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Deal With The Devil
Posted On: 08/01/2008 07:56:05
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I wasn't sure what exactly I was planning to do once I found Liam Gallagher and his gang. All I was thinking about, really, was getting Eileen away from them. Alright, and maybe a little bit of hard love for Vern's face from my fist. The metal one.
That's the thing about Ranger training. It taught me flexibility, adaptability. It taught me to act independently and outside of any plan, much more so than any other military training would have. It honed my instincts as well as my body.
My instincts were telling me that there was going to be a fight, wherever I found them. My whole body was a coiled spring, ready to explode into action. I was on the hunt. And I had absolutely no idea what the bloody hell I was getting myself into.
Liam had a favored haunt, back in the bad old days. I tried that pub first, but it had been burned to the ground years ago, while I was away. It was getting dark, and no one in their right minds was out on the street at that hour. Or no one who didn't have someone else backing them up.
The alley wolves followed me for some distance before becoming more obvious. I had seen their like before, here in Huyton in my youth as well as in other cities I had haunted during R&R. Urban predators are all the same. They hunt anything that appears weaker than themselves, and always in numbers.
There were six of them. The five moved around me, whilst their leader took up a position in front of me, turning with a jaunty little spin in his rags to mock my manner of dress. I'd put on the good evening suit Polly had given me.
“Top o' the mornin' to ya, mate,” he said in an exaggerated brogue, grinning wildly.
“Bugger off,” I replied simply, continuing on in stride.
The fellow made a look of false affrontery, and his fellows laughed.
“But sir, how you hurt me with such unkind words!” he whimpered, a merry smile of sport in his eyes.
“That's not all I'll hurt you with if you keep this up, lads. I'm looking for Gallagher tonight. He wouldn't be very pleased with me for going into his place with bloodstains all over my new suit, now would he?”
It took a moment for what I'd said to sink in. I couldn't be sure whether it was the wolfish grin which had accompanied the words, the threat to harm them if they continued stalking me, or dropping my quarry's name that had made the leader's decision. His eyes narrowed, and he made motion to his pack.
“Come on, lads, there's better sport out there than this one!” he cried as he continued his jaunty spinning, right down an alley and away from me.
The others followed him, some looking back with what almost seemed a disappointed look. I flexed the metal clamps on my cybernaughtic arm in their full view, and they turned away to continue their flight.
I wandered Huyton's streets and alleys for another hour before I found anyone who might tell me anything of Gallagher's current nightspot.
“Hullo, sirrah,” a husky whisper came at me from a darkened corner of the intersection ahead.
I continued my walk down the street nonchalantly, waiting for whoever had spoken to show themselves. A lady, if one could call her that, stepped from the shadows. She slipped in beside me, her legs pumping to keep up with my pace, the heels of her secondhand-fashionable boots clacking on the cobblestones.
“You look like a gent who's looking for a good time, right? Am I right? Well, Maddie's my name, and whatever you like is my game. I'll treat you right good, mister! You like French love? Five quid, and I'll suck your fat prick off good!”
She was pretty in a ragged and worn way, city life having taken rough toll on her some years ago. The lines of worry and hardship drew down the corners of her mouth, even as she smiled. Her clothing was fancy even in its dirty raggedness, and designed to show off charms she definitely had an ample supply of.
I had an idea.
“Maddie, be a good lass and come over here with me,” I smiled.
“Oh, no, I think that the alley over there would be much more suitable for our needs, milord,” she said, attempting to be coy and batting her long eyelashes.
I laughed at her loudly then, and she looked confused. I let my wolfish grin come out, and she began to look frightened.
“Over there, what, where your filthy pimp can slit my throat while you busy me with your charms? Oh, no, my dear, I have much greater things in mind for you.”
Her face went white. I gripped her by the arm and hauled her into the shadows of the alley I had indicated to our left. And then I waited. I barely caught sight of her hand going to her inner thigh, to the garter covered by her dress, and lifted my cybernaughtic arm just as her hand lashed at my head. As her wrist collided with the arm, I heard a sharp crack of bone on metal, and her eyes went wide and a whimper escaped her throat. The straight razor clattered to the cobblestones.
The sound of booted feet pounding the pavement near us alerted me to her pimp's presence. I ducked and swung myself slightly to my left, and heard the thump of something wooden striking flesh. The cricket bat the man had intended to brain me with had struck poor Maddie in the temple as I ducked beneath the swing.
I turned to the pimp, all grin.
“Looks like you've just hit wicket, mate. I'm going to have to give you out for that, ” I growled, and hurled myself at him.
After a few moments of instruction upon the fine art of fisticuffs with the batsman, I left him bleeding upon the ground. The girl regained her consciousness slowly. She couldn't move very well when she finally did, I had made sure of that beforehand. I'd tied her ankles tightly with a strip from the bottom of her dress, and her wrists behind her back with another.
“What're you going to do to me,” she said, looking horrified at her pimp where he lay crumpled unconscious.
“Nothing too terribly painful, if you tell me some things that I'd like to know, Maddie. D'you think you might be able to do that?”
She nodded vigorously, her eyes fearfully fixing on the cricket bat in my right “hand”.
Interrogation's a tactic one learns in the Rangers as well, you see. But I didn't need much in the way of training to know that this bird would sing at the merest hint of physical threat to herself.
“Where can I find Liam Gallagher at this hour?”
I let my voice sound soothingly smooth, but kept a subtle edge of violence ready to become unhinged in it. I'm sure it was a tone she was familiar with. Only I was a much bigger man, and one with a mechanical arm.
She cringed a bit, eyes narrowing.
“What you want to know for? You aren't one of his boys.”
The wicked blow I struck with the cricket bat served two purposes as it lashed out and was followed by the splintering of bone. First, it provided me with a means to insure her pimp would not follow me with a broken ankle and try harrowing me further on my journey this night. And as for the second, Maddie winced, her face a naked mask of fear.
Her pimp howled in anguish, awakened from his slumber by his newfound pain.
“I'll be asking the questions here, love,” I said in that same smooth voice.
“They're at the Nancy's!” she screamed, the tears beginning to flow.
“The what?” I asked, letting a little more violence into my tone, “Tell me where that is, and truly, lass, or it's your pretty face with the next one.”
I hefted the bat menacingly. Sobbing, her hands rising to her face, Maddie spilled the directions out in a flood of words. The Nancy's was short for Nancy's Hall of the Burlesque, a little place in a more quiet neighborhood of Huyton. It was quiet before I'd left from lack of a large amount of criminals in the area. Now it was surely quiet for fear of the same.
I had one last thing to do before I left the duo, though.
“Maddie, I want you to look at me.”
Her eyes raised, the tears still streaming and her chin quivering.
“I want you to run along after tonight, be a good lass and find something else to do with yourself, d'ye hear me? Forget this man and the life he offers you. Because if I ever see you out and about with him again,” I brandished the straight razor she'd thought to use on me earlier before her eyes, “I'll know what you've been up to, and I'll carve you a second smile to match that pretty first one you've got right under it.”
“And you,” I said to the squirming, wheezing pimp on the ground as I ground my bootheel down onto his broken ankle and he began to howl in agony again.
“Look at me, you piece of shit,” I said coldly, gripping his chin to pull his gaze to mine as his cries died down to wheezing whimpers again, “I want you to do something for me as well. I want you to spread the word high and wide that Robb Kendall's not a man to be F-BOMBED around with. I'll make sure I break more than just your bloody ankle the next time I run into you. And the same goes for any of your little F-BOMBING friends as well.”
“Christ, this place really has gone to the shitter,” I muttered as I walked away from them.
Tags: Scifi Etherpunk
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