Dirty Work: Volume 1

Cold Space - 2

There are many things that go through your head when you realise what you've just seen is a man ripping another man to pieces with his bare hands. Not many are pleasant, and in actual fact I should scratch that last statement and say that none of them are pleasant. I'm sure that for someone that lived on some strange planet in the Abyssal Cluster, should there actually be any life in there, it would be fairly ordinary. Life forms devouring one another is part of nature, part of life one might say. That's why we have meat in our burgers, why birds pick at the carcasses of the dead, and why our ability to select when we eat flesh of another being has been cited as a reason that humans are one of those species higher up the evolutionary ladder than others.

But to know that you've just witnessed someone going against social, moral, and evolutionary order is something beyond chilling. And I say this coming from someone who essentially works for an underground thief, drug cartel runner and gun-for-hire who owns a strip club. There certainly is irony in the world.

Ashrore went over to the body, or what was left of it, and inspected it. The man was, had been, about twenty five, with a little stubble of a beard and an empty gun, the canister ejected and discarded down the small tunnel a little further on, still smoking. Nearby was a small briefcase.

I opened it up and discovered an awful lot of money, too much to put down in words.

'This is the guy we were giving the stuff to,' I said to Ashrore. She nodded, turning the man's head to one side. He had a small tattoo behind his right ear of a gun, crossed behind by twin syringes. Definitely a member of the guys we were delivering to.

'No doubt about that,' she said, dropping the man's head back to the ground with a small clunk. There's nothing graceful about handling a dead body, fresh and still warm, no matter what anyone tells you.

'So what do we do with the money?' I asked. 'We can't just leave it here.'

'But if we take it, it will look like we sssstole the money insssstead,' Ashrore said, looking the case over. 'And I wouldn't like a gang coming after Dirty Work.'

In the depths of the tunnels came the sound of a howl, a twisted, distorted howl of some demon from the lower levels. There were so many shivers in my spine when I heard that hellish wail of a noise that you could have rented me out as a massage parlour. In the distance were scrapings and scrabbling as the thing prowled in its fury. It was far enough away to not be bothering us immediately, but close enough that the echoes felt as if they were right behind us.

The small girl that carried the drug knelt down beside the body, or what was left of him. She reached out a hand and slowly, ceremoniously, closed his eyes.

'We can't get him out of here to a proper burial, can we?' I asked, half hoping for some denial, some comment from Ashrore that we could get him to the surface and do some right by someone who, I'm sure, was just following orders. Just as we were. There are a lot of good people that just follow orders and end up in the worst of places and those that sit back and give them that end up in the best of places. It hasn't changed much and probably never will.

'We can't,' Ashrore said. She stood up, pacing for a few seconds, thinking. We couldn't message out for help or reinforcements because we were too far down for Halo-Cores to be effective. Across billions of miles of intergalactic space, sure. But give it a few hundred meters underneath the planet and Halo shuts down with its messaging system. Typical.

'Take the money?' I asked. I know I've kept asking the same basic questions but I wanted to move quickly. We may have scared the man off, but I didn't like the idea of him coming back. I wanted out of there, and out of there as fast as we could manage.

The quiet girl took the briefcase in one hand and held her 48 Alpha in the other, answering my question.

'We'll sssstassssh the casssse ssssomewhere near our exit,' Ashrore said, moving away from the body and looking back the way we came, 'and we'll let the bossssss know what'ssss happened. We can't do much elsssse.'

I took her word for it as we left the remains of the body to collect maggots and dust in the sewers. Rats would get to him far quicker than a removal team.