Ivory Lawson is an average girl living a less than average life. With her mother dying from brain cancer, her father out of the picture, and her older brother disabled from a car accident almost a year and a half earlier, she has to do more than a r...
I was already having a crappy day; the body a miserable attempt to lighten the mood. Earlier, my manager had snapped at me for accidentally putting the wrong cosmetics on the wrong shelves, now here I was, on my way home from work and I nearly trip over some random dead person. Visually unsettling? You bet. Uncommon? Unfortunately, not to the extent the majority would like. It wasn't unusual to trek through the alleyways of Sanford and find any hint of a recent murder. Or, as it should be put: Execution.
"The Deathbringers strike again," I grouched, giving the corpse an irritant kick in the leg. When it jerked like a living person's, my body seized up. It was a recent kill. Leaning in close to get a view of the corpses' face, I discovered it was runaway serial killer Homan Somali; the guy who managed to somehow escape the maximum security prison in Vancouver.
Peering closer I saw ragged slash marks scored through his throat... And a deep pit in his chest where his heart would've been.
Then I found it. The evidence anyone would need to feel assured this was the work of the Deathbringers. Drawn intricately onto the body with its own blood was the Deathbringer gang symbol:
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Smeared right onto the back of the body's beige jacket.
"I wouldn't linger here more than you already have," a guy's voice materialized behind me.
I spun, startled. A tall, blonde-haired, blue eyed guy---who looked no older than nineteen or twenty---was leaning leisurely against the side of a Dumpster, his arms folded over his chest. He was clearly a member of the Deathbringers, he wore the attire: blood red muscle shirt under a black leather jacket; ebony jeans held up by a leather belt, black boots, and a pair of red lensed sunglasses hung off the collar of his shirt. If I looked closely enough, I could just make out the Deathbringer symbol tattooed on the lower side of his neck, almost hidden by the jacket collar.
"Cops'll be here no doubt, once you or some other by-passer notifies them of this," he stated casually.
"Did you do this?" I demanded, stabbing a finger at the pit in the body's chest.
He glanced at the corpse like it was nothing more than a piece of trash, no different than the piles that built up at the base of the alley walls, and that were scattered across the ground. "Nope."
I stared at him in confused annoyance. The annoyance was coming from the bland responses he was giving; the confusion coming from the nagging intuition that I knew this guy from somewhere. "So you didn't kill this man... Homan Somali; the serial killer?"
"No." The Deathbringer looked from the corpse to my face. "Only top ranking members have the honors of preforming an execution. I, frankly, am only still a newbie."
" Then why are you still here? And why did they take the heart?
A guarded expression shadowed his face and he started to run his fingers along the gold chain around his neck, almost as if it was tightening. "You're starting to ask some pretty sensitive questions here, I hope you see that."
