“Can we go somewhere private?”
“Why?” Hez’s laugh was sinister. “Ye gittin’ plans on me, mate?”
“Naw.” Rude’s smile was totally genuine. Hez had a way of making everyone around him just a shade happier, even troll killing machines. “I need to show you somethin’.”
“Exactly.” He winked, the sworl tattoo around that eye shifting colors from blue to pink to that strange yellow of a soynana peel.
“Ha!” Rude laughed out loud halfway through a pull from his drink and sprayed foam into the air. “Yer killin’ me.”
“Looks like somebody already tried tonight, mate.” Hez leaned in and a shine crossed his eyes that didn’t match up with the lights of the room. His demeanor suddenly changed to much more serious. “Yeah, let’s take this elsewheres.”
Hez held up an awkward hand gesture—something between a gang sign and an arthritic palsy—to the bartender, who returned it with a curt nod and the press of a button under the bar. Without a further word, the ork grabbed Rude by the mechanical hand and led him toward the far wall.
“Hey gorgeous.” A thick-horned troll wearing little more than a red leather bandolier tried to interject in their path, but Hez shot her a look and she stepped aside knowingly. “You go get yours, sugar,” she added loudly, spinning back to the crowd.
Rude was led to the bright glow of the back kitchen hallway, but he and Hez took an abrupt turn through a deceptively difficult to notice panel into a small room with a private table.
The troll shrugged off his sword scabbard and strap, sliding it onto the table with a dull thud before swinging off his coat, draped across the back of one of the chairs and plopped down into another.
Hez took the chair across from him, pulled a small gold-plated box out of his mock-snakeskin jacket and thumbed it open. He plucked a small, thin cigarette from within, clasped the box shut, and started to tap the filtered side against the top. Popping it into his mouth, he lifted a single finger to the tip. Smoke immediately started to curl up from the bright red ember flaring to life beneath his touch. “Awl’raight, show me whatcha got.”
“What do ya’ll know about these guys?” Rude drew a plastic baggie out of his pocket, pinched open the sides, and let what looked like a lump of bloody, grey-blue lunchmeat flop onto the table. Poking at the folds with his finger, the lump flattened out to reveal an oblong patch of leathery skin tattooed with a somewhat stained version of a white-feathered serpent. “Snake Squad, or somethin’ like that.”
“Wow, mate.” Hez recoiled a bit, less in horror and more out of surprise. “Now I see why ye dinna wan’ to yank that out in public. ’Tis quite a shock.” He carefully turned the flap around to face him. “Oy, Serpent Squad. Nasty pieces o’ work that hire out from al’ovah. What’cha need from them?”
“They went and tried to kill one of mine.” Rude smirked. “But I took ’em down a few pegs. One of ’em said somethin’ about bein’ hired to a job on a corp that just so happen to have just double-crossed my team. I might not be the smartest troll around, but that seemed too much like a coincidence.”
“Stranger things been known t’appen, mate.”
Rude pulled a second baggie out of his other pocket and pushed it across the table; it was full of assorted broken bits of electronics sprinkled with tiny motes of broken glass. “These Serpents were jammin’ our comms. Our comms. Like they knew the link codes t’our private network. Not just that, but they knew where my guy was supposed ta be meetin’ a Johnson. They came in like the Law, and hit hard. If I wadn’t already there scopin’ the joint, one of my guys’d be an elfy-shaped stain on the street.”
“Oi,” Hez took a deep drag off his cigarette and blew out a plume of blue-gray smoke, “sounds a roughin’.”
“I’ve had worse.” Rude snorted. Prolly.
“Ah’m sure ye ’ave.” The ork sat back in his chair, blew more smoke toward the ceiling like some kind of orcish dragon, then looked Rude in the eyes. “But this’n still sounds a sight awful, mate. I don’ know much about the Serpents, but I ’ear things.”
“What kind of things?”
“Nae much, really.” Hez drummed his fingers on the edge of the table, “but ah do know where ya maight dig up sumfin’.”
“How much is this gonna cost me?” Rude took a drink, leaving just enough to swirl around at the bottom of his glass as he spoke, “’Cause my nuyen’s all tied up at the moment.”
“Nuffin’, mate.” He shook his head and fidgeted with the ring on his pinky. “Call us even. Ah still owed ye fer that Tacoma job.”
Hez searched the ins and outs of his jacket and found a folded napkin with a purplish-brown wine stain on the corner. Flattening it out on the table, he smoothed it down a few times with his hands before tracing across it with his finger, with the paper smoldering into the dark letters and numbers of an address.
“Show off.” Rude finished his drink and slid the napkin away from the ork. “Ya could’ve asked if I had a pen, you know?”
“Just be careful, mate,” Hez warned him. “That ’ole block be crawlin’ wi’ problems. Call if ye get in some trouble.”
“Trouble?” His grin was wide as he stood, and he dramatically clutched invisible pearls. “Little ol’ me?”
“Ah mean it.” All of Hez’s illuminated tattoos shifted color to various shades of violet, casting the ork awash in new darkness. “Sumfin’ big is brewin’ out there, an’ even ah dunno what it be just yet.”
“I will.” Rude shrugged on his coat again, slung the bandolier back over his shoulder, and adjusted the sword to sit between the worn calluses in the leather. “And thanks.”
“Don’ mention it, mate.” He chuckled. “No, seriously, if ye get busted—ah don’ know ye.”
Rude nodded and headed back out into the club. He returned his empty pint to the goblin at the bar, made sure to throw him a good “Next time don’t question me” look, and crossed through the crowd to the weapon check at the front doors.
“Have a good night?” the dwarf minding the vault scanned his AR signature and handed over the mirrored plastic storage pouch that held the troll’s sidearm.
“Just gettin’ started.” Rude tore open the bag with his teeth like a snack-n-seal. “Ask me in the mornin’.”
“That’s the spirit!” The dwarf stroked his beard suggestively. “Have a good one then, chummer. Come see us at Horneez again real soon.”
Rude stepped out in the wet night air, the thrum of the electronic dance music of the club dulling to a muffle as soon as the doors hiss shut behind him. He flexed his injured arm a few times, still thankful for the patch pouring anesthetic into him, and opened the napkin-note from Hez. Aside from the address and Hez’s personal link info, there were four words scrawled across the top like a newsblog headline…
Here There Be Monsters.
Rude held the note up and matched it to the giant plastic lettering nailed to the marquee of an ancient, dilapidated concert venue. The sign letters didn’t match each other; some were likely originals from when they put names of bands or artists up, a few were taken from other signs on other businesses, and the two “S’s” were just spray painted on. Whatever this place was, its advertising either was greatly wanting—or it spoke volumes of the establishment inside.
This part of Renton felt like a baited trap during the day, but at night Rude could feel all the eyes cloaked in cover and shadow watching him, many of them probably through a set of crosshairs. Everyone knew the gangs really ran this part of Seattle. The Underground maintained a powerful presence here, too. It was Rude’s longstanding rep with a few of their “middle management” members that he hoped would carry him safely through this.
I hope the intel’s good, he took a deep breath and stepped through the curtain of hanging chains that made up the front doors to Here There Be Monsters. Like the two seals of a hermetic airlock, there was a second curtain a dozen steps or so inside the first; this one constructed from hundreds of straps of leath
er. He could hear a variety of different sounds and noises from inside that heavy curtain, many of which honestly piqued his curiosity more than anything.
Before passing through to whatever was…hissing?...on the other side, Rude took a moment to turn up the read on his Sony, thumbing through his contacts for any familiar signatures to turn up. Nobody around. Great.
Rude swept a section of the curtain aside with the sweep of his arm, his senses immediately bombarded with new-yet-familiar foreign stimuli. There was the mustiness of an apartment that had too many cats in it, or that pungent tang of rat piss mixed with just enough sick-sweet of rotten food. It was a hairy smell that you could somehow taste.
What used to be the venue’s stage center had been gutted and torn down to the basement level, creating a pit of sorts. A rough cement floor stained with blood and other fluids stood there gaping in the floor like a stone grey eye staring at the ceiling.
Rude knew what he was looking at—a paracritter-fighting arena. He was no stranger to these types of barbaric entertainment centers, and they’d never even left a mark on his conscience; he’d given more than his share of nuyen to the bookies over at The Coliseum. Even so, the way this place was put together, the way it smelled…Rude felt greasy as soon as he took three steps inside.
There were pens and cages of various sizes and shapes standing, lying, hanging and leaning throughout the huge chamber that made up the floor plan. More than half of these pens contained a myriad of beasts. Augmented fighting dogs, a hooded firedrake, a thornquill bear, and other creatures all made their strange sounds from around the room. By the ropes of its glowing saliva falling from obscured jowls, even a barghest hung in his cage, ready for his turn in the pit.
“Fights’re cancelled this week,” a heavily cybered human shouted down from her perch on the far balcony, the shine of a chromed-out pistol in her equally chromed-out hand. “Whaddaya want?”
“Info, I hope,” Rude replied, holding his arms out wider to show he wasn’t looking for a fight. “I was told ya’ll might know something about a job gone bad by a local crew.”
“Depends.” A second voice surprised him from behind, a dwarf holding a shotgun emerged from a side office. A ring of maglock key fobs dangled from a stretchy bracelet around his wrist, meaning he was likely the boss here.
“On?”
“What crew, what job.” The dwarf spit a foul glob of phlegm on the floor, “And what’s it worth.” He lifted the barrel of the shotgun so that it pointed at the small of Rude’s back.
“Whoa, whoa,” Rude gestured with his open hands again, trying to reinforce the fact that he wasn’t here to start something, “I’m not here to ruffle ya’ll. I was told you might have the dirt on the Serpent Squad hit that went south…”
There was a look shot between the dwarf and the woman as soon as the words left Rude’s mouth. It was subtle, and it was the kind of look that spoke volumes. A tiny surge of adrenaline shot through his system in anxious arrival of what part of him knew was going to be the ugly moment about to start.
The dwarf scowled. “Earn your wage somewhere else, bount.”
“No, wait.” Rude tried to diffuse the situation, but part of being a troll meant most people always thought you were about to start a fight. Most of the time he would lean into it, use this natural intimidation to his advantage, but Rude had already been through one ugly scrap today, and didn’t have anything against these guys. I don’t wanna kill anybody else tonight. “You’ve got this all wrong. Just hold on a sec—”
The clack of her pistol behind him was the proverbial pin dropping in a quiet room. Despite the sounds of the beasts around him, the jingle of the chains at the front of the building, someone shouting at their significant other in the alley, and one wild siren down the block—the hammer of that chrome pistol clicking into place was louder than anything else in Rude’s ear. More than that, it was something that rang in Rude’s head.
“I hate Boston,” he muttered as the world fell away into the haze of a broken memory. Here There Be Monsters vanished and it was replaced by a smoke-filled, brick-walled office hallway. The swarthy dwarf in work overalls shifted into a broken and bleeding elf in an Armani three-piece. The arming of a pistol twenty meters away on a balcony became a revolver’s cylinder wheeling into place right behind him. “Ya’ll can’t fool me twice…”
Rude moved so fast the dwarf was completely caught off guard. The metal fingers of his left hand swung forward and clamped around the barrel of the shotgun and shoved it sideways a full second before the trigger was pulled; making sure the buckshot that exploded from the end missed him entirely. A cloud of metal pellets passed by, ripping into a row of nearby cages. Sparks showered from where they struck metal, and a mix of howls and growls from where they met the flesh of the animals inside.
“Knife-eared double-crosser!” With a shout Rude pushed the hallucinatory-elf’s outstretched arm forward, popping it fully out of the socket and collapsing the elbow. In reality however, he had just shoved the stock of the shotgun into the dwarf’s face—but the ke-runch of bone from the impact and the accompanying scream sounded exactly the same.
“Chiphead! What the hell’re you talkin’ about?” The dwarf’s hands flew up to his shattered and gore-spattered face, shouting and spitting pieces of teeth. “Bag and tag this crazy prick, Dollie!”
The troll spun around, trying to bend his thick trunk in a way to avoid the double-crossing wage traitor in his mind putting two Ruger slugs into his spine. However, as that the gunman wasn’t actually standing right behind him, and instead was up on a balcony, all Rude did was toss the dwarf’s firearm away and do a strange little dance move.
Rude didn’t go into these memory-fugues often, and they never lasted long at all; even less when something in the real world couldn’t match up with the memory landscape—for instance, when a bullet hits him. Or four.
Dollie’s first slug embedded itself in his armored jacket just above the ribs as he spun; he barely felt the impact. Her second, third, and fourth however, were a different story. Pain rocked through him, starting at his armpit and traced around to his navel. Her pistol wasn’t a hand cannon or anything, but she was fast on that trigger and had a good eye for where to put her shots.
“GodDAMN IT!” Rude roared, half in pain and half in frustration with how this situation had turned bad so quick, diving for cover behind a big cage covered in a black tarpaulin. “Stop! Stop! I’ll go! Frag!”
“You broke my face,” the dwarf shouted, scrambling to get at his gun in the chaos. “Now you gotta pay!”
With that, Rude knew that things had gone fully sideways. After smashing up the dwarf’s face, if he was going to get out of here, it was going to be over their dead bodie—
“FRAG!” Fire flooded his hip, and Rude recoiled from it, stumbling backward into a row of benches. He looked down, expecting to see another bullet hole—maybe from some ricochet or lucky shot—but instead there was just a small ring of slowly spreading red flowers. He wasn’t shot, well not beyond the ones he already knew about. If he didn’t know better, he’d say it looked like…
A bite mark?
Rude looked up from the wound at the cage he was hiding behind, saw a flicker of scaly movement at the edge of the tarp, and honest fear froze the blood in his veins—or maybe that was the venom surely seeping through his most recent wound.
Can this day get worse?
A shotgun blast turned the old church pew next to where he ducked to splinters.
Yes. Yes it can.
He wanted to do nothing more than take out every ounce of his anger and regret he had accumulated over the course of these last few days on these two. Maybe shove that gila demon into the dwarf, and the dwarf into the breeder before feeding them all to the barghest like some kind of vengeance turducken—but there really was no time for that now. Between the patch on his arm losing potency, the growing pain in his hip, and the fresh bullets worming around in his torso, Rude was growing a little sha
ky around the edges.
Calm, Rudiarius. Find your calm. He heard the old man’s voice in his head, and knew it spoke the truth. The venom was going to circulate, but if he kept his heart beat slower—slower than what it would take to murder these two—he could get help. Rude took a better scan of the room. Focusing on ways out of the room rather than how to conquer it.
There it is. He drew his boot knife—ironically, the one that he used to carve up the ork runner that brought him here in the first place—and took a slow breath to calm his shaking arm. He hurled the knife up at one of the hanging cages, sinking it into the reddish-brown flank of the beast inside of it.
“Sorry, Fido.”
The fire drake inside the tempered steel bars let out an angry screech—followed by a plume of flame that streaked across the ceiling like a sheet of blazing light. Rude’s eyes were fitted with integral flash compensation, so it was nothing more than a color shift in his vision for him, but the human and the dwarf—two low renters that had to host paracritter fights just to get by—were not remotely as fortunate. They both shouted and cried out, shielding their faces from the dazzling flame.
Rude used the few seconds it bought him to scramble up to his feet and back out the front. The leather and chain curtains slapped at him annoyingly as he passed out onto the sidewalk, but the spreading wetness from his wounds and the venom’s somehow icy heat were causing a variety of internal alarms to blink to life in his HUD. He had no idea how long he was going to be able to stay on his feet, but he knew he couldn’t stop to rest too close to Monsters. They’d find him for sure and, misunderstanding or no, who knows what they’d do to him now.
He found a burned-out collection van on a side street and used his metal fingers to unzip the pollution-corroded siding, half sitting and half collapsing on the devil rat-infested bench within.
“Come on, Hez,” he whispered, a strange taste of copper mixed with bitter salts suddenly on his tongue as he fumbled with his Sony to send the message.
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