Dirty Work: Volume 1

A Leader Of Men - 6

We wandered through the shopping centre that Spyder had pointed out to us, cold and clinical. The throngs swarmed around us, and their heat made us nervous. We knew that we might not feel the warmth of others so closely again, and so innocently. I kept my eyes down as much as possible; I could see targets above all their heads. The gun in the holster by my waist, hidden by my coat, seemed to twitch with excitement. I felt the knot in my stomach tighten.

'What if they're not in?' I asked Markro casually as we left by the back exit that ducked under the walkway to one of the main roads of the highways to Slatezone. It was into the dark from here on out.

We neglected the regular paths and outside routes, favouring to head through the backstreets towards where Spyder had said they would be. The grime began to crawl onto my shoes as we walked. I tossed a coin to a man in a ragged coat with a long, scraggly beard. He saluted me. I thought of turning and throwing my whole wallet to him, why the hell not? Markro pulled me along before I had the chance.

Around a corner we saw the first evidence of our destination. A rose was spray painted in red onto a wall, graffiti to some but territory marking to us. We didn't use such methods, of course. We were a strip-club that happened to dabble in a few things on the side, of course. Such crude techniques were below us.

'Weapons at the ready,' Markro whispered to me. I nodded, flicking the safety of my 58. I felt it shudder, as if preparing to orgasm, which was what I supposed firing a gun was, in a way. The gun wanted to orgasm, and before now I had been having sex with it. I thought that before long I might end up making love to it. That particular analogy filled me with dread, and the cold sweat threatened to break out once again.

'Calm yourself, Xayne,' Markro said to me, sensing my nervousness. 'No time for an existential crisis right now. You can have one later when you're locked up in a safe, a jail cell, or dead.'

'Speaking of which,' I replied, 'why didn't the boss just get the police to go after Flore? Surely it's not beneath him to use them, who are of course expendable.'

'And the Red Rose guys will turn around and present the police with a dozen proofs of underhanded bargains and dodgy dealings that Dirty Work is involved in, all very well and good. No, this is straight up gang warfare, minus the nametag attached to our good selves.'

To this, I couldn't argue.

We stopped in the shadows, looking at two large warehouses. The shutters were down, nobody patrolled the outside. The place looked as if it had been dead a long time, as many places in Celestria were. Large Corporations had seemingly decided that manufacturing on other planets and outposts and then outsourcing to The Empire was easier than manufacturing on Celestria. One should never keep the manufacturing with the paperwork, for it was too much of a mess for one place to handle the cleaning duty of both if it went down.

'I do believe it's time to kick ass,' Markro said, his voice set.

I swallowed hard. 'To war it is,' I replied.

He clapped me on the back and we walked to the main warehouse. He crouched down and hooked his thick, strong fingers under the shutters. With a swift tug he grunted, and the shutters rose.

'Hello, honey,' he yelled into the echoing darkness inside. 'I'm home.'