Where: Walking down Douglas near Echo Park. Who: Justin Brey (NPC) and Lawrence Bloodgood When: Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. What: An experiment. Warnings: Language, suggested violence. Rating: PG-13/R
It had been a late game, running long past the cut-off time of ten thirty. Justin was tired and drunk as he made his way home, forty-eight dollars richer, which did nothing to cover the ninety he'd lost the week before. He glanced at his watch, contemplating a bar, but he thought better of it. Angie would kill him if he came crawling home at three in the morning, and Justin wasn't about to drive his wife to homicide. She was already bitter enough about the weekly game.
He was sure that she was just waiting for him to lose a whole paycheck. Once the grocery money was gone, she'd make a real ultimatum. Threaten to leave. She could do it. She had places to go. People to fall back on. Her mother was an estate agent, and made good money. And wouldn't he be up shit's creek then? Justin couldn't make rent without Angie's added income, weekly poker nights aside. The pawn shop he worked at was floundering against the competition. So in the most honest economical sense, he needed his wife.
Granted, he loved her, as well. She'd been a beautiful woman, once upon a time. Their kids were grown, now, though. The oldest was a waiter uptown, struggling to make it with some kind of performance gig. The other was a receptionist at one of GeneCo's financial aid offices. They were only marginally more successful than he was, himself. Angie also worked for the big G, as it were. She was a claims adjuster or something like that. A desk jockey. Maybe a secretary of some sort. Justin knew that she'd been there for about seventeen years, but he didn't know exactly what she did. It sounded dull, whatever it was.
Everything about his life was dull.
He didn't hear the footsteps behind him. He didn't see the repo man approach. In truth, he wasn't even expecting it. He knew that he was a little late on his liver payments, but he didn't think it had been all that long since he'd cut a check in GeneCo's name. Besides, he had family members working for the corporation, so surely they could cut him some slack, right?
Well, apparently not. When he felt the heavy, gloved hand grip his shoulder, Justin yelped. It was almost a girlish shriek, but he'd been a smoker for most of his adult life, and very little about him could be described as girlish. He turned to face the man in the mask, unable to make out anything beyond the glow of the visor.
Repossessions were supposed to be quick, horrible affairs. At least, that was what Justin had heard. The repo men swooped down on you, tied you up, and essentially tore out the required part. Some people got a chance to scream, but in general nobody had a chance of surviving the ordeal. The messy deaths weren't very newsworthy. One of Justin's poker buddies worked on a clean-up crew that was assigned to spray the streets down after a repossession. Sweep away the gore. Collect the bodies. They'd joked about how such crews were called to task, wondering over beers if the repo men had to keep garbage lackeys on speed dial.
Now, facing the infamous faceless, Justin was absolutely sure that he didn't want to know. He stammered something. Blubbered. Something about this being a mistake, didn't they know who he was? Well, of course they didn't. Play It Again, Sam's Jewelry & Loan was on its last legs. Nobody knew about it. Nobody cared. That was part of the problem... Regardless of that, there still had to be a mistake, Justin reasoned. He wasn't delinquent. He was just a little late.
It became clear from the repo man's silence that he wasn't getting anywhere with that tactic, and suddenly it seemed to him that he should be mentioning Angie and the kids. What would they do without him? Well, the kids would go on as they always had, but what about Angie? She was used to him. She was used to having a man around the house, taking up half of the bed and all of the second bathroom. What was she supposed to do, remarry? How the hell would she pull that off? It would take a lot more than just plastic surgery (that she couldn't afford) to make a fifty-seven-year-old woman who'd birthed two kids marriage material. Her sex drive had tanked since she'd hit menopause, anyway (of course, so had his). Surely, even GeneCo's hired assassins were still human. They could be swayed by reasoning of the heart. Besides, Angie worked for GeneCo. This could all be cleared up in no time...
The repo man interrupted him just as he started to get going on the subject of his status as a family man. The strange helmet filtered the voice, making it dark and unreal. Inhuman.
"Look," it said. "Stop. This is... pointless. Don't make it hard for yourself."
Justin pissed himself, and ran. It wasn't much of a race, although it lasted longer than some would have thought. He was probably carrying seventy pounds of excess weight around his middle, and hadn't exercised regularly since high school. Panic could only take him so far before he collapsed, out of breath. Panic did its best, of course, but there weren't many placed to go, and despite the heavy nature of the suit, the repo man didn't seem to slow down. Justin was eventually caught as he rounded an ill-chosen corner and hit a dead end. He slammed himself into the fence and started to sob, hoping for help. Knowing better.
"Jesus," the repo man panted.
There was something gratifying about the fact that this person could be winded. Justin wasn't in the mood to commiserate, however. He screamed, wide-eyed, and held his arms over his face (even though technically he knew that the abdomen was a more likely target). When he did not immediately feel the pain of scalpels slicing through his flesh, Justin's yells started to take on a daring tone. Do it! he was screaming, inwardly. Get it over with!
But the repo man just stood there, cornering the older man. He fished around for a bit in his bag before coming up with a hypo gun containing a glowing blue vial. Justin had never been addict, but he wasn't so stupid he didn't recognize the glow. He did, after all, watch television. A lot of it, in fact.
"Like... Like I was saying," the repo man said, getting his breath back. "There's... an easier way."
It took a full minute for Justin to fully get the gist of what the other man was saying. He hesitated, certainly. There was a great deal more blubbering. However, given a choice between pain and uncertainty, Justin was a man who subscribed to the notion that ignorance could be bliss.