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Post by Witcher Wolf on Feb 4, 2007 7:41:35 GMT -5
That's right, after having my arm twisted by Jen...the return of Samantha Cross is imminent. It will however be something different compared to the last time Usual copyrights apply, Whisper City and characters, various likenesses and so forth are copyright of their creator - namely me I never did like writing all kinds of leaglese - but we've had to deal with someone trying to usurp the world once before, that turned out messily for them as Dark Quest Games also has a stake in the world of Whisper City and protects it quite effectively. But first a little prologue. Libby should be pleased with this one as well
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Post by Witcher Wolf on Feb 4, 2007 8:45:11 GMT -5
Guns and Crosses
Part Zero: Under the Gun
“And the Devil in a black dress watches over, my guardian angel walks away…” ~ Sisters of Mercy: Temple of Love
He held the gun to the side of her head and slid the cold metal across her temple; he looked down at the woman as she knelt on the floor. It suited him to be in this position, this feeling of power was unlike anything he could describe and he loved it.
Her beautiful brown eyes were perfect, so full of hope and so full of life – he was going to enjoy taking all that away.
He forced her to open her mouth and put the gun between her lips, it was overtly sexual of course, and that’s how he liked it. She trembled in just the right manner – he fantasised about offing a chick like this for a long time, it’s as though the Devil must have heard him – best birthday ever.
He didn’t speak, he wouldn’t cheapen the moment. He just slowly pulled the trigger and felt the hammer slide back.
The gun bucked and he remembered how he’d come to be in this position…
Last night. She’d been lonely and looked pretty forlorn, scarlet lips and smooth red dress. Her boyfriend must have stood her up and he pulled his usual smooth routine, one that had gotten him in this position before. Unlike all the others though this was the first one he really wanted to have sex with, but she just wanted to talk, that was all right though because he had plenty of time and plenty of ways to get off without her.
He’d been one of those abused kids when he was much younger, he’d found himself in the care of a handsome priest but that only made things worse. His sins were between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit and if god was really interested he’d have sent him a sign surely?
Truth be told god had other things on his mind right at that point, but that’s another story for another time.
Now all he had to do was have some fun, clean the motel room up and…there was something wrong, where was the blood, she didn’t scream, they usually screamed out loud just before the gun shut them up, they begged and pleaded, promised him the world and then some.
The casing was there on the floor right where he should have heard it fall, but the woman still had her lips around the gun and her chest rose, fell and rose again. Her pretty head was intact and her brains weren’t painting the murky walls with red and grey.
He looked down and the woman pulled her head away from the smoking barrel, spat the bullet out and smiled with a smeared lipstick smirk. He’d let go of her in the throes of the moment and now she stood up, tossed her red hair to the side and gave a nod.
“You are certainly one of the sickest minds I could have hoped for,” she purred as she spoke and lit a cigarette, in a few moments Danny would actually realise that the cigarette came from nowhere and she lit it with a delicately trimmed red-lacquered fingernail, “Danny boy.”
“What the fuck?”
“Oh,” she smirked again and brushed down her slender red dress. “That’s the best expression of bewilderment I’ve heard all day, you really are quite the charmer.”
His hand still held the gun and he squeezed off a full clip of ammunition into the cocky bitch, she stood there and took it all even while he named her all the things his mentor had called him when he made him, dress up.
“Bitch, Whore, Slut,” the list was graphic and each bullet punctuated the words like a lead laden comma.
“No blood,” he said in a soft childlike voice and sank to his knees. “There should be blood, you should be dead.”
“Like the rest of the women you murdered Danny Boy?” she chuckled and drew in a deep breath from the cigarette, let the smoke out nice and easy. “If only it was that easy to kill me, I’d have been a corpse centuries ago babe.”
“I don’t understand,” he dropped the gun and gave it a glare, it had failed him and the shiny metal glinted in the half-light of the motel room reflecting the unkempt hair, the boyish features and the grey eyes. He was quite a scruffy teenager but those looks often got him what he wanted, he could charm the skin-tight pants off a supermodel or so he was told. “What the fuck are you?”
“I’m your sister, brother, father, mother, uncle, daughter, husband, wife and lover,” she whispered and laughed a shrill laugh. “I’m every little bit of bad in the world topped off with every little sliver of regret, hate, passion and then some.” She gave a twirl and blew another smoky breath out.
“Huh?”
“Really Danny,” she sounded quite disappointed in him. “I am somewhat upset that the charming young twenty one year old that I thought you were, has been replaced by this uncommunicative idiot.”
“You were supposed to be my birthday present, I heard the voices – the Devil said you were the one he’d sent to die like you were supposed to. All the others were just filled full of holes, but he wanted to see your pretty head explode,” his voice drifted to her as though he was a long way off, again, childlike. “You ruined it.”
She put her one hand on her hip and shifted her weight to the side, looked at Danny as though he were dressed in a jester or fool’s costume. “Would you mind repeating that part about how the Devil made you do it?”
“Satan,” he began and she cut him off.
“Wrong!” the woman sighed. “Satan is someone else, the Devil isn’t Satan, how many times do we have to explain to you bloody ignorant mortals?”
“Ok…the Devil,” he continued almost happy to confess this to someone other than his Father at the church. “I heard the voice of the Devil in my head and he told me that I have to kill these people, he even told me when and how.”
“You’re delusional,” she snorted and pulled a deep breath in on the cigarette until the end smouldered into flames. “The Devil is most certainly not a man.”
He stopped and looked up at her, there was something entirely too real about the woman that towered over him. She was perfect in every way, shape and form. Her hair was just the right shade of red and her face was without a single blemish. He’d assumed she’d been one of the women who had enough money to get replacement skin and breast enhancement.
She took a moment to put the cigarette out and wrinkled her nose. “Honey,” she thrummed softly. “I should know who the Devil is and she certainly doesn’t make anyone do anything that they don’t want to.”
“Huh?”
“I don’t go about slinking up to people in a metaphysical manner and whisper in their subconscious,” she laughed and waved a finger. “That would be against the rules of the age old game…and I don’t break rules I bend them.”
“But I heard the voices!”
“Yes, yes,” she said in a patronising tone. “But that wasn’t me and it wasn’t even one of my departments – at least it better not be one of mine or the Bureau of Infernal Affairs will be on my beautiful backside quicker than your kind starts wars.”
Danny was pretty confused right about now and he reached over, calmly took the gun and reloaded it. She watched him with a hawk-like expression and shrugged. “So regardless of what you think you heard me tell you to do, you were not told to shoot those women – that was all you sweetie and that’s why I am here.”
He caressed the gun and vaguely heard her last few words as the voices in the back of his head rose to an almost deafening level. He’d failed in his duty to the dark master and now he was being punished with falsehoods and fake manifestations, the Devil as a woman? Who was she trying to kid.
“You’re not the Devil,” he said in a dull tone. “The Devil’s in my head.”
He snapped the gun to his head and pulled the trigger, there was a sudden moment of bright white light, intense pain and a crackle as skin and bone ruptured.
The woman watched him sag like a popped balloon and let out a sigh. “I really thought he’d last longer than that, poor kid and on his birthday too,” she suppressed a smirk and turned to the window. “Now there’ll be some paperwork to fill in.”
It didn’t take long of course for the sounds of gunfire to draw the attention of others, first there were several bangs on the door and the hinges buckled a little – then the sirens wailed and the lights flashed blue outside of the window.
“Time to exit stage right,” she whispered and stepped back, as she did so she felt the warmth of a familiar place behind her and before she stopped there she stepped to the side and landed on a white paved road. “They must have had the decorators in,” she added as she looked around at the pristine sky and green fields, “far too much green for my liking.”
“Hello Red,” she turned at a familiar voice and smiled as she was greeted by a tall man. He was dressed in pitch black and wore a long coat as though the style were designed especially for him, smart long hair hung just over one shoulder in a delicate pony-tail. “It’s been too long hasn’t it?”
“Nicky!”
He tipped his wide brimmed hat in her direction and stroked the brim of it with a black gloved finger. “What brings you to Heaven PLC?”
“I think one of mine might be trying to pick the locks on the Pearly Gates,” she chuckled softly and gave a quick retelling of the current events that led up to her arrival in the White Corporation. “You haven’t seen a wide-eyed scruffy kid recently have you?”
“Which one,” Nicholas Winter gave a soft laugh of his own. “We seem to be getting more and more Emo kids these days, shame most of them take their own lives – that really screws with their chances to get in.”
“Limited numbers?” she questioned.
“Nope,” he replied. “Not really, just bad for business – not good on the old resume.”
“I see, well you know we don’t mind the Emo ones in Hell INC, it really helps to have those kids locked away in the dark recesses of the lower offices though,” she chuckled ruthlessly and waved a hand. “They make good rank and file troops in the paperwork wars.”
“Same old Red,” Nicholas Winter relaxed a little. “Well minus the pointed teeth and the desire to drink blood,” he added and then grinned widely. “Did you keep those remnants of your former life?”
“They went goodbye when I got promoted!” Red toyed with a slender ruby earring and winked, “what a promotion eh?”
“Yeah,” Nicholas Winter couldn’t help but smile at that. “From Nightcrawler Queen of a major record company to the CEO of Hell INC, quite s step you did there Red.”
Red grinned in reply and it was almost cat-like. “I could stand here and flirt with you all day, but I never did inquire, I mean…what about you, former hitman for whatever corporation paid the highest right?”
Nicholas Winter’s expression went flat for a moment at a couple of memories. “I try my best to set the wrong things that I did back then right,” he answered and gave a guarded smile. “I think this suits me better, agent of the Celestial Investigations Division.”
“Working for sid,” she smirked. “Sorry Nicky I shouldn’t tease you like that, but you know what they say?”
“Better the Devil you know?”
“Damn right,” she chuckled and blew him a kiss. “So can you see if one of mine’s escaped for me?”
“Sure, do you want to come in?”
“No thanks, I don’t think it’d be right you know, me being the Devil and all?”
“Suit yourself, back in a while.” Nicholas Winter turned from Red and walked off into the endless beautiful plains that were the outskirts of Heaven PLC.
The sun gleamed brightly against the soft blue sky and it was perfect, Red shuffled her feet and did miss the darkness of her new home compared to the brilliant perfection that embodied one of the cleanest locations of the newly discovered Multi-verse.
After what seemed like an hour Nicholas Winter returned and shook his head. “The gate guard says no one’s come here at all,” he frowned and adjusted his dark shades. “Are you sure that he came this way?”
“His self-righteous kind always does, so sure that they are going to come here regardless of their sins,” she said bitterly. “You know the type.”
“I think I do,” Nicholas Winter offered helpfully. “But what happens if he convinced himself that he’s destined to dwell in say, Purgatory?”
“Fuck,” she snarled. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“No one does,” Nicholas Winter said in a dry flat tone. “You know if he’s there that you can’t touch him.”
“Yeah, which makes it even more of a pain in the ass,” she huffed. “I mean the kid was evil Nick, completely and thoroughly evil – not puppy in a microwave evil, this was a whole new psychotic level of evil – he was damn near perfect for the corporation.”
“Look,” Nicholas Winter wrinkled his nose and rubbed his chin. “I can’t promise anything but how about I try and take a look when I have a free moment. I have clearance to enter Purgatory and I owe you a few favours.”
“No you don’t,” she huffed again.
“Yes I do,” he was adamant. “Remember?”
She tried hard to remember and seemed to come to the conclusion that it was her that owed the agent of Heaven PLC some serious recompense. “Bullshit Nick,” she said. “I owe you.”
“Want to stay here and argue about it some more?”
“No,” she admitted. “But you don’t owe me.”
“Let us agree to disagree and say that I do?”
“Why?”
“Bureaucratic Red Tape,” he tipped his hat and turned on his heel. “I’ll take a look for this missing kid of yours, you best get back to your bored room.”
“Its board Nick,” she laughed softly. “Or was that deliberate?”
“You tell me?” he chuckled and once again vanished into the ether that claimed him.
“I’ll get you one day Nicholas Winter,” Red clicked her fingernails and chuckled. “And when I do…you’re going to damn well enjoy it.”
She stepped to the side in a quick reflexive instinctive motion and found herself surrounded by the black obsidian plains of Hell INC standing before the massive tower that served as her corporations headquarters in the infernal fire laden landscape.
“Hello boys,” she whispered as she walked with a slink towards the tower, “Red’s home.”
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Post by Libby on Feb 4, 2007 12:38:09 GMT -5
Wheeeeeeeeeee! Red and Nick!
Now, I'm having a hard time with Fate's Hand, but I love Whisper City and Sam Cross. It's the whole concept which keeps me enthralled and chuckling at the voltes-faces you throw in.
I think it's because I'm an 'Angel' fan and the idea of the female Devil being head of a Corporation (like Wofram and Hart) is just delicious.
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Post by Witcher Wolf on Feb 4, 2007 19:32:42 GMT -5
Wheeeeeeeeeee! Red and Nick! Now, I'm having a hard time with Fate's Hand, but I love Whisper City and Sam Cross. It's the whole concept which keeps me enthralled and chuckling at the voltes-faces you throw in. I think it's because I'm an 'Angel' fan and the idea of the female Devil being head of a Corporation (like Wofram and Hart) is just delicious. I think Fate's Hand is a far more complicated story and that it's not as easy to tell, let alone get into
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Post by Witcher Wolf on Feb 4, 2007 19:33:12 GMT -5
Nicely done Wolf......enjoyed that! ;D Thanks, stay tuned, there's much more on the way.
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Post by Witcher Wolf on Feb 5, 2007 11:10:42 GMT -5
Guns and Crosses
Part One: Supernatural?
“You raise me up, when I’m on the floor. You see me through, when I’m lonely and scared and feeling true to the written word, and you're true to me and still I need more, it would tear me apart to feel that no one ever cared.” ~ The Mission: Tower of Strength
Officer Creed hit the door three times with his palm, there was no answer so he pulled out his electronic lock-pick and moved towards the locking mechanism.
“Get out of the way, you’re wasting time,” Samantha Cross’ cold voice cut through him like a knife and he stepped back with a small yelp as her booted foot powered with an extra helping of strength boosting enhancement-ware took the metal door off its frame and smacked it against the other side of the room beyond.
“Whisper City Police,” she bellowed, “freeze!”
There was no one in the room beyond the ruined door and Samantha entered it cautiously, she looked around, flicked through several of her vision modes only to come up with nothing, not a damn thing.
“Creed,” she growled his name. “Get back out there to Johns and Moore, tell them to sweep the whole ground floor and pay attention to the alleyways.”
“Yes sir.” Creed muttered and vanished like a ghost, she heard him clatter down the stairs and only then did she let down her guard a little.
There was one body but there was no sign of an assailant. Upon first glance it looked like the guy had topped himself but that didn’t explain the previous gunshots the caller had described in her frenzied message to the police.
“Cross,” her radio headset fizzed at her, “report?”
“One stiff chief,” she edged into the room, her gun drawn. “No sign of an assailant but the guys are checking the alleys right now.”
“Keep me posted.”
“Will do,” she cut the communication and flicked her amber eyes through several scanning modes, tiny corporate logos flashed up against the cornea as each sponsored cybernetic enhancement ran on her vision, “nothing.” Thermal, UV, you name it and it brought up a negative.
She rolled her neck from side to side and gave a tiny sigh; there were spent casings all over the floor but not a single bullet hole in the walls. If there was an assailant then there was no way that they could have passed Cross’ team on the way up here and the rest of the squad would have caught them climbing out of the window.
Her eyes would have picked up any cloak-tech, so what the hell was going on here?
“How’d you die?” she said to the body of the young man. “You kill yourself or did someone else do it?”
A cold shiver ran over her spine and the hairs stood out at the back of her neck, just prior to a soft whisper of sound, she swore a voice said. “The Devil made me do it.”
Creed chose that moment to walk in through the door and Cross turned to look at him. “What did you say?”
“Nothing, just got back up here?” the younger officer fixed her with a puzzled glance and looked down at the body. “Nice, a bit of wall painting looks like…guy must have been one of those brain painters.”
“Shut it,” she snapped. “Did you hear anything before you came in here?”
“No,” he said and his facial expression changed, he was wary, guarded even. “Hearing voices Detective?”
“No,” it was her turn to go on the defensive. “It must have been a little static from the headset,” she lied, “nothing to worry about.”
Creed moved past her and checked the motel room over, he hated these sleazy apartment style motels – the ground floor ones were so much easier to keep an eye on, but these damn things were just like blocks of flats or skyscrapers, some of them housed thousands of visitors at a time and he loathed block duty.
He wasn’t too happy at being assigned to the ‘Ice Bitch’ either. Samantha Cross, quite the Amazonian with a superb body and great lines. She had a personality like a Speak and Spell crossed with a Freon chamber.
She’d have looked much better if she kept her hair long he thought, but the short white only made her look like a cyber-dyke, that was the in-joke of the moment between him and the boys – she’d roast them alive if she found out, but hey, she couldn’t read thoughts.
He did wonder just how much of Sam Cross was real and how much she’d paid for when she did her time with the grunts, out there in the Corp Wars. He never voiced it and kept his mouth shut, Henderson, one of the older members of the force told him that was a wise choice.
His foot connected with something and that snapped him out of his reverie. “Oh shit,” he saw the cover of the journal and pulled it out from under the bed. “Shit, shit, shit,” he went on like this for two minutes flat until he finally drove Cross mad enough to get her attention.
“What?”
“Look,” Creed tossed her the book and she caught it, her reflexes kicking in to make it look as though she’d been anticipating that throw. “You know what this means right?”
Samantha Cross opened the book without looking at the cover and read the first few pages to herself, she snapped it shut and glowered. “Just great,” she laughed. “We get to play second fiddle to the ‘Freak show’ and watch them get their grubby prints all over our nice crime scene.” She tossed the journal entitled, Daemonica Magnifica to one side and sat on the bed.
“Maybe you’ll get lucky and it won’t be some idiot in a white coat with brains the size of a skeezeball player’s cup,” Creed made a face and pulled his headset microphone around. “Control, we’ve got a 6-66 here,” he made a face at the code, “possible trafficking in matters of the occult leading to the death of a John Doe.”
Samantha shot Creed a poisonous glance and folded her arms. “Maybe you’ll get lucky and she’ll be so fat she’ll have her own gravitational pull.”
“Ouch,” Creed said putting the mute on his headset. “That was below the belt.”
“Officer Creed,” the voice of Control rippled past the sudden burst of static. “Be advised that Paranormal Investigation Agents are on the way, sit tight and secure the crime scene.”
“Roger Control,” he sighed deeply, “Creed out.”
“I take it we’re to baby-sit the scene?” Samantha caught his expression and heard the sigh. “Wait for the pains in the ass?”
“Yeah, PIA is en-route.”
“Joy,” she huffed and stood up from the bed. “I better not sit there…I might disturb the psychic resonances and the delicate balance of the afterlife.”
Creed snorted a little and moved the gun with his boot. “I slipped,” he lied. “I’m sure they won’t notice it though – too busy looking for ghosts and goblins, things that go boom-shakka-lakka in the night.”
“That’s bump.”
“I like my version much better.”
“Did Control give any ETA on the PIA?” Samantha walked over to the window and peered out of it, she looked down and caught a whiff of perfume, strong enough to trip her olfactory sensors and capture the scent and strong enough to make her blink.
“No,” Creed paced back and forth then he caught Samantha’s sudden blink. “You ok?”
“Yeah,” she said and wrinkled her nose. “I just smelt something that’s all, like a rose garden in full bloom.”
“That’s freaky,” Creed concluded. “Funny smells and odd voices, you sure you don’t need a break – I can wait for the PIA if you want?”
“I’m fine,” she said testily and then added. “Really, thanks for the concern Creed it’s appreciated.”
Creed blinked a little and turned his head so she didn’t see his confusion. “You’re welcome Detective Cross.”
She looked down at herself caught in the reflection of the dropped gun; she had the typical detective’s garb. The long black stylish coat and the form fitting top and trousers, slightly buffed with bullet proof and knife proof material.
She checked her watch and put one hand on the window’s frame; she looked out again and took the time to pick out moving shapes in the streets below. The sun had barely broken through the shroud of grey that clung to Whisper like a second skin, it valiantly tried to breach the smoky dark morass and only now had it succeeded.
“This is your second week right Cross?” Creed broke the silence once again and strode over to the window, bored.
“Pretty much,” she replied and gave a wry smile. “I never thought Whisper City would be like this – what about you?”
“About a week and a half, haven’t seen anything yet that really blew me away,” Creed chuckled a little. “You’ve heard the stories right?”
“The stories?” she didn’t turn to look at him.
“Yeah, about the supernatural that’s supposed to be common place here,” Creed didn’t sound all that convinced. “I reckon it’s a tourist thing you know, to trap more people to come visit the city.”
“You think?”
“I am pretty much sure of it.”
“I’m not so sure. I mean yeah, there are things out there that we can’t explain,” Samantha said thoughtfully. “But all I have seen are weird kids with some odd glowing eye-ware and the odd gene-enhanced animal-human hybrid.”
“So like I said, it’s fake,” Creed grinned a little and tapped his badge. “So fake that we need a whole department of lunatics to keep it from being a real problem to the citizens,” he began to laugh. “The walking dead could come by right now and we’d be so screwed!”
Samantha Cross would have laughed with him, were it not for the fact that the body was standing upright and grinning with only half a head. Creed had his back to the corpse and Cross froze for a moment as her still human mind tried to rationalise that dead guys don’t just get up and walk.
“Hey Samantha, do you think we could get some dead guys on the force for the nightshift?” Creed turned to look at the woman’s ashen white face and he followed her gaze and saw that their John Doe was holding a gun. “What the fuck?”
The corpse trained the gun onto Creed and pulled the trigger, a voice with the texture of crunched leaves rippled from it. “The Devil made me do it.”
The shockwave of sound brought Samantha Cross back out of her brief freeze and she rolled to the side, Creed wasn’t so lucky, six of the seven shots hit him and one of them popped a neat hole into his forehead. He rocked back against the window and the force of his impact sent him out of it through a rainstorm of broken glass and down onto the pavement below.
Cross’ gun answered back and she pulled the trigger furiously, the semi-automatic police issue special put enough lead into the walking corpse as it slammed another clip into the weapon. Small holes appeared in the flesh and the pock-marks of congealed blood spat red from the rents.
The corpse tracked her motion with a slow swivel as it was her turn to reload, the dead man’s trigger finger pulled back and the hammer snapped several times in quick succession.
A voice spoke softly and it was like time turned to treacle for a moment, she felt her body go stiff and rigid, she tried to cry out but her lips wouldn’t move and her voice died in her throat.
There was a near-blinding flash of bright yellow light and Cross’ flash-compensators kicked in automatically on her eyes, the lenses turned opaque to prevent any damage to the woman’s ocular nerves and receptors.
She saw the wall shatter where three shots broke away the cheap plaster and butchered the metal coverings. She witnessed the confusion on the remains of the corpses face as it stood there blankly trying to figure out where she was.
Samantha Cross was alive and she stood to the right of a tall gentleman with long dark hair, dancing blue eyes and a charming smile. He looked like he might have stepped out of the pages of a comic book or graphic novel – upon the palm of his right hand numerous mystical symbols flickered out and died in a soft blue hue.
He didn’t give her time to ask questions, he put his finger up to his ear and said. “Ice my dear,” he had a cultured voice that enunciated every word. “We have a code six. A Jacker, it might be an idea to bring out the big guns.”
“But you are the biggest gun we have Donovan,” a woman’s voice sounded as clear as crystal through Donovan’s earpiece. “Go get them tiger,” she added a purr.
“Funny,” Donovan said and moved Samantha to the side behind the door frame. “I will explain shortly,” he addressed her. “But right now I have an un-dead code six to put out of our misery.”
Samantha Cross was tough but her mind was grappling with things that she didn’t want to comprehend right at that moment. She looked at Donovan as though he were a ghost dressed in a bunny suit and nodded.
The corpse had other plans; it moved quickly and went out through the window without any grace or finesse. It dropped like a stone and landed with a dull thwack onto the body of the deceased Creed.
A whisper of grey white light emanated from the dead man’s mouth and flowed into Creed. A few seconds later officer Creed’s body rose and looked up at the window with a twisted smile.
Donovan appeared at the window to look down, yanked his head to the side as the snap of a shot split the ceiling above him and sighed. “Wonderful,” he said acidly. “Not only is it adept at Jacking bodies – it is now out there trying to kill me.”
He drew his right hand into a complex pattern as Samantha Cross peered around the door frame, she was just in time to see the man called Donovan sheathe his hand in a white-blue coruscant aura that flowed like liquid fire and left small droplets of arcane energy in its wake.
The Jacker in Creed’s body saw the glow and beat a hasty retreat across the road, it stalled traffic as it ambled past stunned motorists and shocked pedestrians. Some people screamed and some people thought about offering assistance – those who got too close saw the officer’s true state of being and ran away immediately.
A priest cried out to his god to exorcise the demon, he received a lead donation for his efforts and a shrill laugh for his troubles as his life bled out on the floor. He was vaguely aware of a long haired man with a beard watching him from the shadows and smoking a reefer before he died.
Donovan followed the Jacker out of the window and landed with a soft swish of his long white coat, he adjusted his lapel and leapt the intervening distance from the one side of the street to the other, just as Samantha Cross reached the window to look down – she was transfixed by the grace of the man’s jump and the fact that he was able to land directly in the path of what looked like Officer Creed.
Did Creed survive all that, he must have?
She collected enough of her wits to make herself useful again and shot down the stairs, out of the mid level door and jumped thirty feet to the ground as her replacement limbs and muscles took the strain of the leap.
Donovan stood before the monster and put up his hand, the fire swirled around his fingers. “Go no further Jacker,” he hissed softly and the creature recoiled looking out through Creed’s eyes. “You have no place in this world and no permit, no authority to be here.”
Samantha Cross reached them both and levelled her gun on the man in white for a moment, until she saw the state that Creed was in and the lop-sided grin he gave her when she appeared. “What the hell?”
“It’s called a Jacker Miss Cross,” Donovan said through gritted teeth. “A nasty code six demonic possession that sometimes escapes the lower levels of hell and wreaks all sorts of havoc upon the world of the living.”
“It looks like Creed,” she said warily and trained her gun back and forth between them both. “Creed, is that you?”
“YeSsssSs,” it hissed and one of Creed’s eyes popped out to hang on the stalk.
“You look like shit,” Samantha turned the gun back on the body that had been Creed’s. “You might want to do something about the eye?”
Donovan rolled his eyes for a moment and kept his hand trained towards the creature, every so often tongues of blue fire almost licked towards it. “Detective Cross, you were asked to assist the PIA in this matter so can you please keep your gun trained on the bad guy, not me.”
“If the hissing voice didn’t give it away,” she replied sourly. “The eye-pop sure did, so what now Mr?”
“White,” Donovan said tersely. “Donovan White, PIA, speciality in dealing with demonic influences and satanic lore, now if you will excuse me I’ve a trespasser to sort out.”
“Then you can explain what the hell is going on,” Samantha Cross’ eyes narrowed and one of them brought up a targeting reticule on the corpse, “over a cup of strong coffee.”
“I’d be delighted,” Donovan let go of the primal energy he’d been restraining and blue flames leapt forwards like a hungry dog, it devoured the corpse and the Jacker’s spirit in one fell move. “Tea for me of course,” he said.
The body of Officer Creed turned to phosphorescent ash and blew away on a strong breeze; Donovan White smiled a little and spoke into his headset. “Code six neutralised – Jacker returned to point of origin.”
Ice’s soft voice whispered in his ear. “I told you, that you could handle it.”
“Indeed,” Donovan White chuckled. “Now have a clean up team search that motel apartment and keep me apprised of any significant clues.”
“Roger.” Ice said and cut the communication off.
Donovan turned to Samantha and said, “Now, about that coffee? Or tea in my case?”
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Post by Libby on Feb 9, 2007 8:08:29 GMT -5
*claps*
Some fabulous imagery there Wolf. I can really feel your enjoyment at writing this. The humour is spot on and the tech stuff very subtle...like the idea of the logos/sponsors.
Where/when does this fit in with Sam's encounter with Nicholas Winter?
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Post by Witcher Wolf on Feb 9, 2007 13:42:09 GMT -5
This is an alternate, or perhaps to put it better - a rewrite of the whole thing. I wanted to take a different angle this time.
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Post by Witcher Wolf on Feb 20, 2007 12:26:51 GMT -5
When I was writing this it dawned on me, I know the history and back-story, the creation and all that behind all the characters that inhabit Whisper City, or any of my worlds. Some of you might not know the reason behind the creation of a character or how it came about so…I figured that it might be somewhat interesting for anyone that reads the stuff I wrote to learn a little about where some of these folks come from, apart from inside my head. For instance, you might say that Johnny Death is a parody or homage to Ghost Rider since there are several likenesses – but you could also say that he’s related in some ways to Hellboy, without actually asking me – you won’t ever know – some people will rightly/or wrongly assume certain things. So in the case of Johnny Death, where did he come from? He first appeared as a non-player character (NPC) in a tabletop session of Cyberpunk 2013 for some friends. It was set in an alternative to Night City, Whisper City, and it featured demons, devils and a host of other non-William Gibson stuff. He turned up as a kind of Bounty Hunter, working as a freelancer and running his own net-based TV program: Hell Truckers. If I had of known then what I know now I’d have cornered the market on the Reality TV shows trust me He actually has no name; his name of Johnny Death came about when one of the Edgerunners asked him. Hey are you Johnny Silverhand, the Rockerboy? “Naw, I’m Johnny Death,” he quipped. “Silverhand’s stunt-double.” From then on JD was born and he kept the name, since no one tried to take it off him. He’d have shot them of course had they tried, because that’s the kind of guy JD is. Who or what JD is, well, that’s another matter and question entirely. He comes from a long line of people that hunt down demons, devils, lost souls and even shepherd the dead. Shepherding the dead was his prime occupation; it’s been that way ever since his Granddaddy did the job for Heaven way back when Heaven was Heaven and not a Corp. So there’s a little bit of Ghost Rider in there with a splash of Hellboy and a tad of Constantine even. You’ll just have to meet him for yourselves and pretty soon, at that.
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Post by Witcher Wolf on Feb 27, 2007 9:37:47 GMT -5
Part Two: Tea and sugar
As the riders loped on by him, he heard one call his name. “If you want to save your soul from hell a-riding on our range, then cowboy change your ways today, or with us you will ride trying to catch the Devil’s herd across these endless skies.” ~ (Ghost) Riders in the Sky – Stan Jones
O’Toole’s was one of those services that flourished even in a fractured place like Whisper. A generic bar/diner that seemed to infest what remained of the United States like Subway, Burger King and McDonalds before it. It was the epitome of greasy fast food and convenience in the lives of so many people.
There was originally a man known as O’Toole that started the whole franchise, but he’d long since passed on and the ownership had gone from father to son, to father to son and then somewhere along the food chain, the links had broken and it had been handed over to a corporation.
They kept the O’Toole name and the dingy-grimy atmosphere, they felt that it was a best seller in that respect and for the most part, they were right.
“You take every woman you meet to places like this?” Samantha Cross sat down at the table opposite Donovan White and leant back. “Or am I a special case?”
Donovan smiled thinly. “I could have taken you to Saint and Sinner, but I figured that I would save that for later on when you’d adjusted to what I had to tell you.”
“I’m all ears,” she replied and settled her ice-like gaze onto Donovan White’s shape. She ran a few bio-metric scans and flicked idly through the vision modes in her expensive eyes. She was used to seeing nothing, but this time her sight revealed something about the man before her that caused the policewoman to take a deep breath.
“Is there something wrong?”
“No,” she replied, “Not wrong, just different.”
“That’s a first,” Donovan stirred his tea and then let go of the spoon, unlike most spoons that obeyed the laws of physics this one refused to stop moving. Samantha had the feeling that somewhere, a certain physicist was turning in his grave. “Usually people describe me as eccentric.”
“Freaky,” she said and kept her eyes firmly on him. “What is that?”
She watched a kind-of glowing heat-haze dance about the man and whip through his body, out of the other side and repeat this random dance, like a Brownian motion of mystical energies.
“It would help,” Donovan dropped a couple of sugar cubes into his drink. “If you explained to me, what you mean.” The spoon kept on stirring for a few more seconds until it stopped and he removed it.
“I can see you in a different way, thanks to these,” a long well-trimmed fingernail tapped on her eye. “It’s a Kenyiro Optics special edition. They detect all sorts of unusual phenomenon supposedly, but up until now I’ve seen jack shit through them.”
The cup went to Donovan’s lips and he sniffed at the liquid for a moment, smiled and nodded. “I thought so; if you look very closely you can see the rolling ad-logo whirling about in their replacement depths.”
“Poetic,” she admitted and chuckled softly. “So are you going to answer my question?”
“I try,” Donovan looked from side to side and tapped the rim of his cup. “It really depends on what answer you’re looking for. I have met with a range of replies when I tell people the truth.”
“Try me,” she looked askance. “I mean. I saw the corpse I was investigating get up, walk, kill my partner, jump body and kill a whole bunch of other people.”
“True.”
“I admit,” she left her coffee to cool. “I was a sceptic to begin with, even though people have been telling me the world has changed. I just never saw it.”
“Human nature I’m afraid,” Donovan sipped his tea again and peered at the woman over the rim of the cup. “What we do not understand we either destroy, decry or better still – ignore. It suits our limited and blinkered perspective to pretend that everything is happy and normal – without that failsafe most of us would go mad.”
Samantha picked up her coffee mug. “A failsafe?” she questioned and then answered her own question, “a mental block that prevents true comprehension.”
Donovan put down the tea cup and regarded it for a moment, as if he was trying to make sense of the structure. “The universal truths would shatter the minds of the unprepared. As they have done for centuries, men have attempted to understand the greatest questions and the most obscure facts since the dawn of time.”
“So what changed and why are you, like you are?”
“In the very answer lie a multitude of questions Samantha Cross,” he waggled his finger backwards and forwards like a metronome. “There’s no one true way to give you what you’re looking for, but perhaps I can enlighten you on the how and why of what happened.”
“I’ll take anything I can get at the moment, my failsafe isn’t working as well as it should.” She grinned however and drained the whole of her coffee in one long gulp. “Start talking Mr. White.”
“I won’t bother putting a time scale on this, because knowing when it happened would only confuse matters and provide more cracks in that failsafe,” Donovan gave a cat-like grin and titled his head. “We shall simply call the day that the world changed forever – the Event.”
“That sounds pretty lame,” Samantha followed the cat-like grin with a smirk. “To me, but I was a realist.”
“Reality is but another word for shackle,” Donovan quipped. “At one time the Universe worked like that, black and white, pink and green, up and down, left and right, sugar and sour.”
“And now? How does it work?”
“Alice, you really don’t want to step into the Looking Glass,” he said and waved his hand, silver streams came off his fingers and coalesced into tiny falling flakes of snow. “The Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter and the Queen of Hearts are all real.”
Samantha Cross watched the snow and blinked several times, mostly she ran through the various scanning macros of her eyes. “My god,” she found the breath to speak at long last. “C.S. Lewis has a lot to answer for.”
Donovan laughed a little and he rolled his eyes. “And here I was trying to be mysterious and serious all at once, do you mind?”
“Sorry,” she smiled. “Go on?”
“At one time,” he continued. “The world spun on its axis and we thought that it was God that made the rain,” he chuckled at this. “Science taught us that it was the Water Table and various natural reactions that created rainfall, science gave us the shield and the failsafe to explain things we thought were magic.”
“Yeah,” Samantha Cross ordered another coffee from a passing waitress; it had been a long day so far. “Science has always tried to explain the paranormal and the unexplained.”
“The unexplained, by its very nature is just that,” Donovan wrinkled his nose at the smell of coffee. “It can’t be explained because there is no scientific answer – for example you could say that the sudden snowfall was a result of scientific principles applied to the air via an expenditure of arcane power.”
“Don’t confuse the issue,” Samantha warned softly. “Your mind is running on too many tracks, it’s going to derail mine, I’m not capable of processing about two-hundred facts at once.”
Donovan smiled somewhat sheepishly and nodded. “I am sorry, we’ll save the in-depth explanations for later on if you want, now back to the Event.”
“Thanks, it is appreciated,” she winked. “And yeah, save the deep magical study for when I want that question answered.”
“The Event,” he got his mind back on track. “It was the time when a scientist made the biggest mistake of his life.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Samantha gave a look to the greying sky around the city and shot a glance back to Donovan. “I guess.”
“You’re right,” he nodded. “It wouldn’t be, but it would be the first time that someone has made a mistake of this kind. It used to be said that no one man or woman, had the power to change the world – but this man did, completely by accident.”
“One man turned the world to shit?” she scoffed. “I find that a little hard to swallow.”
“One man turned the world to shit, yes,” Donovan replied and snapped his fingers so they made a loud click. “Just like that, his hubris and arrogance almost destroyed it.”
“Well sounds like a typical guy thing then?”
“It could easily have been a woman, his wife was just as blinkered as he was,” Donovan sighed. “Professor Alex Mc’Leary.”
“I remember him,” Samantha said and picked up her new coffee. “He did a big globally covered seminar, on Heaven and Hell.”
“That was part of it. It was called, Magic: Hoax or Truth,” Donovan corrected her. “It was meant to show us how stupid the belief in the supernatural and paranormal was, but it didn’t work like that.”
“What happened?” she could almost taste the coffee on her lips but the intensity in Donovan’s voice robbed her of the will to drink it.
“Mc’Leary had in his possession a stone, an artefact that he found a long time ago. A piece of a puzzle known as the Logrus – he should have never read from the text on the surface.”
“Nothing came of that, if I remember,” Samantha tried to think back to that time, but all she got was a blank.
“Nothing,” Donovan’s cup trembled as the force of his will played over it. “Happened? Yes, some people’s failsafe kicked in and locked down their minds – but those people at the seminar were not so lucky.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he soothed. “It isn’t your fault. The stone was read out aloud and to cut a long story short. Instead of debunking the paranormal, Mc’Leary was swallowed by a portal to Hell and the Earth never recovered.”
“You said the people at the seminar were not so lucky?”
“Yes,” he put his fingers together one by one until they made a pyramid shape. “Most of the audience were killed by the portal’s energy; it opened and drew in the souls of nearly every one there. But that wasn’t the end. Until we managed to close the damn thing it tore this planet apart.”
“Shit,” Samantha’s coffee trembled in her fingers as she could almost see it now in her minds eye. “How did I lose my memory of this?”
“Simple,” Donovan clapped his hands together causing the woman to jump. “Your mind shut it out, blocked it, it was too terrible for you to process and you simply blanked on the whole event.”
“I really don’t remember,” she sounded exasperated and thoroughly fed up, “which pisses me off.”
“The planet went through some apocalyptic changes, massive coastal and environmental damage. Some places were wiped off the map completely and well, Seattle was dragged into a Hellstorm and displaced.”
“Seattle?”
“It was here before Whisper City, quite a nice place. It had a wonderful tower, the Space Needle; I wish you could have seen it.”
“I do,” she found herself saying. “It sounds fantastic.”
“Portals appeared all across the world, they brought in illegal immigrants from the various dimensions. Vast regions of the multi-verse destabilised and the corruption from the spheres just melted into one another. Soon we had demons and devils running for Congress, things that you never thought were possible came out of hiding and suddenly the Big Bad Wolf was as real as the Tooth Fairy.”
“I shouldn’t wear red then?”
Donovan rolled his eyes again and said. “I’m serious Sam and this is the result. This isn’t a normal place any longer and people like you, who do a damn good job, get killed because they can’t accept that there are things that go ‘bump’ in the night.”
She blinked again and looked to the side. “Thanks,” she wasn’t used to getting compliments, especially from handsome guys like Donovan. The P.I.A were usually full of stuffy suits that lorded their so-called arcane and paranormal knowledge over the rest of them, they looked down on people like her. “So what do I do?”
“Adapt,” he said. “Or perish. Like in Evolution, this is the next step in your life’s transformation. You can ignore it and pretend that the monster in the closet isn’t real, or you can accept it and shoot the monsters head off.”
That brought a smile to Samantha’s face again and she laughed. “I think I would like to go with the latter option, not sure if my gun’s going to do much good against shit like that though. Hell,” she snorted. “I don’t even know what kinds of shit there is to shoot at.”
“All kinds,” Donovan settled his gaze onto the container with the sugar in and mentally tallied the small crystals. “More than the number of sugar grains in that shaker.”
“I have a feeling you know how many,” she said offhandedly. “So how do I deal with it?”
“We’re going to have to train you up,” Donovan gave her a sly wink. “That is of course if you are at all interested in working with the P.I.A?”
The silence hung thick in the air for a long moment, minutes passed as Samantha just stared at Donovan. The man in white kept his unblinking gaze firmly fixed on the depths of her optics.
“You’re serious?”
“Deadly,” he said and a wry half-amused smile appeared on his lips. “Do you want the job or not?”
“Isn’t there some kind of exam?”
“There should be, but we tend to pick talented people up from all over the place.”
“When do I start?”
He thought on this for a few seconds, “how about now?”
“I wasn’t expecting this,” she admitted softly. “Thanks.”
“You handled yourself pretty well against circumstances that most people, who describe themselves as sane, would consider terrifying.”
“The dead don’t just walk around and they don’t come back to life, except in movies,” she replied. “Or at least that’s what I used to believe.”
“That’s the hard part to rationalise Sam, belief is the biggest power out there. Once you can master that, you can pretty much do anything.”
“You believe that?”
“With every atom, molecule and fibre of my being,” he said impishly. “And besides I am a walking advertisement for the paranormal and supernatural. What I can do, you haven’t seen the half of it.”
“It’d be clichéd for me to say I might be looking forwards to that,” she laughed and then something settled on her mind. “You could help me with this investigation, there’s a question I need answering.”
“Ah,” Donovan had an inkling what that might be. “Believe me Sam; you don’t want to dig too deeply into some of this – not yet.”
“How do you know what I want to ask, you’re not a mind reader are you?”
“No, no,” he assured her. “I’m just a cop like you.”
“A cop that can make snow fall out of his hands,” she corrected. “That’s not like me at all.”
“I don’t have company sponsored eyes or boosted strength and speed,” Donovan tackled her verbally. “So we’re both special that way.”
“I’m not going to win this am I?”
“No,” he grinned. “You want to know who killed the guy or if he took his own life?”
“Yeah I do.”
“He was scum,” Donovan said flatly. “He took women to his motel room, not the first time he’d done it either, he raped them and they turned up dead. He wanted so hard to believe in the Devil and the power he could give him.”
“I saw the book,” she remembered. “It was some demon catalogue or something?”
“He bit off more than he could chew.”
“In what way, did he dial a demon?”
“Dial a demon, don’t give them ideas,” Donovan’s grin was back. “Hell INC would love that – I know Red would.”
“Red?” she had a name and she followed the inquiry further. “Did she have something to do with the guy’s death?”
“He was unlucky, or perhaps Red picked him out of all the damned souls she could find,” Donovan’s fingers drummed the table top idly, almost as if talking about the woman made him nervous. “He took her back to the room and she dealt with him, but you can’t touch her Sam, she’s beyond any of us.”
“What?” Samantha Cross blinked. “Donovan. If she murdered this guy, self defence or not we need to follow due process.”
“There isn’t any kind of due process for her; she works outside the law and outside of our sphere of influence. The Hell INC sees to that.” Donovan wished he could light a cigarette or something, but he had given up quite a while ago. “Red didn’t kill the guy, that’s not the way the Devil does things.”
“The Devil,” Samantha’s voice sounded incredulous. “This Red, is the Devil?”
“She is now; she got the promotion a while ago.” Donovan closed his eyes and sighed. “I used to run security for her company Sundown Records.”
“The promotion,” Samantha whispered this quietly. “I thought a promotion was going up, not down?”
Donovan laughed again and opened his eyes. “You’ll learn and when you’re ready, you’ll see.”
“Right,” she blinked once. “It is going to take some time right?”
“Yes,” he promised in a way. “It takes as long as you’ve got the guts to handle it.”
“The guts,” she pondered this and smiled thinly. “I’ve got the guts Donovan and the determination, question is, do you have the guts to handle me?”
“We’ll have to find out,” he stood up from the table and put his hand out. “I suggest you go home and take a shower, you’ll need a clear head and a clean body for what we’re going to put you through.”
“Sounds kinky,” she shook his hand and stood up. “You knew that right?”
“I did,” he quoted something. “Cleanliness is next to Godliness.”
“I always had a hard time believing in God,” she admitted as she turned towards the door of the diner. “There’s something about that whole religion thing that never sat well with me.”
“God as you might know him, well, all that’s changed. Heaven is a Public Limited Company now, just as Hell is an Incorporated.”
She stopped dead and turned her head to regard the man. “I don’t think I want to know.”
“Don’t worry, you won’t have to meet the Board of Directors in Heaven PLC just yet – they do like to say hello to brand new P.I.A recruits eventually though, since we are an Earth-bound division of the company.”
“I definitely need that shower,” she said and walked casually towards the door. “Thanks Donovan, where do I find you?”
“I’ll be there when you are ready to take the next step,” he said cryptically. “Trust me.”
“Are you just going to appear out of thin air?”
“I thought personally I’d take a trip to your apartment, knock the door and invite you out for a quiet drink to discuss how to proceed.” He smoothed back his hair. “I mean if you want I can port right into your shower?”
“No,” she blushed. “The drink and discussion is just fine.”
She left the diner blushing furiously, something she hadn’t done for a long time and settled into a long stride, as the wind hit her face she looked upwards into the sky of Whisper City and into the soft cry of the rain.
“What the hell have I gotten myself into?”
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Post by ginxy on Feb 27, 2007 16:06:08 GMT -5
hurray....more to read. I meant that in a good way ;D Be catching up on some things tonight hopefully - can't wait
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Post by Witcher Wolf on Feb 28, 2007 6:06:49 GMT -5
Cool ginxy! I really should add more to Fate's Hand as well at some point, since that story is going somewhere honest
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Post by Witcher Wolf on Feb 28, 2007 13:15:33 GMT -5
“I like Cal and his dog Napalm. I like Ike and his itty-bitty A-bomb. Everybody got one, I want mine. You can order it up on Channel Nine.” ~ The Sisters of Mercy (Doctor Jeep)
Part Three: Waiting in line at the Supermarket of the Gods.
Whatever your religion, whatever your knowledge of the way that things work, nothing ever prepares you for the cold hard truths that you have to face once you cross over from life to death. Of course there are those who can step between worlds in a blink of an eye, Red, Nicholas Winter and the servants of the various Universal Corporations.
They already know what’s out there and they already know what’s waiting for us after we shuffle off the mortal coil. And perhaps subconsciously we’ve patterned our own existence after a fleeting understanding of the places beyond the veil, of the worlds that we can’t see with the naked eye.
Since the Event however, things have been vastly different. Magic and the supernatural is common place to many people as smoking a cigarette or taking a breath. Some blinkered souls choose to ignore it and some embrace it, some are corrupted by it but all are eventually entranced by it.
A tick and tock is all it takes to slip from one dimension to another, like you might put on a coat to go outside and face the cold, Nicholas Winter turned a corner on a one way street and the world melted away in a sliver of multi-coloured mist. Reality came apart like turpentine thrown over a masterpiece painting, the colours all mixing down into one swirl of madness.
There was an absence of sound as the air turned to nothing, as the sky shifted into a black void pin-pricked by the odd glimmer of something akin to starlight. Nicholas Winter adjusted his hat, it was going to be one of those days and he was on a mission for himself, not for Heaven PLC.
He was quite fond of Red but he wasn’t sure how you could handle a relationship with the Devil, she was a dangerous woman – but she didn’t really know it yet. Still, their professional relationship was cordial enough and he had to admit that when Red smiled, he smiled back.
After a while of stepping on a path that only he could feel, he turned another invisible corner in the multi-verse and found what he was looking for. It appeared to his eyes as a precipice of sorts, a cliff of rock suspended above a sea of shimmering stars.
A sign pointed out in black and white: Purgatory, this way.
He took the facsimile of a deep breath and stepped off into nothing. A soul could fall forever and ever it was said about Purgatory, the rumours were varied and each one permeated different religions with facets and flights of fancy.
The truth was probably more amusing than terrifying and when mortals discovered it, they would stand and stare at the doorway for what seemed like hours. It never ceased to make Nick smile of course, especially when he saw the reaction of a fresh soul to the terrible secret that was the realm of waiting, he didn’t know if at the core of time and space this place had always been like this – but he had a theory that over the endless sands of time it had been shaped by mortal desires and thoughts.
Under a rolling sky he tilted his hat upwards and beheld a giant construction, a massive building that stretched almost off into the planes of the infinite. A high domed roof curved upwards and covered a flat rectangular core structure. The building sat in an immeasurably large concrete quadrangle, with various regimented lines painted upon the floor.
There were a multitude of glassy-eyed vacant people that thronged about the forecourt, they moved in a kind-of stupor backwards and forwards like zombies from a bad horror film. Some even pushed metal cages on wheels, shopping trolleys shoved by the souls of the departed.
There was some kind of humorous universal irony there Nick thought as he watched this for a while, he put both hands in his long coat and stalked towards the revolving entry to the building.
Within the structure it was the same story, there were rows and rows of shelves in an almost endless number of aisles, a loud speaker played some old song from a long forgotten age and everything was lit by a gaudy neon glow.
People stood in line to be served by ghostly cashiers and the queues were backed up in hundreds of souls, they all held something they thought was of value. It was a fake image of things that they still clung to, meaningless menial objects and portions of their old lives that they held dear.
Things that souls really had no need of, a ghostly old lady held a metal basket at the back of the line, within the contents of the wire frame were two tins of a nameless brand dog food and three packets of hairnets.
As Nicholas watched there were times when a soul would make it past the cashier, down towards the door and vanish into the white light as it opened. He knew their destination even before they did, some went to work for his corporation, some went to work for Red’s – that was the way the multi-verse worked and for the most part it seemed to be a decent system.
Of course like any system there were bugs that crept in, outside influences that kept things interesting. Like the case of the missing punk kid, Red had caused him to blow his own brains out and now he was nowhere to be found. He wasn’t in Heaven, because frankly he wasn’t White Corporation material and he wasn’t even in Hell.
He’d slipped between the cracks; Nick was hoping he’d find him here. If not, then there was something up with the Universal Machine and he’d have to call a Trouble-shooter from an outside department.
It was like finding a needle in a haystack and he was sure someone from the Accounting division of Heaven PLC was laughing right about now. He stepped forwards and gave one of the cashiers a dark look as they stared at him, the spirit snapped her gaze down to the counter and he walked on in. He shook his head and began to mentally extend his will throughout Purgatory.
A shabby man in a long blue coat, puffing on a big cigar leant on a mop; he scratched the stubble of his chin and peered at Nicholas for a long time before he crackled out a question.
“Hey buddy, you looking for someone in particular?”
Nicholas turned around and levelled his mirror-shaded gaze onto the man; he blinked a couple of times and then smiled. “I certainly am, and I did not expect to see you here. The last I heard you’d part-timed as a hitman?”
“Got bored,” said the man in the blue coat.
“You got bored that quickly?”
“I find I do these days Nicky,” he puffed on the cigar again. “I figured that I’d give this job a go, see if I liked it.”
“I’m not sure I can handle the idea of God as a janitor,” Nicholas Winter said. “With all due respect, you were better off running Heaven.”
“Got bored of that, I mean, look at the mortal world Nick and tell me – who needs a God like that anymore?”
“Well,” Nicholas furrowed his brow, he tried to find an answer to that and shrugged. “I guess you’re right.”
“So then who you looking for?” former God blew a ring of smoke with his cigar, “not my lazy, good for nothing son right?”
“No,” Nicholas chuckled. “Not at all, he’s busy being a bartender last I heard.”
“Good for him,” former God snorted. “Saves having to die for their sins, now he just gets to hear their endless drivel.”
“Ouch,” Nicholas forced a smile. “I won’t ask what made you so bitter, but I can guess it begins and ends with mankind?”
“That’s part of it,” former God gave a long laugh and then coughed. “I don’t know why I smoke these, perhaps it’s to piss off the anti-smoker folks or just because I can.”
“You were God, you know, you could do anything you wanted.”
“If that’s the case, then why couldn’t I keep that planet straight?”
“I don’t think anyone ever could,” Nicholas admitted. “Mortals have a particular way of making the most and the worst of what they’re given.”
“Got that right,” former God narrowed his eyes and leant more on the mop; it was starting to bend a little. “You said you were looking for someone?”
“Yes,” Nicholas was glad to change the subject, there was something about being in the presence of a being like this former God that unnerved him. “He would be a young soul, terribly scarred by evil and shackled to his misdeeds more than Jacob Marley ever was.”
Former God puffed another smoke ring and wrinkled his nose; it caused small laughter-lines to appear around his eyes and just to the side of his lips. “What makes you think that he came here?”
“He’s not on Earth, Heaven and he’s certainly not in Hell,” Nicholas replied and counted the places off on his fingers. “Red can’t come here as you know, but employees of the White Corporation can.”
“Yup,” former God snorted another cloud of smoke. “But who you’re looking for, he isn’t here either.”
“Damn,” Nicholas titled his hat and looked around. “That complicates things a great deal.”
“Yup,” former God smiled thinly and rolled his eyes. “You’re going to require the services of an Outsider, and you know what that means.” A small cloud of cigar smoke settled like a halo around the man in blue’s head. “You have to hire a Bounty hunter Nicky and one that has access to all the multi-verse at that.”
“Great.”
“If you’ve got a Runner, it’s the only way to make sure they don’t cause trouble for either company Nick.”
“Do you happen to know of someone?”
“Oh as a matter of fact. I do,” former God gave a wicked grin and swished his mop, “a fellow by the name of Johnny Death.”
Nicholas Winter had heard that name before; he really didn’t want to go to Johnny because his methods were less than ideal. But as they say, beggars can’t be choosers. If this soul had skipped the due-process intentionally or by mistake Death would be the only one who could go to places where members of either corporation were not supposed to go.
Nicholas’ only worry was that Johnny would bring with him his own brand of destructive justice, disregard for the law and rack up a body-count higher than some cult films of the twentieth century.
“Small price to pay for averting a company disaster Nicky,” former God plucked the thoughts out of Nicholas’ skull, “if you think about it.”
Nicholas thought about it, he thought about it some more and finally he realised that former God was right. “Do you have his contact information?”
“Left pocket of that coat you angels like to wear,” former God smirked and winked a little. “That’s his number, give him a call.”
“I hate it when you do that.”
“I don’t,” former God winked again and turned as the speakers buzzed to life. “I never have.”
“Clean up on aisle 3-3-3,” sang the voice from the speaker. “Clean up on aisle 2-5-7.”
“They’re playing my song Nicky,” he gave a wave of his hand, picked up his mop and bucket and vanished into the endless nightmare that was Purgatory, the Supermarket of the Gods
Nicholas Winter watched him go and drew out the gaudy business card; an emblazoned image of a big truck was stuck on the card with a bright yellow font behind it. The information read: Hell Truckers, Johnny Death, no job too small, no demon or entity too big to tackle – get TRUCKED today.
The angel gave a long sigh and turned to leave Purgatory, when a small mousey-haired man grabbed hold of his sleeve. “Excuse me,” he said. “But could you direct me to the toilets, I’ve only just got here and I really need to go.”
He gave a half smile and pointed to the furthest aisle about three hundred rows back. “Over there,” he said. “You should just make it if you run.”
Nicholas Winter turned and left quickly, he stepped into the light and right back out of the same alley in Whisper City he’d walked into moments ago. He startled a woman that smiled wanly at him and hurried on; he tipped his hat and tucked the card back into his pocket.
The dark sky of Whisper City hung oppressively over him like some kind of shroud, he ignored it and listened for a moment to the world that was staffed by mortal hands, but created by immortal desires. He chuckled and pulled out his cell phone, dialled the number from the card and took a deep breath.
“Yo bitch, Johnny Death here, what can I do for you?” a gravel-like voice that sounded as though the man had a permanent chest cold, grated from the speaker.
“Mr Death,” Nicholas Winter said formally. “I work for the White Corporation and I’d like to talk to you about a possible bounty.”
“Sweet,” Johnny Death laughed on the other end of the phone and Nicholas heard him shut someone up, “where and when do you want to meet?”
“Let us say Saint and Sinner in about two hours from now?”
“I’ll be there, you best not be yanking my shackles!”
“I’m the last person,” Nicholas sighed. “That would want to yank your particular shackles Mr. Death.”
The phone went dead and the angel looked upwards to watch a streak of light as one of Whisper’s many aircraft shimmered across the night time sky. He turned his head back down and pulled out a cigarette from his coat, lit it and drew in a deep breath. It didn’t do anything for him but just like former God he did it regardless.
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Post by ginxy on Feb 28, 2007 18:43:16 GMT -5
Cool ginxy! I really should add more to Fate's Hand as well at some point, since that story is going somewhere honest good to know - don't be like the creators of LOST who keep saying that but keep adding more questions instead of answers. I'm not saying you are right now - just saying don't become that way....lol LOST is on tonight (can't wait to see what else I can not find out)
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Post by Witcher Wolf on Feb 28, 2007 18:49:04 GMT -5
I'll try not to. Though I tend to accidentally add more questions, most of the time however the story that I write has a definite beginning, middle, end and I know where it's off to.
Fate's Hand has a defined set of events that are going to happen come Hell or High Water.
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Post by ginxy on Feb 28, 2007 20:59:34 GMT -5
I'll try not to. Though I tend to accidentally add more questions, most of the time however the story that I write has a definite beginning, middle, end and I know where it's off to. Fate's Hand has a defined set of events that are going to happen come Hell or High Water. I have no doubts whatsever ;D Good reads with the tunes - so write on ;D And some of my friends call me Lois (as in Lois Lane) because I ask so many questions - so they don't really bother me - I'd rather have a thinking story than a wet-noodle story. I just mentioned the LOST relation because of a comment you made. ;D
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Post by Witcher Wolf on Mar 1, 2007 4:06:11 GMT -5
*grins at ginxy*
I get quite a few questions about the things I write from MaWa, she has a habit of asking things that almost throw me for a loop when in comes to the answers.
So I don't mind questions as I'm writing, since Cross' story is a kind of pet project nothing is set to come of it publication wise. Of course, that could change depending on who sees it.
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Post by Libby on Mar 2, 2007 6:13:23 GMT -5
Finally! Been wanting to take time out and read this all week.
Now you've explained that this is a re-work it makes much better sense.
I think having Donovan 'recruit' Sam works really well. I love her enhanced vision and the idea of the logo. I read lots of crime/forensic books, especially those featuring strong female characters and Sam's a classic.
As usual, the characters are well drawn and 'real'. Even if they don't last long...like Danny and Creed...they're given a 'life'.
I think maybe what hooks me into Whisper City, though, is the subtle humour and the upside-down/inside-out view of the world as it is post-Event.
As I said before, it reads like you really enjoy writing it. It's phrases like which have me chuckling. And the idea of Purgatory...well, Sainsbury's feels like that every day!
I really chuckled when Nick (yay for Nick!) met up with the guy with the brush. As soon as you wrote I clapped and said to myself 'Has to be God!' I think being a janitor suits him...until he gets bored again and maybe decides to have a shot at Red's job!
Johnny Death... going to an interesting character addition. Looking forward to reading how throwing him in the mix is going to affect the storyline.
Super stuff!
edit:
And yes...I enjoyed the dialogue between Donovan and Cross...nicely paced and informative without appearing forced. Sometimes it's good to slow things down to let the reader take a breath. ;D
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Post by Witcher Wolf on Mar 2, 2007 6:50:55 GMT -5
Thanks Libby, it's that kind of feedback that pushes me to keep on going with my hobby projects. I have several cool characters, wait until you meet JD's side-kick (alluded to) I don't think you'll be expecting what Frankie is.
Or you might.
There is an actual storyline, Nick's involved in part of it. But I do want to explore it like Sin City in a way, where each character has their own little story but they mesh, interleave and so forth. So expect some interesting twists...especially if you ever read my Whisper short, Jack and the Dreamstalk, because there are some changes coming to the Celestial Heirarchy that will cause a few chuckles and introduce another strong female lead.
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Post by Witcher Wolf on Mar 2, 2007 12:53:06 GMT -5
“She's into superstitions black cats and voodoo dolls. I feel a premonition that girl's gonna make me fall. She's into new sensations new kicks in the candle light. She's got a new addiction for every day and night.” ~ Ricky Martin (Livin’ La Vida Loca)
Part Four: Variations on a theme
Samantha Cross made it back safely to her apartment, stripped down bare and almost leapt into the shower. Her mind was ablaze with thoughts as she replayed the night’s events; it was pretty impressive and scary stuff. She was pleased with herself, someone else might have gone to pieces but she held her sanity and faced the demons – that counted for something.
As the hot water hit her it washed the troubles away, her smooth skin tingled as the liquid cascaded over it. The artificial rainstorm trickled down and over the woman’s shape, dripping off her curves. Sam had very few pleasures in life and this was one of them, she’d never tried a bath, not a proper old bath – so the shower was the next best thing.
The light from the fitting above her made the water sparkle a little and she turned her head into the force of the storm, a smile crept onto her lips. A Detective in the Whisper City police force turned agent for the newly established Paranormal Investigations Agency, what would her colleagues think?
Some of them like Creed, Creed would have been sceptical and she lost the smile as she thought about how he ended up, he was a real shame and she’d come to quite like the guy in a partner kind of way, nothing sexual, just good friends.
Jack would probably laugh, Collins would be amused as well and mention something about ‘things that went bump in the night’ then Taylor would make an innuendo and assert he could make things bump in her night, it was always about sex with Taylor and if you hung around him for too long, you started to think along those lines too.
She found the more she thought of that, the more that she needed to tune back her emotions. Thank God for the Lyre 3000, she dialled back her emotions and put both hands against the white tiled wall, splayed her fingers and tensed her back. It would be good to have someone in the shower with her though.
The chip did its job and the tears that threatened to fall dried up, instead the water made false streaks down from her eyes. That was the price she paid as a badge in the WCPD, standard issue chip – it didn’t do too good to get close to some of the scum she had to put down, they could use emotional blackmail to get the better of you.
She rubbed her hands through her hair furiously, as if she tried to wash out the other thoughts that tried to scuttle through her brain. Try as she might she couldn’t shift the grinning half-dead punk kid. He sat in her psyche and smiled a knowing smile as if he had a secret he could share with only her.
She timed herself under the water, about half an hour and she actually felt better, just as the timer on the chip dialled her back up to normal. Sam liked the feel of the rough towel against her skin as she buffed herself dry, some people preferred the hi-tech solution but she was a woman who adored simple pleasures when she could get them.
She wrapped a dressing gown around herself and tied the belt, slunk down onto a couch and just lay there a while. Sleep slipped in and delivered a gentle kiss on her forehead, she drifted off.
Elsewhere, there were other stories, other players in Whisper’s deck of cards doing their own thing. People like Nicholas Winter and Johnny Death who were destined to follow a twisted path as they tried to uncover what had happened to the rogue soul. Of course there was a reason that the rogue, was a rogue in the first place and it wasn’t quite what you would expect.
It had been one hell of a night, Nick’s cigarette burned out as he waited for Johnny outside in the street. The flashing lights of Whisper’s cop cars lit up the cold hard pavement as they whistled past and cried out a wailing siren’s call, part despair and part warning.
A tiny dappled pin-prick of water landed on the brim of his hat and the rain tumbled down, it forced him to slink back into the shadows and he almost vanished from sight. People quickened their pace to get in somewhere out of the coming storm.
Just then his phone buzzed in his pocket and he plucked it out, snapped it open and spoke softly. “Nicholas Winter?”
“Hey Nicky lovely,” it was Red’s sultry voice and she almost purred down the phone at him. “How’s my favourite angel, you know you really should wear white, I keep on getting bugged by the Fiendish Bureau Infernal, they really think you’re Hell INC material.”
“I’m flattered Red, truly,” he answered with a chuckle. “Because I’d love to work under you,” he let that innuendo hang for a moment. “But you know I do a better job right here, where I can keep an eye on Heaven and Hell.”
“Oh,” she purred again. “Nick, you know how to break a girl’s heart.”
“It comes from being a hitman once,” he said and tapped the phone idly. “So what can I do for you Red?”
“Do you really want me to answer that, because I have a list right here,” her voice took on non-subtle seductive undertones. “And it’s a long list.”
Nicholas Winter would have blushed if he could, but instead he just laughed and replied with candour. “My dear Red,” he stressed the dear. “Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it.”
“Can’t I have it early?”
“It’s not Christmas!”
“Every day in Hell INC is like Christmas for me Nicky, well, without the whole Christ thing, I mean Jesus, the guy has the best birthday ever and he has to get all emo about it,” Red snorted in reply and then began to laugh in unison. “Oh I am such a wicked woman.”
“I wouldn’t expect the Devil to be a Saint now would I?” Nick grinned in the shadow of the awning he was under.
“Saint Red, Patron Saint of Sin,” she chuckled once more. “It has a nice ring to it, might bring it up at the next board meeting.”
Nick couldn’t help but laugh loudly at this, he gathered a couple of odd looks from people passing by, and he returned them with a wink and a smile.
“What’s up honey, cat got your tongue?”
“Nope,” he stroked the phone with the tip of his finger, disconcertingly Red made a purring sound into the speaker. “So, innuendo and flirting aside, you rang for a reason or is the Devil making social phone calls these days?”
“Oh, well,” she whispered. “For you I’d phone the ends of the Earth, or phone till the end of the Earth. But I do admit,” here it comes he thought. “I wondered if you’d managed to find my missing psychopath.”
“He’s not in Heaven, as we know,” Nick replied. “Or in Hell, as far as you know,” he added. “Nor is he in Purgatory, so I have one lead left to follow up on.”
“Blast,” she sighed into his ear through the phone. “What lead?”
“A demonic bounty hunter,” Nick said and adjusted the lapel of his coat as it got colder. “He’s a self-made Mage-net media personality, otherwise known as the one and only Johnny Death.”
Red clapped her hands together in a show of sudden girly-glee. “Oh my Nick, you have been busy. I am such a big fan of that show, Hell Truckers, Johnny Death, wow, you make sure if you ever need to come see me, bring the big guy with you. He’s put more souls at my corporation than anyone else on the planet.”
“I know,” Nick sounded somewhat disturbed by Red’s enthusiasm. “Where Johnny goes there’s usually trouble and lots of it.”
“He’s such a brutal guy, lots of style, love the truck,” she enthused and Nick could hear the sound of her lacquered fingernails as they drummed on the desk top of her office. “Not as hot as you though.”
“Why thank you,” he said. “As an angel I find that amusing, to be thought of as hot. But hey, times have changed and angels aren’t what they used to be.”
“About time if you ask me.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah,” she admitted. “I could never dig those stupid girly wings and halos; I mean that’s crappy design Nick. Long coats, attitude, that’s cool.”
“I have to admit,” he caught sight of something as a large shape appeared at the corner of his eye. “That I like the new look. Ok, Red, I gotta love you and leave you babe – Johnny’s here.”
“Say hi from me,” Red thrummed softly. “And you will come and see me sometime about this rogue soul, personally.” To Nick it wasn’t a question, it was an offer and a demand all rolled into one.
“Yeah sure I will,” he closed the phone and turned to watch the big truck pull into the car park of Saint and Sinner.
It was a massive black and gold monster, thirteen headlights were plastered all over the front and it had a big trailer at the back. There were more wheels than Nick could count and the exhausts rose up from the left and right side of the cab, they towered over the top by several feet.
Along the side of the trailer in bright orange and yellow letters was the name: Hell Truckers.
An ear-splitting bellow echoed from the truck as the driver pushed the horn, windows of nearby parked cars were pulverised and the angel nearly fell over as a pure wall of sound hit him. He adjusted his hat and waited for the giant vehicle to come to a complete stop.
There was no doubt about it, if the logo didn’t give it away, the man that exited the cab and stood at a height of around seven feet tall did. Johnny Death looked larger than life and dressed the part, he had short brown hair and a wicked heavy set face, and his eyes were almost completely black and only had a slight gleam of white in them.
He wore a big battered long brown armoured trench-coat; it had a ragged set of bullet holes over the front and the sides, a few red stains here and there that could have been blood. A crossed-bandolier of shotgun shells rested across his chest and he had at least three visible weapons on his person. The shotgun, with a polished wooden stock, a big combat knife tucked into his boot and a massive pistol the size of Nick’s forearm rested in a shoulder holster under the coat.
“Got any cigars Heavenboy?” he snorted as he looked down at Nicholas Winter. “You’re Nick Summer right?”
“Winter,” the angel corrected.
“Winter, whatever,” Johnny said. “Got any cigars?”
“No,” Nick replied. “But I have a packet of cigarettes, if you like to smoke.”
“Screw cigarettes, cigarettes are for pansies,” the big man scoffed. “Cigars are for real men and generals and maybe Cuban dictators.”
“Right,” Nicholas nodded and didn’t bother extending his hand. “I would like to get right down to business, if you don’t mind?”
“Don’t mind at all,” Johnny looked around. “Being with all these walking breathing corpses makes my skin crawl.”
“Those happen to be your fans Johnny,” Nick chided. “You know those people that spell into the Mage-net and keep you with food on the table.”
“Yeah, walking breathing corpses, make good fans, didn’t say I had to like em now did I?”
“No,” Nick admitted. “I see we’re going to have an interesting relationship.”
“Yeah,” Johnny gave a snort. “You pay, I do the job, no one has a relationship, I’m happy. Got it?”
“Got it,” Nicholas Winter rolled his eyes behind the mirror-shades. “So, I need you to find a lost soul.”
“Understood,” Johnny turned his head and blew a loud wolf-whistle at a Mexican woman that strolled past; she was hot in Johnny’s world, slinky and damn drop dead gorgeous. He’d have to try and find her again, when he got bored.
“Nice ass,” he said helpfully.
The woman put her middle finger up and said. “Screw you.”
“That’s the idea,” Johnny cupped his crotch and gave her the benefit of his best Ricky Martin impression. “You know you want it.”
“I’d rather screw your friend, at least he looks hot,” she replied and climbed astride a wicked looking motorbike. “He’s got a cute smile.”
Nicholas Winter grinned cat-like in the falling rain and shrugged at Johnny, who made a face. “You see, style my friend over crassness – wins every time.”
“He’s too skinny,” Johnny protested. “He’d break with a fine piece like you.”
Rosalita Mendez let the bike answer for her as she drowned out the trucker’s reply with a few revs. The woman was gone in a heartbeat and she left a string of Mexican curse words on the air.
“I bet she’s a prostitute,” Johnny nudged Nick with an elbow. “Mexican, totally hot, got to be a prostitute turning tricks for the big dicks.”
“Smooth Johnny,” Nicholas Winter was having a few second thoughts, but he turned to face the trucker. “Very smooth, now can you get back on track?”
“I can,” Johnny had already forgotten about her. “Rogue soul, yadda-yadda, shoot them until they cooperate – drag them screaming back to the White Corporation?”
“No,” Nick shook his head as rain dripped from his hat. “Not the White Corporation, they’re supposed to go to the infernal offices in Hell INC.”
“Oh,” Johnny chewed his lip. “Well, that’s screwed my stereotype up the ass,” he gave a crass snort. “I’ll do it, got nothing else to do. We get to Mage-net it right?”
“If you want,” Nicholas Winter rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “It might make a good show.”
“Hell Truckers: Rogue hunter,” Johnny liked the sound of that. “I’d be bounty hunting this rogue all over the multi-verse, sounds like a slippery customer to me.”
“Very,” Nick admitted. “He’s off the usual grid, can’t find him anywhere.”
“Sweet,” Johnny grinned. “I’m hired; I’m on the clock, say for the usual fee?”
“Agreed,” Nicholas Winter brought out a small book and opened it, he wrote out a tiny piece of paper and handed it to the big man. Johnny looked at it, took out his pen, signed it and handed it back.
“Rock on,” the trucker laughed harshly. “Now you know I work alone, apart from Frankie, my camera – guy?”
“I didn’t,” Nick admitted. “But I do now, that’s fine by me.”
“Good,” Johnny hollered into the truck. “Hey lazy skull, get your bones out here and come meet the Heaven-boy Nicky Winter.”
The right side of the truck lit up and there was a blaze of gold and orange fire, a glowing/burning skull left the cab and floated over to the two men. A stream of flame trailed behind it, curling into the air.
“Hello Frankie,” Nick said. “So you’re Johnny’s camera guy?”
“Frankie,” the skull said with a Hispanic accent, “at your service Corp man.”
“Good to meet you,” Nick nodded and looked back to the trucker. “I wasn’t expecting that, nicely done.”
“Hey, he’s the best God damn,” Johnny made a face. “The best, period, he’s got skills with film and stuff like you wouldn’t believe.”
Frankie’s sockets burst into glittering golden flames and he moved around slowly, getting a good view of the Saint and Sinner club in an old gothic church, Nicholas Winter, the various streets – he finally settled on a shot of Johnny and the truck before the eyes went dull again.
“You just filmed that?” Nick said impressed. “I can’t wait to watch the full show, when do you head out Johnny?” not as though the angel was tired of Johnny’s company but he was eager that someone found this rogue before other agents were called in, less, helpful forces from Hell INC.
“No problem my friend,” Frankie grinned, his choices being limited due to his grisly nature. “And yeah, I did, film it all in the blink of an eye: if I had eyes.”
“Right, we’re on the clock, gonna be fun,” Johnny stomped back to his truck and climbed in, he blew the horn again and it was quieter this time, less destructive, a few alarms went off nearby. “Come on Frankie, haul ass,” he guffawed, “if you had one.”
Frankie let that go and clacked his teeth together in irritation; he followed Johnny and sailed in through the window.
Johnny reversed the truck out of the car park, right through the back wall and over at least two other parked cars. The big trailer and cab crushed them like they were soda pop cans.
Nicholas Winter sighed and took off his hat; he ran his fingers through his hair before he put the hat back in place and adjusted the tilt. He needed a break for a while, so he walked off down a nearby alley and appeared in a different part of Whisper, the part that he liked the most. Big city lights and towering skyscrapers were everywhere.
This was the business district of the city and there were corporation buildings for everything, Starr Enterprises, owned by Madeline Starr and the biggest, tallest tower in the city belonged to Whisper’s founder, Maximilian Corellaine – it looked out over all the others like a predatory lion surveying his pride lands.
He recognised the bike that the Mexican woman had and stopped to take a look at it, it was a custom job and reminded him of some movie he’d seen once. It had a lot of death motifs and the headlight was shaped like a grinning crystal skull.
“Nice,” he heard himself say and checked his reflection in the chromed surface. “Looking good there Nick, looking very good.”
“Excuse me,” a man in a suit with a wire that trailed off behind his right ear stepped up to him and put his hand on a hidden holster. “I am going to have to ask you to move back sir, this vehicle and the rider are protected.”
Nicholas Winter blinked and he stepped back. “I was just admiring it, if you think I was going to steal it, you’re mistaken my friend.”
The bodyguard wasn’t convinced. “With all due respect,” he opened his jacket. “They all say that, please vacate the area.”
“One moment,” Nicholas flicked his sleeve and produced his C.I.A badge; it carried weight on Earth as well as in Heaven.
The man took it and it was like someone had slapped him in the face with a giant hammer, he almost dropped it in his hurry to put it back. He looked wild eyed for a moment and shook visibly.
“Sorry,” he mumbled. “I had no idea.”
“You’re just doing your job Mike,” Nicholas Winter gave him a reassuring smile. “As am I, but don’t worry, this has nothing to do with your client.”
The man relaxed a little. “That’s good to hear, I was worried when I saw that badge. Miss Mendez isn’t in trouble is she?”
“Like I said, no, nothing to do with her,” he had a name and a famous one at that. “Gina Mendez, star of ‘Once upon a Dream’?”
“No,” Mike answered, “her daughter Rosalita, Mr. Winter.”
“Johnny was wrong,” Nick laughed and then stepped further back. “I won’t bother you any longer Mick, stay safe and if you ever need anything. Here,” he tossed the man his card. “If there’s a job you can’t handle, call me.”
Mick Long took the card and put it away. “Thank you,” he managed before he stepped back to his guard post. “I hope I don’t need to call.”
So the girl on the bike had been Rosalita Mendez, Gina and Diaz’s daughter. They were a family in Whisper City that were almost as powerful as Max, her father was a politician, her mother an actress, her brother was a big shot in the cyber and neuro-surgery field.
Johnny had missed the mark with that, but that was the trouble with Johnny Death, he loved and lived with those stereotypes so they were part of his world. He could never step outside of the box, which was a shame and that’s why he’d ended up in Hell and not Heaven.
The rain started to clear as Nick found a small night-club and bar, he stepped in and dried his hat off. He paid the two dollars at the door and vanished into the heavy smoke laden atmosphere, loud music, sea of faces and bodies. It was time to unwind, Heaven could wait.
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Post by mawa on Mar 2, 2007 17:14:57 GMT -5
Finally got round to read it all. Definitely interesting and, although it's been quite a while since I read the previous verion, I'm pretty sure I liked that one better. This one is a fun read too and I'll surely keep an eye on it, but I can't quite get used to the overall story setting yet. So far, unlike Libby, I do prefer Fate's Hand over Cross. Don't ask me why, that's just a part of my personal preferences
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Post by Witcher Wolf on Mar 2, 2007 19:16:54 GMT -5
Thanks MaWa. I was on the phone to someone today and there's a definite chance that it'll be set to hit the 2008 publishing list they have. So I just need to finish Fate's Hand.
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Post by mawa on Mar 3, 2007 8:14:30 GMT -5
Ah, that's great to hear! I hope that this one - unlike the last time - will pan out. I really wish you that
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Post by Witcher Wolf on Mar 3, 2007 19:20:35 GMT -5
That's just Fate's Hand. I'm actually working to contract 'Ghost Writing' a novel trilogy for a client. I spent the last few months designing his world and setting as well.
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Post by Libby on Mar 6, 2007 10:19:24 GMT -5
Nice chapter...
I had this whole 'Duel' image of Johnny's truck...'cept for the gold bits.
So the skull in this one has an Hispanic accent (will have to think Antonio Banderas)...the last one was Welsh!
Unlike MaWa, I think this version is better than the first .
Talking of skulls...have you been watching the Dresden Files? I'm hooked...a wizard PI with a skull/ghost helper (sort of).
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Post by Witcher Wolf on Mar 6, 2007 11:16:00 GMT -5
Libby: haven't seen Dresden yet, and I have the same feeling about this version of Cross' story over the original - I prefer this one.
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Post by Witcher Wolf on Apr 6, 2007 13:32:15 GMT -5
"I'm getting off this carousel, you can do as you please, you can go to hell. You put my back against the wall. Well I'm not gonna fall on my knees, no not at all. So you're a saint, I'm a sinner, but deuces are wild" ~ KISS (Saint and Sinner)
Part Five: Saint and Sinner
It was live music night deep within the former gothic church, a wall of sound struck Nick in the face as he pushed the two black doors apart and a wail of an electric guitar followed. The spotlight was centre stage on a single figure that gyrated and whipped her dyed purple and red hair about in a frenzied motion.
Her fingers flew over those frets and as she hammered out power chords and threw her heart and soul into the music, it was a cover of some kind, but rather than being a shallow reflection of a former great rock and roll hero’s song – this sparkled with fresh talent and charisma.
She was young, around twenty six or so and she wore just the right mix of Goth and Punk clothing, shredded T-Shirts and ripped denim jeans were the order of the day. A single studded leather wrist band wrapped like a snake around her right wrist where her fingers flew at the strings of her Gibson Les Paul classic cherry red.
“Yeah!” a voice roared over the speakers. “Give it up for Pandora Foxx; come on you bastards – louder!”
A cheer rose in a mind-numbing crescendo and the angel adjusted his jacket, not a single person had seen him change out of his long coat into a slim black suit. It had happened in a blink of an eye, a perk of the job.
“Louder!” the voice screamed.
Pandora Foxx grinned at the singer and hammered on and off, her fingers rippling like water of the fret board of the guitar and she sank to her knees, Hendrix style – next thing she’ll be playing the damn thing with her teeth thought Nick.
There was something else at work, the angel’s eyes settled on the young woman and he saw the interconnected lines of magic running through her, the guitar and flickering from her fingertips.
“Now that is interesting,” he said and slipped past the nearest heavy set rocker type, who was in the middle of a pounding head motion, “very interesting.”
He was able to take in more of the interior further past the central dance floor, covered by a multitude of dancing figures and gyro-mounted spinning lights. A massive metal spiral staircase took up the far north and rose upwards towards a brightly lit area. The décor reminded him of some parts of the Sistine Chapel.
Then of course there was the downstairs, beneath the bright lights and dancing – a dark ruddy red lit area lurked. The walls down that iron staircase were painted akin to Dante’s Inferno and lots of dry ice and smoke poured up from it.
The middle ground was a mix of faux-gothic architecture and deep purple lighting; the stage was off to the far left of the stairs and the bar to the right. There were dry ice machines, fans and fake bats everywhere.
Then above all of this in seven foot high glowing neon letters were the words, Saint and Sinner. They pulsated in time to the music and flickered in and out to Pandora’s latest blistering riff.
“Been a while Mr. Winter,” said one of the waitresses as Nick found a table. “Would you like the usual?”
“I wouldn’t mind,” he flicked a few dollars over to her. “Make it a double.”
She sashayed off and left Nick to his own devices. He stretched out a while and settled back on the stage, he had a prime view of everything from where he was and he could see the subtle traceries of the arcane whispering through the audience – it jumped from one to the next.
He figured it out in the end, it didn’t take him long. Pandora was cheating a little, she was an excellent guitarist but the magic wasn’t aimed at making her play better, it was aimed at keeping her fans happier. It sent a kind of mystical euphoria through the listeners and worked better than any kind of drug.
“Here you are,” said the waitress. “Is that all?”
“Yeah thanks,” Nick gave her a couple of dollars as a tip and sipped at his whiskey. “Take care.”
“You too,” she flashed him a beaming smile before stuffing the money down her tight top and swishing away again.
He watched the rest of Pandora’s set with the cover band and tapped his foot in time to the music, about half and hour later the DJ was back on and the stage was cleared. A few people sat down exhausted but the majority of them carried on dancing, a sea of moving bodies with very mortal frailty.
It always amused him how complacent the rest of humanity was, how some people, even with the supernatural rubbing noses with them or in the case of some men and women, doing more – failed to acknowledge the fact that they were dancing with a devil or necking with a vampire.
He checked himself. Of course, Nightcrawlers, it wouldn’t do to call them vampires now would it? They would be terribly offended by that for some reason, even though it was an established mortal word for their kind. Just like werewolf or even angel.
Things must have names to fit into the proper order, that’s what he figured. He tossed back the double and let his mind drift for a moment, he’d come to this particular job when he’d least expected it.
It was back in the early 90’s when he’d been on assignment for special operations, a failed attempt to remove a dangerous political figure had left him high on the rooftop, on foreign soil with his government spouting plausible deniability and words like disavowed.
He’d been gunned down there and then, buried in a watery grave and forgotten. He’d met Death and found out how much he truly hated that kid. Fortunately for him another job opportunity had presented itself, in the afterlife as an angel explained. He could go to Hell or Heaven, but Heaven offered him a second chance at some kind of life.
He took it.
“Hey!” a slightly gravely but seductive voice snapped him out of his daydream. “I caught you watching me, earlier.”
He looked up into the slightly blue eyes of Pandora Foxx and blinked, he twisted his head to look behind him and then fixed her with a friendly smile.
“You did?”
“Yeah,” she chuckled and slid the guitar around behind her back, leather pants creaking slightly as she moved. “Damn it’s hot, is it always so hot in here?”
“It has been known to be hotter,” Nick replied and shook his head. “But tonight it’s especially hot; you were quite something out there.”
“Why thank you,” she purred, “Mr?”
“Winter,” Nick looked past her for a moment. “Nicholas Winter, but you can call me Nick.”
“Not Old Nick, I hope?” she joked.
He laughed. “Not at all, I work for a different group of Celestials.”
“Oh,” she looked askance as if he had just said something totally off the wall. “You know I know then?”
“You know that I know you know,” Nick played into the old joke. “But in knowing that I knew that you know what I know, then I figured I’d know that you’d known all along about things like that.”
“Er,” she shook her head softly. “You could have just said yes.”
“I know,”
She looked around for something to throw and then settled into a seat opposite him. “So why were you watching me so intently, who do you work for?”
“Heaven PLC,” he flashed a card and adopted a casual tone. “Good guys sometimes wear black, not white.”
“I haven’t done anything wrong, you know, by using magic to give these people a pep?” she looked at him with big apologetic and hopefully eyes, it was an act.
“Not at all,” he said. “You can’t be accused of the crime of spreading happiness, unless of course you were working for Hell INC and then Red would so fire your ass.”
“Fire my ass, sounds kinky.”
“It probably would be,” he mused, “knowing Red.”
She flashed him a beaming smile and laughed. “You’re alright for a suit Mr. Win, I mean Nick.”
“You almost slipped up there Pandora, or should I call you Miss Foxx?”
“Touché,” she wriggled a little and shifted the guitar over a couple of inches. “You’re a sharp one. It’s Pan, or Pandora, but never Miss Foxx, that so makes me sound like some kind of porn star working for Madeline.”
“Wouldn’t that be Foxxy Pandora?”
“Ew,” she made a face and wrinkled her nose. “I never want to hear that name again, on pain of beating you to death with my Gibson Les Paul. It would be a horrible waste of a good guitar but I have to think of the satisfaction.”
“So,” Nick ventured. “Did you come over here to chat to me or was there something else you wanted?”
“I was curious,” she perked up a little and put her head on her hands, balanced both her elbows on the table. “My world’s changed Nick, and you have such a sparkly aura – imagine that, a sparkly aura.”
“Cute,” he replied and slid the whiskey glass to the centre of the table, “So you’re wondering what I am?”
“Yeah,” she bobbed her head a little. “You said you work for Heaven PLC, but for all I know you might just be a freelancer or are you something else?”
“I’m something else,” he admitted. “Angelic, if you must know. But don’t let that fool you, I’m not the epitome of Godliness, none of us are.”
“Wow,” Pandora’s eyes almost lit up. “A real honest to goodness angel,” she chuckled a little. “You read the stories, and you hear about your kind but when you meet the real deal – you never expect them to be so very hot.”
“Not bad,” he beamed a white smile. “But I think you’re bullshitting me really, you can’t be that naïve.”
“Oh, does it show?”
“Yep,” he admitted, “in every fibre of your being, not to mention that you have a very strong connection with magic through that music of yours.”
“I wasn’t lying about you being hot,” she pouted. “I think you’re hot, but I always did like someone that looked like a hitman, and you look more like a hitman than a hitman.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Nick replied. “I think.”
“Please do,” Pandora shifted the guitar again and snagged a passing waitress. “Hey honey?” she soothed. “Do you mind bringing a bottle of the hardest whiskey you have to this table, another glass and,” she paused. “Put it on my tab babe.”
The waitress gave her an imperious look and then realised just who she was speaking to. She scurried off.
“Nice,” Nick clapped his hands. “You read my mind.”
“I did, wow, never done that before,” she joked. “Perhaps you’re just too easy to read, like a book that’s been well thumbed?”
“There are a million roads of innuendo to walk down there,” but Nick was on his best behaviour and didn’t take the bait.
“I know,” she gave a sly wink and when the drink arrived poured herself and Nick a glass of the whiskey. “Drink up, because I’ve got a favour to ask you.”
Here it comes Nick thought, first the sweet talk and then the pitch, mortals. “Oh?”
“I had a sister, she was running with a bad crowd,” Pandora took back her first whiskey and then drank from the bottle. “She used to tour with us, well, last night I heard she’d hopped a plane to London and shacked up with the bastard that runs a gang of ‘crawlers there.”
Nick sipped that whiskey this time as he listened. “Go on?”
“It must have been a couple of weeks ago now,” Pandora took another big swig from the bottle. “I had a dream.”
“That’s never good, unless it was a good dream of course,” Nick waggled his right hand in quick succession, indicating a fifty-fifty kind of situation.
“Definitely not, she was standing there alone on a bridge dressed in a white dress.”
“A metaphor then,” Nick concluded, his smile vanished for a moment, “or perhaps a foretelling?”
“I always figured she’d come back to us you know,” Pandora sounded forlorn. “I mean we’d fight and bitch, argue and moan, like good siblings.” “I can only imagine,” Nick replied. “So?”
“So,” she said. “I found out she’d gone to London, and I think something bad has happened to her. She’s lost, she’s alone and I can feel it.”
“I don’t doubt it,” he said sympathetically. “But where do I fit in?”
Pandora wrinkled her nose and hadn’t quite thought this far ahead, she wasn’t expecting to have a conversation with a real agent of the White Corporation. “I don’t know, I thought you might be able to help me find her?”
He could reply that he didn’t have the time, he was already swamped with a case and he didn’t know when he’d be free. He could tell her that the White Corporation didn’t concern itself with matters of that nature; they were too trivial and too small to bother with.
But that wouldn’t be Nicholas Winter, so he squared his shoulders and watched her reaction. She was telling the truth, he knew that for certain.
“Count me in,” he replied. “I can’t say much more than that.”
She slammed down the bottle and took him by surprise, wrapped her thin arms about him and hugged him until he thought he heard her ribs creak. She wasn’t exactly overly endowed as a woman, but she was decently proportioned and he almost had a face full of her cleavage.
“Thanks,” he said as he finally extricated himself. “That wasn’t something I was expecting.”
“Sorry,” she blushed but she wasn’t at all sorry, he could see it in her defiant eyes. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“So what’s her name?”
“Marian,” Pandora settled back into her seat opposite Nick and slid the guitar off; she rested the instrument by her leg. “And thanks again.”
“Got a picture?”
She dug around in her jacket and slid him a photograph over, a slightly rounder face and straighter hair, but she was the twin of Pandora by a mile.
“Twins?” he queried.
“Yeah,” she blushed. “I got the good looks, she got the brains.”
“Oh I don’t know about that,” Nick chuckled. “I think you both got the fair share of…both attributes.”
“Thanks,” she blushed again. “So when do you think you might be able to try and find her?”
“Time,” he chewed on his lip thoughtfully. “I would be lying if I said I had an almost infinite supply of it, but I don’t follow your rules as much as the Universe as a whole would like me to.”
“So?”
“That means I don’t have to worry about distance travelled, aeroplanes and all that jazz,” Nick said slyly. “So I can leave now, if you want me to?”
Pandora was suddenly torn; this was her first concrete contact with someone out of the ordinary. Sure she could use magic; she could sway a crowd with the right notes forming a musical kind of spell. She’d gotten the idea from an old computer game she’d played at one time, practised and practised until one day it worked.
“I think we can spend some more time talking, if you don’t have to rush off,” she said finally. “That’s if you’ve got the time for a mortal huh?”
“I love mortals,” he said with a laugh. “I used to be one once, until I made a few bad choices – ended up on the wrong side of several clips worth of bullets.”
“Ow, that must have hurt.”
“Like hell, but I was gut shot on the orders of someone else.”
Pandora winced and her face was ashen white for a moment. “It sounds horrible.”
“They dumped me in a lake and left me for dead. I was dead, dead as well, dead as dead can be,” he poured himself another whiskey and tilted the glass upwards. “They did do me a favour – they got me out of the Rat Race for a few hundred or so years and gave me time to reflect.”
“That sounds so blasé,” she shook her head and listened intently. “The way you speak about it, you’ve come to terms with it really well.”
“The mortal’s gone,” he replied. “The agent of the White Corporation remains.”
“I don’t think so,” she shook her head again. “I think there’s still some of that mortal there – otherwise I think you’d have told me to shove off.”
“I don’t think I’d have said that,” he admitted. “But you might be right; I could easily have told you to leave me alone.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I wouldn’t be a good representative of the White Corporation would I? If I told someone in need that I couldn’t help, we had too much of that when we changed CEO, when God left; the planet went to shit for quite a while.”
“Oh,” she didn’t know how to reply. “I never knew.”
“No one really does,” Nick sipped his whiskey. “We make sure that the planet spins and the peoples of the world remain largely oblivious, of course that’s harder now what with the Event.”
“Yeah,” she laughed. “It gave schmucks like me extreme cosmic powers. I can sour milk with the right note. I can cause a fire or even make that gorgeous guy over there fall madly in love with me.”
“Magic is something quite elusive to many people,” Nick chuckled. “The Event just opened the portals to more than one dimension, you already had the talent.”
“Flattery,” Pandora decked half the bottle, “will get you everywhere honey.”
“It usually does,” he ran with the joke again. “I suppose though I really should start looking for your sister.”
Pandora gave a tiny pout and wished that she could find someone like him, just the once, it was probably the angelic nature – she’d heard that the serene beauty and grace of Heaven’s agents had an effect on mortals still.
“We’ll speak again soon,” he promised. “Here’s my number if you need to contact me, regardless of the time or place.”
“I’ll keep it close to my heart,” she thought that sounded so cliché but she had to say it, then tucked it in her left hand ass pocket, “right next to my wallet.”
Nick laughed and stood up. “It has been a pleasure,” he kissed her on the cheek and she almost turned her head but thought better of it. “I will find your sister, no matter what.”
“Thanks,” she watched him go as he melted into the sea of dancing bodies and gyrating people. “Be careful,” she called but the music was too loud.
The last of the whiskey was too good to waste and she drowned her sorrows in the bottle before she curled up in the corner, by her guitar and closed her eyes. One of the roadies would come to find her if something important came up.
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Post by ginxy on Apr 6, 2007 15:01:12 GMT -5
“I’ll keep it close to my heart,” she thought that sounded so cliché but she had to say it, then tucked it in her left hand ass pocket, “right next to my wallet.”
*snicker* - Nice.
Really nice work - looking forward to more adventures of Mr. Winter. ;D
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Post by Libby on Apr 10, 2007 4:25:18 GMT -5
Ooooh! To quote/misquote our (in)famous vice-council...'How did you come to miss it?
Totally missed this!
Hmmm...Pandora Foxx. Going to be interesting to see how her story interweaves with Sam and Johnny Death.
I like the idea of the guitar/music/magic link. I remember reading an Anne McCaffrey story (part of her 'Talents' series) where a singer used her empathic powers through her voice to control the audience's emotions. This is much better.
'Saint and Sinner'...when I was at Uni in Leeds we frequented a club called the 'Heaven and Hell'. I googled it and it's still there and as wild as ever!
Nick's got to have some ulterior motives lurking under this 'sparkly aura'. He's wasn't so 'white' in his last incarnation and I'm waiting for a few voltes-faces!
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Post by Witcher Wolf on Apr 10, 2007 13:42:21 GMT -5
I think Nick's words about none of them being saints or something akin to that, should be a clue that when the going gets tough Nick tends to forget about rules Thanks for the feedback Libby and I'm glad you're enjoying it. I often wonder who else is enjoying Cross' story who hasn't said anything yet *grin* but that's the nature of the beast.
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