Shadowrun: Blackbird One: Base of Fire by Russell Zimmerman

Author:Russell Zimmerman [Zimmerman, Russell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catalyst Game Labs

I drove as far as I could. I drove as far as exhaustion, anger, pain, and the puke roiling up from my belly would let me. It wasn’t that far. I sat in my little bubble of light and sound as my truck carried me through the dark stillness of the Cascades, and I raced away from Fairbairn like I never had in my life. I didn’t know where I was going, I just knew I had to go.

I made up my mind to go to Vancouver—hell if I know why, just to try and vanish in the biggest crowd I could think of?—but pulled up short at Seattle. Or, rather, on the Council side of the Seattle border, a few clicks away, grabbing food at an Issaquah McHugh’s alongside I-90. I stopped because I knew I’d have to make it through Salish-Shidhe checkpoints to get into, then out of, Seattle, to head up the coast to Vancouver. I stopped because I knew I might already be legally dead, depending on how well the system was up.

But most of all, I stopped because I saw the damned place. The Seattle Metroplex.

The Night of Rage had rocked Seattle hard, and was still gnawing on it like a dog with a bone. The whole skyline was lit up, by their usual twenty-four-seven lights that made my skin crawl, by the giant corporate logos on everything…and from the fires. The air around the Metroplex was choked with smoke, hazy, glowing an awful orange that should’ve been pretty as a sunset but somehow wasn’t. I sat in the front of my truck and I stared and I felt sure that if I tried to go through Seattle, I’d die, and I felt equally sure that I couldn’t go to Vancouver, ’cause it would be more of the same.

I’d never stayed in either city, or anywhere half their size, or anywhere half of that, or anywhere half the size of that; the thought of that many people all around me, that many strangers, turned my stomach. I knew how I’d stand out, a troll—a fomori!—and how I’d, in times like these, just be a target. I’d just be the biggest stranger anybody’d ever seen. The most alone. Just an idiot, with nobody to call his plays for him and nobody to watch his back.

“What’n hell do you know about Vancouver?” I asked myself, chewing on a cheeseburger.

Nothing. Nothing except that everyone I knew from Vancouver—football and stickball players, wrestlers—probably hated me as much as I hated them, from our short, brutal interactions. I knew Vancouver was Cascade Crow country, and they were anti-Anglo as all get out and not too metahuman friendly, while I was a mixed-breed Irish goddamned troll. I knew I had no idea what I was going to do once I got there, where I’d sleep, how I’d eat. I knew I had about eight bucks left to my damned name, and that wasn’t much.

Once, on a different lonely night on a

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