Hook on a level

You foul beasts. Blood dripping from the maw of your bone filled skulls, the hulking mass steaming. Your fury knows no end. The stoop in the shoulders you power capped and you can't stand it. Burning desire takes you through madness so close to the edge of losing it all you can cry, but you won't. You'll do nothing trapped like an animal in a cage, you're going nowhere. Smile like a fool, deny your nature, the ripping shredding howling lust that fills your mind. Your eyes turn bloodshot crimson the color of your hate the color of your thoughts the breathing thick and heavy the snarl as the snare closes tighter.

….. I've recently had a woman say she'd kill for me. Wild stuff check it out." "He hands the pad to his friend, hook. Hook looks at the messages and smirks."

"Shea crazy, man, don't give her hope."

"Ya man I know I'm not going anywhere near the chick. Come'on den, them boys on 4th level."

"Derek packin?"

"Ya bro, David's there too."

Hook and his friend finish the spliffs, hop off the wall and head down the hall towards the lift.

They enter the expansive lift. The ride is short from 3rd to 4th level not like going to 100+ that can take half an hour. The smooth steel colored walls are marred and full of tags from years of youthful gangs claiming territory that they never really owned. Hook had spent almost his entire 17 years inside citadel 1. The mega city-like monolith structure rose out of the remnants of old Los Angeles. The citadel, sometimes called angel, was a rectangle many hundreds of miles long and rising to the sky 4 a few hundred stories with 100 levels below the ground.

The session has been full of hard-fought battles but in the end the Silicon Valley corporations won and rended the United States apart. How many 'new Americans' as they went by lived in giant structures like this tens of millions at a time.

The are made sick and poisonous by a new Industrial Revolution that brought about the giant effort to construct the citadel's, give people no choice but two do as their new corporate overlords wished and live in them. Most people live fairly normal lives well adjusted to life in the Citadel. They travel with their friends and family, they get educated, they go to their jobs, they live their lives. Hook was a youth like any other. He went to school, got in trouble with his friends and joined a gang as most do at this age at the sub levels.

Now he and his friends we're going up to the fourth level to meet some of their friends to cause some trouble for a rival gang.

"4th level" the elevator announced as it slowed to a stop. A bing. The door slides open to a Promenade that's edges are hard to see being that it's so vast.

The roof of the level is a good 100 feet up and shrouded in shadow. There was a entrance type platform that lead out from the elevator towards then down a few steps to a market like courtyard filled with stores, shops and kiosks of all sorts mostly smooth or polished concrete with some metallic accents every wall was a dull gray giving the shops an extra kick of bright visual flair with the contrast.

Hook looks out, it's darker than it should be. No one is moving about. He sees some blood 30 feet in front of him and a pair of shoes on a dead man. David. Hook's eyes go wide. His friend starts to step off.

"Yo what the.." his friend begins. Hook puts a hand on his stomach to stop him as he does a cackle echos out from the entrance of the hall.

"Wet Dem boys." a voice echoed from somewhere.

Hook felt the impacts, three of them into his friend's chest just above where he put his hand. He felt his body shutter with each one. Terror fills Hook.

On instinct he ducks behind the elevator panel and starts smashing the door close button as his friend falls backwards into the elevator dead. Nothing happens, the door remains open for ever, there is more laughter now, they cackle the bastards. Hook runs on Instinct and adrenaline. The door doesn't move, why? His heart is pounding sweat is in his brow he stares at his dead friend and keeps hitting the button.

Then the gentle roar of a police hover bike is heard, growing quickly louder it soon fills the air as the 2 man craft descends from the ceiling.

"this is the police, surrender or face the consequences." the speaker blares from the bike.

"eh man fuck you." a man screams at the hover bike as he gets on top of a kiosk with a machine gun.

A spotlight hits him. "put the gun down and surrender."

The man fires off a burst toward the hover bike. It floats aside.

"Jesus!" one cop says to his partner. "time to light him up."

The police hover bikes are equipped with heavy armor and high powered mini guns. They also have non lethal deterrence but any patrol at this level will probably never use them. As the elevator door mercifully closes, Hook hears the whine of the mini gun starting up then the mechanical burr of 100 rounds a second being fired off into the shooter's direction.

Almost as if it sensed the situation the elevator begins to mercifully move down. Still unable to take the situation in, Hook sits on the floor, his knees up and starts to sob unabashed as his friend bleeds out next to him.