Steven Campbell - Hard Luck Hank - Basketful of Crap

A defiant, loud, raucous celebration of life while it lasted.

I came up to it in my metal shoes with my autocannon and silly hat and felt immediately out of place.

Everyone was joyous, yelling to strangers, hugging, making out, and running from club to club as if they were on fire and the next establishment was an extinguisher retailer.

Even the streets themselves looked different because every inch of every building was covered in graffiti. People doing their best to leave a permanent mark when they knew very well how fleeting this life could be.

Colored street lamps provided unique illumination. Not disco or flashing, just colored lights. I think this was the only place on Belvaille that didn’t rely on the lighting from the latticework.

Looking at all these people running around I couldn’t tell if they were drunk or drugged or just youthful—maybe some combination. When I was a doorman, if I saw people acting like this I wouldn’t have let them inside. But that was a casino and you were expected to behave a certain way.

“Hey!” A woman screamed at me and grabbed hold of my arm. She said something else and I couldn’t hear her.

“What?”

She was talking to me excitedly and I couldn’t hear any of it. The Strip was just too loud. Or I was too deaf.

She held my arm and had her head against my shoulder as we walked down the street together. I couldn’t tell if I knew her. Stupid lights. Everyone looks the same under a blue filter.

She was a medium height woman with blonde hair and dressed in black synth strips that crisscrossed her body strategically. She had a black synth miniskirt on and had to take very fast baby steps to get around.

I definitely saw people doing drugs and drinking. It was unusual to me to see that in an open street. It felt almost like Deadsouth except people were happy. Maybe The Strip was what Deadsouth started out as.

We were walking languidly, just people-watching. The woman attached to me was bumping around and unsteady. Because of her weaving I kept checking to make sure I didn’t step on her feet. These metal clogs and my weight on those little open-toed shoes were going to be painful.

“Where are we going?” she asked me finally.

“I don’t know. I was just walking.”

She laughed at that hysterically, covering her face with both hands. She reached up to put her arm around me and pulled back, confused.

“What’s that?”

“That’s my autocannon.” I turned to show her.

“What’s it do?” she asked.

“It’s a gun. It shoots ten miles.”

“It’s really big. Is it true what they say about big guns?” She poked her finger at me seductively, and I felt I should be flirting, but those skills atrophied decades ago.

“It has a lot of recoil,” I confessed.

She giggled and continued walking. I took a few steps and caught up.

“We should go into a club,” I said.

“I want a Rodye,” she said.

I kicked that word around in my head and had never heard it before. I knew she was younger than me, a lot younger. And I knew this wasn’t my scene. She could be talking about a drug, a drink, a candy, a cybernetic modification. I had no idea. I didn’t say anything.

“Let’s go to your place,” she said suddenly.

“Okay.”

On the train ride back I got a better view of her without colored lights. She was pretty, had good bone structure and great skin. It’s funny, at my age, when people look good, you have to really be taking care of yourself. But at her age, you have to really go out of your way to be ugly.

I can vaguely remember myself at that age, and I was good-looking. I don’t mean that to show off, either. I was good-looking because I was young. Because I hadn’t been stressed-out yet. Hadn’t been shot in the face a hundred times. Hadn’t lived off the dubious nutritional value of space station food.

I was about middle-aged now. Not that there was a set mark for that. I could live for another hundred years or two hundred years. Or because of my mutation, die tomorrow. Who knew?

I wasn’t excited about taking this woman home—whose name I had forgotten to ask and now it was too late. Maybe a hundred years ago I would have been excited. Now it was just another thing to stress out about.

I had gone to The Strip to try and purge my thoughts from all the things I had to do, but I’m not one of the people that can do that easily. Maybe that’s why I was a good gang negotiator.

I was always on the job.

Sitting here on the train with a cute blonde in my lap I was still piecing together how I would attack the Ulzaker-Ses club.

There was going to be people in it no matter what time I attacked.

Unless there weren’t!

“Hey,” I said.

“What?” The blonde brightened, seeing as I had been a big lump the whole time.

“Nothing. I just thought of a way…” and I looked at her. “Thought what a sexy woman you were. Are.”

“Aww,” she said. And put her head back on my shoulder.

At my stop we began walking to my home. I’m not sure if she had been under the influence and my sober attitude had sobered her, she was naturally coming down, or she found me dull. But in any case she was a lot less bubbly.

So about my front steps. How was I going to do this?

“Want to play a game?” I asked her.

“What kind?” she said, perking up.

“I want to see if I can carry you all the way in. But you have to close your eyes.”

“Don’t hurt yourself,” she warned, as if she weighed even half as much as my autocannon. “How far away do you live?”

“Close. Come on, climb up.”

I picked her up easily in my arms. In fact, she was a nice counterbalance to my gun.

She laughed joyfully as I jiggled her around.

“Cover your eyes,” I said.

She did so, dutifully. Not asking how it related to being carried.

The Gandrine were still there.

“Keep those eyes closed,” I taunted.

“I am!”

I walked past my two gargoyles and then approached Toby and Byo’lene. I turned to the side so I could see where I was walking better. I didn’t want to step on the corpses. If I dropped the woman at that point, things might become very bad when she opened her eyes.

Suddenly I heard a chok from in front of me.

I looked down and the woman I was carrying had a circular wound in her chest. Right over her heart.

Her hands, which had been pressed tight against her eyes, dropped flaccidly down. Her mouth which had been fixed in a smile, relaxed. Her eyes went glassy.

I placed her on the ground and put my hand above her eye, blocking the latticework light and removed it, to see if her pupils reacted. They did not. Turning her, I saw an exit wound clear through her back.

Staying hunched down, I got behind the Gandrine for cover.

“Come on, I didn’t even know her!” I yelled to the street.

I looked back at the growing pile of corpses at my front door. It was clear they weren’t trying to shoot me. But why shoot strangers?

It’s like someone really wanted me to become antisocial.

“Everything looks good?” I asked Cad the following night.

“Yeah, it’s quiet. No one on the whole block,” he said.

My big brainstorm was to bribe Garm’s people. Of course I had to give 25K to Garm and sprinkle about half that among her techs. Then they cut off the electrical grid to the Ulzaker-Ses club and the surrounding block.

For the first few hours I knew they would be in a panic, trying to get the juice restored. Get their customers to stay put. At the third hour, they would chalk it up to Belvaille incompetence and not bother.

We would attack on hour four of the brown-out.