Post by Anton Kresnikov on Oct 3, 2013 17:33:13 GMT -5
|| A fair warning, what reads below may be deemed graphic. ||
Cromwell Morris was more nervous than words could relay. For years now, the rumors of the Specialist were well known in Underside, and the concept of requiring his services was an admittance of willing violence that only a select few were willing to pay for. But every so often, words had done all they could, and actions needed to be taken. He had heard from a friend of a friend that the process of hiring the Specialist was one of shadows and patience, and after finding someone who was willing to tell him how to reach the killer, Cromwell clutched the old leather bound book tightly. The process seemed so arcane; a precious book wrapped with a note and tekbits, the note containing only the names and address of the Study Session, was to be left in a drop box that had been attributed to him namelessly.
Sweat ran down the back of his neck as he looked to the slot, fingers gripping the book tightly as his hand shook. He looked back and forth rapidly, wondering if it was all a trap, if someone was setting him up. Cromwell was not a strong willed man, nor was he violent, but the man that had stolen so much from him... The man thought back to the horrible beatings, the constant taunting, the way Brayton had stolen his wife away and left him broken. His teeth clenched together as resolve filled his body, and the book was put into place. He heard it sliding down along a track before settling in the depths of the box. It was done. There was no turning back now.
Cromwell stepped away from the box, staring at it a moment longer before he turned and walked away. He had been told that time would need to pass. The Specialist was not to be an immediate fix, he was a message. He returned to his life, trying to clean up the broken shambles of the world that had been left for him. An empty home, a broken shop, and nothing left to his name. With barely enough to eat to survive, the one thought that kept him going was awaiting the results of the Specialist's work. Each day that he walked through the deck, he saw Brayton torturing someone else, and the woman on the brute's arm that had abandoned him.
Bile filled the back of his throat as he stared daggers at the two, clenching his fist and thinking that perhaps now he would be strong enough to do something. But the solace of knowing he already had would stay his rage, and he would walk on, leaving the woman who so cruelly broke his heart and the man that helped to their continued ignorance. Days turned into weeks, and weeks to months, and he began to wonder if he would ever hear that his request had been fulfilled. He would occasionally go by the box where he had left the book, peeking into it as if to see whether it had been taken, but the darkness that filled the box was absolute.
Nearly three months after his request, Cromwell awoke to the sounds of screams in the common path of the deck. A blood curdling scream of shock and fear. Stirring and barely managing to dress he rushed outside to see what had caused the commotion. The street had started to fill, and a crowd had gathered into a circle of murmurs and shock.
"I knew them!" Some said. "They may not have been nice people, but this...?"
"No one deserves this kind of treatment, my god!"
Pushing through shoulders and pulling people out of the way, Cromwell managed to find himself at the front of the ring. His eyes went wide with shock at the sight of Brayton and his wife. Former wife. She would never be anyone's now.
Brayton's cruelties had been done unto him twenty fold. His body sat there on its knees with both legs broken at the femur and bones protruding from the flesh and through his clothes. His stomach had been opened, entrails spilled out to the deck plates between his legs while flesh had been torn- torn away, not just cut -to leave his ribs exposed, which were propped against the bones that jutted out of his legs as if to prop him up like a tripod. His head was dropped back, eyes open with a permanent look of tortured fear plastered across his face, his jaw severed away and leaving his tongue hanging down in front of his ripped open throat. Arms remained behind him, resting limply with more severed flesh beneath his hands. Behind him two spears of bone had been shoved into his back, keeping him upright.
Between his barely spread and broken legs was the torso of a woman, face down in the pile of entrails making her funeral pillow. Her legs were missing entirely, and only the nub of her spine and internal organs remained, resting against the bloodstained metal that had become the canvas of death. Someone from the crowd had moved forward, taking the woman's blood mottled hair and lifting slowly to see who she was, but with a cry of shock the hair was let go and the head dropped back down into the slurry of intestinal meat and gore. Her face had been sheared off through the bone, leaving only the slickened cavities where her brain and mouth had been.
"Her face! It's... it's missing!!"
"No... it's... it's back here, in Brayton's hand..."
Several of the crowd started to thin out as the sound of weakened stomachs seeking a place to empty themselves could be heard. Cromwell stood there in the crowd in shock, staring at the grizzly statue of violence that he had paid for. He knew this was his doing. The rumors of the Specialist were true. "...oh, god."