Howling Legion

same attitude and like to push their luck.”

“What did you mean about those cat bands?” Cole asked.

Paige hopped down from her stool and tapped his forehead. “Know your enemy, young one. Steph and Ace’s working girls all wear their hair in pigtails tied back with bands that have cats on them. Haven’t you ever noticed that?”

“They’re scantily dressed vampire hookers that flash their goods every chance they get and you think I’m looking at the bands in their hair?”

“Did you at least notice the pigtails?” she asked hopefully.

Cole perked up as he replied, “Oh yeah. I noticed the pigtails.”

“We need to pay Steph and Ace a visit. They know better than to cross the border we laid down, so that means they’re either testing us or they’ve got reinforcements to back them up. We’ll go to that new Blood Parlor tonight after the crowds die down.”

Cole watched Paige hop off her stool and walk out of the kitchen. He’d been around her enough to know just how long he could study her from behind before getting caught. When the timer in his head went off, he pretended to look at something else. Paige shot a quick glance over her shoulder but had no reason to break her stride.

“Too slow, dragon lady,” he whispered in his own kung-fu impression. “Time for young one to polish his stick.”

Cole’s spear leaned in the corner of his walk-in refrigerator, gleaming with a fresh coat of the varnish that was mixed using an old Skinner recipe. Although Skinners tended to hand down their teachings through word of mouth, Cole desperately wished Paige would just give him a damn list of ingredients. Instead, she’d forced him to mix up dozens of batches until he finally got it right. Since he actually had some time for himself, he abandoned the Skinner stuff in favor of something from his own century.

The laptop was his own little tricked-out piece of home, which had recently been upgraded so it could handle Sniper Ranger multiplayer without locking up every ten minutes. Running a connection into the sealed metal box hadn’t been easy, but it was worth it. That and the signal booster he’d rigged for his cell phone turned the freezer into a work space that was slightly better than the first cubicle he’d ever been assigned in the real world. As soon as he logged in to play a few rounds of Sniper Deathmatch, an instant message popped onto his screen: CALL JASON.

Jason Sorrenson was a friend, which meant his messages were usually a bit more colorful. Rising to the upper echelons of a prosperous game designing company hadn’t turned Jason into a corporate jerk, so whenever he even slightly sounded like one of those jerks, something was wrong. Cole flipped open his cell phone, pushed the button to dial his old work number, and sifted through his mental list of all the reasons Jason could be pissed at him this time.

“Digital Dreamers.”

“Why the formalities?” Cole chuckled.

“Who is this?”

“Aw Christ, I haven’t been gone that long. Besides, dumb shit, you just IM’d me to call you.”

“Pardon me?”

For Jason to be this serious, something was definitely wrong.

“This is Cole.”

“I’ll patch you through to Mr. Sorrenson.”

Then again, another good explanation was that the person who’d answered the phone wasn’t the head of Digital Dreamers. As if to make Cole feel even more out of place, the person on the other end of the phone asked, “Cole who?”

“Cole Warnecki. I work there. Jason’s expecting me, so just patch me through!”

Having tapped into his mean streak already that night, Cole was able to repeat the trick well enough to get the lines of communication unclogged. There were a few clicks, followed by a ring tone and then another voice that sounded a whole lot like the previous one.

“Jason?” Cole asked cautiously.

“Yeah, Cole. I’m surprised you responded to the message so quickly. I’ve had a hard time getting in touch with you.”

“Maybe your new assistant has been handling all your business. Nobody’d know the difference.”

“I know. I’ve been trying to talk differently to avoid confusion.”

“You really need to learn how to throw your weight around more,” Cole chuckled. “What’s up?”

“How’s that downloadable content for Hammer Strike coming along?”

“I’ve put a few more things together. The game’s only been released for a couple months.”

“People on the forums have been clamoring for it,” Jason replied.

Cole let out a haggard sigh that he hoped translated fully through the cellular connection. “People on the forums are always clamoring for something. When we announced there would be downloadable content for Hammer Strike, they wanted to know what it was and when it was coming. When we released that first batch of stuff, they all bitched that it wasn’t enough. When we announced that the new multiplayer maps were coming, they bitched about the release dates or the price.”

After a slight pause, Jason said, “That first batch was just a bunch of different clothes for the characters and new designs for the weapons.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“The new designs didn’t even change weapon performance, and we charged three dollars for each download.”

“I know!” When Cole sighed again, it was less for dramatic effect and more to get some actual air into his lungs. “That first batch was rushed. I know it was crap. I made the crap. I check the forums, so I realize everyone else out there thought it was crap too. Still, it sold pretty well.”

Jason didn’t voice his impatience, but Cole could feel it as if he could see his boss rolling his eyes to examine the underside of the Mariners cap that was always stuck on his head. “We’ve got some loyal fans. They buy our games because they know they’ll be good, and they download the extra content because they think it’ll be just as good. I let that first batch slide to test the waters, but it didn’t go over well. Not well at all.”

As always, Jason was being kind. Cole had worked on Hammer Strike since the game was nothing more than an excited conversation over some hastily drawn sketches. Since then both of them had been hip-deep in creating the characters, enemies, fighting mechanics, level design, background rendering, and anything else it took to turn ideas into a functioning video game. When Cole took off for his vacation to Canada, Hammer Strike had been almost ready to be pressed onto disks. That was before he knew what a Skinner was or that monsters were real. After Hammer Strike had been released, it was all he could do to keep up with the project he’d started.

“Maybe I shouldn’t be on this team anymore,” Cole grumbled.

“That’s what I was calling about.”

“What? You really think I should be off the team?”

“No,” Jason said. “I could tell you’ve been having your doubts. Before you left Seattle, you ate and breathed Hammer Strike. You were supposed to come back to fix the remaining bugs, remember?”

“Yeah.”

“You never came back and just threw together a patch on your laptop. What the hell happened?”

Rather than try to lie to his longtime friend, Cole simply replied, “I told you what happened.”

“First you told me there was family trouble you needed to work through. Then you said you had to stay in Chicago for personal reasons. The only way those excuses could get more generic would be for you to send them to me written in black ballpoint on a brown paper sack.”

“I know.”

“And I’m not trying to get into your personal business. If you need time away, you can have it. If you want to keep working for Digital Dreamers, you can, but I don’t usually allow someone at your level to work remotely. I don’t care what kind of a laptop you’ve got, you need to be here with the rest of the team to hash out new ideas and put together a functioning build for the next Hammer Strike. We need something to show at the next Electronic Gaming Conference.”