Created G.H.O.S.T. System - A Cyberpunk Story

With all the scavs right there in the open, Trace barely even needed to aim. All he needed to do was pull the trigger and keep his head out of the way of the bullets coming his way.

The extended twenty-round magazine for the semi-auto pistol was glorious. He only wished there had been two of them. It would take forever to reload. If that was something he was even capable of doing in his current state.

Four more of the scavs met their end before the gun clicked empty. All told, he had taken out six of the twelve scavengers that he knew about. He was still praying that there weren’t more of them.

Trace was barely hanging on by the skin of his fleshware teeth.

This entire situation had spiraled so far out of his control that he would have laughed at the poor, soon-to-be-dead bastard if it had been anyone else. But, no, this was his life, and he wasn’t ready to die just yet.

He pulled out the box of ammunition for the pistol and began woozily reloading the magazine. Bullets spilled across the floor as his shaky hands proved barely effective at the task of loading it. All he managed to get loaded were five rounds before he was forced to put it down and draw the revolver.

This group of scavs might have been more cowardly than usual, but once they had been riled up, there was no going back for them. They simply pushed their dead to the side and kept pushing into the room.

The main issue with using the massive revolver was that it required him to use both hands to fire. Or at least it did if he didn’t want to break his wrists.

That meant that instead of just having the gun and his peeking around the corner of the desk, most of his body would need to be exposed for each shot.

Which is exactly what he did.

Trace whipped the revolver into position, cocked the hammer, roughly aimed it at one of the scavs, and pulled the trigger. The gun bucked, jerking nearly a foot into the air from its original position and sending him onto his butt. His arms hurt, and the PlugDocs groaned against the unexpected impact.

The arm, part of a torso, and several walls behind the scav he had been aiming at all vanished in a cloud of pink mist and concrete dust.

Apparently, that was the last straw. Hearing the giant revolver roar and seeing that even the walls of the apartment couldn’t protect them as they simply vanished in the aftermath was enough to break those that remained.

A minute later, Trace was alone with all the bodies and a slowly mounting sense of disbelief that he had somehow survived.

He was riddled with holes, and his aim had been absolutely terrible, and yet, he had somehow survived. It was a heady feeling and not something that he knew how to handle under the circumstances.

The adrenaline running through his body at that moment was giving him the jitters. It was making his previously unsteady hands downright unbearable. It was all he could do to open the revolver and clumsily retrieve the spent cartridge. He slipped a new one in its place and closed it back up.

He would need to keep the brass for this behemoth of a gun. If he could buy new ammunition for it, they would undoubtedly give him a discount if he brought in the spent casings. On the other hand, assuming he couldn’t buy ammo for it, then he would need to learn how to reload it himself. Which would mean these casings would be even more precious.

Regardless of how much his arms hurt after just firing it the one time, there was no way he was letting this thing go. It had scared all of them off and saved his butt. HE LOVED THIS REVOLVER!

Trace spent the next few minutes picking up ammo off the floor and loading the magazine for the semi-automatic handgun. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a holster for both guns. So, the revolver was shoved into the small courier pack he wore, along with both boxes of ammo and all the remaining stims.

After that, it was time to finally get to work salvaging the apartment for some goodies. There was no telling when the scavs would come back, but judging by how quickly they had run away, he was comfortable with spending some time going through the place. Hopefully, he would find some more healing items.

It took Trace several minutes to ransack the desk, finding the item he had originally come to find in the process. There were a lot of other semi-decent items in the other drawers as well, but the best finds were the two crypto-vault prisms. Some people used them to hide secure documents and the like, but their main purpose was to transfer money around.

Everyone possessed a crypto-vault inside their NetConnect already where they could store their money. These prisms simply made certain transactions easier, plus not everyone liked having to connect their private system to another’s simply to pay for something. The cost of paying to verify the handshake over the net, versus doing the transaction in person, was often the deciding factor for people.

Hopefully, he would be able to find the codes for them among the dead scavs, otherwise it would take forever to break into them. For the moment, he simply stuffed them into his pocket and moved on.

His little courier bag had quickly reached maximum capacity, and there were still more items that he wanted to grab. More than that, he hadn’t even fully gone through this one room, let alone the rest of the apartment.

However, that didn’t mean he was going to leave any of it behind. This was his one chance to make some money and get ahead in life, and he was not going to let it pass him by. He was going to scrape this place clean and take everything of any value. There wouldn’t be a single screw left when he was done if he had a choice in the matter.

With that in mind, Trace began moving everything that looked like it might have some resale value into the center of the room. He would worry about how to move it all later. For now, he just needed to gather it all.

In the corner, he found what appeared to be a server rack of sorts. It had a bottom tray that was filled with data prisms and an oddly shaped unit that was serving as the central processor. It was an entirely black box that had the normal ports but had been extensively customized.

There was no good reason that he could think of that a bunch of scavs could need a server like that. However, modifications nearly always meant money, so there was no way he was going to leave it behind. He’d take the data prisms as well and go through them all later when he had time. Maybe there would be information he could use on them. If not, well, then he could simply erase them and use the prisms for something else.

Either way, these items were all money to him and got moved into the center of the room with everything else.

He hadn’t looked for hidden caches yet, but he wasn’t sure he was going to either. His body was really starting to flag. The loss of blood that he had been ignoring for the last several minutes was beginning to catch up with him again.

Leaving the room with the desk behind, he moved back into the operating room. The bodies of all the scavs that had died were still on the floor where they had fallen. He nudged them to the side for the moment and began going through the supplies in the boxes and shelves.

There had to be something that would help him with his little blood problem. Sure, these people were scavs, but they also needed to have a way to treat their own injuries. Those sorts of things didn’t just miraculously disappear on their own. These sorts of people lived very dangerous lives because of how hated they were.

In one of the boxes, he found a whole bunch of old-expired first-aid kits. Many of them had been opened and were missing various pieces, but there were still at least a dozen that were unopened. He didn’t care that they were expired, and he doubted his body did either. It was medicine, stims, wraps, and a few other things. They either worked or they didn’t.

It wasn’t like he had the money to buy any of those items new. Who was he to complain?

Thankfully, he didn’t need to open any of the unopened kits, as several of the opened ones still had blood-gels in them. Blood-gels were a delightful little item that activated the body’s ability to produce blood and then supercharged it. Now, he just needed to find some liquid, or he would be supremely thirsty in just a few minutes.

He shoved another couple of the blood-gels into his pocket and moved into another room in search of something to drink.

Trash was everywhere, and the tiny kitchen -which was really just a sink and a fridge- was practically a crime scene in and of itself. Inside the fridge, after he brushed the bottles of alcohol aside, he finally found a couple of old bottles of suspicious-looking water. Not that he cared about its quality, he had drunk some pretty questionable quality water in his day. Everyone had.

Pulling them both out, he twisted the top off the first and promptly began drinking it down. You needed to drink these things quickly, otherwise you would start to obsess about the murky color of the water and the odd smell that always seeped out when the cap came off. If you did that, then the water had a tendency to come back up.

Clear, clean, and properly purified water was yet another thing that he had never been able to afford. He dreamed of one day being able to drink it and discovering what it tasted like, but that was a faraway dream.

He ignored the film of gunk that coated his tongue, using a blood-covered fingernail to scrape it off. Ugh, he wished these scavs could have had something decent to drink in the fridge. Their choice of alcohol was barely better than paint-thinner, and the sodas that most of the population chose to drink weren’t anywhere in sight.

His stomach gurgled, as the water and the pieces of blood-gel still in there interacted with each other.

As long as he didn’t push himself too hard and dislodge any of the PlugDocs, then he would survive this mess. With that comforting thought urging him on, Trace made his way to the front door and locked it. He then promptly tipped the nearby shelf in front of it for a little extra added security.

After picking the lock earlier, he had absolutely no faith that the door by itself would hold anyone back if they decided to come back. The shelf probably wouldn’t help much either, but it would at least create a lot of noise as they forced it out of the way.

In the first room were several large, wheeled crates. One was full of cyberware they had pulled from people previously, while a second was roughly half full, and a third only had a few loose pieces inside it. He removed those and put them in the second crate. With that done, he began wheeling the newly empty crate throughout the different rooms of the filthy apartment.

Every data prism, gun, holster, piece of tech, ink-sheet, and unused drug that he could find went into the crate. He didn’t use substances like that himself. Once again, he was too poor to afford such a habit. However, he knew plenty of people who would pay for them, and better they paid him, than some of the other shady types out there. It was a little scummy, but when you were on the verge of starving, your morals got a whole lot looser than they did when your belly was full.

Trace ignored all the clothes in the place. You couldn’t convince him that there weren’t fleas and lice infesting this place. After his little swim through the trash pile earlier, he probably had them as well. Along with whatever bloodborne disease he might have managed to contract.