I'm back...I hope y'all like this chapter. I'm not quite as happy with it, personally, but I'll leave that up to you.
Thick locks of damp, silvery white hair fell into the trash can, as Vicious snipped his hair back to the length it had been before falling into a coma.
Finally satisfied with the job, he set the scissors next to the sink and walked out of the bathroom, wearing only a towel around his waist.
He had rented a cheap hotel room in the small town of Lusurn, several hours outside of Tharsis. Drawing on precautions implemented before his coup, he had purchased a train ticket and tolerated a whining brat with pigtails demanding candy from her mother for seven straight hours.
Heaven help the next person to so much as look at him the wrong way.
His katana had apparently been lost; whichever thoughtless oaf it was that took him to the hospital had not had enough sense to carry along his favored weapon.
Or, perhaps, they were a little low on cash and just pawned it.
There was also the thought that a katana was a very distinctive weapon, one he was known for using if they didn't know his face. It was possible that it was disposed of ensure his anonymity. He had no doubt that the hospital staff, if they had known who he was, would have turned him in to either the Syndicates or the ISSP, private patient or not.
Whatever the reason, he did not have it.
He had arrived at seven o'clock in the morning, and it was now 8:10. The sun was bright over Mars by this time, and Vicious had drawn the curtains to keep the room dark. He had originally intended to sleep on the train, but since that proved to be impossible, necessity dictated that he find someplace to rest. His body was not yet up to par, and until it was he would need to watch himself.
Vicious slipped into the cheap pair of flannel pants he bought at the hotel gift shop downstairs. They were checkered blue and white.
He was in a positively foul mood. The price of this pitiful, beige covered room—50W—was ridiculous considering the poor quality. It was small, with a full sized bed taking up a good two thirds of the open sleeping area, its comforter an eyesore mixture of bright blue, yellow, and green splotches of color.
The bathroom was at the far end to the right, with a small mirrored closet opposite the bathroom, and a tiny table with a television on it at the foot of the bed. One of the lamps didn't work, and it was fairly badly lit.
Then again, such pathetic standards were to be expected in towns like Lusurn, where their main income came from milking the traveler who didn't want to sleep on the train and didn't know any better.
After the Gate Accident, the economy of the entire solar system took an almost vertical nosedive, from which it had not yet recovered.
Many people, not just on Mars, lost everything, after the Accident. Unable to cope with the skyrocketing cost of living in the bigger cities, they moved out of the cities and created numerous smaller towns. Lusurn, like many other towns in the same vein, was simply a gathering of ramshackle houses and concrete bunker buildings, which dared assign a name to itself.
The chaos the Accident had generated had been the catalyst that firmly entrenched the Syndicates in their bids for real power, outside of the marginal existence they had led before the Moon was destroyed.
Vicious pulled the covers back, and laid down.
He would rise at midday and go attend to his business. It would take his enemies a fair amount of time to regroup and mount an attack—Vicious had always been known for his brutal efficiency, an efficiency which very few could match or compensate for—and those men were dead.
Vicious knew an attack was possible, but not here and now. It would behoove him to sleep.
When Ella Shepard had been given her job as a clerk in a small antique bookshop on the north side of the city three months ago, her employer had taken her in to the back room and given her some very specific, if unorthodox, instructions.
Tom Morley was a short, balding middle-aged man who wore a different color flannel shirt and khakis each day of the week and horn rimmed, bottle glasses. He didn't smile very often, and had a painfully dry sense of humor.
"When a man comes in and asks to see River, you say you don't know a River."
Ella nodded obediently. She was a college student, working to pay her tuition, and she was simply grateful for a job. Lusurn supported a small college, which, while well thought of, was stressful on the checkbook and many students had jobs to help cover the costs of tuition. She turned a blind eye to the shady undertones that she worked under.
"If anyone ever comes in asking for someone other than me, you say you don't know anyone, got it?"
"Yes."
"If they do, mark it down with a pen on the calendar on the wall--not a big mark, and don't do it right after they leave. Do it in green pen and write something about...needing more staples." Tom watched her carefully, for any signs of hesitation or discomfort. He'd hired her simply because she was naïve and willing to follow instructions.
"Okay, I can do that," Ella replied readily. The pay was good and she could study in between customers. The shop wasn't all that busy, and she inwardly wondered how it had remained in business as long as it had.
"Now, this is real important. If a guy ever comes in, and he has silver hair and blue eyes, you don't ask anything, you just get up, lock the shop and take him out to this address."
Ella accepted the slip of paper with wide eyes, not comprehending.
"A guy with gray hair and blue eyes...? There's got to be a million of those!" Ella commented, smiling just a bit, trying to offset the sudden discomfort she felt.
Tom stared at her without a hint of amusement in his eyes.
"You'll know who it is if you see him. His name is Vicious. Memorize that address and then burn it. Don't let no one see it."
Ella unfolded the piece of paper and stared at the words written on it.
24 W. Reisling Davenport
What the hell have I gotten myself into? Ella thought, frowning slightly, as she read and reread it, and committed the address to memory.
Vicious' long strides carried him through the town, past familiar streets and down narrow, familiar alleys.
Lusurn had been his home, after all. He had known this town since he was a child, before even the Syndicate. The woman who had birthed him had lived in a tenement apartment complex half a mile outside of Pingula University's campus. Scraping up the bills to keep the closet he slept in was virtually her only influence on his life.
The town was small and closely packed, as it always had been. One shop that he remembered as it had been open had been long since boarded shut, the ancient paint on the windows dull and dirty.
It had been a chocolate shop.
Vicius sneered irritably. Of all things, he loathed nostalgia.
He had shut the door on this part of his life years ago, it would be up to an old man's whims tonight if he could pry it back open.
The small corner shop just ahead, a tiny bookstore which he had never been inside, was his goal. It still had the old-fashioned sign hanging out over the street in the shape of a book, and on the windows, which were covered with a wall of stacked, yellowed books, was painted Rhubarb Book Shop.
He stepped inside, and heard the bells attached to the door tinkle.
He was greeted with bright fluorescent lights overhead and mountains of books to every angle. It smelled old. To the right was the cashier's desk, with a figure sitting behind it, nearly bent over straight, peering down at a book.
The girl behind the counter lifted her head, smiling. She was short, slight of frame, and had brownish-blond hair that fell past her shoulders.
"Hello! How are you?" she asked, and then looked at him a little closer.
Vicious stopped, almost taken aback, but he instantly smothered his surprise before it was visible.
She stared at him, and went a little pale. Surprised disbelief flooded her face, and her pale gray eyes stared at him in blank horror. She was dressed all in black—black slacks, black turtleneck, and he assumed her shoes were black, too, though he couldn't see them and didn't particularly care to.
He said nothing.
It's not possible that River sold this place...
"Give me a few minutes, okay? I have to get a couple of customers out." She hopped off of her stool, closed the textbook she'd had her nose in, and hurried off into the bowels of the little store.
Over the next few minutes, several disgruntled looking people passed by Vicious and stalked out of the store, and one or two of them remained standing with books clutched in their hands, refusing to leave until they had made their purchases.
The girl quickly returned, and hurriedly took care of the irritated looking customers, who threw Vicious odd looks before snatching their things and leaving.
"An early date, Ella?" one snide looking older man snapped.
The girl turned cherry red and shook her head, almost appearing afraid of the idea.
"No," she replied pointedly. "Here's your books."
When the man left, she locked the door and shut off the lights.
"I'm sorry you had to wait," she said lamely. "Please follow me."
She led him back into the store, slipping sideways through the narrowest halls of books that lined the shelves to the ceiling. It was a reader's paradise, and had a healthy array of books of very varying ages. If Vicious had been a reader himself—he wasn't—he supposed a place like this, that smelled of old books, would be akin to heaven. Some were bound at the time of the turn of the 20th century, although more were from the turn of the 21st century. Very few of them were of modern print.
She led him up a ramp past a wall of books detailing WWII and Hitler's Reich.
"Sorry," she mumbled very quietly, and quickly snatched a thick book from that shelf, and tucked it under her arm, out of sight.
She unlocked a door labeled EMPLOYEES ONLY and held the door open for him as he stepped outside into the back of the store, into the employee's parking lot that also serviced the pizza parlor to the right and the mobile phone store to the left.
"That's my car," she said, and pointed at a dirty, rusted blue Jeep Wrangler, that was older than the Martian colonies themselves.
He climbed in wordlessly, as she settled herself into the driver's seat. She set the thick book on the dashboard, and turned the key in the ignition.
It was a stick shift, and she was being more than a little jumpy with the clutch.
"We should be there in thirty or forty-five minutes," she said quietly.
Vicious said nothing, but nodded slightly.
The title of the book was: ATTACKS, and the author was Rommel.
Out-dated...
Tanks had not been used on Titan. The sand rendered them useless—besides that, they were considered sitting ducks since the late 2050's. Small, mobile units were more the style of warfare.
Of course, that had all gone to Hell in a handbasket on Titan—a lot of things had. Still, tanks were obsolete.
"If I don't have to take a detour," the girl said softly, shifting into successively higher gears until she was cruising at 70mph, down the desolate Intraplanetary Mars—the IM—highway. "They've been working on the highway, lately..."
I'm not quite as pleased with this chapter as I was with the last one...time will tell, though. Be patient, my readers. This was more of a filler/transitional chapter, anyway. I really, really hope I didn't get Vicious OOC...we never got to see him much in the series, so I've tried to work with that...he's quite calculating, imho...I suppose he'll get back into the 'I'm a mean and evil jerkwad' when the situation warrants it. Right now he's just in transit...
I have the tendency to enjoy expounding on who the supporting characters are, so it'll tend to follow that even if they aren't a big part of the story, they'll still have a little backstory to them anyway. Don't worry, Ella won't be featured much longer, so if you think she's annoying, bear with me. I just don't think it's fair that simply describing the way a character looks equates to making her a major character—I simply like describing people. People fascinate me.
WWII has been incorporated in a rather minor way simply to show some of the more finer evolutions society has taken. The results and consequences of WWII have been very instrumental in our modern world—I figure that it retains some effect that isn't so apparent in their society, but is still there—so I saw it fit to include it. It was also meant to present Vicious in a fairly educated light—most people don't know what the book ATTACKS is, much less that it was written by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. Much less to apply it to a thought about old military strategies becoming defunct.
And to all my precious reviewers, a big thank you! I shall try not to take so long next time. College classes are evil, and I have finals in the next two weeks.
To psychobeautyqueen: Thank you! SxF just isn't my cup of tea...for one thing, it's not canonically possible, for several reasons...wishful thinking, I think. There's been some very nice fanfictions written about the pairing, but I just...don't get it, lol. As a history nerd (har har) I'm a little obsessive over the nitpicky details like political involvement and such...
To microfibershoelaces: Thank you! You made me blush...yes, I don't think most people realize that Vicious' temperament isn't of the deranged psyhopath, but instead simply does the job in the most efficient manner. Which simply tends to be violent most of the time, heh.
To schwarzsturm: Do you really think so? I've tried not to make it so boring, this time...I've never actually read much Grisham, so I'll just take that on faith, lol. Thank you muchly for your review. I hope it answers your questions.