Indebted (working title)

The Messenger (part 2)

Old man Weiss watched in fear that quickly turned to rage. "How dare he?", he thought. How dare he pass him over as if he were already dead. How dare this black bastard deem him unworthy of a swift end. He summoned all of his remaining strength and with a blood-curdling howl that was halfway between an anguished yelp and a battle cry, he stood up and flipped his pistol around so that he was wielding it like a club. He raised his hand to strike but it was over before he could.

"So... fast", he thought as his eyes met the African's. There was a sharp pain in his chest and he realized he could no longer draw the labored breaths he'd grown ac accustomed to. He took in short gasps that stopped short and his eyes darted around the room searching for something, anything that might offer him some comfort in his final moments but all he found was a cold gaze, an angry, hateful gaze that followed him to the ground where he lie twitching and then motionless. He thought refusing to die soft might bring him something closer to peace but there was folly in that, and he knew it... only when the gasping stopped.

It had been less than a minute since Zion entered the room and all that remained was young Louis, who'd wedged his scrawny, quivering, urine-soaked body so deeply into a corner that it looked like he was trying to push through the wall to the other side. Zion inched closer and kneeled to stare at him. He only said two words but he said them with a presence so commanding and powerful that Louis wondered if some version of God, or more likely Satan, was speaking through him.

"Stay here", Zion said, and then he left, leaving Louis behind, confused and surrounded by corpses.
Across the deck, Shakale moved through the storm and the battle in a haze.
"it was too late for them", He thought, but the sounds of battle and wind and rain, did nothing to quiet the echoes of screams that played in his mind.

He knew that he would remember their eyes the most. He always remembered their eyes the most. The wild and panicked gaze of soon to be drowned men was something he'd been seeing in his nightmares for as long as he could remember, and in the backdrop of every single disturbing scene, every personal hell that his mind saw fit to send him to in times of respite... was he.

He knew she would be on board the ship by now, that somewhere she was wondering through the madness, feeding off of it, being strengthened by it. His entire quaked with the prospect of seeing her but he knew that wherever she was, she could see him. He called her name in a voice low like a whisper and smothered by the ambient noise, "Tempest".

There were two lifeboats aboard the Almsgiver, one of which was bobbing away on distant waves. Shakale could not tell if its occupants had been part of the crew or part of the cargo, but it didn't matter. The waves battered it and shifted it violently from one side to the other before finally capsizing it. It rocked there overturned for a few seconds as its crew swam out. A massive wave swelled behind them reaching skyward like a claw extending from the paw of some mighty animal... before crashing down upon them in a watery explosion that shattered the lifeboat and washed the crew away.

Shakale turned his attention to the other lifeboat. Someone had rigged to be lowered but seemed to have abandoned the idea. Suddenly he could feel her in his head. It was an awful feeling, like fingers digging into his mind and pulling it apart in small pieces. He wanted nothing more than to scream and fall to his knees but he could fell her compelling him to move forward. She was in the lifeboat, he knew that now, she was waiting for him.

She laid there, her body draped over the lifeboat's wooden benches like a blanket and her head resting in her folded arms. She was older than Shakale, much older, but there were no wrinkles to be found, no blemishes, no scars, no birthmarks... no flaws. She appeared as a woman in her mid-twenties, as he'd always remembered her. She wore a jet-black naval officer's coat and bicorn hat, new items that she'd likely precured form some poor sea captain on another one of her outings. Her pants were a vibrant blue and hung loosely from her hips. There was no dirt on her clothes, no blood or gun residue, she didn't even look wet from the rain. It was as if she existed in a her-sized bubble and dirt, dust, air, and time were unable to penetrate it.

Her smile existed in the nexus between his dreams and nightmares, and he felt a sharp jolt in his chest when she flashed it at him. So many things about her kept him awake at night, but just as many things made it impossible to leave the sea behind. The two of them were players in a game that she would always win but was to cruel too ever stop playing. She stepped out of the boats; her eyes locked on to his from behind a curtain of stringy braids that were adorned with blue metal cuffs that glowed with blue light. Bullets whizzed by, the sounds of metal on metal and metal on flesh rang out from all directions, but in Shakale was hypnotized. He stepped onto the boat as Tempest lowered it. He looked down to see that a section of the sea had grown still. A narrow path of calm waters stretched out before him while the waters churned, splashed and hissed on either side.

He looked back at Tempest as his boat landed with a splash, and she nodded to him as if giving him permission to leave. He'd done well and in return she'd given him what she'd always given him for his service to the gods, a chance to live on and serve them again. He rowed forward, occasionally glancing back at the figures on the deck engaged in their brutal dance-like battle and silhouetted by another purple flash of light from angry skies. He heard the long wine of straining wood as the tornadic spouts tore into the ship, ripping the mast away and sending it spinning off, like a gigantic wooden spear. Finally, he watched the Almsgiver drift between the spouts, and vanish into the swirling, cloudy mess of ocean and wind.