Here's Story 3 of my Shadowrun fan fiction. Once again, it's veeeeery lengthy (14 1/2 pages in Word).
If you read it, please leave some feedback.
[ Spoiler ]
Story 3: Meeting My (Weapons) Maker
Most people in the shadow community that know of us – by “us” I mean the hunter community – think that we’re all solitary types, lone nuts walking the night. They think that we’re all anti-social nutjobs, hunting the creatures of the night because we’re too psycho for anything else that might require more human interaction.
Let me clear this up right now – while some lone nuts hunt, the majority of us are social creatures. In fact, most of the social and mood problems some of us have come from the fact that we want social interaction. Unfortunately, our line of work doesn’t leave much time for parties or casual bar visits.
This doesn’t mean we don’t have friends, however. Most hunters I know have friends, usually people that are involved in the hunt in a supporting role. The bonds we form with these people are strong out of necessity – it’s the rare average Joe Chummer that can stand a friend that hunts the undead by night.
I’m fortunate to say that I’m one of those hunters that has friends. They’re mostly those that help me with the hunt, but like I said, we’ve got a tight bond.
Let me tell you how I met one of them – the friend that helped me into my current line of work.
It happened about three months after I first moved into my apartment in Renton. That money I gained from the vampire I’d killed allowed me to get the place, but I soon realized that without a means of getting some cash, I was going to be right back out on the streets again.
It wasn’t like I had too many marketable job skills either. Hell, I’d never even had a burger-flipping job.
In short, things were looking bad. I had two months to find a job that could pay my rent, and I had no experience.
The only thing I could think of that I was remotely good at that could make some money was vampire hunting. But without a gun (which, being newly SINless, wouldn’t be very easy for me to get), I would have been just another victim. It’s not like I had black market connections to get myself a firearm, after all.
I think this is where I’m supposed to spout some cheesy quote about fate and the turns it throws at us and how things get better just when it seems the worst.
Well, forget it. Yeah, I did meet the guy that helped me get into the hunting life, but it wasn’t so perfectly executed as to be a twist of fate. It was pure luck – no divine intervention, no twist of fate. Know how I know that?
Because I can’t think of any divine plans that would involve the fate-twisted being outnumbered five-to-one against flesh-eating beasts.
Even though I couldn’t get myself a true firearm, I decided to get a practice gun, since I figured Infected hunting was where I was going to end up sooner or later. There were simply no other options for me.
I went down to the army surplus store about a month after moving in and bought myself a CO2-powered air gun. Yeah, it was just a replica and wouldn’t harm anything except a sheet of paper, but I figured that I could use it for target practice.
It was a nice gun, actually. It was a metal-framed replica of an Ares Predator, nearly identical except for that damn orange tip on the barrel to distinguish it from the real thing. The funny thing is, even though I knew it wasn’t real, I still felt a surge of confidence when I picked it up for the first time. Only cost 100 nuyen, too, which I eagerly plunked down.
I spent the next couple months practicing with my new prize, setting up all sorts of challenging targets for myself – cans, paper bulls-eye targets, the occasional spider crawling on my wall – and daring myself to hit every one of them. I didn’t hit them all the first time, but after constant practice – sometimes up to 10 hours a day – I’d managed to build up an impressive amount of accuracy.
For all that accuracy, a couple months later I was still without a real weapon and two months away from street life again. I considered all my options, but I quickly ran out of them. No legal way to get it, and no illegal connections I felt comfortable dealing with.
The night I met my friend, I’d formulated a desperate plan – find a lone ganger in the Redmond Barrens and mug him for his weapon. Yeah, it was stupid, but it was the only choice I had. I was banking on my replica Predator – newly painted to remove that pansy-looking orange barrel tip – to intimidate the ganger enough that he’d fork it over. As some added insurance to protect myself – and hide my gun during my stroll over to Redmond – I bought myself a nice black leather trench coat with Kevlar woven between the leather layers.
I was all decked out with somewhere to go, and I headed out into the mild April night, Predator hidden under my coat, ready to carry out my half-cocked plan.
I’d only been walking for a few minutes when a terrible stench hit my nose. At first, I thought some Renton squatter had just taken a dump in the alleyway, but I soon realized that this smelled a whole lot worse. Like…rot. Rotting flesh. Don’t ask me how I knew what that smelled like, ‘cause I’m still not sure myself.
I also noticed that the further I walked in the direction of Redmond, the stronger the smell was getting. I silently thanked my lucky stars that one of my powers granted to me hadn’t been a sharper sense of smell and continued onwards.
Then I heard it.
“HELP!”
It was a man’s voice, and it sounded very distressed – an assumption punctuated by the sound of a shotgun blast quickly following the cry.
The sound didn’t seem too far away, and I couldn’t just ignore somebody in danger. I ran in the direction of the sound. As I feared, the smell just kept getting stronger, along with the man’s subsequent cries for help.
After about a minute of running, I saw a bunch of people crowded in front of a small building, one that looked like a business of some sort. Another cry for help and several shotgun blasts, one of which sent one of the mob members flying backwards, confirmed that that was the building where the trouble was, and that the man in trouble was inside the building.
“HEY!” I called out to the crowd. “Leave him alone!”
The rear-most person in the crowd turned towards me, and what I saw nearly struck me dead with fright.
His eyes were white and milky, his skin gray as smoke, and his head completely barren of any hair. He had the same rank odor coming from him that I’d smelled further back. His clothes were in tatters, and his fingers ended in horrific, sharp nails that were long enough to be claws.
It was a ghoul.
“Welcome to our dinner party, meat!” he shouted at me, baring terrifying piranha-like teeth.
Our party. Great. That entire crowd was made of ghouls!
I mentally cursed myself for not even suspecting the possibility that the horrible stench could have been ghouls. They’re flesh eaters, for Ghost’s sake! And I called myself an aspiring Infected hunter?!
Sharp movement in my field of vision shook me out of my self-loathing, and I dodged to the side just in time to avoid the ghoul’s bull charge. I gave the monster a swift axe kick to his spine – a trick I’d seen in some martial arts movies – and heard a satisfying crack as he crumpled to the ground.
I tried to run for the storefront, only to feel a hellacious pain in my groin.
“SHIT!” I cried out.
I must’ve pulled a muscle doing that axe kick of mine. I cursed myself again for being so stupid. That attack may have taken the one ghoul down, but there were at least ten more left, and the cannibalistic crowd had heard my pained cry and was turning its attention towards me.
Hoping to look intimidating enough to ward them off, I pulled my replica pistol and pointed it at them.
“Stay back!” I commanded. “Don’t come any closer!”
No effect. They kept walking towards me, almost as though they were shambling. Since they certainly could have moved faster, I had to assume that they were trying to scare the shit out of me before they killed me.
Sadistic bastiches.
“HEY!”
I turned towards the storefront. It was the guy that was crying for help earlier. He was an old man, at least in his late 50s, and he looked Asian. He was also waving a gun above his head.
“Put that pea shooter away! Take this!”
With a huge overhead throw, he hurled the gun towards me, high above the dead-looking crowd.
Tossing my replica aside, I caught the thrown pistol with a perfect catch and immediately switched the safety off. I leveled the gun at the closest ghoul, an act that caused the entire crowd to pause for a second.
I didn’t waste that second with a cocky remark. I just pulled the trigger.
The bastard’s head exploded not two meters away from me, his blood and brains flying backwards and splattering some of the crowd.
Another gunshot rang out a few meters away and I saw another ghoul at the rear of the crowd go down. The old man must have gotten back to business.
I grinned as I realized that we could win this thing, and I popped two more flesh-eaters, their hearts pierced by .45 caliber lead.
“Hang on over there!” I yelled to the old man.
I broke and ran for the storefront, ignoring the twinges of pain shooting through my groin. I shot another ghoul on the way over, but I only winged him and pissed him off. He stared at me with a murderous glare and leaped towards me, but two more shots to his head cancelled his flight about halfway to its destination.
Finally arriving at the storefront door, I was greeted by an open door that quickly slammed shut once I was inside. The mob outside was quickly advancing towards the narrow opening.
“Back up!” I heard as I was pushed backwards.
“Here, take these,” he said, pressing a couple extra clips into my hand. “And get ready!”
I looked towards him ready to thank him, but he already had his shotgun trained on the opening, his eyes tensely focused on the crowd of pack animals outside. He clearly wasn’t in the mood for conversation. Couldn’t really blame him.
Fumbling around with the clips, I ejected the partially spent one and replaced it with a fresh one. There wasn’t going to be any time to reload once the shooting started. I placed the half-empty one in my back pocket, mentally marking it as the last one.
The gun’s digital readout read 13. One chambered, twelve in the mag.
Hoping that 13 shots would be enough, I pointed the gun towards the glass window of the wooden door. I tensed my finger on the trigger, causing the gun to project a red dot from its underbarrel laser sight on one of the many smoke-gray faces staring at us through the glass.
“How many shots you got in that thing?” I asked the old man.
“Eight,” he replied.
“21 shots between us,” I said. “Think that’ll be enough?”
“It will have to be,” he replied.
That didn’t sound good.
“Listen to me,” he said. “On the count of three, I’m going to kick the door open. Once I do, start shooting and don’t stop till every one of them is dead. Make every shot count.”
I nodded in acknowledgement.
Holding the pistol steady, I watched as the brave old guy stepped towards the door, shotgun ready.
“One…two…THREE!”
He delivered a swift kick to the door, shattering the wood around the lock and throwing it open. The mass of swinging wood knocked the gathering ghouls off balance, and the old man took advantage of the confusion to blow the head off one of the ghouls.
I followed his lead, firing my gun at another ghoul and making a nice big crater through his face.
Seconds later, the ghouls were all dead. Twelve corpses littered the street in front of the store, their newly begun decay adding to the already horrid smell of their bodies. We shot any corpses with their heads still attached through the head, just to make sure they were down.
I looked up from where I’d shot the last dead ghoul at the old man I’d just met
and strolled towards him, carefully stepping over the diseased corpses.
“Looks like I owe you one, man,” I said. “Without that tossed gun, I’d be dead meat, literally. Maybe even one of them.”
The man looked up at me, a grave look on his face.
“We’re not out of the woods yet,” he said in a tired and heavily accented voice. “Lone Star will be here soon, and they’ll doubtlessly be asking questions. A massive shootout doesn’t really go unnoticed in Renton, you know. I’ll do the talking; you just go inside until it’s over. I’ll meet you back in there soon.”
I nodded in agreement and headed back into the shop just as the sirens of Lone Star squad cars started blaring.
Taking a look around the store, I realized for the first time what this store the old man was protecting was. It was a gun shop. There were hunting rifles, pistols, even assault rifles, all up for sale in this place.
You couldn’t ask for a better place to make a stand.
I spent a good 15 minutes ogling the gun collection before the old man walked back in, looking to be in a considerably better mood.
“Well, they’re carting off the corpses now,” he said. “They’re writing this off as a case of self-defense; the gang symbol patch on their clothes was reason enough.”
“A gang?” I replied. “That mob that just attacked us was a gang?”
“Yes,” the old man said, nodding. “The Hannibals, they call themselves. Some reference to an old horror movie, I’m told. They’re trying to muscle in on this area, and many of the storefront owners are so afraid of them because they’re all ghouls that they just pay the protection fee.”
Damn. The Infected were getting organized? No one said the hunting profession was a safe job, but this put a whole new twist on things.
“Anyways, the cops weren’t too sad to see members of a violent gang put down,” he continued. “Combined with my account of what happened, that was enough for them.”
I let out a relieved sigh.
“Please allow me to introduce myself,” he said, bowing. “My name is Toshiro Yamato, and I own this store.”
I bowed in return. “Jonathan,” I said, not including my last name. “I’m just a guy with a hatred for the Infected that just grew a mile skyward.”
Toshiro nodded understandingly.
“Shall we continue this elsewhere?” he asked. “There’s a steakhouse nearby.”
I nodded, and we headed out for a midnight dinner.
We spent a good hour talking at the steakhouse over a plate full of meat that tasted like it was cooked with a military flamethrower. Still, he was buying, so I couldn’t really complain.
We sat quietly for a good few minutes before he realized that I wasn’t going to tell him anything without a bit of give-and-take, information wise. So he started talking about his store, how long he’d been in business and stuff like that. In return, I told him about the past few months – my family, the destruction of two vampires and those ghouls outside his store, and how the only thing I had left to live for was hunting these monsters.
Clearly, he hadn’t been expecting the tale I’d told him. He just started at me, like he didn’t know how to reply.
“Look, I didn’t mean to dump my whole sob story on you,” I said, breaking the awkward silence. “I guess I just got a bit carried away and…”
“No, no, don’t apologize,” he said. “It’s just…I’ve never heard a story like that before. It’s terrible.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t know how common it is in Seattle, but…the statistics don’t mean much when you or your family is the victim.”
“Indeed,” he said. “Well, as both of us know, there’s already one gang of flesh-eating monsters in this district; there’s got to be at least a few more monsters in other districts, and who knows how many there could be in Redmond and Puyallup, where the police never go?”
That made sense. Anyone who didn’t want to be found could just hide out in the Barrens and just let the rest of society forget about them. Until they started wreaking havoc in a “nice” neighborhood, that is. That was the only time the police ever seemed to care about anyone in the blighted districts of Seattle.
“So what now?” I asked. “The Hannibals aren’t just going to let the deaths of a dozen of their number go easily.”
“Indeed,” Toshiro replied. “And who knows how many more there are left in the gang? They might all come after us next time.”
“I was wondering,” I asked. “Why did they come after you? What made them brazen enough to attack in the open in a district as well-patrolled as Renton?”
“I refused to be cowed by them any longer,” he said. “I stood up to their efforts to extort money out of my business, and that attack was their way of saying that they intended to take it by force.”
“Maybe we could take them out,” I whispered.
He started, sitting up straight.
“Take them out?!” he whispered harshly. “Are you insane?! Did you not hear me saying that there could be scores more ghouls at their hideout?”
“Better to die on your feet than live on your knees,” I replied. “And you must think that way too, or else you wouldn’t have stood up to them in the first place.”
He crossed his arms and sighed, staring at the ceiling.
“Besides, they’re going to attack your store again anyways, and this time it’ll be for your head, not just your money,” I pointed out. “If we go after them first, make a bit of a pre-emptive strike, we might have the element of surprise.”
“It will take more than surprise to succeed against them,” he replied, shaking his head. “We’ll need more firepower than you and I combined can provide.”
“Know anyone that can help?” I asked.
Once again, he crossed his arms, sighed, and stared at the ceiling. He seemed to be thinking.
“I’m not sure I should be telling you this, seeing as I just met you,” he said, his tone somewhat sharp.
“However…you did save my life, and I suppose that’s worth some measure of trust,” he said. “And since you have said yourself that you’re a hunter of the Infected, or at least trying to be, I suppose that means you run in much the same circles.”
I flashed a puzzled expression, not understanding what he meant.
He leaned in a bit closer, whispering so that I had to lean in to hear him.
“I also provide my goods to shadowrunners,” he said. “You know what I mean, so ka?”
I nodded. I understood his concerns about trust – shadowrunning was certainly not a legitimate business, and his reputation and legal status could be in serious trouble if that information found its way to certain people.
“Anyways, due to these customers,” he continued, pulling his head back so as not to attract attention, “I have contacts in the community. I could pull some people together. They might be able to help us.”
“Sounds good,” I said. “How soon can they be called to service?”
“Let’s find out,” he said, getting up to leave. “Come back to my store and I’ll make a few calls.”
I sat up from our booth and followed him out, heading back to the still-stinking gun store.
Two hours later, Toshiro and I had a plan. Thanks to his connections in the shadow community, we now had two runners willing to help us clean the Hannibals out from their hideout. Unfortunately, they were busy with “other matters” (I didn’t bother asking what that meant) and wouldn’t be available for another day.
A day in which the Hannibals could attack the store again.
I was sitting in a chair in Hannibal’s gun store, thinking about anything that we could do in the meantime to prepare for the attack – ours’ or the Hannibals’, whichever came first. I had a feeling that we’d gotten lucky in our victory over the ghouls; from what I’d read in Patterson’s, they were usually tougher than that.
Whatever the case, I had a feeling that the ghouls wouldn’t make the same mistake again if they attacked. They would send their strongest this time, and the battle would not be so easily won.
“Hey,” Toshiro said, rousing me from my thoughts. “You should really go home and get some sleep.”
I shook my head. “I’ve gotta prepare. This is going to be a tough fight, and if those bastards attack us…”
The old Japanese guy shook his head in return.
“They won’t attack again, not immediately anyways,” he said. “And the best way you can prepare is to be rested. Go home. Come back here by noon tomorrow; I live right above this place, so I’ll be here long before then. Know how to use an assault rifle?”
I shook my head.
“Then prepare for a crash course tomorrow. Remember: noon, sharp.”
Well, this was his house. I got up to leave.
“Noon. I’ll be here.”
The next day, after a few hours of a sleep and an overnight heating pad treatment for my groin injury, I came by the gun store, carrying a McHugh’s bag and ready to go through a good few hours of firearms training. I was half-dreading arriving to a store with smashed windows and Toshiro’s dead body, but everything was intact when I came by.
Toshiro was dealing with a couple of customers when I arrived, so I just sat down for a few minutes and waited until he was done. He looked up at me once the customers left.
“Hey there,” he said, smiling. “Brought some lunch, I see?”
“Yep,” I replied. “So…where’s the targeting range?”
“Right this way,” he said, waving me into the back room and telling another employee to cover for a few minutes.
I walked into the back room, but it looked like a typical warehouse – no bull’s eye targets set up, no weapons except those packaged in boxes, nothing.
“Ok…what’s the deal here?” I asked, confused.
The old man tugged at a chain on the floor. A trapdoor wide enough to fit a troll through hinged open at his pull, and a small staircase led down into what looked like a basement.
“Down here,” he said.
I hesitated for a bit. Trapdoors leading underground tended to be how some bad horror sims started.
He must have seen the concern in my face, because he looked a bit surprised at first, but that soon changed to understanding.
“If it makes you feel better, I’ll go first,” he said.
I nodded, and he started down the stairs.
Cautiously following him down, I took a look around.
This whole basement was set up like another gun shop. Workbenches lay all around, with partially constructed guns of all types laying on them, along with a bunch of power tools. There was even a miniature firing range set up on the left side, running the entire length of that side of the basement.
“Damn, nice setup here,” I said.
Toshiro laughed as he closed the trapdoor.
“You didn’t think I did my shadow work up there, did you?” he asked.
“Guess not,” I replied, feeling a bit dumb for not thinking of that earlier. “So judging by all these disassembled guns, I’m guessing you do custom work as well?”
He nodded. “Been crafting guns for people for ten years, ever since I bought this place. Gotten a lot of positive feedback too.”
“Nice,” I said.
He waved me over to the firing range and handed me an AK-97. There was a silhouette of a humanoid shape at the other end. That only amounted to about 30 meters, but it was better than nothing.
“This is the most basic type of assault rifle I can think of. If you can handle this, you can probably handle just about anything,” he said, walking over to a tool bench. “If one target gets too shot up, there’s plenty more lying around. The wall behind the target’s made of Kevlar, so don’t worry too much about damaging it.”
Toshiro walked back over with a cigar-shaped object that he immediately screwed onto the barrel of the rifle.
“Suppressor. That’ll keep the customers from hearing all the gunfire. Just remember to change it every 300 rounds; there’s several more lying over there,” he said, pointed to the bench he just came back from.
“Well, that’s about it,” he said, walking towards the staircase. “Need any help, just push the door open, come back up and get me. The runners will be here around midnight, so you’ve got plenty of time.”
I nodded.
“Good luck,” he said, going up and closing the trapdoor, leaving me with a rifle and a target to shoot at.
I spent a good half hour just learning how to load and ready the thing – I’d never used an assault rifle before, so it was a new experience. Once that was done, I just kept firing. Empty the clip, change the clip, and fire.
I kept aiming for the head and the heart on the paper targets – fatal shots on a living target. Before long, I had managed to refine my aim enough to hit those targets even on full-auto fire, though I still only managed to hit the two fatal targets about 30% of the time, at best, on continuous fire. Still, some chaotic spraying fire might just be called for on a mission like this, so I trained myself in firing that way as well.
Before long, it was midnight, and Toshiro had come downstairs to get me. He looked at the used paper targets I’d laid out on another workbench, the head and chest areas perforated, with some stray bullet holes spread out throughout the rest of the targets.
“I see you’ve been busy,” he said. “Looks like some nice progress for twelve hours.”
“Managed to do pretty well on burst-fire, less so on full-auto,” I said. “Kicked ass on semi-auto, though.”
“Well, in my experience full-auto is best for heated mission,” he said.
“’In my experience?’” I asked. “So you’ve been in combat before?”
He nodded. “Ran the shadows for twenty years before retiring to this place. Took a lot of jobs – corporate mostly. I refused to touch organized crime.”
“So that’s how you made those shadow connections for the mission,” I said.
“Yep,” he replied.
“Are you gonna be alright if you come with us on this?” I asked him.
Toshiro looked at me, and I knew I’d made a mistake asking that.
“You mean, ‘Is my old age going to get in the way?’” he said accusingly.
“Well…”
“Jonathan, I might be pushing 60, but I’ve still got the dead eye aim that made me a good shadowrunner,” he said, hands on his hips. “And I can still empty a clip from a pistol pretty damn fast.”
“Wires?” I asked.
He nodded. “Smartlink too. So don’t worry about me, I can handle myself.”
“Hey, I’m sorry, I just thought…”
“Don’t worry,” he said with a grin. “The ‘slow, old man’ image is something I’ve used to my advantage a few times in the past few years. It’s fooled a lot of people, so you’re not the first. I figured it might work to our advantage against these man-eating punks tonight.”
I saw what he meant. The element of surprise might be on our side if those ghouls thought he was a helpless old guy.
“So if you start walking with a limp…?”
He nodded. “It’s an act. But it’d help if you and the others played along with it.”
“Speaking of the others, are they here yet?” I asked.
“They’re waiting for us upstairs. But first, you need to get suited up for battle.”
He walked over to one of the boxes and pulled several of them over to a workbench, unloading a few items from each.
He plunked an assault rifle from one of the boxes down on the bench.
“Heckler & Koch G12A3z. 32-round clip, laser sight, and a gas vent system in the barrel to stabilize the weapon during fire. I’ll attach a sling to it for easy carrying.”
“Nice,” I said. “But don’t you have anything with better recoil compensating? Y’know, just in case I need to lay down some serious firepower?”
“No time,” he said, attaching the sling. “Attaching those components takes a bit of work, and we’re set to roll right now.”
He pulled a large pistol out of another box. Even before he said what it was, I knew I was gonna like it.
“Colt Manhunter,” he said. “Integral laser sight and attached silencer so the neighbors won’t wake up. Got a holster for it too, along with a few more clips for both weapons.”
Turning to a third box, he yanked out a jacket that looked big enough to be a winter coat.
“Armor jacket – excellent protection for low weight. Got some pockets to hold the extra clips too.”
I started picking up my equipment, figuring he was done, but instead he turned to a longer cardboard box and pulled something out I didn’t expect to see – a sword. More specifically, a Japanese katana.
“Finally, something I’ve always found useful on shadowruns – a melee weapon,” he said. “Never runs out of ammo, and just as useful as a gun.”
“I appreciate the thought,” I said, “but if we have to get into hand-to-hand combat with these guys, it’s probably over. Either we’re dead, or we’ll be one of them.”
“Maybe,” he said, “but it’s saved my life more than once. Take it with, just in case.”
I shrugged and clasped the sheathed katana. It couldn’t hurt.
“Well, let’s meet our allies,” Toshiro said, picking up a rifle, pistol and armor jacket before walking up the stairs.
Taking stock of our allies that were waiting in the back-room warehouse area, I felt a bit more confident of our ability to take down the warehouse of ghouls.
“Jonathan, meet Fenrir,” Toshiro said, pointing to a giant – as in the troll metavariant – standing on the left. The guy was huge, and looked like he was armed for war – not only was he wearing military-style armor, he was hefting what looked like a full-out machine gun attached to some sort of harness he was wearing (I later found out this was a gyro-mount). The guy also had his entire left arm replaced by a cybernetic limb. Quite a menacing figure, though I doubted fear would be effective against a bunch of creatures that were already ugly as sin.
“And this is Hecate, a mage” Toshiro said, pointing to a human woman to the right of Fenrir. She was decked out in all black, topped off with a trench coat that I suspected was armored. I didn’t doubt she had at least one gun concealed under it, in addition to the magical firepower she wielded.
“So…are we ready?” I asked, eager to get started.
“Almost,” Hecate said. “You need a code name.”
“A…code name?” I asked, somewhat in disbelief.
“Yeah,” Fenrir said. “What, you gonna use your real name? Every runner needs a code name.”
“Yeah, but pick one fast, ‘cause we gotta go,” Toshiro said. “Mine’s going to be Link, the name I’ve had in the shadow community ever since my first one.”
I’d never thought about this. It didn’t occur to me that a code name might help – and just plain sound cool.
It only took a few seconds of thinking before it came to me. I was a vampire hunter now, and what did the vampires of legend fear more than anything?
Sunlight.
I smiled as it came to mind.
“Call me Helios,” I said.
“The Greek sun god,” Hecate noted. “Fitting choice for a vampire hunter.”
“Alright, let’s do this,” Link said. “I’ve got a van out back that’ll fit Fenrir and Helios; Hecate will ride in the front with me and do some astral scouting before we arrive.”
“Let’s go.”
About a half hour later, Hecate had completed her astral recon of the warehouse where the Hannibals were holed up and given a rather unsettling report.
“I count 20 ghouls in the warehouse,” she said over the earplug communicators we all had. “It’s a pretty simple layout – giant lower floor with lots of boxes for them to hide behind, a few staircases leading to an upper catwalk, and a second-level office where the leader is holed up. There’s several doors leading to a loading dock on the lower floor; it looks like that’s been made over into a barracks.”
“20 ghouls, and lots of places for them to hide,” I said. “Who thinks this could get messy?”
“Well, three of us have night vision,” Fenrir noted. “And Hecate has astral sight; that should help immensely.”
“Yeah, but they’ve got astral sight too,” Hecate noted. “And it’s on all the time for them.”
“Okay, so how are we going to approach this?” I asked. “If they’ve got astral sight, then my stealth abilities won’t be too effective.”
“Let me take the lead,” Fenrir piped up. “I’ll lay down suppressive fire, and you guys bust in and take care of any of them that I don’t.”
“Sounds good,” Link said. “Just be careful not to hit any of us.”
“Gotcha,” Fenrir said.
“Let’s do it then,” I said, pushing open the rear door and letting Fenrir jump out first.
I followed up behind the giant, standing to the side of the warehouse’s large door. Hecate stood behind me while Link stood to the other side of the door.
“One, two, three!”
Fenrir kicked the giant door down precisely on “three,” following it up with the deafening “chop chop chop” sound of machine gun fire as he sprayed the entire warehouse. Two ghouls unlucky enough to be in the giant’s line of sight were chopped in half by the concentrated fire, and another sprawled to the ground, his right arm sliced off at the elbow.
Un-slinging my assault rifle, I took the stairs up two at a time, setting my rifle to burst-fire and firing at a ghoul that was already moving to attack on the catwalk. Three holes appeared in the monster’s chest, but he still kept on coming!
Cursing the bastard’s strength, I pulled the trigger again. This time, all three went into its neck, causing a wet, gurgling sound to register from his throat. He fell over the catwalk railing and plunged to the ground, his skull cracking open on impact.
I looked down to check on my teammates. They were doing ok for themselves. Fenrir was still spraying the room and had turned several more ghouls into sieves, and Link was using his dead eye aim to decapitate those that Fenrir missed. Meanwhile, Hecate was tossing bolts of pure magical power at one ghoul at a time downstairs. All in all, a successful run so far.
Just as I thought that, I heard a gunshot ring out and felt something hit me in my chest, impacting against my armor. I stumbled back from the hit, but kept my balance on the catwalk.
Damn, I thought. They must’ve recovered from the surprise and gathered their weapons.
Switching to my thermo vision, I checked around for ghoul heat signatures, and was greeted by swarms of them below me, advancing on the rest of the team. I also spotted at least three on the same catwalk I was on, and they all had guns.
Thinking fast, I brought up the rifle and squeezed the trigger twice. I heard several wet “thuds” as the bullets hit their marks, but they were all still standing – and raising their guns at me.
I pressed the trigger as fast as I could. Three, six, then nine bullets leapt from my gun and streaked towards the flesh-eaters. One trio cratered the face of a ghoul and sent him flipping backwards into the wall, and the others clipped a second one enough that he lost his balance and flipped over the railing.
The third one, unhurt by the flying lead, fired at me. The bullet hit me in the upper right arm with such power that I spun around in mid-air like a top, falling to the catwalk. I had to hang onto the railing to keep from rolling off and falling.
Grimacing at the pain slicing through my arm, I looked up and saw the ghoul running towards me, gun drawn and ready for a second shot.
Trying my best to ignore the intense pain, I raised my rifle and shot, emptying the rest of the clip into the neck and head of the charging creature and sending him flying backwards, his face a smoking hole.
Silently praying I wouldn’t get any ghoul blood into the wound, I pulled a couple of large airtight bandages I’d had the foresight to bring along out of my pocket and slapped them on the bullet holes – both the entrance and exit wounds.
I knew those things would come in handy.
Switching out the clip in my rifle, I strolled to the end of the catwalk – and felt a tingle in the back of my neck. Not from cold or anything – it was more like those things psychics claim they feel in sudden emergencies.
I swung my head around a split second before I heard Hecate scream.
“HELIOS, WATCH OUT!!”
A ghoul was almost on top of me, his piranha teeth glinting in the dim light of the warehouse.
Time seemed to move in slow motion as I raised my leg and kicked the bastard back before he could lay a single skin cell on me. He flew backward and hit the catwalk with a loud clang, followed by three bursts from my rifle that put him down for good.
I didn’t realize it until the action cooled down later, but that was yet another power that I had gained from my Awakening – a sixth sense for immediate threats.
Taking a few deep breaths from the scare that I’d just received, I walked up to the office door and kicked it open, poking my rifle through the entrance.
Peeking through the door, I saw the monster I was expecting to see – a ghoul, larger than any I’d ever seen before, and the added mass was all muscle. I knew he had to be the leader; one thing I learned from my month in the Barrens was that gangs were led by the strongest.
The ghoul didn’t even flinch at my presence, or the rifle pointed at him. He just smiled and strolled towards me threateningly, obviously counting on intimidating me.
I could only imagine how sorely disappointed he must have felt as I set the rifle on full auto and fired at him. At this range, I wasn’t too worried about missing due to recoil.
I was worried, however, when he shrugged off the bullets and kept on walking towards me, raising one claw to strike me.
Thinking fast, I jumped backwards, landing on the catwalk outside just out of his swiping range.
Fumbling with the clips in my pocket, I tried to switch out my empty rifle magazine, but the ghoul lunged forward and swiped again, forcing me to jump backwards to avoid him.
It was all I could do to keep my balance on the catwalk, and the rifle’s sling wasn’t enough to keep it from being thrown off me by my sudden movement. A loud crash resounded below as the expensive weapon hit the ground floor.
“Shit,” I groaned as I faced the ghoul.
The beast just stood there, grinning at me as if daring me to make a move. I wanted to spit at the bastard for being so cocky.
Unfortunately, he also had me right where he wanted me. Any movement I made to draw a weapon would be a split second he’d have to claw me, and then it’d be all over.
He must’ve gotten tired of waiting at that point, because he lunged at me again, shaking the entire catwalk with his thunderous footsteps. This time, he waited until he was almost on top of me before raising both his claws in a haymaker motion, ready to plunge both sets down on my head.
Instinctively, I jumped backward as far as I could, managing to clear out of range of his claws. As I did, an idea flashed into my mind.
I’ll only get one shot at this.
As he raised his claws up from the ground, I leapt forward and drew my katana from my back sheath, drawing it across my chest as I started my slashing motion.
A look of horror on the massive ghoul’s face told me all I needed to know – this would work.
I couldn’t help but grin.
It was the last thing he ever saw.
I slashed horizontally, slicing cleanly through the ghoul’s neck and then jumping back before any blood could spray on me.
Two seconds later, the monster’s head slid cleanly off his torso, leaving a fountain of blood spraying from his neck before the body fell backwards.
It may sound crazy, but the only thing I could think of doing at that time was to find a mirror, to make sure no blood sprayed onto me. I didn’t want to take any chances of becoming one of those inhuman animals.
The sounds of gunfire had died down by the time I’d finished my business on the catwalk, so I ran over to my teammates. I was so worried about the possibility of becoming a ghoul that I didn’t even notice Hecate’s leg wound or the bullet hole in Fenrir’s shoulder at first.
“Guys! Do I have any ghoul blood on me? Answer me!”
“Hey hey, calm down,” Fenrir said. “Let me take a look.”
After looking me over for a few seconds, the giant backed up.
“Doesn’t look like it, and I’ve got some decent optical magnification on these eyes,” he said. “If there were any on you, I’d have seen it. You got lucky, considering that sword trick you pulled.”
I let out a sigh of relief at that.
“I just did some astral scouting,” Hecate said. “No signs of any more ghouls. I’d say they’re all dead. So what now?”
“Let’s search the place,” I said. “They’ve been shaking down businesses for protection money, they’ve gotta have a huge stash somewhere. Enough to make this whole thing worthwhile, at any rate.”
“I agree,” Fenrir said. “Let’s get that money for this…and some sterilizing tools to use on the credsticks, just in case.”
While cleaning out the warehouse, we found that the Hannibals had been quite productive. They’d been collecting protection money for only about six months, to hear it told, and yet they had a stash of over 40,000 nuyen stored in their hideout. Chalk that up to their fear factor, I guess.
After a few hours of sterilizing the credsticks of ghoul skin cells and blood – thanks to Hecate’s ever so useful Sterilize spell – we’d made enough cash to make our trouble and wounds worthwhile. We split it evenly, so Link more than recouped his losses from when he was shaken down earlier, and I managed to get more than enough for a few months’ rent.
After we split the money and took a few hours for Hecate to heal our wounds, we all went back to Link’s gun store and unwound over a few drinks. We were all pretty hyped up on adrenaline for a good long time after the fight, so we needed some cool-down time. Facing death will do that, I suppose.
After the other two left, I was ready to leave and get some well-deserved sleep, but Link stopped me.
“You did good out there,” he said. “You handled yourself well, you stayed alive, and you were all business. Those are qualities I’ve seen in every good shadowrunner. I think you have what it takes to be a hunter, if you’re still set on that.”
“I am,” I replied.
“If you’re going to be a hunter, you’ll need a source of weapons,” he said. “Given that I’ve already got connections in the shadow community, I think I could help you out.”
“You’d do that?” I asked, very surprised.
“I’ve seen firsthand just how dangerous the Infected are in recent months,” he said. “If I can help someone do something about it, I would be wrong not to.”
I was elated. I couldn’t believe that I was actually going to be getting the support I needed to become a hunter.
“Thank you so much, Yamato-san,” I said, smiling and shaking his hand. “I accept your offer.”
The old man smiled back. “Glad to help,” he said.
“Well, I guess the first purchase I’d like to make is that Manhunter you lent me for the mission,” I said, handing him one of the credsticks taken from the ghoul hideout. “I didn’t have the opportunity to use it, but I think I like it anyways. And then, if you can, I’d like to order a few other things…”
A couple weeks later, I had the first tools gained for my hunting career. Namely, my “hunting suit,” made of a layer of form-fitting, full-coverage body armor and an armor jacket, both modified to make them fire-retardant and non-porous. I was especially happy for the latter, since I was so paranoid about the ghoul blood on the last mission; the sealing was more than enough to prevent accidental exposure from occurring.
As an added precaution against exposure, I also had Link order me a fog-resistant, strap-on face shield, sort of like you see on some hockey helmets, to completely cover my face. It wouldn’t be enough to stand up to bullets, but that wasn’t my reason for getting it anyways.
When all was said and done, between my armor and Manhunter, I was out 8,500 out of the 10,000 I’d made on the anti-ghoul run. Only enough for another month of rent.
But I’d gained something far more valuable: the means to start hunting and making money, and a comrade in the hunt.
And a freakin’ cool nickname, of course.
(end of story 3)
The Helios Chronicles, Chapter 3
May 4 2005, 04:47 AM
