Chapter 3

“King’s fucking balls!” Shin screamed in panic. He instinctively wheeled the car out of the line of fire and straight into the ditch.

Shin winced as he heard the fender crunch when the car slammed into the embankment on the other side of the ditch. It was half from grief for his beautiful car, and half from the impact throwing them violently against their seatbelts. They came to rest at a 45-degree angle.

Shin, at least, would be nursing a nasty bruise for the next few days. But his magnificent chariot had suffered vast cosmetic damage, scarring her beauty, and wounding her pride. He placed a hand on the dashboard, and had a very brief moment of silence for the terrible suffering of his lady fair.

Dmitri glared at Shin, purposely saying absolutely nothing. But his flat stare spoke volumes.

“Not one word,” Shin hissed. “My baby has been shot, and now she’s laying wounded in a ditch, and I don’t need any of your fuckin’ sass!”

Shin turned off the engine and fought the urge to flee. Running would only make her angrier. He braced against the steering wheel. He unbuckled his seatbelt and clambered over the side of his wounded car. Dmitri stumbled out the other side, nearly tripping on his seat belt.

“Sally!” He yelled at the top of his lungs. “Thank you kindly for making that a warning shot! If we’d been whoever you were actually expecting, I’m sure you'd have scared us off!”

“I knew it was you, Asado. Nobody else would have the balls to drive a car that ugly!” She shouted back. “And that wasn’t a warning shot, I missed. You’re not welcome here after what you pawned off on me last time!”

Shin's brows knitted together, nothing he’d sold to her had been defective or substandard. Not this time. That he knew of, anyway. “You don’t miss!” He countered.

“You damn near blinded me with the paint job on that ugly pavement princess you pranced in on!” She countered.

Dmitri made a gesture of circling one index finger around a closed fist, asking if he should try and flank her.

“Only if you want a gut full of lead,” Shin hissed, making a face like he’d bitten into a lemon. “That’ll just piss her off! People who piss her off get closed casket funerals!”

He crouched down behind a large rock and brushed the dust off of one of his nicest dress shirts. It had been fresh from the cleaning service and neatly pressed. Seeing it in this state pained him nearly as much as the state of the lilac bombast.

“You get that ugly piece of shit out of my ditch! Turn around and go back the way you came, or King help me, I’ll send you to meet your ancestors!” She threatened.

“I don’t know what you think is wrong with what I sold you, but we can work this out like civilized people!” Shin offered.

“You know exactly what’s wrong with it. That’s why you sold it to me, you cheat!” She countered.

“Come on, Sally!” a slight whine to his yell. “You know I don’t lie to friends or family anymore!”

“We ain’t friends, and I’m certainly not related to a little Asado crotch-goblin like you! I ought to throw this damn grenade on your head for selling me a Hellbender without its control system!” She declared.

Dmitri’s eyes grew panicky. He looked imploringly at Shin. Dmitri had a bad history with explosions, which was part of the reason he was quite literally half the man he used to be.

“What control system?!” Shin demanded in exasperated confusion. “The thing just mounts onto the hull and plugs into the damn transport computer!”

“No, you jumped up little peacock, it doesn’t.” She all but screamed. “The control unit regulates the plasma flow. The capacitor is liable to blow without it. And it'll blow harder than that diseased ten-crown hooker mother of yours!”

“Leave my mother out of this!” Shin snapped back angrily. His mother hadn’t precisely been a credit to the species if he was being honest. But those were half of his genes she was slandering. “And it doesn’t matter, we’re here to buy the damn thing back from you!”

“You crooked little shit.” She shouted back, “Were you trying to use me as a payday loan? You left that thing without its control unit so you could come back and get it later because you knew I couldn’t sell it?””

“Isn’t that what pawn shops are for?” Shin asked in genuine confusion at how pissed she was. “I’m coming out. Please don’t get blood on my favorite shirt.”

“Come out real slow, and bring beefcake with you.” She growled, “Keep your hands where I can see ‘em.”

Shin gestured to Dmitri to get the suitcase from the back seat and follow him, earning a skeptical glance. “I have no idea what’s gotten into her, but she’s probably not going to kill us,” Shin assured him. It wasn’t a lie. She’d probably just wound them.

Dmitri did not look reassured, but he followed suit as Shin rose from the ditch. They put their hands in the air as they marched up the dusty, loose gravel slope to face the music.

“There you are!” Shin said, feigning joy to see the wrinkled, leathery face of Sally ‘Pale Rider’ Perez.

Sandy Perez had been the terror of the outskirts. Even now, the 4’11 woman looked like she could bite the head off of a half-ton borot frog if she could get her mouth around it.

“Hello, ma’am!” Shin replied, and presented himself, “Here is your doting nephew, grandson, person with arms in the air because I know you’d never shoot an unarmed man!”

“Please,” Dmitri looked at Sally in desperation, “The filthy svoloch' might have all the moral fiber of an hourly rate hotel, but he is not lying to anyone but himself, today.”

“That’s your play to try and keep me from using his hide as a floor mat for the women’s restroom?” Sally asked in astonishment.

“Yes?...”

“It’s not exactly convincing.”

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“...Please don’t kill him because he is my boss?”

Shin looked back and forth between the two, aghast.

“You get one more try,”

“Please don’t kill him because… Fluffy will be sad?”

“Fine, I guess I care enough about the little purple doodlebug to hear him out. Now, start talking,” she hissed, aiming a rifle longer than she was tall at Shin’s center of mass.

“Look, I’m sorry, I didn’t know there were any separate pieces, and I have enough money to pay you back in full, in cash! All 70,000 nBits worth!”

“How do I know you’re telling the truth, for once?” she asked, bringing the scope to her eye.

Shin breathed in, then out. She was really pissed this time. “I swear on Big Time Asado’s grave, I didn’t know there was a separate control unit.” He said, resting his palm on the sheath of the dagger. It was his only remaining keepsake of the man who kept him from being dragged off to the cult his parents had bought into.

“Boy,” She growled, “This is the last time you ever get to invoke Big Times name to me.” She lowered the rifle.

“Can we put our arms down now, Sally?” He asked.

“Put ‘em down, boys, Slow.” She said with reluctance.

Looking at each other, the two men dropped their arms slowly.

“Dmitri.” Sally nodded to the burly cyborg.

“Perez.” He nodded back.

“No stupid coat today?” She quirked an eyebrow.

“I think it’s in the ditch.”

Sally snorted, “That’s a good place for it. I never understood why you Slavic cultural revivalists insist on dressing in trade attire. Why in the world would you want to wear a railroad worker uniform?”

Dmitri simply shrugged. “My little girls say I look better in a princess dress, but I don’t think I have the legs for it.”

“Thank you for trusting me, this was a genuine misunderstanding,” Shin said in relief. “I know you’d never really shoot me.”

Overflowing with irritation, Sally fired from the hip and shot him right in the foot.

* * *

“I can’t believe you shot me!” Shin said, for the fifth time since Sally had let Dmitri drag him inside the shop to patch him up. She’d let him roll around in the dirt and howl for a minute before she let Dmitri help him up.

He’d taken off his bloody shoes and socks. He has been given enough medical gel to stop the bleeding. It would close the wound and fix the internal damage in a few hours but still be quite painful in the meantime.

Dmitri had been sent around back. Her helpers waiting there would help load the hellbender into the back seat of the car. Dmitri had gotten his poor, beautiful baby girl out of the ditch, scratching her paint even more in the process.

“So you keep saying,” Sally growled from across the small sitting room. The front of her establishment was packed wall to wall with ancient treasures—or maybe just junk, depending on who you asked.

When he was little, Shin thought this was the most interesting place in the world. All the anachronistic technology fascinated him and colored his perception of the world. If there was any place on Siluria that was squarely to blame for his bizarre tastes, it was this store.

Sally was like his grandpa, a firm proponent of using the minimum level of technology or magic to get the desired outcome, that had colored his thinking even further.

There was a brief period of time when they thought the Phantom Husks could sense electronics. Engineers had cobbled together a new generation of analog technology, but now it was shunned. But to Shin, the buttons, dials, and levers felt more real. They were more tactile than modern technology.

“I just though-”

“Actions have consequences, boy. About time you learned that.” Sally snorted.

Shin’s eyes turned cold, “You think I don’t know that?! What was that even a consequence of? I told you I made an honest mistake. What crawled up your ass this morning?” He hissed through his teeth.

“I don’t think you do know about consequences,” Sally folded her arms. “You’re too much like that god damn woman your father married. Convinced the world will just fall in line with whatever you say, regardless of the truth.”

“Yeah, that’s exactly how it is,” he agreed, “And I didn’t learn anything when I watched everything I loved and cared for die.”

“Oh really, and what did you learn from that?”

“I learned enough.” Shin bridled at the dismissal of his progress toward bettering himself.

“Did you, now?” She asked in a raspy tone, “Paid an awful lot to learn 'enough,' though, don't you think?" She stared holes into him.

"Watch it. I'm not in the mood for this right now."

"Was Razor in the mood for it when you shoved him right into the arms of that husk to save your own worthless hide? Think he was in the mood for it when he screamed your name while it was sucking him down?!"

Shin was out of his seat in a flash, Payday drawn in his left hand and the balisong knife he’d flicked out of his sleeve in his right.

“Are you trying to get my goat, lady?” He snarled, and tried to reign in the red haze that threatened to rise up and take control.

“Trying to get you to give a shit,” she countered. The handgun she’d pulled from beneath a crocheted old lady pillow on her couch was aimed right at Shin’s center of mass. “Your Uncle Heckler passed through here for the first time in a while the other day. I told him he should forgive you, and take your crew on so you can get some decent jobs. He told me the whole story.”

Shin clenched his fists and gritted his teeth.

“Your client fucked up, and you idiots found yourself running for your life from a B-Class husk, and it was gaining on you. Does that sound familiar?” She demanded.

“Your uncles were above you. Razor reaches down to haul you up, but the husk was too close, and you’d never make it. You needed a distraction.”

“Sally…”

“So you sacrificed your own flesh and blood. You yanked him off the ledge and right into the Husk, and climbed up while it ate him. The way you told it, I thought the Husk had gotten in your head and pushed you a little around the bend, but that sounds an awful lot like something a clear headed person would decide to do.”

Shin’s face fell as the memory threatened to overtake him.

"That's the expression I was looking for," Sally said bitterly. "Anger, shame, disgust."

She stood with a grunt, "But do you know what else I see?"

"What?" Shin all but growled.

"Cowardice." She told him "You're a man who will do anything to save himself when the chips are down. None of your team are safe with you. Sooner or later you'll get them all killed if you think it’ll save your own worthless skin."

Shin trembled with rage. There were things you didn’t say to a person - even if they were true - and not expect to get a knife in your kidneys. But sometimes, you simply deserved it. Sometimes, you just had to take it and walk away.

“You have no idea of the hell I put myself through after that,” Shin accused, "And I’m not going to put myself back through that just because you decided all of a sudden to unforgive me because Heckler decided to be an even bigger piece of shit than usual."

He straightened up and sheathed his dagger, vanishing his balisong back to where it had come from with a flick of his wrist. “I’m not going to give you the satisfaction. You’ve been paid in bits and blood. My past mistakes aren’t debts I owe to you. I’ll sort them out myself. I’m going, you bitter old hag.”

“Heckler went back to look.” Sally said to Shin’s back. “Razors a husk, now. Heckler says it screams your name. Said it was your job to lay him to rest.”

Shin paused only briefly, but for once, he had nothing to say.