“Come on, get up” said the taller one.
He felt a gloved hand grasp at the hair on his head. It seemed to seep through the man’s fingers, the colour of old blood and dark wines. The boy was reeling with shock and terror, the firm grip upon his scalp doing nothing to tear his eyes from all those little black blotches forming on the ground beneath him. His nose was dripping – it felt broken, maybe even shattered. One of them had landed a blow right in the centre of his face, the offending fist sheathed in almost an inch of unfeeling steel. It hurt like hell, like fire soaring up his nostrils and through all the wrong canals, straight into the fleshy meshwork of his brain.
They dragged him back into the living room, where his father was slumped like a sack of potatoes against the sofa he had scavenged last year. He sputtered at the smell that assailed his nose – make that a sack of
rotten potatoes. Slowly, the rank odour sank in, and despite all his attempts to think to the contrary, he began to realize what it meant.
His heart began to rage wildly against its cage. He felt stupid, masculine, and vindicated. His breath sharpened, and through him, like a plague of flame, the drool of a war-god ran.
“Him too?”
“
No.” he interjected.
At first, he didn’t know what this feeling was. But when they were lying at his feet, strewn like scattered puzzle-pieces across the frayed carpet, he realized it was anger. But anger like nothing he’d ever felt before.
-~-
“Holy shit, man…
fuck…”
Christopher spat out a lungful of narcotics and turned to glance in the direction of his fatter, louder companion’s voice. The alley was etched deep and slathered in a thick, palpable murk, just like most of Ganymede, but he could just about make out the stumbling silhouette lurching its way towards them. It looked like the living dead, and when it finally stepped out of the shadows, it wasn’t looking any better. It was, however, looking pretty familiar.
He was covered from head to toe in a veil of unmistakeable crimson, but Culainn’s weird tattoo was just as distinctive as ever. The look in his eyes was new, though. They surveyed the world around him with wolfish fury, as though they were about to just pop straight outta their sockets and take a bite from whatever Culainn’s gaze happened to be settled on.
“
Hey,” rasped the spectre, his voice a skeletonized rattle of its former self.
As he advanced, Christopher couldn’t help but feel a feral anxiety coiling through his gut, as though the creature stalking towards him was more animal than man, and far more worthy of fright than either. Sensing their friend’s discomfort, a few of his fellow gangers detached from the dumpster they’d picked out as their diner for the night, falling in around him like a pack of ghouls.
Culainn grinned. He grinned and grinned and bored his eyes into Christopher’s skull until his teeth seemed sharper than hell, and his eyes darker than the deepest of Ganymede’s pitiless caverns. The back of his skull pulsed. He could feel the growing, dusky glow of rage spreading embers through his brain, down his spine, into the webways of his veins and arteries, where it transformed into a brutal, sulphuric rhythm – one that he, for some reason, knew exactly how to move to.
“
You’re the snitches, right?”
