I tried to remember the guy had been asking for it as I watched him lie on the ground, eyes bulging out of their sockets. Blood pooled beneath him over the shiny tiles. He had come up to us jittering from his last fix of hyper-stimulants, and he had brandished a bat as he begged them for cash they did not have. If he had just accepted he was attempting to rob two fellow Below-dwellers, then we never would have had to fight him so we could go home.
My partner-in-crime’s uneven breathing drew my attention away from the body. He looked nothing like me with natural black hair shaved close to his head, eyes their natural brown, no signs of cybernetic enhancements. The guy was one of the lucky few who had survived cryogenics before the world had ended, making him a Relic, as most people called them.
I wondered for a moment if he was why the guy mugged them, but considering the Crust-dwellers looked more machine than human, the guy just could not have been thinking clearly.
“Hey, Jude,” I said, holding back the urge to touch his shoulder in comfort, “it was self-defense. This is all on this guy.”
The Relic turned his wide-eyed gaze to him but did not stop panicking. He stuttered something, but it was unintelligible.
“All right, listen,” I said. “I’m going to drag you out of here before the wrong people find us, and I’ll introduce you to my partner’s famous lasagna that I was telling you about. How about it?”
Jude only continued to wheeze. I sighed.
“Well, I tried being polite.”
I hauled Jude over my shoulder, and I booked it out of the area before a drone came along.
Stephanie Clark is an aspiring author from a small town in the Midwest of the U.S.A. She loves anime and video games, and she spends a little too much time on YouTube. Receive a free dark fantasy short story by signing up to her newsletter (below), and you can also stay up to date on all of her works (including upcoming urban fantasy, dark fantasy, and the occasional horror).