Section 99 - Canine: New to the Neighborhood

Now, for a little writing practice.

Today was a day spent derusting my actual ability to write prose, specifically, prose in action scenes. To do that, I wrote a little short about an incident that happened the day Van moved to Port of St. Joseph. The jist: this man has no chill, for the cause of the common and downtrodden. Always has, always will, and no regrets. Enjoy!

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When each syllable of the phrase ‘we had a verbal agreement’ is accompanied by a hard heel-stomp to the torso, you can be assured the person screaming doesn’t value lawyers as much as he thinks he does. Especially not when that person tried to sell tried to sell your recreational pharmacy a bunch of bunko party-stims that were nothing but food colouring, saline solution and spent nanites, with the promise of more coming soon. Especially when that person turned up the next day and freaked out when told to get out, you’re a charlatan and your collective’s ID card was printed with crayon.

Jerry Renault had heard rumors there was a meth house in his particularly closed-in neighborhood in Port of St. Joseph. Now, he was pretty sure he was getting the shit kicked out of him by its owner-operators. Owner-operators who were well past the point of the concept ‘getting high off your own supply’ past the point of a moral or ethical issue, and more enjoying it as a perk of the business.

He had also just heard his rib snap, and his breathing suddenly felt as though he’d been huffing cornmeal and glass dust. He took that kind of pain as a bad sign.

“You know how fucking unprofessional it is to just back out on a deal like that is, man?” The man who printed ‘Lorne’ on his pathetic attempt at a collective ID screamed, as he loomed over him. “That is just fucking ridiculous!” He thrashed, and planted another few kicks into Jer’s legs and gut. The din echoed down the narrow alley, made for local pedestrians and trash drones to pick up the recycling from out the back of the combined commercial-residential blocks that lined Bidwell Street. The sound carried broad, but didn’t go far- St. Joe never really went to bed, and not only was Bidwell a busy artery, but a city inside a hollow asteroid doesn’t really have a typical daytime, which meant the noisy Night Market nearby never really closed as much as it slowed down.

Still, it didn’t stop some from noticing.

“I will call CivSec, I swear to God, I’ve got kids up here!” A terran voice called out from an apartment screen door.

“HOW MANY YOU GOT LADY? I’LL TAKE EM ALL ON AT ONCE!” Emil had just bumped, and was really starting to feel the come up. His everything felt amazing at that moment, especially the way his blood was lighting on fire.

“I hev gun, wan see gun?” an elderly rhidling shouted from his window, “Get lost or I ken show you!”

“Yeah, yeah, come on down, show it close up,” said Six-Eight Nate, spitting at him. “Old fuck.”

“You know I had heard this neighborhood had an asshole problem,” said a figure that rose out of the shadows with an easy grace, “but seriously? Not even my first day, I just got done moving in, and already? This?” He waved a hand back and forth. Three sets of eyes stared at him with stimulant-dosed incredulity; a half set of eyes stared that universal wordless statement of help me, despite the other being trapped behind swollen lids.

“You motherfuckers are being serious with me?”

He took a drag on a spliff, held for a while, and exhaled a cloud of smoke. He shook his head, rapid fire, boggling. Just boggling.

Six-Eight measured the man as being about a head shorter than he was, but as wide at the shoulder, stocky, broadly cored. The way he stood, even with one hand in a pants pocket, and the other hand to the spliff in his mouth, gave him a moment of pause.

“You.” Six-Eight Nate pointed at him, like he was aiming a laser dot. “Fuck off out of here. Mind your business.”

“Nah.” The man said. “This is my hood, now. And not in my hood, you don’t.”

“My man, you are five seconds away from joining him, you don’t back the fuck up and get the fuck out of here.”

“I’m about five minutes away from my pizza showing up, me eating it, and then going to bed,” the man said. “I have time for you three assholes, trust me. Especially if I don’t bother calling an ambulance for you.”

It had taken only a few seconds for Six-Eight and the man to share their words, but in it, Emil’s heart rate had spiked from a high-abnormal to something you’d expect out of some kind of atomic mutant. The man from the shadows could tell this, through the green glimmer in his eyes, the subtle, intermittent blink of it taking data readings going unnoticed by the three men and their three variously altered states. Glimmer. His rate of perspiration is skyrocketing, he’s going to dehydrate himself by standing still at this pace. Blink. He’s got hypertension, the blood vessels in his eyes are ready to go off like firecracker chains.

The man from the shadows could see his move coming before it came.

Emil lurched forward, ice-spiked crazylegs finding traction beneath him as he half-bellowed, half-keened an incoherent battlecry. From his side he took up a baseball bat and cocked it over his head like ragged equestrian polo player calling tally-ho on an open ball, wheeling crooked feet that drove him forward semi-serpentine, like a hubcap come loose from a speeding drunk’s car.

He leaned in and committed to his swing. The man blinked, the green glimmer flashed again.

Mute beneath the fog of a rising THC high, the passenger, the predator, the Voice in the man’s brain instead chose to growl with delighted anticipation. A split second reading of incoming data, captured with heavily augmented senses: 1,679 exploitable flaws in the incoming enemy’s form, collated, analyzed and soft target-locked by a combat co-processor riding piggyback on his brainstem, a little bionic box filled with killer instinct.

The Voice pulled on its leash, a halted lunge towards an unprotected buffet spread; the man held tight, and from the table, picked it out a treat.

The bat whistled through clean air, 11 o’clock to 5. The man weaved under, darting sideways with the kind of speed that’d leave vapor trails in high atmosphere conditions. His left elbow came down like a guillotine blade on Emil’s right arm, a wet, hollow crack issuing from within, and the bat dropped out of a hand that popped open, loose. Emil screamed, only to have his volume cut by a chopping right that painted the alley wall with the fluid contents of his mouth and a spinning back elbow that added teeth to the composition. Hobbling on the heel of one stiff leg, with a head partying too hard on crystal to be shut off in full by even that, Emil tried to wheel forward, regain his balance, fight through the pain in one amphetamine-soaked desperate attempt to cling to his bravado. The flat of a heavy-soled boot to the face, driven upwards and straight with such force that it lifted him off his feet, was the price he paid for not having the sense to go down. He landed like about 20 watermelons in a sleeping bag.

The man looked down at Emil’s twitching form. Lorne and Six-Eight looked on, deadly silent, a cold sweat forming that wasn’t a side effect of the ice. Six-Eight noticed it for the first time: Shimmer. Blink.

The data the man read from Emil’s utterly, totally, academically defeated body:

ADVIS: Target Biosigns Significantly Altered.

ASSMT: Significant impact trauma, head- possible grade IIIb concussion; significant skeletal damage, multiple instances.

CNCLS: Target Neutralized; less lethal administered.

The Voice in his head made a satisfied sound.

It was in that moment, even though he was comfortably rolling on his 17th hour of wide awake hustling, that Six-Eight Nate realized he was in a far more complex position than he thought. Then Lorne went surging past him, lunging with his knife and howling “YOU THINK YOU CAN FUCK WITH ME, YOU PIECE OF SHIT?” and he felt a distinct sort of discomfort. It was the mental pain of chemically-induced and raging self confidence getting t-boned by a reality he wasn’t high enough to deny, the worst cognitive dissonance he’d ever known.

He tried to shout, “Lorne, he’s got bionics!” He could barely get ‘Lorne’ out before the green shimmer happened again.

The man took a final drag on his spliff, and when it was red hot, he flicked it into Lorne’s eye, a spiral smoke trail tracking its arc into an explosion of hot ash and burning herb against a seared cornea. Lorne squealed at a glass-shattering register, dropped his knife and clawed at his face, rearing backwards and straight up. In one motion, the man from the shadows sank to a knee and buried a right straight into his balls, letting him drop doubled-over as the fight drained out of him, like air from a balloon.

The man picked up Emil’s bat, and gave it a few idle twirls as he walked toward Six-Eight. Shimmer. Blink.

“Yeah, some fuckin tough guy, right?” said Six-Eight Nate, squaring his shoulders, raising a shell stance. “Take every advantage you can get, right?”

“Nah,” the man said, breaking the bat across his knee, abruptly. “Just thinking about what sort of a shitheel brings a bat to a three on one beating.” He threw the halves against the opposing walls of the alley, his stride unbroken.

Six-Eight Nate clenched his fists, tensed his muscles. Lorne was his hookup for the shit that made it so that he could max his gains past the mortal boundaries that bind lesser lifters, and in his mind, Six-Eight had become the Zeus of the One Ton Club’s Olympus. More than just providing him with primo workout fuel, Lorne been solid enough to cut him in on business, and introduce him to some extremely real fast money. He didn’t care that he had trouble remembering which day it was, or sometimes could forget where he was in the galaxy, because everyone has their off days, and at his best, he wasn’t just a great man, he was ten great men at the same time. He didn’t care that sometimes plans didn’t make sense, or that he had a hard time not wanting to kill Lorne or Emil sometimes, because fuck that, he had his. Finally, he had his. And he wasn’t giving it up for some bullshit good samaritan that didn’t understand his place was standing aside and pretending not to see.

He didn’t know what this man was, or who he thought he was. All Nate knew was, he’d put him in his place.

“Come on you fucking pus--” he said.

Shimmer. Blink. One step, and the man was standing in his range. Six-Eight was frozen. He was fast. He was so damn fast. He was standing in his range, staring at him, and Nate didn’t know what to do.

“Sup?” the man from the man from the shadows said.

The jab-straight combination that Six-Eight peeled loose with would have anesthetized, then euthanized a horse. Instead it hit the fading afterimages of the man with that green shimmer in his eyes, who slipped them like they playing in slow motion. The man slid a boot to the outside of Nate’s stance and pivoted, blackjacking him across the mouth with a backhand slap that made Nate bite loose the tip of his tongue. Six-Eight tried to wheel with the force and swing through with something, anything for a counterattack. The man ducked the wild swing and sunk a left into his liver, then grabbed him by the straps of his muscleshirt and pulled him into a nose-flattening headbutt that turned his grill to a red mess.

From a bloody heap rolled against the building, Jerry could barely believe his eye. Port of St. Joseph is a place where you can see a fight pretty much every hour of any day of the week, and folks throwing hands on a party night on Bidwill Street was nothing new. This wasn’t anything he’d seen before, not a brawl between idiots, not the spectacle of a drunk getting bodied by someone they shouldn’t have picked on, and sure as shit not someone getting pulped in a back alley by a gang of assholes. What he was seeing, was punches landing faster than he could see them being thrown. What he was seeing, was someone bigger, heavier and rangier, getting worked over by a smaller man who might as well had only been using two fingers and a thumb. What he was seeing was a terran being dismantled with the precision of a machine, a living autopsy performed with blunt force.

And the guy doing the dismantling, was the guy in his corner.

Saint Joe Provides, thought Jerry Renault through his mild concussion and wheezing, agonized breathing.

Nate’s back hit the alley wall, feeling every landed shot with the impact. He lurched forward and fired a wounded right hand, and the man from the shadows blew it away with a parry that nearly broke his elbow, before burying his own right in Nate’s breastbone and pounding his lungs flat.

“Yeah, folks like to pick three on one fights, huh?” the man from the shadows said, gutpunching Nate, then hooking his leg with his arm and uppercutting it out from underneath him, dropping him on his tailbone, hard, “Like to threaten the bystanders like they’re next? Kids and old men, motherfucker?” The man drove the point of his kneecap into Nate’s sinuses, made his head ricochet off the wall he was slumped against. “You’d be the experts on tough guys, huh?” He paintbrushed Nate with the toe of his boot for good measure.

From out of his periphery, Lorne howled, and the Voice in the man’s head made an alert growl. In his own mind, in the nanosecond it took for him to snap back at his own bionics, he said, “I could hear that without you, y’know?” He caught Lorne who was lunging hands-up-fingers-out, Nosferatu-style. He hooked his arm with a G-lock, spinning him around and blasting him with back elbow that made him stand stiff, bowlegged. Without ceremony, he punted Lorne in the crotch from behind, going for some deep yardage.

ASSMT: Significant neurological shock- potential damage to primary sexual organ(s); target has fainted.

CNCLS: Target Conditionally Neutralized; less-lethal administered.

Again, the Voice made a pleased little sound.

The man from the shadows turned back to the wreckage of Six-Eight Nate, an individual coming to terms with how hard it is to move with a broken clavicle, multiple fractured ribs and a bruised tailbone. He reached for Nate’s head, and Nate grabbed back- one, two, three short little hammerstroke punches to the temple dissuaded him, and drove him to the edge of dreamland. The man yanking on his greasy hair, jerking his head side-to-side kept him awake.

“Like I said. I live here now, and not in my hood, you understand? Never in my hood. I see you or these dipshits around, I will track you down, all of you regardless of which one I saw, and I’ll finish breaking you apart. And I will do it slow-style. You understand me?”

Six-Eight’s eyes were wounded contempt. Then they glazed, and the man slapped him awake.

“You don’t get to pass out yet, idiot! Do you understand me?”

Six-Eight nodded, weakly, curtly, trying to growl and spit as he did it.

“Good, tell the others when you wake up,” the man said, planting one last right to his temple. He didn’t need his combat co-processor to tell him the guy was out.

Slowly, with painful difficulty, Jerry forced himself up out of his fetal position, leaning back against the alley wall. He blinked and a stinging mixture of blood and tears blinded him. Through it, he saw the form of a man that was shaped like a beast striding towards him, broad-shouldered, heavy handed, a wolfman a half-week off from a full moon.

Then he wiped the tear away, and the image resolved, of a man that was built strong, with strangely-scarred arms, wearing torn jeans and a plain black t-shirt that read, in white text, “TELL YOUR DOG I SAID HI”. His knuckles were bloody, but completely untorn and unbruised. He searched around for his spliff, picked it off the ground and relit it, grumbling about “waste of good weed. Fucker.”

He crouched low to Jerry. “You smoke?”

“I run a head shop,” Jer didn’t speak, as much as he made his swollen face form words.

“Take it,” he said, putting it into Jer’s swollen lips. “You need it.”

He inhaled, and nodded his thanks as the smoke blunted the pain.

“Who are you?” Jer said.

“I’m, uh, Van Parker,” the man said, head on a swivel, pulling his phone to call for a medic. “I just moved in down the block.”

“No, man,” Jer said again, wincing as something in his side popped. “I mean, who are you?”

“I’m just a guy, man.” said Van. “Seriously, I’m just, trying to get through a time, trying to set up shop, doing what I do.”

“What do you do?”

“I solve other people’s problems, mostly.” Van said, matter of fact and resigned.

As the stranger began giving the details to the emergency operator, Jerry nodded to himself. He knew now what he was looking at. He could see it plain as day.

Do no harm, but take no shit. Shaped like a man.

“Welcome to the neighborhood, Van Parker,” Jerry said to him.

Splattered with other people’s blood, Van smiled. “Thanks. It’s nice to be welcome somewhere.”