by M. R. Forbes
Either way, this whole thing was getting exponentially more fucked up by the heartbeat. A third team had been sent to take out the second, after the second had taken out the first and... well... me?
"Go on out and make some noise."
He looked back at me, his dead eyes still able to show some fear.
"They can't hurt you, you're already dead. Go." I pushed a little harder on him through the tether. He walked ahead, into the midst of the gore. I turned around and headed back the way I had come. I should have gone back out the rear in the first place.
No. That was stupid. There was no chance I was going to be able to get away on foot. I needed to get to the garage, and hope that they kept the keys with the cars.
I tried to remember the blueprint as I ran, my mind flowing over the red dots and the outlines of the walls. The garage was off the west wing, the other direction from the way I had come. I traced my steps back to the library, forgetting about caution in my mad dash to get away. I skidded around corners and sprinted along the hallways, my finger on the trigger of the assault rifle, ready to blast anything that appeared in front of me.
I shoved open the door into the garage at the same time I heard the gunfire. It only lasted for a second or two. I don't know what happened to my new partner, but the speed at which he'd been silenced caused me to spin around and take aim.
There was nothing there.
I backed into the garage, looking over my shoulder. There were four cars, lined up in a row. The closest was an Escalade. I wasn't about to be picky. I tried the door. Unlocked.
A dark shape hurtled through the doorway, cornering with impossible dexterity and rocketing towards me.
It was over before I could think.
I pulled open the car door, using it as a shield, and was thrown backwards to slam into the side of the SUV from the force of my attacker smashing against it. My shoulder lit up in throbbing pain, taking the brunt of the force so I wouldn't drop the stone. I clenched my teeth, pulled off the car and ducked down, looking below the battered door.
Six feet of muscle and fur, a large semi-canine head with sharp, nasty yellow teeth. A fucking werewolf? It was laying on the floor, blood running from a gash in its head. It seemed dazed as it tried to pick itself up.
Today was full of surprises. The Houses weren't supposed to use necromancers. They were even more not supposed to use ferals. Ferals were efficient killers, vicious and violent, but they were also beyond difficult to keep in line. That a House had chosen them on purpose to head-up this orgy of chaos and death was chilling.
There was no way to know if this one was alone, so I assumed it wasn't. I ran around the Escalade to the next car in the line, a Lexus sedan. I made it into this one without a catastrophic event, found the keys above the visor, hit the button to open the garage door, and started the engine.
I looked over to find the big bad wolf, but it must have still been on the ground. I put the car in drive and hit the gas, blasting out of the garage. I saw another dark form coming from my left as I accelerated - a second werewolf. He pounced forward towards the car, and nearly caught me, his shoulder smashing into the rear quarter panel. It rocked from the force, the wheels skidding and spinning, and then righted itself. I watched the feral fade in the rear-view, a hulk of a thing with mottled black and white fur. He stood and watched me for a second, and then retreated back to the front of the house where a brown version waited.
I kept going, gaining speed as I reached the front gate. I expected it to be closed. I was wrong. It was sitting open, undamaged and unguarded. I knew there had to be a reason for it, but in the moment I didn't care.
Someone had done some serious work, and spent some serious cash in order to take out Mrs.Red and get their hands on whatever the rock resting on the passenger's seat was. My survival had just thrown a big wrench in their scheme, and I had a feeling they had the will and the means to throw something even bigger and badder than a few werewolves back at me.
The one thing I knew for sure: I would never, ever take a job without consulting Dannie first, ever, ever again.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A case of the munchies.
I wasn't stupid enough to keep the Lexus for long, especially with the dent in it. The only way I could have made myself easier to find would have been to turn around.
Instead, I drove the car back to the Ford, and then drove the rental car back to the gas station. I thought about calling Dannie a couple of times while I was driving, and dismissed it. Now that the adrenaline was wearing off, it was leaving me shaken and more than a little punch-drunk. I shouldn't have been driving, but I didn't want to stay too close to Red's mansion.
The parking lot was empty when I got there, save for a beat-up old Honda that had to belong to the clerk. He'd parked it around the corner from the main lot, which was pretty stupid of him. Then again, this wasn't the kind of area where you'd need to feel too protective over a hunk of rusty Japanese metal.
I didn't steal it right away. I parked in the lot and just sat for a few minutes, my heart racing, my cough kicking up and leaving my throat dry. I glanced over at the stone in the passenger seat, and shook my head. I couldn't believe I had just fucked up my whole miserable life for a rock. My life, and Danelle's.
It was more than a rock though, wasn't it? It had to be. It was worth killing Mrs. Red over. It was worth hiring feral thugs to ensure there wouldn't be anyone to blab about what they had been involved with; a risk that was already minimal among ghosts. It was well-organized, and well-orchestrated, with multiple levels of deception and double-cross.
And I had screwed up the whole plan.
I was the wrench in the gears. The gremlin. All of that planning, and my unique combination of magic and undeserved dumb luck had gotten me out of there alive. It was great in the short-term, but long-term?
Maybe there wasn't a long-term. There was going to be at least one kill team moving after us, maybe in addition to the feral hit crew. If this thing was valuable enough to kill the head of a House over, I couldn't be sure there wouldn't be more than one player racing to get to me first. Red had told me to go to Jin, whoever that was. I didn't see any other choice.
It took me less than sixty seconds to gather the rock, pick the lock of the Honda, hot-wire it, and drive away. I watched the mirror as I did, but the clerk didn't seem to notice that his car was being stolen.
Actually, I hadn't seem him at all.
I hit the brakes, threw the car in reverse, and backed up to the door. Turning my head and looking in the windows, I could see the register, but I didn't see the employee. I got out of the car and went in. I wasn't concerned about the guy, I was afraid of the implications. When I found him laying in one of the aisles with puncture wounds in his neck and his body cold and shriveled, my fear was confirmed.
I was half-expecting damage from a werewolf attack, so it was a surprise that a vampire had done him instead. It had left him in a cleaner state, but I felt bad for the guy. There was nothing pleasant about being bit. From everything I had heard, getting drained was one of the worst tortures imaginable, and since the venom left your muscles paralyzed, you couldn't even scream.
The bloodsucker virus, as it was so colloquially named. It was a food borne disease that came from tainted meat, the shitty kind that got sold in shady deals to shady people, who passed it off as good and sold it forward, mainly to the lower class. People ate the meat, and those with the right genetic susceptibility got infected, starting a chain reaction that turned them into creatures that were worse than any myths or legends could have imagined.
They weren't people anymore. They were barely even ferals, and more than one politician had run their platform on getting them classified with the Rot zombies so they could be exterminated instead of controlled. The problem was that they were still alive, that they had never actually died. That made them people to a lot of people, but the hunger for blood was constant, the ability to think outside of that eradicated. They became
nothing more than a human shell for a single drive, albeit a human shell with enhanced strength and agility, and a tolerance to take a shitload of damage before they even realized they were injured.
That there were werewolves and vampires here together couldn't be a coincidence. That someone had managed to get a vamp to follow a command? The concept scared the shit out of me.
"Why did they kill you?" It wasn't worth the energy to bring him back to answer. "To keep the vampire satisfied, so it wouldn't turn on its handlers? To make it look like the carnage at Red's house was the work of some random band of rabid ferals? Does it even matter?"
In the end, it didn't. I was wasting my time, and staying too close to the scene. Whatever the reason was that the clerk had to die, it wasn't my problem.
I grabbed a box of Twinkies and a six-pack of Coke on my way out.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I love New York.
"Where the fuck have you been, Conor?"
That was how Dannie answered the phone. Not that I could blame her.
"I've been better."
"Seriously? That's how you're going to answer me?"
"I'm too tired to be more expressive."
"The job?"
"You were right."
She gave an exasperated sigh. My terse answers weren't doing anything to help the nerves I'd frayed. "About which part?"
I returned her sigh with one of my own. "The worst part. I almost died tonight, Dannie, and not in a pleasant way."
All of the anger fell away. I'd kind of expected it to go down like that, once she'd switched from pissed to worried. "What happened?"
"Not enough time to tell you everything. The bottom line is that you need to get the hell out of Chicago, before something bad happens to you."
There was silence on the other end, and then a solid exhale. "How am I going to do that, Conor? You know I can't drive the van. I can barely even wipe my ass on my own."
"You're being overly dramatic."
"I'm being realistic. How am I going to get out of here?"
I looked up and watched a road sign for I-95 go overhead. "What about Dalton?"
Her cold laughter was enough of an answer.
"Come on. You've got connections everywhere. You're telling me there isn't one person you can call? We've got money to pay them, or at least we will."
More silence while she thought about it. "Okay, yeah. I think I know somebody. You're going to owe me your life for this."
"I already owe you my life. I'm going to owe you more. I need you to bring the van."
"What?"
"The van. I need the van. More to the point, I need Evan and the guns. Somebody is going to try to kill us. You can be afraid about that later. Right now, you need to get us organized while I try to hunt down someone named Jin. Mrs. Red told me they could help out."
"Conor, you're my best friend, but I fucking hate you right now. Mrs. Red? What the hell is going on?"
"There's no time. You need to get moving. All I can say is that the whole thing was a setup, a massive setup, and Mrs. Red and the stone were the prize. Now it's just the stone."
"Red is dead?" It came out in a whisper of disbelief. "They killed the head of a House?"
"I said I've been better. Dannie, go do what you need to do, and call me when you get to New York. That's where I'll be."
"Shit. Okay. I'm moving on it."
"Oh, and if you see any ferals... Drop them on sight." I paused, and then remembered the most important part. "And be careful. I'm sorry I fucked everything up."
"You be careful, too. You can't help fucking things up, it's part of who you are."
At least I got to hang up laughing.
It was only an hour drive from Fairfield to the New York skyline. I was halfway through it, traveling south on I-95, when three massive armored trucks rolled by, headed in the opposite direction. The letters "USFC" were stenciled on the sides, white text on dark blue plating. Feral control. I couldn't see them through the tiny slits and mirrored glass that served as windows, but I knew what was inside. All of the cities had routine USFC patrols moving through them at night, keeping an eye out for the wrong kind of human.
I knew where they were going, and why they were going there. I could only hope they didn't try to trace me back to the scene. I hadn't noticed any cameras on the inside of the mansion, and the one at the convenience store was a fake, but that didn't mean my face hadn't been caught somewhere.
There was nothing I could do about it now. I watched the mirrors until the trucks faded from sight. A minute later, a news van came trailing behind them. My foot eased down on the accelerator, getting me up to a healthy seventy-five. A couple of extra minutes couldn't hurt.
Jin. It was nothing more than a name to me, some silhouette of a... I don't know what, that had some connection to Mrs. Red. Male, female, human, user... I had no idea. I couldn't even be sure they would be friendly if I ever did meet them. It could be they'd see I had the stone, and kill me on sight. Wouldn't that be ironic?
I had a destination, but no destination. New York was a huge city. It was an easy place to get lost, which was good, but a hard place to find someone, which was bad. A three letter name wasn't going to get me much further than the two hundred dollars I had in my pocket, and I wasn't hot on using plastic until I had a better feel for the depth of the shit I was in. Mr. Clean may have laundered our deposit nicely, but he couldn't do anything for our withdrawals. Regardless of how the link in between was made, I would be screwed, and Clean had already admitted he would squeal like a baby if a kill team came knocking.
It was better to wait until Dannie got here, if I could manage that long. She would be able to help me get a better line on Jin, and Evan was the best kind of backup I could get. It did leave me wondering who she was going to reach out to for the ride. Ghosts knew other ghosts by reputation, and by handle. We didn't keep contact lists of one another, and we didn't socialize outside of the Machine. We were anonymous to each other most of all. Hell, the POTUS could be a ghost, and none of us would know.
I scanned my brain forward and backwards, trying to come up with a name. I was sure Danelle knew people I didn't know. While Black had cast her out for not being even a small portion of the user he was, she had made some inroads with people inside the family's circle who weren't as unemotional as her dear old dad was. They would help her out just because, as long as they wouldn't get caught.
Those thoughts, and a million more encircled my brain like angry wasps while I finished the drive into Manhattan and ditched the car in mid-town. I pulled it up along the sidewalk, tucked a package of Twinkies and a Coke in my pocket, wiped my prints off anything I had touched, got out, and walked away. I kept the stone tucked under my shoulder, out of sight beneath my trench, and wandered off into a dark alley a few blocks down. It wasn't an ideal situation, but it was the middle of the night, and even most places in the city that never sleeps took a breather this time of morning, keeping the path clear for the new kind of night jobs.
That wasn't to say the city was deserted, because there were random folks out doing whatever people did at three in the morning. There was a tension to it, a caution. You never knew what kind of person was out here, when the new world became the most dangerous. They knew they were taking a risk, and they were willing to take it. That made them inherently unsafe.
I found a spot to sit behind a dumpster, leaning back against the graffiti-covered steel and taking a deep breath, and then stifling the cough that wanted to follow. I had tried to conserve myself, and I had done well all things considered, but raising the grunt at Red's mansion was going to speed up my decline. The realization that I was likely cut off from Dalton and my treatments brought a level of anxiety and fear into my breathing. If this thing went on too long the kill team wouldn't be able to get me, because my sickness would kill me instead.
Was that irony, too?
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Famous.
I didn't dare go to sle
ep. Even the homeless knew well enough to stay alert at night, and rest during the day. The police and feral control tried to keep everything as safe as possible, but nobody wanted to be the statistic. Nobody wanted to be 'that guy'. There was bad shit out there, it was guaranteed, and that was good enough.
The alley was deserted when I entered it, and it stayed that way for the five hours I spent tucked behind the dumpster, cradling the stone in my lap and listening for the sound of anything coming down the pipe. Every once in a while I would glance up at the walls on either side of me for good measure, but the coast stayed clear.
Dawn broke, daylight began to filter through skyscrapers, and normal life pushed itself back into gear. The sun even made random appearances through patchy clouds, and in the brightness of the light I almost forgot for a moment that I was up the creek and I hadn't just lost the paddle, I'd lost the boat with it.
I left the alley with a high degree of caution, scouting the passerby in search of anyone who looked like they were looking for something, or someone. This crowd was ninety percent sapiens, with the occasional dwarf or elf mixing in, and a couple of twelve foot ogres cleaving a path through them on their way to wherever.
It was a picture of modern civility and society, a lustrous surface to a universe with a tarnished underbelly. It had been thirty years since the Houses had helped settle the fighting, but I'd seen some really twisted shit move through hospital doors that only proved we were still animals at heart, even if we were coming with more varied packaging. I understood the rules, I understood the reasons, but some things... some things just left you with that huge pit in your stomach, and did damage that could never be undone.
Her name was Kayla. She was eight years old, and an orc. I could remember her like it was yesterday, laying on the operating room table, her body and soul tortured beyond measure. It had been seven years since I had helped her to a quiet end.
