Chapter Thirty-Six – Wrapping Shit Up

Chapter Thirty-Six – Wrapping Shit Up

“It’s not true. There aren’t people living underground, it’s all some bullshit urban legend. Some punk saw a hobo and didn’t know better and then when he told his buddies they exaggerated the story.

There’s no such thing as a ‘sewer dragon.’ It’s stupid.”

–WriteIt Post, June 2040

***

There was a lot of shit to wrap up, metaphorically speaking.

Gomorrah was, somehow, worse than me when it came to sweet-talking folk, so I got the dubious honour of being the one to talk to the people currently stuck in bathtubs with no limbs.

It took proving that we were both samurai to convince them to calm down, that and six points worth of alien painkillers. The folk currently pinned to racks were somewhat mobile, though they reminded me of some videos Lucy’d shown me of cloned baby giraffes taking their first steps. Awkward and unwieldy, and they tended to crash into everything around them.

At least we didn’t need to carry them.

Doc Hack, as it turned out, had a clever system in place to communicate across the sewers. Morse, transmitted over signals that ran along the network of pipes. I didn’t get into the finer details of it, but once Gomorrah figured it out from his stuff, it wasn’t hard for her and Atyacus to tap into the entire communication system the Sewer Dragons had.

Its simplicity actually served it well. We could swamp it with random data, but there was no real way to hack into a communication system that could be powered by someone with a pair of booster cables and a stolen car battery.

Still, Gomorrah managed to get the message across, and before we knew it, Sewer Dragons were congregating. Not at Doc Hack’s lab—the place was currently a mess—but at the Oasis.

We left the lab the same way we came in, out the top. Carrying our new limbless friends made that somewhat complicated, but we managed, even if it took well over an hour to trace back a path that had initially taken us ten minutes to walk.

By the time we were outdoors and meeting a team of EMTs, I was dead on my feet.

And it wasn’t over.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Franny swore as she walked closer.

We didn’t stray far from the entrance of the pharmaceutical building, no matter how much it annoyed the guards. Seeing us come up with the quasi-Sewer Dragons had made an impression, I think.

The Fury parked itself right on the sidewalk. Rac and Franny hopped out, the younger of the two with a mouth stained blue by slushie, and stopped half a dozen metres away.

“You fucking reek,” Raccoon said.

“We do?” I asked. “I can’t actually smell anything.”

“You’re lucky, because if you smelled yourself, you’d off yourself like a corpo after too many months of overtime.” Rac nodded at her own sage words.

I snorted. “Right, I can imagine. The EMTs were giving us looks too. They didn’t say anything though.”

“You’re covered in shit and blood,” Rac pointed out. “And you’re wearing nutso samurai stuff. They’d be mental to try anything.”

She had a point.

Gomorrah sighed, then looked me up and down in a way that had me very worried. “How fire-proof is your armour?” she asked.

“That’s not a question I’m very keen on hearing,” I said.

“It’ll remove the smell.”

“It’ll remove my fucking skin,” I countered.