Everything hurt. It's a cliche, but it was true. My head throbbed dully, my face burned and was starting to swell. My throat felt like it had been wrung, mostly because it had been, and my body was covered in nascent bruises. I fumbled for my Pseudoderm mask and yanked an aerosol canister off my belt.
After blasting myself all over the head with it, I peeled away the second skin and staggered into Poly's restroom. My face was a pulp, strands of my orange hair spilling in front of my eyes. Both eyes were swelling, my nose was crooked, and a tooth was loose. Lovely. I wondered how Vic Sage was gonna have to explain this tomorrow on the job.
I went back into Polys' room, past his corpse, said hello, and grabbed one of the bottles he had been chugging. It was still half empty. I swigged a third of what was left and poured the rest on my face.
It hurt like hell. The bourbon that got in my eyes was the least of the pain as the alcohol seeped into the cuts and scrapes all over my face. I stumbled back into the bathroom and dunked my face in the sink. Everything felt a little better, but that wasn't saying much. The people who were saying quite a bit, however, arrived at the door, pounding at it with what sounded like a jackhammer.
"HCPD! Open up!"
I grabbed my mask and, fingers zigging in and out of the mortal plane, hopped to plaster it back onto my face, dousing it in the aerosol. I winced as it pressed against the various injuries decorating my mug, and sprayed the aerosol back into my hair. It darkened quickly. I pulled out my pistol and chambered a round.
I put half the mag into the door, aiming low to buy some time, before sliding into the kitchen. I grabbed the guy who had been chewing on the snowglobe and, after pulling it out, emptied all but one bullet into his head. "Nothing personal," I grunted, dragging him over in front of the door. I grabbed one of his friend's guns and put it into his hand.
Dashing back into the kitchen, I put my fist into the wall, grabbing some thick tubing, before placing my final round into one of the windows and getting on the floor. Some of the other mooks were unconscious, and they'd tell the police everything about me once they woke up, but I'd be long gone by then. The cops began aiming their own popguns into the door and started firing back, hitting everything in sight, including the poor Snowglobed citizen. But again, that was the general idea. Hopefully, when they came in, they'd see a pile of mooks who had been 'firing back' at them
I took some quick and unfortunately shallow breaths before crawling forward and plummeting out the window, clinging onto the rubber piping. My heart stopped as headlights danced dozens of stories below me in the soupy black of a summer night. The air felt lacking and beat at my face and whipped my hat off my head. I let go of the tubing quick enough to snatch it out of the air, then shouted in pain as the pipe caught my fall, wrenching my shoulder. It wasn't my first rodeo, though, so I contorted my body to catch the momentum. Still hurt like a bitch. I swung freely, dangling from one arm.
Then the piping snapped.
The building that Alexander Polys lived and worked in was called Huppert Court. Named after an Americanization of Hub City's discoverer Gaston Hupert, Huppert Court had been designed in the early 20th century and butchered in the late 20th century by Polys' architects attempting a 'renovation'. As it stood, nearly every window of the building was flanked by a pair of gargoyles.
It, therefore, should have come as no surprise to me when I landed on one of these stone-hewn monstrosities, and yet it did. One of the wings broke under my weight, and I instinctively rolled onto the gargoyle's main body as its limb fell onto the street below. From there, the jump to the nearest window was relatively easy, but crashing through it hurt as much as some of the hits I had taken earlier.
