Silence (2 page)

“
Wanna let us in on the
joke?” jeered one the gangsters. There was a chorus of
slightly-strained laughter. Everyone that’d heard of Silence, knew
he was the master of last second turnarounds.

Sheikoh turned and looked the man
right in his eyes.

“
Did Ghost let you in on
the reason he wants me to fall in line so badly?” He raised his
eyebrows. The man’s face went white at the mention of Ghost, with
good reason. “The man that does more than anyone to pay my
bills?”

Ghost’s name was only whispered if
ever spoken at all. He was the invisible man, ranked number one on
the Interium’s wanted list. He’d single-handedly beaten every other
gang into submission, molding a hundred packs of rabid criminals
into the deadly ‘Legacy’. They’d built a wall to contain him, but
within its borders, Ghost held absolute dominion.

Ghost had sent Indigo, his pet
ganglord, to offer Silence a place within Legacy. Sheikoh had
declined. Apparently however, it wasn’t an offer as much as an
conscription notice. Indigo had been after him since.

“
Don’t
you find it odd, that Jinx dies and then, in that same week, the
Century start making trips over into the West?” Sheikoh improvised,
spitting out some blood. “And then, the
next
week my freelance work isn’t
enough for him anymore, he desperately needs me under his thumb.
Want to know why?”

Sheikoh paused for gravity, and tried
to figure out what to say.

“
Last week Ghost had me
break into an East Side estate, owned by a mate called Fiano
Trill,” Sheikoh lied to the expectant gangsters, his voice
apparently lost in memory.

“
Fill…
was…
a billionaire import export merchant between
Skyrei and Sunsit. Dealt in arms.”

The gangsters leered down at Sheikoh,
their eyes bloodthirsty. He had to ramp up the excitement level if
he planned on buying any time at all. He didn’t need
much.

He was getting close.

“
I made it through the
toughest security I’ve ever seen,” Sheikoh continued, thinking
furiously. “Which means pretty effing tough, before I finally got
to the safe Ghost had described to me. That was…” Sheikoh trailed
off, shaking his head. “It had a blood rune inked into the
top.”

Sheikoh hid a smile. The gangsters’
faces were wide with shock, even Indigo’s. He had them right in the
palm of his hand. This cobbled conspiracy had entered the realm of
the Celestial. The Celestial were the wielders of amazing magical
powers. They were chosen by the stars or the gods or whatever the
latest religion was going with. Sheikoh had looked up the
eyewitness videos himself. No matter how far CGI had come, it still
took time and effort. But there were literally millions of videos
confirming the Celestial’s powers. It was too many not to be true.
Rumors about the Celestial weren’t exaggerated in the
slightest.

“
I was sure the contents
couldn’t be worth the protection investment,” Sheikoh went on,
lowering his voice dramatically.

A few of the gangsters stopped
breathing. Even Indigo looked like he was listening intently.
Perfect.

Sheikoh could
already
feel
it
pulsing in his veins-

“
But I was wrong,” Sheikoh
went on quietly. “I couldn't believe it. I detonated the lock and
found Entilei Vest’s old-

NOW!

To the gangsters, it was like he
disappeared.

Sheikoh threw himself at one of the
men, ripped the man’s pistol out of his hands, and twisted his
body, snapping an arm like a twig. Then he rolled over the guy’s
shoulder and flung the dude’s limp body into the group before
racing into the darkness. Criminals fell over one another like a
bunch bowling pins.

Already streaking away, Sheikoh
pointed his newly-acquired pistol back at the gangsters. Three jets
of lightning arced from its muzzle. Three men went down. The rest
of them took his cue and disappeared, fleeing the dangerous light
of plasmafire like roaches from sunlight.

One of the fallen had
survived however. The big man pushed himself back onto his feet.
Sheikoh glanced back over his shoulder. Of
course,
Indigo just
had
to be the one who
survived. The ganglord was wheeling around, searching for any sign
of him. Luckily, Sheikoh was already all but invisible.

“
BRING ME SILENCE’S HEAD!”
yelled the ganglord.

His order intertwined with the hissing
echo of plasmafire, reverberating around the factory like a dying
scream.

Sheikoh padded silently
through their shadows and rolled into a crouch beneath one of the
hanging assembly lines. His body went still as he scanned the
surrounding darkness. Moonlight shimmered through the half-rotten
roof, barely touching the thick shadows of the abandoned factory.
Shattered windows bared their broken glass teeth down at
him.

A moment later, he let his body relax
against a metal leg of an assembly line. He gingerly pulled the
collar of his shirt down, wincing at the bruises already darkening
on his skin. Indigo’s signature.

His hand, the one holding the gun,
shuddered violently. He held its wrist against his leg. After a few
long seconds, its twitching calmed. Sheikoh took a deep breath and
sat there for a moment. He knew that he was all but invisible in
the gloom, courtesy of his black outfit. He could lurk here
unnoticed until the gangsters assumed that he’d escaped and left to
plan his torture or whatever, but he wasn’t in the mood to hide; he
was in the mood for some revenge.

And when the boot stepped around
Sheikoh’s corner, his body responded quicker than conscious
thought. He threw himself forward, drawing a black blade from his
boot in one, fluid motion. His vision stuttered. He was standing
over the gangster, looking down into a pair of shocked eyes. All
six inches of silent electroblade were lodged in the man's throat.
The dude was barely able to gurgle his surprise, before falling
onto the ground like a sack of flour.

Sheikoh put a foot on the man's chest
and jerked the blade free. An icy chill settled deep inside his
bones. His eyes flinched away from the gangster’s face, and then
hardened. Innocence was a luxury. It had no place in the real
world. The real world was kill or be killed. Innocence was
something Sheikoh had lost his chance at a long time ago. And
staring into a pair of empty eyes wasn’t going to change
anything.

Sheikoh suddenly realized that he was
holding a long metal tube.  He glanced down at a shot gun with
slight surprise. A vague memory of ripping something out of the
man’s hands glanced across his mind.

His thoughtful frown twisted into a
grim smile. Things were starting to go his way. He might actually
have some real chance at surviving this. Sheikoh stepped into a
cloak of shadows with the lethal silence that’d earned him his
street name.

“
Ready or not here I come…”
Sheikoh muttered beneath his breath.

He faded into the night.

Sheikoh glided through the dark, easily avoiding the
gangsters searching for him. He made mental notes of the factory’s
layout as he went. Finally, after a few long moments of quiet
footsteps later, he reached his destination. But he wasn’t the only
one there.

A gangster leaned against a clunky
filing cabinet. Sheikoh could tell the thin, pale man was afraid,
even in the dark. He could almost taste it in the air.

There was a faint tremor in the hand
holding a pistol. The gangster swung around, leveling it right at
his face. Sheikoh froze. He was going to die. His eyes
stung.

He was going to
die
. He was really going
to die. Thirteen years, all the sweat and blood he’d paid, all of
his struggles and triumphs, all of it wiped out in a single
second
-

A rat skittered out of the
darkness.

Sheikoh held his breath.

The gangster let his pistol fall to
his side.

Still frozen, Sheikoh watched the
gangster shake his head, flash a smile of relief. Slowly,
carefully, Sheikoh let his pent up breath sigh between his lips.
The man was obviously off his guard. Sheikoh crept forward,
cradling his silent blade. His body was as cold and as sharp as
blacksteel. His movements were lithe, yet chained to their task. He
was eight feet away.

Five feet away…

Four and a half feet…

Four…

The man’s eyes focused on him.
Sheikoh’s heart stuttered. He reached out and grabbed the dude’s
leather coat, jerking the man off-balance, and the man dropped his
weapon. It clattered noisily against the hard, stone
ground

The gangster was unarmed and staring
up at Sheikoh. His eyes were wide and fearful. Pleading. Sheikoh
hesitated.

This dude wasn’t
fighting
back
.

What was he supposed to do? Kill him
in cold blood-?

A scream tore through the
gloom.

Sheikoh’s hand blurred,
slicing through the man’s throat. Terror cut off with a weak
gurgle. The gangster fell back through the echo of his own scream.
A dead body dropped onto the stone floor with a dull
thud!

Sheikoh’s chest fell along with,
weighed down by the corpse.

He knew he’d done the world
a favor,
knew
the
dude at his feet would’ve watched him die without a second thought.
Nonetheless he couldn’t banish the cold pit in his
heart.

He’d lived the terror behind that last
expression. Too many times.  

Footsteps pounded his way, jolting
Sheikoh back to reality. He shook the hair from his eyes and tried
to ignore his heart beating in his ears. His back was to a wall,
and he was boxed in without cover of any kind. If anything went
wrong, he was done for. This had to be the dumbest idea he’d ever
come up with.

His eyes dropped, as though
despairing, and pierced the darkness for any hints of motion. As
the group of men gasped into view, Sheikoh dropped his
electroblade, raising his hands in surrender. The weapon clattered
against the floor.

“
Got me cornered fair and
square!” Sheikoh called. “You beat me, and I’m not ashamed to admit
it.”

Indigo pointed Sheikoh’s own pistol at
his chest. The ganglord’s eyes glittered with malice.

“
I’m unarmed!” Sheikoh went
on hurriedly. “And I’m truly, honestly considering that one
proposition you put to me before. You know, about joining Legacy?
Not a bad idea at all now that I’ve had some time to wrap my little
head around it. What do you say, Indi?” Sheikoh smiled winningly.
“Ten speed?”

Indigo’s face arranged itself into a
snarl. He raised the plasma pistol, aiming it at Sheikoh’s
face.

“
You
see,
Silence
,” Indigo told him, his face dark with vengeance. “I can’t
take you on now. Those men you killed had families, you know. You
ask me, you owe them closure.”

Sheikoh smiled sadly, unaffected by
Indigo’s words. His hands were still raised as though he didn’t
believe the ganglord was really about to shoot him. A few
straggling gangsters joined the group behind Indigo.

“
It
is
sad, isn’t it? Those
poor
families. It must be really hard to tell them
that a gangster got shot, huh?” said Sheikoh in a high clear voice.
His eyes sparkled, and he couldn’t resist adding;

“
Still… I
would hate to have to be the one to
drop
that on them.”

Before the gangsters realized what had
happened, Sheikoh’s wrist flicked a shotgun from behind one of his
raised arms. A glaring, red jet of plasma hissed straight through a
link of the rusted chain overhead, and the crate that it’d been
holding came rushing downwards. Indigo was the only one to react.
He leaped to the side firing bursts at Sheikoh. Sheikoh threw
himself in the opposite direction, skidding against a wall, as the
rotten crate smashed into the ground with a sickening
crunch.

A wave of splinters exploded outwards,
pelting Sheikoh’s skin painlessly as he bounded through the rubble
and limp bodies, agile as a breath of wind. Somehow, his plan had
worked. His hands throbbed; he’d scratched his palms raw when he’d
thrown himself against the wall, but better bleeding hands then a
smoldering plasma hole in his face. He abandoned the abandoned
Toshiyama Factory and then sprinted down two blocks of winding grey
streets, beneath a full moon. Buoyed by adrenaline and the purpose,
Sheikoh felt invincible. He was on top of the world.

He slowed to a measured trot and took
stock of things.

“
Well,” he told himself
lightly, “Probably shouldn’t head back home looking half dead.
Don’t want to scare Dorothi.”

A giggle escaped his lips
and seconds later he found himself clutching his sides and laughing
hysterically. He let himself fall back against a concrete wall and
slide to the ground coughing and sputtering in amusement as the
sharp pain all over made its way through the haze of adrenaline. A
few moments later, Sheikoh got up, brushed himself off and made his
way over to his favorite thinking spot; a walled garden that
everyone in Interium seemed to ignore.