E A R T H E N D E R

001 /// The Rapid Dog & Dead Hound

THE GHASTLY POOL OF BLACKISH-BROWN BLOOD, garishly flooding the cracked concrete, looked like flat cherry coke purposely poured out from one of Claude's obligatory cans —because you could always count on Claude De La Cox swigging at the synthetic chemicals, more addicted than a Sew-licker to 'sheet music' or a crack cocaine baby to Roxanne.
"Looks like someone bit the asphalt." He noted, offhandedly and, as predicted, took a deep swallow from the can, metal rim clanking against his four good front-teeth.
Although, Claude didn't really have good teeth to speak of. He was missing most of the back teeth on the left side of his mouth. As far as I knew, it had been the result of an accident. A nasty one with the sharks, maybe even the Hound, and 'a baseball bat that pulverized my empathy center and my balls just the same', as Clause had put it.
Whoever they were, they'd smashed in Claude's skull, gracefully bestowing upon him a ticket to the healing house up on the hill, comatose department, room 644, and that was where we'd met. Him and me. Just over a year ago. The details of his life before room 644 were all foggy to me, maybe to him too, but the fact was that Claude didn't have as many teeth as a new adult should've.
That, paired with his general cheerful, but extremely violent 'fuck you' attitude, and the long red scar over his buzzed head, made him look like a rabid dog. A mad brutal punk, on the run from a straight jacket, and on the run with a hysterical laugh and a Molotov cocktail in his hand.
"Looks like a Kid-Street kid paid his Sew debt with internal bleeding." I said, down at the blood that slithered, thick as syrup, along the gutter, slowly carrying a chewed up cigarette butt like a river carries a boat.
"And not just internal —that looks pretty external to me, Vladdy boy." Claude merrily gestured the pool with his drink.
"Yeah." My Name wasn't Vladdy boy, or Vlad, or Grimmy, or any of the weird ass names that Claude ever called me, but I had stopped protesting and correcting him a long time ago. "It's fresh. The Baron's hound could still be around. We should go." I said.
There was enough blood to suspect that whoever got attacked, didn't survive it. Or at least didn't stroll unaffected away from the clash. And if the Baron's repo man, The Hound, had been the cause of this, as he usually was, then there was reason to believe that whoever got attacked definitely, 100% unequivocally, didn't survive it. Survivors simply weren't the Hound's style.
I glanced around in the alley.
Though I couldn't spot any molested bodies lying around, evidence waiting to be found by the police and then bribed by the Baron to be discarded, I didn't feel like going looking. The cigarette butt in the crimson river flushed down and vanished through the bars of a rainwater trench in the street.
Claude snorted and pulled on a fake chirpy British accent. Just for my benefit.
"Good man, good man. Don't want the bloodhound blasting us full of laser scythe holes. Let's skedaddle ol' champ." He pushed his black dickhead-sunglasses up his slender, but extremely crooked, nose. The glass flashed in a pink and blue neon shine as they reflected a bright commercial mounted somewhere far up above us, on the rooftops.
I nodded solemnly, glad that he was thinking the same as me, and turned to walk down the other alley we'd come from —The lower levels of Crest City were almost entirely made of alleyways, but then, Claude's voice stopped me.
"Or," he said, grinning like a busted skeleton now "we look around for easy loot. You can tell, like I can tell, this poor soul didn't get very far with most of his plasma juice all over the ground. And you know, like I know, that the Hound leaves the valuables once he has the Etherum. If we find the bones, we could relieve them of their earthly possessions, buy us a steak dinner at Xion's with the wallet. And this person, probably dead or dying behind the nearest dumpster, might even have some nice shades or a flashy cap for you to cover up that pasty disapproving goth-mug of yours, Vladdy baby."
I frowned at his speech then said without hesitation:
"No." Curtly and firmly. Like slamming a door.
Claude opened up his arms and grinned wider, showing off the hole inside his mouth where at least four upper molars should've been.
"Aw, come on, Grim! 'Tis so easy money!"
I shook my head. Nothing was ever easy.
"You know, like I know, that if the Hound is here, he'll rip out our spines and gnaw on them."
"Bah. The Dennis the murder Menace is probably long gone. Why not seize opportunity?" Claude had no fear in his voice although I knew the colorful stories about the Hound, circling the streets and occasionally surfacing, did get to him once in a while. It was the way his black eyes forgot to blink while people talked about how the Hound had poured hungry rats into people's orifices to make them suffer. But apparently robbing the dead for a steak weighed heavier than reasonable fear tonight.
"That only means that the blue blinks will show up next."
"If you help me search, we'll be quicker and I promise we'll split whatever we find down the middle. Straight fifty fifty. Clean as a coke whore's glass, scout's honor!"
I'd turned around and started walking, away from the blood, away from Claude trying to convince me like the devil on my shoulder.
I stuffed my hands deep in the pockets of my tattered jeans. The neon light faded behind me and small sporadic street lamps that pooled cold light on the asphalt every few steps, replaced the light. Iron pipes pumping chlorine-tasting water like a heart and thick rope-y wires, funneling electricity, ran along the walls. Their deep pulsing sound, the sleeping beast of the city, filled the narrow way before Claude came up behind me and fell into my step.
"Is it because you're too moral to fondle the dead? It's not like you're too moral to suck the living." His black brows wriggled over the rim of the straight line of the narrow stolen asshole-sunglasses, and I clenched my jaw.
"Would you just—" The prickle creeping up my neck was an embarrassed angry blush, looking for my face and ears. I hissed through my teeth "—go loot your own fucking lost-n-found corpse, Claude."
His brows shot up and he made an amused 'o' of his mouth, theatrically mimicking profound surprise.
I never lost my temper, or at least very rarely. Claude could spend an eager hour, grinding and hammering random key-smash combos before he even came close to pushing my buttons.
But tonight the Crest had felt foreboding for some reason. Whirly but quiet, like magnetic dust refusing to settle. The dull gray smog clouds had been extra choking, hung extra low in the sky and looming just a bit too closely over of the shuffling crowds' heads. Even the dim orange light from the dying sun burning a million miles away, trying to cut through a faux and wrecked atmosphere, seemed to have intensified its sickly glow —shining a blistering yellow or a upsetting off-white, over the concrete landscape.
And now the blood. It was an omen and the gleam in Claude's douchebag glasses, a prognostication, no, a divination, of trouble coming our way.
Claude laughed beside me.
We had turned around another corner and were still walking away from the scene where something unknown, and yet easily imaginable, had come to pass.
"Dang! touchy touchy tonight, aren't we, Vlad?"
I was about to snap something back at him or maybe just give him a glare. I was angry and on edge, but I stopped in my steps. So did Claude, softly bumping into me with his boney shoulder. Something blocked the alley.
The argument had suddenly lost all meaning and whatever unpleasant and uncharacteristic response I had been about to deliver, was a balloon being popped by the sight before us.
Pop!
"Oooh." Claude said, slowly sliding his glasses down the left leaning slope of his his nose. "Oooh shit boy" he said again, adding a disbelieving chuckle to the stretched 'oh'.
"Is that..." I started, completely frozen and not really able to continue talking because my brain was busy trying to make sense of what it was seeing. Ping ponging the vision between my light-sensitive receptors and my thalamus until it comprehended the image.
A man was sprawled in a messy bundle of coat, guts and blood in the middle of the asphalt. Stone dead. I was flabbergasted. Dumbfounded. Stupefied!
But it wasn't because this man looked like he had been clawed open by a bear in the middle of the city, or that he was clutching his vibrant membrane-y insides, looking like lilac worms trying to crawl out of him —no, I was surprised because of who it was in the mess of gore.
"It sure is!" Exclaimed Claude and made a howl of joy.
It sure was. It was the Hound.