Chapter Nine
Elective Surgery
Northeast Tacoma
Tacoma, Seattle
April 4, 2059
10:02 am
"You want to know about the worst thing I ever saw?" Ramon said with a wondering mouth. His hands gently guided a pair of probes into the back of Michelle McVey's skull. Ramon had given her a sedative that put her out cold. Then he had laid her on a table and setup an antiseptic, plastic blind over the table. It wasn't long after that until Ramon pulled out the tools of a surgeon and started cutting.
"What's that, Ramon?" Lenny was leaning against the wall watching the procedure. His features were stern. He was more than a little angered by overlooking the fact that Michelle had a bug on her in the first place. That mistake could have been fatal if they weren't prepared back in Auburn.
"It was when I was still legit."
"Figure it had to be."
Ramon shrugged. "Yeah, well, I was working ER over in Community General. Just out of med school. We always got some of Puyallup's worse cases. Being there on a Friday night was like sitting through a chip of Dante's Inferno and I don't mean the nightclub."
"I can imagine." Lenny said, only partly interested in what Ramon was saying.
"Well what I saw came in at four in the morning on a Saturday shift. Worse thing I'd ever seen. A eleven year old boy had been so cut up that he looked like a pin-cushion. Some ganger had cut his lips, nose, ears, fingers, cheeks, arms. You name it and it was cut. Apparently he was tied up with razor wire or something of the like. Poor kid looked like a big red rag when he was brought in. That's not what made it bad, though."
"What did?"
Ramon adjusted one of his probes and pulled a scalpel from his tray. "The kid was in so much pain he must have passed out half a dozen times. If he was awake he was screaming his head off no matter how much morphine we gave him. I swear I was stitching him up for a solid hour. I counted them up later. I put three hundred and three stitches in him. That's a lot of thread. Thing is that he was either quietly passed out or screaming at me while I was putting them in." Ramon stopped for a second as he picked up a syringe and placed it at the hole in Michelle's head. "But towards the end he just started at me. Big ole' brown eyes just stared right at me as I pulled his skin back together. Like he didn't even care anymore. To be honest, it shocked me. He spent the better part of an hour screaming his head off, but he eventually just stopped. Like he didn't care anymore. Like he had gotten numb to the pain or he just accepted it." Ramon snorted, putting the needle back on the tray. He had told Lenny earlier that the shot contained a mixture of drugs. One was to deaden the nerves while the other helped to close of the capillaries and reduce bleeding.
"What happened to him?"
"Oh, he lived." Ramon said as he pushed the clamp down and started cutting again. "Little fellow lost a lot of blood, but he still lived. We set him up on an IV and a few units and kept him overnight for observation."
"So that was the worse thing you saw?"
Ramon shrugged. "I'd seen people that had been blown in half before, Lenny. Those aren't much to think about though. It's the quiet ones that stick with you."
Lenny glanced at the floor. Ramon seemed so distant at times. Then again, years of working the emergency room at the hospitals would harden anyone.
"There, I've got it." Ramon said as he held up a small metallic disk in a clamp. "You can turn off the jammer now."
Lenny walked over behind the doctor and switched the device off. In the meantime, Ramon dropped the tiny disk onto the floor and stamped on it with the heel of his boot. There was a small crack as the transmitting crystal was shattered.
"Just let me put this girl back together and I'll be finished."
"How long?" Lenny asked.
"Five minutes." Ramon pulled out a tiny curved needle with a thin thread trailing behind it. He picked two more instruments from his tray and started closing the hole he had made in Michelle's head.
"Shard?"
Sharon perked her head up and rotated it towards Lenny.
"Tell Riggs we'll be ready in a minute and have Gid come in here."
Shard nodded and stepped out a heavy metal door. She headed down the wide hallway to fetch the ork and tell Riggs to fire up the Bison.
"Smiley with you?" Ramon said. The doctors eyes were still focused on closing the cuts he had made.
"Eh?" Lenny mouthed, not understanding the question at first.
"I'm assuming the only reason you brought this patient to me was because you are on a run." Ramon said with an unconcerned voice. "So I would've thought that Smiley would be around."
Lenny shook his head. "Not here, Ramon, no." Lenny circled around the unconscious form of Michelle as Ramon started putting the finishing touches on his work. "He and Nightsky are arranging a place to crash." Lenny couldn't understand why Ramon was curious about where Smiley was. Then again Smiley did seem to make people nervous. Fortunately Lenny had sent Nightsky and the rather unstable samurai, Smiley, to Redmond. There they were to arrange a new safehouse. Nightsky's contacts with the local gangs and the nature of the Redmond barrens should keep the team safe for a while.
"That's another sad story."
"Who? Smiley?"
"Yes." Ramon admitted as he applied a paste on the closed incision he had made on Michelle's neck. The paste was suppose to stimulate the skin to grow and, thus, minimize the risk of infection as well as scarring. "You can tell that some of his metal was put in backwards."
"Maybe, but he's still there."
"More or less." Ramon fashioned a bandage together with gauss and tape. "The human body can only take so much metal in it. It's hard to tell wether Smiley was born the way he is or if it's just the result of all that modification."
"Perhaps we're all better off not knowing?"
Ramon shrugged and changed the subject. "I've got her back together."
Lenny took a few steps forward as Ramon pulled the plastic mesh away from Michelle. She was still unconscious and her skin had a ghostly color to it.
"She'll be out for another hour or so." Ramon explained. "The stitches I put in will dissolve into her body with time. She's going to be stiff and probably have a little pain for a while, but that's to be expected."
"I guess so."
Ramon unlocked a cabinet that contained a number of pharmaceuticals. He pulled out a small bottle and handed them to Lenny. "These are some painkillers that should help out. They're better than the stuff you can get out of a medkit and they will last a lot longer. If she suffers any disorientation or dizziness, I suggest slapping her with a tranq patch and let her sleep it off."
Lenny took the pills and glanced at them. The name didn't ring any bells, but he did not have any knowledge with drugs in the first place. Not the legal kind anyway.
"Otherwise, she's ready to go."
"Thanks, Ramon." Lenny put the pills into his coat pocket. "What do I owe you for this?"
Ramon shrugged as he threw damp sponges into the garbage. "You mean for the work or for getting me up early?"
"How about both?"
Ramon forced a thin smile. "Five, transfer it into the panel on your way out."
Five hundred is what he meant. Lenny figured it to be a fair price. Besides, there were not many street docs like Ramon who would have let Michelle in. A hot piece of corporate property that was transmitting a signal back home was not very popular with doctors who had hundreds of thousands of nuyen in their clinics. Insurance companies did not pay doctors in the shadows if a corporate hit team came barging in.
Gideon pushed the door open just as Ramon put away the last of his things. The ork spared a quick glance at Michelle on the table. Then he glanced at Lenny. "Got a call from Smiles and Night. They say that the bolthole be ready, but Night got to take care of some personal biz."
"Okay." Lenny nodded, motioning his head at Michelle. "Give me a hand with Michelle and we'll be on our way."
Gideon grunted, his way of saying, "No problem."
The Barrens
Redmond, Seattle
10:15 am
The sky was clouding up again, promising another day of beautiful Seattle weather. Dark, hazy clouds loomed quietly over the city as thunder gathered in the distance. It was going to be another downpour. There was no escaping it. It was getting to there the gray sky was matching the gray concrete. A chilly breeze did not help the depressing nature of the clouds one bit.
Nightsky glanced around. Before him was one of the nicer bars in Redmond. That meant that the bar had a roof. It was open twenty-fours hours, which meant that it always had an assortment of crazies and gang-bangers coming in and out. It was called "The Smack" which linked it with a number of street names for illegal drugs and BTLs. It was just a name designed to attract customers and Nightsky was not here to score himself a chip.
He watched the bar from the parking lot. It was nearing the middle of the day, but the clouds above made it look like late evening. Nightsky was surrounded by various Blackheart gangers of varying ages and descriptions. A little more than half a dozen of them had gathered together. That was not including the gangs leader, Jackal. Nor did it include the shadowrunners, Smiley and Nightsky, either.
When Nightsky had come to Redmond to secure the bolthole for the team, he had not expected to find Jackal in such a vengeful mood. Apparently he was tired of being pushed around by the Night Hunters and seeing his fellow gangers being cut down like animals. Jackal had been pushed too far and Michael knew it. When Nightsky arrived Jackal was the first to greet him. It was then that he spoke of a plan to get back at the Night Hunters. The Hunters had been using the Smack as a watering hole. He knew for a fact that the leader of this cell, a skinhead named Torres, was inside. Jackal was going to put an end to this fighting by confronting Torres. He was prepared to accept whichever path this confrontation would take him and the Blackhearts. In no kind terms, Jackal had reminded Nightsky that he still owed loyalty to the gang. He was responsible for the fate of the Blackhearts who had crashed at his former doss. He had to show his own strength by standing with the gang now. Nightsky could have refused, but he didn't. Partly because Jackal had hinted that if he didn't help he would not allow the team to stay at the bolthole. Yet that was not the deciding factor that pushed Nightsky into action. It was hearing the story of what happened at his doss from Sand. That story angered him to hear it and he knew that he had an obligation to the gang. Thus he agreed to go along.
Deep inside Nightsky knew that this confrontation would have only one result. There would be a shoot out and there was no way to get around it. Jackal was expecting it too. He had already made sure that the Blackhearts he brought with him were armed too the teeth. In this section of Redmond no police ever came by. That left the gangs to fight things out.
"You don't have to be here, Smiley." Nightsky commented as Jackal continued to give some last minute instructions to a pair of gangers who were working with a pair of shotguns that were stowed in the back of a Jackrabbit that the gang boss used. "You could go back to the bolthole and wait it out. Why don't you?"
Smiley grinned, like there wasn't a shred of tangible thought in that space between his ears. "What makes you think that I want to set on my ass watching the trid? Considering that the doghouse of a hole doesn't even have a trid in the first place."
"Still," Nightsky said, letting his voice wonder a little. "You don't have to be here."
"The way I see it I might as well bring a little sanity to this bunch of riff-raff." Smiley chuckled. "Plus, ever since we busted the drek out of Auburn, I been itching for something wiz to go down. It's like a drug don't you know?"
"You think running off to get in a fight it like a happy pill?"
"Works for me." Smiley said in an all to cheerful voice.
Nightsky could not see what Smiley had to be happy about. The odds were that there was about to be one massive fight about to occur. The very thought of gave Michael a sinking feeling in his stomach. At the very least he would lose some friends. At the best he would probably limp out and survive long enough to find Shard. Smiley, on the other hand, was actually looking forward to it. The samurai definitely had a twisted sense of reality.
Jackal came up behind Nightsky. The ork had a vicious look on his face. A handgun was stuffed on the inside of his leather jacket. A sinister looking knife hanged loosely on his belt. Everything about him screamed a defiant anger. He had something to settle and he was going to settle it.
"You not going soft on me?" The ork grumbled.
Nightsky's eyes narrowed. "I'm here aren't I? You don't see me backing down." He pulled the tail of his long coat back, revealing that he was armed and ready for action.
Jackal made a slight grin, showing his teeth. He made a motion towards Smiley. "What about you? What are you still doing here? Babysitting us gangers?"
"Nah, chum." Smiley gave a disturbing smile, showing a hint of wildness in his eyes. "I just thought it be fun to crack some heads open and see what's inside."
Jackal thought that this guy was a total loon. He had come here with Nightsky, that made him at least half reliable. However, Jackal wouldn't trust Smiley any further than he could throw him. It was still good to have the samurai here, though. Nightsky as well. Between the two of them, they had enough talent to take out at least half the Night Hunters. The Blackhearts could handle the other half with a little luck.
Of course, that was the best case scenario......
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