They walked out into the living room. Julia grabbed the handles of the heavy canvas duffel bag, slinging the strap over her shoulder, and gripped the handles of two of the large suitcases. Santi, despite his small size, grabbed the handles of the remaining two suitcases, determined to carry his own weight.
They walked out of the apartment, the heavy door clicking shut behind them for the final time.
The elevator ride down to the lobby was slow and quiet. When the doors finally parted, Julia walked directly to the concierge desk. The corporate attendant behind the marble counter didn't even look up from his terminal, his optical implants glowing faintly as he processed incoming data.
Julia pulled a small, silver data drive from her pocket that contained the encrypted access logs, the biometric key codes, and the official surrender of the property. She placed it on the marble counter.
"Apartment 7004," Julia stated, her voice devoid of any emotion. "We are vacating the premises per the termination agreement."
The attendant finally looked up, swiftly taking the drive and slotting it into his terminal. He tapped a few keys, and the screen flashed green.
"Confirmed. Your access codes have been revoked and your biometric data purged from the residential registry," the attendant recited in a bored tone. "You are officially removed from the Charter Hill corporate database. Have a pleasant day in Night City."
Just like that, they were erased. Almost twenty years of climbing the corporate ladder, twenty years of Alejandro bleeding for Militech, wiped away with a single keystroke.
Julia turned away from the desk, guiding Santi toward the expansive glass doors of the lobby. Outside, the relentless, acidic rain continued to fall, washing the neon reflections of the city across the wet pavement. A sleek, armored taxicab was idling at the curb, its heavily tinted windows obscuring the interior.
As the automated doors slid open and the damp, smog-choked air of Night City hit her face, Julia's mind briefly flashed back to the call she had made the previous night.
She had locked herself in the bathroom, using a burner Agent to bypass the corporate communication logs, and dialed a heavily encrypted international number. She had called her parents.
They had lived in Mexico for almost fifteen years now, having fled the suffocating corporate grind of Night City to retire in a small, quiet coastal community far away from the smog and the gang violence.
When her mother had answered, Julia had broken down. She had explained everything: Alejandro's death, her immediate termination, the impending eviction, and the absolute lack of safe harbor for her and Santi. She had begged for help.
Her mother had wept for her daughter's pain, immediately agreeing to let them use the old family property that had been sitting vacant in Santo Domingo for a decade and a half. But then her father took the phone.
"I told you, Julia," her father's voice had crackled over the poor connection, bitter and entirely devoid of sympathy. "I told you the day you married him that the Solo would leave you in the gutter. I knew he was nothing but a street-rat playing dress-up in a corpo suit. He played a dangerous game, and now my daughter and my grandson are paying the price for his stupidity."
Julia had bitten her tongue so hard it bled, stopping herself from burning her current lifeline by defending Alejandro and screaming at her father. She had swallowed her pride and her rage because she desperately needed a roof over her child's head.
"The house is yours," her father had grumbled finally. "But it has been sitting empty in Rancho Coronado for fifteen years. God only knows what state of disrepair it is in. We'll send you the access codes. Keep your head down, Julia."
A quiet moment passed before her father spoke again. "I'm sorry you have to go through this. If you need anything, let us know... Te amo, mija."
The memory of the call faded as the cab's rear window slid open. "I ain't got all day to be waiting around, woman. You gonna get in or what?"
"Ah, I'm sorry, yes," Julia apologized to the cab driver and loaded the suitcases into the trunk before ushering Santi into the backseat, and climbing in beside him, throwing the heavy duffel bag onto the floor space.
"We're going to Rancho Coronado, Santo Domingo," Julia told the driver. "Take the highway toward the badlands. There is an unnamed residential cross-street situated directly between Sequoia Street, Crestmont Street, and Bullard Street. Drop us at the intersection."
"Yeah, I know where the place. Dingy little spot," the driver responded with a grunt. "Time says forty-two minutes, pero solo Diosito sabe si es verdad (but only God knows if that's true)."
The cab pulled away from the curb, merging smoothly into the elevated traffic roads of Charter Hill.
For the first twenty minutes, the view outside the reinforced windows consisted of towering glass skyscrapers, glowing corporate advertisements, and elevated sky-bridges connecting the bastions of the ultra-wealthy. But as the cab descended the massive off-ramps and crossed the municipal border into Santo Domingo, the other side of Night City violently asserted itself.
The gleaming glass and steel gave way to rust, stained concrete, and sprawling industrial complexes. The air outside grew visibly thicker, choked with the yellow-brown smog of the Arroyo factories.
Santi stared out the window, his tear-stained face illuminated by the flickering, broken neon signs of cheap ripperdoc clinics and grimy liquor stores. He was analyzing the architectural shift of the buildings and the disparity between the two places. Charter Hill was built on verticality and optimization, while Santo Domingo was a sprawling, chaotic mess of poverty, pollution, and survival.
The cab navigated the cracked, pothole-riddled streets of Rancho Coronado. The neighborhood was a maze of identical, decaying single and two-story tract homes, originally built in the 2020s for the corporate middle-class before the sector had been abandoned to the gangoons and the working poor. Now it was under the control of the 6th Street gang, whose presence could be seen throughout the sector.
"We're here," the driver announced, and the cab turned off the main thoroughfare and rolled slowly down a narrow, unnamed street lined with cracked sidewalks and overgrown, dead weeds. It pulled to a smooth stop at the curb.
"That'll be 200 eduardos," the driver said.
Julia paid the exorbitant fare, and they stepped out into the humid, garbage-scented air of Santo Domingo. As soon as she retrieved their luggage, the cab quickly sped away, eager to get the hell out of dodge.
She turned and looked at their new home.
It was a single-story brick house, the masonry stained black with decades of acid rain and industrial soot. The front lawn was a patch of hard, dead dirt, and looking up, Julia could see the roof. There were four working solar panels, their glass surfaces cracked but still drawing a meager charge, alongside three entirely shattered, non-working panels that had been utterly destroyed by hail or vandalism.
The property was bordered by a chain-link fence that was rusted through in several places. Through the gaps, Julia could see the backyard. It possessed a detached, dilapidated garage and, crucially, an open, unsecured access point that bled directly out onto Sequoia Street.
Because of that open access, the backyard had clearly become a dumping ground with piles of soggy cardboard, shattered glass bottles, and rusted, discarded cyberware parts heaped near the back door. The stench of rotting trash was overpowering.
Julia looked across the street. Looming over the neighborhood was the short concrete structure of the NC Center for Behavioural Health. The facility looked more like a maximum-security prison than a hospital, its walls topped with razor wire and security cameras panning the street.
Just down the block, lingering near a broken streetlamp, Julia spotted a group of five men. They wore tactical vests, combat boots, and American flag bandanas wrapped around their arms and faces.
6th Street gangoons.
They were passing a bottle of cheap synth-liquor back and forth, their optics glowing in the shadows as they openly stared at the woman and the small boy standing on the sidewalk with a pile of expensive luggage.
Fear spiked in Julia's chest. They were absolute prey out here.
"Grab your bags, Santi," Julia said urgently, keeping her eyes fixed forward, refusing to make eye contact with the gangers. "Move quickly and head straight for the front door."
Santi grabbed his two suitcases and followed her up the cracked concrete path. They stepped onto the small front porch. The wood was entirely rotted, groaning dangerously beneath their weight.
Julia pulled her Agent from her pocket and brought up the digital key her father had sent her, pressing the device against the rusted electronic lock on the front door. The lock beeped weakly, protesting the sudden use after fifteen years of dormancy, and the heavy deadbolt ground against the rusted frame before the door finally clicked open.
Julia pushed the door inward, and they were immediately hit by a wall of utterly foul, stale air. It was a suffocating smell, a mixture of mildew, trapped dust, peeling wallpaper, and something deeply, inherently rancid that made Julia's stomach violently heave. The house was pitch black, the heavy blackout curtains drawn tightly shut over the windows.
"Papi," Julia choked out, pulling her shirt up over her nose to filter the stench. "Wait out here on the porch for a minute. Do not go near the street. I need to go inside and open up the windows to let this air out."
Santi nodded, dropping his suitcases on the porch. He stood perfectly still, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his hoodie, his violet eyes warily watching the 6th Street gangers down the block.
Julia took a deep breath of the relatively cleaner outside air and stepped into the pitch-black house. The floorboards creaked under her boots, and she fumbled blindly in the dark, her hands brushing against dust-covered walls and cobwebs. She navigated by memory from her childhood, moving through the narrow living room and down the short hallway toward the master bedroom.
She found the doorway and stepped inside. The rancid, suffocating smell was infinitely stronger in here. It smelled like copper, rotting meat, and vomit. It was the smell of death.
Julia coughed, her eyes watering as she stumbled across the room, her hands desperately searching for the heavy curtains. She found the thick fabric and ripped it backward, throwing the window open to the gray light of the stormy afternoon.
The dim light flooded the master bedroom, and Julia turned around to survey the room, and the breath was violently stolen from her lungs.
Lying in the center of the rotting mattress was a corpse.
It was a man, though his features were barely recognizable. His skin was a mottled shade of purple and black, bloated with advanced decomposition. He was dressed in filthy, ragged clothing. A crude, rusted cybernetic arm lay limply at his side. Clutched in his remaining organic hand was a heavy, glass hypodermic syringe, the plunger fully depressed. Dozens of empty, crushed ampoules of Black Lace and synthetic heroin littered the floor around the bed. A thick, dark puddle of dried fluids had seeped into the mattress beneath him.
The corpse had been rotting in the suffocating heat of the sealed house for at least a week. Maggots writhed in the sunken hollows of his eye sockets.
A high, terrified scream ripped from Julia's throat before she could stop it.
She spun around, clamping a hand over her mouth as she violently dry-heaved. She bolted from the bedroom, sprinting frantically down the dark hallway and bursting out the front door, gasping desperately for the fresh, rainy air.
Santi jumped, his hand instinctively flying to his backpack where his cyberdeck was stored. "Ma? What is it? What happened?"
"Stay out here!" Julia gasped, leaning over the porch railing and spitting bile into the dead grass. She pulled her Agent from her pocket with shaking, frantic hands. "Do not go inside!"
She dialed the emergency NCPD dispatch frequency. It rang three times before a bored operator picked up.
"NCPD Dispatch. What is the nature of your emergency?"
"I just found a dead body!" Julia cried, pacing frantically on the porch. "I just moved into my family's old property in Rancho Coronado! I opened the bedroom door, and there is a dead man on the bed!"
"Address?" the operator asked, entirely unbothered by the panic in her voice.
Julia rattled off the intersection and the specific block details.
"Copy that. A patrol unit will be dispatched when available. Do not touch the remains."
Then the line clicked dead.
Julia stood on the rotting porch, her arms wrapped tightly around herself, trembling uncontrollably. Santi stood quietly beside her, his small hand reaching out to grip the fabric of her sweater. He leaned against her side, offering what little comfort a grieving ten-year-old could provide.
They waited in the grim afternoon. The 6th Street gangoons down the street eventually grew bored of staring at them and wandered off into an alley, seeking shelter from the worsening rain.
The wail of a police siren echoed through the neighborhood over thirty minutes later.
In the affluent sectors of Charter Hill or Corpo Plaza, a thirty-minute response time for a reported corpse would have resulted in an immediate internal investigation and the firing of the responding officers. In the forgotten, decaying sprawl of Santo Domingo, a thirty-minute response time was considered a miraculous record.
A battered, heavily armored NCPD cruiser pulled up to the curb, its red and blue lights reflecting off the puddles in the street. Two patrol officers stepped out wearing heavy tactical armor and carrying shotguns, their faces hidden behind rain-streaked visors.
"You the one who called it in?" the lead officer grunted, walking up the cracked path.
"Yes," Julia said, her voice shaking. She pointed a trembling finger toward the open front door. "He is in the master bedroom down the hall."
The officers sighed, clearly annoyed by the paperwork. They walked into the house, activating the tactical flashlights mounted on their shoulders.
Julia and Santi waited on the porch, and five minutes later, the officers emerged. They weren't rushing or calling for crime scene investigators or trauma teams.
"Just another street-rat who pushed his luck," the lead officer said, casually adjusting the strap of his shotgun. "Looks like an overdose. Black Lace, probably cut with rat poison. Happens ten times a day in this area. The back door was kicked in, and by the looks of it, he squatted here for about a week or so to ride out a binge, and his heart finally popped."
"What... what are you going to do?" Julia asked, staring at the officer in disbelief.
"Called a meat-wagon," the officer replied, gesturing down the street as a rusted, heavily armored municipal ambulance turned the corner. "They'll bag the body and haul it to the incinerator. You're gonna have to buy a new mattress, lady. And you might want to invest in security for that back door, or the next squatter might not be dead when you find him."
The ambulance pulled up, and paramedics in heavy hazmat gear walked into the house with a black body bag. Less than five minutes later, they dragged the heavy, foul-smelling bag out the front door, tossing it without any care into the back of the ambulance.
The cops got back into their cruiser, and the ambulance drove away. The entire horrific ordeal was processed, categorized, and forgotten by the city in less than fifteen minutes.
Julia stood on the rotting porch of the decaying, garbage-strewn house. She looked at her ten-year-old son, who was staring blankly at the empty street, his genius mind attempting to calculate the unadulterated apathy of the world they had just been thrust into.
Julia let out a hollow, bitter laugh that sounded more like a sob as the rain continued to fall, washing the grime deeper into the concrete. Alejandro was dead, her career ashes, and her family had been reduced to the clothes in their bags, standing on a rotting porch that smelled of dead junkies and stale despair.
What a damn welcome to their new lives.
---
HALT! Stones, must pay tax!
The infamous P@treon exists for those of you who want to read ahead.
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They get around 3 long-form weekly chapters (4.5-6k words each).