Damned

Chapter 6

Holy crap you're gonna want to read this chapter it's amazing. It's where crap really starts to hit the fan, but I won't give away any more than that now. Enjoy.

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The first thing that Ean registered was the smell. It was the dankness of a decaying building and the rain-washed scent of the city, carried along on the same breeze, yet distinctly separate. And drifting over it was the metallic tang of blood.

Ean smiled wryly. Funny, it wasn't the throbbing pain in his head that brought him to consciousness, but the smell of blood.

Throbbing pain? He shifted slightly, wondering why his hands were tied behind a metal pole. Where am I?

Ean's eyes flew open as his last waking moments came flooding back. He tried to stand up, using the leverage of his back against the pole, but his limbs were too numb to work properly. Where was Kain?

He looked around the room, if it could be called a room. From what he could tell it was once the bottom floor of one of those multi-story parking lots. He could see a glimpse of the floor above through a giant hole in the middle of the room. The ceilings of the upper floors had all caved in, leaving a pile cement and mangled rusty metal below. The light of the overcast sky trickled in through the gap, a dull grey that leached the colour from everything. Rain had dripped in through the hole and leaked in around the walls, coating the floor in an inch of water. He must be somewhere in the part of town abandoned from flooding.

And across the room, hands tied behind another support pole, was Kain. He was slumped against it, legs splayed out in front of him and head loling to the side. A line of blood trickled down the side of his mouth, mixing with the blood from the bullet hole in his chest. He had lost so much that it haloed out in a circle around him, mixing with the water covering the floor. The pool of red still seemed to have colour in the grey light, making everything seem more surreal.

Ean wondered for a moment if Kain was dead --he had lost so much blood it seemed impossible he wouldn't be-- but he could hear the sound of his ragged breathing. It bounced off of the cement and water, splitting it into a hundred tiny echoes.

For a while Ean just sat there, staring at Kain's limp form and listening to the painful sound of his breathing. His brain slowly began to reboot. There had to be a way out of here. First things first, he needed to get out of these bonds so he could get to Kain. There were more than a few questions he needed to ask him, and Ean couldn't just leave him here at the mercy of whoever had tied them up. Ean spotted a twisted scrap of steel by his foot, edge glinting dully. Perfect.

Just as Ean managed to maneuver the metal to his hands he heard the sound of footsteps coming from nearby. He began to work furiously at his bonds, but just as he felt the ropes begin to fray a pair of doors opened to the side of him.

The double doors were the same colour as the mold-streaked cement around them, seeming invisible until they had been opened.

A man walked through, flanked by two brutes that looked like the street equivalent of bodyguards. The man in the middle didn't look particularly large or menacing at first, but the way he carried himself made Ean sure that he was the one in charge. He had a lean, almost starved looking face with a vivid scar running from eyebrow to jaw and deep set, menacing eyes. He wore a worn, white leather jacket and a handgun peeking out from his waistband.

Ean realized too late that he should probably play possum, but they had already spotted him. The one in charge, who Ean had subconsciously began to call Scar --like from the lion king-- looked towards him. A gleam lit his eye, making his face seem more alive and less like a skeleton with skin stretched over it. He reminded Ean of a cat that had cornered a mouse and was going to enjoy playing with it. Ean couldn't pull his eyes away from the man's. The closer Scar prowled the higher his heart climbed in his throat.