Ain't Talkin'

The middle of the night saw the streets nearly empty, but still the Resistance boys were quick and quiet, checking every corner. Even one person noticing a merc troop cavorting around in the night would raise a panic unless they put them down.

They kept to the alleys and dark corners far from street lights. The doctor moved with quick feet, a strange shuffling-run that befit a man who hadn’t spent much time out on his own. He was an educated man, a man who’d spent years in libraries and laboratories.

Eighth Street. They’d come this far. The string of alleys looked clear ahead, save a solitary man wrapped in a blanket, seated and breathing misty breath.

“We can keep goin’ down. Briggs take him out, don’t kill him.” Roche watched the alley as they came up to Eighth Street. They’d have to cross the road to get to the alley when the man sat huddled.

Roche peeked left and right. Old cars, rusted in place and burned out. Orange Street lamps. Twenty yards to the left, a small group of bar-hoppers was going in the other direction, wandering drunkenly around.

When the drunken travelers had moved another ten yards away Roche motioned the soldiers across the street.

Once there, Briggs switched his automatic rifle around and brought the butt down on the man covered in his blanket. The figure groaned, started and slumped sideways.

Briggs drew the canvas blanket back and nearly shit himself, he threw the blanket off.

The remaining soldiers shuffled into the alley across Eighth Street, swallowed up by the darkness between the bricks and hidden by dumpsters, an upturned car and an old panel truck with it’s metal frame stripped completely off of the front end.

“What’s the problem?” Roche asked, spitting chew.

“Look.” Briggs said, pointing down at the man, presumed to be an old homeless fellow in a blanket, that he had just knocked senseless and black with the butt of his gun.

It was a Corp hired-gun, a soldier, in a flak-jacket, battle-dress, goggles and appropriate colors.

“So what?” Roche spat.

“Why’s he here?”

“Cares? Drinking out late, on leave, just cold, the shit cares?” Roche stood up and looked down the alley and then back towards Eighth Street. Weaving was beside him, and his breath was growing heavier.

Briggs knew it before Roche did, and he could feel the wrongness of it creeping in.

“Not everything means something is up. Just a soldier in a blanket. That’s all.” Roche said but even he didn’t believe the words when he said them.

Markus, .45 in his hands and the gun trained on Weaving out of instinct and mistrust looked to Roche.

Even the kid, Roche knew, could feel something wasn’t right. Soldier in a blanket could’ve just been a soldier in a blanket. But Roche knew that wasn’t the case. Soldier in a blanket meant they were waiting. Maybe they didn’t know for sure that the Res was gonna come into New San Fran tonight to get their own work done, but they knew someone might try, or maybe they were just being cautious. One way or another, when Markus took a half second to start to ask Roche what to do next, the good Doctor Shithead made a break for it at a dead sprint down the alley.

Rifles went up, trained on the doctor’s nice suit.

“Don’t shoot!” Roche slapped out at their weapon barrels. The soldiers of the Res, mercenaries, took the order. Markus did not. In the one time the kid could maybe have stood to miss a shot, he flicked the safety back from the .45 and pulled the trigger.

The doctor clipped in his run, faltered and then kept going. The bullet hit him somewhere in the shoulder, but he just kept on bookin’ it.

Roche swore and took off after the doctor down the alley on dusty bootheels. Markus followed somewhere behind, and the Resistance boys took their sweet seconds deciding what to do.