Shadowrun hell on water, p.4
Shadowrun: Hell on Water, page 4
“What?” Cayman finally said.
“Where’s the threat?” X-Prime said.
“What threat?”
“The threat of whatever it is that you’re going to do to me if I don’t do what you say? Come on, there’s plenty of stuff here you can use. Maybe you’ll break my back over the edge of the dumpster. Or maybe you’ll go to the other side of this wall—” At that moment X-Prime pushed a corrugated metal wall near the dumpster that wobbled with ominous creaks and moans “—and push it over on me. Get creative! Make me scared! It’s, you know, your thing!”
Cayman’s eyes narrowed and he struggled for control, so that his voice would be even when he spoke. “I’m not going to threaten you. I don’t need to force you to do your job. You’re a shadowrunner. A professional. You know what it takes to do things right—at least, that’s what I’m counting on.”
X-Prime, he returned his eyes to their normal width, and he made sure he waited for a few seconds before moving, but then he turned and scrambled into the dumpster. He pulled himself up to sit on the edge, swung his legs around, then pushed off so that he landed feet first on the garbage inside. It made a soft, squishy noise. Odors of rot were freed by the impact of his feet.
“That thing you did just now,” X-Prime said. “That professional thing. That was a low blow.”
Cayman smirked and waited for X-Prime to complete his search.
This took a few minutes, and X-Prime uncovered a wide variety of smells that helped him expand his definition of the word “repugnant.” He found many things that were revolting, nothing that had any intrinsic value, and no package like the one he was looking for.
“It’s not here,” he said, climbing out of the dumpster and wiping the larger pieces of dirt and muck off him. Cayman thought about asking him to check again, but then decided they could move on.
Their instructions were not very specific. They were told to find the item they were looking for in a dumpster near the Esogbue Iron Works in Ikeja. Groovetooth told them what she could about the factory, but the factory had changed names many times and had opened and closed and re-opened many times, and in the end all Groovetooth could do was suggest an approximate location, and say that Cayman and X-Prime should just search through every dumpster in the area, which is always an easier suggestion to make when you are not the one who has to carry it out.
There are a fair number of dumpsters in the area, because industry always produces things it does not need; in fact, the two men have seen more dumpsters than people since they have been in the area, since most of the industries in this area are no longer functional, but the dumpsters were left behind, because who wants to claim a dumpster, especially since when it is quite possibly full of toxic materials? The few people seen in this area were squatters, who do not move around much, and the people who work here, who were not permitted to walk around when they should be at their stations doing their work. And so the streets were as empty as the dumpsters were full.
Cayman and X-Prime walked behind a speckled brick building, walking through an alley with potholes so deep they might well be concealing alligators. They walked by one dumpster that was so eaten by rust that it was a piece of red-brown Swiss cheese on wheels, and if you have never seen a piece of red-brown Swiss cheese, than you have never shopped in a Lagos open-air market. They walked by this dumpster and they looked in it and that was all it took to tell them that there was nothing in there to interest them. Because metal pockmarked with rust was not what they were looking for.
“So all the scheming, all the planning, all the manipulating that have made this run what it is has left us here,” X-Prime said, continuing a conversation from a bit earlier as if it had not been interrupted. “Is that fate? Is that destiny? Clearly someone wanted us to be here, and it’s someone more powerful than us, because if they weren’t more powerful than us, they would not have been able to get us to go someplace where we’d obviously rather not be. But they might not have even thought about us, the two of us, as people, when they came up with this part of the mission. They put the package here for whatever reason they had, and we’re here more as an accident, as a side effect. Nothing more.”
“Is this going anywhere?” Cayman asked.
“Just thinking out loud. See, the thing is, we’re just a sideshow in this plan. It’s about something bigger than us. We are, at best, tangentially related to the plan, which means it doesn’t matter what the plan is. It’s moving on its own course, and we’re briefly caught up in the gravity of its passing, but soon it’ll move by us and leave us alone again. So the size of it, the shape of it, doesn’t matter much to us. We don’t matter much to it, so I can’t see why it, whatever it is, should matter to us.”
“Because things matter,” Cayman said stubbornly, but if you pressed him he probably would not have been able to say just what he meant by that.
Then there was another dumpster in front of them, much like the one that X-Prime searched before. White was its base color, but red dust and rainwater and mold and the foul substances that can often be found in cities with substandard plumbing and significant homelessness can add a great mottled variety to the metal. Both men walked up to the dumpster, and both stopped at its edge.
“Your turn,” X-Prime said.
“Who says we’re taking turns?”
“It’s only fair.”
“Who said I’m interested in being fair?” Cayman said.
“You do. You’re the one usually talking about how fair you are, except for when you’re trying to take advantage of me, which happens a lot.”
“And is happening now. Get in there.”
“No. I did the last one.”
Cayman thought about puffing out his chest and preparing a significant amount of bluster to throw in X-Prime’s direction, but then he thought that perhaps he had used that particular tool too often and if he kept using it, it would become dull and ineffective. But a good boss always has more than one management tool at his disposal, so Cayman chose a different strategy.
“This is ridiculous,” he said, “standing here arguing about this. I’ll search the damned thing, and I’ll show you how easy it is.”
With a single smooth motion, Cayman jumped forward, grabbed the edge of the dumpster, pulled himself up hard, tucked his legs in front of his chest, and vaulted over the edge. He landed in the assorted refuse with a sound that was first a rustle, then a squish, then a snap, then a squeak.
The dumpster came alive. The boxes and papers and empty bags on top started bobbing up and down as if they had suddenly been swept into an angry sea, and Cayman’s eyes bulged. He yelped, then jumped backward, quickly sitting on the edge of the dumpster, his feet just above the garbage in the bottom half.
It was still alive in there, roiling and swarming, and the source of the movement started to become more clear. Pink flesh, wrinkled and mottled, showed beneath the garbage, with darker pink tails and furiously twitching ears. Then one of them jumped up on its hind legs to show its uneven, sharp teeth and its angry eyes.
For its trouble, that devil rat was shot by Cayman. He thought about spraying bullets into the dumpster until they were all dead, every last clammy, evil-eyed one of them, but a missed shot hitting angled metal could have effects that Cayman would quickly regret.
“Get off!” X-Prime shouted, and Cayman did not bother to yell at the boy for saying the obvious. He wished he could just drop a grenade into the dumpster and take care of the creatures then and there, but if the package they were supposed to pick up was in there, that would be very bad for them. So the devil rats must be eliminated through more conventional means.
Both fortunately and unfortunately, the devil rats had a way out of the dumpster—fortunate in that it got them out of the place that Cayman and X-Prime did not want them to be, unfortunate in that it meant they had to deal with the creatures being all around them. The rats squirmed through a hole in the base of the dumpster, squirting out one by one, and some of them disappeared into dark shadows, but not all of them. There was enough red dust in the air to filter the sun, and devil rats were not prone to backing down from a fight. They were quick, nimble, scurrying over the broken asphalt on twitching legs, and they were large, their size and hairlessness making them sometimes look like horrible crawling mutant babies.
X-Prime had his little lemon squeezer out, and what he lost in stopping power he made up for in accuracy, as most of the flechettes found their way into a devil rat’s skin. The rats were moving so quickly that the target on Cayman’s heads-up display was making him dizzy, bobbing here and there, changing from red to yellow to red, but Cayman had dealt with moving targets before and he knew how to react almost before his target actually moved, and he fired rounds into scuttling rats that stopped them in their tracks. But the other rats, they were coming, the dead bodies in front of them did not disturb them or slow them, they scurried over the bodies and bared their teeth and hoped to get a taste of human flesh before they were killed.
X-Prime was slowly moving backward, giving space to Cayman, so Cayman pulled out his sawed-off shotgun and sent out blasts that did not need to be targeted because they were brief hailstorms of lead that pulped anything in their range. The shotgun was in his left hand, the handgun in his right, he grabbed shells and reloaded when he needed to while trying to keep firing the whole time because he had been on the streets of the city, and he had seen the plague that was killing people here and there and everywhere, and he knew what could happen if the rats got a bite of him. A few had already tried when he was in the dumpster, but they received nothing more than a mouthful of boot leather for their efforts, because no matter the climate, no matter the environment, Cayman always had heavy boots on, and this day only firmed up his resolve to keep it that way.
The rats were dying steadily, yet somehow coming closer, because you can always gain ground when you have no care for your own life, and they were getting perilously close to X-Prime, whose legs were not protected by anything more than canvas pants. X-Prime was moving too much, dodging back and forth, for Cayman to be able to shoot to help him, but if Cayman could clear enough rats near him he could move in and help with a blade, so he shot and shot and hoped he could kill the ones in front of him fast enough, and he looked at X-Prime and saw one particularly large rat coming closer, it was only a meter away from the boy and closing fast, and X-Prime hit it with a flechette but it did not seem to care, it leaped forward, mouth opened, aiming at X-Prime’s vulnerable shin, and X-Prime could not stop this beast with his gun because it was coming too fast, and Cayman tried to run and get a shot off but he was not sure he could find the angle, and the boy’s foot moved forward with a kick, which was not a bad idea but it would not be enough, because the rat would just react by grabbing the boy’s leg, wrapping around it and biting, but Cayman saw a glint of metal as the foot moved forward, and the boy’s toe caught the rat right in the belly, and Cayman swore he could see the rat’s eyes widen even though he was behind the creature, and the rat suddenly stiffened and then went limp and then fell to the ground, bleeding through a wound in its gut, and Cayman reminded himself that he should not forget that the boy is full of surprises.
It was as if that single kick took the steam out of the rats, and the tide of them slacked off. There were a few more to kick and shoot here and there, but they became less of a threat until they disappeared altogether, either dead or searching for less well-armed prey.
Cayman walked over to the dumpster, looked cautiously inside, then sat on the edge and poked around with the barrel of his shotgun. There was no movement inside, which was a significant relief to Cayman. Not only that, but as his shotgun moved around the rubbish shifted and all of the sudden there was a package, a simple black package, sitting uncovered and waiting for them. There was a bit of rat leavings on the box, but other than that it seemed in fine condition.
“Ah-ha!” Cayman said, and X-Prime walked over and looked in and saw what he saw.
“See, that’s what they should have told us in the first place,” he said. “That the package was in the one with the devil rats.”
Chapter Six
There are times when a group must stop for a moment to take stock of where they are and what they are doing, and if you happen to be in a moment where you find that, without having any knowledge of it, you are carrying a human scalp, that is one of those times.
This is not to say that the group stops moving. Cayman is already impatient enough to get to Lagos Island that he is not going to stop just because they need to talk. Walking and talking is fine with him, so long as there is no one trying to attack him.
“Why is someone sending around a human scalp?” Agbele Oku asks, a note of anger in her voice.
“Why do we care?” X-Prime says. “If we had done all this right, we wouldn’t even know what’s in the box. That means we can do our job without worrying about it. So let’s keep the box closed and forget about it.”
Agbele Oku’s eyes narrow. “Have you trafficked in human body parts before?”
“Not that I know of,” X-Prime says, “though we did cut off this one guy’s cyberarm once.”
“Then maybe this is easy for you,” Agbele Oku says. “For me, I am not making the adjustment so easy. We have a body part, and I want to know why we’re carrying it.”
Halim is walking and looking straight ahead. “There’s no one here who could tell you anything about it. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“There are ways we can find things out,” Agbele Oku says. “Maybe Groovetooth can do some quick research. Do you have access here?”
Groovetooth lets out a short bark that they all take to mean “no.”
“I don’t like this,” Agbele Oku says. “And I do not think I will like dropping this off to a person who would want such a thing.”
“I think you’ll like it once you get your cred,” X-Prime says.
Speaking at almost the same time, Akuchi says, “You don’t have to like it. I’m not sure I like it, but that doesn’t change much. We have the package, we are paid to deliver it, we need to deliver it. We can worry about the whys of what we’re doing later.”
“When you try to worry about it later, you generally worry about it too late,” Agbele Oku says, though her tone is resigned now.
The crowds have thinned somewhat at this part in the bridge because they are farther away from land, and it is more difficult for people to come and go here. Cayman finds the sparser crowd appealing, as he can walk faster and try not to get involved in the conversation behind him. The wind is at his back, pushing him toward the island, and it doesn’t seem all that far off anymore, maybe only eight kilometers, maybe less. They will make it, the scalp and whatever is in the other two boxes will be dropped off, and it will be over. And they will not even have to bother knowing anything about what the other boxes hold.
“What do you suppose is in the other boxes?” X-Prime says.
Cayman stops and whirls on him. “Why do you care?”
X-Prime shrugs. “I don’t, really. Just seems like it might be interesting. I mean, that one box is kind of neat, if gross. So the other two—”
“Are none of our business!” Cayman thunders.
Agbele Oku has stopped. In her green-and-black gown with her long neck and sharp features, she looks like some kind of queen. “Maybe we should open them. That might help us learn more about what we are doing.”
“We’re not opening anything!” Cayman says with as much command as he can put into his voice.
“We learn what is inside, we get more information,” Agbele Oku says. “Groovetooth, the more information you have, the better, right?”
“Don’t drag me into this,” Groovetooth says, looking skittish and nervous. She keeps looking around, looking back over her shoulder, and Cayman figures the lack of AR and Matrix access has her unnerved.
Agbele Oku pulls herself to her full height and the breeze makes her robe billow out in front of her. “We have a duty—” she begins, but Cayman cuts her off quickly.
“To do our job!” he says, and he continues south on the bridge.
The wind feels good against the sweat on the back of his neck, and Cayman considers walking backward for a time to let the breeze blow on his face, but that would mean he would be facing the rest of the group, and possibly make them think he is inviting conversation, which he most certainly is not.
It is because he remained facing forward that he sees the line of women standing in front of him on the bridge. They have picked a spot where some of the bridge had crumbled and it had narrowed to half its width. That meant that a group of eight women could form a line across the entire bridge, which they did. Cayman notices that they are well-groomed group of women, all in clean robes and all with alert eyes. They look watchful but not hostile, standing casually, some with their arms folded, others with their arms at their side or a hand on their hips. They do not look threatening, but they also do not look like they are about to move.
Cayman waves an arm toward Halim without turning to him. “Don’t get any weapons out. Please. Let’s not kill them if we don’t have to.”
Halim says nothing, and Cayman takes a deep breath and then lets it out.
He keeps harboring a distant hope that they will approach this group of woman, walk through them and past them, and move on without anything happening. There are many, many people in this city, and many, many people on this bridge, and it is possible that these women are looking for someone else on this bridge, and not this group. Why should everyone be looking for us? is what Cayman thinks. People in this city, they have other business to do.
But Cayman’s hopes are soon dashed when he comes within twenty meters of the women and one of them steps forward, a short woman whose feet are apart so she looks firmly anchored to her spot, and the wind barely seems to be touching her, her robe and her long braids are not even moving, and her face his round and calm.
