Indebted (working title)

A Drifters curse (part 2)

He tried to scream but found he had no voice. He could not even speak. There was a soft plop as he dropped the jaw bone back into the red muck and he shuddered at the realization that what were bits of rock, were bits of people, who'd once stood where he was standing now. He calmed down, however, when he recognized that a part of him had known this from the beginning. There was death everywhere he went.

For a long time, there was silence, and then he heard them. A chorus so loud that their voices seemed to shake the earth. A ghastly and complex blend of mournful wailing and shouts of condemnation, that sent Shakale to his knees. He covered his ears but that did not silence the screaming, it grew louder and louder, to volumes he thought impossible. The voices burrowed into his head and reverberated on the walls of his skull until he could it behind his eyes. He let out a silent scream of his own and shut his eyes tightly. He could hear words, barely intelligible amidst the distorted cries.

"Come back", moaned a woman.
"Coward", said a man

"Please, please no!"

"Help us!"

"I'll kill you! I'll kill you I swear!".

He knew these voices. He'd heard these things before. They taunted him, tortured him with their familiarity, and when he opened his eyes, he did so fully expecting to be tortured by their, horrible dead faces as well... he was not. There was only one face, a beautiful face marred only by faint traces of underlying cruelty. He saw Tempest smirking at him from deep in some nexus between consciousness and his hellish nightmares.

He woke up gasping and sweating with Wren sitting on the stool beside him and looking down at him with contempt written across his dark, handsome face. He was young, maybe mid 20s, but he bore the eyes of someone who'd seen more of the world than one would ever want to.

"Thinking that someone here might give enough of a damn about you to help you up, would be a forgivable mistake." Wren said before taking a long drink from the half empty glass in his hand. "Dehydration can do things to a man's mind... invite delusion."

There was a coldness about him, there'd always been a coldness about him.

Shakale looked up at him, too shaken by his ordeal to take offense at Wren's words.

The tavern had come alive in Shakale's slumber and the young woman who'd served him earlier, was now waiting tables nearby. Her skirt was stained by the various drinks she'd spilled onto herself that night and she wore the same panicked expression as a child that feared a spanking from its mother. A drunk and rowdy patron whose mouth was stained with the residue of old drinks he hadn't bothered to wipe away, hurled a stream of slurring insults at her as she approached. She winced at every word as if he was striking her, and the drinks she carried shook on the platter she held in her nervous hands.

"She's no Paula", Wren said as he looked at the server.

"No.", Shakale said as he regained his focus and followed Wren's gaze. "She isn't." He pulled himself to his feet and looked around before asking "Where is Paula?"

"Paula's dead", said Wren. "Been dead for a while now. Damn shame really, she was the only good thing about this place"

He left his drink unfinished and walked over to the half-drunk patrons still berating the server. He grabbed a drink from her platter as he went and slid it across the table to the man who was shouting the loudest.

"You should take it and go", he said with a friendly smile that only thinly veiled the fact that his suggestion contained a threat. Then the man looked at the drink, then looked at Wren. He started to say something, but Wren put up a hand to silence him.