Gambit's outro Who: Seven What: A drug deal with a twist. Where: A condemned apartment building. When: Today, midafternoon. Warnings/Rating: Violence and graphic/disturbing imagery.
It started out like any other ordinary deal, on any other ordinary day. The building was a shithole in a filthy corner of the city, with crumbling walls and water stains dripping down from the ceilings into brown puddles on the floor. It was full of squatters, mostly homeless kids who would inevitably move on once the constant flow of traffic in and out the front door attracted the cops, but there were also a couple old-timers who had been living there since the building was first condemned.
Seven rolled in with two soldiers flanking him, all three dressed down in dark jeans and hoodies in order to blend. His contact was a dude named Hector, who bought a decent amount of crack cocaine every month and sold it off in smaller parcels to the buildings’ haphazard residents. This month he had asked to make a larger purchase than was usual - something about some visitors from out of town who won a jackpot at the slots and were looking to pick up - and so Seven had tagged along to oversee the deal and check Hector out for himself. One of his soldiers had a nondescript pack slung over one soldier and the other found the right door, pounding a few times while Seven stood back and observed the surrounding filth with distaste. It had been a long time since he’d lived in a place like this, and he didn’t much enjoy having to return to the underbelly and squalor in these corners of the city. This wasn’t his world anymore, he’d made sure of that.
The man who opened the door was your typical junkie, and the deal went over fine. It wasn’t until Seven had stuffed the money into the pack and handed it back to his man that he heard it. Crying. A baby. None of the junkies seemed to even notice it, all preoccupied with pinching off rocks to stuff into the ends of their glass pipes so that they could get their fix. Seven motioned to his man to watch them, and moved off to find the source of the noise.
It was coming from a back room of the apartment, and the stench of cigarette smoke mingling with human waste was overwhelming as Seven stalked down the hallway in the direction of the sound. He found the boy in a tiny shoebox of a bedroom, standing naked in a playpen and wailing at the top of his tiny lungs - he couldn’t have been older than a year and a half, maybe two years at the most. Seven froze in the doorway, taking in the sight of the overturned furniture and trash that littered the room, taking in the way that the baby’s ribs stuck out at sharp angles above a stomach that was swollen with malnutrition.
The next few minutes went by in a blur. He was, in some distant way, vaguely aware of carefully picking the baby up from the playpen and carrying him to the disgusting bathroom where he cleaned the boy off as best he could, wrapping him in the single clean towel that he found in the back of a cupboard. He did not remember carrying the boy back out to the main room, and he did not remember pulling out his gun. He did not remember handing the boy off to one of his soldiers with instructions to take him out into the hallway, far enough away that his little ears would not be damaged by what followed. However, he was entirely conscious of his actions when he pointed the gun at each of the three screaming, sobbing junkies and pulled the trigger three times.
Bam. Bam. Bam. Three careful, measured shots to the face. He barely waited to see if they were in fact dead before he slammed out of the apartment, gun in hand at his side. “Get rid of the bodies,” he barked at the remaining soldier, taking the pack from him and swapping it with the other man for the baby boy. “Make sure nobody asks any questions.”
An hour later, a little boy was dropped off at the nearest hospital and handed to a nurse along with a thick wad of cash, in exchange for her guarantee that he would be treated and delivered to Child Protective Services with no questions asked. By the time anyone else even thought to wonder where he had come from, Seven and his soldier were long gone, and three John Does had been dumped at the edge of the desert. It wasn’t until Seven got home and climbed into the shower that he noticed that his head was free of french-accented epithets. He felt strangely... empty. He tried not to think about what that might mean, and turned the hot water faucet as high as he possibly could.