Just A Simple Run - Prologue

Shadowrun:  Just A Simple Run – Prologue

“Thank goodness for Double-Coupon days!”  I said, pulling the heavy bags of groceries out of the trunk of my new (to me) GMC Commodore Sedan.  Yes, things were very much looking up to me.  Boyfriend, car, rent paid up for a few months, and now enough food to last me a bit, even with my bio-thingy boosting my appetite.

Of course, when things are going well when you work the Shadows, the criminal underworld of 2070, it only means that you're being set up for a fall.  In this case, it was physical as I felt a blow to the back of my head, then one to the front as I hit the trunk, sprawling to the ground as my bags went flying everywhere.

“So, this breeder thinks he can just park anywhere on our turf, huh?”  Came a guttural voice as I shook the blurriness from my eyes.  Breeder, oh frag, these guys were so stupid they couldn't even tell an elf from a human.

Looking up, I saw the reason why, they were members of the Hobnails gang, rivals to the Acidic Tide gang that operated this area.  The Hobnails were orks, one and all, and not the brightest of their metatype, either.  There were three of them, one smaller ork lazily holding a knife and two average sized-orks, one with a jack handle and the other with a length of chain.  Which meant I was between their sizes, thanks to the botched operation years ago that grafted copious amounts of muscle to my frame.

It was at this time that a strange thing happened, I flashed back quickly to my Uncle, a former Marine, sitting me on his knee, and telling me, “No true son of Texas ever gives up a fight without getting at least one blow in.”  Well, I may not have been in Texas for almost a decade, but I was a True Son of the Lone Star, and came up swinging.  No words, no gloating, just a good, solid crack on the jaw to the smaller one, the one that had been gloating.  He went down faster than I had, whining about his jaw and rolling around in my groceries as I whirled around and tried to keep an eye on the other two.

Unfortunately, I was wearing the wrong clothing for this kind of dust up.  Ballistic fabric-lined denims gave a bit of protection against bullets, but not so much against fists, clubs, or even knives.  The one on the left of me, with the chain, whipped it out, wrapping it around my leg pulling tight, as the one on the right came at me swinging, hitting me in the kidney, knocking me off balance, and thus back down.

The jack handle came ever so slowly towards my head, time slowing down.  I started to wonder when my life would flash before my eyes when suddenly chrome fingers appeared around the plassteel bar, and then time went back to normal and the bar was rapidly ripped away into the opposite direction.  So fast, in fact, that the original holder didn't even have time to let go as he was flung threw the air and landed, flat on his back on the open lids of a convenient dumpster.  He dropped into the trash and the lids fell shut behind him.

I was a big enough fellow, and the medium-sized Hobnail orks were larger than I, but Brad Harrington is the poster child for Big Angry Ork when his friends are endangered, wearing only his shirt, overalls, and hard hat he had come to my rescue.  And I was the Godfather to his daughter.  However, I was far from being out of this fight as well, and came up, grabbing the chain-wielding ork by the back of the head, and slammed his face into the brick wall with all the force I could muster.  A wet crack could be heard as I shattered his nose, and he slid down the wall leaving a red, wet smear.  For good measure, I lifted my left, synthleather engineer boot covered foot up, and slammed it into the back of his head.  He dropped to the side, exhaling a large amount of blood, teeth, and tusks.

The small one was just getting up, and had more bravado than brains.  He came at Brad, knife first, screaming out a battle cry that would have chilled the blood of most gangers.

Brad, however, had one serious mad on right now, and wouldn't have been intimidated by a tank.  He just reached out, and his massive chromed right paw enveloped the knife, and the hand that held it, stopping the punk's charge cold.  Then the flatmotors of his fingers and wrist began to whine as he squeezed.  And squeezed.  And continued to do so.

The battle cry turned into one of pain and suffering as the knife, and then the hand was crushed in the vice-like grip.  The punk dropped to his knees whimpering in pain and humiliation, as the massive form lifted him up by his shattered arm and whipped him up into the air, slamming him onto the top of the recently closed dumpster, the plastic lids bent inwards, and deposited the mouthy gang member with the glass jaw where he belonged.

“You OK, Nas?”  Brad asked, after a few heavy breaths to calm down, and reaching down to a drain pipe, washing the blood off his mechanized hand with the polluted water that rained down constantly from the Seattle skies.

“Yeah.  I'm fine.  Other than being out 200¥ of double-coupon food.  Looks like we'll have to tell the Acidic Tide folks that the Hobnails are trying to move into their turf.”  I said, rubbing my kidney that had taken the brunt of the blow through my closed denim jacket.  The bright side to all the muscles that had been grafted onto me was that I was a tough fellow, and only suffered a bad bruise from the blow.

“I'll take care of that.  They'll believe me more than you.  Something about not wanting to tell me that I'm lying.”  He said, chuckling and stretching from the workout.  The Acidic Tide gang was scared of Brad for some reason.  Something about how he lost his right arm in a bank robbery, and the SWAT team rescuing the bank robbers from him.

“Got time for a beer first?  I'm buying.”  I said, smiling.

“Hey, a fight, and free beer.  It's a damn fine day!”