Chapter Thirteen-A

  There were dead bodies everywhere she looked, and the way the full-body hazard suit rustled against Malory’s skin as she moved made her want to scream. The respirator filtered each breath she took, but it still tasted of sterile demise, of old roses, of rotten compost. She dragged a body bag over to the first corpse, a bearded man in his thirties that woke up that morning thinking the rest of his life was in front of him—all those back-alley poker sessions, his kid’s soccer games, erased. When she lifted his feet, she knew this wasn’t a job meant for a single person. The boots were worn from years of work, and she wrenched them into the plastic. Sweat beaded on her brow from the exertion and fell into her eyes. It was going to be a long day. She avoided the empty gaze when she maneuvered the torso and zipped him into the only casket he’d ever get. She grasped the carry handle at the edge and hauled him out to the van, scraping on the concrete. By the time she got him secured in the back, her arms were numb, and she cursed her eagerness to take the job. She headed back into the Black Hands warehouse for another.

  There were bullet holes along the walls, scores dug into metal support beams, a littering of shell-casings on the ground, and hundreds of pallets overflowing with illicit goods—memory chips, medicines, counterfeit children’s toys and holograms, alcohol, electronics, construction materials, and sweatshop garments waiting to head to markets and under-the-table deals; all the product and profit secured at the cost of dozens of lives. Malory didn’t think such a sacrifice was worthwhile, and she added it to all the growing fury waiting for an outlet. She hated the city, the way it churned the desperate through a grinder. Another body, entombed. Another. She kept at it until the van was at capacity. It was going to take several trips. Mal climbed into the driver’s seat and used her network to set the autopilot to head for one of the crematoriums listed in the job details. As it pulled out into the street, she undid her mask and ran her fingers through damp hair. She wanted a drink. To obliterate herself. To shoot something. The van weaved in and out of traffic, and she hoped no cops nearby decided to do their jobs for once. Getting pulled over was a quick trip to the penitentiary; there was no way to explain so many unregistered dead.

  The van pulled up at a loading dock outside a brick building whose upper floors had been remodeled into tenement housing. The ovens were running at capacity, and high above, smokestacks disgorged thick black smoke. The air was heavy with the smell of incense, and Malory knew the place was barely a step above the orphanage. It was meant for dead-enders that circled the drain, the kind of place kids like her wound up if they refused to join the gangs and didn’t have the gift like Nadia. She took manual control of the van and tried to back it into the dock. It went well enough, at first, and then she pressed the pedal a little too hard and slammed the bumper against the concrete limp. The bumper caved, but a little damage wasn’t her problem. She climbed out and walked over to the access door. There was a sticky red button that activated the buzzer, and she shoved her gloved thumb into it over and over. She was impatient; there was so much work left to do, and she was on a time limit. A full minute passed before a portly man came out muttering curses, his eyes sunken with lack of sleep. She sent the contract details to his net, and he called over a team to collect.

  “They have you cleaning all alone?” he asked. He fished a pack of bent cigarettes from his pocket and offered her one. Any excuse to take a break, it seemed.

  “Yeah,” she said. She wasn’t a smoker. Her lungs had been weak since she was a toddler, but she took it anyway and waited for a light.

  “No offense,” he said. He flicked a Zippo and held it for her. “Not really a job for someone like you, girl. You should be working in the clubs, or something.”

  “Fuck that,” Mal said. As desperate as she’d ever been, shaking her ass had never been an option. She felt the implant burn, and hate crawled out. The way the man undressed her with his eyes, how his fat jiggled when he spoke. It was disgusting. She took a heavy drag, felt cloud down into her chest, and coughed hard.

  “It’s easy credits,” he said. He did a little shimmy with his arms as the team started to unload the bodies. “A little dancing, a sultry whisper, some heavy petting, and wallets empty out like that.” He snapped his sausage fingers and ashed his cigarette.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “I’d rather drink bleach,” Malory said. She felt the weight of the pistol against her ribs, beckoning, and forced herself to take another drag. The ghost fluttered to life next to her and started dancing around in circles.

  What a specimen. He sees flesh as a commodity for the markets. A thing to be used, to be sold. Sold. SOLD.

  “Hell, I’d get up on a pole myself, if I could,” the fat man said. He blew a cloud of smoke in her face and the team dragged more bodies into the building. “Always thought life would be simple as a woman. Effortless to get what you want.”

  “That has to be the dumbest thing anyone has ever said to me.” Mal flicked her cigarette at the ghost doing pirouettes between them, watched it phase right through and bounce across the ground. “And I grew up with a couple of meathead orphans.”

  “Whatever,” he said. He dropped his own smoked butt and ground it under his heel. The last body was removed from the van, and they were done here. His eyes lit up. “Your payment, in bulk. If you have more, take them somewhere else.”

  “Sure,” Mal said. She spun on her heels and headed for the van instead of surrendering to the growing urge to blast a hole in his forehead. The implant messing with her mind frightened her because they were impulses she already had, just cranked off the scale.

  Mal closed her eyes on the ride back to the warehouse and tried to calm down. The ghost had left her alone, which helped, but her temples throbbed. She flipped on the radio, focused on the words to a random pop song. The refrain was catchy, but it felt strange to travel with her personal space intact instead of being crammed onto the monorail. She kind of missed it—the noise, the overheard stories, so many people living lives that were different from everything she’d known, and she felt disconnected. Traffic flowed around her and she hummed. When she reached the warehouse again, she sighed and fastened the rebreather. Instead of gathering more bodies, she started collecting shells and scrubbing blood stains from the area she’d cleared before. All the evidence went into thick trash bags and over to the industrial recycler. It was designed to dispose of everything illegal if the NDPD got a wild hare up their asses and raided the place; it was rated for the bodies, too, but the higher-ups wanted to claw back some of their investments in the crew selling to the crematoriums. The implants were flipped on the black market once they were ripped from cold flesh, and Mal knew her own eye had been destined for the same.

  When that was done, she went back to filling body bags. She moved through the warehouse and down the hallway that led to the employee offices where she found: a forklift operator, his yellow vest stained red, a secretary wearing too much makeup and missing a leg, a divorced man who’d missed spots on his morning shave and had no one left in his life to point it out before he headed to his shift, three teens her age that maintained inventory counts, a security guard decked out in chrome that caught an armor piercing slug with his eye and weighed so much Mal could barely move him, and a few others so disfigured by a grenade they weren’t anything more than meat. They all went into bags and the back of the van. The further down the hall she worked, the more she found members from the hit squad; she left them lying in their own filth. They were for last. ZenTech would send their own team to collect soon enough, and Malory was looking forward to it even though she was supposed to be done before it happened. An outlet, her gun, and an overwhelming impulse egged her on. She didn’t try to resist.

  Once the van was full, she plugged in the coordinates to another crematorium and chugged an entire bottle of water. She was caked in a layer of sweat, and the clothes underneath the suit clung to her skin. The sun was setting, and she wished she could see the colors lit up on the horizon instead of so many skyscrapers flicking on their neon and ads for the evening. She rolled down the window, hung her head outside, and let the air sooth her overworked bones. Her body felt like it belonged to someone else, and she wondered if construction jobs were as difficult before robots took over the heavy labor. She pictured herself clocking in for the day with a little paper slip, her lunch pail overflowing with a home-cooked meal the way it was in the movies, and then she was there. The second drop went much smoother—the grandmother that came out was busy playing slots on her network, so the two stood in silence while the van was emptied. Mal watched them tag-team each bag onto a stretcher and wheel them inside. Quick, efficient, and destined for the harvest. When she received payment, she didn’t wait around. She was eager to deal with whoever showed up.

  patreon or and subscribe! Every pledge makes a difference! Book one is nearing it's completion, and you can get early access up to chapter 23 right now! That's over 80k words!