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

by Lee Bond

  "And wot is that, squire?" Dom's body was buzzing now with the energy and violence he'd used to break free from his prison and to thoroughly trash everyone as were stupid enough to stand in his way. He wondered if this were how Garth felt all the time, and if that were true, how could the man stomach the sensation for more than a few moments?

  It were like chewing on stuff as made your teeth buzz right in your skull.

  "You don't have any implants or augments." Tongbok smiled darkly. "And even if you did, they aren't the kind that can have you move fast enough to avoid this!"

  Sherriff Slar Tongbok dropped his hand at the emphasized word, dropping back at the same time to minimize the chances of getting hit. It wasn't likely, but with Barrett, you could never be too sure.

  The single gunshot from the Excelsior cracked the air like lumbering thunder, momentarily turning the Sherriff insensate. Only for a second, as all the men -including himself- under his command had enough training under their belt to recover from that kind of thing fairly quickly, but a second can be a long time.

  "Well, see," Dom said earnestly as he closed a tight hand around the Sherriff's slender throat, "that's the fing, squire. I ain't need any implants, hey. Weirdest fing."

  Then Dominic Breton, ex-Gearman for Arcade City, broke the Sherriff's neck with a brutal motion. He looked up at the deputy, took in the slowly swiveling recoilless rifle, and put himself on the move, becoming a blur of violence.

  ***

  "What's he doin' down there?" Vess demanded, alternately angry and irritated that their man was taking such a mad risk. Didn't matter that he'd proven himself to be the better of everyone in their little group. Didn't matter that every move he made was capable of injuring, maiming or even killing. The gangs and other groups they'd come across so far hadn't been government. Hadn't been so well-armed.

  The bluecoats down there were -more or less, Vess supposed- relaxed and refreshed, where the marauders they'd taken down had been rough and ragged and just looking for a place to get their heads down for awhile before resuming their own slice of terror.

  Zorno scratched his nose, picked at it a bit and flicked the resulting mess off his finger. "Gonna ‘negotiate our way down’, he says."

  Vess couldn't believe his ears. "He's … asking them to let us through?"

  It was one of those things you just had to laugh about. "Yeah."

  Vess didn't quite know what to say about the lunacy involved with that. "First thing we do if he lives is find him a mirror so he can see what the fuck he looks like. Fucking surprised they didn't shoot him out of general principles. Our man may've been a pretty boy where he come from, but his time here … if I were an honest man, I wouldn't let him near me. Fuck, man, I'm a rotten motherfucker who killed his own mom and dad and all kinds of other shit in between and the fucking guy gives me the fucking creeps. He say what happens when it all falls to pieces?"

  "Yeah." Zorno pointed. "Said he was going to be the distra … holy shit, did he just fucking dodge a recoilless rifle round?" The gangster rubbed his eyes, convinced he was hallucinating.

  "Fuck my life." Vess snapped his fingers and started bellowing orders. Those that'd been in the Rapscallions the ‘longest’ -which meant more than four hours, which was approximately eighty years of experience- responded quickest, with their newest members stalling a bit before getting it through their heads that unless they joined in, they’d be buried. "I'm … we've gotta talk to this guy. We ain't like him. He's gonna … fucking hell! He's going to get us all killed!"

  Zorno grabbed the rifle he'd taken off the body of a dead officer some time ago and started aiming at anyone who poked their head up too high. It was a terrible weapon for this kind of thing, but with Dom down there, lugging around his freshly repurposed recoilless rifle, the guardsmen were going to be pretty preoccupied.

  "This is fucking nuts!" Mamie howled as she rushed down the stairs with a small handful of thugs. "This guy's a fucking lunatic. Who now has the biggest fucking gun I've ever seen and he's carrying it around!"

  Vess followed after Mamie, still barking orders that he hoped would prove to be workable under the situation Dom had made for them all.

  Better to've denied the man the luxury of having his own band of 'Rapscallions' than deal with this kind of bullshit.

  ***

  Dom howled alongside the screaming torrent of furious noise shrieking out the end of his wonderful new toy, filling the air with a wonderful music borne of chaos and the rage he carried with him everywhere. Bluecoated soldiers fell in front of him, incapable of moving as fast as he, even with the tremendous weight of a gun designed to put holes in tanks that were miles away. Limbs fell, heads erupted in grotesque fashion, chests disappeared in a haze of blood, bone and viscera.

  If this was how Garth N'Chalez felt every moment of his life, every second of every day, Dom had to admit they'd been well lucky that the man had turned his hand a better way 'neath The Dome, especially with the Kingsblood burning his soul to blackened ash. In the end though, his paramount self-control hadn’t mattered one whit. His true nature, that of a destroyer, had risen up out of the murk tainting his soul and the only world he’d ever known had fallen at the man’s hand.

  Dom couldn’t rightly say how or why he’d been given a second chance at life, and he supposed he weren’t even really going to try and find out. He planned on spending his new life, here, on the Outside, working to undo everything that Garth N’Chalez had laid down.

  Getting his hands on Book was but the first step, and if he had to descend into madness for that to happen, well, there were worse things in the world you could do to gain justice for the fallen, wasn’t there just?

  Another one of the elevator’s bluecoat guards disappeared in a puff of pink and red mist, leaving behind a collection of metallic-looking implants amidst a soup of guts and bone. People on the Outside died so easily, e’en the ones as were supposed to be hardened against that sort of thing.

  The raging ex-Gearman risked a look down and over the side of the elevator, half wondering, half hoping his misbegotten crew of Rapscallions were finally taking advantage of the distraction he were causing. When he caught sight of the EuroJapanese fella as named Zhenzhen scurrying round a corner wi’ a few other lads in tow, the Arcadian nodded to himself. Aye, they weren’t the best crew yet, not e’en halfway to being remotely usable, but there were quite a few stops left along the way before they would find themselves face-to-face with Chevy and the others.

  Dom resumed laying about with the deadly weapon. It weren’t long after that that he started filling the air once more with his own wordless, nearly incomprehensible screams. It felt like the natural thing to do, didn’t it just? Joining his sounds with the sounds of the machine?

  A man rushing at him -screaming his own wordless holler of defiance, eyes wide and bright and flashing with white that proved madness lurked in his soul- fell by the wayside, shot through the forehead with a single bolt from one of them guns as was called a ‘laser’. Dom looked back and saw that it were burly Zorno that’d killed the man.

  “’bout time you lot showed up.” Dom hollered to be heard over the sounds of warfare. “Thought I were going to ‘ave to do this whole crew in myself.”

  Zorno refused to confront the charnel mess they were wading through. The bodies … the bits and pieces that’d once been alive, breathing men littered the walkways and gantries of the elevator like a back alley during a garbage strike. A very real part of him –the part that’d been dissecting what it was that Dom wanted and how he planned on getting it- shivered. He’d done terrible things in his life as a petty gangster. He’d murdered people, hurt a lot more, left entire families out in the darkness, but this …

  This was madness.

  Vess was right. They’d chained themselves to a madman and for better or worse, there wasn’t a good goddamn thing they could do to change that, not unless they wanted that festering mad look turned their way.

  So he grinned. Flash
ed his pearly whites right back at Dom, the blonde haired, blue eyed maniac that was fairly coated in blood. Grinned against the darkness growing inside of him and said, “We thought we’d let you get yours in before joining in the fray, boss. You do seem to enjoy this sort of thing and we didn’t want to hog the limelight.”

  Dom hooted. Zorno, at least, were coming along. “All right then, you bloody Rapscallion, let’s get this show on the road. By my count, there’s near about fifty or sixty o’ these here pricks left alive. Them as I and any o’ you as did any killin’ were the ones who weren’t thinking right. Them as are left, well, I do believe they’ll ‘ave settled in, dug deep into them places inside this here rig we don’t know. Rooted in like ticks.”

  A loud sound –impossibly loud, nearly impossible to identify- and a brilliant, skull-piercing flare of light that flooded the almost completely darkened 43-A with illumination burst suddenly from the ‘roof’ of their level, forcing everyone, everywhere, foolish enough to be outside to cover their ears and eyes and wonder if this wasn’t it, this was the moment that Trinity had just decided it was easier to destroy the Stack quickly instead of letting those who remained alive die slowly.

  All except Dominic Breton. He turned his eyes upwards, forced his peepers to endure the brilliance as it arced downwards from the ceiling so far above their heads. This were important. This were something unanticipated and unexpected and if he failed to bear witness to what were coming through that roof, well, he hardly deserved the right to lay hands on Book, hey?

  Gods, the light were bright! Brighter than anyfing ‘e’d ever seen before, brighter e’en that the forge-light burning inside of a Nanny’s cauldron, hey, and all them shadows that kept everyone scurrying about doing their own business were well and proper blasted away, revealing all their dastardly plans.

  The light winked out so quickly that Dom reached out to grab hold of a metal girder to keep from falling to the metal planks beneath his feet. He were dimly aware of Zorno and a few of the others in his crew cursing and damn him if he didn’t feel a wee bit of positive emotion coming from them bluecoats as were hidden in the elevator.

  All right then, so bad for men like him, good for men like them that needed rooting out.

  “Wot in the bleeding fuck were that?” Dom asked once Zorno had found a grip on his behavior. “An’ more important, why’s it got your nipples all twisted, mate?”

  “Fucking Enforcer.” Zorno ground the word out, unable to take his eyes off the skyline. Not that he’d see the goddamn thing coming at them, not in this relative darkness; they could all be dead men walking, right that second, and they’d never see the armor-clad Enforcer coming. He realized a second or two later that Dom was just standing there, eyebrow raised, a look of complete neutrality on his blood-stained face. “Dangerous. Clad in armor. Works for Trinity. They … they usually destroy whole planets. For one … oh shit oh shit oh shit …”

  Four more piercing beams of light stabbed 43-A, turning the whole level into the heart of a living volcano. Shadows burst apart. All their grimy, dingy hopes and dreams were hauled before the light. Their faces, seamed by tragedy and horror, violence and death, transformed into grim masks.

  Dom re-shouldered his recoilless rifle. “Nah. Nowt to worry about, mate. Wotever these Enforcers of yours are, they hain’t comin’ ‘ere to stop us. Not yet, at any rate. Come on, lad, we got men to kill or coerce.”

  Not that he’d needed it before, but Zorno knew he now officially had all the proof he would ever need that Dominic Breton was the very epitome of madness. There wasn’t a soul alive that’d take in the presence of not one but five Enforcers on the chin, shrug it off, and suggest that resume the already batshit insane process of murdering legitimate protectors of an area.

  The older gangster turned Rapscallion watched Dom tromp down the gangplank, humming a tuneless tune as he sought to hunt down the remaining militia men guarding the elevator. He caught himself calculating the odds of being able to shoot the maniac in the head or the back before noiselessly cursing himself out.

  There was no proof at all that a wound like that would even stop Dom. The man seemed unkillable, unstoppable, a force of nature.

  “Fuck my fucking life.” Zorno trotted after the humming loon. Being at the man's back was probably the only sure way to avoid being killed.

  ***

  "Right then."

  The bound and gagged officers watched the bloody fiend pace back and forth not ten feet away, absentmindedly flicking random chunks of skin and bone and other pieces that'd once belonged to friends of theirs, good men that'd believed in something greater than themselves, with seething hostility. More than a few of them were busy working on their bindings, but it was tough going; beyond the main madman that'd slaughtered so many of them so ruthlessly, there were about thirty other bastards lurking near the wide vehicle entrance to the elevator.

  A faint smile flicked across Dom's lips. His senses were still heightened. He could literally feel the hatred and rage burning inside his captives, could hear the faint sounds of bonds being tested, of plans being silently and circumspectly formed.

  Didn't matter. None of it mattered. They were welcome to try, welcome to plan and plot and do whatever else it took for them to believe they had a say in what became of the rest of their lives.

  "As you lot no doubt understand," Dom peppered a layer of cheeriness into his tone, the sort of thing old Chevy used to bring when gearheads were being especially thick in the head and the splash order hadn't come through yet, "me an' mine is interested in goin' down."

  The unintended entendre brought laughter from a few of his crew, and while he didn't know why what he'd said were funny, he still delivered a wry wink to them as found it funny before continuing on.

  "But wot you is not knowin', I don't fink, at any rate, is that before I snapped your bossman's neck so 'ard I felt me own bones twinge, is that I were offerin' him a nice little deal. I asked 'im oh so nicely if 'e could just let us all climb in an' go down wi'out so much as a raised voice or a mean look. D'you know wot 'e said?"

  Dom paced back and forth for moment. "I is not really expect you to answer, as I 'ave not forgot you is all gagged up. Which, so you know, is all your fault and nowt anyone else's. 'ad you been proper polite boys, you'd all be allowed to say your piece like gentlemen. But alas, you lot 'ad only aw … I is off track. Your boss basically told me to go fuck myself, hey, and that really 'urt me feelings. Swear on the King Hisself, I hain't never made no one an offer like that 'ere now, and seein' as 'ow fings went, I reckon it hain't going to happen ever again. You Outside lot. Most disagreeable, aren't you just? Worse than a fuckin' greyskin or a Golem. Can't think to reason."

  Dom wandered towards the captives, mindful that e'en though they were bound with hands behind backs, they still had their feet about them. Embarrassing as hell to be tripped up when he were busy doing a bit of showboating for his lads. It were important his Rapscallions see him as a reasonable man, it were. It weren't difficult to tell that they 'ad their concerns about his stability and e'en though he truthfully didn't care at all what they thought or felt, he did nevertheless still have a need for them.

  Even if it were just as cannon fodder to distract Chevy and the others. Just long enough for him to put his hands on Book. After that, it didn't fucking matter. Not one jot. These stupid pricks were lower e'en than wardogs. Had no value to 'em.

  Plus, they were criminals, hey?

  "And as," Dom slapped a bloke in the back of the head as he walked by, just for general principles, "as you no doubt understand, we is well violent. Tore through most of your friends like Dark Iron through a man's soul, and nary a serious wound to show for it."

  "Hey!" Someone shouted angrily from the ranks of the Rapscallions.

  "Right, right, right." Dom threw an apologetic hand towards his men. "Well, a few lads got shot in the arms or legs and what 'ave you, but they ain't died, so I call that a non-serious wound. Anyways, this brings me round to m
y point."

  Dom smacked a few other lads in the head as he strolled past, content for a moment or two to consider the technical skill of the Outsiders. It were well amazing to see machinery as weren't laden down with the usual King-demanded fripperies of gears and joints and other pointless gewgaws. What the blacksmiths and artificers of this Outside must be able to create! Things that could fly, and the wonderful range of weapons! They were -in addition to being rude and inconsiderate- true masters of their world.

  Didn't have a patch on Old Arcadia, true enough, but in their own way, these Outsiders had themselves a nice little racket going on, didn't they just?

  "Which is this." Dom spun on a heel and strode right through the horde of prisoners and came 'round to stand before them once more. "You boys have two choices. One. I kill all of you right here and now wi'out wasting too much more o' me breath. Odds are some of you might not die all the way right quick as I got all these ideas in me noggin that are beggin' to be tried out. So that's a choice. Death, quick or slow, by these two 'ands' Crikey, that is a good amount of blood there, in't it?"

  The crazed Arcadian waved his bloodstained hands back and forth, up and down, a stage magician distracting the audience while he prepped his next trick.

  "Option one is kind of a lot of work for me, as I is admittedly under pressure to get moving sooner rather than late, and I may allow some of my displeasure in being forced to waste time into dispatching my duty." Dom watched the men arrayed in front of him. Good. He well had their attention. Their mood hadn't changed much, but they'd stopped fidgeting with their bonds. Proved they were smart. "Option two is less work for me in the short run, which is okay, as in the long run, I will be well prepared for any shenanigans. Two is you all joinin' in wiv me an' my Rapscallions 'ere on the grand adventure as waits for us all down below."

  None of the Rapscallions were surprised when the prisoners did their best to mock Dom through the gags, but they were quite amazed that Dom didn't just immediately kill them where they sat for their rudeness.