Crack in the Kill Code (AmpCore #2)

15 - Great White

They led her through to the back room of the basement. The place was a maze of corrugated metal shelving, stacked with crates, bottles and bags. She navigated around black-bodied beer kegs and bottle racks, until they emerged through into an area at the rear of the building, repurposed into a workshop of some kind.

Laid out on an industrial bench at the back of the room was the body-bag, still closed, and flanked by the two heavies she'd seen earlier. Both of them carried bulky shotguns, and fairly new ones too, their barrels augmented with holo-sights and ammo counters gleaming on their polished exteriors. Both of them started forward at the sight of Holly, but Alba waved them away wearily.

"It's okay boys," she said.

"Alba, you... you okay?" one of them asked, disbelieved stamped on his rugged features. "Thought this damn thing minced you up good and proper."

"Oh it did. You can just thank your sainted balls for the charity of our corporations," she chuckled, gesturing to Holly. "Made a deal to keep me breathing a little while longer." Alba nodded to the bag. "Open it."

The pair exchanged uneasy looks, but they obeyed nonetheless. They slung their shotguns over their shoulders, and the man on the right reached for the zip. Holly saw him hesitate, his fingers freezing for just a second, before he rolled his shoulders and pulled it open. She moved forward as the zip rasped, barely able to contain her eagerness.

Alba's heavies moved aside, equally eager to keep their distance from the bag's contents. They parted, slowly bringing their guns back around as she stepped right up to the table and looked inside.

Holly's eyes widened and she shook her head in amazement. "Shit."

"Bad as you thought, eh?"

"I'm not sure yet."

Closing off the outside world, she ran her eyes over the ravaged creature, the smell of it washing forcefully out of the bag. It was a cyborg – an honest to goodness cyborg – and not even in the loophole sense of an AmpCore agent, with grafts neatly concealed beneath the skin. This individual looked half machine, with ugly dark metal grafts replacing great chunks of their body.

A man once, probably, but there wasn't enough organic material left for her to be totally sure. The skin of the face seemed to have been scorched smooth, and the upper right hemisphere, complete with eye and ear, had been replaced by a chunk of armoured circuitry. Wires splurged from a ragged bullet hole in the outer casing.

She drew her wand, reaching out to tentatively touch the mangled structure of the cyborg. More grafts replaced the man's lungs, most of one arm, and his spine and hips had been fitted with a strange rotating plate, fixed to the base of his spine. Holly realised, with a jolt of surprise, that the arrangement would have let him swivel his entire torso one hundred and eighty degrees.

The mental image made her feel a little nauseous.

A lot of bullet holes pockmarked both the armour and what grey flesh remained. Alba's cohorts hadn't taken any chances. Both of the man's wrists had been grafted with bulging metal brackets, each one housing a twelve inch blade.

"Where did you run into it?" Holly asked.

"Damn thing came out of the Tostvig freight loading yard," Alba grunted. "We were just on a milk run, collecting our cut from our fence, when this freak just appears from under one of the trains. Near enough cut Geraude in half before we knew what was happening."

"It just attacked you?"

"That's what I'm telling you."

"Any idea why?"