Emperor-for-Life: DeadShop Redux (Unreal Universe Book 6)

by Lee Bond

  It didn't take long for the relative cleanliness of the main strip to give way to darkened alleys and disreputable homes and businesses. A rising sense of excitement grew inside Andros…

  Senses suddenly bristling, Andros surreptitiously paid very close attention to his surroundings; a half-dozen boys, dressed in the same kinds of clothes all Frengtonite men wore, only far neater and of higher quality, than the other local men could afford were just down the street. The hair of each man was also considerably fancier than was practical when you were expected to climb down a mineshaft to earn a decent living. The time it took to craft those locks into such shapes also made it extremely unlikely that any of the man slouching on the corner had already done their shift in the mines or in the factories because, frankly speaking, Andros was worn out just thinking about the effort involved in such capacious hair-do's.

  Andros kept a grin to himself.

  These, then, were the very sorts of men he'd been ahunting. The only type of man able to dress himself so nattily and to keep himself so coiffed in a town where every other man worked long, hard hours for the luxury of putting scraps on the table were those who provided less than savory items for those hardworking men.

  Men like this might be missed, but not very loudly, and not for long.

  The most ancient Bruushian warlord relaxed and prepared for some fun.

  ***

  Andre looked to his boys, who were busy looking at the weirdo walking down the side street. A few sniggered and one of the lads –Cherrin- downright burst out laughing, and why not? The guy was big as a barn door and looked like he might be able to handle himself in a bit of a fight, but that was all washed away by the absolutely stupid getup the guy had on; Andre couldn’t think of the last time he’d seen a man wearing something that looked like a lady’s dress.

  What kind of a man dressed like that? He didn’t have on the right kind of shoes, his hair wasn’t done properly … it was ridiculous. Even the drones that worked the mines and the factories took time out of their day to try and dress right. They didn’t pull it off every day on account of how they didn’t have the time or the money to do it properly, but they tried.

  This guy, though? Weird as a bearded lady!

  Still, Cherrin’s reaction was less than polite, so he gave the lad a swift smack to the back of the head.

  “Man might not be right in the head, but leastways he’s walking around proud of lookin' like a idiot. Go find out what he’s here for, Cherry. A weirdo’s hard earned buck goes just as far as yours.”

  Cherry made a dirty face, looked at the others –who were suddenly cast in stone for all the support they were giving him- then hopped off the garbage can he’d been sitting on to do as Andre bid. Eying the huge bulk of a man sideways, careful to remember the blade he had tucked into the pressed sleeve of his right arm, Cherry approached.

  Weirdoes in dresses also bled like normal dudes, too.

  “Hey, friend, what brings you down this way?” Andre said it was always best to be polite to fellas that came down the side alleys because you never could tell which were cops and which were gonna be fellas who wanted to buy what they were selling. They had a few of the local constabulary on the arm so it should be unlikely that this slab was looking for bribes.

  “I’m lost.”

  Damn, but the man’s voice was deep and smooth like honey fresh from the farm. Cherry looked over his shoulder at Andre, who jerked his chin. “What you looking for? Who you looking for?”

  “As to who I'm looking for, friend, well, I'm afraid that answer'd make little to no sense." Andros answered wearily. Wasn’t that the truth? N’Chalez could be anywhere in the Unreal Universe. Anywhere at all, and here he was, in a backwater system, looking for scraps of meat to feed a wounded spaceship. “And as to what I’m looking for?”

  Andre motioned to the others and they were off like a shot; the gangbanger couldn't explain what had him suddenly on edge about the fella in the almost-dress, but there was just something about his voice and the way he stood there, all loose like that, ignoring Cherry … it just seemed off!

  Every other man or woman that came down their alley knew just what they were getting themselves into, even if they’d never been before, even if they had accidentally turned down the wrong way, but they all had the jitters.

  Not this geek, though.

  No one ever just stood there, having a polite conversation with the Well-Dressed Boys. Not under any circumstances. Not even the cops were cool as this nerd!

  Pleased that his boys were covering the alley’s mouth –preventing the huge man from an easy escape- and that they now had their hands really quite boldly on their various weapons without actually displaying them, Andre sidled up alongside Cherry –who was sweating bullets, of all things- and addressed the stranger. “Name’s Andre Fortinbrac, friend. What’s yours?”

  Andros flashed a fleeting smile. The leader of the group was courteous as anything. People –human people- were the strangest of things. It was only this particular form of life that took such pains to present themselves in immaculate clothing, proper speech … it was almost as if –from the moment they were born- they hated who they were and did everything they could to be someone else, even if only for a few minutes.

  It was why his Black Clinic had been so popular, so … in demand. Andros regretted that of all the things he’d managed to accomplish with the human flesh, he’d never once discovered the root cause for Humanity’s ingrained disloyalty to their own selves.

  This Andre Fortinbrac was a thorough criminal, undoubtedly responsible for many deaths and the slow disintegration of people’s lives through drugs, alcohol, and ever-deepening debt, yet here he stood, acting as if there was nothing awry. Like he was a good, honest man, turning a decent, respectable trade.

  “Andros Medellos.” The Bruushian Warlord answered simply enough. With a start, he realized he’d already grown bored of the conversation. He wasn’t here to figure out who these people were, why they behaved how they did, none of that. He needed local currency and flesh and bone for his poor child. “What kind of currency do you use on this backwater ditchplanet?”

  “Say what now?” Andre actually jiggled his ear, he was so gobsmacked by the words coming out of the fella’s mouth. He motioned minutely with his head, and the fellas standing on all sides moved in a bit. This was going weird, he could feel it. This whole sitch wasn’t like nothing they’d ever dealt with. This dink was a nutjob from another town over or something, come out this way to cause trouble that wouldn’t follow him home.

  “Your currency.” Andros repeated slow enough for the monkey brained idiot to process the request fully. “Is it paper and coin or some kind of digital coinage? I realize this world fears the Dark Age enough to lock itself permanently into an Industrial Age, but there’s no reason to live like animals.”

  Cherry’s mouth opened, almost against his will and the words just came out. “P-p-paper and coin.” He flinched when Andre smacked him hard enough across the back of the head to bring out stars.

  Andre flashed the fella an apologetic smile before drawing his thin, slender blade. He angled it this way and that, a bit of a mesmerizing trick he’d learned from his dad; while he wiggled his lone blade this way and that, his boys were pulling out their own blades, blackjacks and other bits of mayhem, all unnoticed. “Now, I don’t get what you mean by calling it ‘this world’ and all that, acting like you’re from some other place, but that don’t happen here. We’re born here, we live here, we die here, same as everyone else. You may be some freak from one of the other towns nearby, head all cracked from the fumes in the plants or from the deeper mines, but we know how to take care of ourselves here in Frengton.”

  There was a subtle movement, and suddenly, the fella … Andros, was standing there, holding … holding what … Andre looked sideways at Cherry, who was suddenly shrieking like he’d been bit by a snake and … the …

  “What the fuck?” Andre stepped back and Cherry, who
was missing his right arm, toppled to the ground like a tree that’d been freshly cut. Great jets of bright red blood spurted from the where the arm used to connect to the shoulder, with poor Cherrin making the kinds of sounds newborn kittens made. “What the … what the … fuck?”

  Andros looked at the arm in his big hand with disgust. “You people. The most prolific race in all of the Unreal Universe’s history. Spread out across more Galaxies than is convenient for the rest of those who live here. More power than makes sense. More flavors than is honestly calculable. There exists amongst your kind some of the greatest thinkers to have ever drawn breath, men and women capable of thinking thoughts so profound their very words shiver the air. Artists, able to sculpt or paint images so vibrant, so wonderful, so rich that even an old lizard’s heart feels the faintest of stirrings of that thing called emotion.” He tossed the arm at Andre, who screamed like a girl while skipping backwards to avoid getting any blood on him. “But most are like you. Monkeys, howling in the dark, covering the walls with your own feces.

  Andre didn’t waste time messing around. He and his boys charged the maniac en masse, failing to realize in their terrified bloodlust that whatever’d given their enemy the strength to yank Cherry's arm from it’s socket like plucking a fruit from the vine wasn't a onetime thing; as two of his boys started pummeling Andros in the back of the head with their wickedly weighted saps, the over-wide, over-tall psychopath grabbed hold of Luke –coming in on the left with a vintage blade belonging to his dad, who’d also been a Well-Dressed Boy- by the neck, hauled him off his feet, and slammed him into the nearest wall hard enough to knock bricks loose. The leader of the gang took this opportunity to drive his blade –a wickedly pointed shiv designed to pierce internal organs, a nice, easy way to kill someone- straight into the man’s chest.

  This was a killing blow, designed to have the geek bleeding like a stuck pig, and Andre’d had loads of practice to get it right.

  At first, the tip slid in with a kind of nauseating ease before meeting with a surprising amount of resistance. Undeterred, Andre put his weight into it, furiously trying to work out what kind of man had armor on the inside, because that was the only thing that'd stop a blade like his. Andre pushed once more, using all his strength, until his favorite weapon snapped off three quarters of the way up the hilt.

  Andre felt his eyes nearly bulge right out of their sockets as the snapped-off end of the deadly weapon … disappeared into the man’s chest. “Wh…wh…what the hell?”

  Andros ignored the saps bouncing against his head and back, the thick skinsuit absorbing the punishment as it’d been designed to. “Do you have any idea how much of a pain it is to dig things out from inside this skin? It’ll take hours, and it’ll chaff the whole time. I hate you people. All I want is to go home. I am weary of you pale, wriggling creatures and your obscene plasticity. Give me the black glittering halls of a warlord’s spire or the unending plains filled with marauding warriors any day.”

  And with that, Andros Medellos went to work, neatly dispatching Andre with a quick blow to the chest that shattered the man’s heart, most of his ribcage and spinal column; the dandified gangster didn’t even have time to gurgle out an apology or another of his mystified demands for explanation before falling to the ground alongside the one-armed fool who’d gone first. The gang leader fell sideways into the puddle of blood, immaculate hair ruined, powder-blue suit jacket permanently ruined.

  Satisfied, Andros turned around to deal with the two honestly moronic buffoons who should’ve gone away running some time ago. It was what he would’ve done were he a hairless ape confronted with a being capable of pulling the arms off people and able to ignore the ceaseless hammering of heavy weapons designed to knock foes unconscious after a single tap. Grabbing each of the nameless and unimportant men by the neck, the Bruushian Warlord simply choked the life out of them, squeezing hard enough to grind neck bones to dust and crush everything worth crushing.

  Andros dropped the two corpses to the ground and contemplated his work. He felt … off … somehow, about the killing. He’d started well, pulling the arm from that one human, but after that … it was as if he’d lost his passion for bloodthirsty savagery.

  “Is this what comes from playacting as human for so long?” Andros demanded wearily as he began rooting through the corpses’ pockets in search of currency and anything else that might help him fit in for however long it took to find a reasonable source of protein and nutrients for his ship. “Instead of bathing in their blood as a Bruushian should, I resort to simple, bland murder? And … looting corpses?"

  If that was the case, it was a definite sign that he needed to leave this Unreal Universe, and in a hurry. Nigh unkillable as he was, if he was losing that vicious, uncompromising instinct that’d made him a Warlord so many millions of years ago, someone, somewhere –possibly even Trinity Itself- would exploit this new weakness.

  Andros couldn’t accept that risk.

  Pocketing the local equivalent of a pittance –surprising, considering the career paths chosen by the men he’d just killed- Andros spent a few minutes hiding the corpses further down the alley, beneath some piles of trash. Satisfied –and disinterested in wasting any more time- that no one would find the boys for at least a few hours, Andros went off in search of a bar or some other establishment. He recalled from his early days in learning how to be a man that places like that were usually filled with men and women who failed to look too close or ask too many questions about who sat next to them.

  The ancient lizard realized he had two goals. One, obviously, was to feed his larvaship so he could get Offworld.

  The second was to get in touch with Jordan Bishop on Tenerek, see if the man had made any inroads on his unknown quest to find Garth Nickels’ location. The old lizard wasn't terribly hopeful; the beast Jordan had become hadn't been out in the wilds for very long, and beyond that, there was perhaps more … wildness … in Bishop's resurrection than there should've been. There was every chance the 'man' had broken free of his restrictions by now and was pursuing his own mad goals.

  It was important to be hopeful, though.

  ***

  Calvin had been a bartender most of his adult life, and in Frengton, that meant he’d seen a lot of folk just … dwindle away into nothing.

  That was life in a mining town. You worked long, hard hours for bosses who plain old didn’t care about anything but the bottom line and then you came to places like Bottom’s Up for a quick pint before heading home. You stayed, leaving only when you could barely walk.

  In his time as bartender, Calvin had seen most every kind of man and woman come through his front door, but he’d never seen anything like the man who’d come in, ordered a pint, and then parked himself in one of the furthest booths like he had something to hide.

  Men and women who came into his bar had the right to sit wherever they wanted to sit, and from time to time they’d had themselves the kind of day that demanded sitting sullenly in a corner, drinking until there was no more drink to be had.

  Now, on an ordinary day, Calvin would be fine with that, but there was just something about this guy that had him –and the others, who couldn’t help but look over every now and then- watching the stranger like a hawk.

  Cal didn't much like the stranger, but he liked the attitudes of his regulars even less.

  Martine came up for a fresh round of drinks for the boys, and while Calvin started pouring pints, she brought up the man everyone was pretending they weren’t fascinated by. “He’s just sitting there, drinking his drink and watching the wall.”

  “Man’s got a right to watch what he wants, Martine.” Calvin said, fussing with the tap for a second.

  “He doesn’t look like he’d be interested in the kinds of things our wall shows.” Martine persisted. “He doesn’t even look like he’s from here.”

  “Isn’t.” Calvin handed over two pints, which Martine put onto her tray. “He’s from Townsley. Made mention of his strange outf
it. All the rage, to hear it.” He started work on the second batch.

  “Townsley’s full of weirdoes for sure, but this guy rubs me wrong.” Martine remembered the look on the man’s face as she’d brought him his first –and only- pint nearly an hour ago. She wasn’t smart enough to put proper words to that look, only that’d it made her feel like she was nothing to him. Less than nothing. Barely worth noticing.

  That kind of feeling was awful.

  “What you want, Martine?” Calvin demanded irately. He’d already gone through this with himself, and there was nothing he –or any of them- could do unless something happened.

  Cal knew Morrie and the boys weren’t going to do nothing more threatening than what they were already doing, and from the looks of it, dirty looks and mean whispers weren’t going to get the stranger in the booth up and out of his chair, fists swinging, any time soon.

  “Ask him to leave.” Martine whispered furtively when she felt the broad man’s disinterested gaze sweep her way. It was like her skin pricked every time those odd eyes looked at her! “You can refuse service. Got a sign that says that and everything.”

  Cal shooed the stupid server on her way with a flick of the bar rag he kept tucked into the top of his apron. He could ask the guy to leave. He did have a sign. Two things stayed his hand.

  One, the man's money spent. The guy didn’t look like he was trying to drink the night away like Morrie and the boys, but from the size of him alone, Cal was willing to bet the man was going to order some food any minute now. Now, and a fair bit of it at that, and the markup’d more than recover anything lost over diminished booze sales.

  Two, if he did ask the guy to leave without any real reason, he could go to the police or damn near anyone he wanted and start complaining, and that was shade Cal didn't want; the whole damn town was in an economic slump ever since they’d closed down Shaft #14 and if word got around that Calvin Shoori was kicking people out of his place for no good reason, that might mean the death of him.