Dirty Work: Volume 2

Story Seven - The Breaking Storm: Part 2 - 3

I'm fairly certain I was knocked unconscious for several seconds. Could have been a few minutes, but I'm pretty certain it wasn't that long. When I woke up I found the side of my face feeling like it was peeling off, and I smelled smoke when I coughed up black phlegm. I turned onto my side and saw my hands torn and bleeding in the rubble. A tinny ringing was all I could hear.

I slowly sat up on my knees and looked behind me. The smoke that still slithered through the air, serpentine, couldn't obscure where the hallway ended in a jagged rip across the floor. Parts of wall were broken away and wires hung down, crossed like danger signs, sparking. Only then did I realise what had happened.

I pushed my way to the lip of the abyss. I saw through to the room below, chunks of metal and mortar scattered on the ruined floor. I looked around for Z11 without pushing myself over the edge too far. Couldn't see anything. Maybe the hyperadrenaline had done something to her and helped cushion the blow, like when you've had too much to drink and you can take any punch coming, and she'd crawled away. Maybe she'd fallen out of view and was lying there with an arm blown off, bleeding out. Maybe Red Rose had come to inspect their carnage and taken her body as a trophy, dead or alive. I wasn't sure if I'd have wanted her breathing or not if that were correct.

The image of Z11 strapped to a chair, tortured and broken beyond all bodily and mental boundaries, was what got me going. I was onto my feet before the room swayed and my knees buckled. Back to the floor, glass in my palms. I looked at the dust and thought for a brief moment that that's what should become of us all. Dust. We lead to suffering and pain and chaos. Why shouldn't we all just end it? Why shouldn't I let go?

Z11 got me going again a second time. Lost, but not in vain.

I staggered to the door at the end of the hall and raised a bleeding palm to the handle. Pulled it down. Door swung open. I crossed the threshold in a crouched shuffle.

I found myself on a metal platform overlooking a massive cave of a warehouse. It must have been three hundred meters to the far side, and a plunge of several hundred meters down again. Everywhere in front of me was stacked with columns of safes and containers, a section of underground cityscape with streets on the floor. Little kars drifted up and down the levels, in and out of the buildings looking for the right vault to extract their goods from. Ants in a colony, shoppers in a mall, parking in a multi-storey.

On the platform just to my right was a man, or what remained of him. His face was mostly blown apart, though his finger still twitched. He was collapsed against a mounted skreen, blood on the glass. I propped myself against its front and examined the display through the red smears. Someone had used this after the murder, without caring that they were literally getting blood on their hands. They hadn't bothered to hide where they were going. 9673M was loaded in front of me.

An explosion echoed somewhere in the cavern, followed by the screaming of rapid gunfire.

Steps clanking to my left. I turned, gun out. A woman with an Ochre Vaults cap and uniform held her hands up. 'Please. Don't shoot.'

'What's under the uniform?'

She didn't comprehend, and then her eyes went wide. 'Please. Not that...'

'No. Are you Red Rose?'

'What?'

'Show me your left arm.'

Slowly she lowered her hands. I kept the gun trained on her at all times. She gingerly peeled back the uniform, enough so that I could see she wasn't wearing it over the top of a Red Rose getup. Just skin. No insignia.