I slam my palms onto the grimy cement wall outside the bar, holding on for dear life. Droplets of sweat slide down my face, my head feels like an anvil, and my stomach twists like the two lovers sucking face beside me.

I figure maybe I’m just shitfaced until I can’t hold back anymore and puke. What comes out has a swirl of scarlet red and leaves a coppery taste in my mouth. The thumping bass from the club matches my heartbeat.

Jonzo. That bastard. Musta slipped some nox into my drink when I went to the boys room. Of course it was him. I look down the alley and there he is, leaning next to the side door, arms crossed, all awash in neon green and sucking on a cigarette. He’s staring me down with those chromed eyes, scanning me, watching my vitals flop around like a fish and waiting for them to zero out so he can cash in. He’ll finish the job if he has to. Must be a corpo hit…I don’t know how, but someone finally found me out. I’m fucked.

Thankfully, I always keep a stim on me. Uncle Jack insisted. Even from the grave, he saves my ass. Fingers trembling like crazy. I can feel the stim in my pocket…now I gotta play it like I’m chalked. Can’t break the stim. It’s my only chance.

I hit the ground like a sack of shit and slam my face in the puddle of my own bloody vomit. Probably broke my nose–all the better. Make it look more convincing. The lovebirds finally take a hint and shove off. Jonzo’s gonna make his way over here any second to seal the deal.

He’s coming. I can hear his footsteps. My thumb is trembling on the stim plunger.

Jonzo kneels beside me and slides out his blade. Now or never. I slam the stim and my body is pumped with so much adrenaline that my skeleton tries to leap out of my skin. There’s some neurovine in the stim to stall the nox too, though I don’t know for how long.

I’m on my feet and Jonzo looks like he’s seen a ghost. He makes a move for his kukri, but I’m jazzed up like a jackrabbit and my own blade comes out first. I slice him across the neck so deep that I feel the edge hit his neckbone and warm blood gushes out like a broken water main all over this random Jane, and she screams like a banshee.

That’s my cue. I beat feet down the alley like a man on fire, but I have no idea where the fuck I’m running to and the stim’s gonna wear off any minute. I don’t think there’s a street doc waiting around the corner, and I don’t have the scratch anyway.

People take cover as I sprint by, probably thinking there’s a stray bullet or two coming their way. The colors smear together as my vision wavers and I can’t even tell where I’m going. Finally, my legs stiffen up in protest and start to shake. My heartbeat slows down; the stim put them into debt.

The nox will kill me if my heart doesn’t give out first. Each heartbeat farther and farther apart. The searing streetlights and harsh noise fades, bringing the world into focus for one final moment of clarity as I collapse onto a sodden old cardboard box in an old basketball court in the middle of some rotten shantytown of stained plywood and scrap metal. I made it all the way into oldtown. The Reliquia.

Soot-covered street kids are staring at me. This won’t be the first time they watch someone die.

I’m not dead.

Not yet, anyway. The steady drone of an air purifier is buzzing beside me on the concrete wall, and I’m strapped down in some third-rate pre-war gurney with tubes sprouting out of my arms into some second-rate med tech. It’s dark, aside from a few bulbs on the machines. It’s cold. I must be underground. Oh, shit. Am I in a chop shop? I’m not missing any body parts as far as I can tell–but wait, they must have purged the nox. I’d be flatlined otherwise. They wouldn’t have bothered with that if they were going to slice me up like sashimi.

I struggle and see if I can maybe slip my hands out of the restraints. They’re on pretty tight. Might have to brute force it–but the grimy metal door squeals open before I can.

This guy walks in. “You still alive?” It’s a digi–a digital voice modulator–and it’s too dark to see who’s talking.

“For now,” I say. My throat is raw and scratchy, like I smoked too many cigarettes the night before. “Where am I?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” He flips a switch by the door and a pair of halogen lights flicker to life overhead. He walks over and I’m staring at a gunmetal gray polycarbonate mask grafted over the bottom half of his face that makes him look like one of those psycho killers in the old movies. There are little scars all over the rest of his face that look like maybe he took a faceful of shrapnel.

“My name is Caito,” he says, looking down at me with tired eyes. “They call me Doctor C around here.” The doc fiddles with the tech I’m hooked up to and nods approvingly. “You keeled over in a pool of your own blood in full view of some kids playing. They wanted me to help you. I promised them I would.” He unstraps me from the gurney.

“Hmph.” I sit up and roll my shoulders. “Sorry doc, but I’m broke.”

He laughed bitterly. “You think I don’t know that? You’re the most wanted man in Rosetta Beach, Mr. Foster–just so you know.” The voice modulation puts in the appropriate cadence, the words loosely connected with digitized ligaments.

I immediately tense up. Part of me wants to run, another part of me wants to knock this guy out first…but the part that wins tells me to think for a goddamn second about where I am and what he’s done. If he wanted to turn me in, I’d be long gone. “So…I open that door, there’s not gonna be a bunch of suits waiting to snatch me up?”

The doc shakes his head. “Just a cramped hallway and some people in scrubs who ought to be somewhere else.”

“You’re tube mooks.”

The doc crossed his arms, and the little LEDs on his mask arranged themselves into a flat line. “Out here, you have to be.”

“What do you–’out here’”?

I tear off the hospital gown like a napkin and put on the ordinary clothes the good doctor has provided, booting up my internal GUI to check my cyberware and vitals. The overlay appears in my vision with text scrolling through the digital gossamer windows showing the results of various system analyses: everything looks good, and I’m still off the grid–Doctor K could have easily slipped into my interface and switched on my IP, allowing NovaTech to track me down within the hour.

“My bounty’s gotta be 50k, at least,” I say, focusing on Doctor K’s calm eyes. “What’s your angle?”

“I told the kids I would help you,” he says. “I wouldn’t lie to them. Not for 50k, not for 50 mil.”

I scoff. “Bullshit.”

Doctor K’s eyes are just as stoic as when he walked in. “I know that the materialistic culture you’re accustomed to has made you forget this, Mr. Foster, but some of us have higher principles.” He reads the monitors again, then tosses an old black cap and surgical mask at me. “You’re cleared to leave. If you will follow me…”

He opens the door and leads me down a cement hallway illuminated by flickering halogens that provide a pale blue ambiance. It’s a pre-war railway maintenance station that’s been repurposed into a two-bit clinic. A few people in cheap scrubs give me odd looks as they brush past. The smooth gray walls are clean–someone keeps them that way–but there are long grimy stains from shit dripping down from the ceiling over long years that no amount of elbow grease will ever erase, and the old light tubes running along the walls and ceiling have long since died of old age.

There are a few other doors and there’s a cheap telescreen and a torn-up chair in a nook down the hall. An industrial-grade air scrubber whirrs in the corner like a beehive, spewing sterile air.

A short walk down the hall brings us to a wall mounted ladder with a hatch above.

“I don’t like to waste neurovine,” Doctor K says, “so do me a favor and don’t get geeked right away.”

“Don’t worry,” I say, putting on the cap and mask. “I learned my lesson.” I draw a long sigh. “Thanks, doc. I’ll pay you back someday.”

“Sure you will. The kids are waiting for you up there.” He flips a cover and presses a few buttons on a telescreen. “DIssuade them from your life choices, and I’ll consider the debt repaid.”

“Hmph.” I climb the ladder to what looks like a manhole cover in the ceiling. As I get there, a bald, sketchy-looking geezer pulls it open and drags me into a scrap metal hovel. He closes the manhole real quick and lets go of a faded old oriental rug he’s sitting on which flops over it.

The smell hits me like a garbage truck. Toxic smoke drifts through the air, which is chock full of carcinogens: the signature scent of the Scrapland. So many lovely notes: rotting food, tires, filthy rags caked with grime, and the strange soup of chemicals that come from obsolete electronics. Lots of batteries, too–sometimes they decide to spontaneously combust and start huge fires. The PD and corpos sure as hell doesn’t care about this place, so the folks here have to do their best to put ‘em out. Sometimes their best ain’t too good. At least they’re by the beach, so it rains a good amount.

I kick on my bronchial filtration mesh to clean out the shit in the air–good thing I’m rested, ‘cause it’s gonna be working overtime. I’ll have to find some food to make sure my bionodules stay juiced up.

Rickety partitions separate rows of cots and bunk beds. There’s men, women, kids, sitting despondent on the edge of their mattresses or on shitty old office chairs. Rusty, corrugated metal walls form the shell of the flophouse behind crumbling cement bricks bristled with twisted rebar. Pretty standard for this dump.

I recognize the trio of kids who stand before me as the ones watching when I collapsed on the street earlier. I thought they’d be the last faces I ever see. They look like chimney sweeps from one of those ancient novels. One girl has a blind eye, the iris all milky and still. Far from uncommon in the Scrapland. Another one of the kids is on his way: his eye is bloodshot and weepy–maybe Doctor K can help him. Maybe he already tried. A blunted sadness wells up in me.