The ground beneath me crunched and crackled as my boots made prints in the dirt.  Cautiously, I walked up to The Pit, hand hanging on my hip near my gun. Even from outside, I could hear music and incoherent shouting.  As if to accent my concerns, a scrawny-looking man crashed through one of the front windows, landing on the pavement with a thud.  Shards of broken glass stuck into his back, causing thick red blood to stain his shirt and drip onto the ground. He noticed me approaching and grunted, dusting himself off and pulling some of the glass from his back.  As if nothing at all had happened, he turned and opened the door, returning to the bar.

“What… the hell?” I shakily thought to myself. “After this job, I don’t ever want to be here again.”

On high alert, I approached the door, took a breath, and entered the bar. Inside,  the smell of cheap liquor and vomit stung my nostrils as I walked up to the counter.  I tapped the side of my head, using the BodyTech in my eyes to scan the room. A lot of people in the bar had bounties on their heads, most of them being quite small, and for smaller crimes like carjacking or shoplifting.  

“You gonna buy something or just keep looking around like a dumbass,” my scanning was interrupted by the bartender, who had clearly grown tired of my loitering.

“Y-Yeah, sorry,” I apologized sheepishly, trying not to cause more trouble than I had to. “Whiskey on the rocks?”

The bartender said nothing more, just grunted and grabbed a glass from below the counter.  He poured a shot out into the glass, dropped a few ice cubes in, and slid it across the table to me.

“5 credits,” he said.

I tapped the button on my wrist to pay for the drink, picked it up, and quickly walked away to an empty corner of the room.  The jukebox was blasting metal, and the people around me were drunkenly pushing each other and yelling, so nobody had really paid much mind to me. I took a sip of the whiskey, which tasted like motor oil, and continued scanning.

After a few minutes of scouring every single face in the bar, I saw him.  Paul Rodriguez, sitting on a stool on the opposite side of the bar.  He was alone, sipping from a bottle of cheap beer and looking at his phone.  He was clearly drunk, his eyes were hazy and the bottle was slipping from his hand, but that just made him more dangerous. He was more likely to open with violence and ask questions later, and I couldn’t just shoot him in a bar full of people.  I needed to think of a way to get him outside and alone.

I have a few options, I thought to myself. I can wait until the bar closes and catch him outside by himself, I can go up to him right now and provoke him to come fight me, or I can kill him now and try to run. Option three is essentially off the table.  If I kill him now my chances of making it out the door before getting the shit kicked out of me by every patron here is slim to none. Option one will take a long time, this place closes at 3 AM and it’s 7:35 PM now. Safest, but also the slowest. That leaves option two.

Still holding the glass of whiskey, I made my way over to Paul, dodging the drunkards still shoving each other around. When I got within range of him, I made a show of tripping over one of the table legs and spilling the drink into his lap.  He looked up at me, pants covered in whiskey and ice cubes, and snarled.

“You fuckin’ dimwit, look what ya did to my clothes!” He growled at me.

“My bad brother, I just tripped,” I said, feigning ignorance. “I don’t want any trouble.”

“Too late, jackass, outside. Now.” He shot back. 

He rose from his stool and put his massive hand on my chest, pushing me. I was barely able to keep my balance.  Some of the people in the bar looked at us, wondering what was going on, but most just kept to themselves.  Nobody’s gonna stick up for some idiot in a situation like this, especially not in The Wastes.  I was counting on that.

The sun had fully set, meaning that the only light was coming from a dim streetlamp in front of the bar. As I was pushed through the door, I smirked, realizing that everything was going according to plan. I lunged forward and turned around, staring the behemoth of a man down with all I had.  The intensity in the air was palpable, and the seconds felt like hours as we stood, eyes locked, tensions high.  Without warning, I drew my Mk VII and took aim.

But Paul Rodriguez was gone. 

“What the f-” I started to say before a searing pain in my temple caused my vision to go blurry and I was knocked to the ground. As if being compelled by an invisible force, I was jerked to my feet, then knocked down again, this time the pain being in my gut.  I coughed, spitting blood onto the ground.  It mixed with the dusty brown dirt to form a black sludge. Before I knew it, the sludge splattered into a shape that looked like… a bootprint? My mind went into overdrive. What the hell was going on? What was causing this immense pain?  Where did the bootprint go?  Is he just that fast? Or was it something else?

Questions ricocheted around my brain like bullets bouncing off metal, but I didn’t have much time to think.  Jerked to my feet once more, I felt a firm grip close over my left shoulder and arm, before…

“AHHHHHH.” 

I screamed in agony as my arm was torn off, and began floating near me.  Blood poured from the stump where my arm had been only seconds earlier, staining the ground and my clothes a deep crimson.  As quickly as he had disappeared, Paul Rodriguez appeared once more, holding my arm in the air like a trophy. He grinned at me, a crazed, psychotic grin with no emotion in his eyes.

“Watch where you're going next time,” he said simply, before dropping the arm, my arm, next to me and going back inside the bar.

Alarm bells were ringing in my head, but there was nothing I could do but mutter “How… did… he…” before passing out, the blood loss being too much for my body to handle.