Shadowrun: Spells & Chrome (31 page)

But Alvin had been a good dog. He couldn’t let that one go. Didn’t make much difference at this point. His foot was well into it. Only option now was to see it through to the end.

Still in his apartment, Kaine heard footsteps coming down the hall toward his place. He shrugged out of his trench coat leaving him in jeans, a black Troika Death t-shirt, and sensible brown work shoes. He had a good build for a man of sixty, thanks in no small part to the 70% of his body that had been replaced with chrome. Not the slick “looks like real skin!” crap Runners were getting these days. It was hardcore; polished steel, exposed pistons, buff it with Turtle Wax chrome. Not even the retro-rustic crap the gangers were getting into recently could compare.

Kaine flexed feeling the rotors in his joints whirr, and he called up a status report via the HUD in his cybereyes. Everything was either yellow or green, meaning it would work well enough for what he was about to do. It felt good to fire up the old systems again. Real good.

Kaine dove out the door, rolling into the hall and coming up next to the stairs. Two gangers, both armed with old model HKs, skittered to a stop as he appeared. Before they could activate their wires, Kaine had the Predator up and firing. The first ganger dropped before he could figure out what the hell was happening. The one behind him only managed to get a single shot off before the unexpected arrival of a chunk of hot lead in his skull interrupted his concentration.

Kaine ducked in time to avoid the ganger’s bullets, but they hit the banister beside him, peppering him with a hail of splinters. By the time he got to his feet, two more gangers had hit the hallway.

“What the hell?” the first one gasped. “This fucker is chromed.”

Kaine sprinted towards them.

Or he would have, if his right knee hadn’t gone redline. The whole mechanism locked up, his HUD squealing an alarm, and Kaine took two stumbling steps forward. Reaching out with his free hand, he grabbed one of the banister’s pillars just in time to keep from falling.

In a stroke of the same good luck that had kept him alive all those years back in Seattle, the boys at the door didn’t have guns. Of course, in a stroke of the same bad luck that had forced him into hiding in the first place, they were carrying something just as bad.

Monofilament swords.

He hesitated for half a second, wondering again just what the hell he was doing. He might as well put up a flag out front with his face on it. The smart thing to do would be to get out now, before things got any worse.

But damn it, Alvin had been a good dog.

As his system tried to reboot his left knee, Kaine brought up his pistol. A single shot took the first ganger down, but he knew the second would be on top of him before he could fire again. Instead, he pivoted to the side just as the ganger got close. As the ganger passed, the mono-molecular edge of the blade cut harmlessly through the air instead of slicing his arm off.

Kaine gave his wires another kick, even though he knew full well that’s probably what screwed up his knee, and brought the Predator around. The ganger recovered at the same moment, and he swung his blade at Kaine. Before Kaine could get the shot off the ganger’s blade sliced through the end of the Predator’s barrel.

“Shit,” Kaine growled, tossing the now worthless chunk of metal away.

The ganger, shocked by his own success, didn’t react quickly enough. It gave Kaine the time he needed. Willing the chrome in his left arm up to full power he ripped the pillar loose from the stairs with a crack. Pivoting on his locked knee, he brought it around and jammed the jagged end of it straight into the ganger’s face. The ganger dropped his blade and stumbled backward, hands clasped to his bleeding face. Kaine limped after him, and with a swift blow to the ganger’s neck dropped him to the floor, lifeless.

From outside, Kaine heard shouts and cheers.

He limped down the hall to the building entrance, his damn knee still not turning over. With tires squealing, the last two gangers peeled off down the street in their GAZ-P, crap tumbling out of the back as it skidded around the corner and disappeared. Kaine’s neighbors rushed to him, clapping him on the back, and shouting their thanks.

Kaine grimaced.

•
•
•

Everyone gathered in the empty apartment at 4D. Kaine had finally gotten his knee to reboot, but it was still running on the edge of red. He sat on an empty crate, listening to the crowd of people arguing over what to do.

“We don’t need to do anything,” the young man from 4C insisted. “Those guys won’t come back here.”

A number of people nodded, making noises of agreement.

“I don’t know,” an older woman from the apartment above Kaine’s replied. “I think the best thing we can do is move on. Find somewhere else.”

A few folks mumbled their assent, but others began arguing against this. Kaine could see the argument that had been going round and round for the last twenty minutes was building up steam again. He couldn’t take much more of it.

“She’s right,” he shouted, his hard, gravelly voice cutting through the noise. The crowd went silent.

“Didn’t you see the markings on those kids?” he asked. “They’re New Chamber Boys, the biggest, best-armed gang on the west side of the wall. You think those boys are just going to run home, and that’ll be that? Hell, no. They’re going to go back to whatever shithole they crawled out of, they’re going to get a whole bunch of their friends, a lot more guns, and they’re going to come back here to teach everyone a lesson.”

A low murmur ran through the crowd.

“This is all your fault,” a middle aged guy in a shirt and tie growled at Kaine.

“You’re right,” Kaine said. “This is my fault. I should have let it go, but I didn’t. For that, I’m sorry. The only smart thing to do is get out of here.”

“Sorry?”

The voice was soft, wavering. It cracked a bit at the end of the word, and Kaine knew it was Madam Hilda. The ancient ork woman, draped in the multi-colored crocheted shawl she always wore, shuffled forward. The people around her stepped out of the way, and as she passed, the gnarled stick she used for a cane rapped the floor with surprising strength.

“You’re sorry that you refused to be degraded by those beasts? You’re sorry that you did what more of us should do? Or perhaps you’re sorry that you didn’t kill them all, the only apology I’d be willing to accept, I might add?”

She limped right over to Kaine and glared at him.

“Look, lady. I hear you. I really do, but let’s be serious. If these folks stay here, they’re gonna get slaughtered.”

“No way,” the young man from 4C said. “I’m done being the whipping boy for every damn slot in this city. I’m gonna stay and fight. I’ve got a gun.”

“Same here,” rumbled the big truck driver from 5E. “I’m sick of bein’ some gang’s bitch. I ain’t movin’.”

More people spoke up, and a murmur of agreement ran through the crowd.

Kaine looked around and gave a hard laugh.

“You people are crazy. That’s not how the world works. It beats you up, and if you manage to live through it, you get up and start again. Keep your head down and your mouth shut, and you just might make it. I already apologized for screwing this up, and that’s all I’ve got to offer. Go have your little war if you want, but count me out.”

As Kaine left he heard someone say “We don’t need him” and the group began making plans for their defense.

Out in the hall, Kaine stopped. He heard the voice of the old, wheelchair-bound guy from 7D offering his shotgun. He heard the pretty welfare mom with five kids mention a year in the UCAS Army Reserve. He heard the skinny kid from the top floor offer to hack the building and help coordinate.

Kaine frowned. If they went through with it, those people were dead. They were brave, and their hearts were in the right place, but they weren’t killers. Not one of them knew, except maybe the Army Reserve lady, what it really meant to kill. Worse, he doubted many of them knew what it meant to watch the guy next to you die.

It’d be a bloodbath, the gang would tear them apart, and tomorrow he’d read a two-line story about it, six pages down in the
Detroit Free Press
police blotter.

Kaine leaned against the wall, taking some of the weight off his bad knee. He wondered if the old lady was right. He’d spent the last fifteen years “playing it safe,” and what had it got him? A long string of crappy squats in the worst neighborhoods the UCAS had to offer, a list of dead friends as long as his arm, and the pleasure of having his dog shot by a bunch of snot-nosed brats from the ass end of Detroit.

Kaine cursed himself for what he was about to do, but something sparked deep inside him that he hadn’t felt in a long time. As he stepped back through the door of 4D, everyone stopped talking.

“I’m not saying you won’t all die, but if we’re gonna do this, let’s at least get you some real weapons.”

•
•
•

A small group of them stood in the boiler room of the apartment building. Kaine reached behind the boiler and hauled out a heavy sledgehammer.

“A sledgehammer? That’s what we’re going to fight them with?” the annoying teenager from 2H asked.

Kaine glared at him and resisted smacking him upside the head.

“No, kid,” he growled.

With a swing that sent the others scrambling back out of the way, he brought the hammer around and smashed it into the cinder block wall. The blocks cracked, and with two more swings he smashed a good-sized hole. Shining a flashlight into the gap, the thin beam revealed a closet sized room filled wall-to-wall with rifles, pistols, sub-machine guns, boxes of ammo, and even a small crate of grenades.

“We’re gonna fight with those.”

•
•
•

He spent the next hour handing out weapons and showing folks how to use them. As he tore the plexiwrap from an Uzi III and handed it to a kid that couldn’t have been more than fifteen, the kid asked “They’re still in plastic. Are they brand new?”

“No, I sealed them so they’d be ready to fire without prep if I needed them.”

“How long have they been down here?” the kid asked.

“I don’t know. Ten, eleven years?” Kaine said, pulling the last of the plexiwrap from the next weapon.

“But you only moved in here two years ago,” the kid said.

“Fer cryin’ out loud, kid. what are you, trying out for the Knight Errant investigative squad?”

The kid looked at his feet and kicked at the dust.

“I’ll admit,” the young guy from 4C said, holding a Defiance T-250 shotgun like it would bite him if he grabbed it too hard. “I’m kind of curious about that too.”

Kaine sighed.

“Before I retired, it was useful in my line of work to have places where you could run if things went bad. When I was looking for a squat, this just seemed like a decent place to settle.”

The kid waved the Uzi toward the hole in the wall and said, “So you hid all this stuff there back in the 60’s? That’s cool. It’s like
Prime Runners
.”

Kaine glared at the kid, reached out, and pushed the barrel of the Uzi, which was currently pointing straight at him, down toward the ground.

“Yeah, and they’re all freakin’ loaded, so do me a favor and keep it pointed away from me.”

•
•
•

About an hour later they had gathered in the empty apartment again. The crowd was smaller this time. The one bit of sound advice Kaine’s neighbors
had
listened to was to send the families with young kids away. The only exception was Elise, the ex-army reservist. Her mother took the kids, and Elise stayed behind. Kaine wouldn’t say he wasn’t pleased. It would suck if the kids had to grow up without a mom, but he needed anyone who actually knew what they were doing with a gun here.

He turned to the trucker and a couple of his big buddies.

“Let’s go over it again. You three are on the front door. You gotta keep them from breaking through, and if they do you need to hold them until we can regroup on the main floor.”

The men nodded, readjusting their grips on their weapons. Kaine had given them the two mono-blades from the dead gangers and a shock baton from his own collection. They looked like they could fight, but if the gangers were carrying anything heavy they’d be little more than a speed bump. Of course they didn’t need to know that. He turned to the next group.

“You eight are going to take positions in the upper story windows. Four front. Four back. Even if it looks like we’re getting hit heavy from one side, I want two of you to hold to your side at all times. Let’s not get fooled by a feint. When firing, never take more than three shots from any position, then move to the next. It’ll make it hard for the gangers to know how many we’ve got and where to shoot.”

He turned to Elise.

“Elise. You’re my second. I want you on the roof where you can perform physical overwatch. I also want you to take the grenades. You’ll be our air support.”

He turned to the rest of the group.

“What Elise says is law. Like I told you up front, you need to do exactly as you’re told if this is going to work. You go running off on your own or playing this like some Neil the Ork Barbarian sim and we’re all dead. The only chance we have of making it through this alive is if we work together. Got it?”

Everyone nodded.

“What’s our status, Darius?”

The skinny kid from the top floor was swiping wild patterns through the air in front of him, his eyes twitching between AR windows only he could see.

“It’s Shadowpanther,” the kid corrected him, never taking his eyes off his virtual displays.

Kaine sighed. Darius had informed him that Shadowpanther was his Shadowrunner name. Ever since the trouble started he’d insisted that everyone use it. “Whatever, kid, Just give me a damn status report.”

“They’re three blocks off but moving slowly. Looks like they’re stopping to pick people up along the way.”

“How many?”

“Twenty-three, no, twenty-four now. Five cars. Almost everyone has guns.”

Kaine didn’t show any sign of it, but he was impressed. The kid’s old link had been decent, but not up to the sort of matrix work they needed. Kaine had hauled an old deck out of his cache. It had belonged to Spindle, a decker he’d run with in the 50’s. Last he’d heard Spindle went down with all the other unlucky bastards in the crash of ‘64. Kaine figured Spindle wouldn’t mind if the kid cannibalized the deck and its software.