the first of them. And they’d known he was coming. Now that the numbers weren’t in his favor, Reiji’s foe was right fucked.
“They don’t mean any more of a shit to me than they did to you.” Lips curled behind a ragged and unkempt beard and the man spit. Narrowed eyes showed sclera turning yellow. Drug abuse or disease, Reiji thought. Likely both, given the area and the man.
His proclamation of disinterest in the fate of the three men was a lie. Reiji could tell from the way the man spoke. The twitch of his lip and the desperation in his eye. They’d been his friends, but he knew they were already as good as dead. Nothing he could do. A groan followed his proclamation, as if one of the dying men had heard and decided to register a formal complaint.
Reiji turned away from his opponent for a split second. What if one of the men he thought he had put down was a regenerator? Men who had various medical devices, specialized in dealing with traumatic injuries, implanted in their bodies. They might appear dead to the world, but could be back on their feet in a matter of minutes if not seconds. A plaything for the ultra-wealthy and the most valuable government operative. But sometimes such things found their way down into the slums and among the hunters.
A fresh, armed, man might be ready to bounce back into the fight out of sight to sink a blade into his back. He’d seen no such thing on his scanners before he’d burst into the room along with the shattered door, moving with practiced speed and killing or fatally wounding with single strikes. But it wouldn’t be the first time that a scanner had failed him.
The split second of distraction was all that the other man needed. Reiji moved back realizing his mistake and took a defensive stance, but there was no need. Despite his looks, this one wasn’t stupid.
The man turned and ran straight for the window, plunging through headfirst with his arms crossed over his face. The heavy blade he carried met the glass first, doing his skin the skin of his face a favor. His jacket was cut by the impact and tatters of it trailed along behind him as he fell from sight. The skin beneath was likely split as well, making Reiji’s job that much easier.
A shame about the jacket though. A nice jacket for someone who lived in these parts. If it didn’t fit, it could fetch a few credits, no doubt. It must have been expensive at one point in time. The desperate man hurling himself out of a window above the ground floor may have had better times in his past. Or perhaps the man wearing it had simply taken it from someone else. Robbing or killing them to become its owner.
There was a dull thud from below and a great intake of air, as if the man had hit the ground flat on his face or back and then tried to force breath back into his lungs.
Reiji looked down through the shattered window to see the man limping hard and shoving his way through a group of people, miraculously having held onto his weapon in the fall. At least three stories to the street below. Ballsy, to say the least, Reiji thought. Perhaps he was augmented. A few bionics and such a leap would mean nothing. Or perhaps he was just desperate and lucky enough to have chosen to hide in a unit a few levels above the street.
The man limped by the remains of a vehicle, the shape charred and twisted by repeated fires until it was unrecognizable what it had once been. A group of prostitutes cat-called to the man as he passed, but he ignored them. Obvious trannie
s by the look of them, Reiji thought.
Supposedly there had been a time when the surgical arts had progressed to a point that it was virtually impossible to tell if man or woman had actually been born a man or a woman. But those days were long past, and the gaggle of whores harassing Reiji’s target as he passed them were less than works of art.
Broad, muscular shoulders, narrow hips, and huge fake tits. Either there was a female bodybuilding competition going on nearby, or they were men working the streets as women. The former was unlikely, to say the least.
Whores were far from uncommon, especially in this neighborhood. But this group appeared to be the only ones on the block. Perhaps they’d muscled out their competition and taken over. Reiji dismissed the train of thought, and locked onto the man trying to flee from him.
His bounty, the reason Reiji was here, was for the return of proof of the man’s death. The man likely knew as much and knew what kind of evidence would be required to collect. Proof like that usually came by way of a severed head, still intact enough for biometric scanning to verify the identity of the deceased.
That identity being one Meyer Eben. Wanted for a whole host of minor crimes, the total bounty of which would barely put a steak on Reiji’s plate for dinner, and one major crime. The murder of a peace officer. The bounty for that last one…that would be a different story.
Central Control was paying enough to keep Reiji neck deep in drink, drugs, whores, and honest-to-God, not-grown-in-a-vat-or-lab, real food.
As incompetent as Central Control was, they at least made a show of trying to look out for their own. Anyone who killed a Central Control employee or operative could expect a death sentence in absentia and a large bounty placed on their head. Just as had happened to Mr. Eben.
Reiji stared out of the broken window and looked out at a filthy street barely lit by a solitary street lamp that had seen better days. Piles of garbage tossed out of the windows of nearby living units grew along each curb, threatening to block the progress of anyone not willing to get shit and garbage on their boots. He had almost gotten used to the smell in the few hours he’d been in the slum.
Almost.
Narrow pathways through the refuse wound down each sidewalk and the middle of the street as well, allowing the passage of people on foot and the occasional armored vehicle from Central Security.
Cent-Sec…Or Cunt-Sec as many had taken to calling them, and popular graffiti showed on their vehicles. What a bunch of assholes, Reiji thought. They were as likely as anyone else in this entire slum to try to cut him down. But at least at the end of the day, those assholes would be the ones paying him. If he could make it back to the claims depot without one of them robbing him along the way. It wouldn’t be the first time that had happened.
They liked to camp out around the organ return offices as well. It wasn’t just men’s lives that had a bounty on them. Any organs that survived the bounty collection process could be worth a good deal, so long as the previous owner had been healthy and drug-free. Reiji had made no small amount of credits that way as well, and he’d also been robbed by Cent-Sec men there too.
Fucking Cunt-Sec, he thought.
The memory made him grip the handle of his sword tight. No sense dwelling on the past, he mused. At least not when there was money to be made in the present. He took a few steps back and performed a chiburi. A flicking motion with the blade to remove excess blood from it. As far as Reiji could tell it didn’t really do much, but the importance of the thing had been drilled into his head since he had started training as a child. Now it was a force of habit and it felt wrong if he didn’t perform the movement.
The blade slid smoothly back into the sheath. A deep breath and a sprint into a leap carried him through the silhouette of the broken window and sent him plummeting to the street below.
Filth crunched beneath the soles of his heavy boots as he landed squarely in the largest pile within leaping range of the window. Reiji sank into the accumulation of garbage with a dull thud, its stink assaulted his nostrils and caused him to gag. He felt nausea as he pulled himself out of the fetid shock-absorber and was glad that he’d skipped breakfast. It would likely be coming right back up, just about then, if he had eaten.
A necessary evil. The pile of trash broke his fall, saving him from the concrete below. There would be no sense in leaping into the hard street like an idiot and injuring himself like Meyer had just done. A footrace between cripples. Reiji shook his head to clear it of the vision of the two men limping after one another while trading blows from their weapons.
As he emerged from the impromptu shock absorber, Reiji met the eyes of a man seated across the street, staring at him. His face was partially obscured by a dust-mask. The kind that someone might wear if they had any of myriad lung infections or didn’t want to contract such a thing. The height of current fashion, no doubt, and his form shrouded by a jacket a good three sizes too large for him. A pair of goggles were pulled back from his eyes and rested on his forehead. After a moment the man seemed to realize he was staring and looked away. Perhaps common sense wasn’t such a rare thing after all, Reiji thought.
As he rose to his feet that foolish notion was dispelled for him.
“There’s another one. Looks like it’s raining assholes today.” Someone said loudly as Reiji arose, twisting the words with the intonations of slang popular among lower class teenagers. He looked back to see a group of men and a few women lounging about. All teenagers really, sitting on the steps leading up to the main entrance of the living units.
“You got something to say old man?” The boy stood up, cheered on by his friends as he drew a knife from his belt and began walking forwards. He stood squarely in the middle of the sidewalk, blocking Reiji’s path to Meyer.
The fuck is wrong with kids these days? Reiji thought to himself as he looked at the boy. A full head shorter than him and half again lighter. And with some worthless shit pig-sticker at that? Was he trying to get himself killed?
Reiji looked back to Meyer, still limping down the street at a good pace, about half a block away. As much as he wanted to gut this little shit and paint the slums with his blood, it was unlikely there’d be any money in it. And possibly a bounty of his own, depending on who the punk’s friends were. It seemed like every two-bit sack of shit in the city was employed by someone with at least a little clout who could make life unpleasant for most people. Better to go after the big payday in this case.
“Shut your fucking cunt mouth before I fucking scalp you, boy.” Reiji said as he drew his sword from its sheath with a threatening hiss. A full meter from pommel to tip of lethal nano-forged steel. Honed to a deadly razor-edge that never seemed to dull. One of Reiji’s favorite design features of the blade, and one that was an artifact of the nano-forging process.
Kaishakunin.
It was the name given to the blade by some long dead ancestor. One of the men in Reiji’s family line who had wielded the blade over the passing years. Perhaps the man who named it had produced it or purchased it, or possibly even stolen it. In the case of the latter, it was unlikely the man would ever admit to it.
Regardless of its origin, it had made its way into their hands and into the hands of their sons for some generations. Reiji forgot exactly what the name meant. Some nonsense about taking heads in ceremonial executions, though that was undoubtedly a useful thing. Reiji called it Kai for short, when he felt the need to speak the blade’s name. Which was a rarity.
An even rarer thing than beheading someone committing ritual suicide, that sword. You couldn’t even buy weapons like that anymore. For any price, in any place, on all of Lexington. You couldn’t make one for yourself either even if you happened to be one of the handful of obscenely rich men on the entire face of Lexington who owned or had access to a nanoforge. Something about a shortage of materials needed to make the alloys due to an ongoing war off-planet and a problem with raiders interrupting supply lines in the wastes. That and a total absence of interplanetary co
mmerce unrelated to that same war for several decades.
Reiji looked into the boy’s dark brown eyes, almost the same color as the skin of his face and the hair that hung there in scraggly strands, partially obscuring it. He saw a distinct lack of intelligence within. The effect was magnified by a network of poorly done tattoos that covered the boy’s face and neck. Boasts of women and men conquered and plans of future global domination, no doubt. Or some stupid shit like that. That was what the marks on the stupid always came down to.
Reiji could almost hear the buzzing static that must surely pass for this one’s thoughts. The boy might just be stupid enough to not shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down. The boy paused in his approach, licking his lips with eyes growing wide.
Not in shock or fear, but anger. Anger that a man twice his size, twice his age, and with an actual weapon, instead of tin-foil soldered into shape, wasn’t putting up with his juvenile bullshit. Definitely a stupid one then, Reiji noted. The boy remained silent as he took a step back, but kept the knife clenched tight in his fist.
“Better watch your back, asshole. Be seein’ you around!” The boy said as he sat back down among his friends, all now completely silent with taut faces. A few hands were obscured by clothing, no doubt reaching for weapons should Reiji take this little fucker’s head.
Fair enough, Reiji thought.
If the boy made a move, now or in the future, he was as good as dead. Perhaps another bounty to collect when Reiji needed some extra money, after remembering the boy’s face and the address of the nearest building. If he happened to notice that the boy was a wanted criminal next time he checked, well then he’d have all the excuse he needed.
He smiled to himself at the thought of looking into those same dull eyes while gutting this kid, seeing the recognition there, and the knowledge that it was all his own fault. That he had brought the hammer down on himself. But Reiji doubted the little shit would remember who he was in just a few hours. He doubted the boy was capable of the lengths of logical reasoning that would allow him to arrive at such a conclusion.
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