Technobabel Read Free Page B

Weizack is a man with a bit of a paunch and red-rimmed eyes. He wears a scuffed leather jacket and a faded and stained denim shirt. I also notice the butt of a pistol protruding from the side of his belt underneath the jacket.
    His partner is a tall, hulking figure with a broad, flat face. Two short tusks protrude up over his upper lip and his ears are longish and pointed, lying back against his skull. He looks like a goblin or ogre out of some fairy tale, but I realize he’s an ork, one of the metatypes who assumed their true forms when magic returned to the world. He is right about one thing; his face is ugly as sin, but it’s nothing like the hideous visage of the creature they work for, the ghoul. I catch the thing’s face out of the corner of my eye as they lift me off the ground, and he almost looks sorry for me. That worries me more than anything I’ve seen so far.
    The two handlers carry me away from the meat-wagon, my feet dragging on the ground, toward a low brick building. The van is parked in an alley alongside the building, and there’s a side door nearby. The weathered brick walls of the building are smeared with years of accumulated graffiti; the signs, scrawls, and symbols meshing together like the secret writing cities use to communicate with those who know how to read it. The symbols are strangely familiar to me, but then I notice something else scrawled in vivid red near the door of the building: "Beware the Tamanous."
    I’m dragged through the door, down a corridor lit by the blue-white light of flickering fluorescent tubes, a glow to make a healthy person look dead, which only emphasizes the ghoul’s pallor. He leads us into a room and turns to Weizack and his partner.
    "Put him up on the table," he says, "so I can get him prepared for delivery."
    Delivery to whom? I wonder, as the men drag me toward a flat, steel table in the middle of the room. Next to it I see a tray of shining, polished instruments: scalpels, needles, tubes, wires, and gleaming hypodermics.
    "It seems like such a waste," the creature sighs softly somewhere behind me. "The parts are always best when they’re fresh."
    When I hear those words I feel the adrenaline rush into my body like a dam breaking. Synapses fire and connect, newfound energy shoots through my nervous system and I find the strength to plant my feet on the floor and shove Weizack away. As he stumbles back with a yell into the tray of instruments, I grab for his gun. Time goes strange and everything seems to be moving in slow motion to me.
    Weizack crashes to the tiled floor along with all of the sharp and shining surgical gear as I flick the safety off on the gun and spin on his partner. I faintly hear the gray creature cry out not to damage me too much as I level the gun at the ork.
    A look of total and utter surprise on Riley’s face makes him look almost innocent and comical for a moment before I fire and the rounds from Weizack’s gun erase his face in a blur of red. He topples back toward the floor with the top of his head blown off.
    Before I can turn toward the ghoul, he is upon me, slamming into my side with surprising speed and strength. His skin is like leather and his eyes are hideous, wide and staring. The smell of him is as overpowering as the charnel smell of the meat-wagon, and he sends us both crashing to the cold tile floor near the steel table. The gun flies from my hand and slides across the tile floor just out of reach. I struggle to get to it, but too late.
    The creature is hideously strong and I am still weak and moving too slow. It grabs me and throws me down onto the floor on my back, pushing the air out of my lungs with a whoosh and sending pain lancing up my spine. A blow to my stomach makes me want to retch, and another upside my head has me seeing stars. I struggle to throw the thing off me as it straddles my legs and strikes at me with its wiry arms, but it is too strong, too heavy.
    The gun is out of my reach and Weizack is