The adventures of grave, p.30
The Adventures of Grave, page 30
She stood there, chest heaving, as women on the street gave her weird looks. The only thing they’d heard from that exchange was “massive cock”.
“She thinks I don’t meet the standard. I’ll show her some freaking standards,” Gabi wasn’t done yet. She had her phone in her hand, and her fingers flew across the keyboard.
She easily logged in – she didn’t even need to hack – into the company net through her former manager’s profile. From there, it was easy to get deeper into the systems, and give Electronics Barn a real middle finger. Her finger hovered over the enter key as she contemplated what she was doing, but she didn’t give her conscious enough time to get in her way. She smashed her finger onto her screen and dropped a digital nuke on her former employer.
All across the country, the systems that helped the company run their stores went on the fritz. Servers went into emergency shutdown mode as her virus swarmed through cyber space. Records for years were wiped out, the inventory log of every store in the country went blank, and every contact on the company intranet was deleted. In a matter of seconds, Gabi threw one of the premier electronics companies in the country into chaos.
Even better, when a cyber forensic specialist finally sifted through the chaos, it would all point back to Ms. Thompson.
“F you,” she grinned back through the window where the woman was already hitting the register awkwardly with a panicked look on her face.
“I did it,” she said to no one in particular as her feet started to automatically take her away from the scene of the crime. “I’m free. I never have to go back to that job ever again. No more looking over my shoulder. No more stressing if I didn’t help someone the right way. Never again.”
That’s when reality smacked her in the face.
“I’m never going back to the job because I don’t have a job,” her face fell and she started to hyperventilate. “Crap . . . my bills . . . abuela . . . how are we going to get by?” the unknown pressed in all around her like a pair of hands closing around her throat. She stumbled toward the curb; her hand outstretched to hail a taxi. She needed to get out of here.
Thankfully, they were everywhere at the heart of Arch City. One pulled up, and she fell into the back seat with barely enough breath to provide her address. The girl behind the wheel gave her a worried look, but nodded and started heading toward the older section of town. Every couple of seconds, she checked her mirror to make sure Gabi wasn’t having a heart attack.
Her brain struggled for answers as the cab pulled away and took her home. It took her longer than she was proud of to come to the obvious conclusion.
“Marcus,” it had been staring her in the face the whole time. “Marcus is the answer.”
Marcus had a plan, even if he hadn’t said what it was yet, but he had included both her and Ramona. If the purchases today indicated anything, it was that she was an integral part of his strategy moving forward. It all boiled down to trust, and even though she’d just met him, she trusted him. Fighting side-by-side tended to do that quicker than dinner and a movie.
After some hurried calculations, she knew she had six weeks, maybe eight if she pinched pennies, before the money situation became bad. Even then, everything else could wait, but her abuela needed her medication. Somehow, she knew Marcus would have something before then. It had only been a day, and he was moving with a purpose to achieve his goals. There was no way he was going to wait months to make his move. He was a man of action, which was something that was incredibly hot. Knowing that Marcus was going to come through allowed her to relax.
She laid back against the cab’s sticky seats, and felt a little better as downtown Arch City passed by. The skyscrapers tried to caress the clouds, and she saw more than one Neohuman flying around up there.
“They get to play in the clouds while I live here in the dirt,” her hands flexed from another spike of anger, but she cooled it by thinking of what was coming her way.
Soon, she could be up there right along with them. As they passed through a busy intersection, a bright splash of color caught her attention.
“Oh, CapeCon is this week,” she saw the banners that adorned the convention center.
None were as large as the ones depicting the capes of the Arch City Guardians. Each of the four members was thirty feet tall, doing their signature pose, and looking down on everyone that entered the convention center.
She made a mental note to check out the program. Now that she was in charge of keeping a powerful Neohuman off their radar, it would be good to know who was in town for the festivities.
“Cool. That could be fun.”
Chapter 14
It wasn’t just the leering looks of female criminals that told me we were getting closer and closer to our destination. It started slowly, but the farther down we went, the more a foreboding sensation started to nag at me. At first, it felt like I was being watched. Humans had developed that instinct long ago, and Guildmaster’s defenses took full advantage of it.
It got more intense the farther down we went. Soon it felt like there were sounds just out of reach; rustlings that triggered the primal part of my mind and told me to turn back, that danger was right around the corner. Despite my brain telling me to run, there was something else that steadied me. It identified a hollowness to the foreboding feeling; like it was there, but it really wasn’t. That was enough for me to fight back against it, and ignore what my brain was telling me to do. That wasn’t true for Ramona. Her whole body seemed to freeze, as she began to tremble beside me. I knew something was off, but she didn’t.
“Keep going,” I told her. “Squeeze my ass if it helps.”
She took a big chunk of my butt and squeezed hard enough it made me wince. I was going to feel that tomorrow morning. We kept going until the light above us finally winked out. One second, it was like twilight around us, and the next, we’d been dumped in the deepest part of space with no stars around to find our way home.
“Marcus?” she whined. I could feel the terror in Ramona’s trembling bones as her instincts screamed at her to flee back to the light.
I grit my own teeth and beat back the horror trying to overcome my mind. “Just a little bit further,” I placed my hand on her lower back and pushed her forward.
One . . . two . . . three steps, and it was like someone flicked the light switch. One second, we were in complete blackness, and the next, we were standing in front of a retractable barrier. I turned around to look back at the darkness, but it was gone. Not just gone; it was like it never existed. It was nowhere in sight.
We were far enough down that the light from the surface didn’t do more than give the place a dull glow, but street lamps straight out of Victorian England were spaced down the winding path. Pools of light illuminated shop fronts, but it gave the whole place a permanent sense of dusk. Still, it was a hell of a lot better than the crushing void that had nearly driven Ramona to flee.
As I looked back, something seemed off. I squinted, and the more I focused, the more I thought I saw lines. Like the laser grid from Entrapment, they spread across the road we’d just walked through, but they weren’t exactly lines. As I focused more, I thought I saw little geometric symbols that . . .
“Ow,” a sudden migraine hit me like a punch between the eyes. I blinked and quickly looked away.
“What . . .?” Ramona’s heartrate was still elevated as she tried to calm down and shook her head to clear off the lingering mindfuck.
“Are you okay?” I didn’t miss how her wide eyes darted left and right looking for danger.
“I . . . I’m . . . what the shit was that?” she rubbed her eyes with her hands like she was trying to banish sleep. She was just as confused by the darkness’s absence as I was.
“Are you two coming, or are you going to play grab ass all day?” a woman leaned on the barrier and watched us.
This woman was huge, a real-life amazon if there ever was one. She was eight feet tall, built like a championship bodybuilder, and her sleeves were rolled up to show bulging, tattooed, biceps. That was a lot to take in, but what intrigued me most was her eyes. One was green, and the other blue. Both were focused on us.
“C . . . coming,” Ramona cleared her throat, and got it together.
“Don’t sweat it, blondie,” the guard gave her a wink. “Most people don’t get past the ward. You’ve got to really want it to get through.”
“It was eldritch spellwork,” now things made a lot more sense. I’d known something was off from the start, and that had to be my own innate abilities blunting its effect. “Awesome,” I couldn’t hold back my smile. “If eldritch magic can do that, what else will I be capable of?” it was a good question, and one I intended to find out.
But first things first, I needed to get an ID; and that meant getting past the barrier.
The giantess didn’t budge as her eyes passed over me. With it came a tingle, and I knew I was facing off against another magical Neohuman. Still, I stood my ground under her gaze until the tingling vanished.
“You’re an interesting one,” she smiled at me. “And you,” she turned to Ramona. “When you’re in the woods, give him some privacy.”
“Woods . . . privacy . . . is this one of those if you don’t hear a bear shit in the woods it never took a shit situations?” Ramona glowered at the amazon.
The bigger woman just laughed as she pulled the barrier up with a single hand. She waved us through with a dramatic gesture, and we were in. Both of us looked back at the tattooed amazon, but she wasn’t paying attention to us anymore. She lowered the barrier, and went back to leaning on it and watching outward for newcomers.
“Where to?” I asked Ramona, trying to put the tingling sensation out of my mind; as well as the woman’s cryptic statement.
“Not far, just up here on the left,” she said, her face showing the same confusion that I was sure was mirrored on my face. She pointed to a nice little shop without any outward advertising.
“How do you know they’re going to have what we need?” I wondered, as we approached. Just like Angel’s, the place looked empty.
“Rich people contacts,” she replied bluntly. “It’s not just supervillains with Class One NTAs that need a clean set of papers every once and a while,” she grinned. “Technically, I guess some of the white-collar fraudsters out there might seem like supervillains to some people,” she amended.
I nodded. Her words made something tug at my memories, but I couldn’t quite place it.
“When you run a Ponzi scheme and trick thousands out of their savings, you’re going to want a backup plan in place; and that means you have to come to a place like this to get an ID,” she opened the door for me.
“But don’t worry,” she suddenly looked a little panicked at the look on my face, “my family and I have never done anything like that. Dad’s a real boy scout about rules and regulations. He’s got a major stick up his ass, which I guess is a good thing when dealing with shady vendors and a strict building code. He’d rather lose a contract than fuck over someone. After all, a fight between A-Class Neohumans can level a city block if stuff isn’t built to code.”
I had no problem believing that.
“My mom is the one you have to worry about, but that’s more along the line of her snubbing you at some charity event, or celebrity golf tournament. She can be brutal, and has made being a blue blood into a contact sport,” even the cocky Ramona looked like she didn’t want to mess with her mother. “Then, there is her magic pussy power,” I nearly stumbled and fell.
“I mean . . . it’s not a real power, but mom and dad have been married for over thirty years, and I’ve never seen him look at another woman. Her blowjobs must be crazy good.”
“Maybe your dad is just a good guy,” I didn’t want to wade too far into this weird topic.
“Maybe,” but she shook her head like she wasn’t quite sure. “He’s a boy scout, not a saint; and with the amount of poonanny that has to get thrown at him all day, every day, mom has got to have something special going on downstairs.”
“Sounds like you have an interesting family,” I didn’t know what to say to that.
“Eh,” she shrugged. “They’re still both a couple of blowhards who keep telling me I need to do something with my life, make something of myself, and stop ruining the family reputation,” she rolled her eyes, as she threw out a lot of air quotes. “I’m pretty sure I nearly gave dad a heart attack when I got an NTA,” she sounded upset about that.
“We are doing something here and now,” I reassured her, as I gestured around at what clearly was some mad scientist machinery that someone had haphazardly strewn all over the place.
“I know,” she shot me a wicked grin. “I can’t wait to see their faces when you meet them.”
I froze up a little at that. The idea of meeting a girl’s parents filled me with some unpleasant memories; especially ones who had the economic and political connections the Lewis family seemed to possess. I needed to fly under the radar, not soar up in the rarified atmosphere of the Arch City elite.
“Don’t worry,” she seemed supremely confident. “I’ve already gotten off my ass and gotten out of the house. They think you’re a good influence on me.”
I stopped a laugh before it could start just as we reached the counter. I gazed around and didn’t see anyone, but there was a little ring-for-service bell; so, I smacked my palm down on it.
“Wha . . .!” a figure burst up from where it had been completely covered in components of some machine. “Welcome!” she recovered quickly.
Rough hands with grime stuck under its fingernails quested across the table, knocking more tech onto the floor, until they snatched up a pair of glasses. Unlike the next-gen pair that Gabi had put together. This one had a more steampunk vibe. There were numerous monocles attached to the glasses, and the Neohuman running the shop quickly switched them to the setting she wanted as she pulled herself out of the chair and stumbled over to the counter.
“How can I help you today?” she smiled, which highlighted the circuit-board imprint that covered her cheek. That couldn’t have been comfortable to sleep on.
“We need an ID for my man here,” Ramona cut right to it.
“Sorry, I don’t do human trafficking,” the woman shrugged, and started to turn.
“I’m not being trafficked,” I was mildly offended. “I just don’t want the government getting all up in my business.”
“Ah,” the woman spun back toward us. “An anti-establishment rebel. That, I can work with,” she grinned a little madly.
I wasn’t sure if that’s how I would describe myself, but whatever floated her boat and got my ID made. Then, she dropped the bombshell on us.
“A full ID will run you fifty grand.”
“Fifty G’s?” Ramona’s jaw dropped.
We had that much, but that seemed way too high to me. “Fuck that,” I grabbed Ramona. “There has to be a better shop around here somewhere,” I started to drag her away.
Considering the shop was empty, and the woman had been asleep at her desk, I bet business wasn’t booming. I could use that to my advantage.
“Wait a second you two,” the woman called out and rubbed her hands nervously together. She might make good fake IDs, but she didn’t have Angel’s salesmanship. “You haven’t heard everything I’m offering. Fifty is top of the line. I’ve created an entire life for those IDs. Everything from an original, genuine birth certificate, social security, school records, doctor’s visits, failed driver’s tests, college degrees, bank accounts, annual taxes; you name it, and every conceivable life experience that can be digitized is in the system for those IDs. I’ve even maintained email accounts, social media, and subscriptions to sex catalogues for the female ones. Hell, the male ones even have Department of Population Control appointments they’ve been putting off,” she wiggled her eyebrows at Ramona. “Those are top of the line, golden-platinum plus, and they come with my one hundred percent guarantee. They are bulletproof. The feds could run a deep dive on you and you’ll come back clean.”
That was all well and good, but if I got busted, her guarantee wouldn’t do shit if I was in jail.
“But they’re still fifty grand,” Ramona had her hands on her hips.
“Pfft,” the woman blew a stray hair out of her face. “I could do forty-five, but nothing less.”
“At least she took something off,” I kept a frustrated look on my face. I really liked the idea of a bulletproof identity.
“What about your cheaper options?” I asked.
“The less they are, the less work I’ve put into them, and the greater the chance something will trigger a flag,” she shrugged. “I don’t know which to recommend to you if you don’t tell me what you want to use it for,” I saw the trap even before she stopped speaking.
I just crossed my arms across my chest and glared at her.
“Fine,” she waved her hands defensively. “Let me just put the specs on the screen for you and you can choose for yourself,” she hit something below the counter and a holographic projector sprang to life with all my options.
I made a scene of looking them over carefully. Truthfully, there was only one I wanted. I couldn’t half-ass things if I wanted my plans to work.
“Forty-five for the bulletproof ID,” I confirmed, and got a big, fat grin from the woman. I gave Ramona a look, and although she paled a little at the price of a small piece of metal, she nodded.
“Do I at least get to pick a name?” I asked.
“Unfortunately, no,” the woman shook her head. “I’ve cultivated these for decades, so the names are what they are; but I do have a few options. Take a look,” more information appeared on the display.
“Wendell Wayne?” I looked at the name. “Sounds like a certain billionaire’s second cousin who lost out on the family inheritance,” I moved on.
“Miles Masterson?” I shook my head. “I’m not a senior manager at some marketing firm.”
“Do you have anything without matching initials that would blend?” I scrolled.
