I staggered to a halt, freezing, staring open-mouthed in horror at the figures right before me, and they slowly turned to stare at me as well.

A dozen of them, all in various states of decay and collapse—bodies that ranged from perhaps days old, to decades and probably more—stood as if they’d found out their dog ran off with their partner and left them a fresh turd in their pillow as a goodbye, heads hung, shoulders slumped, and arms stilled by their sides.

Until the fucker in the middle made a sound. It was a click, sounding almost like a lock snicking closed, but ending in a hiss of static. At that noise, they all shifted, seeming to go active all at once, reaching for me.

I spun, running in the opposite direction, bypassing the way I’d come down with only a brief panicked glance. There was no way out that way, no way to the surface I’d seen.

The click sounded again, followed by a fucking boom from the shotgun. I cursed as the solid slug tore past my head. Every legend of the specters I’d ever heard rose in me, making my asshole clench in fear as I forced battered and bruised and exhausted limbs to carry me ever faster.

I knew there were different grades of specters. Everyone did. But anything beyond the mindless feeders? Insanely rare. Like, there were occasional outbreaks from them, or rumors and tales of them happening, but fuck me! I never expected to see a fucking ghoul.

The ghouls were their equivalent of soldiers, or if you believed the tales, they were what happened to a soldier who’d gone bad. Not just in the traditional mod-extreme and virus ways, but in the “fucked up and slaughtering civilians” way.

Ghouls had serious mods, usually combat ones, carried weapons and could use them, and tended to act as low-level leaders for the specters.

That itself was a serious source of argument. Most people didn’t want to even accept that specters existed, for fuck’s sake, and those who did?

They wanted to believe that all grades of specters were the same: brain-dead, puppeted by viruses written by evil hackers, and weaponized.

That something could command the others, that they could think to lead them, to use weapons and more? And that they could become these from any of the races? Humans, orcs, elves, goblins…any of us?

It was terrifying to a society built on modding itself.

I darted into the next opening in the station, emerging into an abandoned train tunnel, and dropped to the edge of the platform, skidding over the side to fall to the tracks below with a grunt.

I hissed in pain, forcing myself to keep moving. The lurching steps behind me grew in volume, and I ran again, left hand pressed tight to my side, right hand full of machete as I frantically searched for a way out.

The tunnel was huge, from way back when people had traveled across the city in vast numbers down here, and the trains were appropriately massive as well, meaning that the first emergency hatch I passed after only a hundred meters was fucking miles out of reach above me.

I cursed, staggering on and on. The tunnel twisted slowly left and then right, in great, slow arcs.

Some two hundred meters on, gasping for breath, I finally collapsed against the wall, unable to go on. My entire body screamed at me that I was fucked and needed to just stop and die, my broken ribs slowly doing more and more damage to me.

I’d passed a handful of bodies already, most of them torn asunder, literally shredded into separate parts, unrecognizable as humanoid beyond the occasional skull; bones had been broken apart, presumably to get at the marrow inside. But the figures that shuffled into view were terrible to behold.

They were a mix of old and new, but what they really were was intact. That might not sound terrifying when you considered the original horror of what they were—that they were the dead, or brain-dead at least.

But these weren’t the barely upright figures I’d usually seen as specters. These were solid, most of them armored, integrated mods, and several still had…one of the front-runners wore military body armor. It was an Air Force rig—one of their perimeter guards, I mentally tagged him as. Although his gun was gone, his vest and uniform, tattered and torn, remained.

My heart raced, panic surging that his armoring and mods might give him more of an advantage over me. Then I focused in and realized that he was also gifting me a goddamn chance.

As part of his uniform—and he still had them attached—were the ammo pouches. Even at this distance, I could see they were full. It might not be ammo I could use in here, but it was likely that it was. And any chance was a better one than I’d had a minute ago.

He was third in line, and I could already see others stumbling out behind him.

“Okay, you want to play? Let’s play,” I muttered. The panic that had risen before, the ragged emotions I’d been dealing with for days, the edge of exhaustion and more, faded away under a layer of determination and professionalism.

I needed some time with him, to search him properly. So far, he and the rest of the first three had demonstrated they were the fastest of the pack, so that was fine.

What was needed was to kill the other two in the lead, slow him down, and take out the next nearest competitors. Then draw him away from the rest.

I could do this.

Checking quickly behind me, and seeing that the tunnel drew off into the distance to the limit of the goggle’s range unimpeded, I nodded, and rather than waste any more time, started forward toward the incoming horde.

The first in line was an ex-corpo type, which made the entire thing much more palatable, considering the grey and filthy suit he wore. Hands reaching, he lunged at me, eyes glowing bright blue in the darkness; the chest looked too big and bulky for his frame, indicating subdermal armoring or a hidden removable kit.

I didn’t care, slashing the machete left and right in a figure eight. He was left fingerless. And then a hard slash, left to right, removed the head, sending the corpse crashing to the floor, twitching.

The next in line was too close to repeat the move, as was my actual target, coming up behind him. I spun, hacking the arm almost off at the elbow with the machete, before twisting around, ducking and grabbing the remaining arm by the wrist, tugging her forward and flipping her over my shoulder, dirty-blonde hair streaming through the air.

She hit the ground hard, and I straightened, twisting the arm, and stomped on the side of her head while pulling, firmly.

I felt and heard the snap of the neck, but it was the machete chopping down into the skull that finished her off.

I wasn’t as fast as I’d hoped, slowed by the wounds, and my target in the ammo vest plowed into me, fingers reaching and drawing long scratches down the side of my bloody, bruised, and swollen face.

He tried to bite me, teeth lunging for my throat, and I stabbed him in the stomach on instinct, before cursing and head-butting him to get some room.

The others were getting too close, and I shoved him backward. His foot caught on something and sent him sprawling, before he started to rise again.

I lunged forward and kicked him in the face, then hacked wildly at the next two that drew close, before turning and hobbling off, trying to open up some distance between them and me.

A hundred meters or so farther on, gasping with the pain of my wounds, I stopped again, bracing myself against the wall of the tunnel. They were still in sight, only a dozen meters back for the first of them. I forced myself to move again, stepping up and slapping the reaching hands aside, then beheading the first of them, grinning as I looked at the next. The ammo vest stood out. I had maybe six or seven meters from this one to the next; I ducked under the outstretched arm, the other having broken, apparently, in our fight before.

Stabbing upward, the tip of the machete sank into the underside of his chin…then the worst possible thing happened. It hit something hard as hell, and the goddamn blade snapped off at the hilt!

I froze, staring in horror, before its arm swung in and wrapped around me from behind, bear hugging me and dragging me in close to those flashing teeth.

I panicked, left arm braced against his chest, and I dropped the useless hilt, bracing the heel of my hand under the snapped-off blade base and shoving, even as I fought to break free of the bear hug.

Whatever augments or mods this fucker had before his death, his working arm was like a piston, slowly dragging me in closer and closer, and my own could barely keep us apart. Flashing “overload” warnings popped up in my vision. I snarled, grabbing the blade and cutting my fingers as I dragged it out, then angled it toward the back and shoved again.

Whatever internal work he’d had done, the blade scraped across something, then slid almost smoothly upward, punching into the brain via a gap, and he collapsed atop me, crashing us both to the ground.

I hissed in pain, desperately trying to roll free, only to find that the arm that had been around me was locked tight. The body atop me kept me in place, and I snarled in frustration, determined not to go out like this.

Bracing my knees against his stomach, I roared with the effort, pushing him back. But as soon as the ammo pouch was visible? I was in it.

The first pocket held rifle ammo, as did the second. The third was a handgun, fortunately, and I could feel something hard in the lower pocket as well.

That wasn’t important, though, because I could damn well hear the fuckers closing on me. I fumbled the seals open, pulling a magazine free for a different model of handgun than the one I had—of course—and I had to waste time flicking free the individual rounds.

A face appeared over the shoulder of the body on me, and I focused and fired in one motion. The echoing retort of the gun in the tunnel made it abundantly clear that I was now even shorter of time than I’d thought I was.

The single shot I had, thoughtfully given to me by the asshole who stole my revolver, took my target in the right eye. He fell soundlessly, brain and bone decorating the tunnel behind him. The round sparked off the wall and vanished, as I frantically reloaded from the loose rounds.

Three I managed to get into place before the next appeared, and he took two shots. The first bounced off his chrome-plated skull as I swore in frustration.

Two more rounds into the gun, and the next three figures went down one at a time.

That was eight, or maybe nine? I didn’t know. Fuck, it might have been seven. But I had a few seconds, and I used them well, reloading, getting shots off only as the figures closed the distance—two more, then a third going down.

I grinned, reaching for more…and found the cupboard was fucking bare.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

The second magazine was for an incompatible handgun—not much of a problem, but it was the red iridescent strip around the tip of the bullets, marking them as high explosive, that was the issue.

The reason such bullets were marked was that they couldn’t be used in regular handguns; they needed specific magazine and contact points.

The army was exceedingly particular on this, going so far as to demonstrate—using a cadaver with a shitty cybernetic hand—exactly what happened when you tried to use them in a regular handgun.

The detonation, the destruction of the gun, the hand holding it, and the remains of the body that had once held it?

It made an impression that stuck with you.

What also made an impression on me was the sound of footsteps.

I looked up, seeing the figure approaching out of the darkness at my goggle’s maximum range. I cursed, struggling to get free; the arm behind my back still clicked away as it processed the last command it’d been given, and tried to crush me.

The ghoul walked slowly closer, a tactical shotgun lifted and pointed at my head, each step slow and methodical as it approached, then hesitated as I made no move to shoot the fucker.

I had no ammo, of course, and whatever was running the show behind its tactical goggles clearly realized that.

The shotgun slowly tracked to my right hand, locking in on the handgun clutched there in warning. I dropped it, only to have the ghoul kick the gun aside, before slowly circling me.

It clicked and hissed, the static sound rising and falling. But what was it doing? If it was trying to talk, trying to radio for fucking assistance, maybe to order a large pizza, or who knew what, it just wasn’t clear.

What was clear? The feeling of something round pressed against my right kneecap. I’d braced my knees against the dead one’s chest, trying to force it to release me, or to find the strength to get free.

Now one of them was pressed against something that felt suddenly familiar.

Three things came to mind instantly: a baseball, a stupid little container for gum that Scott was always buying, mainly because he could bounce the container off the walls to ricochet into the corner of our shared chill area back at base…

And a very specific kind of grenade.

I lifted my right hand slowly. The shotgun whipped back around to lock onto it, even as my left hand slid into the pocket, finding the grenade and slipping it free, dumping it into my crotch, then sliding up slowly.

The fixation it had with staring at my hand made it clear that even if it was more aware than its brethren, it still wasn’t firing on all cylinders.

As soon as my right—flesh—hand was out of sight, I lifted the left, and instantly the shotgun tracked across. It froze, locked onto the hand, and I forced myself to breathe again. The sweep of the shotgun’s barrel over my chest had made my asshole twitch like I’d been given bowel prep for a surgery, and it was about to go nuclear.

With the fucker fixated, though, I lifted the hand higher, moving it slowly back and forth, waving then lowering and slowly slipping from sight under the body that pinned me.

He shifted, tracking the arm, moving closer, and I grinned. My right hand closed on the grenade and felt the familiar ridges, as well as the thumbprint.

Activating it was as easy as breathing. The thumb plate, once triggered, would pop clear, storing the activation signature inside, as the use of a fucking EMP grenade in civilian areas was a serious fucking offense.

That this dead fool had one?

That spoke wonders as to how he’d ended up down here. Either he’d been hunting the dead as I sort of was now and it was a last-ditch backup, just in case, or he’d intended it for himself. Because using an EMP?

It wasn’t something that most low-level mods would survive.

They’d need full nanite replacement packages.

Use it somewhere outside? Or in, just as a wild example, a corpo headquarters?

You were looking at millions, if not billions of credits of damage, not even counting the deaths and physical damage.

EMPs more powerful than the grenades, were seriously hard to get hold of outside of the military. And even there, they were watched more closely than a wandering priest who found their way into a preschool.

Either way, as I gently pressed my thumb to the activation plate, and I felt it shiver then disconnect, starting the five-second countdown, I smiled.

I’d been luckier than I had a right to be, finding one of these. My organelles weren’t going to like me much—they were biomechanical, not electronic, so would survive with only their installation nanites wiped; my arm, though, was gonna be fucked.

I set a two-second shutdown to my goggles, hoping being offline they’d survive, and triggered an emergency deactivation protocol for my RI.

It might survive…My brain mod? My left arm? Nope.

This was gonna suck donkey dick.

The ghoul moved closer, shifting to line its shotgun up on my forehead, clearly tracking the sudden spike of activity in my nanites with whatever senses these fuckers used in place of normal eyes…and I grabbed the shotgun barrel with my left hand, yanking it sideways.

It fired, any sign of aggression enough to set it off. The explosion of the shotgun going off literally right next to me was enough to burst my left eardrum, and red-hot fléchettes smashed into the ground right next to me, ricocheting in all directions.

I dragged it hard to my left; the ghoul yanked it back and tried to free the shotgun barrel, fixated on it. My right hand came up. Counting down in my head—three…two—my goggles shut down, and I gritted my teeth, imagining the figure before me.

I sent the grenade flying like a fastball, aiming to hit it in the forehead. The sound rang out of it, hitting something…before detonating.

There was a bright flare of light as whatever magic the armament manufacturer stuffed into those fucking terrible little balls went off with three flashes. A visible pulse flooded the area, before vanishing, and then a crash nearby.

I heard the clatter of metal on metal, and I grunted as my arm dropped, dead. The constant distant thrum of activity and clatter of work that had been filtering through cracks and more in the walls?

Anything nearby shut down, and I heard distant shouting, making me curse as I tried to reboot my goggles, getting nothing, and then the same from my brain mod, my arm…nothing!

I forced myself to shove free of the fucker that’d had me pinned, its own arm that had given me so much trouble now dead. I searched my pockets until I found that damn lighter, and sparked it up.

The ghoul was dead, well and truly, as were any others nearby. But where I’d hoped to set it off and run? Nope. I was stuck down here. And if I found a way out into some factory or whatever down here that I’d just fucked with the EMP grenade?

I’d be absolutely fucked up by the workers I’d just screwed over.

The corpos wouldn’t care that it wasn’t the workers’ fault; they’d refuse to pay them until they were working again. Meaning that anywhere from a few people to hundreds of families would be going hungry tonight.

I needed to get the fuck out of here, as I’d swapped being killed by a fucking ghoul for possibly being killed by angry factory workers. But first they’d have to fucking find me.

The EMP wouldn’t have gone far, but anything in proximity would be fucked, so I needed to get moving and out of the area, get rid of the evidence that I’d triggered it—hopefully, before any more fucking specters wandered in.

I searched around quickly, finding some dry wood in a crevice off to one side, and I wrapped some torn cloth from one of the specter’s clothes around it, before lighting my makeshift torch.

The difference from a tiny flare of a lighter to the bright flame of the torch was insane. I moved quickly, my left arm utterly useless and my RI not responding. And my spine?

Well, I was damn thankful I didn’t have any attachments or spinal tap systems in any more, they’d need replacing for sure if I did. I knew that the actual signal was partially run through electronic methods as well, but as I could currently still move. I wasn’t going to question my good fortune.

I guessed that having the body atop me and that section of my spine pressed hard against the ground might have protected it somewhat, but that was a guess.

I jammed the torch into the ground, using the armpit of a specter to hold it in place, and I got to work recovering the activation plate from the EMP grenade and searching the corpses.

I didn’t have time for this shit—I seriously didn’t have time for this—but I was fucked if I didn’t do it. I was beaten to fuck, had my favorite gun stolen, my mods were fucked…

I’d not be able to get any work as a merc without working mods, and no factory work or anything like that either. So that meant that my options were find something that covered the costs of repairs at least, or end up on the streets, begging and thieving.

That or sell my soul to a gang.

If I did that? I’d never be free of them. And that was if a gang would take me.

The thought of Richie and Sync dying, their cryosleep failing and the pair of them simply never waking, rotting in their suits in a fucking cave, lost to everyone, all because of a bunch of dickhead mercs who’d jumped me for something Richie had done six goddamn years ago?

That it was all down to me being too slow to remember why the fucking sign had been so familiar?

That fed right back to the shitty mods I’d been saddled with and the general crapshoot that had become my life.

I gritted my teeth, working as quickly as I could.

I ignored the other bodies for now, focusing on the ghoul.

The shotgun was nice, a high-tech one as well. The ammo counter and palm ident reader were dead, but that meant that the weapon had unlocked automatically, and I quickly checked it out.

Seven rounds, five solid slugs and two…I couldn’t make the writing out, not without my damn mod working in the flickering darkness, but I was betting either incendiary or bolo, considering the weight.

Incendiary was literally a massive “fuck you” to anything that you fired it at, the combination of a flamethrower and a shotgun to the face at the same time.

Fergie had summed it up once in his description of dealing with some fucker who’d been running mutated funnel-web spiders. They were augmented and enhanced to where a dedicated controller could control them, much like I could my suit, but remotely.

“Fucknoasaurus,” he had said, dragged the normal clip out, and slotted a Devil’s Asshole clip, turning the entire tunnel full of nightmares into a literal entrance to hell.

Bolo, on the other hand, was just evil:

two steel ball bearings connected with a short chain. When fired, they opened out and spun, creating a hell of a wound when they hit something.

In the distant past, shit like that had been used in cannons to take down enemy ship’s masts. Now we used them on people who played their music too loud and ate with their mouths open in public.

Progress was wonderful.

Either way, I quickly loaded the shotgun with a slug, then one of the unknowns, and then spread out the rest, before loading the last unknown as the final shot, glad that the shotgun was a magazine-loading one rather than the old breech versions.

That done, I searched pockets, coming up with a single credit-chip that had somehow survived out of five. Even more luckily, his thumb was identifiable enough that it unlocked, and the hundred and seven credits were locked to my thumb instead as I took ownership of the chip.

Two grenades—both frag—went into my pockets, and I dragged the knife free, resolving to make the most of the chance. Ammo for the handgun was plentiful in his pockets and body armor, and for several seconds, I tried to remove his armor. It was better than mine, and we were both covered in filth and shit from down here…

It wasn’t meant to be, though—there was too much damage to it. In the end, I settled for stripping it and filling my pockets.

I continued to search him, finding a handful of random bits: some ident-locked key, a trigger from another EMP grenade—making me even more curious about his path down to here—and a nice little gun cleaning kit in one long thigh pocket.

The real prizes, though, were his mods.

He’d had a chest piece embedded, heavily armored; right arm, definitely higher end than most. Hell, it had to be a tier three at a minimum. It was a full arm replacement—like mine—but Sod’s Law, it was a right instead of a left.

I didn’t know how I’d feel about using a recovered part, especially when it was recovered from a specter. Hell, I wasn’t sure I could bring myself to do it, but…but it was a feasible way to seriously supercharge my upgrades for a much more reasonable cost.

I shook the thought away again, and got back to work checking him over.

Spinal mod—reinforcement, like mine, not a tap job like I’d need to get, unfortunately. Something in the skull, probably a high-end brain mod…I gritted my teeth and slammed the skull into the ground a few times, hoping to crack it like an egg. But the result?

It was nasty. In the end, I managed to crack it open and put the brain and eye mods into a pocket.

The mess, though—just horrible.

I moved on in a state of numbness, partly from the beatings, the exhaustion and, yeah, partly from the shit I was having to do in the dark now, all thanks to some fucks deciding that I’d make a good punching bag.

I moved onto the next, getting a hand and a heart pump, no clue what it was, but it looked well-made in the limited light I had, and I kept going.

The body that had been holding me in place had some serious mods—the right arm again, especially, but it’d looked mainly “normal,” so rather than spend time checking it, and very conscious that other specters could be incoming, I simply hacked his off, roughly, and kept going.

All in all, I spent less than five minutes there, but it felt a lot longer, coming out with two right arms, a new back sheath for the shotgun, a new handgun—it was crap, but hey—two optical and one brain mod, a lower jaw mod, and a hand. I bundled them all up in the ghoul’s chest mod.

It was shaped like a normal rib cage, with thick reinforcement for the organs, overlapping plates of armor, and then attachment points for internal replacement organs and more.

There were mods that I’d never seen before in there, when I’d opened the fucker up. I’d frozen, looking them over and hoping there wasn’t a dead man’s trigger on something; then I’d moved on.

If there had been, I’d have already been fucked, or he would have been. The chest was like an old-style knight’s armor, shrunk down to fit under a skin graft, and damn it was impressive.

I stripped two more coats away, looping them under and around, tying the arms to each other and essentially making an insanely awkward bundle I could carry.

It was a fucking mess, but I was armed with a handgun with actual bullets now, as well as a spare. I had a new shotgun, and looking at it in the flickering torchlight, it was a good one. And last of all, I had some military-grade mods.

Yeah, they were salvage, but fuck it. They still had value.

I stumbled through the darkness, torch tied to my left arm, which dangled like a corpo without a dick-stiffener. The bundle, pressed tight to my chest, constantly slipped and shifted. I couldn’t even carry my gun at the ready, thanks to all this shit, but still I went on.

I’d walked right into there, walked in with my eyes open and as innocent as a fucking lamb. I was an idiot, a complete fucking idiot who had almost cost Richie and Sync their best chance at life.

I wasn’t doing that again, not ever. I needed to be harder, less trusting, and even more of a bastard. I needed to not give anyone a chance, not now. I was alone. I needed to act like it.

Every step I took, I repeated a promise to myself, each stumbling, limping footfall hammering it into my soul.

“I’ll get revenge,” I swore. “I’ll judge them all.”