David Neale (revenir) wrote in repose, @ 2018-04-03 18:37:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | *log, aiden baptiste, david neale |
Log: Capital - David and Aiden
Who: The Revenant and a Reaper
What: The Revenant is delivering up souls, and the Reaper is reaping them.
Where: The Capital - a no-name brothel by the docks.
When: Recently.
Warnings/Rating: Violence.
The no-name brothel wasn't an 'establishment.' There was no madam, no magnolias spilling from crystal bowls, no buxom girl with sweet breath at the door to take your coat. It had: bare rooms, bare bulbs, and the meagerest of comforts. It had: thin, cheap comforters and short carpet. It had: linoleum in the hallways. Once upon a time, this had been a dockside motel where a sailor might stay the night before putting out again. There was still a certain tang in the air when walking inside, but it wasn't salt.
The girls were gone. They flooded out the front door into the night, one of them clutching an index card with a scrawled address where they might find helping hands. Trafficked, almost to a one. If they didn't want to go home, the people on the card would find them a place to stay. If they wanted to leave, they would put them on a boat and send them back to their families, their children, their sisters.
That left just the Revenant. The men who had run this place were dead now, all except Charlie. Charlie was in the back office, lying in a pool of his own blood in a pile of counterfeit export papers. Charlie was talking.
Routes in and out of the city, and who was responsible for them, where the terror standing over him could find the cash they had stored, who he was working for, it all spilled out of Charlie's shattered jaw in a flow of words and red-tinged spittle.
The Revenant just wanted to know where Dalisay was. Where was she buried? Her family missed her.
Dalisay had spent her life in the Philippines. She was top of her class, and when a cousin offered her passage to America, she took him up on the offer. The boat hadn't gone in the direction she expected. Her life had ended in this building. He could feel her here, somewhere.
Charlie said Dalisay was in the wall of the first floor bathroom. She was hiding behind the tile, like a sleeper in a tomb.
The Revenant didn't need a bullet to kill Charlie. One sharp drop of boot heel was enough to destroy him. "Destroy," he said, out loud, to himself. Such a strange word. The word they used for putting down horses when they'd broken a leg. They had to be destroyed.
There were two dead men in the hall, and one dead inside the front door, which had a hole in it the shape and size of the Revenant's fist. He opened a white hand and brushed his thumb across the black ash that had gathered in the crevices of already healing wounds. Standing six feet something, eyes white, flesh white, hair matted with blood and shrouded in black that hung low on his body, he was a halloween ghost with real blood on his fingers.
If he had known that death was coming, he still couldn't have dressed more for the occasion.