Meta Zero One by Martin J Moss Page A

flagged up to be watched more closely.
     
    There were three of them ahead of Elroy, walking in the same direction as he was, so they had not seen him, but they had seen someone. Walking to one side of the street Elroy could see a man,  who was clearly very drunk ahead of them, swaying from side to side across the pavement.
     
    He was clearly drunk, and clearly human.
     
    The three MAH thugs had also clearly picked him out for something more substantial than a good telling off.
     
    Elroy watched them follow the man, they were looking for an opening, and opportunity, which came when he turned, or more rightly stumbled, into an alley in between two buildings.
     
    The three followed him in, one, Elroy saw, drawing a knife from their back pocket.
     
    Elroy increased his pace, so that he reached the alley seconds later, and glanced down. The man was on the ground in a pool of foul water, and the three thugs were standing around him taking turns to kick him in the guts.
     
    For a second Elroy considered turning away and leaving him to his own problems. He had better things to do and three to one odds could present some degree of risk.
     
    The thing that stopped him was not a sense of civic duty, nor even a sense of right and wrong, no it was that even in the dark, even lying on the floor with his hands over his head, protecting himself, Elroy recognised the man.
     
    The man being beaten up was Stanley,  the man who had bought him a cranberry juice in the bar.
     
    And that made him deserve better than a kicking.
     
    "Time to stop your fun boys," Elroy said loudly, perhaps they could be talked down, perhaps they would see sense.
     
    The three stopped and turned to face him.
     
    Elroy grinned, they were obviously low level thugs, and unlikely to have any significant powers, but you could never tell.
     
    One had a long red beard with pointed ears, one had green scaled skin and looked like he struggled to breathe and the third, who went up a notch in terms of threat assessment was a girl with pale blue skin.
     
    In gangs, girls were usually more dangerous than boys. Additionally she was armed, she held a knife in one pale blue hand.
     
    "Go away zero," she said, with a voice which was soft and melodic, a voice like syrup dripping over a warm cake, like an iced beer at the end of the day. Elroy felt himself twitch in response,  he felt the urge to leave, to walk away and leave Cranberry Juice man to his own problems.
     
    "Walk away and don't look back," she said, smiling now, she was surprisingly pretty even with her pale blue skin. 
     
      Elroy wanted so much to please her, he wanted to do just what she said. He felt himself turning away.
     
    The girl watched and smiled at him, a smile which rapidly faded as Elroy grinned evilly back, turned to face her and took a step forwards.
     
    "Girl," he said, "I've had freaks like you trying to tell me what to do all my life. The other week Mental Man tried to get me to forget that he had just murdered and raped a teenage girl, and do you know where he is now?"
     
    Pale Blue girl just looked at him.
     
    "Do you know where he is now?" Elroy shouted, "no, you don't. And you never will, because he's locked away at the bottom of a very deep dark pit. He is locked away playing hunt the arsehole with all the other crazy fuckers who thought they could make me do anything I didn't want to do."
     
    Elroy stepped forwards, Pale Blue stayed were she was, Red Beard took a step to his left and Green Scales a step to the right.
     
    Cranberry Juice  stayed on the floor where they had left him.
     
     "I'm going to give you a chance to walk away from this," Elroy said calmly staring at each of them in turn, "one chance, and one chance only. And that's just because I have somewhere to be in ten minutes and I really, really need to be there. So if the three of you walk away, if you leave now, I won't break your legs and leave you for dead in this alley."
     
    They weren't going to go