"Shit." I yelled as the lead slug burrowed its way into my gut. "Shit, shit, shit!"
I raised the hand-warm Revolver in my right hand shakily, and unloaded 6 rounds into the masked face of the woman who had just shot me.
"It's my Adam! Mi-" Her defiant cry was cut short by the first of these bullets slicing her tongue apart, then finding its way through her hyper-spliced brain and erupting out in a shower of grey matter, blood, and fragments of skull cap.
"Bitch!" I spat, and kicked her limp corpse after struggling to my feet. I was bleeding, a lot, mostly from the hole in my abdomen but crimson was beginning to seep from the corner of my mouth too. I was short. I needed my fix soon.
Where was... there, there it is. The glowing scarlet hypo containing that most precious substance lay discarded by its long-dead owner amidst some rubble, bright and conspicuous in the dull grey scree. I scrambled over to it, sure that I was alone in my pursuit of it now, and after wiping most of the filth off the needle, stabbed it deep into my wrist.
It didn't sting anymore. I suppose it might have done, the first few times, but if it had I don't remember. My time before Adam was blurred in places... non-existent in some. The hunt for this stuff was my life now, it was all I lived for.
I depressed the plunger, slowly, savouring the feeling of the liquid in my veins. My heartbeat accelerated, my muscles tensed up then relaxed in mere fractions of seconds, my pupils shrank to pinholes. This was the rush, this was the feeling I had killed so many for.
It never got old.
"Fuck!" I screamed in my ecstasy, bursting into fits of manic laughter. "Fuck, that just never stops bein' so good!" I looked around, unsure of where I actually was. I had chased Jessie the Junky (my euphemistic nickname for female Splicers that I didn't actually know) for at least a mile through the city, so I could be anywhere in a mile's radius of Arcadia. Screw that, I thought to myself, There'll be more Adam here. Arcadia was a ghost town.
"A ghost town in a ghost city. Interesting idea," I pondered aloud to the silence.
As the Adam euphoria began to fade, the world darkened again and the pain in my gut returned – and not gently either. I clamped my hand around the wound, and looked around in hope of a medkit or First Aid station.
My desired prize was found on the corpse of Jessie, her bifurcated tongue lolling comically out of her soundless, still-screaming mouth. I recovered the kit, spitting on her corpse for added insult. In doing so, I caught sight of myself in a shard of the broken mirror she seemed to have kept on her person (Bet it wasn't broken until she saw herself, I thought idly). The reflection wasn't a pretty one.
My eyes were sunken and as red as the blood that pooled around my shoes. My pupils were barely visible in the vast scarlet oceans of my irises, and looking into my own eyes was like looking into the Devil's. My nose had never recovered properly from being smashed with a brick on New Years Eve '59, and was crooked at an odd angle to my face that was far from the perpendicular it should be. Closer to parallel, I suppose. My lips were pulled back from my mouth, showing jagged, dirty teeth that I swore had bits of human flesh in them. Hell, when a guy gets you in a headlock, you do whatever the fuck you can to get out, right? The entire canvas of my face was a mess, a regular freak show. I grunted my disgust, and returned to the task at hand.
When the bloody hole in my abdomen was suitably plugged, I retrieved my Revolver – 'Justice', I called her – and set off on my way.
But... where? Where was my way?
Where was I, for that matter?
A long, pained groan silenced my thoughts. I dived into the shadows of the piles of plaster and debris, and listened.
I knew that groan.
Everyone knew that groan.