Dirty Work: Volume 1

Cold Space - 6

I have shot at the underworld version of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. I have been shot at, chased, had numerous guns held to my head and watched people die. Entering into the small room with the door ripped off its hinges and red smears along all the walls with bones for islands in rivers of blood, I felt more scared than I have ever done in my life. For once, there was no adrenaline mixed in with the fear. It was sheer terror.

Ashrore went ahead of me, tail now stilled and upright, flat against her back as she took one, two and all three feet over the threshold. I followed after, ducking past the grimy door.

The temperature suddenly dropped once we entered into the room. We scanned with our lights. Nobody home.

On the floor were numerous skulls, bones of every kind, along with scraps of flesh and strips of cloth that were once clothes. Blood was everywhere and the smell of piss and excrement was strong. The man wasn't toilet trained, it seemed, and due to the location, half of the work had been done for him. The room stank of death itself.

We rummaged through the skulls, looking for anything of interest, namely the case.

Up-ending one skull, I saw a glint of something small and sharp. I looked closer and extracted a syringe from the eye-socket.

'The fuck?' I whispered. Ashrore looked over at me and took a closer inspection. It was clear, with a blue marking on the side. Nothing in the syringe, empty, save for a single drop of blood on the needle.

'Drug addict, then,' she said. I looked at the floor near where I had picked the skull up and, to my surprise, saw this section of the room just a carpet of needles. How I hadn't noticed them before, I don't know. Probably through sheer terror.

And suddenly it all clicked.

'The stuff in the case,' I said. 'You don't think...'

'He'ssss an addict on one hell of a bad trip?' Ashrore commented. 'I would ssssay sssso. Driven him to almost nothing. He thinkssss he issss an animal, ripping people apart to get more of the sssstuff. It explainssss the casssse being taken. And why he attacked thosssse guyssss we were delivering to.'

I remembered back to his eyes that I had seen. They weren't just eyes of hate, or rage, or fury, or even of anything inhuman. They were the eyes of desire, and despair. In a split second, I almost felt sorry for the man. No, I almost felt pity.

This was a man that had consumed something he shouldn't have. He wouldn't have known that this is what it did to him. More than likely his body lived on it to survive, and with the amount of exchanges done down in the tunnels, he would get it. There were more spirits haunting the passages and dark reaches underneath Celestria than just criminals. This is where the lowest came to die, and sometimes to live on after death.

'We sssstill need the casssse,' Ashrore said. 'Sssshould we wait for him to return?'

'He's already been back and gone again,' I said. 'Unless he came back after killing the other guys. In which casssse...'

We heard scampering outside the room, from the tunnel.

We raised our guns to the door and turned off the lights. We waited to spring the trap.