REAPERS - Book Two: The Hunger and the Sickness

11

Skinner was all knots. Body and mind still contorted by prison. His arms felt light and unruly with the shackles gone. His mind squirmed like a nest of rats as he walked through Camshire's disquieting avenues. It wasn't long before the felon's thoughts turned away from his lofty fantasies of redemption upon his release under Warden Hotch's bargain and went into a darker and more needful place. To the stars with the Warden and to the pits with them missing urchins—they could all wait. Skinner needed smite. That first. The rest, after. He secretly knew and feared his imagination would ultimately veer once he first allowed himself to fantasize how sublime that first hit would be after going so long without the intoxicating stuff. Just one wick to burn through the night and set him even. Just one.

No. No. This was to be Skinner's second chance. Probably his last. He couldn't spit in the face of new luck, a chance at salvation. The repeater steeled himself and thought of those poor lost kids and trumped westward, away from Fetterstone prison and toward the lower wards of the city. As he went forward he watched the orderly and lifeless row houses of Gallowshade decay into the more dilapidated hovels rented by the laborers who toiled in the Hookyards beyond. Every jaunt through the city of Camshire was a tale that could fill a book. There were drunks in the gutters, thieves in the alleys, chaotics on the rooftops. Every last man and woman seemed to have some scheme in the cookery, a half-forged and deluded and often diabolical way out of this pit. There were bodies in the streets. Some crumpled on the spot they had perished. Others had been dragged outside and left for the so-called 'Ferrymen' in their beaked masks who carried the dead on carts to the hungry crematories that never ceased their burning—or more nefarious destinations if the conspiracies were to be believed. Some of the dead had the black eyes and veins of the Rot, giving them the look of diseased gobs. Others had fallen to less exotic cause. All were now at peace. Rendered into things to be dealt with, obstacles for the still living who must walk these streets, serving as reminders of their own mortality.

Of course not all of Camshire was so pandemonic but only privileged eyes ever saw the manicured gardens and grand architecture rumored to sit beyond the enormous walls that sectioned the city like a butchered hog. It was a metropolis divided. Skinner saw that the Diluvian hardsticks had taken it up a few notches during his stint. The city guards regularly patrolled in formations under the pretense of maintaining order and peace in greater numbers than before. The blackened armor they wore and the halberds and shields they carried were designed as if to instill fear—the better to control the masses. The most notable change was that their helmets were no longer open, their identities now masked by frowning reptilian plates. Skinner knew the kinds of faces hidden under those masks. The kinds he'd like to knock the teeth out of.

Soon the repeater's feet carried him past the sighing districts of those who still clung to any domestic ambitions and into a steaming jungle of alleys and shanties and mud and lowfolk. Self-evolved complexes of rambling scaffolds and walkways threatened to collapse or burst into fire at a blink. These runaway monstrosities had succumbed to the flame again and again in the past. Sometimes the infernos would claim thousands of souls before finally being snuffed by a wash of chemical rain, the only time such weather was ever praised—but still people just kept on building in every direction and lighting their candles and torches. An entire community with a death wish. Dangerous neighbors to have—and so everyone had iron daggers in their sleeves and iron jackets round their hearts.

This was the Gutters, where hope went to die. The rambling blight smeared the line between the miserably poor and the truly starving, an unsanctioned ward teeming with dens of every known sin. Truly a bad place for an addict to visit. Skinner ignored the temptations from the festering pushers ("A pinprick, blood? To quiet down the nasties?") and trudged onward. A parade of sick scenes played out in these streets and parlors, and worse transpirings still, Skinner knew, in the alleys betwixt them and the basements below and the attics above. Want to watch a woman suck off a woebeast? Witness a live vivisection? Try your own hand at either? The Guts was your place. This sprawl was itself a rot upon the metropolis. A mindless scourge of sinkholes and reeking aqueducts and railways for freight carts pulled by enslaved muscle. Walls crowned with spikes and broken glass that did little to keep the blistering masses of poverty at bay.