Dirty Work: Volume 2

Story Two - The New Groove - 6

I woke up the next morning to find the bunk next to me lying empty, the bed made again, alone in the room for the first time. My sleep had been peaceful, having drifted off only a few minutes after the boss had left me, and I felt well rested and ready to leave. There were still a few aches and stabs of heat every now and then, but on the whole I felt good and ready to kick some more ass. I looked up to the speaker and called for someone to release the restraints. The nurse that had first seen to me came to my side and looked me over with his usual, detached expression.

'You want to leave?' he asked me.

'At the very least I'd like to be able to move,' I said, 'if that's at all possible.'

He pulled out a Halo-Core and spent a moment in silence looking through menus and screens with deliberate slowness. 'Well,' he said, flicking through information, the blue reflecting off his face and turning his eyes inky-black, 'You've been fine all according to reports, no trouble caused through our darkest hours. Seems like you're fine again, or should be.'

'So you can get these things off me,' I said, rattling the cuffs impatiently.

'Not too fast,' he said, putting the Core away lethargically, 'you can't leave just yet.'

'I don't care about leaving,' I said, getting more irritated with the man with each eternal second that ticked by, 'I just want these things off me. No doubt I've still got injuries to recover from.'

'You have,' the nurse said, extracting a key from his pocket and moving to the side of the bed to unlock my wrist. 'I would suggest another 48 hours in here, just to be sure that you have recovered from your injuries enough to be safe to leave.'

I snorted in amusement as my left wrist suddenly tasted freedom. I flexed it around and moved my arm in the air to get the blood flowing again. 'I want to be gone in 24 hours, if that's possible.'

'Possible,' the nurse said hesitantly, 'yes. But not advisable.'

'Perfect,' I said as my other wrist's cuff snapped off. 'I'll give you your bed back at this time tomorrow.'

'You might be back in it in a week if you're not careful,' the nurse said as he unlocked my legs. 'May I suggest some free, friendly advice to your young self?'

I blinked the surprise away at being given advice from an upright asshole. 'Sure.'

The nurse smiled to himself. 'If you don't want to keep lining my pockets with gold, just go into something mundane like advertising.'

He then informed me that food would be on its way shortly, before leaving me to my solitude once again.

The emptiness of the room should have been disquieting, but as I slowly swung my legs out of bed, I felt like a songbird being released from a cage. The pins and needles that rushed into my legs didn't stop me from staggering across the floor, slowly walking towards the window at the end of the room.

I was three floors up overlooking a quiet section of one of the higher regions, possibly Region 11 or 12. A few kars went by underneath me, but for the most part there was very little activity below me. Everything seemed to have ground to a halt, though the world seemed to tingle with the electricity of an approaching storm. I could feel it in every bone in my body, a kind of intuition that I had also felt when standing atop the church. Carea Euphero, and the gang she had ended up involved with, was out there somewhere.

I found myself with a longing I hadn't experienced before; the longing to go back into the club. It wasn't possible, of course, aside from going to where the refurbishment was beginning to take place, but I felt like I hadn't been home in a long while. I had my apartment, of course, which was probably full of food going mouldy in the cupboards by now, but that wasn't really my home. I spent as little time there as I could. No, my home was Dirty Work, where everything came at you in chemical form and your heartbeat went in time to the thumping of the music.

That was what I would focus on, after all this was done and I wasn't trying to stop someone being kidnapped. I would help the boss rebuild the club. We would do it bigger and better and stronger, get that non-human stage he had been talking about for so long and get it so damn dripping that it would be the hot topic of conversation even all the way to the top on Prosterothal. We would completely redesign the entire place so that everything flowed nicely together, so that nothing would be cramped up and dingy. We would make sure that there was enough light everywhere, so that when the dancers were naked and everyone was cheering, there was enough room between everyone that your drink didn't go flying.

I stood looking over the street and imagined it all, perfect in every way, a glittering beacon of down and dirty entertainment.

What would I do? I would make myself head of security, of course. There would be no way in any hell waiting that there could be a repeat occurrence, not on my watch.

When I could finally move from the window again, the pins and needles having died down, I got my Halo-Core and to tell Markro to my leaving plans. He tried to smile, but there was nothing there in his eyes, glazed over like the eyes of a doll.

'You're moving, then,' he said simply.

'Yeah,' I said, 'got the nurse to let me out just now. I'm leaving in 24 hours, whether they like it or not.'

Markro looked behind him and said something to Ashrore, who was standing just out of view. He got back to me a second later. 'Ok, we'll grab you at 10am tomorrow and escort you home again. You take it damn easy before then.'

'I always take it easy,' I said with a laugh, hanging up and putting the Core on the bed. Only twenty four hours to wait here. Beautiful. I couldn't be gone soon enough.

I got my clothes off the chair at the side of my bed and slowly began to change, feeling every ache and pain bolt through me like molten metal dripping down my cartilage as I did so. Eventually clothed, I began to stagger to the door out of the room. I needed a wander, anywhere of any use, just to remind myself of the concept of hallways.

My Halo-Core pinged behind me, alerting me to a received message.

'I just put it down and now I get a message,' I muttered to myself, turning around and picking up the Core. It was from an unlisted source, someone unknown to me. I frowned, opening up the message.

XAYNE. YOU WILL MEET ME UNDER CRYWATER BRIDGE AT MIDNIGHT. IF YOU DON'T SHOW, THREE OF YOUR FRIENDS WILL DIE. IF YOU TELL ANYONE, FOUR OF YOUR FRIENDS WILL DIE. YOUR CALL.

I stared at the message for several minutes, simply trying to comprehend what it said. My first thought was that it was a wrong number, but the message referring specifically to me meant that that idea was out of the question. The idea of a prank briefly suggested itself, but nobody would pull a prank like this.

No, it was genuine, and a genuine threat at that. The worst part was that I believed it; I believed every damn word it said.