Armageddon Bubblegum

Chapter 1

It was supposed to be simple. Not just the job. The whole enchilada. All we had to do — we, the people — was walk around with our friends and family, picking fruit and hucking spears at mastodons or whatever. Then one of those sex-obsessed murder monkeys decided he wasn't satisfied with just his bananas; no, he wanted all the bananas. So he dedicated the rest of his natural life to fucking everyone else over. And now, some umpteen-hundred-thousand years later, we're still paying tithes to the echoes of that King Kong motherfucker's primal grift.

The worst part is, he was probably my uncle. Or your uncle. I mean, y'know, an uncle with an uncountable number of somewhat ironical "greats".

But whatevs. I always start with the primitivist thinking when shit goes sideways. I'm just being bitter. Salted parsley in the mouth of a finicky child. Everything happened the way it happened. What matters right now is the aforementioned job.

Which, and I can't stress this enough, was also supposed to be goddamn simple. A quick in-n-out like prom night. So what makes this night different from all other nights? Well, ok, not much. There's no such thing as a gig without a hitch. And to that end, here I am swarmed by beezles, reeking to holy hell of their sulfuric slobber as I hurtle through the Credenza District; Hi-Vi on the fritz; a package sporting some serious dentage that suggests the very non-zero possibility of payload contusions; and the maraschino on this putrescent sundae, I dropped my ube milkshake. Popular wisdom says it's not worth shedding the saline over, but goddamn it, I really wanted that milkshake.

So where was the hitch, exactly?

I got the keen from Tako-san around midnight, as per ujze:

DISPATCH: MR TAKO

RECEIPT: LIL BIX (00:00:42)

CLIENT: MR IKA

SOW: PROCURE ONE (1) [redacted] FROM ROOF OF MESA MANZANILLA IN CD. DELIVER TO CATHEDRAL CORAZON BY 05:00:00.

That was literally it. Which, like, ok. The deets of these Banshee jobs are typically cryptic, operating on a need-to-know basis. And as living, breathing courier drones, a Banshee's need to know is less than paramount. But it's always contraband; the stuff you can't get dropped on your doorstep in a screaming neon U-Freight-EZ box. And seeing as U-Freight-EZ owns Septagram City in toto, our services come at a premium. Presumably, this particular package contained a lump of organic matter — your bog-standard Banshee box will include anything from muscle fibers to dermal sheets to follicular bundles, sometimes even dental bullion, and not infrequently some grotesque amalgam of all of the above — for use in black market surgeries or black magic ceremonies. It always struck me funny how Venn those particular diagrams are.

But sometimes you get something special. And given the barley-tenable surfeit of beezles currently buzzing my business, this delivery seems especially special.

So...wait where was I?

Midnight at the Behemoth Burger

I paid for my shake, turned around, and ran smack into Tommy Tonsil, greasy wunderkind and enfant terrible of the professional information addicts. Not to mention perennial thorn in my ass.

"Where's the fire, Bixler?" That he sticks his schnoz in my happenings would be almost forgivable, considering that the more clandestine comings and goings of the city are his stock-in-trade, but he also tends to take the initiative to paste a leer on my figure with his slimy teenage peepers.

"Watch it! I almost lost my shake."

"Big keen tonight?" Tommy was also a tactless buffoon.

"How many times, you flap-gummed weasel? I don't keen, as I'm not a Banshee. Never been a Banshee. Don't know any Banshees. And if I did — which, let it be said, is an 'if' of the highest magnitude — I wouldn't be filling your bucket with it," I slurped my milkshake for emphasis and shoved past him, out of the french-fried fluorescence and into the dark hum of the city.