This was not how I preferred to spend my night out.
"Are we gutting this one or selling him wholesale?" A tall brutish thug asks his compatriot. He was nearly entirely bald with the exception of a thinning collection of hair gathered at the back of his head, pulled together in a greasy rattail.
"Don't ask me, I hate this part of the job. Makes me feel like some kind of cannibal or something. Ask Danny, he's the one that takes the orders, "The other thug responded with a raspy voice. This individual was not quite as imposing as the first, being about a foot shorter than his compatriot and around 100lbs lighter. His current focus lay not with their merchandise but rather with what is on the table in front of him. A myriad collection of unornamented jewelry is laid out before the two goons. A couple gold rings, a few steel and iron studs, and other assorted jewelry made from metals that the low-life cretins can't quite make out.
This annoys me greatly, less that I'm being ignored and more that these two-bit goons think that they can touch my stuff and get away with it. Well, to be fair, they're well within their rights to think that. After all, what can I do to stop them? They drugged me, disarmed me, tied me up, and left me hanging upside down in a meat locker and locked it shut. Just about anybody else would be helpless in this situation, but there is a real big qualifier that my gracious hosts have failed to understand. I am not just anybody else.
I stop burning tin, and the conversation between the two thugs outside the locker fades away into the familiar droning of the freezer doing its glacial work. Stretching my neck, I burn pewter and tear the sturdy rope constraining me away as if it were cardboard. I extricate myself from the tender mercies of the meat hook I was tied to and stretch, I could hardly feel any ache thanks to the pewter. With my feet firmly on the ground, as the good lord intended, I observe my surroundings with a little more care than I had bothered with before. A few gutted pig carcasses were hanging on some of the hooks in the locker awaiting to be processed, but what drew the eye was not the swine, but rather the half dozen human cadavers in the same position I was in a few moments before.
After rifling through their clothing for anything of use (they're not likely to complain), I come up empty handed. Those thugs from before had likely looted the bodies long before they nabbed me, have they no shame. I shrug off my mild disappointment as I try the door leading out into the main facility. The door didn't even budge when I threw my full weight against it and only budged a tiny bit when I pushed with steel. Backing away from the door, I sigh in annoyance before I remembered a sneaky little friend of mine. I have many piercings, most of which were confiscated by the thugs while I pretended to be unconscious, (I mean honestly this was probably one of the worst kidnappings I've been a part of, they could've at least tried to keep pumping me with tranquilizer), but one piercing remained unconfiscated from the graverobbing duo. A little iron stud sat right in the middle of my tongue; it either went unnoticed by the duo or was simply too innocuous to matter to them.
I giggle a little as I square up against the door once again, 'Those dumb motherfuckers are about to see something spectacular!' I tap into the reserves I have stored in the iron metalmind causing my weight to increase, only a tad though, I didn't want to drain it too fast. After all, why waste my stored weight when I could just compound instead. With a devilish grin I burn iron and compound my tapped weight a hundred-fold! With a brief flare of steel, the door flies off its henges, tearing part of the wall with it. I laugh maniacally as the door flies across the room and slams the tall thug into the wall, a disturbing crack signaling the end of one part of the perfidious duo. I stop tapping my iron and instead start burning my pewter and use steel to push against the metal wall behind me. I rocket across the distance separating me from the remaining thug, pushing and pulling the metal pipes, panels, and flooring, so I don't even touch the ground as I approach the terrified thug. The thin man quickly rallied and reached for a pistol on the table. Unfortunately, he chose to wear a studded belt today, I grin as iron flares in my gut and the blue lines connecting me to the metal in his belt snap taught as he lurches toward me with no control over his fate. He screams as he rockets towards me, forked tongue in plain sight as his mouth is wide open in fear and slit pupils wide in terror as he nears me. Just as he's in range, I throw a simple pewter infused punch. What once was a man is now nothing but meat, red mist spraying out into the frigid air as the snake mutant's headless body tumbles past me.
"Goddammit! He got in my eyes!" Cursing to myself, I wiped my eyes clear and walked back to the table where my two captors were relaxing moments before. "Come to daddy, don't worry your safe now," I gather my assortment of rings, earrings, bars, and piercings and return them back to where they belonged. I probably didn't need to let them take almost all of my metalminds but fuck it, they really couldn't hurt me if they tried.
Whistling a jaunty tune, I stroll down the hallway of the plant while twirling a ring of keys I looted from the thug crushed by the freezer door. Behind me the hallway was awash with blood and the bodies of the colleagues of the two poor sods I liquified outside the meat locker. Reaching the door at the end of the hallway I opened the door and walked into a staff room chalk full of at least two dozen gangbangers and one particularly well-dressed individual who I can only assume was the aforementioned Danny, I could tell he was the boss cause he had the word 'boss' tattooed across his forehead. I sweep my gaze across the gathered ner-do-wells and considered my options. After a few moments, I turned around and locked the door.
__________________________________
A few minutes later I sat on the meat plant's front porch twirling a fancy pistol and kicking my legs while waiting for my ride. After only about ten minutes of waiting a red sports car pulls up in front of the building and out steps a pale statuesque woman in a dark red dress. As she walked around the car, I had a good look at her figure. She was ridiculously tall, at least 6'8ft with long blonde hair, high cheekbones, a prodigious bust exemplified by her tight dress, and legs that went all the way up. In other words, an absolute dommy mommy. She walks towards me with a stormy expression, knowing my next words were likely going to be my last, so I chose them carefully and with reverence. "Please step on me!" I half shouted in a rush, eager to forestall my awaiting execution.
Thankfully she deigned to be confused rather than furious, "What? Never mind that, what were you doing!? I've been looking for you all night!" It seemed I had managed to evade the inquiry I feared the most, and then she took one glance down at the rest of my body and her stormy expression returned, "What the hell happened to you you're drenched in blood!?!"
I hold my hands up to ward the beast away from my defenseless form, though she seems to believe that it was some kind of peace offering for some reason, "It's not like I asked to get drugged and kidnapped, you can hardly blame a guy for defending himself," she rebuffed my completely infallible argument with a dismissive wave at my blood-soaked apparel.
"I absolutely can when you're immune to drugs. Admit it, you let yourself get kidnapped so you could spend the night marauding instead of meeting with the client with the rest of us." Drat. She had seen through my ruse.
"In my defense, they were human traffickers and organ harvesters, so I was doing the city a service." She gave me a blank stare, clearly seeing through my deflection. I didn't want to do this, but she left me with no choice, I toss the gun I looted off the boss to her, "I thought you might like this, so I nabbed it for you."
Her eyes went from murderous to inquisitive in a microsecond, "Hmmmm," she turned the gun over in her hands, ejecting and then reloading the magazine as well as checking the slide.
I lean off the porch towards her, "Eh, eh, you like it?"
She huffs and spins the gun around on her finger much more dexterously than I was doing earlier, her attention firmly placed on the firearm, "I'll let this escapade slide this time, but one more last second kidnapping like this and you're de-" she was cut off when a loud bang echoed out from behind me and a hole opened up in her forehead.
I turned around and one of the thugs from the staff room staggered out on a broken ankle and at least a few shattered ribs. The pistol he just fired is now aimed at me, "I really should start checking for survivors," I mumble to myself.
The thug is half delirious from pain and anger; he's sputtering about revenge and some other nonsense before he goes pale as a sheet and tries to quickly switch targets. He's too late however as the would-be survivor is now but one of the many corpses littering the facility.
Turning back around I spy a sight I'm a little too familiar with. My dear friend MeLaan is holding a smoking pistol while a clearly lethal bullet wound heals like it was never there. "Fucking prick! I just got this skull! Do you bastards not understand how hard it is to get skulls that perfectly match a different skeleton!" I stayed well away from her as she let her anger out on the dead man.
Once she got that out of her system, she slid the pistol into her right breast. The fat, skin, and muscle splitting open on command to act as a 'skin-tight' holster, heh. She walked back to her car and threw me a change of clothes she had prepared for this eventuality. After getting changed and depositing my clothes into the bag she had given me and jumped in the passenger seat as she peeled off from the scene of the crime.
By the time we got back into New York City limits, swat teams and police cars tore up the lane opposite of us back towards the meat plant; we just left. Thankfully, the roads were still packed late at night, providing us with some cover. I looked out of the window at dozens of billboards and holographic displays plastered across buildings and on walkways. Pro-hero merchandise lined store shelves, and their posters advertising their brands were just about as prevalent as the McDonalds advertisements. Star and Stripe posters were still up from her last visit to the city the month before.
MeLaan pulled her car into a wide alleyway in the Bronx, parking in a reserved space for specific tenants only. We climbed the stairs back to our apartment; the damn elevator was still out and barely made it inside before crashing on the couch. "Kel, take a shower, you smell like old meat," MeLaan slurred out. While her anatomy could hardly be called human, she could still feel fatigue, and she's had a rather exhausting night even excluding my escapades.
"Make me," I was feeling a tad petulant. She dragged me into the shower and then into bed. Settling into bed with MeLaan was one of the few consistent pleasures I had in this life of mine. "Did you switch skulls already?"
"Nah," MeLaan had a fairly deep voice for a woman, but I suppose that was more by choice than chance, "bullet went through clean, just needed a patch job. Now shut up and go to bed, we have a job tomorrow." And just like that she was out like a light, face pressed against my chest as she snored like fucked up motor.
I follow her along the path to sleepyland and bring an end to another eventful day of my life in this fucked up world. Fuck it, who am I lying to. This was exactly how I preferred to spend my nights out.