“I’ve had worse nights, yeah,” I conceded.
“That’ll change,” they said. The wind shifted. They smelled like shit.
I flicked my gaze over and saw him clearly. Bald and hairless as only a ghoul can be, misshapen face, ugly mouth full of ugly teeth. He had a row of spikes implanted on the top of his chromedome, like a mohawk made of silver studs. He had piercings and mods all over, but most notably the facial tats, the stark white skull leering over his face.
He punched at me with his claws, just driving his hand into my gut—literally—to the wrist, claws parting my armored shirt like it wasn’t there, stabbing into me, probing, wriggling, reaching inside me and squirming against my innards. It lifted me off my feet. I felt his nails scrape against my spine.
“Hngh,” I managed, falling backward off his bloodslicked hand, drawing my Colt as I tumbled, legs going noodly. My idiot fucking biomonitor let me know something was wrong.
I fell on my butt, pulling the trigger as I went down, bashed my head on the sidewalk. He slipped the gunshots like I normally slipped punches, and then he was all over me—no, two of them, maybe three, Sideways picking out enough details I could tell I wasn’t just seeing double in my shock—kicking and clawing. I was in the middle of a gang beat down crossed with a hyena pack. I didn’t aim, just jerked the trigger again and again.
I didn’t cover up, didn’t roll with the hits. There was no way to meaningfully protect yourself from this sort of thing, all a fella could hope to do was take someone with him. I just shot. Colt waving above me, smartlink dancing wildly as I was jostled, kicked, rolled from side to side by the sheer force of their attacks. My suit and coat fell off me in shreds, blood spraying as they opened up a bicep, tore at my shoulder, slashed a thigh, my Corpsman dutifully alerting me to each new laceration, politely suggesting a bandage might be in order.
The slide locked back on empty, but my TacWhisper hadn’t heard a single gunshot because I had this weird ringing in my ears ever since the first couple boots to my head. I let my Corpsman’s warning messages blanket my field of vision, but before it did I saw the ghouls bolting. Other shadows chased them. I lay there, bleeding out and coughing.
If I’m being honest? Mostly…bleeding…out.
My pop-ups went black, because everything else went black.
I was alone in the dark. There was no pinprick of light that I willed myself toward, no white room with a Dweller on the Threshold to taunt me. There was no Adversary, there was no Ariana. There was nothing and no one. I was cold. Very cold…
Then, I wasn’t. Suddenly, in an eyeblink, I came to halfway across town, stripped to the skivvies. I jolted upright with a grunt, clawed at my hip for a Colt and a wand that weren’t there—were, in fact, on a coffee table just in front of me—and then registered where I was. I hadn’t been there in a dozen years, but I’m not wired to forget much.
I was in the Hermetic Order of the Auric Aurora’s primary headquarters, the lounge above the Blue Moon, a lore shop.
I threw off my covers and pawed at my belly, looking, searching, praying, and feeling it smooth. There wasn’t a ghoul in there, up to his elbow in my guts. I was whole. Unblemished. Whoever’d done the casting, they did a better job with that—the gaping gut wound—than I’d done on myself, with the little poke-poke-poke series of shallow, clean stabs; the knife wounds still felt tight, still looked raw. My stomach was fine. My arms, my legs. I was fine. More naked than not, but fine.
“Mr. Kincaid.” Dr. Reynolds materialized from the room’s darkest corner, his usual faintly disappointed, thoroughly professorial look on his face. He sat in a lounge chair, fingers steepled, a fresh set of clothes folded in his lap.
“It would seem that the investigation is not going well.”
CHAPTER 33
He tossed me the clothes and I got dressed, side twinging as I reached and twisted.
“You don’t seem to have been bitten,” he said, and I felt the same relief he seemed to.
“Their claws weren’t much better, mind. Filthy things. We were quite liberal with the applications of assorted healing magics that should assist against infection, but—” He shuddered. “Just the thought of it. Of the things they had under their nails, to say nothing of the Kreiger strain having gotten into your wounds, the way you shot some of them. You’re lucky, Mr. Kincaid.”
“Yeah, thanks.” Lucky was just how I felt, after having a ghoul wrist-deep in my fucking belly.
“‘Lucky’ is not a compliment.”
There was the Reynolds I was used to.
“‘Lucky’ means you should have died, or worse. ‘Lucky’ means you don’t deserve to have lived. ‘Lucky’ is, as I recall, how your last noteworthy interaction with the Infected ended up.”
“Yeah.” I gave him a flat look. “Thanks.”
He frowned at how I holstered my Colt first, then my wand. I’d known Reynolds almost half my life, and he’d always wished I’d favored the latter over the former. He was a bit of a magical supremacist, truth be told, favoring Talent over much else.
“You’re wrong, by the way,” I said as I slumped back onto the couch, feeling tired just from the effort of standing, getting dressed, stuffing my things back into my pockets. “About the investigation.”
“This is your idea of progress? Being torn to ribbons by a pack of scavengers? Almost dying?”
“Yup,” I said with a nod, pulling out my crumpled pack of Targets. I fished around in the box, checked on a few, saw which troopers’d survived the beating and which ones hadn’t. I found two that looked okay, flipped one into my mouth and offered him the other just from how he was eyeballing the whole procedure.
“Thank you, no. I don’t indulge like I used to. Special occasions only.”
I shrugged and stuffed the pack back in, hauled out my lighter.
“Suit yourself,” I said around the process of firing it up, “But this might be worth celebrating.”
“Your miraculous recovery?” He sniffed. “Hardly. Standard healing magics, hasty but thorough, delivered by myself and Dr. Pike.”
The illustrious head of our illustrious order, Dylan Pike, ThD. Whoopty-doo, I should’ve asked him to sign my ruined torso.
“No, not that. The attack.”
“Explain.”
It wasn’t a question—he didn’t like questions—it was a demand for clarification. I could just picture it scribbled in red in the margins of an essay on summoning or energy transference from the astral to the elemental.
“It means I’m makin’ progress, Doc.” I slapped my lighter shut with a flick of my wrist. “It means I’m asking the right questions, pissing off the right people. It means I’m on the right trail.”
All of which was bullshit, mind, but Reynolds was a client, and sometimes you tell the client what they want to hear. I didn’t know if I was after the right pack of ghouls. I didn’t know if the right pack of ghouls were after me. I just knew someone was, even if I couldn’t say the trail was leading to Nimbus, really. But Reynolds didn’t need to know that.
He seemed satisfied, or at least as satisfied as a sourpuss like him ever got. He showed it by standing up, scarecrow thin and taller’n me, his small stores of compassion and worry apparently exhausted.
“I’ll be off, then, and leave you to your triumph,” he said. “It’s very late, Mr. Kincaid. Your friend is still downstairs, last I heard.”
I let him go, took my time, savored the tobacco and the quiet for as long as I could. I hadn’t been in the lounge for a while. It was lined in certificates, plaques of honor, a few framed photographs. There was a portrait of Dr. Minirth up over the table, with a small black ribbon tied around it.
“I’m workin’ on it, Doc,” I promised him as I stood up, stubbed out my Target in their ashtray, and glanced at the table.
A simple three-card Tarot reading was laid out on it, most of the cards upside down from my point of view. It may’ve been Reynolds, but in this place, in the Order’s headquarters a
bove a shop like the Blue Moon, it could’ve been just about anyone.
I saw the Tower, upside down because I was looking at the whole spread from the wrong side of the table. Ruin. Change. Chaos. Crisis. It made me think of my ruined office, my ruined life, and I wondered if Reynolds had seen it and thought about the loss to his academic department, to the ivory tower of our Hermetic Order. The Star card caught the light just right, and the naked woman looked just like Ariana for an instant. Optimism. Generosity. Hope. Without her handy, I was running low on all three. The Moon glared down at wild wolves and dogs near some water, and instead I saw snarling ghouls and bloody-fanged vampires wading in sewer tunnels. Tension. Confusion. Fear.
I didn’t know who the reading was for, and I wasn’t in the mood to lay out a proper spread for myself—I’d done it before, mind; Black Magic used whatever worked, and sometimes the Tarot seemed to—but on a whim I reached for the deck and just flipped the top card for myself.
The Juggler, the Mountebank, the Magician, posing with his wand in the air, but in reality the lowest-ranked trump card. Perfect. I snorted and gave it a casual toss onto the table, sent it spinning, no right-side-up or upside-down, turning my back and heading toward the stairs before I saw where it landed in relation to the other three. Energy. Movement. Personal Power.
What a crock of shit.
Down on the lower landing, Gentry was doing push-ups.
I shook my head on my way down the stairs. “Little late for that, don’t you think?”
“Suprathyroid, bro. Gotta keep the thing busy,” he didn’t stop, just kept pushing away. “You know how it is.”
I really didn’t. Especially not on a night like this—actually an early morning, sun-up was maybe an hour away—when I felt about a hundred years old and beat half to hell.
“I stole your car, before you ask,” Gentry said, still pushing, dropping, pushing, dropping. “I didn’t think you’d mind. My bike wasn’t gonna cut it, I didn’t know where else to take you.”
“Here?”
“It was in your contacts.”
Oh, right.
“Well, thanks.”
“Null persp, raé.” He finally had the decency to stop working out, hopped nimbly to his feet, not even sweating. Friggin’ Alley Cat Express fitness whackos. “If I let you get gutted like a fish, who’s gonna tell me what I’m looking for in this sweet megahack?”
“Yeah. So, last night?”
“Heard the scuffle. Me and a couple other celés ran outside and chased the ugly buggers off. They got away, but we clipped a couple, or you did, or both. They’ll think twice before they mug someone outside the Armadillo.”
“Wasn’t a mugging.”
“Oh?”
“They’re what we’re after on your sweet megahack. Ghouls, and their vampire boss.”
“Oh.” He sounded a little less upbeat about the whole thing. Remembering the feeling of those wriggling claws in my belly, it was hard to blame him.
“Just keep recruiting. Find who you gotta find, sell the prestige angle, give ’em the sizzle, not the steak. We’ll be hitting up city utilities, maybe with an in at Eta, depending how their system’s set up. Call me when you’ve got a crew together and I’ll get you more info, all right?”
“Yeah, sure.” He nodded, the pair of us heading for the door.
“You need a ride?” I figured the least I could do was offer him that, after he’d saved me. He must’ve left his bike down in Puyallup to do it. Unless the Armadillo staff’d really taken a shine to him or he had top-notch security installed, I gave it maybe even odds to still be there.
“Nah, I’m cool. I got a crash pad not far. A little run’ll do me some good. Once I’m there, I’ll dive in VR, hit up a few hangouts, have a couple more interviews.”
“All right, kid. I’ll see ya. And hey,” I held out my hand. “Thanks, Gentry. I owe you one. A big one.”
CHAPTER 34
I spent part of the day looking through the cracked-open commlink. I opened it all at once, sifted through the files, I let my headware look for patterns, for clues, for repetition above anything else. I got addresses without names attached, names without addresses. No one with a helpful Tamanous next to their name, natch, no list of contacts full of Disassembler tags. I filed things away, regardless, held onto hope.
I called around, cops I’d known, cops I still knew, asked for leads, asked for them to check the drop-boxes I’d found. I leaned on every street doc I could think of, knowing as well as they did they were knee-deep in the organlegging. If they didn’t provide the parts, they bought them, and vice versa. More than one had a pack of ghouls on standby, more than one used Tamanous and the Disassemblers, even if they wouldn’t admit to it. I threatened, cajoled, schmoozed, joked, pressed, leaned, leaned, leaned. A few told me what they knew. Most didn’t. I understood. It was part of the business, sometimes, keeping secrets. I wasn’t a cop, but I was close, and they knew what’d happen if they flipped on such unsavory partners.
Things were starting to fall into place, though.
I got a mapsoft patch from Hank Weazely, which substantially improved my mood. It was a solid start, the sort of thing only Eta Engineering would care about; a layout of the known tunnels beneath the city, sewers, drainage, everything. Some were high-traffic, routinely worked on, well-maintained. Some weren’t. Some were on there in dotted lines, practically, no one sure what was still there, what had fallen apart, what was still working…but it was a start, and a really solid one. I sent him a happy little thumbs up icon, didn’t call him, just let him keep working.
I worked on a file in my head, updating it here and there, marking known hotspots.
A glance at my chronometer showed sundown getting close, so I headed out to my Ford and cut across the district toward Beaver’s Dam.
“Doc” Beaver—Lord knew if he’d ever been certified, as opposed to certifiable, like most street docs—was called that because of his chubby, round face, his brown hair and beard, and his tremendous overbite. A street name’s a street name, and he’d let that one stick.
No one was really mean about it, and if they ever were, they were an idiot. Insulting a street doc’s a good way to wake up missing some important parts. I pushed my luck more than most where black market clinics were concerned, because I had Ari to keep me in one piece, usually, and connections on the right side of the law that meant I could go to a real doctor, usually.
Most other folks living a life of violence, especially closer to the south end of Puyallup? They didn’t have that luxury. A street doc was what you had to patch you up when you got shot, upgrade your chrome when you weren’t fast enough, replace a lost limb with something flashy or flash-cloned. It paid to be respectful, but that didn’t always happen. Sometimes folks showed up at a street doc mid-crisis, out of their gourd, bleeding out, stressed out, high on adrenaline and success—or failure.
That’s where the muscle came in.
Most street docs kept a couple razorgirls or -guys on hand. Folks who got paid via augmentation as often as not, obviously scary-types, who basically worked like bouncers. They kept the peace, or they took a piece. Simple, brutal, ugly.
Beaver went another way. Instead of wasting combat chrome on his muscle, he had a couple ghouls working for him. It sent the same sort of threat, only uglier, when you stopped and thought about it.
So I sat and waited. I got there a half-hour before the sun went down, chomping on some streetmeat from closer to home, a little Irish coffee in the cup holder. I had a pretty good idea of what this Sammy Bones asshole looked like, I had the memory of how Gem’d been terrified at just saying his name, and I had a good little mad-on going. I figured I’d get a good look when he showed up to work, spend his shift comparing it to whatever databases and facial recognition I could dredge up thanks to my Transys, and then I’d see what data that gave me. Tail him home if I had to, y’know, subtle, detective-y stuff.
Then I saw him.
Chrome-flashing
body mods. Bald head with implanted spikes in a mohawk crest. A white, leering skull tattooed over his face, almost glowing in the dark.
Oh. Oh. So that was him.
Well, fuck subtle, then.
I floored it, turning the lights on at the last instant, just ’cause I wanted to see him gawk like a deer right before the push-bar took him out at the legs.
The bastard was slippery, though, quicker’n spit. He jumped and twisted at the last minute—he was so damn fast!—and the front end only just clipped him. Sammy went sprawling, though, because even being ‘just clipped’ by the grille of my Ford left someone feeling it. I swerved, not quite ramming straight into the abandoned storage facility Doc Beaver called an office. My tires squealed as I slapped it into reverse, new tires whining, kicking up smoke as they dragged the big car backwards, rear bumper—thanks, rear-end collision camera, for letting me see the look on his stupid face!—smashing into his shoulder just as he’d clambered to his knees.
He went flying again, and all I could think about was how it’d felt to have his filthy fucking hand clawing around inside my belly, fingers wiggling like I was a glove that almost fit just right.
I dragged my Colt out as I climbed out of my Ford and kicked the door shut. I walked toward him, angry, stiff-legged, methodical, and switched over to the Astral after I lined up the sights.
His aura flared with power—an adept, an adept for sure—and he started scrambling, moving faster than most folks who hadn’t just been run over twice. My Colt bucked in my hand, and he went rolling out of the way, my shot kicking up ash from the Puyallup pavement. I blinked my sight back over to the meatworld as he scrambled to his feet, eyes wide, staring at me in a moment of fight-or-flight.
Shadowrun: Shaken: No Job Too Small Page 19
