[WATSON NORTHSIDE INDUSTRIAL DISTRICT- LONGSHORE NORTH AND EISENHOWER]

  Tuesday| 29 JUN 2077 | 18:43

  [PACIFICA, PARTS OF NORTHSIDE, KABUKI, AND ARROYO FLOODED. MAYOR DECLARES ONGOING DISASTER.]

  Time slowed. Will hadn’t realized he’d activated his cyberware until the warm gooey sensation spread across his body. He began noticing everything in hyper-detail as his Sandevistan hummed inside his head. In the darkness, he couldn’t see the dust particles in the air, but he could feel them landing upon the bare skin between the techgogs and his mask. Beads of sweat formed on his skin only to be absorbed by the damp cotton t-shirt beneath his armored jacket. The rusted filing cabinet felt cool on his back. It was somewhat peaceful in those few seconds that passed while certain death approached. Then, after accepting the unwinnable fight as a foregone conclusion, he noticed the bottle of bleach resting against his knee. He lifted it gently, removing the cap and letting it pour out onto the floor of the cramped storage room, filling the room with noxious fumes. He disengaged his Sandevistan a moment later.

  The Punisher that had caught his scent earlier sniffed the air again. “Li te nan chanm sa a mwens pase inèdtan de sa. èske ou tande anyen?”

  Stillness.

  “Non. Anyen.”

  Will was still holding his breath. It’d been almost two minutes, the bioware respiratory tuning had apparently been fully integrated. He barely felt the need for more oxygen, but he didn’t know how far he could push it. Luckily, the Voodoo Boys were on their way out (and in a hurry) as his lungs began to feel the mild strain. It became clear to him as to why when the sound of the distant police sirens hit his ears. He let himself breathe again. The Punishers were gone. He could hear them climbing the stairs. Then, the sound of car doors slamming shut and a vehicle driving away through the downpour.

  Emerging from the storage closet, Will was struck hard by the sight. With grisly carnage right out of a horror movie all around him, he forced himself to move.

  The two scavs that had been preparing to chop Big Red into pieces were now themselves lying lifeless on the concrete floor, their arms and legs flung a short distance from their bodies. He walked through the scav hideout silently, scouting for drops and casually assessing the damage. Thirteen dead. Including two whom Will hadn’t even known were in the building, were killed in their beds. All in all, a typical Tuesday evening for Northside.

  Will didn’t waste time lamenting things he couldn’t change. Instead, he gathered what he could from the bodies that weren’t too horrifically mutilated by blade or shotgun slug. A few hundred eddies in cash and a single money shard that held nine hundred eddies were his reward. The Punishers hadn’t seemed very interested in looting. They hadn’t come to rob the place. Will had to assume the hit was related to the stolen cargo and not some opportunistic raid under the cover of the storm. For one, Voodoo Boys didn’t venture outside of Pacifica without reason. It would have been an awfully strange coincidence for them to have wiped out an entire den of scavs the same hour that the deal between Big Red and Ringer had gone to shit. Perhaps the cell phone in Will’s pocket would provide some clues.

  The sirens were getting closer. Will needed to leave now. Yet, something about the setup made him hesitate. He took one last look around the basement, then headed to what was left of the door to the stairs before freezing, sensing something off. He scanned the path with his techgogs and found it. It was a motion-sensor claymore that had been almost perfectly concealed upon the entranceway. It was only thanks to Will’s paranoia that he’d avoided having his legs blown off.

  The Punishers had decided to leave a nasty surprise behind for anyone unlucky enough to come this way. Will had to wonder if it was for him or for the hapless cops that would have stumbled onto the scene. Carefully, he deactivated the explosive device and placed it into his large jacket pocket. It might come in handy tonight, he thought. Sirens. Right! Time to move. Will could hear them just outside the apartment building now, so he opted to climb the elevator wire to the second floor to find another way out. He flew up the wire with ease in under thirty seconds, bioware on full display. It had been a long day, he had navigated a conversation with a dangerous sociopathic professional fighter, witnessed a man’s last breath, and then nearly been caught and killed by Voodoo Boy Punishers in a scav crew’s basement. His brain was done, but his body still surged with energy. He counted his blessings.

  Will pried the unpowered shaft door open with his bare hands and climbed over the bookshelf someone had placed in front of it. He turned to his left and found an apartment with an unpowered door. It was blocked by a couch and looked like it hadn’t been opened in weeks. In the back of his mind, he wondered how bad the conditions would have to be for any space in Night City to be blocked off. Will heard the sounds of authority from below as cops entered the building and immediately secured the stairwell. Will gently lifted the couch away from the door and began pulling the unpowered door open. He had almost gotten it open far enough to squeeze through when he heard the rack of a shotgun just over his shoulder.

  “Give me a reason, choom.”

  That voice. Will glanced over and saw the figure standing with a shotgun. It was a Night City classic, the M2038 Tactician from Constitutional Arms. Will had one just like it beneath the front desk at Kowalski’s clinic. It was a reliable weapon, unlike the man who wielded it. Sergeant Aaron McCarlson, a self-serving prick from Vice.

  “Good evening, Sarge. Wanna lower that barrel?” Will said, calmer than even he expected.

  “Do I know you?”

  “Homicide division. Once upon a time.”

  “What happened in the basement?” McCarlson asked. The M2038 still aimed at Will.

  “It was a massacre. No survivors,” Will answered. It was close to the truth, but vague enough to give the Sergeant second thoughts about pulling the trigger. The cops down in the basement could be heard yelling all the way up from the second floor. The look on McCarlson’s face said he was thinking things over. He lowered the shotgun.

  “Thanks. Scavs make shitty neighbors. You get out of here, I'll handle the boys downstairs, detective.”

  The title felt wrong coming from the mouth of someone like McCarlson. Will didn't stop to complain. He entered the pitch-black apartment and exited through the door to the fire escape and into the storm. Somehow, the rain had increased in intensity.

  The descent down the fire escape into foot-deep water took seconds. Then Will was splashing through the darkened streets back to the van as police lights strobed menacingly. He didn't envy them for the mess they were left to clean up, but it could have been worse. The claymore in Will's jacket felt heavy suddenly. It could have been waiting for them. He still had only guesses as to why the Voodoo Boys had sent in Punishers to deal with a low-level crew on the other side of Night City. Had the claymore been just a final act of cruelty? A distraction to tie up the cops with casualties so they couldn't pursue?

  When Will got to the van, he punched in the address for the Megapax Export storage facility just a few miles away. Even in this weather, it'd be a short trip, so Will would have little time to figure things out before his competition did.

  Will opened up Big Red's cellphone and started reading. The screen was opened to an outgoing message that had never been sent. It read, “Sorry, boys, seems that everything I touched turned to shit. Your stuff is safe in my unit. Code’s 495094. Mind Miranda.”

  Had he written this before the meet with Ringer, or was this written as he lay bleeding out on the floor? There was no timestamp to tell when he'd grown a conscience, and at this point, Will didn't think it really mattered.

  There were other messages between Red and Ringer. Vague wording about merchandise. Nothing that would have held up in court, but enough to help Will understand how it started. Small thefts at first. The kinds of stuff you can justify to yourself. Nobody’d miss one UV grow lamp. A box of heirloom seeds here, a water filter there. It had escalated. Big.

  In what little time he had, he put the pieces together. The big deal was the truck. Half up front, twenty-five thousand eddies on a cred chip before the handoff, then another twenty-five thousand wired to an encrypted account after they confirmed the location of the goods.

  Fifty grand seemed like a big haul for a scav crew. It wasn't impossible. It just didn't fit right. Throw in the Voodoo Boys to the mix, and the whole thing just felt off. Then, of course, there were the messages to, an unknown contact. Thankfully, one mystery was cleared up by these. The ‘meet’ at the No-Tell Motel wasn't with a buyer or a joytoy. Big Red had an output he'd met from, of all places, drug rehab. Once Red had secured the money, they were going to head out to Chicago. Start over. She was probably still waiting for him at the motel. He stopped reading as the van pulled into the courtyard. Beneath the shadow of an ominous power pylon was Megapax Export. Will could see the truck through the downpour, parked at an angle to the door of Big Red’s storage unit. Red must have unloaded the cargo and covered the truck with a tarp to prevent anyone from identifying it from the road or sky. In this weather, it served more to keep the truck dry than it did to keep it hidden. Will drove on the other side of it, concealing the van from the road in case the rain ever did decide to stop falling.

  As he stepped out into the mud, he wished he had brought his raincoat. His clothes were soaked and starting to chafe his top layer of skin. The bioware procedure had toughened the dermis and subcutaneous layers to the point of stopping small caliber bullets from penetrating his body, but his outer skin still bruised and itched like normal.

  Will checked the back of the truck and confirmed it was empty. Big Red had left nothing except for a few broken wooden pallets. Will checked the keypad to the side of the rolling door, saw Red’s name, and entered the code. This was where Red had offloaded the cargo, but why move it at all? Just to make more work for the scavs? Will gripped the handles at the bottom of the door and started lifting. One thought continued to bug him. The Twins hadn't known that Big Red had an output, but his message to them mentioned a woman's name he apparently expected them to recognize. ‘Mind Miranda.’ Who was Miranda?

  The roller door was heavy. Even with his new increased strength, he had to pull hard until it was at chest level. He was about to push the roller the rest of the way up when a little red dot appeared over his heart.

  Oh crap.

  His Sandevistan activated. He could feel the individual drops of rain as they made contact with his clothes. Time felt sticky again as he turned away from the laser sighting of the turret too late. Three cracks split the world open. His only saving grace was that the rounds were 7.62x51mm NATO standard-rated full-metal jacket and not something more serious. His Street Operator jacket by itself wasn't enough to stop them, but the ceramic plate he'd inserted over his heart took the rounds as easily as you could expect. The kinetic energy, however, kept traveling through the armor and into Will. He was already spinning in slow motion when the next two rounds hit at an angle, cracking the plate and ricocheting off into the night.

  The pain from the shots dragged on longer than he’d have liked, thanks to the Sandevistan, and he felt the blows in more exquisite detail than if he had been experiencing time at the normal rate. It was torture. The kind of torture that kept you alive.

  Will's body rolled along the ground as the rolling door slammed down, and his Sandevistan disengaged. He could hear the whirring of the turret die down as its target vanished from sight. So that was Miranda.

  Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

  Will pulled out the cracked cell phone he'd been given by Red and searched the apps as he lay down in the mud. There it was, a lonely little icon labeled Miranda. He opened it and deactivated the turret, then continued to lie there for a moment, grimacing in pain. Hopefully, no one heard that. Had anyone heard? Will sat up too fast, regretted it, but scrambled to his feet. If the Punishers had heard, they could be headed this way. The rain was his best friend at the moment, but with the right cyberware, someone could at least be pointed in the general direction. That somebody could also have Will’s scent. He needed to hurry. So Will made a phone call.

  “Calling so soon, huh? You better not be asking for a date.”

  It was Jamal, the bouncer at the Tripple Xtreme Gym. The fact that he had taken the call at all was a good sign. Will didn’t waste time.

  “Nothing romantic, but I need help moving some cargo over on Leru Street at the Megapax Export. Four hundred eddies for twenty minutes of work. Same for Rico if he's available.”

  “It'll take a minute in this rain, but sure. Five hundred eddies, though.”

  “Works for me. Oh, so that you know, there might be a couple of Voodoo Boys Punishers looking for this cargo. I’ll understand if that’s a deal-breaker.”

  Jamal went silent for a moment. “Scrap, what the Hell have you been up to today? Nevermind, it doesn’t matter. We’ll be there in about thirty minutes.”

  Thirty minutes. Will hoped it would be soon enough.

  [WATSON NORTHSIDE INDUSTRIAL DISTRICT- LERU STREET]

  Tuesday| 29 JUN 2077 | 19:45

  [REAR END COLLISION CAUSES MAHIR MT28 COACH BUS TO DRIVE OFF CORONADO BAY BRIDGE. ZERO SURVIVORS.]

  When you don’t know if your enemies are heading your way, assume the worst. That’s what Will did as he waited for his newfound friends in the Animals gang to show up. He’d gotten the roller door to Big Red’s storage unit open again and took remote control of the turret and the security camera over the door through his external Agent. The old NATO rounds weren’t going to put a dent into a borg, but they might distract the Voodoo Boys long enough before his backup arrived. He moved the truck towards the back of the courtyard, not out of sight, but far enough from the Leru Street entrance to pull his enemies into a trap.

  The Claymore motion sensor mine got deployed behind a rusted burn barrel in the most likely path the Punishers would take coming from the road. If they came from a different direction, he thought he might be able to lead them into it if he lived long enough. After he’d run out of traps to set, he walked across the courtyard and broke into an unoccupied storage unit directly across from Red’s, then pulled the roller door down. He didn’t try to hide his scent. If the Punishers came, he wanted them to head to his position first and catch them in the crossfire once they got into the firing zone. There was nothing else he could do except hope that he was wasting his time. He checked his magazines for the tenth time (he only had three) as he squatted with his back against the wall of the unit. It was a strange feeling, preparing for a battle that might not come.

  The rain stopped abruptly. If the Punisher that had caught his scent at the scav basement was within a mile or two, all he’d need to do was stick his nose out to find him. Of course, Will had another option. He could run, leave the cargo behind. Set the Animals and the Voodoo Boys on eachother, then come back and clean up the mess. Most mercs wouldn’t bat an eye at that sort of thing. Might even call it a smart use of his resources. Will didn’t think he could live with that, though. He kept checking the time through the beat-up Agent in his hands, wondering who would come first. He didn’t have to wait long to find out.

  A vehicle pulled into the entrance. Will monitored from the Agent’s connection to the security camera as two figures in black trench coats exited the car, a Mizutani Hozuki MH2, a modest vehicle one might not expect to be the ride of two professional killers for one of the more dangerous gangs in all of Night City. The two Punishers looked exactly as Will had expected them to look. One was tall and bulky, holding a sledgehammer with two chrome gorilla arms. The other was of average height and slim, carrying an Arasaka Shigure SMG with an extended magazine. Sledgehammer scanned the courtyard, spotting the security camera, but didn’t seem to consider it a threat as he went back to sweeping the area with his eyes. After a few seconds, Slim sniffed the air, then turned to Will’s hiding spot and pointed.

  Planning out an ambush and actually carrying it out are two very different things. On the outside, Will looked steady, even fearless, but inside, he was shaking. These men had easily murdered eight scavs that Will himself had been warned to steer clear of. Nevermind the fact that Will had already been punched and shot today and wasn’t operating at his best. Odds were Will was done for, but hey, at least he had-BOOOOOM-surprise on his side.

  Sledgehammer had stepped in front of the motion-sensor claymore mine that he and his partner had left at the scav basement. The resulting explosion had literally flung him through the air, slamming into one of the adjacent storage units through the rolling metal door. Slim had activated his Sandevistan and was down at the side of his comrade in a blur of speed. The security camera barely caught it. Will watched on in horror and amazement as the Punisher rose to his feet, body armor shredded, and cracked his neck. He didn’t even look particularly angry as he stepped out of the wreckage. Slim, on the other hand, looked upset. He nearly vanished from the camera, appearing in front of the roller door that Will was hiding behind. As he started lifting it, Will took control of Miranda and unleashed a barrage of 7.62x51mm NATO rounds directly into his back. The first six or seven rounds caught him by surprise, tearing up the armor with surgical precision. Sledgehammer put a stop to it, jogging into the line of fire and using his crossed gorilla arms as a shield while his partner recovered enough to activate his Sandevistan again, pushing so hard Will lost him at first, before Slim appeared three yards away from Miranda and fired a disabling burst from his Shigure, putting Miranda out of commission.

  Slim and Sledgehammer were a good distance away from each other at that moment. Will wouldn’t get another chance at either of them alone anytime soon, so he rolled out from beneath the half-open roller door and, as he sprang to his feet, activated his own Sandevistan. It was a short sprint over to the Sledgehammer, and then after disengaging his Sandevistan, Will squeezed the trigger of his Lexington and unleashed an automatic burst of fire into the Punisher’s skull from less than three feet away. He emptied twenty rounds of armor-piercing 9mm rounds in two seconds before Sledgehammer even knew what was happening. He dropped to his knees, chrome sparking. His head looked like EEZYBEEF. Will ignored the sudden urge to vomit, ejected his mag and replaced it, and then turned to face Slim just before he started firing three-round bursts at Will, screaming in anger.

  Will ran to the right, dodging the unaimed shots from the hip. Slim had completely lost any sense of professionalism and was now fully operating on what appeared to be pure unadulterated vengeance. Will made it to the MH2, hiding with his back towards the vehicle’s hatchback, head down. Unlike in the movies, most cars weren’t bulletproof. They did, however, slow the velocity of bullets when you used them as a shield. Slim emptied the entire magazine of his Shigure into his own car just to get to Will. About a dozen rounds had impacted the ceramic plates on the back of the Street Operator jacket, grinding it down bit by bit. Two bullets had found themselves embedded in the flesh of Will’s right thigh, and more than a few had left trails on the back of his neck.

  Adrenaline pumping through his veins, Will acted the second he heard Slim’s extended mag hit the ground. Leaning out from the flimsy cover of the MH2, he fired a burst of three rounds that should have hit center mass, only Slim was no longer there. He must have been pushing his own Sandevistan hard, because the next burst of rounds hit Will in the right shoulder before he could even react. The impacts slammed him hard against the side of the vehicle, but Will spun himself fast enough to dodge the next burst. He made a complete circle around the car as Slim stalked him at super speed in a wide circle.

  By the time Slim’s Sandevistan gave out, Will had already become the host to another half-dozen rounds. Slim collapsed from the strain his cyberware had put on his brain. Bleeding and pissed off, Will took his own turn throwing bits of tungsten down range at the stationary Punisher. Slim soaked up round after round, enough to put down ten normal men, but wouldn’t go down. Bastard was tough and stubborn. Will ejected the empty mag and slapped in his last one. Slim took that as a signal to rebound and spray Will’s general position with automatic fire. Will retreated behind the MH2 for another round of hide and seek. The hatchback popped open after a stray round shattered the locking mechanism. Will turned to look inside the vehicle for anything useful. There was nothing but a single spare tire. He grabbed it, desperate for anything to slow down the bullets zooming towards him.

  Emerging from the pseudo-cover of the car, Will briefly engaged his Sandevistan to unload his final magazine at the Punisher. He did his best to compensate for the recoil of each shot, managing to keep the majority on target as Slim fired wildly at him. The Sandevistan disengaged, and both men were standing off with empty guns. Will dropped his spare tire shield to the ground with a splash. Slim was smiling now, his face a crimson mask slick with blood. He dropped his Shigure, and Will holstered his Lexington. It started to rain again, this time, lightly.

  “Maybe, call it a draw?” Will asked, almost pleading.

  “Non,” said the Punisher. His breathing was ragged. Will could hear a crackling sound coming from his lungs as he gasped for air. It was a sign of a punctured lung. It seemed that Slim wasn’t one for half-measures. He reached for something at his back, and out came the same mono-edge machete he’d used to chop up the scavs at the apartment building. Will just sighed and pulled his kaiken from its sheath in the small of his back. A duel with a Voodoo Boy Punisher in the rain. Unexpected, sure, but fitting.

  “We doing this?” Will asked with a lot more bravado than he actually felt.

  Slim activated his Sandevistan first and lunged forward at superhuman speed. Will had been conserving his inferior Mk.1 Sandevistan, using it in bursts, but now with a machete-wielding psychopath sprinting towards him, he was ready to push. He flicked his Sandevistan on with his mind and ducked the subsonic swing of the machete. Slim’s cyberware was superior, sure, but Will’s reflexes and bioware enhancements combined with his Sandevistan made up for the advantage. To onlookers, they would have appeared as two phantoms dancing beneath the tombstone pylon. For Will, he perceived it as a desperate and clumsy affair. Two men unwilling to die and unwilling to let the other live.

  Slim swung his machete again and again, the blade tasting the carbon nanotube-laced fabric of the Street Operator jacket. Will dodged, constantly moving, but conserving his energy even as he pushed his cyberware to the breaking point. Then it happened. Slim jumped into the air. The mistake was fatal. Will, grounded, maneuvered around the floating mass of fury and drove his kaiken up through Slim’s jaw and deep into his brain. Both Sandevistans gave out. Will collapsed forward, blood streaming slowly from his ears and nose. Slim landed in a heap in the mud, dead before impact.

  That sucked, Will thought. Whose gonk idea was it to take on two Punishers, anyway? None of this was in the job description. He pulled off his tattered jacket and used it to wipe the blood off his face. The sound of servos whirring up carried from across the courtyard. Was it even possible? Will stared at Sledgehammer with disbelief as he rose to his feet, half his face missing. This time, he looked a little peeved.

  Will grabbed the hilt of the kaiken and pulled it out of Slim’s head as the undead Punisher began his charge. The Sledgehammer in his right hand was reared back for a killing swing as he picked up speed. Will threw his blade, and it struck the Punisher dead center, lodged deep into his chest. He didn’t even slow down. Will tried to activate his Sandevistan, but it wouldn’t respond. He tried to move, but his muscles and tendons, for the first time in weeks, were already pushed past the point of exhaustion. He had nothing left to do but watch Sledgehammer close the distance.

  A bronze arm seemed to materialize out of nowhere and smash the Punisher in the face so hard his head went flying off his shoulders and into the mud ten yards away. It was Rico ‘fucking’ Handsome.

  “Now that right there, Will, was ONE-HUNDRED PERCENT.”