Cognitive Deviance

57. Drug Bust

June 7, 2045 - 11:45 AM

I don't want to be here anymore, Margo thought, waiting still as the cacophonous, blinding world around her assaulted every one of her senses.

Her hands gripped around her Fatemaker, lifting it to the wave of clubbers before her, but someone else had control over her arms. She watched her fellow Psychwatch officers open fire, the beams of deadly energy cleaving through the indocile crowd before her, but she felt immovable amid a world that couldn't hold still. She wanted to save people that day, but never in her life would she have considered death to be a treatment superior to all others. Never.

Until she'd stepped foot in that hellish club. Until she'd discovered firsthand that there really were people who'd put innocents in harm's way just to feel even the most fleeting moments of euphoria. Put them through rape. Murder. Humiliation. Everyone before her, hiding behind a rabbit mask and clouding their minds with the false promise of pleasure that was Wonderland Mist, would never see the light of day again.

Margo pulled the trigger. Once. Twice. Eight times in only ten seconds. A shot landed every time. Sometimes, the target would utter a scream. But each scream was indistinct, fading into the hundreds of others filling her ears at the moment. With those screams and the shrill, metallic crackle of her Fatemaker, her ears would go numb by the end of the day, like fists against a concrete wall.

Maybe I can save them, she thought, studying the fragments of orange light discharging from her gun. Maybe I...

She stopped pulling the trigger, her finger hovering over it, ready to strike. In the far distance of the room, she watched the Multi Man and those peculiar twins descend the steps to the bottom floor. Directly before her, the screams were the loudest, and the messes, most copious. Severed limbs littered the floor, deprived from their original owners by Subjugate-Mode Fatemakers. Of course, when standing in nearly complete darkness before a crowd of inebriated savages with unpredictable movements, the officers didn't always land clean shots. Or at least that's what she told herself to justify the sight of organs and chunks of flesh splattering the floor.

In all the chaos, she'd forgotten about Mr. W and Slater, the latter choked into unconsciousness. And following that realization, her gun trained on the rabbit man.

"Don't kill him!" she yelled. "Psychwatch needs him at the end of this!"

"I'm not killing him," Mr. W replied. "I'm doing you all a fav—"

A growl distorted by static left his tongue as a beam of orange light grazed his shoulder. Slater's body sagged from his arms to the floor, his rabbit mask breaking his fall with a loud clang. Blood sprayed from the fresh wound, and Margo jerked her head to the side to see Andrade armed with an Assault Fatemaker, training it on her and the rabbit man.

"Don't sh—" Margo exclaimed, but her superior was quick. Not as quick as she was, however. The shot burst into harmless little particles as it collided with her chest.

"Out of the way, Sandoval!" Andrade barked, but her colleague refused. Margo smacked the barrel of her gun away, and a random clubber fell victim to a powerful blast, his body disappearing in a burst of red mist.

"Thank you," Mr. W said, gripping the wound on his shoulder.

Margo turned to him, frustration burning in her eyes. "Take off the mask, or I'll let her shoot you."

Andrade scoffed. "Perra, you don't get to order—"

She gasped as the Fatemaker jammed into the crease in her arm, forced back by her fellow officer standing before her. Even the BufferSuit couldn't keep her in place, the gesture causing her to stumble back toward Kusanagi. Margo couldn't see her jaw drop behind her mask, but the humiliation in her eyes eased a small bit of her stress. As did the sight of SanityScans descending from the rifts in the ceiling by chains.