Health: 4/5

Assets: 8000 Minneat

Credit: poor, DNL (Do Not Lend)

Status: Nobody

Debt: 35 Million Minneat

Addictions: Minor Siterol addiction - Stage 1, Crippling Zentiaf Addiction - stage 3

Afflictions or Diseases: Frequent Low Level Chemical Poisoning - Chemical Poisoning stage 1, early stages of Emphysema, Microplasmosis, stage 2 Sleep Deprivation

Netscape Identity: NA

Rep: Bottom Line; War Rat

The wind was harsh, slapping my face with weak, cold punches that carried with them the smell of ash and chemicals. The factories in the north were alive; their smokestacks choked the air with vortexes of thick, black clouds. The haze was far off, but ever near.

Stretching out below me was Lowdowns. Vehicles ran in thin lines, marching like orderly ladybugs over thread like streets. From here, the buildings looked like matchstick boxes.

Cherry Hill stretched from the southwest, near Maxway 50, the southbound route out of the city, up to the northwest, ending right up against the industrial zone; it curved around the megapolis, making its western border, squishing right up against Lowtown. Cherry Hill, or Warzone as everyone else called it, was the definition of destitution. Abandoned apartment buildings sat empty, or taken over by squatter gangs, broken down industrial warehouses rotted in disuse, and complete residential areas were forgotten and built atop, paved over by super highways now crumbling and cracking.

Warzone also ran deep underground, layer after layer, for god knows how long. Remnants of super skyscrapers acted like support beams for the crumbling sector and poked up from the ruined concrete and ash-buried roads. They were mostly hollow now, at least the tallest of them, resembling sharp stakes more than structures.

I couldn’t tell you what this building used to be. The inside floors and outer walls had all collapsed, caving down on top of themselves far below in a gigantic pile of ash, rubble, and metal streetside. Only partial concrete floors and the metal skeleton frame remained. But that made it easy to climb through.

At the top, where the air was thin, and the wind blew frigid breezes, there was a flat piece of concrete flooring left from before, large enough to walk around on comfortably. It was sturdy too, so I hoisted up an old squeaky couch and a small table.

This was where I read comics and mags, watched the city lights in LowDowns, ate, sometimes slept, and enjoyed whatever else I could carry up. Up here, I was far, far away from the chaos of Warzone below. And it’s where I was that day, when Mackie climbed up to greet me.

With a grunt, and a stumble of concrete, my peace was interrupted.

“Hey there, boy,” he said, waking me to my disappointment. It had been months since I'd seen Mackie last, and this wasn’t the time for a reunion. Not here in my happy place.

Mackie wasn’t known to turn up just to say hey. Nah, he was here for something.

I kicked my legs off the corroded metal bed table, my footrest, and closed my “Classics” mag I’d been using as an eye mask. Before I said anything, I hid it under the couch cushions.

“Mackie,” I acknowledged.

“Damn. You can see everything up here.” He walked over to the edge and looked down. A shudder visibly ran down his spine.

A sick feeling in my gut started to bubble up. I’d been doing fine so far. Little cash grabs here, some odd jobs there. Cash was coming in. I’d been scrounging well enough on my own. Now, Mackie was here to pull me into some bullshit job that was a fifty-fifty if I’d make money or lose some. I swore I’d resist his offer, but somehow he always pulled me in.

“Damn it’s cold up here,” he continued, walking over and plopping down on the couch next to me. I stiffened up and laid my head back, my thick black rimmed sunglasses covering my eyes. There was another reason I wasn’t in the mood for this.

“That’s why I wear a jacket up here.”

“Yeah, I see that. Always with this fucking coat. What’s with this old thing? Your mother give it to you? Come on, give me some cover.” I’d been wearing it like a blanket and Mackie pulled at the edges.

“Fuck off. Bring your own next time.”

“Yeesh. Touchy subject. I'm sorry." He exaggerated, letting go of the coat. Mackie started fiddling with something on the metal table, a metal keychain a girl in Lowdowns gave me a long time ago, not that I'd tell him that.

"What do you want, Mackie?"

"What’s your deal? Huh? Haven’t seen you in, what… four months? I climb my ass all the way up here and I don’t even get a hey?”

“Hey.”

“Oh, I see.” He leaned over and pushed up my sunglasses. The hazy sunlight burnt my eyes. I’m sure my pupils were the size of golf balls.

“You’re high as fuck, amigo.” He let the sunglasses slip back down. Well, I guess I wasn’t doing as well as I’d said. Here in Cherry Hill everyone had vices, had something bad they were hiding. You needed vices to live here. All the smart people either died or left, and the rest of us just got high instead.

“Nah, I’m coming down off one… hard. My head is killing me.”

“Shit. I know what you need. Here,” he pulled out a modified inhaler, gold painted and grimy. A thick smudgy thumbprint stained one side.

“This’ll pick you up after that downer.” He held it out to me. I weighed taking it versus not.

Inhalers like this were used to administer Masipol, or “mace” as it was called in the street. It was a highly addictive upper, akin to old-school cocaine, except made from completely synthetic materials. Crazies streetside put more than mace in their inhalants, though. An upper sounded good right now, but...

“What’s in it?”

“Mace.”

“...”

“That’s it, I swear.” He chuckled. If my head hadn’t been hurting so bad, I would’ve refused. Instead, I sucked in whatever stimulant concoction was in the little bit of plastic. Instantly I started coughing, my lungs burning, my head spinning. The world turned purple through my sunglasses for a full minute before I recovered.

“Woah! Haha. There he is.” He patted me on the back, kicking out another set of coughs and taking his inhaler back. He leaned over. “Come on, now. Focus up. I got business to talk about.”

“Here we go.” I wasn’t back, but the meds propped me up a bit.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“Hey, this one you’ll be interested in. Big fucking money.”

“The last one was 'big fucking money'”, I mocked, “and it cost me more in bribes for passing warrants than what I earned,” I spat, leaning forward and grabbing a piece of leftover food from the kickstand. It was stale and smelled like the bottom of my shoe. I spit it out, desperately hungry.

“No, not this one. This one is fucking big time. We’re talking a score real gangsters go after.” He leaned in, “Three hundred thou a piece.” I nearly choked on spit.

“How the fuck…”

“You know me. I know my shit. So, amigo, you up for a job? Or what? You wanna keep getting high in your bedroom?” He cracked open a beer he pulled from his pocket, the foam spewing over the can rim.

“Shit. What do you need me for this time? Running routes, netjacking, need me to hose down a whole room with a machine gun?” I said sulking, “Aren’t there more qualified people for whatever it is? Drug deals, info theft and all that shit, I hate doing that stuff. Feels like someone’s gonna shoot me in the back the whole time. And it pays like shit for what we’re doing, you know that?” He took a sip confidently as if he knew what I would say already.

“Settle down, no drug deals. Ah, that stings. No, this time I got a real job. Only problem is…” he nervously tapped his foot in the silence, “We gotta knock over a bank.” I looked at him perplexed. For a full minute I didn’t say anything. He gave me the guilty side eye like a puppy who’d shit on the carpet. Who did he think I was?

“Why the fuck would I try and rob a bank? What do I know about any of that? Are you crazy?”

“Fuck, hermano,” he said, laying his head back, annoyed, “You’d be driving. Don’t worry about the bank. I’ll be doing that myself. Got a couple other guys in on it too. You'd never even step foot inside.” Everything in a bank was automated. What would he actually be stealing?

“Do you have a credit scanner, or a chip card that can hold that amount of money? What are we talking about here? Where even is this bank?”

“Nah, that’s the genius of it,” he took another sip to leave me in suspension, “It’s real bills. Check this out, everything's on cards and credit and shit, right, but not everything everything. People still use cash sometimes. So they gotta store it somewhere, right? And with inflation and all that cash, money means less and less every day. So they gotta end up burning it to get rid of it. It costs these banks more to store it than what it's worth.’

“Well, they transfer a sum of credit to smaller banks and in return, those banks take some of that cash to hold until it's ready to be burned. Of course, they send it to a bunch of smaller banks so they don’t have all this cash sitting around in one place. Trucks come to take it to burn it during the week.”

“They burn the cash?”

“Yeah, it doesn’t mean much to them. I mean shit, there’s so much credit flying around what’s cash worth these days? If it fits in their pockets it's more a hassle than a convenience. And they don’t want it sitting around for someone else to take it, right? They got a million and a half in a bank in LowDown right now, just sitting there waiting to be loaded onto trucks and sent to an incinerator.”

“A million and a half? Damn.”

“Yeah, you’re goddamn right, damn. To them, it’s not worth the gas for the fire, but that’s a lot of change for us.”

“Shit, and if we take it, it’ll cost em more to chase us down. This is free money.” I was impressed.

“Heh. Yeah almost. Gotta take it first.”

“Why is it in Lowdowns?”

“Cus like I said, they don’t want it sitting in their nice fancy bank waiting for smart guys like us to roll it over. They spread it around. I’m sure there are all kinds of scores sitting in LowDowns banks right now. Thing is, this score will be gone by the end of next week.”

“How’d you get all this? Who told you this stuff?” Mackie was from Oldtown. We weren't smart enough to know this stuff.

“Tommy from down the way told me. He and his crew have been knocking over banks in MidCity, making pretty good profit. Apparently, on one of their jobs, they cracked this computer server or something. I don’t know how that shit works. They were looking for transfer schedules and all this other shit, but instead found this neat little idea. Cept, for them it’s pennies. He told me about it. Gave me some of the bank locations.”

Tommy. He was connected to some big gangs in the city. A real gangster. That was convincing.

“Why don’t we hit all of them? There’s gotta be a million in each right?”

“Sure, we could.” He shook his head after another sip, foam slipping down his stubbly chin, “They’ll see that shit coming a mile away after we hit the first bank. They may not want the money, but they ain’t in the charity business. They sense one bank going under, they’ll lock up the rest and wait for us to hit it so they can nab us. I say, for now, it’s one and done, baby.”

“And Tommy told you this for free?”

“Yeah. Unlike you and me, me and him are friends.” It wasn’t inconceivable. The money was just sitting there and for a big time thief like Tommy Scagleroni it would be a waste for someone not to steal it.

“Alright. What’s the rest of the plan?”

“Well, you drive. And uh, I got something a little special for that night." He hesitated. I grimaced. Of course, here it is. The Mackie cherry on top.

"Don't look at me like that. Instead of working with other robbers who are gonna take their own cut, I hired some special help. They’re gonna cause some trouble near the border to Warzone. Keep the cop’s eyes occupied. Then we hit the bank and ship out before they have time to respond.”

“Special help?” A really bad feeling welled up inside me, worse than the other bad feelings Mackie gave me regularly. “Who?”

“I don’t want to tell you.”

“What’re you talking about? Who did you get to help us?”

“Eh. I don’t wanna tell you. You’re not gonna want to do it if I tell you.”

“Shit, Mackie. I’m not gonna do it if you don’t. Who the hell you got working for us that you don’t want to say?” He took a long sip and tossed the empty can off the side of the building. It disappeared into the wind.

“There’s this biker group from Warzone called The Rippers.” My heart jumped.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. Are you serious?” My back came off the couch as I turned to look at him. “How fucking low have you sunk that you’re working with Gangers?”

“Alright, alright.”

“No, seriously. Are you stupid? Were you dropped on your head as a baby? These fuckers– how do you even know gangers?”

“We’re born in the slums, Sleeper. We both know these guys.”

“I don’t know em, I don’t want to know em. I got enough of them when we were running for our lives from them twenty years ago. Fucking shit, man. Now you run with these guys, huh?”

“I don’t run with them. Are you crazy? I just sell some shit sometimes.”

“I don’t want anything to do with them. Fuck that. You do it on your own this time.”

“Come on. We hit the bank, pay our cut, and get out. It’s easy money.”

“These guys, Mackie, they’re gonna knife you in the back. They don’t do jobs. They rape and murder and steal however they want.” Suddenly, he jumped in my face.

“You don’t tell me that! I know that. I've fucking known it longer than you’ve been kicking around.” I backed off. Mackie was dangerous. And even from me he would only take so much.

He huffed out a frustrated breath.

“You don’t want the fucking job, don’t take it. You’re a driver and a good one. But I didn’t just come here cus I know you want the money," he said, calmer. “I came here cus you’re my friend. But I can find someone else.”

I sighed. My frustration had been pent up for a long time, but now that I’d exploded, a part of me wished I hadn’t.

“Don’t do this shit, Mackie. Not with them.” I begged.

“Nah, it has to be them. They don’t mean shit to me. I don’t care what happens to these guys. If they try to rip me off, which they will, I won't have to worry about salvaging rep or any of that shit. I don’t mind ripping them off either, if it comes to that.’

“These are guys stupid, Sleeper. Easy. We grab our dough and go. And fuck whatever happens to those pieces of shit. We take three other guys on the job, get our bags, and dump the losers in our smoke. The cops, the streets, whatever gets em will be good enough for me… Come on. There’s a reason I came to you, Sleeper. And you need that money… to get out of here.”

He was right. That money would go a long way to getting me out of this place. Shit, I hadn’t been doing so well on my own anyways, I had to admit. A little bit slipped through my fingers all the time. Some credit here, a buck there. Another pill. Quick food. A place to stay. Over time, it adds up. And these nickel and dime jobs… made me lose sleep overthinking in bed. I couldn’t help but feel like I’d be stuck here forever. Maybe it was time I admit that.

The gangers were a problem, though. They were expendable, sure, but I don’t think he truly understood how savage they were. I think that part of him was numb to it all, the danger. There was a guarantee these guys were going to try and screw us one way or another. And they don’t leave survivors. Not functioning anyways.

But I didn’t say yes because of the money, though it was a nice incentive. He needed someone he could trust, and… fuck it. He didn’t have anybody else. Neither did I.