[KABUKI – Cortes-Kennedy Residential Block]

  TUESDAY | 08 JUN 2077 | 00:05

  [WARNING: RENT OVERDUE €1,200]

  Will recognized the name. Regina Jones was an ex-Media, but more importantly was the fact that she was a fixer. Someone who made things happen if you had the eddies. She was a bit of a folk hero around Waston, a friend to short-circuited cyberpsychos and the downtrodden. Cops tended not to like her very much, but Will listened to the message anyway.

  “Hey Will, my name is Regina Jones, and I need you to call me back as soon as you get this. It’s an emergency.”

  The sound of panic in her voice was real. How she had gotten his contact info was a mystery, but that wasn’t important. He called her immediately.

  “It’s Will, Will Scrap. You need something from me?” he asked incredulously.

  “Will, thanks for getting back to me. Have you been watching the news tonight?”

  “No, uh, what’s going on?”

  “Every district in Night City is on lockdown. Someone is attacking Arasaka Tower! We don’t know much officially, yet. What we do know is that all Hell has just broken loose all around Night City. I need you to help a friend, a ripperdoc in North Kabuki who’s trapped inside a safe room in his clinic. Maelstrom’s trying to get him out, and nobody else is available or in range. You’re my last option.”

  He let the ‘last option’ part slide and focused on the important part, “Maelstrom? Is this a joke?”

  “No, it’s not. Listen. We don’t know each other, but I know your story. You were a good cop, system ate you up and puked you out into the gutter. I can pay you two thousand eddies to get over there and slow them down until I can get a merc in position.”

  Two thousand eddies? Even for a suicide mission, two grand was enough to make Will sit upright. He’d barely averaged two hundred a month after leaving the NCPD. He’d either come out of this with more money than he knew what to do with or get zeroed and not have to worry about all the debt he’d accrued. It wasn’t that tough a decision.

  “Okay, I’ll do it. Give me the address.”

  Regina sent him the coordinates along with the layout of the clinic. It was big, plenty of places to get yourself killed. Now all he needed was gear. Will didn’t have a closet. What he did have was a rusted metal desk with clothes piled on top of it. Beneath the stack of dirty T-shirts and underwear lay his old NCPD bulletproof vest. He slid it on, then threw his ‘puncture-resistant’ coat on over it. It wasn’t much if he was dealing even with just one or two maelstrom psychos, but he needed all the help he could get. He holstered his weapons, pulled on his steel-toed patrol boots, and was ready to go.

  Will practically ran out the door of his apartment, took a hard right turn, flew out the front entrance, turned right again, and hit the sidewalk before skidding to a stop and freezing. His brain took a second to process what was happening. There was a line of a dozen Tyger Claws riding brightly colored Yaiba Kusanagi CT-3X motorcycles in the street, escorting some VIP in a Renault-Volvo Imperator. The sky was glowing orange from various fires around Kabuki. Tracer rounds were tearing up the airspace from Heavy Machine Gun nests atop buildings, and AVs were returning fire and getting knocked out of the sky. The sound of gunfire was everywhere. It was a warzone.

  This was going to be harder than he thought. Needing any advantage he could get, he called in his 2nd free ride with the Delamain Corporation and sprinted North towards the Kabuki Roundabout. With any luck, the talking car would pick him up along the way instead of crashing into him again. He would have to rush to the site if he was to get there before the client got himself flatlined by Maelstrom cyborgs. Until then, Will pounded the pavement and stayed out of sight. He had just sprinted past Forbes Street and ducked into the courtyard of Ganymede Apartments when Delamain pinged him. Will sprang from the shadows and ran to the car, and all but launched himself into the backseat of the vehicle before it took off at high speed.

  “Combat Mode initiated,” Delamain said in its monotone synthesized voice. “Where to, Mr. Scrap?”

  “Get me to Pinewood Junction and hurry.”

  “Destination acquired. ETA: 4 minutes.”

  Four minutes. Will pulled the Lexington from its holster and checked the magazine. Eight rounds left, and he had no clue how many chromed-out maniacs were on the scene. Fear washed over him, but he pushed it aside. Some part of him was still worried about getting his gonk-ass killed. The next thought hit him hard in the gut. What if, after months of deep depression and bouts of suicidality, he overcame his desire to kill himself and then got his head blown off by a Maelstrom psychopath on the very same day? His hands began to shake again.

  [NORTH KABUKI – Pinewood Junction]

  TUESDAY | 08 JUN 2077 | 00:15

  [WARNING: CITY LOCKDOWN]

  Will jumped out of the Delamain as soon as it began to decelerate near the corner of Pinewood Junction. He hit the sidewalk running and forced his body to turn left towards the dark alley where the client was holed up. The door across from some club called ‘Licks’ had a medical cross in bright blue neon above it. According to the blueprints Regina sent, the front office at street level was his best bet for entry. The door was unlocked, he palmed it, and it slid open with a quiet hiss. The place was huge, practically a small hospital, and the ripperdoc was cornered in the basement inside a safe room.

  The front office was empty. No sign of Maelstrom or even a struggle. He let out a deep breath that he hadn’t realized he was holding, then pushed forward towards the stairwell. Will snuck down the steps and peeked around the corner into the surgery prep room. It must have been twenty degrees colder down there. Will could see the puffs of vapor as they escaped his mouth. The place had an eerie greenish glow, felt haunted, but Will swallowed the unease as best he could and tredged forward. He could hear the deep synthesized voices of Maelstrom gangers ahead. He had heard that demonic sound more than he liked on patrol as a beat cop. A cloud of dread hung over him as he tried to steel himself for whatever was coming.

  In the basement, there was a large window facing the surgical suite, so Will kept his head down low and made his way through the prep room to the hallway. Will stopped when he saw him. Straight ahead with his back turned from Will was a chromed-up psycho. Will could hear the voice much better from this position, but he reversed out of the hallway and back into the prep room just in case. The Maelstrom cyborg standing at the end of the hall, facing the steel security door of the safe room, was leaning one heavily armored arm against the brick wall.

  If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

  “Fuckin’ gonk thinks we’re not going to break through his stupid safe room. You hear me, Doc? If you come out now, we won’t torture you, I mean, we won’t torture you for long. Then we can put all this behind us.”

  Whoever was in the safe room opted not to answer. So the big one put two fingers to his mouth and whistled, and two more Maelstrom gonks came down another stairwell with welding gear. “Okay, chooms, cut this door open with the torches. Don’t go in when you’re done, just get me.”

  “Yeah, okay, Charger,” the little one agreed as he pulled down his welding mask.

  Will watched Charger lumber off to the left of the safe room door, losing sight as he walked behind the surgery suite pillar, upstairs into another part of the clinic. Maelstrom had apparently sent one (human?) tank and two recruits to do this job, and Will was supposed to ‘slow them down’. The situation looked dire.

  He continued to assess. The two at the door were heavily chromed up, but mostly useless aesthetic stuff, scary looking, but compared to the 7-footer upstairs, they were practically organic.

  Will scanned the basement from his hiding spot in the prep room. The whole place was cluttered with boxes, pallets of supplies, canisters of CHOOH2, and a ton of second-hand cyberware for every body part. He had to find something he could use to hinder them. So, Will slipped quietly into the hallway and snuck into the surgical suite through the transparent medical curtains that sealed the operating room off from contaminants. That was when the smell of rotting flesh hit him. He gagged involuntarily. There was a corpse lying on the table, for how long was anyone’s guess. Dark things had happened here, he could sense it.

  One hand over his mouth, Will crawled as close as he could to the safe room, using the corner pillar of the surgical area for cover. The little one lit up his torch and started cutting through the steel door. The room lit up from the sparks, the cyborg shadows dancing ominously upon the ceiling and walls. Will looked on with grim determination. If he didn’t do anything, they’d be through the door in 5 minutes. The other gonk just stood there looking bored. He was packing heat, though, some short double-barreled sawed-off he didn’t recognize.

  Will reached into his coat and pulled the kaiken out slowly. His hands were shaking, partly because of the junk cyberware in his head and partly because of fear. If he screwed this up, he and the client would both probably die or end up captives to sadistic maniacs. Will thought of all the reports he’d filed detailing the heinous details of Maelstrom crime scenes and shuddered.

  Focus, Will. You’re alive for a reason. You’ve got to be. The thought of the Lexington jamming still haunted him, even now. He steadied himself a moment more, then committed to the course of action. Stealthily, he crouch-walked just behind the little one, then activated his Sandevistan. Time shifted. Everything slowed around him as he slammed the blade in a wide arc and punctured through the unchromed neck, severing arteries. His mind was fast, but his body lagged behind by what felt like several seconds. Thankfully, even half-starved, Will was fast.

  It had been about a second and a half from the beginning of the attack to the first kill in real time. Will commanded his arm to pull the blade out and redirected his energy to the next target. The blade struck the next cyborg, who was still crouched down, busy welding through the security door, just behind the left ear, piercing through the skull, skewering his brain before he knew what was happening. Three seconds had passed when the Sandevistan died, and time went back to normal.

  Will collapsed on the spot, conscious, but in extreme pain. Everything looked fuzzy. He could hear the blood flowing through his head, and the intense, sharp pain inside his brain felt like someone had stabbed him through the skull with a soldering iron. Combined with the smell of rotting and newly killed flesh, Will’s stomach finally gave in. The contents poured out onto the little dead gonk, which only made it worse. Finally, after several seconds, he got ahold of himself, head still pounding, vision blurred, but moving back away from the kills without making any noise.

  Unfortunately, he was not fast enough. A new combatant had entered the game. He was skinny, smaller than Charger, but with a single large red cyberware eye like a cyclops, and was walking down the steps impatiently. “You gonks done, yet? Charger wants to start cutting this meatbag before he loses his hard-on. Don’t ask-”

  That was when the cyclops saw the carnage below. If it angered him, the only clue was the mantis blades deploying from his forearms. He jumped all the way from the stairs to his dead comrades, scanning the surroundings like a predator. He spotted Will immediately, but the Lexington was already up. Though he couldn’t see clearly, Will squeezed the trigger and sent a burst of three rounds at the blurry center mass, hitting him in the gut, chest, and neck out of pure luck. The cyclops staggered back against the safe room door, spitting up blood. Will struggled to his feet and faced him, knowing that the sound of gunfire had reached the tank above. Then, the cyclops shook his head vigorously, as if the injuries had only been an inconvenience. A split second later, he leapt forward directly into Will, knocking him flat on his back. That’s when he noticed the searing hot pain in his left shoulder. The cyclops had pinned him to the concrete floor with his mantis blade and was rearing back with his left arm for a killing blow. Will reached his hand out, feeling for the Lexington pistol, but no luck.

  “Fuck you,” Will said. He was too tired and in too much pain for something clever.

  The cyclops just laughed as the mantis blade came down, then vanished with a ‘boom’.

  Who did that?

  Will looked up defiantly. The Cyclops was shaking with rage. His entire left arm had been blown off. The pain in Will’s left shoulder intensified as the freak pulled his free blade out from the concrete. Will was only free for a moment when he shoved the Lexington beneath the Cyclops’s chin and blasted three rounds out through his cyberware eye. He fell to the ground, chrome sparking.

  “You fuckin’ gonks can’t do anything right,” came a deep, angry voice from the stairs. Will managed to sit up, his left arm completely covered in blood now and feeling numb. He could see Charger, through the transparent medical curtains in the surgical area, and a large hole in the wall, standing on the last step, seething with anger. Will could just barely see the bright red canister of CHOOH2 next to the giant. Will aimed carefully and squeezed the trigger. The explosion was deafening, and even from more than thirty feet away, Will felt the punishing heat from the blast.

  “Aw fuck,” Will cursed as he saw the tank still walking, on fire, toward him.

  He was slurring his words when he spoke, “Yoooou thiiiinnnk uh liiittlllle exploooosion issss gooonnaaa stop meeee, yooou fuuuuckiinng pissant? I’m gooooing toooo cut yooour legs off annnnd feeeeeed themmmm tooo yooooou. Weeeee’re goinnng toooo fiiiind yourrrr family annnnd maaaaake them watch.”

  Charger kept limping closer and closer, spewing vile promises along the way. 10 feet. 8 feet. He was a monster. More machine than human at this point. “-that’s just whaaaat I’m goinnnng tooooo dooooo toooo yourrrr spleeeeeennn. Yoooou cannotttt imagiiiine howwww muuuuuch thisssss isssss goinnnng to hurrrrrttt.”

  Big mouth, big target. Will half-aimed his Lexington and jerked the trigger back. It wasn’t his best shot, but it struck. Charger caught the bullet with his teeth, his mouth exploding with an eruption of blood. He looked surprised. A second later, another BOOM! Charger’s head exploded in a fountain of blood. The sound of servos winding down and cyberware shutting off signaled the end of the battle. Somehow, he had done it.

  “Now, I can die,” Will whispered to the universe. Then, the universe whispered back.