Shadowrun: Crimson

by Kevin R. Czarnecki

  Chapter 1

  Awakening and Acclimation

  The first thing I became aware of was the blood coursing down my throat.

  I was down to the nub; empty, drenched, shaking from the cold and the overwhelming, sanity-rending need that consumed me. I could feel it pouring into me, just enough to whet my appetite. What I really needed wasn’t in it. This was dead blood, barely good enough for base nourishment. I needed what was behind it. I needed souls…

  I heard the clatter of running feet as I groggily rose. My hands trembled, and my still-dry mouth ached. The blood did little to restore me, but it was enough that my vision returned, enough to sense what was near. I couldn’t think about it, only react to need, as a drowning man blindly rips toward the surface of water for air…but then, that’s an analogy I understand all too well.

  The life before me was too much to resist, and I brought my mouth down on its throat without any pretense of grace. The screams were high-pitched and alien; I didn’t know if they were mine or came from whatever was writhing beneath me. Maybe both.

  The liquid that flowed into me wasn’t human. Not even metahuman. It was clumpy, gooey, acrid. It was revolting, to be honest. But at the moment, I was a starved, crazed beast.

  My tunnel vision receded, the dark room bright to my elven eyes. Other senses could make out the fading heat of the corpse before me. I started feeling guilty over going so long without feeding, for letting myself lose control and hurt someone…until I saw my victim.

  It was vaguely recognizable as once having been human, but its mutations were too numerous to mistake its nature. The arms and legs were twisted, its flesh half-formed into chitinous growths all over the body. A flesh-form bug spirit. Its head was the worst, reshaped into a half-ant monstrosity, mandibles emerging from a mouth torn open, one eye multifaceted while the other seemed to have simply withered. Hideous. I could see the burn marks on its flanks where it had been shocked to bring it down but keep it alive.

  I ran the back of my hand across my mouth to wipe the ichor away, only to find a substantial growth of matted, ginger beard on my face. I reached back to find long strands of hair, ragged and clumped with filth, falling far past my shoulders. Normally I kept it trimmed short, in an unassuming style. What had happened to me?

  I rose from my crouch and looked around. A concrete room, a single, cold bulb swinging from the ceiling. What little illumination there was came from a metal door, the light through the crack underneath betraying someone’s presence. The makeshift cot I had risen from was threadbare but reasonably clean, despite stains prolific enough to cover its entirety. The bug was chained, bolted hooks securing it to the wall and floor.

  The whole set-up was competent, but unprofessional. Where the frag am I?

  A knock sounded from the other side of the door, three soft taps. I tried to respond, but my mouth was sticky, my throat rawer than I could ever remember it being before…

  …Gasping, stirring, metal in my back…

  Okay, maybe once before.

  I walked to the door and knocked back. It opened gently. Guns cocked as pale, half-blind eyes stared up at me from the trio of ghouls in the doorway. None I immediately recognized, but I’ve been on good terms with them most of the time. Birds of a feather and all that.

  I stepped back, hands up to show I had come to my senses and meant no harm. There was no telling how smart the female leader was, or the two males that followed her, keeping a shotgun and Uzi trained on me the whole time. Krieger strain had a bad habit of driving many of its victims off the deep, feral end. The guns were actually a good sign.

  The girl looked at me while winding a strip of dirty-looking gauze around her arm, which bled a dark, brackish red from two neat points. I smiled in gratitude—now I knew who had given me that first, tantalizing draught.

  She surprised me by speaking. “Are you feeling well, Mr. Lang?”

  That name also surprised me. It’d been a long time since someone referred to me by my old given surname. After all, I’d been legally dead since 1999.

  I coughed, working some precious saliva into my mouth to clear away the gunk. My voice came out like gravel and sawdust, but at least she could understand me. “I feel like I just died and came back to talk about it.”

  “Not many people can tell that kind of story twice and be honest about it.” The familiar voice pulled at my brain, surging a dozen memories from forgotten places.

  Steely eyes and razor teeth and a warm smile impossibly intermingling. The face that came through the door matched all of it perfectly. I was sure Needles’ expression must be rare: the ghoul who pitied the vampire.

  The chemical showers had become more mainstream beyond the Chicago Containment Zone walls since Needles had ascended to lead the ghouls. He said it was his effort to make more of them civilized, not to mention necessary for keeping outbreaks of Strain-III controlled. I didn’t care at that moment, relaxing as the hot water warmed bones that felt like they’d been cold for months. I suppose I was fortunate; they’d been cold for many, many years.

  The rest of the warrens hadn’t changed since I was last here. A section of the cable car tunnels, almost two centuries old, reclaimed and refurbished. The ceiling stretched up twenty feet at the peak of its arches, old stone browned and ancient wood supports long rotted away or used for fuel, much to my relief. This section covered a quarter of a city block, sealed off long ago and reinforced many times since, the entrance and exit to be found somewhere in the connective ventilation and maintenance tunnels, a maze of ducts and passages. The air ducts led to other monitoring stations, unused storage sheds, and the endless reaches of the city’s sewage system. But in here, they made the best of scrounged and salvaged materials to create a home.

  The ghouls were comfortable in the dark, their white eyes blind, yet seeing into the astral, meaning the only light was the dim glow of heat cells, but it was more than enough for me to see by. They huddled in small groups, wrapped in patched blankets and nursing the cracked chitin of insect spirit-hybrid flesh, quietly sucking it from the exoskeleton like crab from the shell. Others listened to audiobooks played on tiny, dented media players. One or two ran their long-taloned fingertips over ancient Braille print hardcopy, reading to the small, natural-born ghouls. Without exception, the small, hairless children with razor teeth and pale eyes gasped and giggled at the tales, as enraptured by the words as the impressions the storyteller’s aura made.

  Various rooms had been repurposed to the pack’s needs. Sleeping; storage; a kitchen with a vicious array of reclaimed surgical instruments, kitchen knives, and a battery-powered cooler; and a few offices for those who filled specialist roles. I didn’t give them much attention as Needles led me to the “cafeteria,” a space outside the kitchen where an old, faux-wood table with built-in benches had been recovered from some high school ruin. It was scarred with dozens of claw scratches, right through the enamel coating. A plate of meat was brought for him and a cold, vac-sealed bottle for me. I recognized it as the same kind that attached to a needle cap, used by organ thieves to rapidly harvest blood.

  I’d always appreciated the effort he put into it, trying to bring a disadvantaged people up to spec with the rest of the world. Few realized these days how many ghouls were still sapient, especially those who were born into it, as many of this pack were. Given their need for metahuman flesh and their persecution by the rest of the world, who could fault them for forming gangs and roaming the streets at night?

  Needles was one of those strange cases. He’d been a guard for a charity relief effort for ghouls when they were attacked by bug spirits. His girlfriend, one of the attending doctors at the refuge, got infected. Unable to cope with the changes, she’d attacked him in a frenzy of pain. He couldn’t stop her from rushing the other guards, nor could he protect her when they shot her down. He’d adapted to his own infection much easier, and made it his mission to carry her dream forward, to make sure no other ghoul would suffer as they had in Cabrini. He
’d adopted the pack, and had been trying to get them as educated, organized, and respected as possible ever since.

  I also owed him my life. Twice now, it seemed.

  “You remember who you are?”

  I shot him a look over the bottle of goopy, cold, hybrid blood that said I could remember how to tell him to frag off. He was all smiles about it, showing off those teeth that were his namesake as he chewed a steak of bug flesh. He was strangely fortunate to live here, where he and his pack could feed without hurting anyone innocent. After all, bug spirits were born out of metahuman flesh, and they were still palatable. Not as tasty, but good enough.

  “What the hell happened to me?”

  His smile faded a little, and he took another bite of troll wasp tartare before responding. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

  I tried to dig back…Needles had asked me to come back to Chicago now that I’d hit the big time. I’d invested all of my running money into a small corporation of my own, using it to turn fixer and fence, launder money, and make more. I had a long list of clients still running the shadows, but no matter how good business got, I’d promised myself I’d remember those who had been there to help me get where I was. So I’d responded.

  Seemed his pack was trapped between the bug spirits, who’d taken the time to build their ranks, and Knight Errant, who had decided to let the ghouls and bug spirits fight it out until a winner was declared. The prize was a final KE sweep to pick off the survivors. Seeing as that was hardly playing fair, I shipped a few crates of AKs and several hundred gallons of insecticides over to my chummer, plus I hired a runner group and made for Bug City myself. If I owed anyone, I owed Needles.

  The three weeks of bug hunting were a blur. A new queen was in town, a termite made from the biggest damn troll they could find. We didn’t know we’d flushed her hive until they were flying everywhere. It was like the Breakout all over again. Being the leader and an initiate to boot, the queen went for me. A running fight through the old El tunnels all the way to a Wall-Zone bridge saw me facing off one on one with Queenie. Natch, I figured I was dead. An explosion later, and everyone agreed. After that, nothing.

  Needles put down his fork and placed his hands on the table.

  His black claws clacked, and I suddenly felt really nervous. “Tell me what you suppose happened.”

  I shrugged. “I guess I got knocked unconscious. How long was I out?”

  Needles looked pained. His eyes kept flitting to the side, as though he could see something I couldn’t.

  Come to think of it, I was having a hard time seeing into the astral. Maybe it was because I was so shaky. I felt numb to everything. Why should my magic be any different?

  “Red, what year is it?”

  Oh, drek…

  “It was October, 2064, last time I looked at my watch.”

  His grimace deepened, uncertain how to proceed. He drew in a deep breath before responding, slowly, carefully.

  “It’s November 21st, 2076.”

  The bottom fell out, and I couldn’t feel my body. “Happy Thanksgiving, incidentally.”

  For those who don’t know, vampires, or individuals infected with mainstream Human Metahuman Vampiric Virus—usually humans, sometimes other metatypes—are subject to a great many physical quirks. One of the lesser-known ones is that vampires who are cut off from a supply of oxygen do not die, but enter a state of suspended animation. I know this better than most, because the first time I “died,” this was the cause.

  The short version is that I was born in 1983, before the Awakening. I’d been gifted with small visions, dreams coming true, impressions of people’s emotions, all those little manifestations of magic before the Sixth Age that most would have called instincts. I had the good taste to find the occult fascinating, and the bad luck to find a charismatic quack named Karl who claimed he could show me true magic.

  After working in his bookstore a while, his coven, led by a tall, blond man who never gave his name, came to show off their powers. When I saw that they intended to sacrifice a young woman to fuel their abilities, I tried, unsuccessfully, to stop them. The wash of blood magic created a small pocket of Awakening in the prepared space of Karl’s basement, allowing the coven, led by a vampire, to indulge their skills. Each of them craved the blond man’s power and immortality, and drank blood in emulation of him. As their powers faded, he drained me as well, dumping my corpse into the Chicago River. This was in 1999.

  I was there for, oh, say, forty-nine years, the transformation holding me in hibernation. The virus activated dormant genes, not unlike a SURGE changeling, Awakening my senses to true magic and revealing my nature as an elf. Usually elves express as Banshees when infected with HMHVV, but I suppose since the virus had already taken its turns, I’m one of the rare exceptions.

  By chance, I was picked up by a salvage trawler, and it was Needles who found me in the garbage heaps. From there, I learned about the new world I’d woken up to, and how to make my way in it. As a vampire without a SIN and with a firm grasp of an esoteric tradition of magic, becoming a shadowrunner was almost inevitable.

  I’ve felt a little edgy about large bodies of water since my drowning. So imagine my horror at learning I had just lost another twelve years of my life (Which may or may not be eternal, depending on whom you ask) by the same cause.

  Well, now I knew why I was so disoriented. Why my throat had been so raw. Why I had been so starved.

  A million questions flooded my brain. The first… “Where is she?”

  Needles didn’t have to ask. I hadn’t had a girlfriend since Gypsi.

  “Rick!”

  She streamed through the wall with her usual liquid grace, blue aquatic form materializing like a chiphead’s warped dream of sea nymphs. She might have been a perfect elf, swathed in ancient garments reminiscent of Babylon or Egypt, but for her composition of crystal blue water. She threw her arms around me, leaving only the faintest trace of moisture in their passing. She might have been crying, but who could tell?

  Wait a minute…

  If anyone could tell, I could tell. She was my ally spirit, my familiar. We shared a connection…

  She must have read my thoughts, because she burst into a wailing that might have put a depressed banshee to shame.

  I looked at Needles through her translucent face. “Twelve years?”

  He shrugged. “We all thought you were dead. When that KE rocket took down the bridge and the queen...it’s amazing you weren’t blown apart, too. I think she was blown away by the force of the explosion, so she lost you on the way down. But she never stopped looking.”

  She nuzzled into my collarbone as I took it in. My soul had gone dormant, buried in the muck and astral static, and she was newly born into freedom. No connection to me, no ability to see anything but the contours of skeletons and wreckage for more than a decade, feeling their unmoving shapes to search for a familiar form she was no longer beholden to, with no conception of the passage of all that time.

  “She didn’t have to,” I murmured.

  “I know. She was free by then, wasn’t she? No, she wanted to look. And with the city the magical mess it is, it’s a miracle she found you at all. She found me after she found you. She needed help getting you back up. It cost some cred to get the gear to pull you up, let me tell you.”

  “What do I owe you?”

  His sudden smile was almost hostile. “Don’t insult me, Rick. What are friends for?”

  I smirked and sniffed, knowing he wouldn’t keep track of any debt. But I certainly would. They’d both worked so hard on my behalf, neither one owed me a thing. How was I ever going to pay them back? How could I? I’d lost so much.

  I straightened up—I hadn’t realized I’d slumped in the first place.

  She gazed up at me as I sighed. “Okay. First things first.”

  I stood in the street, the crumbled ruins of the Sears Tower surrounding me as I weathered the cold wind off the lake. My tattered long coat flared, c
louds gathering as the trio behind me watched. Needles and his man were well-armed, in case my exercise in spellwork attracted the wrong sort of attention, bacterially or otherwise. As for her, well, I couldn’t get a moment’s peace from her if I’d wanted it.

  And right now, I certainly didn’t.

  I was concentrating, fighting off doubt and dread, falling into old patterns I had worked out for myself from the earliest days of learning magic. Pre-Awakening, Crowley-esque, dark mumbo-jumbo in the basement of Karl’s new age shop. I even allowed myself the luxury of the old broad hand movements and loud words, chanted in Latin, focusing my will. My hand extended, my eyes fixed upon a broken pile of concrete chunks twenty feet away.

  The spell finished, and I waited for the effect to happen. Every fraction of a second that went by made me sweat, hopelessness welling up with tangible force. I could feel it, almost…almost…like fingertips brushing something just out of reach. I could feel something stirring within me, something faint…

  The ground rushed up with a suddenness that I usually expect from quicksilver mongooses and wired razorboys. My whole body collapsed, but my hand remained rigid, frozen in place, reaching to the stone. I heard my companions rushing toward me, footsteps crunching on the gravel with frantic intensity. Still, my mind and soul labored.

  Their hands reached down to lift me up as I smiled. “Look.”

  Three faces turned to the place I was clutching at.

  A single rock slowly flew through the air toward me, drawn to my fingers until I could grasp it. I gratefully sighed into exhaustion with it in my hand.

  I awoke to find a moist hand brushing my brow. I drew into myself and opened my eyes again, finally seeing into the astral, though I nearly shook with the effort. She smiled down at me, sorrowful relief and joy mixing in her liquid features. I smiled back. It was forced. Now that I had eyes to see it again, I knew for certain that she and I no longer carried that connection. It was gone.