The Parasite

Chapter 6: Night Running

Gun shots could be heard throughout the streets as the gangsters were slowly picked off one by one. Thinking fast the young man leading the group jumped off of his horse into a nearby alleyway with his crew following suit. Running and jumping through the cramped backstreets the leader eventually found his way into an empty building, followed by a few others as the rest scattered throughout the labyrinth of alleys and side streets.

Waiting in silence until the guilders called off their search, a palpable sense of tension could be felt in the air as the gang tried to keep completely silent. As the guilders left the leader of the gang stood up, signaling to the rest that it was safe to move before marching over to the exit. But before he could reach the door he was stopped by one of the gangsters shouting.

"Hey Jack, care to explain what happened back there?" Jack turned around to see everyone looking at him expectantly. "We got attacked and had to run off, I figured you were there to see it." Jack said, shrugging. "I'm not talkin' about that, I'm talkin' about how you promised this was safe." The gangster snapped back. "I dunno if you saw it for yourself, but they were killing us back there, Jack! We don't even know how many of us wound up dead!" Jack turned around and spoke quietly. "I know, and that's why we need to get ready, so we can go and get payback."

The gangster took a step back towards the window they had come in from before speaking again. "Oh no, not with you, I know you got a thing for the guild but we aint suicidal!" The gangster then left through the broken window they all had come in through, followed by the others as Jack tried and failed to rally them in his favor. "Hey, where do you think you're going, come on you're playing right into their hands, this is what the guild wants!" none of them looked back as Jack shouted.

Exiting through the opposite side of the building, Jack walked out onto the dimly lit streets, passing by shops that sold nothing of interest, restaurants he couldn't afford to eat at, and guilders shaking down random people on a whim. Making his way towards a coffee shop he liked, Jack turned the corner to see the place abandoned with a massive hole smashed into the front of it, a for sail sign hung in the hole as if to ward off anyone who would consider buying the place. Not that anyone would, the shop itself was located in the so-called bad side of town, Jack thought of it as a nice enough place, nice enough to have once had a decent coffee shop. Continuing to walk through the streets, Jack grew tired before he decided to rent a room in a nearby tenement building. It wasn't great but when in Rome you do as the Romans do, and the Romans were very into cheap housing.

Slinking into a building called the Queen Mary's Delight, Jack rented a room on the fourth floor where he would be able to sleep for the foreseeable future. Coming into the dark room, Jack noticed the only light source available to him was a lamp set up on the kitchen counter, looking around the other side of the room, he found a toilet and mirror with a curtain hung around them set up across from a cheap bed with no covers to speak of. Overall, it wasn't too terrible, and Jack had slept in less hospitable conditions.

Eavesdropping on the neighboring rooms, as he usually did in these sorts of places, Jack heard someone in the room to his right fiddling with a radio, and in the opposite room a family ate dinner whilst having a tense debate over the efficacy of pig based travel. After he was satisfied with his eavesdropping, Jack walked over to the window, opening it up and leaning over the seal. He looked to the sky, traced out a few constellations, sighed and looked down to the street. He found the sky boring, nothing ever happens in the sky, nothing changes it. Sure it would rain or snow and clouds would block it out, but the clouds and the sky are separate. Jack much preferred the ground, since that's where stuff got done, he looked down on the alleyway where people quietly went about their business, concealed by shadow, he didn't care about who the people were or what they were doing, he just found it interesting how nightfall simply signaled the time for a new kind of work, his kind of work.

Over by the mouth of the ally Jack noticed a carriage pulled in, blocking his view of the street. A number of people stood around the carriage, arguing about something as the driver sat inside it, unconscious or maybe dead, it was hard for Jack to tell, looking down from how high up he was. Perhaps that was how it felt to be rich and powerful, to look down on the world like the alley before him, of course he would have to go a long way before he could reach that kind of status, but he would get there, eventually.