»»»[A little birdy off the grapevine told me a bunch of empty slots just made a run at that abandoned tavern down in the Barrens... o.O]««« - ShyLow (02:33:46/06-7-54)
»»»[! ! !did they miss the twenty fragging threads about that place people've been making over the last week? empty slots indeed. i wouldn't make a run at that building with the entire Underground behind me. place was novahot! ! !]««« - gatzB (02:36:32/06-7-54)
»»»[Quit being so dramatic, gatz. Hindsight is always 20/20. If it had gone well, we'd have twenty more threads with runners saying they were *just* about to do the same thing. It always looks like a milk run until it's not.]««« - Strat-O-Various (03:01:05/06-7-54)
Shadowrun: Daze Gone Bye
Chapter One – All That's Left Behind
Anders followed her body all they way to the local Corpse Grinders, and the mortician had the common decency to apologize for the sign outside the building.
"It was a drek name when the franchise was started, and it's even worse now that we're subsidized and utilized more than the actual mortuaries." The mortician shook his head. "You shouldn't be here, friend-o. The body's already been purchased. If we don't deliver... Well, let's just say those kinds of lawsuits are fairly indiscriminate. They swing wide and they swing hard."
Anders hadn't eaten in days, and it'd been even longer since he slept. Compounded by Daze-E's death, he was reaching a kind of weariness that made his surroundings indistinguishable from the astral. "I just need more time," he pleaded. "I'm begging you. Please don't..." He motioned to the cold slab, to the laser-guided instruments, to the iceboxes that were already labeled with with the names of vital organs and a familiar blood type. "Please don't cut her up."
The dwarf mortician was looking just as rundown, but there was a kind of indifference there that gave the impression he'd had this talk a thousand times before tonight. "I need you to listen to what I'm saying, chummer. Are you doing that?"
Anders nodded.
"As I said when you first walked through those doors, Daisy Costigan's last will and testament is non-ex, and she was found on corporate property with corporate goods, having just shot at corporate security. Those are the three strikes that no one hopes to see." The mortician waited until he spotted some kind of response from Anders. "Now, I'm going to make a leap in judgment and assume that you ran the shadows along with Miss Costigan. Is that correct?"
Another nod.
"So you know about the UCAS Salvage and Recovery Act. All runners do."
"All runners do," Anders echoed at a whisper.
The mortician steeled himself. "That means her corpse is corporate property. That means unless you can produce a will or 'sufficient interring funds' for a funeral before we're finished talking, there is nothing you or I can do about this."
The tears came again. Anders didn't think he'd had any left. "Please. She was afraid of needles..."
Corpse Grinders security came walking up, but the mortician motioned for her to stand down. "Can I give you some advice?" he asked Anders. "We all mourn the dead. We all wish for different, more peaceful ends for the people we love. But don't let that emotion color what's happening in front of you—what's really happening, I should say."
He leaned forward. "Despite the shell you're seeing in front of you, she's already gone. And all that's really left of her in this world is up here," he pointed to Anders's forehead. "Cherish the memories, not the meat."
The mortician nodded and security escorted Anders firmly through the steel double-doors and out into the lobby. He paced across the small room for what must have been an hour, watching the florescents pulse and flicker against the decaying power grid. Off in the corner, past the receptionist's desk where a brown-haired troll was absently running an oversized nail file across her horns, he spotted a tiny plastic sign that read Observation Room.
He stood there, wondering. Maybe the mortician was right. Maybe he should just let her go, accept the unacceptable. That his love of nearly twenty years had gotten herself tagged on what—by all accounts—should have been a milk run, bought and paid for. And that, worst of all, she'd gotten tagged the one time he didn't go with her.
The one time.
That tired little voice in his head had been playing the Blame Game all day, from the moment he'd gotten word from Raina that the run had gone south and that Daze was the sole casualty. He'd wanted to reach through the comm and kill the runners on the other end. Raina sounded happy to be alive. Thrilled, even, since they'd gotten away with most of the goods and would only have to split the profit three ways instead of four.
She didn't even pay Anders the courtesy of telling him all this to his face.
Maybe it was all Raina's fault. Maybe she let her guard down and let Daze-E flatline for that little bump in profit. Raina had been the street sam, after all. Daze's guardian angel. Raina would be blacklisted by most of the fixers in the Sprawl for how everything turned out, but not before she cashed out with the goods. Daze's goods.
But maybe, just maybe, it had been Anders's fault for not going with the group. He'd let Daze convince him it was just going to be a milk run, even though the first thing every shadowrunner learns on the job is that there's no such thing. He let those bright green eyes keep him in place, that wide smile break him down, and that calm, singsong voice convince him that everything was going to be okay. He let her lie to him.
He should've gone.
Presently, Anders walked past the receptionist's desk and turned the corner into the observation room. As fate would have it, Daze-E's body had already been prepped and marked for surgery.
Surgery. Is that what it was?
The mortician wrapped a surgical mask around his mouth and began to dictate into the recorder. His voice came amplified over the only working speaker in the observation room. "Subject is a thirty-eight year old female elf. Name: Daisy Costigan. Cause of death: multiple slug wounds leading to a complete bleedout. Scars around datajack indicate possible dumpshock, but all vital organs—minus the left lung—appear intact according to initial scanning.
"Beginning first incision."
Anders would later find out some unknown art student down in CalFree had paid one lump sum of nuyen for dual reassignment surgery—gender and race—going from male to female, human to elf. Most of Daze's flesh would end up down there, first class shipping in the finest iceboxes money can buy.
The mortician started with Daze-E's face, moving the laser scalpel over her forehead, around her temples, and down under her chin, taking with it the scar she had suffered tripping down the kitchen step of their first apartment. Then there came a bright flash from a device used to detach the musculature from the skin and the mortician pulled her face free without preamble.
He held it up briefly to inspect his work, light from the overhead lamp shining brightly through Daze's empty mouth, nose, and sagging eyelids, illuminating a macabre expression of cosmic indifference that fluttered like a piece of thin cloth.
Anders heard himself cry out in agony, though his own voice seemed miles away. Then, despite the bright surgical lighting and florescents, he saw the floor rising up to meet him and all the world went dark.
