Nyx Smith - Fade to Black

"We're taking you to the Garden."

"A garden of delight," Surikov said, smiling stupidly. "That's my wife."

"We're taking you home."

Surikov stared for several long moments, then rubbed a hand over his mouth and made an obvious effort to get hold of himself. "How… Tell me… how do we proceed?"

No fragging guano.

The runners had called him Cannibal.

With her head lowered and hair hanging around her face, Farrah watched the runner watching her, trying to look as if she were doing anything but paying him any attention.

He made her nervous.

According to what she'd overheard, the runners had brought this Cannibal in specifically to stay with her, to serve both as guard and jailer. The ork runner had referred to Cannibal as a "hired gun." He looked like that. Like the kind of person who would do whatever someone asked, as long as the pay was satisfactory. Red and black slash-tats made his face a vicious mask. His teeth were filed to points and colored jet-black. He wore some unusual dark metallic armor on his upper body, and a small grayish skull dangled from his left ear. He carried a compact rifle-possibly a submachine gun-a pair of pistols, a rather short-looking sword, and numerous knives.

Farrah wished the runners had trusted her enough to leave her by herself. She would rather they'd left her here in handcuffs and manacles than leave her unfettered with this scuzpunk for a guard.

Cannibal leaned against the wall opposite and watched her. Some unknown quanta of time slipped past. Cannibal pushed away from the wall and turned and walked slowly out of the warehouse lounge. His footsteps moved up the hall. The door to that space beyond, the loading area, squealed and then banged. Silence descended, but lingered only moments.

Too soon, the door squealed and banged again and Cannibal returned. He leaned against the wall again, facing her, cradb'ng that rifle in his arms. He grinned.

"Do I make you nervous?"

How to reply to the sociopathic personality? Farrah tried to decide. She could not expect him to observe any of the ordinary social conventions. Almost any response at all would only encourage him. An outright challenge, looks or words of defiance, might well incite him to violence. Better, it seemed, for her to do nothing, say nothing, make no response whatsoever. Better to appear completely cowed, in hopes of providing little or no provocation.,

"I could do you in a second," he said. "I could do you in a way we'd both enjoy. One time I did this biff in bed.

First we bopped, then I took her heart out. I could do you like that. One minute, you're in heaven. The next…"

Farrah suppressed the tremor that rose up through her insides. If he came near her… if left no choice but to try to save herself, she would have one chance and one chance only.

If would be do or die.

No alarms, no shouts…

So far so good.

Rico watched Surikov pull on the hi-visibility orange jumpsuit with built-in plastic shoes Intended to ID him as a noncombatant, then helped him get into a commando-style harness. Surikov moved slow and fumbled a lot, like he was still feeling whatever he'd been drinking, and like he'd drunk too much.

Rico hustled him out to the living room, the slag stumbling and tripping in the dark. Rico kept him upright and forced him ahead, then keyed his headset. "Time check."

Piper replied, "Time is oh-two forty-eight hours."

Maybe another minute went by. Rico kept his eyes moving, glancing toward Shank and the entry to the condo. He kept expecting to hear shouts, shots, detonations, a Fuchi security team blasting into the place and spraying the room with autofire. What he got instead was the mumping of a helo. As the sound drew near, a blackish blur shot through the hole in the exterior window panels, smashed across the top of the wetbar, shattering bottles and glasses, then thudded against a wall.

The blur was a stickihook, a macroplast weight with an adhesive skin and a loop connected to a rope. Shank rapidly freed the rope from the hook and brought it over. The rope had three ends, each with a mountaineer's heavy metal clasp. Rico snapped one clasp onto Surikov's harness and one onto his own. Shank took the third.

Surikov seemed to wake up then. He pointed toward the hole in the window panels, saying adamantly, "We are not going out through mat-"

Right.

Rico put a medjector to Surikov's right arm and fired.

The slag blinked and jerked his arm away, then got woozy-looking, like he might slump to the floor.

"Time check."

"Time is oh-two fifty hours."

Shank helped get Surikov over to the hole in the window panels. The rope connected to their harnesses grew taut.

One quick look and they went together through the hole.

The roof of the foundry gave easy access to a window on the warehouse's fourth floor. Claude Jaeger waited several moments, watching. The window, easily visible from the street below, slowly settled into a gummy, glutinous mass oozing over the window sill like mucus. The mage got that much right, at least Claude hopped through the empty frame, landed lightly on his feet and sank into a crouch. This floor of the warehouse smelled of resin and paint. Piles of antique furniture, some apparently made of actual wood, divided the space into long, narrow aisles. Claude found his way to the stairs. Two flights down, he paused before a metal fire door and listened.

Footsteps approached, softly echoing-the calm, measured footsteps of a sentry, one wholly unaware of any intrusions onto his turf. Claude drew back and flattened himself against the wall to the left of the doorway. In a moment, the door banged and swung inward, right past Claude's nose. The sentry followed through. In that instant, Claude saw the sentry's face from only a few steps away. The man's eyes gazed straight ahead, into the greater darkness of the stairwell.

Claude's fist shot forward and back, and the sentry collapsed. The satisfying feel of snapping bone and crunching cartilage lingered. Claude smiled, then dragged the sentry's body fully into the stairwell.

One down, one to go.

When the rest of the runners returned to this hideyhole, they would find only death. By then, Claude would be waiting in ambush.

He moved cautiously through the doorway and into a large space, the truck-loading bay located at the front of the building. He stood on a loading dock at the rear of that bay. The extra-large door to a freight elevator stood immediately to his left. Beyond that an ordinary-sized door. This led into a narrow hall, past an office, a lavatory, then into a smallish room outfitted like a ramshackle tongue.

The woman there, seated on a cushioned bench, looked like she belonged with the slitches in the holopics on the walls around her. enormous hair, jutting breasts, a face both sublime and whorish. As Claude entered, she lifted her head and drew back fearfully, eyes wide and round.

She gasped and blurted, "Who are you?"

Claude smiled and continued toward her. "Your friends sent me to get you out of here."

"What?" She looked at him as if astonished.

But when he reached for her, astonishment turned to animal fear. She jerked aside and began rising to her feet. Claude seized her elbow and flung her down onto the bench. Her head tilted back and her jaw dropped open and something like a blackish length of spaghetti or string shot out from under her tongue..Claude felt the tap against his chest and saw the string whip back into the woman's mouth, vanishing before he could really grasp what was happening.

Cybersnake. Narcoject delivery system. The burning spike of pain that suddenly pierced his chest suggested hypercyanide, but then he felt his heart hammering like it would burst and realized his eyes had gone out of focus.