Night Terrors 7 - Dead Man
Holding his arm and running down the alley the archangel flees, rushing into dumpsters and not looking back at the quaking alley in the vision of a wounded man running out of time and out of life. He jumps to a fire escape and climbs to the roof, in the old quarter, the old city right on the ocean now dastardly poisoned that tinges the air with the scent of fuel and firearms, the rooftop entrance is easily entered, he has only to make it to the roof the distance from the top of the scaffold stairs. The tribal marshals hardly notice the trencherman enter his chosen edifice, into dark hallways and desolate lodgings guilty as sin and scolded as it were in the olden.
The hallway dark he chooses a door without light shining from beneath it or through peephole, the conundrum would be to survive and as much explain to the proprietor how he had come to reside so uninvited. He closes the door and grabs the first shirt he sees and drops like a pile of bricks before an old reclining chair, he begins to tear the strips as the lights from the streetlights, billboards and flight path lights shines through the slits in the old window-blinds. As he wipes the gore from a wound on his arm, the air is still as simple space. While tying a makeshift tourniquet around the wound he knocks a clear vase with dead flowers to the stone floor, the glass shatters and every crack tears the night and every shard heard sliding the floor. Fervid primitive instinct stares to the body on the bed in the room, laying on one side and not moving.
Arkan: "Fine, don't awaken, but know I don't clean."
The body remains lifeless, so riddled with intrigue Arkan rises to see if the body breaths. It is a dead and empty shell, not to far old for the chord yet not stricken. He rolled the body back of a sleeping older man, the shadows crawl the wall too dark to witness in even bright fires with blackened eyes of mystery, staring from the precipice of the netherworld shadows waiting for him to unravel the clue bound within the dank walls. The proximity bracelet upon the wrist of the occupant is solid red, the monitor signal of death and sign of existing beacon. The door bursts open, the noise of the breaking glass or the comment he had made has roused them to investigate. They like himself had no wrist indicator, they were the infamous 'dead men' of the seedy catacombs called so both for the term the emperor uses to describe them and of self proclamation in an effort to more easily accept the idea of such.
Miscreant: "We're going to need your food old man."
Arkan: "You're too late."
Arkan lifts the deceased person's limb and shows them the red light and they dash into the dark hall, their feet running fast. There is unfortunate ill concept to abrupt their escape that greets with several high-caliber, swift gunshot at the end of the hall. To his feet faster than the floor and to the door, his hands wrap the doorway and he pulls himself through the egress and spins the turn, he 's only one flight of stairs to ascend for roof access and ever-so lucky that they weren't the same as the main stairwell. A desolate stare at the end of the hallway as he sees that he has a right turn to make as the hell hounds charge after him several paces that they traverse faster than he, through the turn he bounds for the door. Three dogs the proven pack hunting commonality chasing him, he slams the door to a stairwell that leads to the roof in full moonlight, and the door slams shut so swiftly that it decapitates the foremost hound. Of the other two, the first cur strikes a clawed paw into the door just above the handle bar and whips the door open. Arkan had dropped a grenade down into the stairwell, it blasts through the demonic mongrel, the door rips from its hinges and tears through the other hellion centurion and the immediate wall as Arkan flees across the rooftops.