The assault rifle was strapped back onto the courier bag, and the revolver, along with a bunch of ammo, was sitting on the roof while Trace adjusted everything. The waist strap would keep the bag in place, but since he so rarely used it, setting it up was a tad finicky. At last, he shoved the loose ammo into his pockets and held the revolver at the ready.

The building had continued to tremble every dozen seconds or so, as the people below all bumbled about. Suddenly, there was the sound of glass breaking as one of the large, reinforced windowpanes cracked.

Hurrying over to the edge, they leaned over and looked down, trying to see what was going on.

From their position, it was impossible to tell which floor it was, but one of the windowpanes had actually been partially pushed out. Cracks spider-webbed all across its surface, while bolts glistened where the pressure had sheared them off at the quick. There were a few more bolts holding it on near the bottom, but it would only take one more good hit to snap them in the exact same way. Even without the hit, the weight of the window alone might be enough to send it plummeting to the ground, given enough time.

Farther down, something similar occurred. The hit was weaker, so while the window cracked, it didn’t break any of the bolts holding it in place.

Monroe looked up at the sky, a grin on his face. “Thank you steel goddess Meredith! It’s a berserk drug alright, but with such a strong dose they have completely lost their minds. It doesn’t seem like they can even tell friend from foe in their current state. With any luck, we can just stay up here where it’s safe until their hearts all give out.”

“Don’t you believe in jinxes?” Trace muttered, glancing nervously over at the door.

“Not when they look like that,” Monroe directed his attention down to the first window. A brute with blown-out veins all over his head was being pressed against it, while veiny-fingers that writhed under the pressure they were exerting were wrapped around his vein-thickened throat. “I take it you have never seen what the berserk drug does to a person?”

Trace shook his head in horrified fascination.

“Extreme adrenaline overload, and who knows what else they have shoved in this cocktail,” Monroe told him dispassionately. “Look at their eyes, then their necks, and anywhere else they have cyberware. You’ll understand then.”

It took him a second, but sure enough, there it was, blood leaking out around the edges of the ocular implants. The NetConnect in the neck of the man strangling him had taken on a distinctly crooked appearance and was also leaking blood. Neither of them had any other visible cyberware augments, but just those two were enough for Trace to understand.

“They’re destroying their own connections. They really have lost their minds,” He muttered.

Monroe nodded. “The more of the drug they take, the stronger they become, but in turn, the less effective they will actually be. Even if they somehow managed to survive a massive dose like this without their hearts literally exploding, all their cyberware and connections would be ruined.”

The window gave out and the two berserk people fell to the ground stories below, alongside the heavy windowpane. They landed amidst shards of glass, their broken bodies getting cut to shreds as they screamed at each other and crawled toward the other. Neither cared about the pain or the blood they were losing. It was doubtful that they could even feel the pain through all the drugs coursing through their system.

There was a crash on the side of the building as the concrete walls were the next to take a beating from the berserkers inside.

“Well, this is fun, but I think I’m going to prep a message for Stick-Point,” Trace took a few pictures of the situation and sent them off to the man, only then seeing that he had gotten a message from him. In the rush of excitement, after he had sent the original pictures, he hadn’t noticed the incoming message notification.

Thankfully, the message was just asking for more details, and not something more serious. Though he imagined the man was starting to get a tad annoyed with him by now. He quickly put the first part of the message together and sent it off, then the second part a minute later.

“How’s it looking?” He asked Monroe, as he had stopped paying attention to everything while he put the messages together.

“It’s starting to slow down, I think. There are a few bulges in the wall, and two more windows were completely taken out of the wall. That’s not counting all the ones that were cracked or partially shoved out.” He shrugged. “They did a lot of damage in a short amount of time, both to themselves and the building. I don’t think any more gangs will be using this place anytime soon.”

“Alright, well, I’m going to put this thing back in my bag. I want to take this chance to look around the area while we wait a little longer.”

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Monroe retrieved the sniper rifle from the watcher Trace had shot earlier, while he stored the revolver and ammo.

“Thanks.” He said as he accepted the long gun from the bigger man. The scope attached to the sniper rifle was barely better than the one on his scout rifle. Every little bit helped, or at least that was what he was hoping.

Over the next few minutes, Trace spotted the locations of over a dozen more watchers spread throughout the area. None of them were close enough to have seen what happened at their location. Only the one watcher had been carrying a sniper rifle. All the rest that they had come across had been carrying scout rifles with crappy scopes or assault rifles.

They were there to keep an eye on the roads near them, not areas in the distance.

While that was comforting knowledge, it didn’t help Trace at the moment. He was trying to find their other base and having no luck. There was some traffic on the roads, and he could even distantly see people moving about. However, he was fairly certain that the people were wastelanders from Parker. The same was likely true for the vehicles.

He wasn’t seeing any that looked as though they were going in a different direction than the others or anything that would have marked them as suspicious.

With a click of his tongue, he swapped corners and began inspecting a different area. This time he was looking more north-east, in the direction behind the store, where the most damage from the wars was still visible.

There were fewer watchers over there, that was immediately obvious. The blown-out remains of a lifted highway, maybe a mile and a half distant, was the big cutoff point. Everything beyond it was inaccessible due to all the rubble. The highway cut a devastating line across the landscape, interrupting everything for miles.

Only a little way behind the old grocery store, Trace found what he was looking for. Whatever the building had once been, it looked as though it had gotten turned into a military outpost during one of the wars and then forgotten about. The original sign for the building had long since been destroyed. The sign that was currently on it called the place the ‘Parker Rec Second Battalion’.

Regardless of what the sign did or didn’t say, the parking lot in front of the building was packed with vehicles. This was the place they were looking for.

“Hey Monroe, look at this place.” Trace handed him the sniper rifle and pointed to the building in the distance. “I think I found the main base we were looking for.”

“Well, it’s certainly suspicious looking, I’ll give you that, and all those vehicles look like they belong to raiders instead of honest wastelanders.” He laid the rifle on the edge of the roof and took a moment to think. “With how close they are to this place; the odds are good that you’re right. I’d like confirmation though, before we send any other teams of edgers in to take them out though.”

“Obviously, we aren’t trying to get innocents killed.” Trace agreed. He used the scope to take a few photos and then put the rifle back down. It wasn’t a gun he was interested in lugging around. If it was still there when they came back to strip the place of loot, he might grab it then just to sell it for a few extra credits.

“You ready to head on down? I haven’t heard anything for a couple of minutes now.”

Opening the door, they slowly made their way down the stairs. Both were ready to hold their breath and or run at a moment's notice. The door to the ninth floor had a massive dent in it, and the upper corner on the inside had been pushed away from the frame. As a result, when Trace tried to open the door, it wouldn’t move more than a few inches before running into the bent upper-corner.

The next floor down revealed a little more about how the drug operation worked, as did the subsequent floors. They stopped on the sixth floor to stare at the remains of everything, understanding how much work had gone into putting this operation together.

The initial drug formula was all mixed together in the containers on the ninth floor. Then it was piped down to the eighth floor, where it was divided and diluted into the different strength mixtures. From there, it was sent down to the seventh floor, where each strength mixture had the inhaler propellant added to it in pressurized chambers.

Finally, on the sixth floor was where the inhaler filling stations were, and the bulk of where the workers had been.

As they stopped on each floor, Trace made sure to document everything and send the pictures to Stick-Point. This operation might have only just recently had a job put out against them, but they had clearly been doing this for at least a couple of years.

The fifth floor was divided between a sleeping and cooking area. The canned food they saw in the back made both of their stomachs growl in hunger. Those were real canned food, not the questionable food items that they were able to buy these days.

No, those had such old labels on them that they crumbled to dust as soon as they were touched. The food inside was horribly expired, but on the off-chance, you got one that was even halfway good… the taste would blow you away. Corporations in their day and age simply didn’t care about preserving the original taste of the vegetables or meat. They wanted to create their own flavors.

“We had already planned to come back here and fetch some items, right?” Monroe croaked, his eyes never leaving the cans.

“Yeah,” Trace coughed and tried again, more forcefully. “Yeah, I’d say doing so just became a lot more urgent, too. We can’t leave those around for another team to find.”

They skipped the remainder of the floors and ran the rest of the way down the stairs. Screw staying quiet, or moving stealthily, they had potentially some of the best food they would ever eat on the line. They needed to get back to their vehicles as soon as they could.

Side by side, they hit the ground floor and burst back out into the burning sunlight. With their minds occupied with thoughts of delicious food, it was easy to ignore the mounds of broken bodies on the ground.

The trip back to the truck and van took only ten minutes, and then two-minutes for them to drive back. Yet, in that short amount of time that they had been gone, three cars had parked directly in front of all the bodies.

Deciding he wasn’t going to have that; Trace drove right over the corpses and as close to the doors as he could get. Monroe tried to follow after him, but his van didn’t have enough clearance to repeat it. All he managed to do was shove the bodies to the side and then skid to a stop beside the stairs near the entryway.

Trace unstrapped his assault rifle and headed back inside the building. Those were their cans of FOOD!