There were, in life, things that happened that were incredibly unfortunate. Biting off more than you could chew or crossing a friend on something too serious for them to forgive. Then, there were things like what I had found down in the basement.

The lightless cold of the room and the chill of animal fear its contents gave me only served to make worse that unfortunate happenstance.

Like a garnish on a fancy dish, only, in this case, instead of some green herb or whatever, it was a metric fuckload of plastic explosive. The kind that you couldn’t get your hands on.

Unlike gun putty, this was military-grade, made to blast walls and bring down buildings. There were extra bits leading to the explosive, but those were less important for the moment. They would be the triggers on this mountain of death, but as best as I knew, they were currently off, like the tripwire on the window.

Either way, I needed to get the documents quickly before someone turned this into a tomb for federal agents. The problem with that was the gruesome figure across the space.

They had been… Changed. It was hard to look at, even for me, the very sight of it making my guts turn.

Much like the creature we had fought before, the woman was like an eggshell around the horrid thing that had spilled out of her. She had a look like someone who had taken a catastrophic gut wound, entrails and gore spilling out of them as they died, hands fumbling at their guts like they could draw them back in.

Only they weren’t dead. They twitched, grouping at the spilled awful, and they weren’t entrails; they were swollen alien flesh pulsing with a vivid red that made me feel alive just by looking at it.

The figure moaned lightly, though not in pain but in something inhuman in origin.

Looking at it, I took it in, and then, in an effort of will far beyond what I could manage without Lilly there whispering in my ear, I turned from it.

I hadn’t been breathing while I stared at it. My legs going out from under me, I hacked and coughed in the dryest cough, bloody phlegm pulled from my lungs to pool on the floor.

It had gotten to me somehow, though that was only while I looked at it. I could feel the draw of her, calling out to my ears, making my skin crawl. It made the voice within whisper about joining her. About taking comfort in the pleasures of the flesh as it tried to turn my very mind against me. Luckily, it wasn’t my mind that moved me any longer. I might still be weighted toward the physical, but I wasn’t physical, and that made all the difference in the world.

As I drew the first one, then took more cool, calming breaths to let my mind find its center, I stood. My legs shook, my heart trying to get off itself. I levelled out, avoiding the figure; I focused on the ground and the stack of boxes used to hold documents.

They were spectacularly bland, the kind a slimy suit would have in their office while they told you about how great insurance was. Insurance was dumb, and those who lived as leaches deserved to die as leaches.

The Junker was ‘Too old,’ ‘Wasn’t safe enough,’ and ‘Who in their right mind would insure a half-functioning boat piloted by a mercenary?’

Fucking insurers. Anyway, them being right aside, I knew those little boxes for what they were. Those little boxes were my gold, and I got rifling through them.

I couldn’t carry out all of it, just some of it, and so I organized only the choicest bits while the being behind me moaned to me. This was hard but also doable.

Statements that were probably bad but were otherwise isolated needed context. I was looking for something incriminating and context-free.

I didn’t have my gorgeous, very overworked coat, and I hadn’t expected to need to grab it today. The best I could do was stick it in my beltline and cover it, and that meant every extra piece of paper needed to be weighed against the possibility of every other piece of paper because I needed to carry it out by hand and not get robbed.

Even a box would be a bit much, and there were eight of them.

Correspondence was the first to mind, but I wouldn’t snub my nose at a document detailing, say, the location of other places where I might find documents, ones where the feds weren’t raiding.

That would be nice.

But while I did find some mentioning places, I thought it might be that there were no locations or direct involvement, no smoking guns, and nothing bad enough to cause the non-existent members to list to start shifting themselves. It was more a branch than an office.

Given the rooftop's nature, I would guess that they had a radio somewhere around here, and this was a spotting location, not the place where they held all their goodies.

I stowed the odd transactions. They had company names, and with those, I had leads, if not dirt. Some of the correspondences gave names that might be important. Even if they didn’t rattle off full legal names and addresses, I could still use those, too.

There was also dirt, though not on them.

I took that, too, because if the Dam wanted, she could buy extra dirt off of me. A few more government employees under her clawed thumb… Paw should be fine.

“Jacalyn, are you sure it's ok to leave that thing behind you?” Lilly asked, clearly unnerved by something.

“What's wrong with leaving it there? It’s not like it can get up and walk away,” I told her quietly. Besides, I don’t fancy firing a gun in here. The place might go up if kinetics can set them off.”

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“Jacalyn… These explosives… They’re in the walls and floors. Your gun wouldn’t set them off; if it did, someone falling over would be a near-death incident. Moving that desk upstairs roughly would be a death sentence. Slamming a fridge door would cause an actual explosion,” she told me with a little snark, and then, with a little more hesitance, she continued, “but it is still moving. It’s pulling itself out of its shell and moving toward you.”

I turned toward it, looking at its mewling form as it oozed out of the shell of its former self. The eyes of the human body were seemingly empty while also clearly tracking me.

I had to wonder how much was left of her up there. Was she gone?

Maybe she was gone, but something about looking at her face creeped me out even more than the pull she had. It was a kind of weird familiarity like I knew I had bumped into her.

“Her face is freaking me out,” I told Lilly before asking, “Have I met her somewhere? Maybe in a crowd?”

“Hmm? Perhaps. They're your memories, but let me think…” she told me.

I decided to let her cook and folded up the best of the crop, some twenty pages of good stuff among the documents. Stuffing them into my waistband and covering them with my shirt to keep any incoming ick off them, I pulled out my handgun and started pacing back across the room without breaking eye contact, intending to shoot her and be done with it, only for the sound of stomping feet and a shattering door above me to turn my head from her.

“Shit,” I murmured, “Worst fucking timing,” I bemoaned, quickly glimpsing for a panel. I found none because this was a clear add-on.

I could take three paths right here.

I could just fuck off.

I could get to the window and fuck off, leaving the goons to pound sand, but they might get more documents, and we would be right back to where we started.

Then there was the whole, alien in the basement thing going on.

If I left and they came down here, chances were they would go insane… This thing was drawing me to it, and I was kept safe because I had a special rock in my head that let me ignore it. A few mooks? Doubtful they were walking out of this.

And yet, while I didn’t give a singular shit about them, they might get… Infected?

I had no damn idea.

So there was option two: stop fed boy and terror girl from going insane and drinking the alien electro-aid.

Option number three was… Well… Blowing this place sky-high.

I could deny the info, deny the alien thing, probably, and I could quite possibly make this a tomb for the two dipshits that decided they would love nothing more than to strap me to a table and see the faces I made when the clamps came out.

The only catch was I needed to put myself in danger to do so.

It would be perfect if not for just how much was in here. If I tripped the one at the window, I would still get my shit rocked, and it relied on me somehow turning the triggers on.

That made it damn hard to pull off, and quite frankly, I didn’t think It was entirely necessary.

I reached for my smoke, and I lit a cigarette as I thought. The situation was a little stressful, and I needed a little grit. And then I looked down at the lighter, and I figured out a plan four. I decided to take a modified plan one. Running away with a side of arson.

“Have a good afterlife, whatever you are,” I told it, quickly leaning down toward the pile of paper toward the side and pulling out my lighter. The room was cold… But remarkably dry, the pages, organized for my perusal, perfectly stacked next to one another.

They lit up, not explosively, but steadily, and the second I saw the flame moving, I started moving like there was a fire in a cramped space that was packed with plastic explosives. The fire provided enough light that I flipped the switch off and left the creature in the dark as I made my way up the stairs.

“That was far more…” Lilly started, at a loss for words.

“Spontaneous?” I asked because it was a bit of an in-the-moment decision.

“I was thinking more suicidal, but sure… That might make a little more sense,” she said, “I mean, who knows if the fire will even set off the explosives? I’m sure if you in your wisdom have decided it won’t light from a fire.”

“Who said it wasn’t?” I asked her, “That’s the good part.”

It was a lie; I was just trying to stop anyone from coming down and destroying the documents, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. I couldn’t go and make it look like I was a hopeless idiot when doing my side of the work in keeping us alive and well.

I slunk back up the stairs as the smoke rushed alongside me, only for me to tumble into the room as footsteps were marching up toward the door.

I kicked the shelf, but it caught; the same mechanism that stopped it from opening easily slowed the shelf down. It was still closing, just not quick enough to stop the smoke from coming out into the room.

With one gun out and my stuff tucked away, I managed to prepare my weapon and move to the window to cover my escape.

And then, the very obvious light on the side of the tripwire lit up… And I turned to the door as a boot smashed it.

The door bent in, a seam along the back cracked; though the door didn’t fly off its hinges, it was open, and the window was no longer an option for all that. There was a world where I jumped over it in a feat of acrobatics; this world was not that world.

I lined up my gun at shoulder height and considered drawing a second gun, but with the close quarters, it might be useful to grab something.

A goon came in, turned and managed to get out a “Who-” before I shot him just below the collarbone, and he fell backward shrieking.

Two other voices called out in confusion, but one of them came in through the door. As I closed the door, cylinder ratcheting, I moved in, managing to close half the distance. Before he got all the way in and started drawing out his sword, I fired from my hip; the bullet traced its way up and skinned his upper arm, the hot plastic boot over my bullet deforming on impact and shunting the bullet up.

It was nonlethal, but it did loosen the sword from his hands and cause it to slip free and spin through the air. The point caught very conveniently in the carpet with a notable metal click as it taped the magnetic plate halfway between us, its prior holder eyeing the sword and me as he bit back the shout and clamped his teeth together in a hiss.

I cocked my revolver a third time and responded, “Don’t even try it, meathead; turn around, hands against the wall.”

“Like hell Gweilo. You’re toast already, fire or not. We have you surrounded,” The mook said.

This was expected. He was, after all, a mook.

“Buddy, your ass is getting a bullet if you don’t step back right the fuck now. Give a quick look behind me, over at the window. Do you see the little black doo-dad with the green light? That’s hooked up to a truly astounding amount of plastic explosive. Blackbird doesn’t scare me, but twenty tons of spicy plastic does. The goods are gone as is, but if we can’t get a bit of rapport going, I’ll be walking out of this building over your freshly cooling corpses.”

My words didn’t seem to matter until I mentioned the little black box. The plastic, the name of his boss, and the threat managed to get him to take just one step back.

That let me take the one step forward.

My arm snapped out like a viper and snagged the blade, pulling it free. It was a nice little blade, one-edge and just short of three feet. It was clearly military, unadorned and made in the hundred instead of one at a time, a workhorse of a blade, not a piece of art.

“Thanks,” I told him, holding the blade and cocking Righty, “This is mine now. Tell your buddy to put whatever stupid idea he has down.”

The mook was used to taking orders, but when he gave the third man a look, the third man raised his voice above the shouting man and said, “I’m not dropping Cheng, you fucking moron. We need to get him to a medic, not stand in a burning building!”

Well, wasn’t that just swell?

The three of them were tied up, I could nearly walk over them.