A Night’s Work – Chapter 2
5 January 2022
She watched the streets from her perch on the second-floor balcony of a derelict building. The windows behind her had been boarded shut but that was good. Nobody was going to sneak up on her from behind. It was never dark in the city but the sun had fully set for a couple of hours now. The rain was gone, too, but the asphalt below remained wet, reflecting the bright graphics and garish colours of the advertising holos above. Her eyes swept over the screen of the device placed on the graffiti-covered unpainted concrete ledge. The green dot sliding through the street map approached her position just as she expected, and her fingers relaxed and contracted, without squeezing too much, over the detonator’s trigger. Soon, things would kick into motion. It would be chaotic for a second but if she played her cards right, she could manage a clean extraction.
There was a smile at the edge of her lips, with her eyes narrowing, focusing on the corner from where she expected to see the van emerging. She estimated twenty seconds until it passed right in front of her, fifteen until she had eyes on it. And those seconds seemed to stretch, almost as if not passing at all. Then her eyes closed, and she took a deep breath. A long exhale, focusing on the sound of her breathing until it drowned all other sounds around her. Until she could no longer hear traffic, the distant sirens and babble of the streets and the endless chatter of the ads playing on a loop above her. Until she could hear her heart pounding in her chest. She took in another deep breath, held it for a moment and let another deliberate exhale break from her lungs. And then her eyes were open once more.
The dark van appeared where she expected. The electronic plate blurred, glitching, as it was common for anyone hauling something illegal across town. The street below was narrow, with only one lane in each direction, with bright orange guard rails on both sides. If the driver was alert, they might have noticed the blinking red LEDs on one of the rails. But their eyes were likely glazing after a long drive and were hardly paying attention to anything smaller than a car. That was why she had chosen to do the ambush towards the end of the route. That, and it was easier to guess which streets they would use closer to the end goal. There was a downside. She would only have a few moments to act, any delays and their friends wouldn’t be far away to come to their aid. But a few moments was all she needed. As the car drove past the blinking device partially hidden in the rails, she squeezed the detonator in her hand.
A pale blue beam shot across the street, between the twin devices she had placed on either side. And just as the van’s front crossed that ghostly line, a heartbeat later, the line disappeared. A localized EMP blast was fired between them. It was silent, invisible, and aside from the lights flickering in the immediate vicinities of the blast, nobody would be able to tell something had happened at all. Nobody except for the van’s driver that watched helplessly as the vehicle’s electronics went haywire for a second, or half a second, and then simply shut down. The car slid forward in inertia for a brief moment but with its electric engine killed, it would come to a halt soon.
But before it did, she vaulted over the concrete ledge and braced herself for the impact of a two stories drop. The impact dampener implants in her legs shrilled as the hydraulics hissed and stopped the worst of the fall from breaking her bones. But she still felt her whole skeleton shaking painfully from the impact against the sidewalk. That was good. Pain kept her sharp and, with barely a second to recover, she was drawing her gun.
The van’s side door slid open and even before she saw what was coming from inside it, she sent two shots towards the darkened interior. The non-lethal rounds landed square on the chest of a large armed thug in a suit, and a blink later, they discharged enough electricity to knock a gorilla off its feet. Twice. The goon went down but the driver’s door was opening now. Her first shot missed, hitting the side of the van, but the second one landed on the driver’s left arm just as he was reaching into his jacket to draw a pistol. ‘Amateurs’, she thought, ‘should’ve drawn before you opened the door’. She rushed towards the vehicle as a few bystanders shouted and either began to dash away or simply stared in morbid curiosity. And then a spray of bullets came from inside the van. If it had been properly aimed, she would’ve not been able to dodge it but fortunately, the bullets whistled by her, mostly to her left, and she whirled right and out of sight as they hit the wall of the building past the runner. She pressed her back against the vehicle and reached into her belt for a white cylinder. A twist and an increasingly more high-pitched whirring sound rose from the device, signalling the grenade was live. She counted to two and just as the barrel of a gun emerged from the open door at the side of the car, she tossed it inside.
She could hear it bouncing once against the opposite wall and heard a heartfelt ‘Fuck!’ being uttered from within before it went off. A loud bang shook the vehicle and a bright, blinding flash and a cloud of highly reflexive ultra-fine particles designed to confuse visual augmentations went off all at once. That bought her around four seconds, which was how much time she needed to spin herself around, hop inside the cramped interior and fire her stun gun point-blank at the first human-shaped mass she saw in front of her. The smell of gunpowder was thick inside and, with their back pressed against the rear doors of the transport, past the two stunned thugs squirming in the hollow interior of the van while covering their ears, she saw the target.
“Mr Montego.” She smirked, raising the stun gun towards him. “I’ll have to insist that you come with me.”
“Whatever they are paying you… I’ll double it,” the short man of red skin glistening with sweat proclaimed, raising his hands to show her his palms.
“Like I never heard that one before. Come on. This will be easier if I don’t have to drag you unconscious.” She signalled towards the open slide door.
Montego’s eyes went to the fallen submachinegun lying halfway between them. She could see the calculations going on in his mind because she was doing the exact same math. She was further away from the gun but in her half-standing, hunched posture, she could arguably dive for it faster than he could reach. But his leg wasn’t far away. A lucky pull with his ankle and he could spray her with fifteen rounds per second. She had nowhere to go in the cramped space. Nowhere to dodge. But her stun gun was levelled at him. Five of six rounds had been fired. If she shot and hit, that would be it for him. A very painful stunning charge was all he could hope for before he was cuffed. But if she somehow missed, instead of using those seconds to dive for the machine gun, she would be a sitting duck.
As his eyes rose from the SMG back towards her, their gazes crossed. There was no exchange of words or even facial expressions for them both to know that they had come to the same conclusion about the situation. Now there was only the matter of what her quarry would do next.
It was a burst of movement. His feet moved to land his ankle over the gun and curled his leg, pulling it close. At the same time, he curved himself forward and angled to the left. She had anticipated the right and fired the stun gun on reflex before having time to correct her aim. The round impacted the interior of the rear door and fizzled. Montego’s hands curled around the SMG’s handle. She dove forward, not towards the gun, but further, towards him. The gun fired, deafening in such close, cramped quarters. Her hands reached out past his head towards the handle of the rear door and they swung open with both of them falling out of the vehicle, SMG still firing.
Montego landed back first onto the asphalt and she landed on top of him, awkwardly, but with enough balance to deliver a solid blow to the centre of his face. The crunching of bone heard was her elbow impacting the bridge of his nose. A soft thump and then he went limp, head hitting the ground. She rolled, landing with her back on the wet road beneath and gave herself exactly two seconds to breathe. Looking upwards she could see the spiralling maze of passages and skyscrapers, holograms and screens barreling towards the night sky. In the glow of the neon lights, she could see small specks of water. Such a light hail one could barely feel it. A car honked as if the driver’s only objection to what was happening in front of him was the delay in traffic.
“Ugh… Fuckers,” she muttered before forcing herself to roll back onto her front and rise to her knees.
Montego was unconscious and despite being short, he was a heavy-set man, so it wasn’t so easy to turn him on his back to slap on the cuffs, but it was even harder to pull him up and drag him out of the road. It was only as she pulled him, arms under his shoulders, that she felt the searing pain on her lower ribcage. On the left side. She thought he had missed his shots entirely with the SMG, but now it was clear one of the bullets had grazed her side. Her bodysuit was torn and a streak of red poured from a cut just where her last rib met her stomach. The adrenaline had stopped her from noticing it before but now, the searing pain was growing difficult to ignore while she hauled the heavy man away from the streets and towards the nearest alley. She lifted her left arm and shouted a voice command to the device attached to it. A cheap, small, compact car stirred into life and drove itself out of the alley.
The vehicle was disposable, something she had acquired just for the job, so she hadn’t bothered spending too much on it. But as she watched the rusty, crudely patched tin can slide from within the alley, she couldn’t help but wish she had gone a bit less cheap just to have the peace of mind that it wouldn’t break during the getaway. By now, the goons were likely recovering from the stun rounds, she reckoned, as she opened the trunk of the compact car. The car had no backseats, instead, the trunk connected directly to the back of the driver and passenger seats. For that reason, she had installed a strong net between them. She didn’t expect Montego to wake up before she could deliver him, or to be able to break out of the electronic cuffs until she entered the release pin, but in case he did, he still wouldn’t be able to reach out from the trunk and try to strangle her or derail the car. ‘Pays to be paranoid,’ she echoed, tossing the unconscious fugitive in the back, hissing as she pressed her hand over the wound and then slammed the trunk closed.
Before taking the driver’s seat, she pulled a small spray from the harness on her belt and applied it liberally over the wound. Her elbows were also bleeding from scraping on the asphalt but that seemed less urgent. The white foam that formed over the bleeding quickly congealed into a makeshift patch, and dispensed some local anaesthetics, numbing the pain considerably. She wasn’t expecting a chase but if push came to shove, at least the pain wouldn’t be too distracting. Then she heard the hum of the car’s electric engine turning on and felt it vibrating as she leaned on it. Her first instinct was to check her data bracer, assuming she had accidentally started it somehow, but all she saw was an error message saying the program she was using to run the car’s remote driving was disconnected.
“What the…”
And then the car simply began to drive away. Through the windows, she saw the silhouette of the back of someone’s head sitting in the driver’s seat. She fumbled with the bracer for a moment but, failing to restore the connection, she instead reached for her gun, the heavy calibre revolver she’d rather not use if she had a non-lethal option available. But the car was moving away from her and as she took aim, she realised that she had a higher chance of accidentally clipping Montego in the trunk than whoever was stealing her car. And then the driver’s window rolled down and she spotted the black and gold cybernetic hand at the end of a tattooed arm being pushed out of the window, giving her the finger as the cheap compact car rejoined traffic and drove away.
For a second, she tried to align her crosshairs with the finger, wondering if she could take it off, despite being a moving target. But as satisfying as it could’ve felt, she doubted it would accomplish much. And then, in the corner of her field of view, she spotted movement by the van. The driver and the goons were likely getting up and she wouldn’t be around to wait. In the distance, she could also swear some of the sirens were growing closer. Without her getaway car, she simply headed deeper down the alley, hopping over a dumpster and then using the opposite walls to propel herself further up until she could reach the end of the high wall on the back of the dead-end alley, and climb into the parking lot above. She could cross it and jump to the street on the other end, confident they likely wouldn’t be able to track her before she could reach the nearest subway station and effectively disappear. And soon, she reckoned, she ought to go down to the Loophole, find Synchro, and give him a piece of her mind. Or a black eye. Possibly both.
