Dirty Work: Volume 2

Story Five - Nostalgia - 7

I'd never been in a proper hospital before, and if the one in Region 76 was anything to go by, I didn't want to go in any others. The lights were too bright, the floor too shiny, the sheets too clean. This might be the only place in Region 76 to have clean running water. I know hospitals are meant to be about hygiene and health, but I'm just not used to it. Give me a grimy puddle any day.

I awoke in a collapsible bed with wires and tubes sticking out of me, looking like I'd been prepped for CyberSleep. I felt a thousand bruises pulsing at once, and my breathing was harsh and sounded like sandpaper. I tried to turn my head and felt a dagger stab me in the chest.

Mansi sat in a chair nearby. 'I can at least get you decent medical care,' he said. 'Courtesy of Celestria Police. On the house, as it were.'

I turned over and tried to pull the wires out of me but my brain almost overloaded with the pain and I fell back again.

'I'd advise not going anywhere for a while,' he said. 'A day at least, if not two.'

'I don't want to be seen to. I want that incense burner.'

Mansi reached down by his side and showed me the object in a clear plastic bag. 'I made them go back for it. Technically it's police property. Or it was. We had our guys run all number of scans over it, and they couldn't find anything important. There are traces of blood that we've followed up on, but no technological interest to anyone. It's just a relic as far as we're concerned; a little piece of history. We returned it to Wolsal, who gave it to you to hand on to your boss when he arrives. Speaking of which, he should be about an hour or so. Did you know he's legally now your next of kin?'

I hardly heard anything he said. 'Turn up the painkiller?'

Mansi chuckled. 'Sorry, mate. Not allowed. Doctor's orders.'

He placed the burner on a cheap bedside table and got up. 'I'll need you to make a statement at some point, but you can do that when you're rested and recovered. Got to do the proper police business and all.'

'Not going to say anything to you.'

He sighed. 'I know. And that's deserved I guess.' He went to the door and stopped. 'If it's any consolation to you, I've changed. Or at least, I am doing. I was an asshole back then. I'll admit it. Someone who didn't know any better. Someone from the gutter. I'm trying to change; I really am. Maybe you'll be a good influence on me in the future. Who knows?'

He nodded and departed the room.

I wanted to shout after him and call him every name under the suns. Assholes like that don't just change. They have to be taken out like vermin before they can breed. He could become the greatest philanthropist the Empire had ever seen, but that wouldn't change anything. I could try and move on, as I had been doing for the last decade, but I'd never forget.

Mansi hadn't said anything about me murdering several civilians, or if any charges would be pressed. Maybe for once in his miserable life, he'd do something half decent. I'm not sure if I wanted that or not.

The pounding I'd taken had knocked more out of me than I thought. You'd have thought the blackout would have told me how much damage I'd sustained, but I have an amazing ability to think I can take a bigger licking than I actually can. Although, perhaps it wasn't the physical aspects of the last days which had drained me the most.

I floated into a half-sleep filled with the ghost of Kellevieve, who clambered onto my hospital bed and straddled me. She was riddled with blast wounds which bled profusely, so that the blood filled the trough my bed sat in. She asked me why I had killed her. She had saved my from my misery back then, and the man I had delivered from her evil had put me in that misery to begin with. Why had I done it? What about all those times? Couldn't I answer her?

In my half-dream I was aware of this phantom sliding off the bed to stand over me. Groggily, with part of me still in the grips of the neverworld, I realised that Kellevieve had put on a black coat with a red insignia which I couldn't discern in my bleary vision. Her hair was now jet black and pulled back by silver hairclips. She had a nose sharp enough to cut yourself on, with high cheekbones and thin lips. She reminded me of a young but stern schoolteacher.

'Too bad you'll never know who killed you,' Kellevieve said. Only it wasn't Kellevieve. She sounded as spiteful as my dead ex-girlfriend would have done, though.

She held something out in front of her towards me. I knew it was a gun, but I wasn't awake enough to fully process what was happening, let alone do anything about it. I think I might have wished it was over quickly.

Then voices down the hallway drifted into the room, getting steadily louder. Talking. The boss's voice in the hazy distance, and other. A nurse? Mansi? I wasn't in the world of the living enough to tell.

The figure looked around, then back at me. She put the gun away and picked up the plastic bag from the side. 'This was a bad dream,' she said. Then, just as I was finally shaking off my dream, she was gone, the artefact with her.

The boss entered the room a minute later. I tried to sit up for him, which was a stupid mistake. He gently pushed me back down. 'Someone stole it,' I whispered.

'The burner?'

'Yes. Went to kill me but heard you.' Then I remembered the red smudge. 'Red Rose.'

The boss vanished like smoke. I wanted to try and move but the realisation that I'd stared malice in the face and lived to tell about it gripped me. I shook from head to toe and the rattling in the bed banged my limbs hard enough to bring profanity to my lips.

The boss returned twenty minutes later. He took out his Halo-Core, ran some security footage, and stopped it on a figure. 'This her?'

I shrugged. 'Possibly. Wasn't fully awake.'

He nodded. He flicked through a menu and pulled up another bit of footage. It was Dirty Work club before it was destroyed. 'This her?'

'Maybe. Who is it?'

The boss pulled the chair up to stop himself collapsing onto the floor. He dissolved the picture and dropped the Halo-Core onto my bed. I had never seen him so drained and weary.

'That was Carea Euphero,' he said.

We fell silent, each lost in their own thoughts.

Eventually he got up. 'I said that I thought there were things happening. Things under the surface which were about to come to light. Dots too random to not be connected. I think now the storm's about to break, and it's going to be too close to call whether we drown or not.'

He put a hand on my arm. 'Rest up well, Xayne. Hell is coming for us.'