Dogs of DevTown

By Taylor Hohulin

Welcome to DevTown. 

In this city, holo ads lumber like neon giants seeking advertising targets. Men and women pop Oracle tabs in search of relief or enlightenment or both. Creatures of unknown origin stalk the darkest alleys. In the center of it all, NexDev Tower looms over the city, home to hundreds of floors of top-secret research.

And in its shadow, Shan Hayes kills people for money.

Rejecting the mechanical enhancements so popular in DevTown, Shan needs only two things: The resynth serum that can reshape her body's entire cellular structure, and her hand-cannon containing a sentient parasite capable of converting her blood into weaponized wasps.

As a hired gun for various crime syndicates, there's little of the city's underbelly Shan hasn't encountered. But when a longtime business associate hires her to track down an underling who's vanished into the neon night, Shan finds DevTown still holds secrets more deadly and terrifying than anything she could imagine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Taylor Hohulin
• Release date: Apr 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393161769

Taylor Hohulin

Taylor is a radio personality by morning, a science fiction author by afternoon, and asleep by 9:30. His weaknesses include Oreos, his dog, and Sharknado movies.

Book preview

1

EVEN ON GOOD DAYS, DevTown stinks. But on nights like tonight—when the rain batters streets and scrapers—all the collected stenches of blood and sweat and human waste rise anew, a multitude of forgotten sins returned to haunt the city until the storm relents. DevTown is especially pungent to Shan Hayes now that the resynth has done its work, converting hundreds of millions of cells along her nasal passage into olfactory receptors. She sniffs the air once again, wrinkling her nose at the onslaught of aromas. Body odor, unwashed clothes, the chemical burn of neon lights. She doesn’t catch her target’s scent, but that’s okay. He’ll show up. He always does.

Shan resists the urge to take another resynth injection. Some extra visual clarity would come in handy cutting through the rain and the holo ads cluttering the night, but she’s been holding the olfactory upgrade for an hour. She’ll inject plenty of resynth before morning. Best not to add any undue strain. Besides, if she can’t smell the target, she won’t be able to see him, either.

Two in the morning, and humanity packs DevTown’s streets in a claustrophobic parade. Even leaning against a scraper, Shan is not immune to the occasional jostle. The crowd shuffles along, hunched against the rain in clear plastic synthate slickers under the watchful gaze of holo ads—twenty-foot-tall women in skimpy clothing and men with chiseled torsos, all cast in blue, purple, and yellow. One holo tracks Shan’s eyes, winks at her, and a product materializes in its projected hands. Shan sees the product, recognizes it on an instinctual level, but does not register what it is.

At the same time, something else catches her attention: her target’s scent.

Her eyes dart about, tracking the aroma’s source. It’s still faint, barely detectable through DevTown’s overpowering stench, but it’s getting stronger. He’s headed her way.

Shan steps into the crowd, gliding between shuffling bodies. She moves with practiced ease—casual enough not to attract attention, purposeful enough that nobody knocks her off course.

The scent intensifies. He’s twenty feet behind her. She slows her pace to let him pass.

There.

She committed his photo to memory; the large mirrorshades and wide-brimmed hat can’t disguise his features. He flips up the collar of his trench coat, as if sensing her attention, but she’s already spotted him. Now it’s only a matter of time.

She slows until he passes her and a handful of people shuffle between them. He’s still within view, but the visual is unnecessary. She has his scent.

Like her, he doesn’t wear a slicker. Rain rolls off the brim of his hat, gray rivulets spattering the shoulders of his coat. The rain won’t do the hat or the coat any favors, but it doesn’t look like either is of high quality, anyway.

Her target moves with purpose, squeezing between people blocking his path. He isn’t subtle. Heads turn, interested for at least a moment as this man forces his way between commuters. He’s not practiced like Shan is. Shan learned long ago how to melt through a crowd, how to glide between pedestrians and disturb no one. Her target is either very bold or very inexperienced.

He hasn’t noticed her yet. His are not the movements of someone fleeing a threat. No, he’s moving toward something.

What it is doesn’t matter. All that matters is the contract. It’s in her apartment, folded into a trick drawer in her kitchen. Cobalt wasn’t happy when she insisted on a physical document over his preferred digital file, but then he always complains about her paper trail, and it hasn’t stopped him coming back to her yet.

The target changes course, and Shan mirrors him from behind. He pushes ahead and ducks into an alley between two scrapers. Neon tubes run up the walls, and their green light swallows him. Shan follows, and not a single head turns to track her.

Darkness and silence swallow Shan as soon as she passes through the lime-colored glow. Both scrapers stretch hundreds of stories into the sky, blocking off the sound and fury of DevTown. Here, there are no holo ads, no street vendors, no crowds shuffling along to God-knows-where. Here, only a sliver of light traces a faint line down an alley ten feet across.

And walking in that sliver, the target.

Something changes in his gait, a momentary hesitation followed by a quickening pace. He hasn’t turned to see her, but he knows she’s there. No matter. Shan maintains her speed, slow but purposeful. There’s no need to run. Not yet.

The target pauses, turns to look at Shan. Here in the alley, shadow swallows his face. Emerald neon reflects off his mirrorshades, but it’s not the only surface catching the soft glow. As he turns, light flashes around his knees and continues to his feet.

Mech legs.

As he stares her down through green-glinting shades, a hissing whine fills the alley. He turns just as the sound reaches a crescendo, and as it releases in a blast, he bounds away. The single leap carries him thirty feet, and the instant he lands, there’s another blast, carrying him another thirty feet.

The mech legs must have some sort of repulsor technology. Shan has heard of newer models which concentrate electromagnetic fields and use them to propel users at high velocities, but it doesn’t matter how his models work. Shan won’t catch him without enhancements of her own. There isn’t a single mech installed on her body, but she doesn’t need mechs. Not when she has resynth.

All these thoughts pass through her head in an instant. Before the target lands, Shan swallows a handful of CalPills. The large yellow capsules land in her stomach like a ton of bricks, but she needs the calories for what comes next. She slides a syringe from the clip on her belt and plunges the needle into her thigh.

She runs.

Resynth serum, that cocktail of proteins and viruses, floods her bloodstream, issuing commands to each cell it touches. The cells comply, transforming to accommodate the design coded into the serum. Heat ignites in her belly as the CalPills fuel the change. Shan’s joints rearrange, her muscles grow, her tendons expand and contract, reforming her body until she isn’t running, but galloping, using the force of four limbs to chase her target. She is more than human now. She is a predator, and her target is prey, no matter how much organic tissue he’s traded for metal.

Thanks to those mech legs, her target is fast, but she’s faster still. The pavement is cool and rough on her palms. The scents of DevTown sharpen as air rushes past her face. Her lips twist in a bitter smile. No hunt is complete without a chase.

In three bounds, the target bursts out of the alley. Here he finds a busy street where he pauses only momentarily before leaping over four levels of hovertraffic. Shan follows. Traffic is heavy at every layer except the highest—this reserved for hovercars belonging to CEOs and crime lords. Headlights and chrome blur together under a sky lit by holos and smeared by rain.

The target watches Shan between lanes and layers of transports, wondering if she’ll follow. Cars race beside and above him, blaring their horns, but he doesn’t react. His trench coat blows in the gusts created by passing vehicles. His mirrorshades sparkle yellow and red from multitudes of streaking headlights and taillights.

Shan leaps into traffic. She can’t clear all four layers in one jump, but her reflexes are good enough to treat hovercars like stepping stones, to account for their speed without jumping too high and getting snagged in a higher layer of hovercars. She moves with ease, but so does the target. His repulsors fire again and again, and soon he’s across the street, bounding in long, soaring strides. Shan scrambles across the final lanes, weaving between cars and cycles. The target’s pulling away, but she isn’t concerned. Not yet.

She reaches the other side of the street at a wild pace. Her newly resynthed limbs scramble for purchase as she finds the sidewalk, and then she’s racing behind the target again. Her body is a perfect machine, no wasted motion as she chases the man with mech legs. She smells the intensity of his breath, the way it comes in too-fast pulses. He shouldn’t be winded, not with how much he relies on his mechs to run. No, he’s not panting from exhaustion. He’s panting from fear. Shan is unlike anyone he’s ever encountered.

The target leaps into the scraper beside him. Two stories up, a repulsor blast shatters a cluster of windows as one mech leg launches him into the air and across the street. Cars honk as he soars over lanes of airborne traffic, but he doesn’t acknowledge them. He catches another scraper three stories higher, bouncing the other way now and repeating the process, zigzagging ever higher over the traffic below. Shan leaps into the street again, landing on a car racing toward the target. Arms and legs spread wide, she lowers herself until the wind is whistling around her, not trying to push her off. Her short hair whips behind her. The car’s traveling faster than she can gallop, faster than the target can flee.

But the target knows this, and he cuts through a side street. Shan bounds across more cars until she finds another headed in the target’s direction. This method is not sustainable. The target won’t come back to ground level as long as she has him in her sights.

So Shan releases the car with one hand, gripping it with the other and using her hind legs to steady herself. She reaches for another syringe and plunges it into her leg. There’s a wave of dizziness and nausea as the serum enters her bloodstream. This change is more drastic, more demanding. Fresh bones sprout from her spine, billions of cells forming in the blink of an eye. Flesh forms around the bones, stretching thin between each spoke that branches off the original structure.

Shan leaps into the air.

At the height of her jump, the wings’ creation is complete. A set of four with flesh so thin it glows green and blue and red and yellow in the light pollution. Shan beats the wings, soaring up and forward as she chases her prey. He bounds from scraper to scraper, and windows burst with each impact.

Shan glides on the air now, streamlining her body to reduce the wind resistance.

And then she catches him.

There’s no grace in the collision. Shan flies straight into the target, wrapping him up in a midair tackle. Her shoulder slams into his back. A grunt escapes him moments before they smash into a scraper. Glass shatters, but this time it’s because his head burst through the window.

Now they fall.

How high are they? Ten, fifteen stories? Shan isn’t concerned—she can control the fall with her wings—but the target is panicking. She doesn’t have to smell his rate of breathing anymore; she can hear him hyperventilating. The pavement races to meet them. The target struggles in her grip, his breaths growing more frantic by the second.

She hears the repulsors before she even knows what’s happening.

She’s just about to unfurl her wings when the target plants both mech legs against the scraper and fires them. The two of them hurtle across the street, turning backward, upside down, while red and yellow traffic races below them. Stunned by the reckless gambit, Shan loses her grip around his torso, and he frees one arm and looks at her over his shoulder. Her own face stares back in his mirrorshades, wide-eyed and drunk on the thrill of the chase, as he twists the free hand backward. The trench coat slides away, revealing another mech. It barely registers in her mind before the gleaming fist fires its own repulsor.

Fresh power propels her over layers of soaring traffic. Her body whips through the night air. The blow left her head fuzzy, and it’s a struggle to stay conscious. Something cracks when she bounces off another scraper, and suddenly she’s sprawled on the pavement. She doesn’t remember hitting the ground, but blood streams from both her nostrils. Her nose feels broken.

She lifts her head, and through the haze of dizziness and rain, she sees the target pull himself up and stumble down another alley without even a glance backward. Muscles and joints scream in protest as Shan peels herself off the ground. She takes a few tentative steps, then builds to a gallop. The target must have damaged his repulsors in the fall; he’s not using them to run away. He staggers along, kicking up sprays of water as his metal legs batter the puddles.

Pain lights up her body, and Shan struggles to keep up. The target still isn’t safe, though.

Sitting on her haunches, Shan lifts the cap on a bulky canister at her side. She plunges her hand through a rubber seal into the lukewarm saline solution. Moments later, there’s a pinprick on each of her fingers, and a familiar voice enters her mind.

Well, hello again! Long time, no talk.

No time to talk, Aldis. Got a target. Shan doesn’t speak the words. She only mouths them, forming the shape of each syllable with her lips and tongue. The parasite in the saline shares a psychic link with her while they’re connected like this. She could think the command and Aldis would understand, but this method helps her focus.

It’s always all business with you, isn’t it? Who’re we after now?

There. Shan’s eyes lock onto the fleeing man, relaying the target to Aldis. Take him down.

Any mechs?

Arms and legs at least. Maybe more.

Alrighty. This’ll sting a little.

Aldis doesn’t need to warn her. This is hardly fresh territory for Shan, but the parasite fancies itself a comedian. Either that, or the cheeky humor is a learned behavior to make human hosts more at ease feeding themselves to a creature no bigger than their fists.

The sting sharpens in Shan’s submerged fingers as Aldis draws her blood and breaks the cells down to their most basic building blocks in order to rebuild them. It was the discovery of Aldis’s species that inspired and drove the initial research into resynthesis tech. When an expedition to the ocean floor uncovered a colony of parasites capable of forming telepathic links with a host and reshaping its blood into other biological structures, it had been a revelation.

Surprising nobody, the technology’s earliest applications were in weaponry, the device on Shan’s hand being a prime example.

And we’re set!

Shan lifts the resynth cannon, steadies it with her free hand.

She says, Save the face. I need evidence.

A swarm of wasps bursts from the cannon, flying across the alley at thousands of feet per second. Mere seconds ago, each cell in the swarm was inside Shan’s bloodstream, but now, Aldis’s unique digestive system and a sophisticated computer algorithm have reshaped the cells into something terrifying and deadly.

Before Shan finishes her next breath, the target collapses, a smattering of ragged holes opening in his mechs. Despite herself, Shan smiles. No matter how resistant the developers make their mech parts, Aldis can always make a wasp to pierce it.

Shan reaches into her belt and unclasps another syringe. She injects a new serum now—one to reverse all the changes to her physiology. Joints and muscles reset as wings melt into her back. DevTown loses some of its pungency. As she always does, she only realizes once her body is in its natural state how much it strained to hold its earlier form.

Once the transformation is complete, she limps down the alley toward the fallen target. He’s moaning, trying to move without his mechs. Pitiful.

He squirms, terror struck, as she approaches. His mirrorshades came off in the fall, lying a couple feet from his head, half-submerged in a puddle. His eyes bulge, knowing what’s coming but unable to do anything about it.

Please, says the target, voice quivering on the edge of a sob. I didn’t have a choice. I had to.

Shan responds by fishing a camera out of her pocket. She snaps a photo of the target, lying helpless before her, then returns the camera.

Had to meet the quota, the target stammers. Had to—had to obey.

Shan doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about. It’s likely meaningless ramblings from a desperate tabber, but even if not, it doesn’t matter. She wasn’t hired to investigate. She was hired to kill. So she lifts her resynth cannon.

P—please, no! The target’s shoulder twitches, like he’s trying to lift a hand to plea for his life. Please, he says. I didn’t want to, but I—I had to!

Shan remains unmoved. She stares down the barrel and mouths two words to Aldis:

Kill him.

2

SHIVERS WRACK SHAN’S body, and she has to lean against a scraper to keep from collapsing. The rain is chilly, but that’s not the issue. She’s overdone it on the resynth again. She’s suffering from a calorie-starved fever, and no amount of CalPills can pull her out of the hole she dug. There’s only one person in DevTown capable of snatching her from the jaws of death. He’ll have a strong word or two for Shan’s recklessness today, or at least his version of a strong word. But he’ll take care of her. Kim always takes care of her.

Shan rolls her head toward NexDev Tower, that giant neon spire in the center of DevTown. She’s not far, only a couple blocks.

The shivers pass, and she pushes off the wall, forcing herself to limp along the cracked sidewalk. Every inch of her body aches, and the brief rest only allowed her muscles and joints to grow stiff.

Cars whiz past, holo ads loom overhead, and Shan shuffles through the feverish haze to NexDev Tower’s only entrance.