The van slid into the first available parking space that Bobby could find and he, James, whose cybernetic finger had been bent back into shape and the skeletons piled out. Michaela came to join them, she was dressed as a man as skeletons are pretty androgynous to begin with and her voice was a lot raspier than you’d find a woman naturally with, except perhaps one who’d spent their whole life chain smoking.

  After doing a numbers count and making sure all his disguised skeletons were present, Bobby led the group over to the queue of pedestrians, weaving and dodging through the parked cars. As he watched, the back door of a van about to park near them opened and a raggedly dressed man jumped out, he seemed to be having an argument with someone inside.

  “I bet you have a tiny one and your girlfriend can’t get you off because she can never find the thing,” shouted the man back into the van.

  Bobby was about to make a joke about it to Michaela, but then the car suddenly revved and shot back into the parking space, crushing the man under it. For a moment his brain failed to comprehend the brutality it had just witnessed, the sheer disregard for human life and the fact that anyone would settle what looked like a little argument via manslaughter just didn’t sit right.

  As he watched with his mouth agape, the driver jumped out, eyes hidden under a wooden mask that covered everything except the man's lower jaw in a ventriloquist doll-like aesthetic. The man seemed highly frustrated, like what his victim had just said had hit too close to the truth.

  He kicked the partially squashed arm of the corpse which was poking out from under his van, and spat into the forming pool of blood.

  Bobby quickly looked away and gestured his group onwards. Not my problem yet.

  At the end of the frankly enormous car park they reached a wobbly little desk manned by a monstrous bodybuilder with a few guards with guns spaced around. The man at the desk had a quaint little pencil and a long list that looked suspiciously scroll-esque. There was a very small queue in front of the desk as the men seemed to be letting people in almost as quickly as they arrived.

  Bobby and his skeletons waited about a minute before they reached the front of the queue. Bobby gave the men a speel of fake names they’d been given by Sammy when he had given them the list, it had taken him about a day to memorise them all, because he needed to say the names quickly as the skeletons couldn’t and stuttering might attract attention.

  “All good,” the man with the pencil told him. Then pointed at the list again, “You said you had a Jonah Mcreedy among you, that’s my girlfriend’s brother, where are you Jonah?”

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Bobby felt cold sweat gather on his neck as he pushed one of the shorter skeletons forwards and began casting the filament spell in his pocket.

  “I haven’t been able to come over in a while, how’s she doing?” said the man, patting the skeleton on its cowboy hat fondly.

  The skeleton didn’t say anything and did the automatic response Gary had given them to any human interaction they hadn’t been told how to reply to, a shrug.

  “Ah you rascal, still ignoring me are you, well tell her I’ll come home soon.”

  Bobby sighed with relief and let his spell dissolve as the man waved them through, the past few minutes had been a bit of an emotional wrangler for him. The corridor opened up and they entered a stream of traffic, soon expanding as streams of traffic from the other entrances merged with their one. Lucky the next part of the plan went off without a hitch as a disguised Sammy pushed through the flow to join him. A wad of tickets passed over, and Bobby idly flicked through them, glad they were all together.

  He checked the stairwells they went past until they reached the one corresponding to the tickets and led his procession up to the first floor. There was a free bar and rows of seats at the edge of a hall like space, decked out with minimalist lighting. They were free to mingle anonymously until the event began, and then the plan was to sneak off in batches, hiding out in the bathroom closest to the entrance they had come in from. Twenty skeletons was not a lot to take down all the men they’d seen, but most of their forces would come from outside, the twenty just needed to be capable of distracting the men.

  Bobby got himself a glass of some lab grown alcoholic drink and forced himself to relax by watching the luminescent particles swirling around in the drink. He wouldn’t have much time to relax later and he was beginning to think even one hundred and twenty skeletons may be insufficient.

  He surveyed the other guests, seeing a lot of members that were obviously from other gangs and a few smartly dressed individuals who looked like they had snuck down from the city above. Novel events seemed to attract people en masse, one of the troubles he would probably face soon was taking over the Kamden crew while avoiding anyone around him dying. They may be able to kill each other in a moment, but he didn’t want to be responsible for any deaths as he wasn’t sure how vengeful each faction was.

  In fact if everything went to plan the people around him would not even realise their hosts were under new management. Bobby took a sip and swilled the drink round his mouth before carefully letting it dribble back into the glass when his taste buds didn’t agree with whatever sugars it contained.

  Then before he had time to stew any further the lighting dimmed and a loudspeaker system crackled awake. “Everyone in ball rooms numbered one to twenty, get ready for a night you won’t forget, please find your seats and settle down for some BLOOD and GORE or shout as loud as you can, we don’t give a shit. The fight will be two hours long with an intermission of fifteen minutes in the middle, so make sure you piss now before you lose control of your bladder in the excitement.”

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