Pepper

March 2056

I was seventeen years old.

2056 was busy for me.  I did a lot of business those first two months and I didn't pull a single job without Pepper.

I remember having a sense that things had changed between us since I gave him that sword.  I wasn't sure what Pepper was thinking, and I wasn't going to pry.  Work had been good to us.  I had more money than I had bills and I was able to grab some gear I had needed.

Shadowrunners are people too though.  Well, most of them are.  I was a seventeen year old wizard with a solid talent, and with enough sense to know that I still had a lot to learn. I was only human.

Pepper had a kid. Did I tell you that before?

Anyway, Pepper must have come to really trust me because I got an invite over to his doss for a bar-b-que.  So there I was, walking up to his place with a sack of stuffer chips and a bag of ice.  It was my first time going to his place and I wanted it to be chill.  Pepper's place was old, a bit run down, but it was clean.  A small house, with a tiny patch of grass (they call those a 'yard' for some reason), a porch and some space out back behind an old fence.  As I walked up, there was Pepper, sitting on the porch with his little boy sleeping in his arms.  It was weird.

I know people have kids.  I just never thought of Pepper as the type to reproduce. Think about my perspective: he had stabbed Zip in the brainpan when he had threatened me with a gun and decapitated a wannabe when the dude mouthed off.  Pepper was a quiet professional skilled in taking life.  It was really strange to see Pepper holding a baby on the porch.  In that entirely odd tableau the most normal thing I saw was an Ares predator pistol Pepper had sitting next to a baby bottle.

So I walked up and Pepper waved me in, and then he went and put his boy to bed.  The back of the house had about a dozen people shuffling in and out of the door to the back yard.  An honest-to-ghost grill was fired up in the back.  The smell was amazing!

I met a lot of people that were related or neighbors or neighboring relatives.  There were kids there, and wives, and Pepper was wearing an apron while he manned the grill.  I ate, talked up Pepper's cousin (a cute girl with curly black hair and green eyes), drank my very first beer (honest) and played a game that seemed to consist of throwing bags at a board with a hole in it.  The whole bar-b-que went on into the late evening.  Pepper's wife, the mother of his son, was really nice to me.  It was one of the best days of my life.  I still have an image file from that day.

So we were being people.  Which was nice.

We pulled another job a few days later.  Got away clean and got paid.

I remember on that run I ran right into a ward.  A strong one that took several minutes for me to bypass. I took note of that, and warded my own doss. Then I spoke with Pepper and offered to ward his place too. Pepper was agreeable and I set off to get the materials I would need.

It started in the baby's room and I put a lot of effort into those wards.  There was already some religious iconography in the baby's room, plus a strong emotional background presence (what some thaumaturgic scholars refer to as "background count").  It made it tough to work any magic, but once I got those wards up they held strongly.  I did the bathrooms next.  Wards on the mirrors (things can come out of mirrors folks... if you don't believe me, study the lore), walls, ceiling and floor.  I worked my way around every square inch of the place.  When it was done, I expended as much energy as I could, felt the wards lock into place, then I sat down on Pepper's couch and fell asleep.

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I woke up to gun fire.

Years of living in the Barrens had taught me to grab cover as best I could, so I did.  I was laying in the floor as bullets blew through the walls and stitched up the wall that blocked off the kitchen. 

I heard tires squealing outside over the sound of gunfire and bullets breaking everything they touched. 

Glasses shattered in the kitchen, water ran freely over the floor, pictures and all manner of family mementoes were destroyed. 

I heard the steady report of an Ares predator returning fire as tires peeled away outside.  I jumped up and was heading for the door when a cold fear hit me. 

I didn't hear the baby crying.
*************************

We buried Pepper's wife and son in a pricy boneyard owned by the church.  We paid extra for full rights and religious magic workings to protect the bodies (sometimes ghouls dig them up).

The priest had offered condolences, and said he would pray for Pepper and the souls of his wife and child.  I thought it was nice, but Pepper didn't take any comfort in it.  Someone had murdered his family.  If Pepper had been in the house, instead of practicing kata in the back yard, he would probably have been dead too. 

The folks who did it had put a lot of firepower on the east end of the house, which is where the bedrooms were. 

We  did a lot of leg work, looking for the bastards who did it, but were coming up dry.  Of all the things to turn things around, it was Angel.  She managed to pull a video clip from a Lone Star surveillance drone that had the car we were looking for being ditched by some punks with glow in the dark faux-hawks.

*********************

March 15th, 2056

I was seventeen years old and I wanted to kill.

Pepper was a chummer, a real top notch guy.  He was my friend.  He had welcomed me into his life, I had eaten in his kitchen, and played with his son. 

We had been more than just bits of tough street muscle and flashy magic.  We had been people. 
Then these faux-hawk wearing bits of trash took that away, and only raw, angry street meat and raging magical energy remained.

The wannabes were just what they looked like.  Two-bit punks trying to play hard.  One of them from the fertility clinic job had squawked about what Pepper looked liked and someone had sold the rest of them his name. 

We started there.

March 15th, 2056
    
2235: Pepper was up the street, about half a block, when I walked into the squalid old building where Mitch the Snitch was hiding.  Seems he had heard Pepper had survived, so Mitch was trying very hard to be invisible.  Hiding in an old burned out tenement building was what he had come up with, but it wasn't good enough.  I crawled in over a pile of rubble, making just enough noise to seem like I was trying to be sneaky but not quite pulling it off.

Mitch pulled a gun and fired at me.  The bullet passed straight through the space where my head was.  My illusion faltered as my attention to the spell was released.  My little sleep spell hit Mitch like a hammer and he fell in a heap.  Pepper came in quietly.

It took a long time for Mitch to die.

****************************

March 16th, 2016

Mitch had snitched to all sorts of things before he croaked, including who he sold out Pepper to, and where we could find them. 

0400:  saw Pepper checking the action on a familiar looking AK-97, and me pulling out some expendable foci I was saving for a special occasion. Neither Pepper or I said a word until we were both ready.  I remember Pepper looked at me, his eyes were red with rage or tears, I'm not sure which.

He just nodded to me and we walked across the street to the ruins of an old pawn shop.

There was no finesse, no subtlety, and no mercy.

Powerball is a beast to cast. It will tire you out quickly, but when you need to blow down a wall and don't have a missile or grenade launcher, it is the tool for the job. The façade of the old place blew inward in a hail of shattered brick.

Pepper was already moving, his AK was barking fire in short, three round bursts. He was methodical and precise. I came in right behind Pepper. I saw a fluorescent blue faux-hawk picking himself off the ground. I remember lifting my little Ares Viper slivergun and blowing his brains across the rubble.

It went just like that, a constant, steady rain of gunfire in the ruined night.  The air was choked with brick dust, and the night smelled of cordite, shit, and blood.  Faux-hawks were screaming just in time for us to silence them.  One came out of the back with a shotgun, but died before he could pull the trigger.  When Pepper's AK ran dry, he snatched that shotgun and went right back to work.

0405:  Pepper and I walked out the back of the ruin.  Only dead people lay behind us, and a trio of living but soon to be dead faux-hawks were running like all hell itself was after them.  They were right.

The shotgun Pepper had snatched had run dry pretty quickly.  The stock was sticky with blood where he had beaten a faux-hawk to death with it.  He pulled his Predator as I was reloading my slivergun.

Pepper brought his Predator up and it roared twice.  Taking one of the faux-hawks in the back and killing him quickly.  I was just bringing up the Viper when faux-hawk number two squeezed off a pair of shots.

That bastard got lucky. One round took Pepper in the throat and the other in his right eye.

I was shooting before Pepper hit the ground. 

The next thing I knew I was standing over the last two bodies.  My viper was clicking on empty and the corpses looked like they had been shredded.

Pepper was dead.

All these years later it still hurts to say that.  Pepper was dead.

I was just able to raise enough money to bury Pepper next to his wife and son.

It was the most lonely I'd been since my folks had died.

I was the only one who survived that hit.  I made damn certain all those faux-hawk wearing assholes were very well dead before I left. The ones in prison seemed to have run afoul of some angry people and were beaten to death. Damn shame that.

Revenge didn't solve anything though.  Pepper and his family were gone.

Remember that.  Revenge doesn't give you anything, but it can certainly take everything away if you let it.

I'm not going to talk about this anymore. 

Lets go grab a bite to eat.