A drum beat assaulted Lloyd’s head, relentless in its torment, building and climbing into an exploding crescendo. He scrunched his eyes shut. They hid behind their lids, darting around. Colours blurred together, creating red flares amidst the black. Crashing symbols flashed through his body. A high-pitched ringing vibrated through his ears and rattled his brain. He plummeted through darkness, lost in the haze. His head nodded and lolled. Rain pattered on glass somewhere. He was in too much pain to be dreaming. His thoughts were incoherent, just out of reach, making it impossible to concentrate. His limbs were tight. Stretched and torn, his veins bulged at his skin under the tension, threatening to rip tears in his arms and burst out.
He opened his eyes. The firelight in some corner of the dark room caused him to squint in retreat. Again, he drew them open, slowly this time. Familiarising them with the light. He felt pain everywhere. More than pain – agony. He scoured his body, terrified of what he might see.
Thick motorcycle chains lashed to a wooden beam above his head secured his wrists, the chains near severing his hands. Their teeth chewed his flesh, and his blood trickled down his arms and through the crags of his black-scaled skin. The beam yawned and groaned as it bowed under the tension. He willed it to snap. It stared back at him defiantly. A third chain bound his feet, nailed into the floorboards with a huge rail stake. He tried to move, to wriggle and writhe. Nothing.
Maybe he could pull at the beam. Somehow dislodge it. He kicked his feet, contorted his body, flapped through the agony like a fish on the end of a line. No, nothing. As he heaved a deep breath, a sharp jolt flashed him into life and his ribs screamed as he gasped for air. Taking shallow breaths, he decided that his ribs on his right side had to be broken. Purple pooled under his skin, his sharp bones threatening to burst through. Worse than any of this, he was suffering from withdrawal.
Sweat seeped out of him, his body glistening with a waxy sheen in the firelight. He coughed hard, the rasp of it burning his throat as blood exploded and splattered the glass in front of him. The chains suspended him a few feet from a massive window over twice the length of his body, divided into smaller squares of glass with metal framing.
It was hot in the room. Heavy air stifled him. Beads of condensation trickled on the windows, but he was cold. He shivered and rattled, desperately scanning the darkness outside for some clue of where he was and why he was there. He was high up. At least on the second floor. He blinked blood from his eyes, looked down, and instantly, he knew where he was.
Below him, The Gardens loomed, firelight shimmering in the shacks and stalls. Low, glowing flames cast eerie shadows over the swamp and the Archway Squats on the far side. He knew it well. Through the Archway Squats were the tramlines and, beyond that, the Mercure Hotel. He could see its windows in the dark sky opposite, like hundreds of eyes staring back, taunting him, watching his plight.
The dull trod of boots on floorboards cut through the ringing in his ears. A reflection in the glass chilled him to his bones. A man stood behind him, his empty gaze burning into the back of his skull.
The man was a wolf, tall and whip-lean, every inch a predator. His movements all assured and intentional, there was nothing clumsy about this man, nothing weak. Not on the surface anyway, thought Lloyd. The man stepped forward out of the shadow, each thud of his boots more unsettling than the last. A weathered baseball cap protruded out from under his large hood, casting a dark shadow over his face. Eyes of angry blue fire, illuminated by the flickering glow, were visible over a thick black snood that covered the rest of his face. His right arm trailed behind him. His hand, wrapped with strips of dark cloth, grasped a black hatchet. The blade edge was a razor, but the flat of the head was gnarly and pitted, covered in mottled blood, hair, and dead skin. His jacket hung open, exposing a rough leather harness strapped to his chest and metal-looped sheaths hanging off to his sides. Long railway stakes with makeshift handles, bound with strips of brown leather, rested in them. From a thick black belt around his waist hung two more stakes. Strapped to his leg, in a leather holster wrapped with silver tape, was a stubby shotgun crudely hacked down to size. A soulless chill emanated from his stare, and when he spoke, his tone was deep and guttural.
“The Conduit. I want a name. Now.”
Lloyd grimaced, fighting through the searing pain in his head as he tried to think. “I don’t have a name,” Lloyd sobbed. “I swear I don’t, please. Am I going to die?”
The man stepped to Lloyd, nose to nose. A grubby hand yanked down the snood. His breath was hot scotch and blood. “You’ll die, you filth,” he spat, “whether you die by this, or this, is your choice.”
As he spoke, the man raised his hands. In one, the nasty-looking hatchet, and in the other was heaven itself – a perfectly clean syringe. Inside, a shimmering golden liquid, littered with flecks of bronze dancing like blossoms on a summer breeze. Lloyd’s body spasmed and contorted, lurching towards the syringe. He forgot his pain, and the chains biting his wrists subsided into a tickle.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
“The gear, give me the gear,” Lloyd begged. His tears evaporated. He salivated from the corners of his mouth. “I don’t know the Conduit, I fucking swear!”
The man raised his fist. The needle pointing towards the floor, he slowly pressed down the plunger. Golden liquid dripped onto the boards below, landing in splotches of shimmering gold solder.
“Stop, stop, I can help.”
“Then help. Now,” the man snarled.
“Only one man knows the Conduit…but you know that, or why else am I hung above The Gardens?”
“Name.”
Lloyd tried to swallow. His throat was like sandpaper, dry and cracked. His eyes had returned to the syringe and locked to it in anticipation.
“Name,” repeated the man as, once more, he pressed the plunger, expelling golden liquid from the syringe.
“Shit, stop, stop...Marcus,” stammered Lloyd. “His name is Marcus!”
“Point him out.”
Lloyd’s head shifted left to right, scanning The Gardens below. A group of drunks staggered near the tramlines, none of them Marcus. He continued his desperate searching. No sign. He glanced at his captor nervously, once, twice; minutes dragged on, but still, no sign.
He risked another glance. He caught the eye of the man, who glowered at him. Lloyd looked some more. It was dark down there, other than for the dim flickers of orange dancing in the shacks and stalls. The Archway Squats was foreboding, a deep chasm of black presiding over The Gardens. Smoke billowed out of its mouth from the faint cookfires in its belly. One light inside was brighter than the rest, however, growing larger and closer and warmer as it bobbed in the dark.
“There!” exclaimed Lloyd. “The man there with the torch, leading the group. That’s Marcus, that’s the runner!”
Below and across the square, a group of four men were being led out of a dark archway by a man holding a flaming torch above his head. He strode forward with purpose, across a boarded path over a muddy marsh, heading towards a large wooden shack holding the corner of the square. In front of the shack stood a hulking figure, holding a huge cleaver in his hands, defiant against the sheets of rain.
“What makes you so sure he knows the Conduit?”
A single tear dropped from Lloyd’s eye and rolled down his cheek, carving a line in the dirt on his face. It dropped to the floor and joined the pool of blood at his feet.
“Speak!”
“Marcus is my brother,” Lloyd snapped through gritted teeth. “Now give it to me! I helped you, now give it to me!”
The man’s sapphire eyes tore through Lloyd’s face. He could feel the disgust radiating from them. “Very well,” the man replied, the contempt in his eyes replaced by a twinkle. He raised the syringe and hovered the needle over a bulging vein in Lloyd’s neck.
Excitement pulsed through Lloyd’s body, the eager anticipation too much to hold. He was so close, painstakingly close, to the feeling of a warm soup and a cosy warm blanket on a midwinter's day. So close to the unparalleled sensation of pure ecstasy tingling through every fibre of his being. He licked his lips and felt his heart racing, pounding and thumping, threatening to burst through his scaled chest.
He howled in anguish as the man slammed the plunger and emptied the syringe to the floor. The golden liquid joined his blood and tears on the boards below. He furiously spasmed in his chains, growling and snapping his teeth, eyes alight with fire and hatred.
The man stepped back, pulling the rail stake from the holster under his chest. He held it, sharp end pointing at the floor, his eyes blank and expressionless. He raised his hatchet, and with an explosive snap of his arm, he swung it back-handed across Lloyd’s stomach. His thin yellow skin burst open, and his entrails gushed to the floor.
Lloyd looked at his disembowelled guts in horrified disbelief.
In a perfect flow, displaying years of mastery, the man flicked the stake into the air. It spun above Lloyd’s head and hung there for an age, glittering in the firelight before it dropped. The man expertly caught it, level with Lloyd’s chest, the point resting perfectly on his skin. Reversing the hatchet, he hammered the blunt end into the handle of the stake, driving it through Lloyd’s heart. Blood spurted across the room, splashing the man’s face with lashes of crimson.
Lloyd’s head nodded into his chest. With all his might, summoning the hunger of every cell in his body, he made one last lunge towards the golden liquid pooled on the floor, but it was to no end. His eyes dropped, blinking, locked to the bronze flecks swirling like diesel in a puddle of murky rain. So beautiful, he thought as his eyes closed.
The man spat on the floor and turned back to the window. His relentless blue stare relaxed into curious thought as Marcus halted before the giant with the cleaver.