Shadowrun: Crimson

by Kevin R. Czarnecki

  “How many?”

  Needles had come up behind me, hefting his prized HK227. The transparent clip had red- and blue-coded bullets. AP phosphorous, then. Ouch.

  “Two still active that I could see. Lots of armor, cyberware. I don’t think I killed the one I hit. The other is dead.”

  “Drek.”

  I glanced back at him. Something inside him was screaming for blood, screaming for vengeance. He could see the corpses of his people as clearly as I. Vile, primitive logic vied for his approval: we’ve lost four. We kill them all now, and it’s even. But he knew that would only bring more. Wouldn’t it?

  His eyes darted to me. He expected my opinion to be an enlightened one? I was caught between my identity crisis as a vampire, my amorous ex-familiar, and a post-apocalyptic war zone. He could have found better counsel.

  But here I was. I looked back, and the fear in the air was palpable to someone who can taste such things on the astral. Not just ghoul fear, but human as well. That was something to bargain with. Then again, fear makes people jumpy, irrational. I felt like I was straddling a mechanical bull wearing a tac-vest full of nitro.

  I shook my head. “We’ve gotta try for peace. That’d be a whole other kind of victory.”

  Needles looked pained by my words, but I could see he was thinking the same thing. Ah, how easy it would have been for all of us to surrender and just frenzy on them, revel in the tearing of flesh—

  I banished those hated thoughts from my mind and looked at the ghoul corpses. None of them had burn marks or chemical stains. Plain ammo, then. Fine. I could deal with that.

  I looked at Needles, who nodded. I concentrated for a whole instant, drawing forth strength from within to steel myself for the pain ahead. My skin became tougher, supernaturally hardened. I then stepped out into the hallway. The two gunners turned their rifles on me.

  I felt the impact and force before I heard the explosions of their launch. I held my ground for a remarkable two seconds, not screaming as I felt the rounds perforate my body. I finally fell back, hitting the ground in a bloody smear. It oozed gray out of me, tiny swirls of those sips of human blood intermingled like oil streaks in water. Time had slowed for an instant, the high of my stolen soul-driven power keeping me alive, despite the massive damage. I could feel the holes closing even now, seconds later, but I remained still. I didn’t need the two officers to feel any twitchier than needed.

  “Hold your fire, hold your fire!” Needles screamed. The two Stars looked shocked they had just shot someone who didn’t look like a ghoul. That moment of hesitation was what we were counting on. “We’re willing to negotiate!”

  The Stars looked at each other. One covered the hallway while the other reloaded. The larger, a burly man, was sweating. I could smell his fear from here. The other, a smaller woman with a weathered face and the bigger of the two guns, an LMG on a gyro mount, seemed like she had no intention of talking to flesh eaters.

  Needles gave them one last chance. “We can and will kill you if you give us no other choice! Lay down your arms, and you’ll be treated fairly. Fire again, and you’ll leave us no other option than to put you down!”

  A heartbeat. Two…

  I heard one of their guns cock as the LMG started its buzzing fire again. I felt the bullets whiz over my face and then the sound of the gun jamming. I took the opportunity to sit up. Filled with the physical potency of my nature, I overcharged a spell that required no somatic components. My eyes met the man’s as I cast the last spell in my repertoire. The mana morphed in my throat, burning it as the spell took a physical toll on me. Still, my voice was smooth as I called to him with mystically charged words of persuasion.

  “Lay down your weapon. We’re all friends here.”

  His eyes were wide, but he placed his assault rifle on the ground. She looked to him with a startled jolt, and stopped trying to fix her gun. It was enough time for Needles to run out and smack her in the back of the neck with the folded stock of his SMG. I didn’t let my eyes leave the man’s.

  “Sleep.”

  He lay down on the ground and closed his eyes. Normally the “Influence” spell doesn’t have that much direct power, but I was drastically overcharged. Smoke from my burning flesh puffed from my damaged lips as I rolled over, moaning. I swallowed thickly, the swollen tissue ruptured and bleeding, the hot coppery taste of burning blood sliding down my windpipe into my lungs. I kept swallowing, afraid to lose any more blood if I coughed. It hurt. It hurt bad enough to make my eyes water. Crying isn’t easy for a vampire. Not the physical symptoms of it, anyway. I started to come down from my high, the world spinning and every wound on my body closing up but the one in my throat.

  I’d forgotten to mention this earlier: physical drain from spellwork heals at the normal, human rate, not a vampiric regenerative one. I would be regretting this for some time.

  I felt the soothing touch of a damp hand, and gratefully passed out.

  I came to with a moist figure pressed against me, once again. Menerytheria floated up to her feet to look at me. I tried to swallow, found it much easier than I expected, and scratchily croaked out, “Is everyone okay?”

  She smiled. “You were wonderful.”

  I took that to mean yes. It wasn’t said in a consoling way.

  I leaned up, despite her protests, and wished I could weave a healing spell for my blistered lips and tongue. I had let the drain happen, feeling my own energy sapped as I resisted its exhausting effects. I wasn’t going to be running around for a little while. Still, there was a lingering aura hanging about me, something of Mene that clung to me and had accelerated my recovery. The burn had eased in my throat, and my lips were merely tender and swollen.

  Despite the urge to roll over and go right back to sleep, I levered myself to my feet. I noticed they were bare as they touched the cold concrete. I saw a heap in the corner that was vaguely recognizable as my old clothes, now shredded rags. Even a feral ghoul wouldn’t wear them.

  I pulled the blanket around my shoulders, shuffling into aged tile hallways. I looked over to Menerytheria, loyally hovering right behind me.

  “How long was I out?”

  “No more than a few hours. Six, maybe?”

  I nodded, then slowly shuffled to where Needles usually hung his hat to find him behind his makeshift desk. He smiled faintly as I plopped down in a chair across from him.

  “Glad to see you’re okay.”

  “Likewise.” I smiled briefly. “How many did we lose?”

  “Just the four you saw. Spirits damn it all…this will change things…”

  “What?”

  He fixed his gaze on me. “The pack won’t like letting them go.”

  “What? For revenge?”

  “It’s not just that, Rick. They’re hungry. Bug flesh is fine and all, but it’s awful for flavor. You know that. It’s just filler. Sometimes we luck out and find a corpse, or we eat what we kill when it’s a gang or warlord. But this? This is live, fresh meat. The ferals are spending their time outside the cell, staring at the door, smacking their lips and drooling.”

  “Kick them away.”

  Needles surged to his feet. “Do you resist your hungers? Do you tell yourself, ‘This makes me less human’ whenever you drink?!”

  My eyes narrowed.

  He slumped back into his chair after a pause. “No. No, of course not. You don’t have to. You don’t have to maim someone, at the least, to get what you need.”

  I don’t think he recognized the issues I was having, and had always had since my change, but now didn’t seem like the time to engage him. Instead, I just let him continue. It was what he needed.

  “You don’t understand, Rick. It’s not like it used to be.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “These past few years...it’s like the hunger has become sharper. We don’t need to eat more, but the craving for flesh has gotten so much more insistent. Mouths salivate easy, and the temptation to go hunting for real human meat is al
ways there, always at the back of your mind or right behind your eyelids when you go to sleep.”

  “Well, you guys have been without for a long time.”

  “That’s not it! Other Infected are going through the same thing! Or—” His eyes swept me strangely. “—most of us, anyway.”

  “What?”

  “It happened all at once, almost. Some kind of change swept through the Infected globally. Maybe it’s some kind of magical phenomenon that inspired mutation, or maybe another astral push, a mini-Awakening like for Changelings, that knocked loose what it means to be any given kind of Infected. The sun is burning brighter and hotter, now, and the hunger is greater than before, and...I don’t know. Ghost knows why. Maybe God woke up one morning and just decided to make it that much harder for us.

  “You, though...I’ve heard vampires are changing, too, but you seem to be just like you always were.”

  Not always.

  I shrugged. “Maybe being down in the river, cut of from everything, kept me sheltered from whatever is happening up here, too.”

  He nodded absently, distracted as he returned to his chair.

  “The pack will protest releasing the Stars. They’ll use vengeance as a cause, but it’s backed by something really simple and hard to ignore: hunger. They’ll claim the starving look in their eyes is nothing but hatred. The smarter ones have a hard time reconciling it, so they fall back on justification.”

  “And you?”

  He paused. “I…I want to chew them up. I want to eat them while they’re still alive. I want to feel it, and I want them to feel it.” He turned his eyes on me with more soul than you’d expect from cyber replacements. “Don’t you ever feel like that? Don’t you just want to tear into them, let it drip around and flood over you?”

  I knew exactly what he was talking about. “I don’t let it go that far. That’s pining for luxury.”

  He sniffed. “We’ve got a strange perception of ‘luxury’ then, chummer.”

  “No, really. Isn’t the purest form of luxury just…waste?”

  “So, you’re saying the real luxury is…?”

  “Not having to hold back. Not worrying about wasted drops or the well-being of your donor. Just… release. Lazy indulgence past what you need.”

  He thought about that. “So…you’re saying I don’t need their flesh? I just want it?”

  I let him make up his own mind about that one.

  The cell door swung open on rusty but solid hinges. It used to be a supply closet for the subway, with only a tiny sliver beneath the door for air. It was the same bare and sterile room I’d woken up in. The three LS officers looked away from the sudden invasion of light.

  The largest, the hulking black man I had influenced, squinted at us. He tensed and shifted his weight. I looked to Needles, who signaled two of his boys to train their weapons on him. They even cocked them for the menacing effect. He settled back down, sullenly.

  The one with the burn mark on his chest looked much better. Menerytheria had done Needles the favor of healing the worst of the damage. This officer looked older, wrinkles on his face and short, salt-and-pepper hair. I couldn’t tell if his life was one spent frowning or smiling. The lady, also rather wrinkled despite youthful blonde hair, struggled with the old metal shackles chaining her up.

  Needles snapped, and the ghouls ran in two at a time to pick up an officer and pull them into the narrow hallway, guns trained on them from a distance the whole way. They were led to the large chamber, formerly a flood reservoir, set up with rows of makeshift benches, like an auditorium. The ghouls of the pack, an impressive thirty or forty of them, including children, were assembled. The officers’ expressions ranged from stoic to terrified. Who could blame them?

  “I brought you here today,” Needles said, the room picking up his voice enough for every ghoul in the room to hear, “to be judged.”

  The snarling cheers were ferocious, horrific.

  “You are guilty of the slaughter of four unarmed, innocent members of our community. You also attempted to murder several other members of the pack, who, though not innocent in the eyes of UCAS law, are not deserving of the death penalty.”

  “We should have a jury!”

  Needles turned to face the defiant older officer with the gray hair.

  “Your insolence is amazing. Did my people get a trial, or a jury? Did they get a chance to plead for their lives before you cut them down?”

  Needles paced before them slowly. The ghouls around them licked their lips in anticipation. “Above and beyond all of your other faults, however, you are guilty of ignorance.”

  He looked to the officers, who seemed confused.

  “Your ignorance is the root of your actions. You see, if you were not ignorant, you would have recognized that this pack has not fed on metahuman flesh for over eight months.”

  One of the officers began to speak, but Needles cut him off.

  “You would also have known that this pack does not engage in murderous activity. Nor do we protest when your Lone Star Security takes the credit for the insect spirits we kill, or fails to extend its protection to us. You would have known that the four ghouls you executed in cold blood were non-combatants, civilians. You would have recognized their innocence, and held your fire. If you had known these things, one of our pack would not be a widower.”

  He indicated a single ghoul near the back of the room, clenching and unclenching his fists.

  “If you had known, one of them would not be an orphan.”

  A single, gray-skinned, bald child began crying, held tightly by another ghoul. I recognized the child the half-naked mother had held nights before.

  “It’s your ignorance that lets you righteously slay civilians. It’s your ignorance that strips your conscience of its obligations toward our people. It’s your ignorance that lets you group us all under the same aegis of guilt.”

  The crowd of ghouls closed in slowly toward the three officers. They seemed hypnotized by Needles, however. He turned back to them with his most human gaze.

  “The penalty for this by any other warren would be death and consumption by the pack.” The ghouls began to surge forward before Needles barked them off.

  “The justice should seem self-evident: kill four of ours, we kill four of yours. Perfect and even. But we killed one of your number. You’ve left us with your weapons and equipment, which will be confiscated for the betterment of our community.”

  He looked to either side, at the ghouls who stood ready to rip the three humans apart. He spoke to them, then to the officers.

  “Killing them fixes nothing. Their deaths will not amend them of their flaws. And punishment is meant to educate. That’s how a good society works…I strip you of your ignorance, Stars. You don’t get to leave here with the firm knowledge that every ghoul you kill is a monster. I leave you to live, to reflect on the innocents you murdered, and your comrades who will come tomorrow and the day after and after that, to kill more. I give you the responsibility to tell your superiors, your fellows, anyone, of how you were judged fairly, how you were shown mercy, by ghouls. Tell them how you were released. Tell them how they wept for their fallen and screamed for revenge. Tell them how you lived to bring back your dead friend, and breathe another day, whole and uninfected.”

  Needles drew close, pulling up one of the Ares Alphas we’d taken from the team. He cocked it, set it to full auto, and aimed it at them.

  “But understand this: the next time I see any of you three with a gun pointed at my people, consider your lives and your flesh forfeit, because if you can’t learn this lesson, then all you’re good for—”

  The gun clicked empty. The officers flinched. He tossed it to a nearby ghoul. “—is food.”

  I clapped slowly as he walked into the room. Needles looked exhausted, but smiled as he turned to see me.

  “That was an awfully human thing to do out there.”

  “Don’t you mean ‘humane’?”

  I shrugged. “Sure
, that too.”

  He smiled a little wider, then sat in a chair. This had once been a break room for subway workers, and still held a table or two with seemingly-indestructible plastic chairs. It creaked a little as he sank into it, running his hands over his bald pate.

  “What’s got under your skin?” I asked.

  He didn’t meet my gaze. I pulled up a chair across from him and waited. “This will mean a lot more trouble than you think.”

  I would have asked him, but he got up and slowly strode away. I wondered what was swimming through his mind to take him down a peg after such an empowering moment.

  I signaled the three ghouls with me to hold up, holding our breaths in the chill night as we headed to a Wall-Zone close to a Lone Star compound. Each ghoul carried a wriggling brown sack filled with the Star’s finest, bound and gagged to avoid attracting any attention. Thankfully, the three, two men and a woman, were among the smartest and strongest of the pack. We’d make it, I was sure.

  I could see the wall clearly, its floodlights steaming red in my thermal vision. Starlight made it bright as day anyway. But I had to be the spotter. The ghouls were blind to anything unliving, seeing shapes without definition unless it contained the spark of life. Seeing only in the astral was a natural hunting mechanism, but it must have made life for ghouls without cybereyes far more difficult.

  I, on the other hand, could make out the details, the signs for entrance corridors in the wall and machine gun nests, while my compatriots could clearly make out the patrols moving back and forth over the wall, eyes alert for any sign of hostiles.

  We moved forward, dodging from ruin to ruin. If we were seen, we could expect the first greeting would be a burst of gunfire. No sense getting caught or killed on a mission of mercy.

  I looked at the three ghouls and wondered how they felt about letting fresh meat get away like this, but they seemed to be focused on the task at hand. Needles had hand-picked them. Now I was sure he had picked them well.