On Rocky's command, Lissandra went in. The Scavenger's ocular rebooted, a pulse shorted his combat wiring, and his weapon hard-locked. Subprocesses hit like parasites and seized his interface. Gunfire cut out. The howl that followed was pure panic.
Rocky yanked David from cover and walked him right up to the crippled guard. The man sat on the concrete, blind and shaking, nerves still sizzling from the shock. He couldn't lift his own hands.
"Kill him," Rocky said, releasing David's collar.
David looked at the man who could no longer fight back and raised the pistol.
The Scavenger heard the order too. He couldn't resist; he could still talk.
"Don't kill me. Let me go. I'm just a doorman. I've got parents, I've got kids. Please. I don't want to die."
In Night City, death is ordinary, but fear of it isn't. David's finger hesitated on the trigger. Up close, this wasn't a thug in a braindance file. It was a breathing person.
Rocky watched him, expression unreadable. Lines like "old folks and children" never meant anything here. The only genuine part was "I don't want to die." And from the day this man chose Scav work, he had chosen the day he would.
"Sorry," David said.
He pressed the trigger. The round punched clean through the man's head. This time, at this distance, he didn't miss.
Breath rushed back into David in ragged pulls. His heart hammered. First kill. Too intense, but unavoidable. There was no way back now.
Rocky clapped his shoulder once and stepped into the den. "Move. Time matters, kid."
David took one last look at the body and followed.
They went down the corridor to the sublevel. The den finally showed its real face. Where the upstairs clinic tried to look clean, the basement walls wore layers of graffiti—crude anatomy sketches sprawled across the paint, red arrows marking price tags on body parts.
With Lissandra sitting on the network, the den hadn't sensed the intrusion yet. The basement stayed too quiet. David still felt tense, but he took the point without being told.
The route on his map kept him straight, and there were no wrong turns. He came to a door not on the necessary path and started to pass. Voices inside froze his foot midstep.
"How many good cuts today?"
"Not many. Folks are getting smart. Fewer clinic walk-ins. Not much decent prey. But a mother and son came in after a car wreck. Woman's out cold, they sent her to the OR. She's on a table in the decomposition room now. Skin's clean, body healthy, no chrome, good meat. We'll pull a nice price off her."
"Not going to bring heat?"
"Relax. The kid's broke. Couldn't afford the bill if you spotted him the deposit. Bet he can't even cover the body storage fee. We take her apart tonight, tell him tomorrow she didn't make it, and push what's left into the furnace. Hand him a jar of ash for the altar. Nothing will go wrong."
"Nice."
They laughed, unbothered.
David trembled. His fist clenched. The hand on the pistol went tight. He recognized the voice. Corridor "doctor." A minute ago that man had told him the surgery was successful. Now he was pricing David's mother.
Anger wasn't only about what they were doing to her. It was what the world looked like without the soft focus. These people deserved to die. Pitying them would only help hurt someone else.
He understood that now.
He pushed the door and shot the "doctor" the instant he had a sight picture. No hesitation this time. The rounds landed. The man folded.
David swung the muzzle to the second Scavenger, who was just starting to turn. The bullet cored his head. David put extra rounds into both bodies and made sure they were finished.
His first real clean takedown. No luck, no accident.
"Not bad," Rocky said from the threshold.
"Thanks."
David swapped to the magazine Rocky had handed him and moved deeper into the basement.
Talent showed when he stopped pulling his own punch. Once his mind committed, the work smoothed out. He cleared the hall quickly, one room at a time.
He reached the decomposition room and stopped. The scene hit like a wall. Bodies that barely counted as human lay across surgery chairs. In the middle, he found Gloria.
"Mom."
He rushed to her and checked. She hadn't been opened yet.
Relief almost reached him when the side door blew inward on a boot.
The Scavenger leader stepped in, same entrance as before. David didn't have time to wonder why the waypoint map had missed him. The leader raised his right arm; the launcher port snapped open, and the projectile jumped, streaking for David's position.