Chương 41: Of Corpos, Gonks, Gangs, and Mustangs IV

A massive chunk of the front metal door, roughly the size of a sideways Alvarado, was ripped from its tracks and blown inward, crashing onto the warehouse floor in a shower of sparks as debris, shrapnel, and shattered glass from the parking lot shot through the darkness, clattering against the concrete and the wooden crates. I threw my arms over my head, curling into a tight ball as the dust and debris washed over me.

I couldn't tell when it had actually been over since my ears were ringing, leaving me deaf for the moment, but I do know that it felt like a lifetime for the building and the ground to stop shaking. I slowly lowered my arms, coughing as a thick cloud of pulverized concrete and dust filled my lungs.

"Argh, you damn gonkheads!" I groaned as I opened my eyes and blinked them. Everything was blurry, but I could tell that the warehouse was no longer dark. Once my vision managed to focus, I saw the jagged hole blown into the front doors, followed by the roaring light from the parking lot flooding the interior. The Alvarado and the Galena were now nothing more than burning infernos of twisted metal, casting dancing shadows across the sprawling interior of the building.

As the ringing in my ears slowly died down, the crackle of the fires outside filled them, sending a fresh wave of panic over me. An explosion of that magnitude wasn't just a minor disturbance. It would be considered a seismic event that would trigger automated sensors for miles. My immediate thought was the NCPD.

If a squad of badges descended on this warehouse while I was inside, covered in dust and holding an unregistered, high-caliber iron, they would probably throw the book at me, assuming they didn't just zero me on sight for "resisting." I scrambled to my feet, ignoring the ache in my collarbone where I had rammed the door.

"I need to move. I needed to delta right fucking now." But as I took a step toward the gaping hole in the front of the building, logic finally pierced through the haze of my panic, and I stopped dead in my tracks.

"The NCPD," I laughed.

"Yeah fucking right." I wasn't in City Center, or the heavily patrolled streets of North Oak, or the corporate-sponsored avenues of Heywood. I was on the desolate edge of Northside Watson, bordering the toxic, abandoned oil fields. This was a dead zone. Unless a platinum-tier Trauma Team subscriber's biomonitor flatlined, or a megacorporation actively paid them to investigate, the badges didn't give a shit about explosions in the badlands.

If a patrol cruiser made it out here within eight hours of that blast without a direct phone call, it would be like God himself personally intervening just to further fuck with my day. I holstered the Overture, rolling my shoulders to pop the tension out of my joints, and finally took a good, long look around the interior of the building. The scrapper had called it an abandoned shipping warehouse, and at first glance, it certainly looked the part.

The towering metal shelving units that lined the walls were completely empty and caked in rust, and the floor was stained with ancient oil spills and chemical burns. But clustered near the center of the vast space, partially illuminated by the blazing wreckage outside, was a series of reinforced wooden crates. And shit, these weren't some cheap-ass plastic shipping containers. They were made from real, synthetic-treated wood, reinforced with steel bands and stenciled with faded, pre-Krash shipping manifests.

Curiosity, the very thing that continually threatened to get me killed and advancing, flared to life once again.

"Why were Arasaka operatives and Maelstrom gangers fighting next to this specific warehouse?" I asked myself as I began to walk over to the nearest stack of crates.

"What could the dead owner of the Mustang be holding in here?" Taking my knife from my boot, I wedged the blade beneath the lid of the top crate and pried upward. The ancient nails shrieked in protest, but they easily gave way, allowing me to lift the heavy wooden lid. I peered inside, my eyes widening in genuine shock as I stared at a meticulously wrapped, perfectly preserved antique.

I carefully pulled away the layers of shock-absorbent synthetic silk to reveal a stunning porcelain vase, painted with intricate designs. It looked like something you would see sitting behind three inches of bulletproof glass in a secure museum. I ran a quick, visual cross-reference of the item through the encrypted high-end auction subnets on the Net, and the results pinged back almost instantly. Ming Dynasty authentic replication. Valued at approximately 18, 000 Eurodollars on the private collector's market.

"Holy shit," I breathed. I moved to the next crate, prying it open with significantly more urgency. Inside, nestled in velvet, was a genuine, 18th-century Edo-period katana with the paperwork to prove it. The folded steel of the blade caught the firelight, gleaming with flawless perfection. A quick scan valued it at seventy-five thousand eddies. This story has been stolen from Royal Road.

If you read it on Amazon, please report it I was standing in the middle of a black-market stash house, and whoever had owned this warehouse before getting zeroed must've been high-end fence dealing in pre-Krash antiquities, hoarding relics of a lost world for the eccentric corpo buyers. I moved from crate to crate like a madman, tearing the lids off and running quick scans on everything I found. There were beautiful, hand-painted oil canvases depicting green landscapes that hadn't existed for almost a century.

There were miniature jade statues of mythical creatures. There were even vintage, combustion-based firearms. I found a fully functional M1 Garand from the Second World War, perfectly oiled and wrapped in canvas, worth easily thirty grand to the right gun-nut. I did the math in my head, and just off two of the prime items I had uncovered, I was looking at easily over a hundred thousand eddies. This place was a literal gold mine.

But it was also heavy, fragile, and currently sitting in a warehouse with a massive hole blown in the front door. I quickly set to work, ignoring the ache in my muscles and the dust coating my lungs. I began physically relocating the most valuable and easily transportable crates toward the front of the warehouse, near the breach where the light from the dying flames provided decent visibility.

I moved with care, terrified of tripping over a piece of shrapnel and shattering a vase worth almost twenty thousand eddies. I stacked the crates neatly, creating a staging area for extraction. After nearly thirty minutes of grueling labor, I moved the final crate, one full of antique firearms, to the staging area.

As I turned back toward the center of the warehouse to grab one last box of jade statues, the shifting of the crates revealed something I hadn't noticed before, and in the heat of the moment, I had almost forgotten about. Tucked away in the very back corner of the warehouse, previously obscured by the stacks of wooden crates, was a dusty canvas tarp. It was draped over something wide and definitely vehicle-shaped.

I felt my heart skip a beat, and the adrenaline, which had already faded, came rushing back in an intoxicating wave. Don't get me wrong, the antiques were amazing. The hundreds of thousands of eddies were life-changing for just about anyone. But the eddies were just a means to an end. The real reason I had even come out this way had to be sitting right beneath that tarp.

I walked toward the back of the warehouse, grabbed the dust-caked edge of the canvas tarp, and yanked it backward, the heavy fabric sliding off the frame and collapsing into a pile on the floor. I stood there, the flickering orange light from the courtyard barely illuminating the corner, and stared at my unicorn. A genuine 1970 Ford Mustang Boss 429. Well... part of it. The excitement that had been bubbling in my chest instantly evaporated, replaced by a hollow sense of bitter disappointment.

The scrapper's message had said it was a "rotting frame" that had been "stripped down," but those words didn't quite capture the absolute devastation of the vehicle sitting in front of me. There was no engine block. As a matter of fact, the massive cavity beneath the front chassis was completely empty, exposing the rusted suspension coils and the cracked concrete floor beneath it. There was no transmission, no drivetrain connecting the front to the rear.

The hood was missing entirely, and the trunk lid had been pried off its hinges. I walked slowly around my unicorn, trailing my hand along the partly rusted and dented steel of the widebody fenders. I looked into the cabin that had been completely gutted. There were no seats, no dashboard, no steering wheel, no pedals. Just bare, oxidized metal floor pans and exposed wiring harnesses that had been chewed on by rats. The entire thing was sitting on four flat, rotting tires wrapped around rusting steel rims.

It was essentially a stripped metal husk on wheels. A forgotten ghost of the twentieth century, left to rot while the rest of the world moved on to hover-tech and synthetic fuels. I leaned against the rusted frame of the driver-side door, hanging my head as the sheer absurdity of the situation washed over me. I had taken so many risks today.

I had walked into a bloodbath, narrowly avoided being turned into red mist by an Arasaka gunship, and I had nearly been buried under the rubble of a miniature thermobaric explosion.

"I almost died," I whispered, my voice echoing bitterly in the hollow cabin of the car. I kicked one of the flat, rotting tires, the rubber barely giving way under my boot.

"For this piece of shit." But as the initial wave of crushing disappointment passed, the knowledge I had learned through the use of braindance sessions began to reassert itself. I stepped back, looking at the frame not for what it was, but for what it could be. This was some real steel. Sure, maybe the newer versions of steel were better, but you can't get more authentic than this Detroit-forged steel. The chassis, despite the rust and the dents, was surprisingly straight.

It hadn't been warped by a high-speed collision, nor was it structurally compromised. Plus, the widebody stance of the Boss 429 was flawless. It was aggressive and undeniably beautiful. It was exactly what I had asked for, and now that I think about it, it's the ultimate blank canvas.

Shit, I didn't need the original combustion engine since there would be no way to keep it fueled, and I was going to rip out the guts anyway and heavily modify the entire car to accept high-octane CHOOH2, give it twin-turbos, maybe even add a procharger or a supercharger. Hell, the plan was to build it back up myself, piece by piece, until it ghost roared louder than anything on the streets of Night City. I felt a smile slowly creep across my face.

"It's a piece of shit, alright," I said to myself, stepping back even more and squatting. I held my hands in front of me, forming a picture frame with my fingers, "But it's my piece of shit." I straightened up and rolled my shoulders, wincing at the deep ache in my collarbone, and walked to the rear of the car. I placed my hands flat against the rusted steel of the trunk frame, planted my feet, and pushed. At first, it refused to budge.

But I gritted my teeth, channeling my strength, and threw my entire body weight into it. With a metallic shriek that echoed off the warehouse walls, the flat tires finally rolled, and slowly but surely, I pushed the heavy, stripped husk across the warehouse floor. It took me nearly fifteen minutes of grueling effort to maneuver the massive car through the debris and into the staging area I had created near the breach in the front doors.

I pushed it out through the hole, the wheels rolling over the metal debris and out into the downpour of the parking lot. The roaring flames of the Galena had died out, and the new flames of the Maelstrom Thrax and the Alvarado had finally begun to die out, reduced to hissing heaps of blackened metal.

The rain immediately began to wash the thick layer of dust off the Mustang's rusted chassis, and once I was done moving it, I stood next to the car, my chest heaving, the rain soaking my hair and washing the grime from my face.

"This was one killer workout," I said to myself before looking through my agent for the cargo contact I had been given by the scrapper and fired off my location.

"With a helluva payout."