CyRun - Chapter 10

Don Medici found was nervous. He was sweating profusely and pacing around the living room of his house, one hand on his pocket and the other one twitching and going back and forth between covering his mouth and rubbing his damp forehead.

“Has anyone found the fucking car yet?” he shouted.

Around him, his men were in chaos and disarray, running around shouting and barking orders and curse words almost to the point of incoherence. Computers beeped and phones rang as everybody was trying to figure out something, anything, about who the man that had identified himself as ‘Gabe’ was, or where the car he took had ended up.

“Our men are still looking for it,” one of his men shouted. Medici couldn’t see him in what seemed to be a sea of people, and Medici was right in the middle of it.

It was a mess. He was growing more and more desperate by the second.

Medici took two steps forward, as if looking for answers where there were none. “What about this… ‘Gabe’, what do we know?”

“Still nothing, boss,” a man. “His fingerprints, his face… all come back with blank results. It is as if the guy never existed. Our contacts know nothing about him either.”

“God dammit,” Medici shouted. “Can’t one of you fucks give me one single fucking answer?”

“Wait,” a man wearing a handset and a visor over his head plugged a computer in front of him shouted. The whole room went quiet, so silent that one could hear a rat piss on the floor. “I think I have something.” He pushed his visor up and blinked, trying to get his sight back, and found himself surrounded by all of Medici’s men, Medici right beside him.

“What is it?” Medici asked.

The man swallowed hard before putting his visor again, beginning to regret him having to deliver the news and having forgotten to check what he was going relay to begin with. “W-well, boss, Fernando and his crew have been trying to zero-in the signal of the tracking device of the car we gave this ‘Gabe’, and according to their last communication, they’ve been finally able to pin point its exact location.”

There was a sign of relief in Medici’s face and his frown began to vanish anda  smile began to form on his mouth. “Excellent. If we find the tracker, we find the car. Can you start an uplink or something so we can see what they do?”

“An uplink is already set, boss. I need to patch the audio. Just give me a moment.” The man began to wave his hands in front of the monitor, his tactile gloves acting as commands to the computer in front of him, except much faster and precise than one could archive with a mouse or a keyboard, his monitor actually having trouble keeping up with him.

Five seconds later, static filled up his visor, as did the monitor in front of him, before changing to a blue screen with the words ‘Audio Only’ in bright red letters right in the middle.

“That should do it,” he said, turning his head down as if looking at the computer. He moved his hand and said. “Mike, repeat what you said.”

“Are all them listening? Even the boss?” A nervous voice coming out of speakers set around Mancini’s floor asked. It was a speaker system usually set for alarms or important communications.

“Yes,” the man with the visor said. “Even the boss.”

“Oh ok,” the person on the other side cleared his throat. “Well, we’ve pin-pointed were the car should be, at least according to our insta-comp.”

There was a very loud sigh of collective relief heard around the living room. Medici himself smiled for once after what felt like hours. “We should be very close to it by now, but something’s off.”

Medici’s smile vanished. “What is it?” asked the man with the visor.

“We’re at the very bottom of the city. The guys are scared something’s gonna fall on their heads and turn them into spaghetti sauce. I’m more terrified of any of those cannibal fucks popping out from the sewers. We’ve seen some of those manholes move, and I don’t like it.”

“That’s odd,” one of the men behind Medici said. “Did he crashed? I bet he crashed.”

“Hundred credits say he crashed,” another of his Mafiosi said. 

“Hundred say he found the tracker and stole the car,” said another.

Medici glanced over to the man that spoke last, his chin jutted in anger. The other man avoided eye contact and looked down and away.

“Careful with the Crazies,” said the man on the other side of the line, the sound of heavy footsteps in the background. “It gets ugly down here, you’re not going back up.”

Someone close to Mike said something, although he was too far away from him from the guys in Medici’s living room to make out. “No, don’t be stupid,” said Mike. “Men scream before they hit the ground, we’ll know if one is falling, get your shit together.”

“How close are you to the objective?” the man with the visor asked.

“Only a handful of steps away. Odd, we should’ve seen the car or some cracks by now. Stupid fog, can’t see a damned thing in this place,” Mike said. “I think this insta-comp is being weird because of this shit.”

The man with the visor scratched his neck. He was getting desperate. He didn’t have to look at his boss to know he was starting to lose his cool. “Anything yet?”

“Not yet bu-- wait, I see something. We’ve got something.” Mike’s speech became replaced by the sound of several people running. “We see cracks, there are definitely cracks on the floor. We--“

The sound of footsteps ended and after that, silence.

“What? You got what? Mike, don’t go mute on me now, don’t leave us hanging. The fuck is going on?” 

Five seconds later, Mike finally broke the radio silence with a single word.

“Shit.”

A collective moan and some curses was heard around the whole floor.

“It’s the tracker,” Mike said between mild gasps of air. “That guy, whoever he was, found the tracker and threw it away. We got less than nothing. We got jack shit.”

“Dammit,” Don Medici shouted as he slammed the closest thing to his hands, which unfortunately happened to be the man with the visor’s shoulders. His device almost went flying off his head. “This is a fucking joke. What else did this guy did that we don’t fucking know?”

“Boss,” shouted Neri, running from the kitchen. The human half of his face looked as if he had just seen a ghost, a remote control on his cybernetic hand.  “You have to see this.”

“Not now, Neri. Can’t you see we’re busy with trying to get our heads out of our collective asses?”

“I know,” he said, stopping in front of Medici. “That’s why you have to see this.”

Without giving his boss a chance to talk back, Neri turned to the CRTs on the wall and pressed a button. All of them changed at the same time to a local news broadcast, a picture of a building on a wide shot as a camera slowly panned around it.

Everyone recognized the building immediately. It was the same building Medici had sent Gabe to.

“Thank you John,” a female voice was heard saying. Emergency vehicles had established a perimeter around the building.. “We’re here on the Fifth Police Pound in the third sub-level of the corner of Koldyron and Hannon, were a gruesome massacre unfolded just minutes ago. Seven on-duty police officers were brutally murdered by an unknown assailant. All corporate media has been banned from the area until investigators end their research, but according to some of the early reports we’ve managed to obtain, there was only one survivor with a concussion who has been taken into custody for questioning.”

The newsfeed on the television was the cut into vertical halves, a news reporter wearing a cheap suit and too much hair gel appeared on the left half. “So Joanne, do the investigators have any possible motives or suspects yet?”

“No John. According to the reports, all surveillance equipment in the building was destroyed in the firefight and nothing seems to be missing except one single solitary truck.”

Medici’s jaw would’ve hit the floor if it hadn’t been attached to his face. Several of his men stood in awe as to what they were hearing, some of them taking their hands to their hair in disbelief. 

“Now, while the report states that it all points out to a single man being responsible of the massacre, the Police Department scoffed at the hypothesis when reached for comments and said that it must’ve been a planned gang strike of at least several dozen and asked us to remind the people that the policemen assigned to the Pound were either rookies or people close to retirement and that nothing would’ve happened if normal policemen had been assigned.”

“Thanks Joanne.” The right half of the display faded away, leaving only the newscaster on full display. “And now we go to the Chief of—“

Neri turned it off. Medici stood there, with wide open eyes. 

It was one of his men who broke the silence. “You have to be fucking shitting me.”

Medici turned to face Neri. “It seems your new guy did his job to a tee, boss.” The old man still couldn’t talk, and took his hand to his forehead as to wipe sweat away that wasn’t there. “I don’t know how he did it, let alone not survive, but he did. What do we do?”

Before he could answer, a voice came out the speakers on the lobby. “Boss, we… erm… have a problem.”

Knowing Medici couldn’t talk, it was Neri who pressed a nearby communicator button. “This is Neri. What it is?”

“Well, erm… it’s that man. Gabe. He’s back, asking for clearance to land… and he has the truck with him.”

That phrase alone seemed to get the old man out of his confusion. “Make him land right now,” he said as he began to run towards the hanger, all of his men following behind him, including Neri.

By the time they had reached the hangar the truck was parked inside, the metallic gates closing behind it.

“You, stay here,” Medici told his crew as he went down to meet with Gabe, who was already jumping out of the truck, carrying the same bag that Medici had given him. Neri followed him anyway.

As always, Gabe’s face was impossible to read and devoid of any expression whatsoever, his jaw clenched and eyes half closed almost as if bored. He closed the door of the truck next to him and didn’t take a step forward, seeing that Medici was already on his way towards him.

Medici signaled the same guy who had opened the door –who was standing next to the controllers next to the gates- to check the truck. He did. “Holy shit, it’s all here.”

“You sure?” asked Neri.

“I-I remember how the truck looked before it went out,” the man said as he climbed into the back truck and pulled one of the small boxes inside. He jumped back down, opened it and took a pair of visors with two small green tubes connected to them with wires. “It’s the stuff, and it hasn’t been touched. Holy shit, it’s all here.”

The old man and his friend could only stare at Gabe in disbelief, especially considering what he had managed to pull off, something not even his best men could, while it seemed that he hadn’t even broke a sweat.

Before they could speak, the man in front of them pulled his card reader from his jacket and typed some numbers. “Pay.”

“Y-yeah.” The old man had been certain he wasn’t going to need to pay the outlandish sum he had promised. He had never expected Gabe to return. Yet he did. “S-sure, give me the reader.”

The only reason his hands weren’t shaking was because he felt a weird combination of nervousness and respect. There was something about Gabe that was utterly terrifying and nerve racking, but also to really admire. He swiped a card and gave the reader back. “It’s done.”

The man with the leather jacket checked the reader, nodded, put it back in his pocket, and began to make his way out the building, bag still hanging from his shoulder and hands in his jacket pockets.

“Wait,” asked Neri. “Where the hell are you going?”

“Home,” Gabe muttered without looking back. Medici’s men didn’t even try to stop him, some of them still trying to register what had just happened. He opened the doors leading to the lobby and closed them behind him.

After several minutes of silence, giving up in trying to find out an explanation to who or what that man was, Neri scratched the back of his head, his attention back at the truck. “Well… what do you want me to do with this, boss?”

Medici rubbed the crown of his forehead and closed his eyes. He tapped it a couple of times before finally opening his eyes again and looked at the truck. “Call Fat Larry. Tell him we have his merchandize and we’re charging double for the extra problems.” He pulled a cigar from the front pocket of his suit, put it on his mouth, and lit it, slowly regaining his cool. “And send someone to tail that guy. We need to find out something, anything about him. Might as well be where he lives.”

CyRun - Chapter 9

Gabe held the rifle firmly in his hands as he crept down the grated staircase, which lead down directly to the storage area. He didn’t know how many people were down there, but he could hear plenty of talking and people walking. 

His back still to the wall, he took a quick peek. No one saw him, but he saw more than enough. There were several shipping containers right in front of the stairs. He counted seven guards, all armed as the one outside. Four playing poker in a table right in the middle of the place, one standing near a small room on the corner, and the last two standing near the exit, which was closed with a metallic security door. None of them knew he was there, and were about their normal duties. If they knew something was wrong, they weren’t showing it.

They were all wearing street clothes, and he could tell none were wearing any bullet-proof vests of any kind. He didn’t know if they were arrogant, stupid, or careless.

Gabe closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He had to make a plan, after all.

He opened his eyes. He knew what he had to do.

Noticing that none of the guards had noticed him, he took a grenade out of his bag, and went down two steps until he had the whole place in wide-open view. He nodded to himself, took the pin off, and threw the grenade at the table.

By the time they saw it, it was too late. The grenade exploded dead center in the table. The four men were blown away by the explosion. Limbs, sparks, and blood flew into the air.

The men began shouting and running. Gabe didn’t lose any time and fired his rifle at the two guards near the security door. The had barely managed to raise their guns. One was hit in the chest four times and ended with his back against the wall. The second one was hit in both the chest and the legs, falling to the ground. Both died on the spot.

Two more men came out of the small room in the corner, pistols out and ready. The three remaining guards located Gabe and fired at him. Bullets ricocheted behind Gabe. He gritted his teeth and jumped from the stairs to the container in front of him, firing his rifle. He missed all shots.

He dived and rolled, avoiding the guard's bullets. He reached for safety as he fell between the two containers. 

Sparks and bullets flew next to him as he checked his rifle. The bullet chamber had exploded. He grunted, shoved it inside the bag, and pulled the shotgun out as fast as possible. Hearing someone running in his direction, he popped out from cover and fired.

One of the guards was hit right on the chest, sending him flying backwards. Another guard aimed at Gabe and fired. He missed. Gabe didn’t. Half of the guard’s face was blown off as sparks from his aug exploded.

He tried to shoot the third one but the shotgun jammed. He cursed his luck as he hid behind between the containers again. The other man get running towards him, shooting wildly. Gabe put his gun back into the bag and pulled the pistol. 

He ran to the other side of the container and around it. The other man was about to reach it, and didn’t know he had changed positions. He jumped out from his hiding spot and opened fire in mid-air. The guard turned and fired once, but missed. Gabe hit him. 

The guard was hit several times but refused to go down, his shirt stained red. Gabe stood up and kept firing as he walked towards him with haste. It took ten shots from his pistol to finally bring the guard down. 

Gabe didn’t stop walking. He wasn’t one to take unnecessary risks. He reached the room in the corner. He heard voices inside, desperately trying to call for backup. He took a grenade out from his bag and threw it inside. It bounced on the ball and landed deep inside the room. Someone inside the room screamed. Gabe took a step back. The grenade exploded, and took the room with it. 

Without skipping a beat, Gabe made his way back to the security door and kicked a switch next to it. As the door rose, he ran to the truck Medici had pointed out. He checked the cargo. It was the right truck. He tried the door. It was unlocked. He jumped inside and began to work on the wires below the dashboard. Two seconds and a simple bridge later, the truck started.

He floored it and, in the blink of an eye, was out and merging into a horizontal traffic line. Anyone else would’ve exhaled, relaxed, and thought it was over, but he knew better. He reached below the dashboard a second time with one hand, the other one in the wheel. It took him longer to find it compared to the one in Medici’s car. They had cross-wired it.

Gabe grunted. He checked the traffic in front and behind him before pulling it off. Like clockwork, the truck’s engine shut down and began to dive, fast. He took his hand off the wheel and began to work on the wires he had unplugged. A sweat drop formed on the crown of his forehead, but he ignored it. He tried two combinations and bridges, but they didn’t work. The alarm sounds of the tuck’s insta-comp became louder. The truck was now completely vertical and in a nosedive against the concrete of the slums, if he was lucky. He gritted his teeth as he tried a third combination. The truck’s engine coughed like an old man before coming back on. Gabe wrestled with the controls to straighten the truck. It relented on the very last second before it crashed against the incoming traffic on a horizontal lane. He spun the truck around and stopped, hovering between lanes.

Not wanting to call the attention of any dregger, he merged into the lane in haste before lowering his window and throwing the tracking device away. He then shifted his attention to the insta-comp. Being in traffic already, and carrying a spare, he pulled it off, unplugged it, and threw it away before raising the window. He pulled his spare insta-comp from the bag and plugged it with one hand. It turned on automatically, and a soft-reset later, it was all set and ready to go. 

He checked the systems to see if they hadn’t added anything overly-creative to the truck’s cargo, running a software that came pre-installed to detect any nearby signals. He focused his attention in the container the truck was pulling. The data the insta-comp displayed was unreadable to the untrained eye, made out of what seemed to be random numbers and letters, but he could read it just fine. He smiled. They hadn’t bothered to do anything with the container.  

He allowed himself a brief moment of respite. He checked his mirrors several times to make sure he wasn’t being followed, and he wasn’t. All that was left was to enjoy the ride back to Medici’s building and the sound the almost perpetual rain made when it fell on the windshield. For the first time in several months, he accessed an insta-comp not to do some hacking or improvised programming, but to do something rather mundane.

To select a music station.

CyRun - Chapter 8

Gabe landed on roof a of a construction two buildings away from his target. He got out, bag hanging from his shoulder, and closed the door. The car took off by itself and went away.

He grinned. He wasn’t stupid. Leaving a nicked car full of fingerprints and strands of hair wasn’t exactly the smartest thing to do. So, he had programmed it to lift on, merge into a vertical line for a couple of minutes before shutting down and crashing straight into one of the many abandoned towers of the city. 

Of course, every car had systems, pieces of software, lines of ghost coding, and even its own shields to stop that from happening. But hacking them out of the main system once you had access to it was pretty easy, especially for him.

He turned around, ran, and jumped from one building to the other. There wasn’t much distance between them.

He kept running and jumped again, this time aiming at a water pipe at the side of the window old man Medici had mentioned. He knew they were a desperate, almost dying outfit, but they had money somehow. They were terrible at their jobs, rats pretending to be men, but he hoped that the intel was at least better than the old piece of junks they claimed to be ‘guns’ they had given to him.

As he grabbed the plastic tube and put his feet on the wall to hold himself in place, he heard some footsteps down below. He looked down. There was a man walking around, armed with a simple straight-action Koshki rifle and some grenades. He did not recognized the outfit, but he was definitely no dregger. They were too proud not to wear their police grab if they were doing such a thing.

If he had noticed him, it didn’t show. The man kept walking under his own stop until he turned the corner and disappeared view. 

Gabe focused on the window. It was right next to him. He took a peak and saw a straight, wide hallway with blue walls and fake blue-ish marble floors. There were a handful of what seemed to be offices, four or five, with windows and doors leading to the corridor.

His window was in such an angle that there wasn’t anything that stopped anyone on those offices to spot him almost immediately the second they looked at the hallway. There was nowhere to hide.

He inhaled slowly and tried to focus on the sounds around him. The rain hadn’t stopped, and it was a fruitless attempt.

He shook his head. He took another peek in second attempt to see if there was someone in those offices. He managed to at least see that the two farthest offices were empty.

He took a deep breath. He was going to have to gamble it. He didn’t like that. 

He opened the window very slowly, so not to make a sound that might alert anyone around. He exhaled, took another deep breath, and jumped as fast as humanly possible. He rolled on the floor and put his back against the wall below the nearest office window, all in the blink of an eye.

If anyone had seen him, he was wide open to get killed on the spot, or warn every single dregger in miles to make a small game to who could cut his head first. But other than a voice behind him making idle chatter, he didn’t see a thing. He sighed in relief, no one had noticed him.

He wasn’t out of the red yet. He was still in a hallway with no place to hide. He couldn’t afford to waste any time.

He shuffled to his right, careful to keep his head and his brown hair below the window frame of the room behind him. He knew someone was there, and didn’t know if he was looking out or not. He stopped next to the door, reached for the handle, and pulled it careful to make the least sound possible.

There was someone on the other side, he knew that. But so far, the mumbles of chatter weren’t stopping and weren’t reacting to the door being pushed open very slowly by Gabe. He took a quick glance inside.

There was a man inside, he was right. His back was to the window, he was in what seemed to be a call. He was behind a messy cheap plastic desk, and was surrounded by several impromptu shelves full of data disks, papers, and devices with tags on them.

“Yeah man, can you believe this? Fucking bullshit,” the man said. “They force us to use this old piece of shit phones to make all calls, and the doors don’t even have card lockers. It’s insane.”

Gabe grinned. He was right about that.

“It’s a miracle I at least have a computer in this fucking dump. When I joined the force, I didn’t think my post was going to be this crap, I’ll tell you that.”

The man was trapped inside his own personal bubble of whining or complaining. Gabe thought he could’ve even sneezed and the man would’ve said ‘gesundheit’ and continue whining to whoever he was talking to on the phone.

However, he had a job to do. He closed the door, carefully, and went to the other side. He took a glance over the second office’s window and saw it was empty. Good, he thought before putting his bag to his right, opening it up, and pulling a pistol out. He put the safety on, just in case.

He stood up and knocked on the door. “Hold on, someone’s knocking,” the man said before setting the phone on the desk and walking towards the door. He opened it wide. “Hello?” After seeing there was nobody there, “Is this another fucking joke, Carl, because if it is, I swear –“

Gabe smashed the pistol's butt against the man's forehead.  He collapsed and hit the ground with a loud thud, unconscious.  Blood dribbled from his head.

Gabe shook his head as he dragged the man’s body back inside the room, came back for the bag, and closed the door behind him.

First thing he did was tie the man down with the rope from his bag. First the legs, then the hand, then the arms, and finally some rope around his mouth so he couldn’t speak, tightening it up to the point the man’s back was stuck on a u-shape.

“Hey, what’s going on?” he heard someone say behind him with a weird mechanical tone. “Hello? I heard a noise. Bro, are you there?”

It was the phone. Gabe stood up, grabbed it, tear it in half, and throw it on a recycle processor on the wall. No need to leave any means to get outside help to the man, or anyone inside the building for that matter.

He walked back to the desk, pushed the chair aside, grabbed the one-piece PC –monitor and CPU in one- and the keyboard and took them with him to below the desk. He wanted to see what the system had, and by the cables alone he could tell there was an info grid in the building, and that meant there had to be a mainframe of some sort in the building. However, it made no sense whatsoever to do so while giving away his position.

Luckily for him, the man had accessed the mainframe before he had arrived and had left it open. That was good, since that meant that was one less barrier he would have to hack and force himself into.

Locating the right software in the operating system wasn’t hard, especially since that computer –as most computers set in cheap offices such as the one he was back then- ran the cheap and practical Mysis OS. It didn’t take him even one minute to access the codeline prompt, the basis of any system, and before he even knew it, with a few lines of extra codes and some editing of the pre-existing ones, he was in the main grid. The defenses they had set up were a joke, he didn’t even had to edit a single line to get past them. He activated some basic shadow software and edited it on the spot to stop anyone, even grid admins, to look at his moves. Just in case anyone was keeping an eye on the grid itself.

He could see it all, control it all, and most important, shut everything off. The surveillance system, the alarms, their records, everything. He made a copy of everything –and some bank records- and sent it to himself via an automated mail system that ran through several dozen proxies and three shadow hi-code firewalls. Nothing was tracking it down.

Then, with just the press of two keys, all of that data was gone from the grid. Their databanks were empty. 

To make sure they didn’t spot anything, he set all the security cameras to stop recording and to feed a constant five minute loop to the monitors themselves. No one would see him coming, and no one would be ever able to tell he was there to begin with. 

He smiled. Sometimes, it was just too easy.

He glanced over the desk. The hallway was empty. He nodded to himself and butted the PC monitor with the grip of his pistol as he stood up and put it back on its place along the keyboard. After patting away all the cheap plastiglass from his clothes, he reached inside the computer and ripped the HDD off the pcb and put it in his pocket, and for the finishing touch, he reached for the pcb itself and crushed it in half with both hands.

There was no way they were rescuing that computer, ever. 

He dusted the plastiglass dust from his hand, picked the bag from the floor, and walked out of the office, careful not to step on the man he had hit in the head who still showed no signs of being any closer to waking up.

He took one quick glance trough the office’s window to see if anyone had appeared on the hallway yet. No one had. He sighed in relief and opened his bag. He put the pistol back and got the rifle out, knowing that he didn’t have the gear to put the weapons were they should be, near him hands at all times.

He went outside and crept along the corridor and up to the farthest door on the left, the only door that had to lead down and to the storage area, his back against the wall, moving silently, guns held ready.

CyRun - Chapter 7

Gabe grunted after changing lanes. He knew he was being tracked, and he didn’t like it.

He knew it had to a be a standalone device, and knew that they couldn’t be dumb enough to put it under the seat like most beginners did, so he put his right hand behind the dashboard and began looking for it on the wiring. He hoped they were lazy and hadn’t cross-wired it with anything else, else he would’ve have to park to remove it, and that didn’t sit with him well. He didn’t like to waste time. 

It didn’t take him long to find it. He didn’t felt any wiring leading directly to it, so he yanked it away. He looked at it and smirked. They weren’t stupid, just lazy.

It felt hot to the touch, so he knew the cube shaped device was indeed transmitting a signal. He rolled his window down and threw the device away. 

With that out of the way, he turned his attention to the cheap insta-comp hastily attached on the center console. The odds of it having a secondary tracer software running were high, since they were cheap to install –especially with pirated software- and easy to track, so with one hand on the wheel, he began typing on the micro keyboard below the dot matrix display, looking for any code or software running on the backburner, maybe hidden as a shadow executable. He searched for several minutes and couldn’t find it.

He grunted, unsatisfied. His eyes began to dart from the insta-comp to whatever was in front of him, careful to go on the right side of the horizontal line and hit any cars. He accessed the main micro-server and unblocked the tracking software for common accessing. He hit the program, and indeed, it was off. He found out just in the time to break before he hit a truck at a high speed, which would’ve sent him ricocheting up in the air.

He rolled his eyes. They were lazier than he thought.

He drove for fifteen more minutes until he found a nice, dark place between two buildings in a hover platform to park. It was obvious enough to make people who saw him not suspect a thing, and dark enough to make most people miss him entirely anyway, which was also helped by the apparent proverbial rain of the city. First thing he did was pull the insta-comp out of its socket on the car’s center console and yanked it off, careful not to cut the important wires. He was pretty certain he was going to need it later.

Then he got off the car and checked the trunk. He was welcomed by the sight and the fresh smell of laundered guns. Several pistols, shotguns, rifles, and even two SMGs, all with three of four of their respective clips, along with an empty duffle bag and some rope.

He checked the duffle bag. It was empty. He rolled his eyes and focused on the guns. So far the Medici family had proven to be not very good at their job, so he checked the weapons they had provided, just in case. He believed there were very good chances not all of their had been taken care of properly.

He was right. All of the gun’s sights were off and at least two loading chambers were busted. The rifles feared a little better, with only one crooked barrel and two had botched nozzles. The shotguns were specially modified to have triple shot, turning it into a cannon, but ironically only one of the mods was assembled properly yet all of the shotguns were dirty, rusted, and didn’t work, one even having a malfunctioning trigger. None of the SMGs worked, having broken loading chambers.

He rolled his eyes as he took a toolbox from the trunk and began disassembling the guns. There wasn’t much he could do, not without the proper equipment, but he could make a good gun or two if he cannibalized enough working parts of all the others.

After ten minutes of constant assembly, disassembly, and testing of each component, he managed to rescue one rifle, one shotgun, and a pistol. The SMGs were impossible to salvage.

He checked the clips. Those were impossible to screw up, so he would’ve impressed if they had actually found a way to ruin those. In the end, he had switched the triple mod from the shotgun –since he didn’t trust the loose fit- to the rifle, although it took some improvisation and change some cosmetics with the butt of a screwdriver. The pistol was the easier to salvage, only taking straight parts replacements.

Luckily, they weren’t. The ammunition worked and the clips fit, which was what mattered in the end. 

He tucked his weapons, insta-comp, clips, and rope into the bag and closed the trunk with the scraps still inside before setting the car on reverse and letting it fall and crashing in a tail dive from the platform to the city and below. He didn’t trust it.

With bag in hand, he walked down the dark hallway until he reached the parking lot of both buildings. He looked around and couldn’t see a security camera. One of the guards was making his rounds on the other side of the lot while the other was taking a nap on his chair, so he shrugged and walked to the farthest car.

It was an old Jurta Karu model. Small yet somehow bulkier than the usual car, with a huge compressor with exposed tubes and wires on top, and neon lights on the side. He knew the type. Popular with car modders with no money and wannabe gangsters looking for a cheap getaway car. You could find spares parts practically everywhere, even more so in the dark underbelly of the city.

There was a reason for that. It was the easiest car to nick in history. 

Gabe looked around twice and saw no one around paying any attention to him. He liked it that way, more so in that moment than usual. He put his back on the main door and discretely shoved the tip of the screwdriver on the wedge were the lock was. The forced it inside with a small his on top of the butt of the screwdriver before moving it left, right, down, and then left again.

He heard a too familiar click. He turned around, and the door opened wide.

The car stank of wet cheap carpeting and cigarette smoke. He ignored the stench, sat down, threw the bag on the passenger seat, closed the door to shield himself from the relentless rain. He grunted when he saw a leak on the roof.

Gabe looked at the dashboard. Whoever owned it didn’t seem to know that all Jurta Karus had a huge design flaw on its wiring, and he could tell because the owner had taken no precaution against said flaw. He shook his head as he pulled the hazard warning light switch, popped back in again upside down, stepped on the accelerator and the break at the same time, and just like that, the car turned itself on without a key.

Not wanting to waste any more time, he took off, merged into a horizontal traffic line, and vanished from view. He knew that by the time the guards saw something was amiss, it was going to be too late.

RAW - Chapter 2: Snacks and Explosions

“Have a good day!” I said.

“Don’t you mean half day?” asked Lester, looking down and adjusting his horrible flannel shirt.

“I’m going to be honest here, Lester. No matter how much you keep fiddling with that thing, it still looks like a rotten topping resting on leftover pizza that has been left out on the sun for two weeks.”

Lester’s shoulders slumped more than usual, which is saying something. “I know.”

“Come on man,” I said with a smile as I wrapped my arm around his neck. “Don’t let your nonexistent sense of style deprive you of the wonders and exciting activities you can do whatever sun we have left. You could watch a film, or count tiles, or watch grass grow!”

“Or I could shove red hot nails in my eyes.”

I tapped my chin. “But where are we going to get so much disinfectant and canned tuna to pull that off without liquefying our brains in the process?”

“I don’t know,” Lester said, surprisingly lowering his head even more than what I considered was the standard human limit. “Maybe I could just always jump in front of a moving bus and call it a day.”

Red alert -- literally. I put my hands on his shoulders. “I will drive you home, and I will take no for an answer.”

He raised an eyebrow. “What?”

“Never mind that.” I had to practically shove the guy to my car. I opened the door with my leg and threw him inside. He landed on his back. Sure it looked funny and nothing like a kidnapping to those curious people staring from the sidewalk. “I’m only making sure he doesn’t do anything stupid,” I shouted as I sat on the driver’s seat and lowered the window. “He said he wanted to marathon ‘Mad About You’.”

All of the onlookers nodded in unison and understanding and carried on.

Before Lester had a chance to sit properly, I was already sinking my foot on the accelerator. I was ready to feel the motor screaming, the smell the burning rubber. It was then that I remembered my car was a Volkswagen and barely accelerated to beging with.

“Could you at least turn on the AC?” Lester said as he wrestled with his seat in a fruitless effort to make himself comfortable.

“Sorry mate, no AC. No radio. Heck, the backseat is made of cardboard and wet newspapers that I put on a blender. Pray heavens this car actually has a motor… either that or the power of the imagination is bigger than I had anticipated.

“You haven’t checked?”

I laughed. “Don’t be silly, I’m terrified of machinery I don’t know. One of those mysterious phobias that people can’t understand, like Hollywood actor’s phobias to criticism… or real life.”

After ten minutes, I felt a rumble in my stomach. I wasn’t sure if it was caused by all the potholes on the road that were slowly killing my fading suspension, or if my poor dietary habits were beginning to get to me, but after I saw a dim light in the distance, something became obvious.

“Hey man, I’m hungry,” I said. “Let’s stop on that ‘Plain’ corner store.”

“It looks that dull?”

“No, it’s really just called ‘Plain’.”

We parked and got out, Lester falling on his face first. Classic Lester.

“I wonder if I can buy a life? Or hopes and dreams?” He asked.

“Don’t think so mate, they discontinued that soda flavor in the eighties after it made people too happy and gave some kids glow-in-the-dark barf.” I walked over the snack stand and pulled a bag of chips. “Oh hey, this time they have one percent real cheese and ninety nine percent high fructose corn syrup. Nice.”

We walked over the counter with some junk food and paid the lady who smelled of wet pancakes and cigarette butts. We exited the place, making sure not to step over the rat that was waiting for its turn to come in, and walked back to the car, my hand already full of fake cheese and crumbs. “You know, you can now at least taste a thing besides stale gluten and sugar in these.”

As we were about to get inside, I saw a red shine, a sparkle if you wish, reflect on my windshield, as if a something had went kaput high above. “Now what was that?” I think Lester saw it too, since he looked up to the sky at the same time I did. “Is it me or did Mars just explode?”

“Good riddance, that was planet was nearly as devoid of life as me,” Lester said with that typical magical depressive charm of his.

“Don’t say that mate, I’m sure—“ Then I saw another sparkle, except larger.

I rubbed my chin and raised an eyebrow, “Well I’ll be…”

“I didn’t know we had two Mars,” Lester said

“We don’t.” I saw another red flash. It was getting bigger, and closer.

Red alert -- literally. “Get down,” I shouted, shoving Lester. 

The store window exploded in a million tiny pieces. Something, someone, or a very realistic special effect crashed into the store and send millions of now-free stuff into the air, scattering nachos and all kinds of artery-clogging snack cakes all over the place.