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

by Lee Bond

  “And who might you be?” Sketch demanded, voice honey and butter and all things sweet. Irritation skittered along his arm. Coming from Ferret. Crink stayed right where she was, though her legs and arms were twitching. He gestured with his free hand at himself, then the others. “My name is Sketch. This is Ferret, and the lady here is named Crink.”

  “Don’t tell him my name!” Ferret hissed, anger spiralling wildly out of control for a moment. Everything ramped down immediately when he made eye contact with the older, more experienced Zee-head. Something in the eyes, some curling or uncurling or shifting thing deep in the man’s faded eyes put him down and kept him down.

  Back on the ultra-quiet level, where no one but a Zee-head could use, Ferret spoke again. “His eyes, Sketch. I don’t like them. Why are we doing this?”

  Garth eyed the girl, Crink, willing to let the two guys have their nearly telepathic conversation on their own terms. It’d be nice if they decided to take the olive branch. Wasn’t going to happen, but any time added to the clock before they started fighting in earnest was time for him to consider just how the fight was going to go down.

  Crink was crouched against the ground so hard, legs and arms trembling so frantically, hands –and presumably feet, she was positioned so he couldn’t even see if the cosmically filthy young woman was wearing shoes- were splayed out so wide that if she wasn’t on Ziggurat, she’d likely break every finger on both hands the moment she took to the air.

  Airborne, Crink wouldn’t be a threat until she crossed the gap. Sketch no doubt imagined that this would give his buddy Ferret –seriously, it was obvious to Garth that the kid had done all the tattooing and piercing before discovering the wonderful world of Futuristic Drugs and the Awful Fucking Things They Do To You because Zigg wasn’t precisely the cheapest high out there, meaning Ferret had essentially woken up one morning saying to himself ‘no, yeah, right here, right now, I am going to completely fuck my face up, thereby guaranteeing I’ll never find a job and neatly securing my position as Upcoming Drug User and Homeless Guy- time to swing into action, coming in on the same vector as he was right then.

  After that, it’d be Sketch. Who was –by the way he kept his midriff stiff and rigid- certainly carrying a weapon.

  Which made things easier.

  A few dance moves built themselves in Garth’s mind, keying and priming the muscles for action just in time to listen to Sketch fill the air with pointless sound.

  “As I was going to say before my friend here lost his manners,” Sketch gestured to Ferret, who’s face went an alarming shade of mottled red, “we’ll leave as soon as we know who you are and whether or not you have the authority to make us leave.”

  Time slowed, everyone’s smallest gestures turning into lumbering, clumsy moments.

  God bless Specter training. When this was all over and done with, he was going to hurt.

  Why did they need to know his name? What was up with that? Options sped through him even as he continued absorbing the scene before him in that place that was a step or seventeen beyond hyper-vigilance.

  They were waiting for the answer. The answer to who he was would set them flying at him, teeth and fists and feet and super-grotesque unclipped fingernails swinging. The fight would be joined for real. He would take those injuries he’d forecast.

  Sketch and his buddies weren’t here on accident. They weren’t here just to steal a bunch of useless shit that’d net them five or six bucks from any scrap dealer shady enough to buy crap from walking corpses.

  They were there for him.

  Garth smiled.

  In the time-travel game, he who makes the first move, loses.

  Ferret couldn’t keep it in any longer. “Why are you smiling? What’s with you? Don’t you know who we are? What we are? We’re dangerous! Let us …” His mind spun and jiggled, and Ferret grabbed on to the last thing he recalled that might make it seem like they were here for other reasons, “let us take what we want and maybe we won’t kill you.”

  Sketch bit back a curse. Moreover, he refrained from smacking Ferret’s brain right out through his nostrils. Still, the boy’s response wasn’t entirely out of place. The unnamed man with the unsettling blue eyes –the man who was standing in perfect fight preparedness- seemed happy as fuck at something.

  Garth dropped pretense in favor of slightly higher levels of success. He raised his hands to the proper height, watched all three shift again, a single being with three heads and six arms, and started talking. “I know more about who and what you are than you three will ever know, Ferret. You think you’re tough? I’ve met your future selves, and you’re nothing in comparison. You wanna know who I am? Fine. Hi, my name is -what- my name is -who- my name is chikka chikka chikka Garth Nickels.”

  ***

  Gambelson, perched perfectly still and quite comfortably atop one of the big cranes that reached nearly thirty feet higher than the third level of the parkade, peered through the combat scope that ordinarily belonged on his very impressive sniper rifle, Isabella.

  When he saw what was happening on the parkade –or rather, what was about to happen, because it didn’t take a fucking genius to see what was what when there were three weirdoes looking like they were posing for Best Whackadoo Costume standing directly across from their boss, who resembled nothing more and nothing less than an explosion ready to rip everyone in his path apart- Gambelson cursed over his open mike.

  “Professionalism, Gambelson, keep it clean.” Rommen’s clipped, Wichitan accent came through perfectly in the earbud.

  Gambelson thumbed the record button on his scope, waited for the Bluetooth to sync, then started talking. “Don’t care. Should’ve brought Izzy up here with me. He’s in a bad way. Outnumbered. Look at these idiots. Dressed up for a post-apoc party and they don’t even have any neon spandex. You getting this, Rommen?”

  “I am.” Pause, click. “Looks like he’s trying to get them to leave peacefully.”

  Gambelson dropped a long, trailing gob of spittle over the edge of the cold metal crane he was hanging onto. If he had Izzy with him up here, it'd be a damnsight difficult to drill any of those fucks. “They ain’t goin’ anywhere, sarge. Chick on the ground looks like she’s fucking Typhoid Mary the Dog-Lady. Fucking kid with the iron and ink in his skull looks like Pinhead’s love child and Faux-Hawk the Pimp in the middle … he’s just creepy. This ain’t gonna go down the way you think, Rommen. We gone haveta explain to management why we let this guy die.”

  Rommen, irritated, sounded like a very angry cowboy. “We just down the way, Gambelson, so’s jes hol’ yer horses and mind your manners. Management reviews these things, y’know. Cain’t have my team sounding like a bunch of foul-mouthed mercs. That’s why you’re up there, watching. Waiting. Telling us …”

  “Holy shitball motherfucker, look at those fucks move!”

  It’d take slow-motion review of the footage –which would later result in complete deletion- to see precisely what happened; the digital recording device built into the high-tech scope wasn’t nearly as good at it’s job as was the human eye.

  Gambelson flicked the scope this way and that, hoping he was getting something.

  Everything down there was a blur.

  ***

  Crink launched, howling in near-orgasmic ecstasy as the strength coiling into her arms and legs was finally released. Fingers arched outwards in the form of claws, eyes windmilling madly in her sockets like psychedelic kaleidoscopes, she was already counting the seconds until her teeth were in the man’s throat. Some part of her, the part that hissed inside when she was freshly high, felt Ferret moving alongside her, ready to grab…

  A rough, strong, implacable hand grabbed her by the ankle. What was going on? Their man had moved out of the way? Just slightly? She could feel herself spinning now, the momentum of her attack bringing her …

  Oh no.

  She tried to scream a warning, tried to warn Ferret through the quiet murmurings, but without Sketch there …
>
  Crink saw Ferret’s face looming so close, so close to hers and then they struck hard enough to hear bones creak and pop; before she lost herself to the temporary inky darkness of unconsciousness, Crink –who’s name, once upon a time, had been Lucy Preen- felt one whole half of her skull pop up.

  The last thought she had before the darkness swallowed her was one of hope for Ferret, who’d taken her skull right in the side of his head.

  Then she passed out, still airborne.

  ***

  Garth let go of Crink the moment after she beaned Ferret hard enough to shatter his jaw, cheek and probably half the side of his skull, intentionally aiming her for one of the tall light posts about fifteen feet away. She sailed off into the slowly darkening sunset. Ferret dropped like a pole-axed steer a few seconds after the filthy woman careened into the metal pole hard enough to bend it like a cheap plastic straw. The lightbulb popped loose and crashed to the ground in a spray of cubic shards of safety glass.

  Garth looked at his hand. He was going to have to invent a whole new level of antibacterial, antiseptic soap. He could literally feel Crink’s essence. Crawling on his skin.

  Sketch blinked slowly and calmly. Five seconds passed. Ten. Fifteen. Through the Ziggurat, the older fiend knew Crink and Ferret were still alive, but … wounded. Gravely. They would rise to fight again in a few minutes, but Crink would be little more than a walking skeleton. Ferret wouldn’t be much better, not with half his head caved in.

  Time to put a stop to this. Garth Nickels’ first move had been astonishing, but his last move –having the life beat out of him- wouldn’t be worth watching. Sketch moved towards the burly, blue-eyed devil, expecting him to move out of the way and feeling a small slender reed of concern whistle through the red hot Ziggurat-rage when he did not.

  Garth slapped the first few punches tossed his way by Sketch this way and that, neatly leaving the guy open for a fantastic front kick right into the stomach. Sketch took the powerful kick in stride, shrugging off a blow that would’ve had other, ordinary men, on the ground gasping and wheezing for dear life.

  “Strong.” Sketch commented, trying to pick up the soft sounds coming from his opponent. It was hard. Between the embedded commands stuck deep in the chemical compound coursing through his veins shrieking at him to kill Garth Nickels no matter what and the rest of the noise, it seemed like the man was humming a song, but that couldn’t be right. “Not strong enough.”

  Sketch pressed again, pushing for an attack that’d do as Garth had done to him a few seconds ago; he’d never fought someone with traditional training before, and having his hands slapped outwards to leave the stomach and chest open had been … surprising. Flickering jabs and a few haymakers, a sortie of punches trying to make their way into Garth’s kidneys and stomach … Nickels kept his arms close to his body, deflecting most of the punches along the outer ridges of his arms, using his fists only to deliver two painful blows into the wrists, which left his hands and fingers numb, tingling.

  Garth let Sketch dance out of the way, shaking his fingers loose of the pain that coursed there. These early stage ODDities were nothing to laugh at; stronger than normal, definitely faster than was easy to deal with, they were nevertheless still ordinary men and women hopped up on a drug that defied explanation and classification. A few short decades from now, when the survivors of Aleph began having babies who were born addicted … then, then the world would be seeing something truly horrific.

  “Strength ain’t enough, bub.” Garth rolled his shoulders and stretched his legs, eyeballing Sketch as the drug fiend circled towards where Ferret lay, moaning and groaning through a broken jaw. “Don’t check on him, man. He’s down for the count for at least another five minutes. Saw a guy with wounds like that once, eyeball all popped out, skull fracture leaking brain juice out through the socket. ‘course, he didn’t have Ziggurat trying to hotwire the nervous system into not giving a fuck.”

  Sketch launched himself at Garth again, pulled to the man as if by an invisible string. Instead of trying fists, this time he started dishing out kicks, just like you saw in the movies. They were really effective against combating other Zigg-heads in parks, but not against someone like Garth; though the furiously delivered, high octane kicks did drive the man from where he stood, his open palms still just flashed out, slapping ankles this way and that way, almost as if an afterthought. Three kicks in, Nickels grabbed hold of an ankle and held the leg there.

  Then … then he moved. Just as fast as someone on Ziggurat. The first iron-hard fist drilled right into Sketch’s ankle, not precisely cracking it, but, as before, driving the foot into numbness. Garth moved, switching his grip almost faster than Sketch’s enhanced eyesight could follow, making the second attack an elbow slammed with breathtaking intensity into the inner thigh, instantly bruising the muscle and breaking most of the blood vessels. Nickels moved again, returning his grip to normal before dropping another elbow onto the knee, hyperextending it backwards with a grisly sound that had Sketch keening a high-pitched shriek that could be heard for blocks in all directions.

  Garth danced backwards, letting Sketch deal with his personal life choices for a moment; halfway through turning the freakazoid’s thigh muscle into ground hamburger, he’d heard this awful huh-huh-huh-huh sound coming from Ferret’s direction, and sure enough, half a heartbeat later, the mortally wounded Aleph-head was coming at him, fists wind-milling in a five year olds’ manner of fighting.

  It’d be funny, if it weren’t for the eyeballing dangling loosely from the socket or the meaningless gibberish streaming from his completely dislocated and fractured jaw, or the thick trail of colorless liquid spilling down one shoulder.

  Garth cursed as he shifted out of Ferret’s immediate line of attack; the whirling fists were moving too fast for him to smack out of the way. Brain damage merged with Ziggurat had the kid’s systems on overload. Even if he did survive the next few seconds, without immediate and advanced life support, the resulting overload would see his nervous system completely cooked.

  Time to take the first of those good old-fashioned blows he’d been banking on.

  Setting his jaw and preparing himself for the worst, Garth stopped moving backwards and stepped forward…

  ***

  Gambelson’s voice tore through the earbud, and everyone in the parkade save Rommen yanked theirs momentarily free from the canal. “Did you fucking see that fucking shit? He fucking walked right into the kid’s haymaker! Who does that? Who is this guy? Ouch! And another?”

  Personally, Rommen was more interested, more curious, about the maneuver involving the older black guy’s leg. The whole thing had gone down in under two seconds, but had been so precisely delivered, so fast and merciless, that it had the stench of something performed numerous times. It wasn’t any move he’d seen anywhere outside of a Kung Fu movie, but it’d worked. Beyond the relative impossibility of the triple attack, there was no disguising the fact that the black dude, currently on the ground screaming like the Devil himself, shouldn’t even have a leg to stand on, but there he was, waving the wounded appendage around, appearing to be working the damage out somehow.

  “This is so wrong.” Rommen whispered to Birchcreek, who was perched right beside him, using field glasses to watch the combat a little closer.

  “You got no idea, Rommy.” Birchcreek handed the glasses over, pointing with a finger. “Kid’s eye is popped out. Jaw … well, I never seen nothing like that. Half the damn head’s fucked, too. He’s fightin’ when he should be on the ground, leaking brain juice onto the concrete.”

  Rommen took the binocs and trained them on the woman Garth had taken out of play early on. The only one who’d seen the action live was foul-mouthed Gambelson –who was going to be spoken to, whether he knew it or not- and his description of the abortive attack should have the girl dead as doornails, but … she was still twitching. Her skull had to be seriously damaged, not to mention she was almost certainly courting a broken or fractured spi
ne from that godawful collision.

  “What kind of drug are these people on?” This was directed to Samantha, who was squatting down on the other side of the rise, back against the wall, monitoring Gambelson’s scope-feed through their laptop.

  “Uh.” Samantha scrolled through video after video of something called ‘excited delirium’, looking for any online coroner’s reports. “Heeere we go. Some kind of chem for sure. Current street name is either Zee or Zed or Alphonse, original name, when it popped up in Detroit nearly fifteen years ago is Ziggurat-Alpha. Don’t know what the hell that’s supposed to mean. Anyways … this is a hell of a drug, Rommy. Enhanced strength, enhanced speed. Puts them into something real similar to excited delirium. Hard to kill. From the videos on YouTube, takes nearly five or six officers to bring one down. It’s rough, though. Chews through the nerve sheaths, erodes neural tissue. Mortality rate … upper eighties."

  “And our man is fighting three.” Rommen handed the glasses back to Birchcreek wordlessly; of all them watching the rooftop antics, the Aussie was the only one with the eyesight to follow all the attacks without skipping a beat. “Who the hell is this guy indeed? Sam, we need to start digging deep into black ops crews worldwide. No limit to the search. Look wherever. Start with legit orgs, obviously, but don’t dismiss anything. I’m talking paramilitary groups, homegrown Patriots, anything. He says he’s from Switzerland and all his documentation supports that, right down to interviews with friends and family for his entrance into the US, but you don’t learn how to fight like this during your mandatory.”

  “Roger.” Sam opened up a secured, encrypted link to Securicorps servers and started the hunt.

  “Ouch.” Birchcreek rubbed his head as Garth took yet another paralyzing crack to the side of the skull …