Dirty Work: Volume 2

Story One - Cravings - 2

The club, as I walked in, was absolutely heaving. I arrived at around 11pm, and whereas most places would only just be getting going by then, Chorus was already doing a thriving trade. The crowds were over spilling from the floors, making even the circular rising platform in the centre hard to see. Synths soared above thick bass lines and heavily distorted, chugging guitars, though it wasn't as if you could hear anything of it over the deafening chaos of the patrons.

I wandered in, squeezing my way through crowds right from the get go, trying to weave my way over to the bar to grab a drink of some sort. I wanted a Black Mariner, but Black Mariners seemed much too sophisticated for the crowd that I was in. Sometimes you just have to make these sacrifices in order to maintain social appearances.

'I'll take a pint of Krowbar,' I said to the bartender after a good ten minute wait, handing over a note. He slammed it into the till and grabbed a glass in a single, swift motion. As he was pouring he eyed me up, trying to work out if he knew me from somewhere. I recognised him; it was Jerro, the guy who had taken me up to see Chorus the first time I'd come here. His beard was more than just beginning to grey now, and there were streaks of silver around his temples now as well.

'Do I know you?' He asked me, handing over my drink.

'I hope not,' I replied, turning away from him to find a place to sit, or more likely stand, before he could work out any hidden meaning in my answer. There wasn't; it just sounded enigmatic enough to be vaguely cool, and was also the first thing that came to my mind. I have a habit of doing things like that, as you might have noticed.

As I was looking around the seating area two girls stood up and locked eyes with two others across the room. I quickly wriggled into position and as they left the space I dived for it, just about managing to keep all of my drink in the glass. Next to me, a group of guys were engaged in a very heated debate, seemingly over the availability of the two girls that had just departed, and looked across at me as if I had deliberately switched with them in order for the women to make an escape route. I tried to drink as inconspicuously as I could.

Cheers went up as the band finished that particular number and began a new one. The lights changed colour and the Chorus sign at the back of the main room began to flash that Chorus purple I was so familiar with now. Sat there, wondering just why it was that I had decided to come here, I watched the girls that had left my seat move onto the dance floor.

I can't tell you exactly what it was that I saw as the four of them wandered into the crowd that was so thick it was practically a brick wall. I can't tell you if it was the way one of them had hair like liquid gold, or how one of them had skin so red she could have passed for a relative of Siala. I can't tell you if it was the way one of them had heels that obviously plagued her, or the rings on the gold-haired girl that flashed as she guided one of her shorter friends into the crowd. I can't tell you any of these things because I honestly don't know what it was that caught my interest, though most things about them caught my attention.

I got up from the seat that I had so recently sat down in, much to the delight of a Soorvite couple that threw themselves onto it, the one guy on the other guy's lap and practically in his mouth as well. I went through the crowd again, but not onto the dance floor. Instead I took the stairs up to the balcony that ringed the floor, the very structure of the platform shaking and vibrating in response to the pulse of the music. I ascended past the drummer, so engaged in his thrash that I don't think anything would have caught his attention; the building could have collapsed and he would only have become aware of it by the time the song he was playing finished. Sometimes I wish I could become so completely lost in something like he was, but after you've worked for Dirty Work for a while, you begin to see everything around you, to spot things nobody else would be looking for, to notice things that you're not even sure if you've noticed. I was now permanently aware that there was, for a select group of people, a price tag hovering over my head, one that I had no doubt they would be ever too eager to collect at the first opportunity.

Coming up to the platform's top I wandered to the middle of it and leaned against the railing, looking down into the pit below. It was almost impossible to discern where one dancing devil started and another began, all shifting and sliding together like grains of sand through an hourglass. I took another sip of Krowbar and grimaced. The thing tasted strangely flat now, though it was still bubbling away. I handed it to a barman as he walked past.

'Anything wrong with it?' he asked.

'Stomach's taken a funny turn,' I said. 'Don't think I can handle anything else just now.'

He looked at me strangely but took it anyway and carried it off. I peered into the crowd below again, trying to isolate the four girls that I had seen heading into the crowd. I couldn't find them, but through the hundred-and-fifty or so heads that ducked and dived below under pulsing lasers and turning lights, I wasn't surprised.

I took my Halo-Core out and pulled up Markro's details.

ANYONE YOU KNOW NEAR CHORUS' PLACE?

I put the Core back into my pocket and continued to look down. Why was I occupied by that group of girls who were, no doubt, simply minding their own business and having a great time in a great club? What was it I had seen? What was it that something in me had picked up?

I stood there wracking my brains, trying to go into my memory and run back the footage in slow-motion. I tried to scan everything, computer like, freeze-framing and zooming in on little details to try and find something, anything, which would justify my concern. It wasn't a mere sexual attraction, although I couldn't deny that the one with the heels was very good looking. There was something about the way that... that they walked? Looked? Carried themselves?

I remembered the glance that two of them had thrown the others as they got up from the seats, and I gazed into my remembrance of their look. It wasn't the happy look of girls that had just seen their friends across the room. It wasn't the look of people having a good time. It was a resolve that one rarely saw, and a kind of resolve one hoped they would never have to have, or see someone else have.

I suddenly felt my stomach tighten, the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Suddenly I understood what was going to happen, what might happen. And I was scared.