The built-up area was soon finished. Before our eyes, a two-lane asphalt road running parallel to the buildings was revealed. To the right, the road was lost behind a bend about fifty meters away, to the left, no more than twenty meters from us, it widened into a parking lot bathed in dim orange light, where tanks with the HematOpolis logo and cattle trucks had stopped. Behind the parking lot, I saw a portal with a glazed security booth, located next to a raised barrier and three lamps mounted on high metal poles. In both directions, a folded sheet metal fence, about two meters high, ran from the gate, apparently circling the entire perimeter of Ghamborz's slaughterhouse.

"The drivers and workers on the assembly lines inside are human," Tania whispered to me, "I know that for sure because I've driven customers here many times for their night shifts. The guards are vampires. We have to cross the road to crawl to the fence and jump over it somewhere higher. I don't think we will have problems, security measures are routine so I doubt they expect intrusion.”

"So nothing hard then," I replied.

We crouched and crossed the road. We found ourselves in a field consisting of unsupported chaos of alternating cracked concrete islands and low thorny bushes, and this turned our crawling into a unique ‘pleasure’. I managed to turn the nail on my right index finger inside out and had at least a million thorns stuck in my palms. The werewolf gracefully slid in front of me and did not seem to be facing the same issues as me.

After what seemed like an eternity, we managed to reach the slaughterhouse fence. By that point, I was breathing like a broken aerate-car. Tania jumped effortlessly up to the fence, pulled herself upwards using her arms, and moved easily on to the other side. I tried to repeat her performance with varying degrees of success, the jump and the grip turned out crooked, but as I attempted to pull myself upwards, I scratched about with my legs pointlessly for a bit, and finally, after a lot of effort, I managed to jump over the fence.

In the distance, I saw a complex of buildings oriented radially around one with significantly larger dimensions.

"It has assembly lines with suction devices," Tania explained pointing to the big building. "The workers call her the Leech. The animals - birds, sheep, cattle, everything you can think of, except pigs, the unliving ones are disgusted by them, are herded there from Ghamborz's farms and are separated in their respective booths with either the guillotines, the snorkels and…”

The werewolf stopped, obviously feeling that this outflow of information was completely unnecessary, and would have just upset me even more.

"I doubt they took your wife to the Leech, Doc. Too many eyes, too many awkward questions. I guess they're in one of the surrounding buildings, either service room, warehouse, or something similar. My instinct tells me that somewhere there is a blood suction device installed for drying out people more discreetly.”

I gritted my teeth and nodded

"Let's go find Lucy!"

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A person born on the street like me is intimately familiar with violence.

Burg Central, Burg Parallel, Burg Crossroads, so many Burgs - different names, different populations, different geographical locations, proximity to a mountain, a small or a large body of water, a difference in everything, but in reality they are all the same.

Under the guise of the apparent well-being of a consumer society, horrific crime flourished in every corner of the Community. Large gangster organizations, all sorts of smaller factions of werewolves, vampires, and humans, no different from wild beasts, were constantly at war over the redistribution of market territory for flesh, blood, drugs, weapons, and any immorality that can be turned into money.

I became a member of the Mummers of Parallel at the age of eleven. For an orphan like me, raised in shelters, this was the only viable choice unless you want to be a blood bag. You join the gangster organization and they become your family, they feed you, protect you, and you thank them by working for them.

At the age of eleven, I committed my first murder. Then, until I was twenty-two, I took many more lives numerous times, but it was the first murder that played a decisive role in my future, and the memory of it never faded.

John and I, also an orphan, were the pair of boys for everything and any type of work, were currently working for an arms dealer and a gatherer, Antim, very low in the Mummer's hierarchy. This is the point in any gangster organisation you start from the lowest rung, a boy for everything, and then climb the stairs of power one by one. You have to be gifted with incredible abilities or be incredibly lucky to jump over several stairs at once, but as it turned out a little later, in one night I managed to rise to the highest heights. To this day, I can't answer if it was thanks to luck or due to innate talent, but from the perspective gained by the advancement of the years, I am more then certain that it was a unique combination of both that allowed me to obtain the power an orphan seeks.

We carried out small orders for Antim, most often we delivered packages with insignificant amounts of money from one place to another, in some rare moments we happened to deliver a cheap gun to a person, and then there were no happier kids than us in the whole universe. When that happened, we took turns to wear the gun, occasionally alternating. Pavel and I were brothers in all but blood.

One specific night, the low-class needle gun we wore, with only six "cloves" as we used to call the ammunition I mentioned, fell on me. I tucked it into my shorts in front, and it formed a bulge under my shirt. Its visibility made me feel proud as I walked down the night street. I had the feeling that everyone - the miserable rodent-looking drug dealer, who was feverishly looking straight up, the prostitutes in multi-coloured latex boots and short miniskirts, scurrying on both sidewalks and shouting at passing aerate-cars and flying carpets. The shopkeepers, who had taken their goods to open stalls in front of their shops - all were beneath me and all knew the indisputable fact that I was armed and dangerous.

Paul, understandably, had sulked with his had down next to me, just as I had done when it was his turn to carry the weapon. Inflated with arrogance like a peacock, I fantasized that Antim, standing in front of the betting shop where he ran his small business and from which I had come out a minute ago with a needle, was watching me smoke his hallucinogenic cigar and wonder how lucky he was to have such a badass type in his ranks.

Vampires lined the street across from us. Two, tall, identical in their black silk cloaks, with elongated pale yellowish faces and long straight hair falling over their shoulders. Their movements were as graceful as those of a cat, and at the same moment, the thought dawned on me that this is exactly what tough guys should look like. It was as if cold, darkness, and death blew through their eyes. We passed each other and Pavel and I turned to follow them with our eyes, the view was so magnetic.

They headed to the betting shop of Antim, who had not yet noticed them, engaged in a conversation with one of his employees, who was smoking next to him. On the move, they pulled out long, slightly curved, thin swords. Antim reacted to the sound of the silver serpent-like blades slipping from the scabbard, his eyes wide with surprise, the cigar slipped from his fingers, pounded on the sidewalk and scattered a cloud of silver dust, and a second later his head separated from his neck followed. wide-eyed, thumped beside the dust. A fountain of blood flooded a smoking employee. He opened his mouth to start screaming, but his head followed that of Antim.

Without thinking about my actions, with the ingrained memories of a trained fighter, which I could not explain, I took the needle-guns out of my pants, clocked the fuse on the move and headed for Antim's assassins.

Antim was a father, a mother, a brother, and the organization that gave me bread and shelter.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

The first vampire turned his head towards me, likely heard my footsteps, gritted his teeth, and then bared his canine teeth in a grimace that said, "Boy, get lost!". When he saw the snotty boy walking towards him, unable to comprehend the information that the boy was clutching one of the few weapons of this world capable of wounding it. The needle pierced his left eye. The container exploded in his eyeball with a chewing sound, the vampire screamed in agony and landed stiffly like a plank on the sidewalk next to the two severed heads. The second vampire jumped and sprinted down the road, trying to escape the deadly gun, but my hand followed him without fear, the needle whistled, and a thin metal rod protruded from his neck. A new scream of agony and another body-thud hit the ground.

I tossed the needles carelessly as I approached them. The processes of paralysis developed with astonishing speed, this fact was commented on a lot and it was concluded that the reason for this was the hits at points close to the brain. The two unliving were struggling to catch their breath, their breathing muscles were already failing. I bent down and raised the sword that the first vampire had dropped. Then I bent down again to give them eternal peace.

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I tried to clear my mind of the bloody pictures that always swirled in the back when I’m angry. I stared inwards at myself, and under the mask of the glossy successful surgeon, modeled for years, beneath the layers of fake make-up, it hid the one whose name once made people and non-humans tremble in Burg Parallel.

"Ah, Damn it. Seems like I’ll have to re-introduce myself to this part of life." I thought as I crawled after the werewolf and realized that regardless of Lucy's fate, I had already made my choice, I would kill anyone involved in this and enjoy it.

Needless to say, I was angry at the moment, I felt like a red-hot ball of rage, and the apathy that kept me going for hours after talking to Jay, and during the trip with Tania let go. Still, I can’t lose control of my emotions otherwise, I wouldn't be of use in saving my beloved, if she was still alive, of course. I’d prefer if my only option is to end in a chaotic and spectacular death, and although at the age of thirty-five I had probably lived about half my life, I didn't want to waste the rest of it right in Ghamborz's disgusting slaughterhouse!

Well, I can’t die before I have revenge.

After moving through the industrial zone, which the experience can be briefly described in two words: silent agony, infiltrating the inner perimeter seemed to me as light and pleasant as a Veela's song. There were no thorny bushes or all sorts of obstacles made of building materials and abandoned machinery, but a rather well-kept, low-mown grass area with asphalt in-between.

We approached the first buildings of the complex a one-story bungalow made of concrete and glass, some insulated, others connected by sheds and tunnels. Windows reflected light here and there and was a good starting point for the search.

The slaughterhouse was oriented sideways to where we were at the moment, not very tall, around a five-story monolithic building, but with a length lost in the distance and the dim light seeping through the small windows at regular intervals on the top floor. I felt that its area is quite large and it seemed like a waste of resources. There was the whistling and creaking of equipment inside, but it was deafened by the maddening rattling of the huge ventilation fans mounted along the walls outside.

The monotonous noise bothered me, it dulled my hearing, which was perhaps a night saboteur's most important sense, but as Tania noted, the vampires could have hardly expected such a quick response, if any response all, which meant that their precautions should be just the routine ones.

I gestured to her and crouched down as we began our tour.

All the lighted bungalows we peeked into turned out to be standardly furnished with two bunk beds and high wooden lockers lined up next to each other. The situation was very similar to that of barracks, but the men lying on the beds with smoking cigarettes rolling dice in the narrow spaces between the towers or playing cards in a carriage around the lockers did not have the tight-fitting appearance of professional soldiers. The thick beards of some of them and their hair of varying lengths, shaped into a variety of hairstyles, made it clear that they were just slaughterhouse workers resting between shifts. In the dark rooms, where we did not forget to check, we could see the silhouettes of sleeping people.

There was no traffic outside the bungalows. I mentally thanked the hellish heat of the day, which turned into a stifling night, for forcing people to keep the doors tightly closed everywhere so as not to lose the cool comfort created by the air conditioners that were fitted in all the buildings in the complex.

There was no denying that Ghamborz, although the nastiest bloodthirsty asshole in the Crossroads, took good care of his human resources.