Tower

There’s a lot of money, if you can find a way to sneak some loot out of the exclusion zone. Getting it out is easy enough, the hard part is venturing into the shit downtown where all the good stuffs at, without getting your head blown off. Cops, Feds, Lions, doesn’t matter. They all have a bad habit of shooting first. Hell, with the shit out here, I can’t even blame them.

I’ve made a couple dozen trips now. Earned a couple hundred grand for the dumbest things. Some slime, a bit of metal glowing white hot, even bullet shells covered in this weird black soot. But my biggest payout? It was a gun.

I think it started out as a normal gun, just a pistol, .45 caliber. The kind they give any idiot kid who signs up to join the army, you know? Some unlucky sonovabitch caught a stray and died. His blood turned black, and something festered in that blood, growing. By the time I found him, his body had been picked apart by… Whatever’s out there. And his gun- It’d grown these fleshy clots. Fatty tumors all over, something that looked like a malformed fish eye, couple of teeth. At first, I thought maybe it was the leftovers of some other fucker stuck to it. Tried prying it off, but they were stuck to it- Or no, rather they were growing out of it. Right through the metal. Wonder what it might of looked like if I’d left it out there for a couple more weeks. But it shrieked when I pulled it out of the blood pool. Figure the damn thing musta been drinking it up. Didn’t want to think about that for too long though.

It was heavy. Too heavy for such a small gun. Didn’t really wanna hold onto it, but hey, that’s what the client pays for, right?

But the fucking thing bit me. Felt this sharp jolt in the palm of my hand. An ugly jagged metal tooth was poking out of the handle. I tried throwing it down, but a stringy bundle of nerves wrapped around my hand, pressing the gun tight to me.

Went to the only place I could go- I went back to the Tower to meet my broker. It wasn’t a long trip, and I was able to make it back, but I was a mess of nerves, sweating through my clothes, pale. Bad shape.

Broker saw me and carried me into some spare meeting room. Threw me down right on the table, and called in his evaluator. They got to quick work, poking and prodding the thing stuck to me. Somewhere in all the fuss, they said something about its “roots” starting to burrow into my skin. Sometime around then, they decided the best course of action was to cut the thing off of me. And when that didn’t work, they figured the next best course was the cut off my whole hand.

I don’t remember the next couple of minutes- for the better. When I woke up, my hand was still attached to the gun, but not to me. The tumor worked fast, the skin on my hand was a dark purple, bruised from the botched surgery, and this thing feeding off my blood supply. It didn’t take long for the gun to drink up all that was left in my hand.

The evaluator quickly put two and two together, and starting feeding the thing regularly, watching it grow. Just wish he’d figured it out without dismembering me.

But hey, they sold my hand and the gun for a pretty penny. Enough for me to retire on- but I got a couple more runs in me.