After The Fall

The rain in this city in unrelenting. Be it a miserable spray or the kind that will soak you through in seconds, it doesn’t stop. And here I am, stuck right in the middle of it. I turn up the collar on my jacket, it’s leather and it cost me a month’s worth of work, if grows mold I’m gonna be pissed. Staring across the road I see a figure disappear into an alleyway, he’s my man. I make my way across the road, there’s no cars, the ground is too soggy to drive on. I reach into my jacket and draw my side arm, a Smith and Wesson 780. Eight rounds of armour piercing ammunition, modelled after an old wheel gun. She may not carry the most bullets but she’s reliable and packs a punch, kind of like my ex.

I check the cylinder, fully loaded, 1 tracking round and 7 live rounds, just in case he fights back. The tracking round paints the target with a mist on nano-transmitters which are tracked by a satellite somewhere overhead. Most crooks run back to a safe house or to their buddies, this lets us get them all together. I round the corner, weapon raised.

“Freeze scum bag,” I yell as I reach for my badge. It takes me a few seconds before I remember I lost that particular hunk of metal a long time, I guess old habits do die hard. It’s all the time he needs though. Before I know what’s going on the knife is in my shoulder and I hit the ground, hard. I fire a round, the damping systems in my arm absorbing the recoil. The round hits him in the leg. He falters but doesn’t fall. Shit, I forgot about the tracker. As I scramble to my feet, slipping on the wet pavement I get off another round, against my better judgement. He’s climbing over a fence when it hits him, square in the middle of the back.

He’s dead before I reach, my anger got ahead of my plan. He probably would have led me back to the man trying to have me killed but that won’t happen now. I check his pockets, not much of note. A pack of smokes, a few dollars and a hotel key card, no name on it of course. No ID, nothing useful, just another corpse. I scan everything for prints, they’re covered in them, his and just about everyone else’s.  I pull the knife out and toss it to the ground, the rain washes of the hydraulic fluid as I listen to the quite hiss of the wound repairing itself.  The rain  begins to soak through the dead guys clothes, diluting the blood, spreading  it across the ground, making it look ten times worse than it is. I hear the sirens and prepare myself, the new officers aren’t so kind on old cops and no ones cares for augs any more.  It’s gonna be a long day.