The Perfect Thug - Cyberpunk

Grint wandered down the slick city streets. Pendulous hands swinging at his side. Blood dripped from purple knuckles as he stared at the neon signs flickering in the biosphere. The distant glass of the dome concordant with his mental state, transparent. Emotions dissipated in him like an intravenous drip, nothing to hold on to, thin blood made thinner in the reflection of dark skies behind his eyes. He lifted both hands in front of his face and stared at the knuckles. Tiny hairs caked one sausage finger where his knuckle had broken skull. They bristled in his sight as the sour breeze from the processing plant wafted through gangret district. Diseased trees lined the street like penitent soldiers back from the war, desperate leaves curling in on themselves in vain hopes of water. Death permeated these streets like the ebony ash in the air. His feet ached as he turned into the stink of the alley that led to his apartment building.

Something moved in his periphery. He spun in a whirl of adrenal glanding as time unfurled like ticker-tape, slow deliberate descent into madness. He saw the Sawblade, heard its mechanical wiring as its wielder danced slow-mo in a spinning move out of a bad martial arts film. Grint pondered him in the slow build of the adrenal overdrive. He wore a black leather trench coat right down to his ankles which concertinaed out like a second skin flayed from his shoulders. Dark eyes flashed from beneath a wide-brimmed hat and needle teeth gleamed silver in the reluctant light which spilled from the distant street. A psydrone. Dull recognition played an old tune along the synapses firing in his hippocampus. It was time to speed things up.

Grint surged forward in the final vestiges of the slow time slamming a giant fist into the stranger's chest with a satisfying crack which hurled the psydrone a full 15 feet to slam into the bricks of the alley wall. Sawblade clattered to the floor as the drones voice system sputtered confused words into the sultry simmer of the city.

Grint walked over to the droid and picked up the Sawblade and eyed its friction-less mechanism. He switched it to standby and slipped it in his pocket. Fucking good blade he thought as he turned and opened the door to his apartment lobby.

He whirled in one lightning movement, flicked the blade to 'on' and hurled it into the psydrone's throat. The voice unit died in a low bleed of conflicting frequencies as he retrieved his new weapon.

"That's a goer." The crowd of cops huddled around the holomonitor clapped and cheered as Lucy Barker looked up at the chief, smiling.

"He took the bait. Good work sergeant. Now we have that asshole bugged maybe we can make some headway." Chief Mahoney's mustache wriggled along his top lip as he cracked a rare smile and Lucy got up to perform a mock bow.

"Right, anyone not on the case get back to your stations. The party is over." Mchoney waved his arms barking at them like he was shoeing away a rat.

"Barker, Cotes lets take a look at this board. We have been trying to nail these scum for years and this is the closest we have ever got." He nodded at Lucy as lieutenant Mike Cotes sauntered over from where he had been leaning.

"Looks cut and dry to me chief. We ambush this big lug and get him well and truly dosed up on immune response suppressants then beat seven shades of shit out of the son of a bitch."

The chief stormed up to him, mustache bristling. "It's cut and dry is it... Mike? Yeah, sure we just need to ambush this fella and it will be back to the station for beers and a round with the old iron knuckles." Mike leaned back as the chief bellowed in his face.

"Wise up boy. This guy is the fastest we have ever seen, but you would have known that if you were watching your partners deployment. Grint Olbardark was out in the wilds beyond the dome for eighteen years. Shit, he spent his childhood there, dodging roaches and running for his life every day. Have you ever been out there boy, beyond the dome?"

Mike slowly shook his head, a sly grin on his face as he goaded the chief. "Me and my sister went on a sky tour once when we were kids, saw all kinds of fucked up insect life. I remember a swarm of wasps that took out this throwback. The poor sap was just spinning on the spot waving his arms as these massive megawasps poked holes in him for fun."

The chief slammed his fist on the desk in front of Lucy. "Well boy, Grint has probably killed more than one of those critters and other things besides. It's hell out there in the dark bracken fields, slick with moss, knowing that at any time, anything could be measuring you up through compound eyes. I spent two years on active service out there and I don't know how many friends I saw eaten alive, poisoned by the air or eaten from within by young insecaziods."

The chief droned on, the usual story. One the whole precinct had heard over and over. Lucy leaned over and hissed, "nice one numbnuts. You've got him started now, we'll never get anything done." Mike doffed an invisible hat with a flourish and mouthed the words, 'you're welcome.'

"Get it done, you two." Lucy pulled up the board as the chief stormed off.

Grint piloted the transport over forests of towers, speckled with pinpoints of luminous neon in the evening mist. Lurid tendrils of shifting vapor caressed purple fingers around the domiciles of the rich of metropolis district. Grint sighed as he plunged the vehicle into a nose dive around these concrete gravestones. Memories flared to life past his neural blocks. Blood running through his fingers as he stared at the twitching stinger erupting from his chest, moss drenched moors shooting by at break-neck speed. A carpet of soft emerald dreams as he plunged in and out of consciousness. Drops of venom dripped from the stinger to plummet down as he found the cushioning fuzz of blackness.

He shook his head and pulled to the side sharply, narrowly missing a sleek red Skydriver sports model seven. He wheeled the transport vertically up the side of tower 259, lights merging into rainbow cacophony in the front window. He landed the vehicle on the tower's roof and stepped out into the purple night.

---

Crystal reflected rainbow beads of light through the champagne as senator Collins eyed this pretty little thing through the same crystal glass. Her form warped into unimaginable contortions as she danced. He imagined warping her to his own twisted whims later and he glanded another hit of StayHard, the needles sting like the sharp release of sex.

---

Grint looked at these huge double doors of antique mahogany and shrugged. He kicked the doors hard and watched them sail through the window of the room beyond. A lithe girl in pink chiffon bodice screamed as the conditioned air rushed out of the apartment and a weazly man stared at Grint slack-jawed.

"What is the meaning of this? Do you know who I am."

Grint ignored him as he pulled up Andre in a neural feed is this guy for a beating or more?His own thoughts echoed disconcertingly through the emptiness behind his eyes.

The boss said to liquidize the asset. His debts are too great and it's just not worth the effort. Let him know what is going to happen to him first though, I will be watching.

Grint grunted and walked toward the man. His erection comically making a tent of his silken dressing gown as terror shone madness in his eyes.

"Senator Collins, you owe the syndicate a substantial amount of money. How do you intend on paying?" He stepped closer to the man whose erection had subsided now as a slow puddle of urine grew around his feet.

"Do you intend on paying?"

The woman screamed past him and nearly made it, damn she was fast. He shot his hand out and grabbed her face, enveloping her skull with his massive hands before crushing it like an over-ripe pear.

The Senator gibbered as Grint closed in.

Lucy moved uncomfortably in the tight confines of the police augmentation suit. As she shifted in her crouch, she felt the smart-tech loosen and tighten around her flexing muscles, reacting to the pressures of friction. It gave her the creeps, it sort of felt like a deep tissue massage but with a modified AI in control. She peeked over the lip of the crate at the monstrous figure entering the warehouse, two black sacks of something suspiciously human shaped over each shoulder. She nodded at Mike as she com'd him through the suits internal feed.

Remember the plan. We wait until he's in a position where there is no chance of peripheral vision. This guy can move faster than sound when needed, if he sees us, we're done for.

Mike nodded as they crept around the side of the crate and darted to the next cover.

Grint prized the lid off one of the plastic barrels and dumped the girl into the hissing liquid. Her organs were no good to him, too small. She wouldn't provide enough adrenaline for one hit. It just wasn't worth the bother, this sack of shit though, he had died with just the right amount of fear and hope to provide a decent quality product.

He deposited the body on the table next to the processing conveyor and whistled a tune as he pulled out the Sawblade and flicked it to the 'on' position. The sawblade's low rhythmic thrum added a base beat to his whistling as he dived into the loose flesh around the senator's mid-section. The slight acrid smell of blood lingered in the air as he felt about in the cavity for the kidneys. Bingo, there it was, big and juicy, just above the major organ. Carefully, he worked the blade into the space between forefinger and thumb which pinched the top of the gland closed and cut it from the corpse. He gingerly placed the quivering pink mass in a cryo-flask before going to work on the other side. He extracted the second gland grinning from ear to ear. Grint knew he would get top dollar for these from the runners if he handed them down the chain, or better yet, the boss might take them for personal use and kudos was worth much more than money.

He heard a scuffle behind him and wheeled about to see... nothing. He scanned the warehouse from top to bottom, nothing moved. Must have been a mouse.

He turned back around and prized the lid off the second barrel, lifted the corpse in his arms before dumping it into the sizzling acid bath. "Thanks for the glands man."

He laughed and felt a sharp pain in the back of his neck. He spun as he felt something shimmy down his spine like drops of dew down a tree trunk. His knees felt weak and his head started to ache as he felt up the back of his neck to pluck the small silver dart out of his flesh. Two figures emerged from behind the conveyor at the far end of the warehouse and walked toward him, weapons pointed.

Lucy approached cautiously as the giant quivered strangely and her partner flanked her to the left, gun aimed at Grints head. Something seemed wrong. The big man's veins were pulsating red with livid blood rushing through his body as adrenal overdrive took hold.

"This shouldn't be happening." She shouted to her partner. "He should be going down. Who mixed these immune response suppressants? Whoever it was didn't get their proportions right."

Grint roared and rushed forward impossibly fast, slamming Lucy off her feet and up into the air. Her suit took over, guiding her limbs for maximum drag as she saw Mike slam two bolts from his pistol into the big man's chest. She landed in a painful roll. The pain subsided as the suit caught up to its computational trajectory and cushioned the various areas of impact as she bounced to a halt twenty feet away. She raised her own weapon, Grint had hold of Mike by one arm flailing him around like a rag doll trying to counteract the damage limitation of the suits mechanism. She fired at the big mans head, fuck non-lethal force. He dodged one bullet and the other raked a scarlet line across the side of his face taking of a portion of his cheek for good measure. The lump of sticky flesh fwapped against the wall in a sickening bloody halo.

She leaped to her feet and ran toward the man as he lifted Mike on high and grabbed one leg and one arm in each hand. Her suit engaged augment and she darted, impossibly fast, but not fast enough, as a crunch of bones echoed through the open space and Mike's jagged hip bone jutted from his pelvis like a white whale breaching a sea of blood.

She barreled into Grint as he tossed her twitching partner aside. Tears streamed from hot ducts as a fire raged in her mind. She knew she couldn't win. The big man scooped her up into a bear hug as she slammed into him, knocking him slightly off balance. He was grinning, gums and teeth shining surreal through the hole in his cheek. She head-butted him with all of her and the suit's combined strength. She felt him topple as her bones seemed to pop in her ears.

A deafening his enshrouded her as smoke blinded her eyes and she felt the pressure lessen. She kicked away into a somersault and landed in an aching heap. She lifted her head to see Grint convulsing in a growing pool of sizzling liquid. He tried to pull himself up as the second barrel spun wildly on its circumference before teetering and toppling in a cloud of crackling red smoke.