Mechanical Maniacs: Life After Life

By Hadrian (Hardman) Howell

CHAPTER 3: Bounty

I kept an eye on the warehouse numbers as I drove the noisy truck down the lane. When I got to Warehouse 10, I stopped. I left the VULCAN in the passenger seat of the truck and hopped out, walking around to the back.

The back of the truck was covered with a tarp, which I ripped off with little ceremony. Inside was a bunch of crates, filled with bottles. I sighed. Times were changing, and I was a wiser man now. I wasn't about to fall for the whiskey-bottles-filled-with-heroine nonsense AGAIN. Probably best to just dump the truck AND the VULCAN in the ocean before I left the scene.

So much for a simple bounty job.

I put the tarp back over the bottles and climbed back in. I sighed again as I revved up the engine and started driving again. It only took a few minutes to get to Warehouse 3, where I killed the engine again, threw the VULCAN back onto my shoulders and got out.

I had the barest hints of a plan in my head. With luck, whatever I was hunting would be either asleep or powered down at this time of... 3:00 am. It would probably be somewhere in the carvernous, crate-filled maze of Warehouse 2. Find it, take it out before it has a chance to make my life miserable.

Hey, back off. I'm not the long-distance planning kind of guy. I'd thought that much would have been obvious by now.

Each warehouse has a main, loading door which is a massive gate that allows access to the bulk of the interior, and a series of access doors along the sides for things like smaller boxes, inventory, and storming the building to destroy its contents. Each of these doors was, as it might be expected, locked, but that was hardly a problem for me.

I mean, yeah, I can't just walk through walls anymore, but I was carrying a heavy plasma weapon and those doors were still, comparatively, flimsy.

The interior of the warehouse was cramped. Filled with boxes, crates, and a lot of other big stuff. There were also two more levels of grate-like walkways over my head. After a moments consideration, I decided to take the high ground. Might as well put the tripod to good use.

I stumbled around for a while until I found some stair up to the second level, affording me a better view of the maze below me. From here, I could see a large open space in the endless stacks, hidden away beyond the twisting, confusing passages that was, most likely, where my target was making their home.

I crept along the walkway, trying hard not to make a sound. This proved difficult with 40 pounds of weapon around my shoulders, but as I got closer to the open area, I heard another noise. It sounded like someone was talking. I slowed my pace even more, craning my neck to see into the space from the closest walkway I could get to.

There was a TV, showing the Channel 4 News, running off an extension cord that also seemed to be powering a small refridgerator that disappeared into the stacks of crates beyond. There was also a fairly lived in, but thankfully empty couch, and several cans litering the floor.

Whatever was living here wasn't here right now, but that was subject to change at any time. I looked for a spot with good coverage of the makeshift apartment while still somewhat out of sight, and set up the VULCAN on its tripod. Free of the weapon's wieght, and straining to hear the noise of footsteps over the TV, I leapt over the side of the walkway and onto a stack of boxes I felt would be safe enough to climb down.

I lost my grip about halfway down and fell the last five feet onto the concrete floor. I grimaced at the pain in my side and the pounding sound in my head. Stupid, frail old man. Probably cracked a rib.

I got to my feet and took firmer stock of my surroundings. The cans were beer cans, which wasn't surprising, and niether were the empty bottles of booze stacked in one corner, but the lingering smell in the air... cigarette smoke. Empty cartons of cigarettes littered the ground, and I picked one up out of passing interest.

Hemmingways.

Oh, you HAVE to be kidding me.

I literally leapt back to the boxes and scrambled back up to the walkway, bolting back to the VULCAN and crouching low. I was going to need every scrap of the firepower it provided against this guy.

This was... a unique opportunity. A chance to repay a few more debts than plain monetary ones. A chance to make up for some sins I allowed to be committed a long time ago by not putting this guy down sooner.

Perhapes I'm being overly melodramatic. Let me explain.

Everyone's done things they're not proud of. Or at least, that they shouldn't be proud of. This guy, my target, was in the latter category. Blowing up a school notwithstanding, he'd been responsible for a lot of other rather horrible acts in already difficult times, including the infamous bridge incident. And then, of course, he managed to be responsible for my own unemployment as well, when the last time we met, I flew off the handle and almost killed him. The other Maniacs weren't very forgiving of me by that point anyway, and attacking a member of an allied team was just way too far past the line.

In my defense, though, I was drunk, and he'd been talking bad about my dead friend, Cassandra.

Diveman never DID know when to shut the hell up.

I heard him coming before I saw him. Stumbling through the rows of boxes, seemingly only finding his makeshift hideout by accident. He looked like he was in bad shape. Too many half-assed repairs since Cossack had been murdered, probably. He slumped onto the couch after grabbing a half-empty bottle out of his fridge, coughed a few times, and lit up a crumpled cigarette.

I bit my lower lip, vast portions of my mind screaming at me to take him down NOW, kill him and be done with it. But, for all his bad habits, Diveman wasn't stupid. Well, at least, not THAT stupid. I watched his frame settle and relax as he stared at the TV. He seemed to be expecting to see something.

I took a slow, deep breath, a dull roar in my side reminding me of my earlier blunder. I checked and rechecked the aim of the VULCAN, keeping a careful eye on Diveman. I knew there was no way to make this quick. Diveman's body was big, burly, built for punishment. It would take some consistent pounding, even with a heavy plasma weapon, to bring him down.

Unless I applied a maximum amount of pressure to a weak spot.

I pulled my Baretta out of my jacket, quietly unloaded the weapon, and cast my glance around for a poorly balanced stack of boxes. By a stroke of luck, across the expanse of space from my position were a batch of small boxes that were supporting a lot of bigger ones.

Cocking my arm back and trying to figure out how hard to throw, I took one more deep breath before overhanding the now empty pistol at the smaller boxes. It hit with a solid sound and destabilized the stack just enough for the whole thing to tumble over. The noise, coupled with Diveman's own surprised shout, was enough to cover the warm-up whine of the spinning barrels before the angry bark of the VULCAN as it spat bright yellow plasma down into the area.

"AH! DAMMIT!" Diveman shouted, catching several shots in the legs as he tried to vault over the couch. I never let up on the trigger, blowing the funiture away, piece by piece, with superheated air.

Not fast enough though. A pair of missiles streaked into view, up and over the boxes. Wild shots, both of them, but the second one slammed into the walkway only a few yards away, shaking the grating beneath my feet. I head the support cables that held the walkway in place snap, and hit the release button on the tripod.

As the floor under my feet gave away and more missiles streaked up into the air, I threw on the shoulder strap and took a chance, leaping back onto the wall-like stack of boxes beneath me. I got lucky again, and landed on a solid crate, swinging the VULCAN around and opening up with it again. From this angle, I peppered Diveman's back and shoulder, drawing more shouts of anger, and his full attention.

"Aw, I'm gonna kill you, ya bastard!" He shouted, his chest opening up to unleash a slew of new missiles. I swore out loud and leapt backward, hitting another wall of boxes hard as the ones I'd been standing on disappeared into a blossoming cloud of fire. I hit the concrete floor hard, knocking the wind out of myself.

"Where'd ya go?" Diveman shouted, now obviously on the move from the way his voice was wavering. "No fair hittin' an' runnin'!"

Jackass. That's MY accent... I pulled the trigger, unleashing the VULCAN's fury on the boxes, which disintegrated under the assault, spraying more plasma into Diveman's place. The TV blew out at some point, and I sprayed plasma in a wide arc, hoping to catch him with either that or flaming pieces of cardboard or wood.

I heard another shout, this one more agonized.

"Gah! That fuckin' HURTS. Wha'd I ever do ta YOU?" Not in the mood to really answer him, I fired another storm of yellow death through the building smoke.

Not even close, it turned out. Diveman came crashing through a different section of the wall, his battered form towering over me. I swung around and fired again, aiming for his knees, and managed to blow out the right one. He sank to the ground with an anguished scream, landing on his hands and his remaining knee, and shot me a look that could've killed someone else.

"FUCK! I'm gettin' killed by a goddamn old FART!"

"Yeah, you keep tellin' yerself that, Diveboy," I growled, taking a step forward and pouring more firepower into his right shoulder, the shock of the blows driving him back and to the ground. He tried to open his chest again, to fire another slavo of missiles, but I shot him in the other shoulder to distract him.

"ARGH!"

"Hurts, don't it?" I snarled.

Diveman squinted at me. "Who th' fuck ARE you?"

"Somebody who's gettin' paid ta kill ya, apparently."

He opened his mouth to speak again, and was rewarded with a spray of plasma to the face. His scream was lost in the high-pitched whine of his vocal processors as they, and a few other systems in his head and neck, went critical and blew, creating a spectacular fireworks effect as his failsafes died and his Dive Missiles cooked off all at once.

I had about negative two seconds to recognize this as a bad thing.

The force of Diveman's death explosion threw me backwards, and I mean FAR. I went through a few more stacks of boxes and landed, for the most part, in a huge wooden crate. Adrenaline still pounding through my system, I picked myself up. The Vulcan was ruined, having absorbed most of the explosion. The barrels splayed in different directions, and the whole thing sparked in one of those 'could blow at any minue' ways. I chucked it and took stock of myself.

I was not in much better shape.

I staggered out of the warehouse, which was now burning merrily, along with its contents, and pulled another long, pointy piece of wood out of my back. Nothing had penetrated too deep, but the sheer volume of puncture wounds and bruising meant I was losing more blood than I would have liked to.

No matter. The job was done. I'd have time on the subway to reflect on the implications of what I'd just done, but right now I needed to get away from the burning building before fatigue and blood loss claimed me and I passed out.

Stupid old man. Lucky, but damn stupid.

I heard the firetruck sirens approach as I pulled away in the army surplus truck. I'd dump it in the ocean as planned, if only because nobody decent would miss a truckload of heroine, and then I'd get back to the Rezatium and get some answers. And maybe a nap.

God, listen to me. A nap. I'm gettin' old.