The rain had been coming down, harder and harder as the night wore on. Vincent stood outside the tiny hut, smoking his seventh cigarette. They had been getting harder and harder to light, and the last one finally spluttered, ashed, and died. He tried in vain to relight it...once, twice...three times. Then he let the cigarette fall, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
In the rain, no one can see your tears.
A small man dressed all in white stepped out of the hut. He looked up at Vincent, and his face beseeched forgiveness. Ever so slightly, he shook his head.
"She's gone."
Vincent toed the ground where the cigarette had fallen.
"I know."
He stepped out into the night.
The Valentine Chronicles
Episode 2 - Valentine's Day Massacre
I smoke too much.
I'll never really know what perverse attraction Sector 7 held for me. Down there, with the lowest of the low, the real shit of the earth, I felt...universally accepted. I felt like here, at least, I had found people who could understand my level of disgust, cynicism...and hopelessness. They also served the baddest whiskey this side of Gold Saucer.
The Devil's Pad has always been my favorite. The lighting, or rather lack thereof, renders everyone unrecognizable...the bartender is quiet, and doesn't try to engage you in any small talk. You can find a nice place at the bar where you can sit quietly and drink yourself to hell and nobody'll bother you.
Anyway, I was on my third bourbon and my fifth cigarette when this little tart sidled up next to me and flashed a thousand-watt smile, which I studiously ignored. Not to be deterred, however, she piped up:
"Would ya like to buy some flowers?" Big, big smile.
I took another drag on the cigarette and studied the tip. "No."
"Are ya sure? They're really purdy...from Kalm!" I still couldn't tell if the smile was genuine or part of her sales pitch.
"No, thank you." I punctuated my refusal by downing the bourbon, which should've settled it.
"I really think you ought to...the company wants you to have them," she replied.
My head jerked up, while a thousand obscenities battled for dominancy over my vocal chords. Finally getting themselves settled, I swore softly and fluently.
She pretended not to notice. "So, can I interest you in some?"
Bitch. "Yeah, sure," I responded. "Tell you what, why don't you pick."
"Sure thing, sir." Again the goddamn smile. "These ones are quite nice." And she handed me a bouquet of slightly faded yellow roses, patted me on the knee, and was gone.
I summoned the bartender, settled up on what gil I still owed, and obtained his permission to use one of the back rooms. I did a quick sweep for bugs, tore open the bouquet, and retrieved the small white card stored within. Tilting it slightly for better light, I got my assignment for the day.
Special Agent Valentine (it read):
I'd say I'm sorry for rushing this on you while you're off-duty, but I'm really not. A little firefight has broken out in Sector 5, near the reactor base, and a number of Shinra troops and one SOLDIER, 3rd Class, have been pinned down. They've taken shelter in an abandoned storage shed near the entranceway, but it's anybody's guess as to how long they can hold out. All of us over here at Shinra, Inc. would be very much obliged if you'd go help them out.
I touched my cigarette to the paper and watched it burn away to ashes, dropping it only when it became too hot to hold. I stomped out of the bar, unaware of how pissed I actually was until a bum tried half-heartedly to accost me for money and I split my knuckles on his front teeth and knocked two of them out.
Whoops.
Fortunately, many other experiences with little white sheets of paper had taught me to always expect my vocation to crop up at the most unexpected of times. The butt of my pistol peeked reassuringly at me from its low-strung holster at my left hip, and extra clips dug into my waist from their resting place in my inner jacket pocket. For most people a single pistol was a horrendous underestimation of the enemy, for me it was just business.
Navigating the Midgar Slums is like trying to make your way through some demented children's maze. Machinery tossed aside and the crumpled remains of once-mighty towers took on a new form as a kind of sick obstacle course, a rat's nest to which only a select few held all the keys. I'd been down there dozens of times myself and still didn't know half the hidden passages and abandoned walkways that crisscrossed the slums - but I knew enough to get by. Particularly useful to me was an old sewer system with outlets at every sector. If you didn't mind the smell - and lord only knows I had much more cosmic things to worry about - it could take you pretty much anywhere you needed to go with a minimum of hassle. A bit of slipping and sloshing later, I popped the hatch and emerged into an incredible cacophony of frenzy and sound.
The reactor loomed ahead of me, stretching its prongs into the night sky as if provoking the gods, daring them to take offense for the environmental rape it was committing. Abandoned buildings littered the barren wastes near the reactor, serving as a fitting testament to the devastation the reactor was causing "for the good of Midgar and the good of the world." All of this was well and good and I'm sure you're all enjoying the tour but more immediately important to me were the guys with guns just shooting the shit out of anything and everything that moved.
I became one of those things by twisting out of the manhole and rolling behind an abandoned bulldozer. I drew and squeezed off a few shots at an opportunistic thug who had decided the perfect maneuver would be to charge me head on, and was rewarded by a high-pitched scream as he clutched his abdomen and rolled into the fetal position. As he fell I did a quick appraisal of his armaments, support, and attire, trying to get a bead on my enemy. Only one solution made sense - he had to be REVENANT.
We'll pause to give you a quick history of REVENANT. Like so many of the underground groups in the slums, REVENANT had chosen its name by picking a random, impressive sounding word and putting it ALL IN CAPITAL LETTERS. Presumably this was supposed to imply some incredibly complex acronym or code, but after we captured and interrogated a few of their agents they finally revealed the truth - it was just random. There were a half-dozen such groups, but REVENANT was the one that most concerned Shinra, Inc. - and consequently myself. They were a surprisingly well-armed, disciplined militia that operated out of mobile bases in the slums and had met with fair success in disrupting Shinra mako activities in the slums. They had been responsible for the deaths of over twenty Shinra soldiers and more than a handful SOLDIERs dispatched to deal with the threat. Their leader, an enigmatic man who called himself Bishop, had never been seen in person before, only on telecast. Their propaganda was the usual bullshit, Shinra is destroying our world, only the rich-elite are allowed any sort of upward mobility, everyone is dying, etc. etc. The reason I was convinced this was a REVENANT excursion was because no other faction had such plentiful access to automatic weapons.
The surrounding area was fairly dark, someone had obviously knocked out the power sources nearby and now only the sickly glow of the Mako reactor illuminated the area. I slipped on my sunglasses and dialed up the polarity, finally getting a good look at the proverbial last bastion for those poor souls I was here to save. I felt almost biblical, thinking about it that way. Every so often a sporadic rifle burst would emit from the tiny little storage shack, but other than that it offered no response to the increasingly violent amounts of ferocity being directed at it. The thin metal walls clanged and quivered with each slug, and it was fairly obvious that the structure wouldn't hold long. Time to change that.
With my glasses on I had the edge over everyone else on the battlefield. Skilled manipulation of those glasses could allow me to see in almost any circumstance, an ability that has saved me quite a few times. By peeking my head out over the dozer I could see the pinpricks of light that signaled weapons discharge. I spotted four immediate challengees and dispensed of them with six bullets total. I quickly readied a grenade, tossed it into what seemed to be the center of their haphazard formation, and broke for the shack.
Every time you're running across a battlefield and people are shooting at you, the laws of spacetime refuse to cooperate and you're left running for hours and hours as your safe haven gets infinitesimally closer. I gave myself something to do along the way by picking off two more targets by bracing the gun on my left arm and firing from the right. I finally reached the cover of the shack and ducked behind. Knowing that I'd probably be shot on sight if I just opened the door, I crouched beside and spoke up.
"Shinra troops and a SOLDIER 3rd class, right? This is Vincent Valentine, with the Turks. I'm here to help you out."
There was a rustle of confusion behind the door, and finally a quavering female voice responded. "R-really? Oh thank god, th-they sent someone!"
Taking that as a cue that I wouldn't be shot on sight, I pushed open the crooked tin door and stepped into a massacre.
Six Shinra soldiers (say THAT five times fast) lay strewn about in various stages of death or near-death. Several were missing limbs, one or two were moaning pitifully and none would walk away from that shack, ever again. In the corner, curled into a tight little ball was a little red-headed thing of about seventeen years of age, rocking back and forth. As I entered, she directed a wild-eyed look of desperation and hope at me that spoke of the forty years she'd aged in the past thirty minutes.
"My God," I said. I couldn't help it. It hadn't been any sort of battle, it'd just been a slaughter. "What happened?"
She could barely speak. "W-we were sent to investigate a 50% reduction in Mako feed from the Number 5 reactor...it..it was a trap. Th-they came as we were filing into the reactor, and..." She petered off there. I didn't really need any more explanation anyway.
Something still didn't make sense, though. "How did they manage to kill the soldiers in here? This shack won't last forever, but it seems to have held up pretty well so far."
"Th-they didn't die...in here," she stammered. "When they...first attacked us, we...we fought them off. But everybody was wounded or...or dead, except me. So I dragged them all in here."
I was stunned. I just couldn't picture this little girl dragging two wounded men and four corpses through enemy fire to safety. I had to ask.
"Why?"
"It's what we're supposed to do," she responded simply. "SOLDIERs don't leave bodies."
There was something about that little girl, some spark of vitality, courage, and heroism the symbolized everything I'd lost over the years. She was, in a lot of ways, exactly like I'd been, many years ago. And in a way...she made me want to be that way again.
"What's your name?" I asked.
"Amberlee Tenzer, SOLDIER 3rd Class. Sir." she said, coming a bit out of her ball. I saw the bloodied rapier which dangled loosely from her right hand.
"Well, Amberlee," I said, "we're gonna get you out of here. Here's what we'll do. When I say so, you go through that door and run like hell to your left, towards the reactor. They'll expect you to try and go the other way, back towards the center of the city, so it'll surprise them. I'll be right behind you. When you draw parallel with the reactor turn to the right, there'll be a small maintenance shaft to your right. Duck inside and I'll take you out of the city from there."
She was shaking her head, bewildered. "I don't think I can...I'm..."
I nodded. "You can, Amberlee. You have to and you will. Are you ready?"
She got to her feet, unconsciously tucking her rapier back into her belt. She took a series of sharp, shallow breaths, then nodded jerkily at me.
"Atta girl," I told her. "Ready....go!"
She had given him a shaky smile and sprinted through the door. Half a second later she was thrown back into the room, the victim of a haphazardly accurate rifle volley. It wasn't like in the movies, where she was merely wounded...she wasn't even permitted the luxury of a few last, moving words. She was simply stone cold dead, a victim of coincidences, of possibilities and probabilities, of permutations and combinations. She died to appease the law of averages, that was all. Her beautiful green eyes stared reproachfully, sightlessly, at Vincent and at nothing at all.
Vincent looked at her for a long while.
His new plan was markedly different from his previous one.
By dialing the polarity of my glasses way down, I was able to see in near-absolute brightness. I had already taken two assault rifles and a brace of flashbangs from one of the corpses, and now I savagely ripped the pins out of them all and stepped back out into the night. With a sweep of my arm I scattered the grenades across the battlefield. Every weapon out there was trained on me, and I made no effort to dissuade them as I strode forward relentlessly. One slug took me in the shin, another in the shoulder. It wasn't that I didn't notice, it wasn't that they didn't hurt, I simply didn't care enough to make an issue out of them at the moment. Then the flashbangs went off, and everything was pure, dazzling, and white.
Except my world.
I now braced an assault rifle against each shoulder, fully aware of what the combined recoil would do to my body and just as fully accepting it. I flipped the weapons over to fully automatic and just killed everyone. Everything was clear to me, the thugs staggering in the milky brightness, the rifle rounds ripping, tearing, dismembering, rescinding life. Everything was clear to me except the moment after next.
None escaped the initial barrage without at least being wounded. I wandered around a bit, finding life where I could and extinguishing it. Their cries for mercy and whatnot seemed to foreign to me, it was the equivalent of a man accosting a random person and begging him for help. The sentiment was the same...why ask me?
Eventually they were all dead.
And then it was just me, sitting crumpled on the ground, bleeding my wretched life away, surrounded by the dead.
Home again, home again.
Hope you all enjoyed. I'd love to hear what you think, including suggestions for future episodes, about writing styles, which long-distance phone company is superior, anything at all. Honestly, tell me things, make me a better writer.
