The Eight of Earth

13: Fargo Shepherd- *Pandora's Box*

My hauler hovers to its landing, squeezing its way between the rickety buildings and onto the narrow street. The people below scatter like cockroaches under an old trash bag. I power down, and as the roar of my engines die, the melody of the Valley is born.

Many would find it unpleasant, but these are my people. Scrappers. Fighters. A people devastated by the Rotting. People who have clawed for every inch of ground they have. Not the friendliest kind, but undeniably real.

I open the door and peel out of the hauler and onto the busy street. Shit, it's cold.

"The fuck out of the way!" A man darts by me in a hurry, shoving me to the side and chased by a heavyset repo man who struggles to keep up. The two shoot by me and blend into the frenzy of motion on the street.

"Gettin' trampled down there?" Cyto yells out from a second-story window. I glance up to find him. "Careful slick, between the shiny new hauler and the amount of grease in your hair, someone might think you're from Groga!" I flip him off and open the trunk. He mumbles something to himself and closes the window. Crotchety old hag.

I grab my pistols, their holsters, and a jacket from the back and close the trunk. The holster vest fits snugly over my shoulders, and the pistols clamp down into their magnetic slots. Once I have the jacket on, I make my way into the building, hand hovering just above my weapons. I love these people, but I'm not naïve.

I walk through the abandoned first floor of the building. Squatters have carved out their own corners of the ransacked floor, making the decommissioned drug store look like a refugee shelter. I step over entire lives on my way to the staircase. Any sympathy for these people gone. Now I just see opportunity. Exploitable, vulnerable vagrants who want nothing more than to spend their last earned Soft on Venom. A reliably dependent client base. Not downtrodden hardworking Valenians who've just been dealt a bad hand. These are the truly delinquent. They don't care about their lives, so why should I? Venom's not addictive, it's not habit-forming, it's purely an escape. I feel no guilt in providing them a portal to a better life.

The staircase moans under my boots. I'd fix it, but it would seem out of place considering how the rest of the first floor looks. And I'd prefer to not draw unnecessary attention. In the hall at the top of the stairs, a hybrid man's corpse decomposes from the Rotting. Spotted with gaping holes like parts of his body were simply deleted. The smell is putrid. The scent of life literally dissolving away, unbearable. I don't need to fix the stairs, but this has to go...

The smell of the corpse only disappears after I step into a small white room at the end of the hall. Inside, it's only an arm's length wide. A thin metal pipe with the diameter of a pen comes out of the ceiling and stops just before my mouth.

"Green and Gone." I speak clearly and emphatically into the microphone. A door outlines itself from within the wall in front of me as it hisses and clicks. The microphone darts back into the ceiling, and I proceed through the door and into my headquarters.

Cyto is waddling around like a madman.

My base of operations is a thing of beauty. Has to be the most luxurious place in the Valley. If it wasn't wedged down in between these mountains where the sun barely breaks through, I'd almost consider living here. But there's nothing quite like a Grogan sunrise.... Or Grogan women. So, I stash crazy Cyto here and make him do my bidding in my absence.

Once through the security door, the room blossoms into a massive space. It takes up the entire blueprint of the building. Consuming the remaining three floors. There's no ceiling until the roof, which has a crystal-clear window in the shape of a pentagon in its center. At exactly midday, the sun shines right through it and projects a gorgeous kaleidoscope onto the floor. An excessive touch, but I am a man of nothing, if not excess.