Mondays suck.

Yes I know it's Wednesday now, but still Mondays suck.

So, to back up a little bit, Sunday night I went into the Alamedan DMZ. Pretty simple, sneak in avoid the patrols and the dogs at the border and the landmines, find the address go in, grab the swag and do the same thing in reverse.

Went easy enough. Got back to the drop site sometime Monday morning and the client was waiting for me.... That should have tipped me off that something was wrong... Frankly everything about the guy should have tipped me off something was wrong. He was a little shady, didn't really describe the interior of the house right, the offered pay was too high for the simplicity of the job things like that.

And so as I'm camouflaging the stash,  he walks up, waves hello, asks me how things are, and then shoots me in the chest a couple times before taking the swag and walking off.....I can happily say that yes Axel's runes stopped the bullets.... it still hurt like I got hit with a sledgehammer and I apparently was the pawn in some kind of operation and expected to be disposable... unfortunately I am now pissed off and the information brokers are stirred up like a nest of bees trying to find out what the hell went down, because well, it's bad for business if they get strung along and dragged into some kind of insanity involving people getting shot. Apparently I'm not the first stalker this has happened to either. I'm just the first one that walked away from it alive.


Now before I get inundated with questions, a stalker is someone that sneaks into restricted or dangerous areas to retrieve things for fun, family and profit. Some people say it's an acronym, others don't depends on who you ask and what the guy they're referring to may have done or not done... I however can say I know who first started referring to "retrieval experts" as stalkers. It's some guy who read a bunch of books before the war came up with the term from a book he read about the aftereffects of first contact with aliens, and the stalkers in that pretty much did the same thing and he's the one who is in charge of keeping things sensible in the chaotic world of information trading in the bay area.


Anyway, not sure which is more annoying, that I was shot, or that I was duped into doing the hard part of a retrieval for someone else.... didn't even get paid either. Anyway the only reason I'm even posting this is because someone was asking around in the shadows for me... specifically by name, and that kinda sent up a red flag, so I might be disappearing for a while.