Stray Cat Strut - Volume Nine - Chapter Twenty-Three (Patreon)

Chapter Twenty-Three

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“Are you... okay?” 

The fact that it was Crisis Mode asking me made me feel a certain way. Not a good way, but... yeah. “I’m fine,” I said as I leaned back against the wall of the elevator. We were heading down. It felt like it wasn’t shaping up to be very good at this shit.

Samurai were a lot of things, but in my mind, they were supposed to be, if not unshakable, then at least able to push through some stuff that normal people would have a hard time with. 

“Are you sure?” Crisis Mode asked.

I almost snapped back at her, but I held back at the last moment. She’d been through a ton of crap lately, she didn’t need me biting at her on top of all that. If anyone deserved to be freaking out, it was probably her more than me.

“Yeah, nah,” I said. “Look, I’ve killed people before. Pulled the trigger and all. Probably blew up a few people as well. It doesn’t keep me up at night. That dude though, who walked out of the window? I don’t know. That felt different.”

“He wasn’t a very good person, I don’t think,” she said.

“Yeah, I know that. It helps a little. But usually when I... I don’t know. Usually it’s sudden? It’s justified in the moment? I don’t know why that matters any more than anything else. Dead’s dead. But yeah. Feels wrong.”

“I think I understand,” Crisis Mode said. “Are you the one that usually handles this kind of thing?”

“Unfortunately, it looks like that’s becoming the case,” I said a little dryly. 

The elevator slowed to a stop and the doors opened, sparing me from any further delving into my feelings or whatever. I’d yap to Lucy about it later, or maybe Gomorrah or Myalis.

Myalis as a distant third. She’d find a way to poke fun at me, even if she was an alright listener.

“What the--” Crisis Mode said, and that immediately snapped me back into the moment. I scanned the space ahead of us. We had arrived on the floor that I knew Shy was on, but that was all I knew about the space. 

The elevator opened into a relatively large space, with an escalator to one side and a few shops along the walls. They looked like they were closed and boarded up, so maybe it was an abandoned interior mall of some sort? 

What caught my eye were the bodies.

The first of them was slumped to the ground against the railings of one of the escalators. A man in fatigues with some light body armour on, an SMG left on the ground next to him.

Further in were two more. Both just... laying there, like their strings were cut and they had simply slumped to the floor.

I pulled my handgun out and held it low by my side. “Eyes open,” was all I said as I stepped out of the elevator and started to scan the area around us. I ran my cybernetic eye through a few different vision modes, but nothing stood out as too unusual. There were a few ads still running on some wall-mounted screens, but otherwise the space was deathly quiet.

“This place was used as a base for the army. Or the people that deserted from the army,” Crisis Mode said.

“How do you know that?” I whispered back.

“I asked my AI? Ah, I should have asked aloud, right? Sorry. I’ve gotten used to talking to him, them, quietly,” she said.

“It’s all good,” I replied. 

You’re going to start a trend. Not that I’m opposed to it. I find the way you talk to me out loud endearing.

“Oh, shut up,” I muttered. 

See. Cute.

I huffed, then slowly walked over to the nearest of the bodies. Something about it felt off, but it wasn’t until I was close that I figured out what it was. Or what was lacking, rather. There was no blood.

I knelt down next to the dead guy and realized that he wasn’t so dead after all. He was still breathing. It was low and shallow, but when I removed a glove and brought it close to his face, I could feel the faint tickle of breath. “They’re not dead,” I said. “Just knocked out. Like, real good.”

“Someone went around and bashed them in the head?”

I shook my head. “No. That doesn’t knock people for more than a minute or so. Usually just pisses them off. This is probably something else. Your suit is sealed, right? If there’s something in the air you’ll be fine?”

“It should be,” Crisis Mode replied.

That was good. I slid my glove back on, then checked the guy over. He was definitely military. Or ex-military, I supposed. He was fit, had some light cyberware around his chest and neck, and didn’t look injured at first glance. 

Then I found a tiny needle sticking out of his uniform, right below the collarbone. I poked at it, but decided to leave it there. “Looks like he was injected with something. Look at this needle here. I think... does that say something?”

It took some squinting to get my eye to zoom in, but there was definitely text on the needle. Fugax.

“Myalis, that mean anything?”

It’s Latin for timid.

“Ah,” I said. “Timid. Well, shit, that’s got to be Shy, then. Who else would use that name? Didn’t know she was into Latin.” 

“Is she, ah, chuuni?”

“What’s that mean?” I asked.

“Nevermind,” Crisis Mode said. She gestured deeper in. “Should we continue?”

“Yeah, probably for the best if we do.” I didn’t know what to expect, but Shy might need the backup. Taking out a few soldiers was nice and all, but I wasn’t sure she could take on a few alerted squads. Was her gear fully bullet-proof? Did they have anything that would punch through what she did have? She was a big girl, so I really didn’t have to worry, but I was starting to worry anyway.

We rode up the escalator, which felt strangely mundane. Above were six more soldiers. They were laid out, one next to the other, slumped down and knocked out. Only one of them, the one at the furthest end of the group, had their gun drawn. It was laying a few metres out, as if it had slid away when they fell.

I glanced up. “There are cameras here,” I said. “If they have anyone watching them, then they’ll eventually go on alert. They have to have some sort of surveillance AI.”

Co-opted. It’s currently replaying loops from the previous days to anyone who would care to look.

“Nevermind, then. Shy’s doing, I take it?”

NAME’s actually, though it was likely at her prompting. Or maybe he brought it up. He was always a softy.

“He? Hey, Crisis, your AI have a gender?”

“I... think of him as a he,” she said. “But I guess I never asked? Um... oh, he says that ‘he’ is okay?”

“Weird,” I said. 

“Is yours... a male?”

“Nah, she’s a bitch,” I said.

Less cute.

We continued to make pointless smalltalk while following the trail of breadcrumbs that Shy left behind. The fact that most of those breadcrumbs were knocked out soldiers was more funny than anything. 

The passage above led to an area with a simple deployable barricade set up before a wide doorway. Within was a smaller, narrower corridor. There were two guards slumped on either side by the entrance. 

The number of down soldiers only increased from there. And this time they were all armed and ready.

“This is starting to feel like, I don’t know, the aftermath of a horror movie,” Crisis Mode said.

“Eh, don’t worry. In this horror movie, we’re the monsters. Makes it more of a dark comedy, I think,” I said as I gingerly stepped over a few fallen bodies. 

How long would Shy’s sleepy-time-needles last? Some of these people had hands on guns and I wasn’t sure if their safeties would all be on. 

The corridor forked, and we ran into a section that very much looked like the back of some mall turned into a temporary base of operations. Bunks were set up in a room to one side, and there were plastic desks out with computer terminals on them. 

One large room, at the end of the corridor had been converted into a command centre. With wide-screen monitors on racks and some no-doubt stolen gear all over.

Shy was there, sitting on an office chair with her legs curled up to her chest, staring at a tablet.

She looked up when we arrived. “Hi,” she said. “I found him.”

With that, she gestured to a rotund man laying face-first on the ground and drooling onto the linoleum. 

“I see,” I said. Well, she did like doing things her way, but if it worked, it worked.

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