Drek! I had a lot of people to call! A lot of old friends to find. I started punching in the first number when I realized…this is a new chance. A chance to start over.
Who knew who might be watching? I was pretty sure any enemies I used to have thought I was dead and gone. Why throw that away if I didn’t get any other perks of coming back from the dead? Still, there was one person who I would never hide from. I finished punching in the number and waited as it rang and rang, deactivating the camera for my face so they would get audio only. The line picked up, clicked for about half a minute with rerouting and antitapping, and finally a heavily warped voice came through on the other side.
“Speak.”
I smiled. It’s amazing how much you can recognize, when you know what to look for. I twisted my own voice in my throat, something I’d always been good at, and tried to keep my voice straight from holding back the giggles. It was like a prank call from my childhood.
“If you want to remember old friends, take a look in Chicago for a crimson name.” And I hung up. I was sure she would figure out the riddle.
It wasn’t my first time in this town, in any of its incarnations. I’d practically grown up in Woodfield Mall before the Awakening, before anything. I learned to run the shadows here before the breakout. In 2057, Ares bombarded the Containment Zone with Strain-III Beta Bacteria, a bioweapon that targeted astral forms such as the bugs and ghouls, devastating the insect spirits and ghouls alike. Then-President Haeffner had officially taken down the walls of the Containment Zone in Chicago in 2058, while the government offered up reconstruction contracts and projects to lure new businesses back into the Shattergraves. What they hadn’t counted on were the non-Awakened warlords and gangers that would keep UCAS peacekeeping forces busy for a long time. Contracts started to dry up, with no one willing to risk their lives to work there, and magic-users avoided the city due to the Strain-III clouds still floating about, despite ongoing Ares cleanup projects. Smaller businesses started to crop up along the periphery, and enough people were trying to making a living there that walling off the larger area once again was impractical.
The new outbreak of bug hives only complicated things further. For whatever reason, some bugs just didn’t want to leave, new ones had come to take up residence, and a few captured insect shamans revealed that the area was especially appealing to them. At the same time, the surviving ghoul population had either found ways to acclimate to the new environment or left for safer parts, and a few new packs had risen up to replace the old. So new walls went up around the highest concentrations of gang, ghoul, and bug territories, slowly contracting to eliminate the “infestation.” So yes, Chicago’s Containment Zone had been dropped, at least on paper. In reality, it had simply shrunk.
I waited for Pretty across the street from the sewer entrance, pulling up a hood and shuffling around like a beggar for about an hour, almost hoping some poor slot would roll up and try to mug me. “Vamping,” we used to call it—vigilantism and hunting rolled into one. I’d started out that way, cleaning up the streets, feeding, and collecting a small arsenal of weapons. The things street scum carried, these days. Knives, pistols, chains, pipes, even the occasional SMG. It was discouraging. I never drained them all the way, only enough to put the fear of beggars into them. I always enjoyed the thought that maybe one of those kids might think about slicing up some poor lady on a street corner for some quick cred, then realize that she might be one of those monsters.
Alas, no one came along to harass me. Maybe Lone Star was too efficient for my liking…
I heard Pretty before I saw her, high heels clicking down the street. Her bio-hair picked up the shine from the streetlights that weren’t smashed, and her artificial eyes flitted back and forth. It was hard to tell if she was predator or prey. Looks like she and I played the same game, just used different cards.
She tensed as I approached, unrecognizing. I let my hunger overtake me for a moment and my eyes shone red. I smiled with fangs out, not caring if I scared her. She was being a real slitch to me, and being friendly hadn’t scored me any points thus far. Maybe she was one of those backward girls who enjoyed the company of the abusive.
She relaxed, completely impassive. I wondered if that was her natural state, or did pretending for the sake of the warren just exhaust her of her daily allotment of natural emotion?
Pretty opened the door.
Ten minutes passed in silence. She’d changed out of her nice boots to some waders she’d left by the vents. We walked on either side of a stream of filth on the concrete bridgeways under the ancient brown stones, silent as quarreling siblings. She seemed to be pointedly ignoring me whenever possible. Made me wonder just how much of an issue my presence in the pack was to her.
I leaped over the gap and stood before her. She didn’t register any surprise, but I felt it in her stance. I was awfully close, a possible miscalculation on my part, but the hell with it. She’d back off if she was uncomfortable, wouldn’t she?
“What is your problem with me?”
Her eyes slowly rose up to meet my stare, and suddenly the closeness felt like too much. She was just a kid. Physically we were the same age, but goddammit, I’m ninety-two! Well, almost sixty of those years were spent asleep, but so what? That still made me her elder. It was just too hard to read her. I’d never spent much time around coherent female ghouls, let alone ones who knew what it was like to be found attractive. She was somewhere between feral animal and sophisticated woman. It was an almost intoxicating blend, except for the utter confusion it engendered. And I hate being confused.
Even now, it was a paradox. Her posture, the position of her feet, the inclination of her head, ready to lift up into a kiss. Everything… except those eyes. Not just the cybernetic alien-ness of them, but something cold. It was within her soul and withheld from the surface, something I might never penetrate. I wondered if anyone else saw it. I wondered if anyone else had a problem with it.
I turned and continued walking, with her behind me. I wasn’t feeling like I had much to lose, and I might have welcomed a fight, so I didn’t care who heard me. I started to rant.
“You know, it’s not like I asked to be in this position. I had it all. Money, toys, magic, fun, and friends. I was on my way up—up and out of the shadows. Legit, free to live a life, not just fight and scrape for one. I paid my dues. Now I have to start all over. And it ain’t easy, you know? Next to no one remembers me, the world kept turning, and I lost years in a long eyeblink. I know you have no idea what that’s like. I know it’s unfair to bitch about what I’ve lost when you’ve never had something like it in the first place, but damn it all, you might just try being a little friendly!”
I spun around on that last word, the echoes reverberating long and hard down the tunnels, dripping water our accompaniment as we breathed the filthy air and stared at each other.
Her expression was something far too simple to be faked: she was shy. She looked like a child who was terrified of meeting a new stranger. But as I watched, this slowly hardened into a belligerent sneer, her chin lifting, scarlet lip curling, eyes narrowing from that guileless width into something menacing. It was unnerving.
I wasn’t even sure if this girl knew herself what she was like deep down. What must it be like, to be born a ghoul, a monster, and then become a human? To live among monsters you call family, yet be forever apart from them? To share their tendencies, but live a double life with those who shun them? How old was she? How long had she been doing this?
Spirits, it was sick what this world did to us all.
“You look awfully thin,” Needles remarked as I stripped off my shirt to hop back in the shower. I looked at a broken mirror propped against the wall. He was right. My ribs showed plainly, my stomach caved in. My arms were like twigs, my legs not much better. My skin was almost ash gray, but that could be blamed on a steady diet of bugs and no human blood to give me a healthy blush.
“What’d you expect after a decade-long nap?�
� I replied.
He smiled. “I seem to remember you in a similar condition the last time you got hauled up.”
…Too weak to move, too weak to breathe, but gotta breathe, gotta…
“Yeah, I remember.”
“Well, then don’t worry about it. You looked fine after a while. Just gotta get some exercise, that’s all.”
I smiled ruefully. “You think you could spare some weights?”
His grin turned feral. “Actually, I was thinking something a bit more…aggressive.”
Chapter 3
Hunting
I clutched the AK-97 carbine in my sweating hands. I imagined it was one of the same ones I had shipped to Needles years back. One of the reasons I’d sent them was their durability. Even today, its antique ancestor, the 47 model, was still around, though you’d never see one outside a private collector’s case or third-world warlord’s army.
I listened, ears perked to pick up the sound of an approaching flesh-form’s steps. I could feel it near. Hours of meditation had returned some of my mystical power. I still couldn’t astrally project for some reason, but at least I could now see the ebb and flow of magical energy, such as it was in Chicago.
I’d gone bug-hunting many times in my life. It was thrilling. I had a distinct advantage, being what I am and all, but those fraggers were still scary. Each one was born from a human, their soul used as a host for the incubating creature within. That, or consumed in bringing the beast over from the dark, alien metaplane they originally came from, a place I dared not contemplate. No one sane knew for sure. But one way or another, once you were locked in one of their cocoons and it got into you, it was all over.
The Universal Brotherhood had taught us how to hate them back in the ’50s, as sure as they preached their ethos of love. The cult used to bring willing, if unknowing, recruits to be used as hosts. That was the most terrifying thing of all—if you went into that cocoon willingly, it might result in your body remaining intact and unchanged, along with all your memories, allowing the bug in your shell to use you to take over your life. The ones who were less willing, well…the merge didn’t go nearly as smoothly, and the body became a twisted hybrid. Like the one I’d fed on when I woke up. Like the ones we usually brought home to the warren for supper.
I checked the magazine one more time. Each green-striped bullet was hollow; chemical rounds, filled to the brim with concentrated insecticide. It was one of life’s little ironies that the bugs had a severe allergic reaction to the stuff. It made the bullets a little less accurate, but they stung that much more.
Crumbled ruins surrounded me, a grim testament to the terror Alamos 20K somehow felt justified to inflict on the lunchtime crowds of downtown Chicago’s Loop. Their bomb had brought the Sears Tower down, killing thousands from the explosion itself and the domino effect of collateral damage. Today it was a picked-over scar, the few standing walls of the depressing landscape usually pockmarked with bullet holes, long-dried blood, human or otherwise, and the ocean of other detritus that accumulates in a forsaken land. No one lived here but us monsters, and the few warlords, gangs, and scavengers crazy enough to take on all the nightmares the world had to offer. In a place like this, I took an odd comfort in being one of the monsters.
It was in the middle of that thought that something far worse than me reared its head.
The buzzing was the first indication, a dull throb that inspired dread. I crouched against the half-wall behind me, AK aimed at the massive, half-formed wasps closing in with death and assimilation on their minds. They may have preferred a perfect human duplicate, but a flesh-twisted monstrosity has its uses, too.
They came in a phalanx of five, swarming overhead and dodging around an errant cloud of Strain-III with a sound that reminded me bombers in old war movies. I could feel them more than I heard or even saw them. Alien chitters and impulses linking their minds together, I might have been tapping in on the sanity of a complete psychotic. Kill. Eat. Expand the Hive.
I felt a little sick.
I waited, the gray dust and debris blending me into the ruins well enough to buy some time. Luck was on my side as they split up, each heading in a different direction. One landed amidst the husk of an old warehouse. I couldn’t see it, so I moved in quickly, staying quiet and picking my footing very carefully. I wished I could have Menerytheria with me, but she would stand out to them like a flare on a dark night. No, I was safest on my own—at least until they found me.
I edged around a corner, seeing the grotesque thing turning over some rubble. Its wings hung limp. The slightest fall of a rock from the broken ceiling above caused them to flutter for a breath-stealing second, its head twitching to search about with perfectly inhuman movements. My safety was off. I might not get another chance to catch it alone. The others might already be heading back…
Raising the rifle to my shoulder slow and silent, I lined it up in my sights, careful not to make a sound—
Somehow, it sensed me.
I barely registered it moving before it slammed into me. My reflexes, along with my muscles, weren’t what they used to be, and the monster pinned me before I could evade it. Its wings twitching, three arms held me down as the fourth tried to claw me. Its extended abdomen, complete with stinger, stabbed repeatedly into the ground, seeking my flailing legs as I dodged for all I was worth. Finally, though, the stinger made contact with my right thigh. I groaned as it punched like a dagger blade into me. I felt my flesh swell as it pumped me with toxins. It hurt like hell, and made me mad.
My rage swelled, drawing out some of the stolen power of my soul to instantly make me stronger. Ignoring its grip on my arms, I lifted it up and threw it off me, one of its wings snapping as it broke the flesh-form’s fall. I growled at it, snarling in a way to make any horror-sim aficionado proud, and pounced on the thing. My fists slammed into it over and over, until they punched through its mottled, bulbous carapace. There was no skill in what I was doing; only the fueled rage of a vampire.
As it writhed beneath me, a scream somewhere between human and…something else issued from its mandible-twisted maw as I lowered my mouth to one of its arms. Inside the elbow was a patch of flesh almost completely untouched, pink and soft and vaguely feminine. I could make out part of a tattoo of a brilliant green butterfly with arcane patterns for wings.
I hated this thing. I hated what had been stolen from the person who had gotten that tattoo, what she had been turned into. I gave vent to that hatred with one final punch to knock it out, and then filled up the empty space inside me with its thick, rich blood, drawing out almost all of the spirit within, and feeling more whole than I had since waking up.
I dragged the corpse back to the warren quickly, before my increased strength wore off. It made me heady, enough to completely distract me from the hole in my leg closing up. Another benefit of my condition. Too bad I was filled with venom from the sting. That’d be coming back later, and all too uncomfortably. I was immune, of course. The vampiric virus rejected all competition, be it sickness or poison, but it had to come out somehow, just like bullets and blades.
The body was taken by some of the more primitive ghouls of the warren. Needles had once told me they were far less feral if kept busy with work or play. Some, he said, were even beginning to show rudimentary signs of socialization beyond the primitive animal level. Of course, he said it with much more grounded words and, I think, no small hopeful bias.
It was taken to a chamber filled with knives and saws, next to tables, probably scavenged from old butcher shops, with drains set in them to catch the drippings. Liquid cannibalism was the only way for me, but ghouls had the option of steak or broth. I grabbed a few vac-sealed bottles before going back to my corner of the warren.
I was starting to come down from my high, and the exhaustion of a fight taken to such visceral levels would be hitting me soon. Shaking, I lowered myself to a cot beside a sleeping ghoul woman. She lay half-naked, a gray-skinned infant sleeping in her arms. I shut my eyes a
nd embraced hopefully-dreamless sleep.
I was drowning, sinking like a stone into the black water. Vampires don’t float. But there was no limit to the depth. Could a vampire be crushed to death? Eventually.
Regeneration has its limits, surely. The pressure would crush my head, pulverize the delicate, unmendable brain tissues, and that would be it. Nothing more. Just darkness and the endless nothing of a monster’s afterlife. That’s all there was for a vampire. My soul had already been consumed, the virus puppeting me like an insect spirit, seeking nothing more than to consume, to spread, to thrive. All my abilities were for its benefit, not mine. I was not gifted. I was dead. I was nothing but a host. And I was drowning…
I awoke, gasping for breath. Sweat soaked my clothing, my brow dripped with it, and a sickly-yellow stain of ejected poison discolored my pant leg.
I looked up, and my eyes locked with Pretty’s. She was only a meter or two away, her makeup off and her hair messy. Her cybereyes were switched to resemble the natural pearly whites of a ghoul. She fixed me with a stare that communicated nothing, like looking into the eyes of an animal, and then stalked off. My gaze followed her, and I felt a damp pull on my face back the other direction.
“I don’t like her.”
I nearly jumped out of my cot. Menerytheria had been next to me all along, probably curled up against me as I slept, much like the mother and child next to us. Maybe the moisture hadn’t been sweat, after all. She looked angry and innocent all at once. She never failed to amaze.
“I don’t like how she looks at you.”
I ran a hand across my face, trying to wake up the majority of my brain. I missed coffee so badly sometimes. “What are you talking about?”
Shadowrun: Crimson Page 5
