He grabbed his Stetson from where he kept it on a hatrack he bought just for this purpose, settled it comfortably on his head, and started moseying his way over to Doc's clinic. It wasn't far.
He got there just in time to see the door open and an unusual man dragging Doc Gloria's kid out of the clinic. He frowned and said, "Pardner, I reckon..." He didn't get more out because as soon as he started talking, the man shifted to look at him, which allowed Johnny to see past the two into the clinic and what he saw caused him to stop talking. There was no need for words now.
He cleared leather before the man's eyes even met his own, and the scoundrel had barely the chance to look surprised before Johnny put a bullet right between his eyes, painting the Doc's door with the no-good varmint's brains. The dead man fell, both in and out of the Doc's clinic, blocking the automatic closing mechanism from working.
Sliding his pistol back into his holster with a smooth motion, he frowned. He'd have to do something about this crying child now. He was a saint of the gun and the sword, but of crying children, he was much less skilled. He'd have to do something, though, on account of what he saw in the clinic.
It was Doc Gloria, dead as a doornail on the ground.
The kid tried to run away, but that wasn't a good idea, so he grabbed the munchkin and said, "Shh, shh." Then, he had a brainstorm and called one of the dolls that he knew had a good relationship with Doc Taylor. One of the door guards was coming to investigate what happened, mouth agape.
Johnny nodded and handed the squirming brat over, and said, "Take this boy to Miss Evelyn right now. There's been a killin'." It was tough being the law 'round these parts, but despite people often making fun of him, he was higher ranked than almost everyone that worked security today, so the other man nodded, grabbed the kid and skedaddled.
He sighed and stepped over the dead man and into the clinic, and he tipped his hat sadly to the dead woman on the floor. The man had shot her with two twelve-gauge rounds to the chest; there was just no survivin' that absent some serious armour.
Doc Taylor would probably want to know, but he didn't look forward to this conversation. Sighing, he dialled her. She answered on the second ring and said, "Johnny, I need you to get security on Gloria right away. I think someone's going to try to kidnap her if they haven't already."
Giving a friend or a loved one bad news like this was never easy, so instead, he just sighed, "Ma'am, I'm afraid that's why I'm callin'. I just caught someone trying to kidnap her boy outta your clinic. I stopped him, and the boy's safe, but I'm sorry to tell you that Doc Gloria didn't make it."
Doc's voice shrieked, and Johnny winced, adjusting the call volume down, "What?!"
"Ma'am, she's dead. The kidnapper shot her," Johnny repeated. It was better to just give it to people straight, he felt.
Instead of shrieking her voice got really, really cold and she asked, "How dead?"
Johnny was confused, "Stone dead, ma'am." What the hell did she mean?
Her voice shifted to exasperated, "No, you fu... No, Johnny... I mean, what were her injuries? What's the status of her skull and brain? WHAT HAPPENED? "
"Ma'am, it looks like there was a struggle. I don't know what happened; maybe the boy can tell you as he musta have seen it. Distraught, he is, but long story short, the guy shot her in the chest twice with double ought buck. But, I mean, I guess her face is okay; we can make it an open-casket funeral and all," he said. Although he had to admit that nobody actually had funerals like that anymore, despite what he saw on his westerns, so he wondered why it mattered.
The voice was intent and commanding now, "Johnny, I need you to do two things right away."
"'Course," he replied.
She told him, and he frowned. He agreed to do it, and she said she would be there in less than ten minutes and hung up. He reached down and picked up the dead lady and said the words she told him to say, "Biobed mode."
He blinked as the Doc's chair shifted and turned into a bed or a gurney. That was pretty neat. He laid the dead woman on the bed and stepped back. He coughed and said, in Japanese, " Spider-bro, wake up."
Nothing happened, and he tilted his eyes and then coughed. The Doc had said it in English, despite the name. He tried that again, "Kumo-kun, wake up."
Suddenly the equipment above the bed started moving and making noises. She'd said that would happen, so he nodded and said, carefully reciting the words she made him memorise, "Kumo-kun, vampire cuff, emergency oxygenation mode."
What happened next caused Johnny the Samurai Gunman to take a step back as six terrifying arms descended down onto the biobed and started doing things. He carefully affected an accent, a Western drawl in English and a homey Kansai-ben when he spoke Japanese, but what he saw in front of him shocked him enough that he forgot, and he spoke with the native Tokyo accent that he thought was so boring, "Maji ka?"
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She bravely turned her tail and fled
It wasn't easy sometimes being an ethnically Chinese man that grew up in Tokyo, but Johnny knew he had the soul of a Samurai, so most things didn't bother him. He let things flow over and around him like the best Zen masters, but he was a bit put off by what he was seeing.
So Johnny merely backed away from what was going on on the hospital bed and glanced behind him to find a full tactical quick reaction force of his brothers, led by Demon Wind Kato himself. While glancing left and right for trouble, the borged-out street samurai asked, "What's going on?"
Johnny sighed and told the man everything that had happened. Not only was the Demon Wind his superior, but he was quick to anger. Kato could be as ornery as a rattlesnake with a toothache, snapping at anyone who crossed him, and it didn't do to rile him up unnecessarily.
Perhaps Johnny was the wrong person to throw such stones from his glass house, but he always felt that Kato was too attached to his moody and brooding persona. If Kato was a lesser man, Johnny would call him all hat and no cattle, but the Demon Wind had the whole herd, so Johnny was always careful to catfoot around the man.
Kato scowled, looking at the abomination before him as it worked on the dead woman, "Well, you better get to it, then. Okada-sama is blowing up my texts."
"I reckon we should do something about this here... detritus," Johnny said, eyeing the man he had shot, "We don't want to spook the customers comin' to the cathouse."
Kato ground his teeth together, "I told you before to stop calling it a cathouse." He turned to one of his men and motioned for them to pull the body into the clinic for now. Glancing around, he brightened when he saw a stack of something in the corner. "Well, at least we don't have to go and get a bodybag; she keeps a number of them around. I thought she was a good Med Techie; why does she need so many body bags?"
Johnny grinned, unable to resist, and drawled, "Probably to put in people who are makin' aspersions on her medical skills." That got two of his men to chuckle and Kato to scowl. He shook his head and went to complete the rest of what the Doc asked him. He walked over to what she had described as her "work table" and peered at it, deciding he didn't recognise any of the tools except one small screwdriver and what he might charitably describe as a fancy pair of tweezers.
Still, he didn't need to. Above the work table was a set of cabinets, and he opened them and looked around. Here things were labelled carefully and stored in over three rows of twenty small plastic drawers each, stacked on top of each other. He followed the drawers with his fingers and stopped when he got to the one that was labelled "XAC-3." He opened the drawer and pulled out one of the small inhalers inside, the same type used for any number of drugs. Closing that draw, he continued looking until he found another draw labelled "Lorazepam" and took another inhaler from it.
He put both the inhalers in his pocket and tipped his hat at Kato as he passed, offering a polite "Demon Wind."
Kato inclined his head back at him but replied, "Clown." Johnny sighed and ignored the provocation. At least Kato's men were loading the dead man into a body bag. He sent a message to the building janitorial division to have the blood and brains cleaned off the entryway. Despite what Kato said, it would scare the customers coming to visit the cathouse.
He walked across the corridor and into Clouds. He walked directly to Miss Evelyn's room and rang her doorbell. "Miss Evelyn is..." Fuck, what was that gaki 's name? "Is that young'un with you?"
In lieu of answering, she unlocked the door, and he walked in to see that he was. The kid was currently still bawling his eyes out while being mothered by four busty dolls, including Miss Evelyn and Miss Himeko. However, when the kid saw Johnny, his eyes went wide, and he broke out of their embrace to race toward him, yelling, "My mom... is she going to be okay?" However, before Johnny could even reply, the kid asked what seemed like a dozen questions about Doc Gloria.
" Yamero... You need to yamate kuda STOP ..." Johnny said suddenly, unable to take anymore. Sometimes had trouble keeping which language he was trying to speak straight when he got flustered.
Shit, the dolls were glaring at him now. He shook his head, "I don't know anything. I talked to Doc Taylor, and she seemed to think that maybe Doc Gloria might not be dead." He looked down at the kid and pulled out one of the inhalers. She was very clear that he was to turn the dosage selector all the way to the left and cross-check that the dosage displayed decreased as he did so. So he did that, making sure the number was the smallest number possible before handing it to the kid, "Doc Taylor says you're to use this right now. Do you know how?"
He shook his head, so Johnny told him, "Put it in your mouth and press that button while inhaling." He watched the boy do so and took the inhaler from him and replaced it with the other to do the same.
Miss Evelyn asked, "What are these?"
Johnny shrugged, "I dunno. I ain't no bonesaw, ma'am." However, he could take a guess as the kid immediately looked less lively and had stopped bawling and hyperventilating. Some kind of light sedative, probably? He blinked as he got a text from Doc Taylor and sighed. Two things he had to do turned into three so often in his life, so he shouldn't be surprised.
"Anyway, I gotta go now," Johnny said, while he tipped his hat to the dolls, "Ladies."
I swore loudly and inventively as I hung up on the call with Johnny Leung, slamming my hand repeatedly into the steering wheel with enough strength to slightly deform the aluminium underneath the soft polyurethane on the wheel. This gave me immediate pause as I sometimes forgot how strong I was, and I was hitting the steering wheel of my stolen van with significant force. If I broke it and, as a result, the car became inoperative, I would be up shit creek without a paddle. Worst of all, it would be me putting myself there with the mother of all unforced errors.
As much as I wanted to break down, all I could allow myself to do was scream at the situation, "Why has everything gone wrong?!" I glanced at the in-car navigation system and auto drive, very thankful that I didn't have to operate the car while ventilating Kiwi. I would have made it work, somehow, but I was inordinately glad I didn't need to.
Glancing around the interior of the vehicle, I was looking for something like a napkin or paper towel. Something I could use to wipe the tears that appeared to be welling up in my eyes, but the vehicle was spotless, without the clutter of yesterday's fast-food bag that sometimes accumulated in one's car.
Finally, giving up, I just used the side of my hands, sighing and slowing my breathing. I had a lot of different breathing and meditation techniques in my brain that were, according to my medical sense, very effective at relaxing a person. As all of them worked in a similar way, I picked one at random and began breathing in a pattern through my nose, holding my breath for a specific amount of time before exhaling through my mouth.
I wished I had some cameras inside my clinic or some way to remotely access Kumo-kun from here, but I didn't think either of those things was a good idea. Kumo-kun was ridiculously dangerous if you were within its sphere of influence, so giving any kind of avenue for hackers to connect to any of its machinery was a bad idea. Also, I occasionally worked in nothing but my bra and panties in there, especially if I was doing electronics work, so a net-accessible camera was asking for trouble there, too.
However, if Johnny did as I asked, then Kumo-kun should be keeping Gloria's brain oxygenated the best he could. By telling it to oxygenate with a vampire cuff, it would mechanically connect the carotid arteries and jugular veins to my heart-lung bypass machine.
It was extracorporeal oxygenation, used, for example, when you needed to perform surgery on or replace either the lungs or the heart. Every cybernetics surgeon, even the terrible ones, had such bypass machines because the heart and lungs were one of the most popular organs to replace, and for a good reason, as the bog-standard organic human heart and lungs weren't the best designed. But, of course, normally, you wouldn't connect the device this way, as it would only oxygenate the brain and head.
It was emergency first aid of the very last resort, taken with the idea that anything that wasn't the brain could be replaced. Kumo-kun had only practised this procedure in simulations, obviously, and I hoped very much it was doing it properly.
I was as worried for David almost as much as I was worried for Gloria, too. I had told Johnny to dose the kid with an anxiolytic, as well as my experimental, almost entirely Tinkertech drug. I didn't have a name for it, and it was just labelled experimental amnesia compound number three, despite the fact that it didn't entirely cause amnesia anymore.
I glanced at the unconscious man that was seatbelted into the passenger seat. The drug was based on the same drug that I had just used on the driver of this van. However, instead of temporarily disconnecting the short and long-term memory portions of the brain, it sought to disconnect the memories from the emotions you were feeling at the time you experienced them.
It didn't entirely work, but I thought that was all to the better as I intended its use to be exactly as I had instructed Johnny to use it today, as a drug to be used directly after an extremely traumatic event. If taken, it would make the last couple of hours as though you watched a film or read a novel instead of experiencing it. In my tests, using myself as the guinea pig, you wouldn't lose any memories, but they would be slightly disassociated.
