Against the Tide - A New Elysium Story [Complete]

Reclaiming What Was Lost

"Come on, man, hurry up!"

Zed shifted uneasily from one leg to another and cast a sideward glance at his partner. Shanks was biting his lip in deep concentration, the tip of his freckled nose only an inch from the switchboard embedded in the wall.

"I thought you know how to hotwire these things Shanks!" he groaned in frustration.

"Put a sock in it, Z. It won't go any faster if you keep distracting me," his partner mumbled.

"You're not even doing anything!" Zed complained. "You just kept staring at for the past fifteen minutes. It won't open by itself, you know!"

"Why are you in such a hurry? The stuff in there won't run away. It didn't during the past weeks, and it won't now."

"I dunno, this place is weird, man..."

Zed gritted his teeth in frustration. He knew that Shanks was right, but it didn't help with his uneasy feeling of being watched. Of course it was paranoia. The station was abandoned, had been for weeks, after it had been picked clean to the core. The raiders had taken anything that had not been bolted to the walls or floors. And even some of that. Everything except for what was in this one room, behind that door that nobody had been able to open.

They were lucky that there was still gravity and oxygen, at least. Zed and Shanks had used to come here a lot, but in its current state, the place gave him the creeps. Perhaps it was because of the kind of work that had been done here in the past. Or due to the dark brown traces of old blood, smeared on the walls and splattered all over the floor. The place had a haunted vibe, alright.

It had been a pity that their boss had died, but Zed didn't shed a tear for the man himself. The sheer endless supply of money that he seemed to have at his disposal, and his willingness to pay for every millimeter of subcutaneous wire they could find for him, that was what Zed missed. But he was certain they would find other buyers. Especially with such high quality wares. Zed knew what was behind that door, because he had seen the Butcher go there once. It was like a vault. Worth a fortune.

So after obtaining some hard-to-come-by tools, Zed and Shanks had returned here, to try again what others had failed to do - to open that goddamn door.

"Excuse me, gentlemen, but you're in my way."

The sound of a female voice behind him startled him so much that he almost dropped his gun. Despite his paranoia, he had apparently been too focused on what Shanks was doing, so he hadn't heard her footsteps. He fumbled for his weapon and brought it up to point it at the woman who had seemingly appeared out of thin air.

She was pale, small, and clad in black, and for a second he thought she might have been a ghostly apparition. Her hair was two-colored, and she wore an eye patch, contrasting oddly with the doll-like features of her face. His gaze wandered down along her body, and stopped at the pair of white guns in her hands. Or at least he thought they were guns. He had never seen anything like them, and the sight fascinated him so much that it took him a second to realize that she had pointed them at the two of them.

"Shit," Zed muttered under his breath.

Next to him, Shanks had dropped his tools and fortunately drawn his weapon too. Now they found themselves in a stalemate.

"My, my. I'm having quite the déjà-vu here... Why don't you put those things down - wouldn't wanna get anyone hurt, would you?" she said in a sweet voice as she took a step toward them.

Zed gritted his teeth and gripped his weapon more tightly.

"Stay where you are!" he warned her.