One: Reckoners meet with McKrougar

__________________

2052 Old Germany

The air was heavy with frost, it had been a hard winter, and the sting of it still resisted the warmth of the sun. Wayland cursed beneath his breath, something thick with Cockney and unintelligible, although obviously offensive despite. Mwamba seemed less offended by the cold, his black skin frozen beneath a thin layer of rime, making him appear a corpse. Corpses… Mwamba knew that this entire city was strewn with the fresh dead, covered by layers of ice and snow, waiting to be thawed out in spring. Although his body was deadly still, his eyes belied the fact that he was tense and ready to spring into action. Wayland cursed again, his gravelly voice further exacerbated by the cold air scorching his lungs.

“Fuck ne-ah, what’re we doing ‘ere anyway? Bloody fucking cold it is, fucking ‘ell.” Despite the fact that Wayland towered over Mwamba by a good seven inches, he danced like a schoolboy trying to keep warm, breathing heavily into his thick, cupped hands and rubbing himself.

“Shh, quiet yourself… just shh…” Mwamba crept forward, moving like a shadow, and peered out onto the street below the abandoned apartment building they waited in. Wayland wasn’t quite sure what he was looking for. He was just there as backup and really didn’t give a shit; he was cold.

“’Ell man, I’m gonna get me a fuckin’ fire started here, colder than a bloody witch’s tit innit.” Just as he was about to pick up a piece of debris to make a burn pile, Mwamba came to life.

“Here they are, come on!” A skeletal black limousine crushed ice beneath its snow tires and carefully crawled along, meandering around wrecked cars and piles of debris from the abandoned buildings lining the street. The vehicle itself was an absurdity in a place like this, the ultimate symbol of wealth and privilege among death and decay. Wayland trailed a measured distance as Mwamba ran down the stairs and to the doorway, where he stopped short, able to peer out while being himself totally concealed by a late afternoon shadow cast across the frame of the door. “That must be our man. Come on.”

Wayland deftly tracked behind as Mwamba darted out into the street towards the limo, and as he neared a door clicked open. The two men deftly and silently jumped into the open portal without the vehicle ever slowing down.

“I see you brought muscle this time, Silence. Poor taste if I do say so myself.” The voice in the shadows belonged to a Mr. Otis McKrougar, American born African, with a bit of urban southern edge to his voice, hardened by years of use and abuse. “Come on, Otis, you know Bludgeon, he’s cool. And you know better than that, I don’t need ‘muscle’ anyhow. So you mind getting to the fucking point, my friend? Time is precious these days.” The apparent insult had fallen on uncaring ears, as Wayland was contenting himself with rubbing his hands in the warm blast of air coming from the vehicle’s vents.

“Agreed. You know you are going to need to tell Abidan that my rates are going up if he keeps sending me on these shit-ass assignments.” Uneasy silence rippled through the air, only punctuated by Wayland’s deep breaths into his cupped hands. “I’m lucky I’m still alive, by the way, thanks for asking, you asshole, but I got what you need either way. Here’s the lowdown, it would seem that somebody, and I’m not totally sure who is at the top of this yet, wants the Syndicates to fight. Although motive is still speculative at this point, it would seem logical that either one of the smaller Syndicates or else one of the bigger competitors wants the giants to fight so that they can come in and pick up the pieces. Easy enough, right?

“Well, not exactly, although I can’t put my finger on it yet, there seems to be something much, much bigger going on here. I’ve been getting reports from a few of the rural villages of massacres, and not by Syndicate militia either, that’s what gives me the chills. You know those border towns, usually they go on pretty much left alone since basically all they have to offer is agricultural goods, and agriculture is basically useless if you kill the farmers, so most of the Syndicates protect them as an asset, or at the very least leave them be.

“The really squirrelly thing is that whoever has been doing it has taken a lesson from Attila the Hun, because they don’t just kill the people, they burn everything, even the harvested crops. That’s the sick part, why would anybody want to destroy food? It just doesn’t make sense, sure there have been plenty of instances of these villages getting raided for food and whatnot, but usually the raiders just take the food and leave, maybe rape and plunder a little, but leave everything basically intact, because if you destroy it all then there won’t be anything to raid when you come back. Hell, even some of the Syndicates started off doing… never mind, I know you’re in a hurry, Silence, so I’ll get to the point.”

“Appreciated.”

“Anyway, here’s the file on the Durenberger kids, what little I’ve been able to nail down so far. Most of it is hearsay and gossip, so I’ve coded it according to reliability, because you never know if one of those wild rumors might end up actually being true, and I figured you guys could use whatever I could come up with at this point.” Wayland sat back finally, apparently thawed out from the hard German winter, and instead put his mind to enjoying the plush leather seats of the limo. Mwamba took the manila folder from Otis and began to flip through it. There were approximately fifty pages therein, some of them full gloss photographs, and a few had official looking seals, probably pulled from old abandoned government vaults of some sort or other. No one ever asked Otis how he came by his information, all that mattered was he did and that he demanded payment for such a service. He was not one of them; he was only a necessary ally.

“Wayland, provide this man with his well-earned payment, please.”

Reaching deep within his green wool army jacket, the giant Brit pulled out a small case, large enough to hold about three golf balls and covered in brushed chrome. Otis carefully took the package from the hulking man with one hand and dialed a series of numbers into a keypad at his hip with his other, causing a safe to open beneath his seat. Without ever looking at the contents, he placed it in the center of the hidden safe and closed the door again.

“How come you don’t wanna look at it, love? Ern’t you ‘fraid it ain’t cushty?”

“No, my brawny friend, you have more need of me than I do of you. That allows me a special privilege in that I need not look at a single payment, because your leader knows full well that a single maligned attempt to cheat me would place your entire organization on the wrong side of the tracks, yes?” The implication that Otis was superior to Wayland seemed suddenly to ignite something within him.

“Hey, tear in a bucket, mate. I could snap your neck like a twig, sorted?” No sooner had Wayland spoken, the muzzle of a silenced pistol poked out through a small previously unnoticed hole in the tinted partition glass that separated the driver compartment.

“Eh ya’ geeza, I’m just sayin’ hypothetical like, no disrespect intended ya’ wankah.” The pistol barrel didn’t move.

“Yes, well, now that it has been demonstrated that you both could be shot in but a moment’s notice, can we fucking continue?” Wayland backed down with a scruffy sigh and continued to satisfy himself with his own comfort, although beneath his casual exterior steely muscles were silently tensed, posed to strike with deadly force if needed.

Otis smiled, his cracked and weathered lips were purple with age and hardship; his face was twisted into a grinning caricature of what was probably once a noble visage that had been wrecked with age. The scars tracing his cheeks bulged with the grin, making the expression appear even more nightmarish. But, of course, Mwamba was no stranger to living nightmares, and the freakish expression that Otis exhibited did little to melt Mwamba’s icy reserve.

“Tell me more about these village massacres…”