Jacqueline Lopez (1)
Every jolt of the truck wrung a scream out of the frayed leather seat, and the dull, heavy knock of the crudely cobbled engine climbed his back and stayed there. Rain hammered the glass. While the rusted wipers dragged themselves across the windshield, neon and the glow of hologram signs smeared into a dizzy blur in the water.
I looked down at the hand on the wheel. Minutes ago that same hand had torn scavenger flesh and drunk the blood. Give it the slightest push of will and the claws would slide right back out. The muscle fiber and the claws had sunk beneath the skin, but the hot, razor-edged feeling left in my fingertips was still sharp.
Not fake. A hallucination, even less so. This is real.
I called up the knowledge of Escape from Nowak seared into my head. With no idea how to get back, I was going to have to survive here for a while. Nowak in the 2080s was a free city, a paradise for the psychopaths who had swarmed in because they hated nations and rules. Getting fleeced in broad daylight was the gentle version. Here they pulled your organs, and even death did not spare you the pain.
Fighting strength alone would not solve it. Even Seven, a capable mercenary, had bitten on a fixer's smooth talk, gotten screwed in a heartbeat, and come away badly burned.
First thing. Stay the hell away from that bastard Owen.
The trigger for an early ruin. The moment you took a third-rate fixer's contract and got tangled with Zhongtian Group, every ending ran straight into annihilation. After that, no matter which ending route you rode, an inescapable collapse came for you. So what was the conclusion? Owen could go fuck himself.
I'd have to be out of my mind to walk that suicide route.
Playing it from the far side of a monitor, sure. A tragic hero's saga, an ending that lingered. I had admired it. This was the reality I was breathing. There was no save file to load. I had exactly one life. Which made the choice obvious.
Scrape together every credit I can and get out of this insane city.
Why else was the game called Escape from Nowak? Because it was about people thrashing and clawing, desperate to escape this gutter of a city however they could. Becoming a legend of the city, or whatever that crap was — bullshit. Vile or pathetic, living long enough to smear shit on the walls was the only win that mattered.
The problem was this body of mine. It was no ordinary prosthetic. It was a living mutation. The one mercy was that Nowak City was crawling with freaks in cheap bioware, or with their genes already twisted out of shape. So long as I did not strut around enough to trip a megacorp's radar, I could sink into the crowd just fine.
Still. I walked away with seed money.
I side-eyed the cargo bed in the rearview, where I had dumped the looted guns. It was raining, but I had thrown a tarp over them earlier, so they would hold up well enough. The sooner I turned those, and the stolen credit chips, into cash, the better. I would need a hideout too. As it happened, there was a way to solve both at once.
The easy-mark fence of Laderas. Jacqueline Lopez. Went by Jackie.
Scare her just enough, put money in her hand, and she'll play along on her own.
Driving an old truck down a rainy night street, it felt exactly like heading out to pick up a quest. I turned the wheel, and the truck slid into the alley with a screech. Rain-soaked plywood, wires snarled together like spiderwebs — I swept my eyes across them, and a sign with half its lights dead caught me.
World Famous & Trusted Since 2065
Lopez Gold & Silver Pawn Shop
The heavy blast shutter over the front entrance was sealed tight. Business hours were long over. I killed the headlights and nosed the truck into the rickety carport beside the pawn shop. When the engine died, only the rain was left.
I reached to the passenger seat and gathered two encrypted credit chips, a data terminal, and one looted pistol in against my chest. The door clunked. I opened it and stepped out into the cold downpour. No getting in through the front, so the back it was.
Shoes first. I need shoes.
I knew all of it. This alley, this street, that pawn shop — every bit was familiar. I circled around to the back. In the corner of the steel fire escape, behind the trash bins, a hidden staff door waited exactly where I expected it. The old electronic lock's number pad blinked a faint green, as if begging to be pressed.
"The code... is this the one?"
Beep, beep, beep, beep. I hit the pad without hesitating. Clack.
"Lucky."
The lock gave way without a fight.
At that same hour, inside the pawn shop, the sales floor was cozy enough to put the damp wind and rain outside to shame. Jackie leaned back in the old chair behind the counter, humming.
"Hm-hmm, hmm~♪"
"In the black again today...! My ass. Ugh. This isn't even a mouse tail's worth."
Maybe she had expected too much. At the disappointing figures she pouted and flicked the ledger with a fingertip.
"Uuugh... once the loan-shark interest comes out, I'll barely have enough to keep myself fed..."
As if the unfairness of it were something she could twist out of her body, Jackie squirmed in the chair. A chest far too heavy for that petite frame hauled the thin cotton tee tight, strained until it looked ready to split.
"Still... if I pound the pavement starting tomorrow, it'll work out!"
She let out a short breath and threw both arms overhead in a stretch. Through the thin cloth, a narrow waist and a volume so overwhelming it looked precarious stood out in full. Right then, from the back of the shop — the emergency steel door — came a sound that should never have come from there. Beep, beep, beep. Mid-stretch, both arms still flung at empty air, Jackie froze solid.
"...Huh?"
Cold climbed her spine. She had locked that door. A trill, then a clack. That back door was sealed with a code only she and her late uncle knew.
Why is the door opening on its own...?
Metal screeched, long and thin, and the door swung open. A huge shadow surged through the gap. The instant she faced what had come in, Jackie could not even scream. She dragged in a breath.
A bulk oppressive enough to fill the doorframe. A ragged patient gown blotched dark red with blood. A raw, coppery reek of blood rolled in and swallowed the narrow room in a second. It was the very shape of a killer crawled up out of hell.
"¡Dios mío! Aaaaaaah!"
Jackie tumbled off the chair, shrieking.
"Wh-what! Y-you! How did you get in! I locked it! We're closed!"
The moment she spun, the heavy chest inside the loose tee swayed hard. She snatched the sawed-off shotgun hidden under the counter, hauled the muzzle up in shaking hands, and pulled the trigger without a second thought.
"Stay back! Stay baaack!"
The shotgun roared.
"Huh?!"
Seven, just stepping through the door, flinched at the muzzle flash bursting right in front of his face.
Why the hell is she opening fire out of nowhere?!
The blast tore the patient gown. Pain lasted a heartbeat. Instinct outran thought. Black muscle fiber erupted from Seven's right hand. Before she could chamber another shell, he gave his wrist a light twist, snatched the gun, and flung it aside, then drove the small young woman's body into the wall in one motion. The impact thudded through the room.
"Aaah!"
Against the forearm pinning her upper body, through the thin tee, he felt the soft give of skin and a chest so heavy the press of it was hard to believe. His other hand closed lightly around her slender neck, just enough that she could not bolt.
"Eek! Kkh—khhk...! P-please spare me! I'll give you all the money, just please, please let me live!"
Terrified, Jackie thrashed. While he held her down, something went wrong. The P-Cells in his body, still raw from the fight, reacted fast. From the end of his wrist a red tendril — not a claw — shot up like lightning.
"Huh?"
The tendril drove straight into the nape of Jackie's neck.
"Ow!"
In the next instant a strange sensation opened in Seven's head.
...Huh?
His brow twitched. He had not meant to do this.
Shit. Don't tell me that was a Servant Cell.
While Seven reeled, Jackie felt hell. Something like a bug wriggled up the back of her neck and burrowed in. Her eyes rolled white.
"¡Madre mía!"
There was no time to explain. Jackie screamed herself raw all over again.
"N-nooo! It's crawling in through my n-neck! A bug...! Waaah! The monster laid an egg! I'm dying!"
Tears spilled in sheer misery. She had never once done a bad thing, had lived decently, and some lunatic had jammed a grotesque bug into her neck.
"M-my life is over... hic, sob...!"
Seven said nothing. The wailing was so pitiful that his hand came off her on its own.
Ha... it just shot out on instinct. How the hell do I clean this up?
He scratched his head, at a loss, and his eyes caught the full-length mirror on a display case. He stopped dead. A monster stood in the glass. A patient gown soaked into a rag of blood. Dark crimson vessels reared viciously along his face and neck. Ten ghastly bone claws sprouted from the tips of both hands. He looked no different from the man-eating thing in a horror film, the kind that rips people apart. Granted, he had in fact just come from ripping people apart.
...I looked like this?
He had rolled through a junkyard on the way here and forgotten his own appearance entirely. Trusting nothing but the game's memory, he had picked the lock without a thought, and the regret arrived late.
No wonder Jackie nearly died of fright.
It amounted to a killer-monster bursting into her room in the dead of night. The shotgun, no questions asked, made sense now. Embarrassed, Seven cleared his throat and gave the crumpled, sobbing Jackie a light shake with one claw.
"Hey. Quit crying and get up."
"Huuuh... please don't eat me... I taste bad... even the money I make all gets taken... hiiiing..."
"I'm not eating you, so shut up."
"Urk..."
"It's not a bug. I'm not going to eat your brain either, so calm down."
"...Really?"
"Yeah."
Explaining a Servant Cell would only feed the fear. What he needed right now was trust.
"More to the point, turn the computer on."
Seven pointed at the old monitor on the counter.
"Huh? Th-the computer, why..."
"Somebody planted a backdoor."
Jackie blinked, blank.
"Open root registry, node three. There'll be spyware chewing on your background traffic."
Jackie wiped her tears and dropped into the chair before she quite knew she had. Her hands shook. The keys did not. They rattled like lightning.
"...Huh? Wha—?!"
Her wet eyes blew wide.
"¡Mierda! It's real?! What bastards! They planted malware to gut my pawn shop?!"
Seven watched her without a word. She fumed, force-killed the process, and stacked a fresh firewall over the top of it. Seeing that, he figured nobody would punch through again for a while.
Good. One of the original's ruin routes, erased.
He had stomped out, at the very start, the spark that would someday bankrupt this pawn shop. With the firewall back in place, Jackie carefully turned her head. Seven was still standing in front of the counter, arms folded. Looking up at the uninvited guest, her eyes trembled.
This monster... what even is he?
When he had first picked the lock and come in, she had been sure he was a killer starved for blood. A moment later he was the one who found the backdoor and bailed her out. The two faces tangled her head into a wreck. Fear and relief knotted together until her mind overheated white.
"Uuu..."
The tension let go, and Jackie slid down to the floor beneath the counter. Still frightened, she hauled her knees up tight against her chest. Crushed into the narrow gap, her full volume bulged precariously against the tee. Seven stifled a cough and quietly looked away.
...Way bigger than the game model.
He took the spoils he had stripped off the scavengers out from his clothes and dropped them on the counter glass, one, then another. Then he looked calmly down at Jackie, curled on the floor.
"Jacqueline Lopez."
"...Eek?!"
Her real name, from a stranger's mouth. Jackie flinched hard and clutched her head.
"H-how do you know my name...? And how did you even find this place? Uuu..."
Seven looked at the sniffling young woman, let a thin smirk pull at his mouth, and spoke low.
"You. Do a job with me."
"Y-yes...? A... a job...?"
Jackie's wet eyes blinked, blank.