Under Dark Sky Law (2 page)

Given how hard it would be to find a
substitute for Argon, she shouldn’t have cared about the
bareknuckle boxing. It was the thought of all of the blood, and the
knowledge that she’d just blown their last soap supply on a petty
vengeance extravaganza that made her hesitate. Blood was just this
side shy of better than semen.

It had only been a few moments since she’d
emerged from the shower, but an eternity had probably passed for
Argon. When he thrashed, the wire let up around his neck for just a
second, and he was able to pull a few gasps of air into his lungs.
She wanted to shush him. His loud noises were still obscuring the
other environmental cues that she wanted to pick up. The light from
the candles gave her a faint glow that extended just past the
bathroom and onto the gruesome battle on the bed. Ironically, if
they’d been out in the pits where technology was supposed to be
dead, their lux estate would have had all the surveillance
equipment that they needed. In the flats they lived like they were
supposed to live.

Argon’s cries were becoming more strident
with each passing second. She rolled her eyes, took one last look
into the ether, and leapt towards the skeleton. Both of her fists
made contact with the Skeleton’s mid-back, striking against the
meat of the assailant’s ribs with even more force than she
intended. Leverage was everything. With the wind knocked out of
him, Xero had a second chance to catch the Skeleton off guard. She
was taller and heavier than your average female, and that was just
fine with her. That extra height that gave her automatic command
over her subordinates and she it gave her a definite advantage in
fighting.

First priority was getting the skeleton off
Argon’s throat. She reached around its head and grabbed it by its
eye sockets. As she dug her thumbs into the skeleton’s eye holes,
she jammed her knee into his spine, torqueing his head and back
into a painful position. The skeleton kept screaming, and as
annoying as it was, she was glad the intruder was such a pussy.
With all that commotion, any back up would have already made its
way there. Either they thought this would be an isolated hit—a
random takedown of a slightly wealthy Flats dweller, or the
skeleton’s shift leader was a complete and total fucktard. Sending
one person to take on multiple Grease Weasels was straight up
suicide, although Argon’s less than stellar reaction time wasn’t
speaking volumes for their reputation

Thoughts about whether or not it would be
worth torturing or testing the subject crossed her brain in
milliseconds. Too much work. With another quick jerk she pulled
back again on the Skeleton’s head and flung all her weight towards
the opposite wall. By pure luck when they crashed into an old
wooden dresser on the other side of the room, the skeleton was the
one to smash face first into the hard wooden drawers. There was
another bonus to landing next to the dresser, besides its
face-smashing abilities. With another set of fluid movements that
had a dancer’s grace, she stomped the skeleton’s head against the
floor with her foot, reached behind the dresser, withdrew a long
machete from a small depression in the wall, and rammed it through
the center of its chest.

The skeleton was already unconscious, and he
didn’t make a sound as she ran him through. Something of a waste of
a blade—now she’d have to clean it, which wouldn’t be done to her
usual standards while they were stuck in the flats, but at least
the skeleton was guaranteed to be out of commission. Even if he
wasn’t dead, he was completely pinned to the floor by the blade of
the machete. You couldn’t be too careful out in the flats these
days. It used to be a step up from the pits, but things were
changing at a quick pace. Argon used to tease her about hiding
weapons everywhere, but now she had a great example to show him
about the importance always being prepared. If her weapons hadn’t
been moved or swiped, then she may have taken care of the skeleton
a lot more quickly. That could have meant the difference between
survival and death in the event of a sneak attack like this one,
especially if they had brought a proper gang of thugs with them.
Shit like that happened all the time in the Pits. In a lot of ways
things had gotten better since they weren’t allowed to have guns in
all the forbidden districts. It was just way too easy to get caught
by stray laser fire, and before the firearm sweeps the district had
been one giant blood bath. Being cast out of the Domes had been a
certain death sentence. Now it was just a probable death sentence.
The tenacious were able to make it. At least until the cancer got
them.

Blood was pooling around her feet, and the
stick warm ooze was flowing in between her toes. Gross. She was
going to spend another long session in the shower getting that shit
out from underneath her toenails, and she had used up most of the
soap and hot water out of spite and indulgence. Karma was a total
fucking bitch.

“Yo Argon, you okay?” she said. She backed
out of the expanding blood pool, her feet making sticky slap slap
slaps as they stamped bloody prints across the floor. Where was
Trina when you needed her? Trina was usually good about trying to
at least keep their shack clear of outright biohazards, but she’d
caught a bad rip of lung zaps, and her Zone Pass had been revoked
until the virus cleared up. Not that anyone in the government
really monitored the Flats very well anymore, but the local gangs
were pretty hardcore about keeping various epidemics out ever since
a bad bout of coyote plague had ripped through the area five years
ago and killed over a quarter of population. You so much as sneezed
in the wrong ghetto and you could find yourself missing a head to
sneeze with a second time. Luckily they had Milo to make sure none
of them bit the dust from the latest viral mutant or the parasite
du jour. Xero was a doctor too, but not really the urgent care
sort.

Argon coughed and sputtered, but replied in a
hoarse cough, “Yeah—thanks for that.”

“Looks like you were a few seconds from being
ghosted,” she said. She moved to stand in front of the bathroom
door where there was more candlelight to see by. In the dark corner
she could see the shish kabobbed skeleton and an expanding pool of
blood creeping steadily towards the bed.

He cleared his voice and rubbed his throat,
which was mottled with purple and red marks from the garrote wire.
Some small trickles of blood were seeping down his neck from where
the wire had bit down hard enough to tear flesh. “Yeah, that was
way too close for comfort. I just took that one up the ass,” he
said. He continued rubbing the wound, accidentally smearing blood
over his face and neck.

Xero flipped strands of her still damp Mohawk
out of her eyes. They were on such short supply she didn’t even
really have any bottom shelf product to slick through her ‘hawk and
make it stand up right. It’s real purpose was for stage shows down
in the pits anyhow, since it had such a theatrical effect, and
there was always some kind of hair gel in the pits. Chemicals were
one thing they never seemed to be in short supply of.

“You know, I’m glad you’re alive and all
that, but you’re now covered in both blood and semen, and there’s a
dead body painting our whole floor red. So help me god if you try
to fall asleep like that and ruin our last clean mattress I will
let you join that skeleton in eternal peace,” she said.

He sighed. “Don't worry—I don’t think I’ll be
getting much sleep at this point anyway. What gives with this
skeleton anyway? I thought you hashed out a deal with Calavera
before we bounced out of the pits.” He coughed several times and
silently gagged as he manually tried to adjust his squashed Adam’s
apple.

She knit her bushy brows together, her weight
shifting between her hips, her fat lips pursed together in thought.
“That is odd. Calavera is a total douche wad, but she typically
honors our deals. That’s why I was thinking maybe one of her
district enforcers is either a moron or running rogue. Or maybe
this is just some copycat fuck dressing up like a skeleton for
shit’s and giggles,” she said.

Argon shook his head and winced, “Nah, you
know what happens if Calavera finds people wearing her threads.
You’d have to be an epic fuck up to even think about trying that
shit,” he said.

Her eyes flicked back to the pool of blood.
At least it wasn’t headed towards the last of their sheets. “And
Calavera wouldn’t have sent just one skeleton to fuck with us—if
she was going to violate our agreement, she would have sent the
whole division after us, not some ragtag scallywag wannabe ninja
loser like this dude,” she said and thrust her thumb in the
direction of the corpse.

“Hey now, that loser almost had me snuffed
from behind like a bad porno,” he said.

She smirked. “No comment,” she said.

She paused for a moment, her brows knit
together, her eyes narrowed at Argon. “Can you tell me why in the
fuck my weapons are missing from the bathroom? If this place was
cased before we even got here, we might have an even bigger problem
then we thought,” she said. “Unless you were stupid enough to do
something with them.”

He cocked his head to the side in thought.
“No, even I have more sense than that,” he said.

She crossed her arms and glared at him. “Are
you absolutely sure? You’ve done stupid shit like this in the
past,” she said and stopped herself from listing off all the dumb
moves Argon had pulled at one time or another. It was just going to
make her angrier.

He swiveled his head around again. “No, it
definitely wasn’t me…wait—I bet I know what happened. Trina was out
here cleaning things up before she got jacked up with the zaps. You
know how much she likes to make sure all weapons are cleaned and
properly maintained. I bet you she pulled them out somewhere to
work on them and then forgot about them when she started getting
really fucked up and we had to boogie her on back to the pits,” he
said.

Xero slapped herself on the forehead. “Yeah,
duh, I kinda remember now,” she said. She’d been out on a run that
went badly when all that had gone down. Neptune and Argon had
mainly handled the extraction, and she hadn’t had a chance to swing
by the shack before jetting out of the domes and back to the pits
to make sure no one was going to try and put a hit out on her.

He hesitated, but continued, “I suppose it is
actually kind of my fault—I didn’t check things after we left.
Things have just been more rushed lately than I would have
liked.”

She let out a long exhale. “No, it’s just as
much my fault for not doing the same thing, and more my fault that
we’ve been sloppy. Speaking of which, we need to clean up this
fucking disaster,” she said. As much as she loved yelling at people
for being idiots, she was no fool, and accepted her responsibility
as their head honcho to run a tight ship.

They were silent for a moment, thinking of
the possibilities and their options for dealing with the corpse and
the resulting mess.

“Fuck, I wish Trina or even Milo were here to
clean this shit up. I really don’t want to drag this body around,”
she said.

“We might want to save the corpse or at least
the head to show Calavera so she can get a bead on what’s up with
this yahoo, if she is in fact on the up and up,” Argon said.

She shook her head hard. Flecks of water flew
from her hair and peppered her collarbone with moisture. “Man, I
don’t want to cut off any heads tonight. Look, let’s just drag this
thing out to the shed and get a message to Calavera to come figure
out why goons dressed in his skeleton uniforms are trying to take
us out in the flats,” she said.

“What time is it? Looks like it’s starting to
get light out, but Calavera gets pissed if you bug her at odd
hours,” he said.

“That bitch is such a friggin queen. We’ll
just pass a message to one of her enforcers and they can figure out
how to deal with it. I want that body out of here ASAP, and with
the way shit’s been going down I don’t really want to involve our
crew in things. I was trying to be discreet about even being here.
I’m pretty sure Calavera will wanna deal with this personally once
she knows what’s up. Even if she went totally insane, and she
really is behind this, she’d still want to come and clean up his
mess,” she said. Professional courtesy.

She shivered. “Damn it’s actually getting
really cold,” she said. The flats didn’t have any remaining
temperature control like the domes, and the straggling biosphere
often had unpredictable weather patterns. Xero hated being cold.
Out in the pits, natural summer still hadn’t let go of the hot and
dry desert.

“I still don’t want to get any of my clothes
fucked up with blood, and I was a total asshole with the soap and
hot water,” she said.

He shrugged. “You killed him naked, may as
well clean up after him naked,” he said.

She rolled her eyes.

“Like you’ve ever given a shit about being
naked,” he said.

He was right, but she was tired, annoyed, and
above all else she was cold, and she didn’t even have the energy
for a properly venomous response. “Yeah, yeah, let’s get this thing
over with,” she said.

CHAPTER 2

After dealing with the body and Calavera’s
cronies, she got Argon to submit to a shower. As aggressive as they
usually were with each other, there was a tacit rule in the Grease
Weasels—if someone was almost vaporized, you went easy on them for
awhile. You fucked them, you brought them cookies, got them nice
things, and helped them out.

There wasn’t much left in the way of hot
water left, so they shared the shower. Argon knew how much she
hated the cold. He wrapped his arms around her, and his body was
hot enough that she could almost forget the water. Xero was tall,
over six feet, but Argon towered almost half a foot higher than she
did. She could still kick his ass in a fight, but he was muscled
enough to hold his own, just as long as he wasn’t spaced out like
he had been from the glory of his own dick.