[Latent - Condemned Docks: The Beast]
A jack of hearts slid across the table. A blood-speckled four of clubs atop it. The next card, and the next, too sodden to slide over the surface to join the others. One the TV, a reporter yammered about some event, while some weirdo BDSM enthusiast and a man sparkling a different color every minute enganged in fisticuffs outside an expensive hotel.
For some reason though, the dripping from the chair next to him seemed likely to drown it out.
Dumpster-breath had been holding one pisser of a st hand. Sunken gray eyes turned to the pale faced man curled into himself on the floor beside the chair, gone stiff now, holding his guts in with one hand. ****** shame he couldn’t hold his blood in too, laying in a near kiddie pool of the stuff now, the tt. Dumpster-breath had a familiar face. Not one he could place, but familiar. He knew he knew him, but didn’t know from where, or when. Not like a corpse needed a name. Same went for Dickless, leaned backward of his chair with a gun in limp fingers like he might have fallen asleep, if not for the eyes staring wide at the ceiling and the cavern where everything below his ribcage, all the way down to his legs should have been- now, maybe he still had his dk, but nobody was checking and it seemed likely as not it was gone when you could see his twiddly little spine from of him. Pornstache looked more familiar than any of them, an expression of surprise still on his face, hand clasped around his throat, the pistol in his outstretched arm rested on top of the table, angled toward the door, spent casings around his arm. Every time he stared at them, he remembered that he remembered, but not WHAT he remembered, something old stirring, but it only made his head throb and his stomach growl, flashes of nonsense, familiar and alien, jumbles of thoughts out of order. Pain. So he didn’t like staring at them. He stared at their last friend, Billy-boy. His favorite. Billy-boy didn’t remind him of anyone.
Possibly because his head above his jaw seemed spread across the wall behind where his body lay slumped atop the broken remains of his chair, popped like juicy-lil-grape. Billy-boy was Nikolai’s favorite. Except that it was probably his juicy-grape-brains that’d left his hands so caked in blood and guts, right under his nails and in every nook, up his sleeves, that he wasn’t sure he’d ever wash it out. He’d need a new suit too.
Nikolai West leaned over in his chair to snuff his cigar on Dickless’ forehead, the four other burns on it and butts on the ground, where he flicked the remains of this one his only reference for how long he’d been here since all this s**t went down, the events of it all missing from his increasingly spotty memory. He knew he hadn’t always been like that. Until…. Until…
He couldn’t recall, but it didn’t matter. Trying to recall just made him hangry, and he was already the best, toughest ****** cruising the slums. He knew that much. The hunger was always there lately, and the more he fed it the worse it got, but the better that eating felt, like he’d been some floor-shitting little growing-baby-boy, and needed to start getting his gains started before the cycle kicked in, hungrier, better, better, hungrier. Whatever his little spark was, it had gone from nearly dead, choking on the air when he’d had his first memory of it to now. A b*h-breaking badass, like he should be. His shirt was soaked in blood, but the dark, almost black stains in his shirt where the bullet holes were barely even hurt underneath it anymore.
The lavender pinstripe suit was mottled in all manner of red, and torn up, half of his bright orange tie missing where the holes were, but deepset, beady gray eyes chased movement and trails of splatter across the room as he chewed on something. Someone, probably, He was kind of curious what, but not enough to spit it out and check when he was so damned hungry. And the eating it tickled his mind, made his body stronger, made everything right, even if the flesh was just an appetizer. It tickled the appetite, but he knew in the back of his mind it wasn’t what he’d come here for. Lucid again, he rose and dusted off his suit- smearing the thick mess on the front of it and tossing blood droplets across the table. The wide square jaw ground as he raised his head, sniffing, veins across the bald cranium turning dark black and wriggling like worms, twisting into arcane shapes and dispersing again as he followed that commanding reek, the scent of the next meal and-
Massive hands gripped the knife on his belt and pulled it out of the sheath with a wet slurp, gore-covered blade sticking a moment before it popped free. Settling down on his haunches over the late Dumpster-breath, the giant thug stared at him hard for a moment, tilting his head- as if that face might make more sense from another angle. Squinting, it only made his head hurt more for a moment- he took a swipe at the face, and sure enough, the look of the cheeky little dead ******** didn’t bother him half as much without his nose. Prying stiff arms away from the body, Nikolai pulled one hand at a time out across the floor, slamming the butt of the knife until bone crunched, then sawing his blade through until he had two hands in-hand, stuffing the stiff bundles of digits into his coat pocket, he walked over to a large shipping crate. Not that a lot came through this way- whatever this was, it was either being illegally brought on a larger shipment to be sold over, or somebody was doing a night-run into the dead old condemned docks on a smaller ship. Either way, by the time he was done snarling and hitting and ripping at the wooden box until the bits of jewelry, books, and dulled copper knife carefully packed inside were strewn across the floor, he’d worked up a nice light sweat to compliment his appetite. There were directions. Magic artifacts- that must have been why they smelled sooooooooo ****** good. Apparently, one or two were earmarked, but most were only for sale to some shitlicker big-spending in Durem. Lil-something. What a tt.
They belonged to the King now.
Pulling the hands from his pocket, Nikolai took a necklace and ring, laying them across the palm, and then placed the copper knife across the thing as well, before taking the other and carefully pushing until he had himself a handy little sandwich. Lips grinning wider, wider, too wide, he opened his mouth, bringing the mass of enchanted metal and dead flesh up to his lips.
*CRUNCH.*
In his gut, his little friend sang.
”Damnatus” Wrote:
