Of Gunshots and Roses

By Darkness Orange

An Introduction

The sun was bright today, but it was not a cheerful shine. It was brutal, cold, and oppressive. Everything around where Torn stood was colored in various shades of grey and black. The city itself was dirty, dank, and somehow windy, despite the tall buildings that by all logic should have shielded them from the wind. The buildings were tall, but they seemed to have been numerous dwellings built up on top of each other, and were so crooked it seemed they would topple in on the streets if you so much as touched them. These were the slums of Haven City, and to live in the slums meant death by age 40, if you were lucky

Torn walked through the slum with the dull, slow, and defeated gait that every person carried who couldn't afford living in the industrial or market sections of the city. He barely paid notice to anyone around him as he made himself to his house. He could already feel the last dregs of the brandy wearing off, for he was starting to feel the cold again. The brandy he wasn't supposed to have at work, but slipped past anyways.

He finally came to his home, if you could call it that. It was a little apartment you had to climb up two flights of external stairs to get too. He climbed up the slippery, wet stairs, taking care not to fall through any of the broken planks of splintered wood. He reached the top, and opened up the splintered, cracked wood door, stepped in, and walked immediately to his liquor cabinet. He pulled a dark purple bottle out from the cabinet and took a gulp straight from it. The effect was instant. His eyes started to twitch in their sockets, and warmth instantly shot out to his fingertips and toes. His thoughts became dulled beyond reason, and he sat down on a sagging, broken down couch, his hands and feet trembling now too. His last thought before passing out was 'Thank God for the booze."

The next day was much the same as the last, only instead of sunshine there were clouds and rain. Torn woke to the distant sound of thunder, the pain in his head, and the dull ache in his back. He had slept wrong the night before, and he had a hangover that, if it had gotten out of his head, it would rip a hole through the very fabric of space and time. Or so he thought. He slowly dragged himself out of the couch, which was an impressive feat, given his hangover and the saggy quality of the couch itself. He walked to his medicine cabinet, the world a twirling, pitching swirl around him, and somehow managed to open it. Inside was a yellow smear of a box. He took it, popped a pill out, and popped the pill down his throat without taking any water with it. Almost instantly his vision and co-ordination was almost that of a normal human being, but the headache was still there, a dull, throbbing pain.

He drudged out of his apartment, down the steps, and out to his zoomer. It was beaten up, worn, and quite ugly, but it was fast and easy to maneuver. He climbed on top of his zoomer, and grabbed the wet and slippery throttles. He gunned the throttle, and then his zoomer took off. He expertly maneuvered his way through the traffic, his headache becoming a dull memory now. He hardly heard the distant screams of the other hover cars that he'd cut off, hardly caring for their problems. He barely noted that he had passed into the industrial district, the only difference being that the buildings were made of steel and bright red streaks of light blending perfectly with the rain to make a grotesque mosaic of colors.

Finally, he pulled up beside the Barons Palace, his workplace, and the place he dreaded most. He was one of the head security commanders, in charge of the placement, planning, and acting out of patrols. In reality, it involved him kick soldiers awake and honing his skills at the virtual training center.

The palace itself was hardly what one would expect. The decorations were not ornate, nor were they pleasing to the eye. Cold, hard steel made the floors; Cold, hard steel made the walls; Cold hard steel made the windows, and the doors, and the ceiling. What little light there was came from faint little squares of lights placed in the cold, hard steel ceiling and the cold, hard steel walls. The hallways were two men abreast and five times as many tall, and had a strange echo to them, as if everything you did was magnified a million times and then played back over and over again until it faded away.

It was through these halls that Torn now walked, each footstep reverberating off the walls, while cameras and microphones zoomed in on him. This was the Palace, and if you weren't its Keeper, you had no rights, no privacy, and no food. Torn kept walking through, a strange draft nipping him at the fingertips and the tips of his long ears. He finally came to a marked, reddened steel door, and walked forward. The door opened slowly, with a lethargic, almost weary whiiish.

The room was like the rest of the fortress: Cold, drafty, and 100 metal. However, it had a large storage room behind it which housed thousands of suits of armor and thousands of guns of varying type, calibre, and range. There was a metal desk up front with bulletproof glass all around it and a door that could only be opened from the inside. Torn walked up to this desk, and saw the poor guy with the 'Gun Cage' duty. He was fat, out of shape, and definitely didn't look like a soldier. Wasn't hard to see why he got the punishment, at least in Torns mind. He stepped up, leaned on the counter with one hand.

"Hello, what can I do for you sir?" The man said, noting his officer tattoos.

"Get me my usual suit and the rifle...you know, the special ones," Torn replied.

"I'll have to get clearance si-"
"Clearance my ass. Thats an order soldier!" He said, taking out his ID pass that gave him the highest clearances short of a general.

"Y-yes sir, I'll be h-here shortly sir!" The man said, shaken severely.

About ten minutes later the man arrived, and told Torn, "Your stuff is ready sir, please step on through the door."

At that, door opened in the same lethargic way as the other door. Torn walked through it, and as soon as he did, the doors shut again to keep others from getting in. Torn walked down the wide and long storage room until the fat man stopped in front of his stuff.

"There you are sir, Stealth Suit one unit, prototype Bolt-Action sniper rifle one unit, energy pistol standard issue two units, and your knives, two units. Enjoy sir."

Torn looked at the stealth suit that he was just given access too. It was a gorgeous piece of equipment, completely black and skin tight, yet underneath its thin mesh it held a deadly secret. It had a cloaking device on it that had microcameras on it as well as microscreens, both of which worked in tandem to provide near invisibility. He put it on, taking care to strap it as tight as possible, and then put the head piece for it on. He took his weapon, which also had the technology, strapped it over his back, and activated the invisibility.

Just then, the alarm sounded and Torn immediately raced out of the room to find out who the hell had infiltrated his palace.