A Case in the Empire of New Texas
starts flying. He hears the man scream something, but it's cutoff by two loud bangs. He waits in silence with the
stink of burning metal in his nose. His HUD cuts through the smoke and shows him a prone figure outside the car
and another slumped over the front end of the vehicle. He grins.
Pushing himself up to one knee, something bites his ear. He knows it's a bullet. The right side of his head is getting
wet and sticky. He sees the woman hunter duck behind the front passenger wheel of the armored car. He sighs to
himself, pulls the pin out of another grenade and lobs it over the car.
She rolls away from the car onto the sidewalk in front of the motel. She crouches low, avoiding the blast. He's ready
for her though, and empties the magazine of his automatic pistol at her. She slumps out of her crouch onto the
ground.
He switches the filter on his lenses to check her vitals. She's still not dead (tough girl), but she'll probably bleed out
before he finishes securing the clone. He looks over at the male hunter lying on the ground: not much for vitals.
(Man's either dead or dying.)
He scans both of them and the area around them for weapons. They both still have guns and other shit on them, but
neither of them have anything in their hands right now. His ear is still bleeding; she shot a decent chunk of it off. He
pulls some Nuskin spray out of a belt pouch and gives his ear the once over. He's standing before the spray dries.
Reloaded, he keeps his gun trained on the woman as he walks up to the motel room door. She's looking at him. Her
lips are moving. She's trying to say something, but he can't tell what it is. He glances at the man face down on the
pavement. (Looks like he got the worst of the first two grenades.) Maybe he'll call an ambulance if the timing works
out.
He checks his bots. 01753681 is still inside the motel room. He turns on the record feature of his lenses and mule
kicks the door in from standing next to it. He clears the corners inside the room, ready to fire.
01753681 sits with its back to him on the bed furthest from the door.
"Hey!" he shouts. "You're public case 01753681. I'm apprehending you to officially resolve that case. My hunter's
license number is 0038462. Do not resist! Put your hands on the back of your head now!" The mixture of stim
patches and adrenaline makes his breathing heavy. (Shit, am I getting old?)
Four seconds pass before the clone carefully puts its hands on the back of its head. It doesn't do anything else.
He pulls a set of handcuffs off his belt as he approaches. He snaps one wrist, then roughly moves it and the other
arm down behind the clone's back. He pulls up on the cuffs, indicating to the clone to stand up, which it does. The
clone looks like a man that he might've seen before but can't quite place. It looks at him with a blank expression.
The whole situation feels eerie to him, so he takes a deep breath before continuing. (C'mon, man! Focus!)
"Let's go," he says, and pushes the clone toward the door and through it, towards his truck. He notes the other two
hunters look worse than they did a moment earlier. He uses a program on his HUD to call a cheap ambulance as he
walks the clone toward his truck. He disables the security system and opens the armored bed cover to reveal a
coffin-like box, which he also opens.