Part five

Relinquish all hope, ye who enter...

Max pushed her bike slowly towards the middle of the road, trying not to draw too much attention to herself. No, not yet. Just a bit more. She revved up her baby, the sound of it getting lost in the blaring of police sirens  and the yelling of orderlies. Then she steered it towards the busiest looking part of the crowd and let it go with as much momentum as possible on the rather short portion of freeroad. Just as expected, the bike got everybody's attention. Max didn't need more as she whisked around the corner to use her favorite way of access into Logan's home: the roof.

Peeking into the penthouse she  smothered every shred of emotion and focussed on the voices she could hear if she strained enough. There seemed to be a guard at the entrance, talking angrily with a few reporters. Forensics were just leaving. Max used the moment to quickly jump in and take a look around. The computers were gone. He would have been really pissed to know that. Max shook herself. She'd have to deal with the informant net and everything else later.

Right now her eyes were riveted on his messed up furniture and papers. Right there, where she had so often found him on her unannounced visits, was his wheelchair and on the floor, next to it, a huge puddle of a bloody mess surrounded by a chalk line made every nerve in her body tense. Chalk on his wooden floor. Her mind was playing tricks on her again, focusing  on everything else but the blood. Well, it wasn't just blood, but that was no excuse.

They had messed up Logan's place and he couldn't do anything about it anymore. But she could ! A grim smile surfaced on her face as she forced her thoughts elsewhere, trying to look in the other rooms. Where was his exoskeleton ? Maybe he had had it on.

Just then, the voices at the entrance  grew louder, attracting her attention. An agitated soldier was trying to ward off the reporters but his efforts had little success.

„Are you sure he was Eyes Only ?"

„I'm not at liberty to say anything, sir."

However, he suggestively looked around for his superiors and seeing none he promptly pocketed a pack of bills.

„As long as you don't quote me"...he mumbled and continued:

„As the paramedics came in they found his computers on and they had the image of Eyes Only on the screen. It was Cale's face, then just his eyes and then the eyes with the stripes, just like in the hack."

„Maybe he was just some freak playing around ?" the reporter tried to suggest, as if it were hard for him to believe that he was actually standing in the door of Eyes Only.

The MP looked flustered, suspecting that his word was being doubted and never once noticing he was saying more than he had intended.

„There were other documents, too, but I really can't say anything about that."

„Well, then, how did he die ?"

Max closed her eyes for a moment and tried to think of Renfro and Manticore, just to prepare herself for what she was going to hear. The answer was prompt and included everything she had hoped to never know:

„He was shot at close range with a large caliber gun. Ok, folks, that's all I can say right now. You'll have to wait till they officially release information."

Using the fraction of a second when the MP was too absorbed by his own importance to pay much attention to anything else, the youngest reporter of the group dared to barge in a few steps, only to have his eyes grow large. He gasped, slightly greenish around his mouth, as he took a closer look at the blood puddle:

„Geez, large caliber, there can't have been much left of his head."

„Yeah," the other one chuckled, „eyes only."

Max shot forwards as if propelled by a spring. She was about to jump him and break his neck but caught herself in time and rushed out to the roof instead, heading straight for the Space Needle. At this point she finally did miss her bike but couldn't care less. Her world had collapsed on her, just as Zack had warned her it would and all she could think of was the time she had wasted. She had thought about that ever since the virus bitch, but now every fucking tiny moment she had thrown away, touching or not touching, weighed heavily on her soul. The soul she hadn't known she had before meeting Logan.