The Bartender (Sanguine Hearts Book 1)

10 Misdeeds

The city was sprawling and massive, eating the land like a plague of locusts a field. The tall intricate buildings sprang from the earth, like a veritable jungle made of concrete and steel. Beautiful, if that sort of thing makes you smile. It was full of beautiful people in beautiful spaces. Where it was tended and cared for, where the people remembered who they were and what they were there for, the city was pristine. Lush parks and large patches of green sprang up along the river. Where the money flowed, the people thrived, secure in their own little spaces, happy to go on about their lives, without a thought or a care in their little minds for the people that society had forgotten.

Like any city in all the world, it had its broken and imperfect bits, a dark and ugly side. Mean and cruel streets are mastered and run by thieves and thugs. Places of lawlessness and poverty. The seedier, darker, uglier, and brutal side of town. It is there that our story truly begins.

It was a night like any other night on the darkened and dirty streets on the uglier side of town. It was hot, horrid, and muggy in the city. But it seemed much hotter on the darkest side of town. If the weight of the humidity that was in the air, the smog, or the pollution didn't put an end to you, there was a good chance that some random stranger would, just for the shoes upon your feet or the clothes upon your back.

The houses were rundown, many far below any standard of living that can be imagined by the average person, some were completely dilapidated. A cardboard box in a hurricane would have been safer and cleaner. Streetlights that were once maintained by a proud and beautiful city, were broken and dark. Litter piled up in the little-used streets, long dead and rotting leaves clogged the gutters of the few houses that still boasted to have them. Everywhere, broken glass littered the ground. Cracks in the sidewalk grew small gardens where the sidewalks had not been reclaimed by the grass growing on either side of it.

Most driveways sat empty, but there were a few broken-down cars along the sides of the streets. The people that lived in the rundown, falling apart and molding houses couldn't afford to buy toilet paper, pay the bills and keep the lights on, or put enough food on the table, if they had one, let alone buy a car just to let it break down and rot in the driveway.

In the slums, life was hopeless. Living was bleak if you could call that living. It was a forgotten and forsaken failed suburbia taken over by the rot and decay of society's neglected and unwanted, a true blight upon the land.

The dark and lawless streets were often crueler in the light of day than they were in the dark of the night despite the police force that patrolled them. The denizen citizens of the slums had little to no trust in the police. It would have helped if the police did more than drive through the streets with their noses turned up, trapped within the safety of their cars. The people that spent their days huddled in the dismal existence they were bound to, were not generally the kind of people you would want to chance upon in daylight. Vagabonds and beggars couldn't even be found on the streets. There was no one to beg from that had more than a vagabond would.

Like every community on the face of the earth, the Slums had its own set of leaders. Old men and women were respected and often feared by the citizens simply because they had managed to survive long enough to have white hair on their heads when they had it and in their beards. Even in a rundown and dilapidated community, elders were respected and had their place. Others stood out among their peers as stronger, wiser, crueler, and therefore somehow better. They were either feared or revered.

The people in the slums were used to poverty, used to the cold of winter kissing their skin and the wicked touch of hunger being the only thing to fill their bellies before they lay down to sleep. They were used to brutality and were familiar with death.

Deep within the slums, an old woman sat alone, huddled in the hovel she called a home trying in vain to rest her weary mind. The day had been long and trying, but that wasn’t any different than it had been the day before or the day before that. She considered herself one of the lucky ones. She had a role that she played in her rundown community. Her reputation allowed her many things it didn’t so many others. It kept the lights on, a touch of food in her fridge and the unneeded locks on the windows and the doors repaired.

She sat quietly replaying her day in her mind. She felt that something was wrong, very wrong. She knew it in her heart, something was wrong. She just didn’t know what that something was. An anger slow and steady built inside her. She was angry at anything, everything, and nothing all at once. She was so angry that she threw things around her tiny little living space, things that held great value to her and broke them. They all shattered into a thousand tiny unrecoverable shards scattered across the floor. The anger was suddenly replaced by an inescapable, inexplicable fear. She grew so frightened that she feared the sound of her own breathing. She was on the verge of panic. She nearly wet herself.

Something dark moved in the kitchen. She heard footsteps whisper and echo down the short hall. She rushed around and turned on every light. Still, the shadows closed in around her. One after another the shadows ceased her throat with their slimy tentacles. She felt a thousand little suction cups gripping her skin, slithering all over her body under her shirt and down her pants. Her greatest fears all came to life as those cold members started to explore her in ways she never wanted to be explored. She wondered why this horrible thing was happening to her.

The suction cups were replaced by sharp little hooks that sank into her skin. They cut, scraped, and slashed her, tearing and slicing her open everywhere they roamed as they moved over her body. She shook and shivered in terror and tried to call for help. She knew it would do no good as the stuff of nightmares continued to slither and claw its way around and through her body. She tried anyway. She opened her mouth in a cry that should have woken the devil only to find her voice gone and a cold slimy tentacle halfway down her throat.

Her worst nightmare, a creature like a Kraken wrapped itself around her, pushed, pulled, and prodded her in every way possible until she lay a weeping mess on the floor she tried so hard to keep clean, then receded into the recesses of her imaginings.

Just as quickly as it hit, the fear disappeared. She pulled herself up off the floor and crawled into her chair. She was left a sweating, terrified mess sitting in the ugly brown, broken-down Barcalounger, with the springs poking through the seat that she had crawled into. Nothing had ever scared her so much in all her life. Not raising children in the poverty-stricken streets of her city, not giving birth to them in the first place, not facing life alone and raising those children on her own, not her fear for her children as they left home and went out into a heartless world. That time, kindness and caring had been forgotten in, nor life itself in her hovel and the mean and cruel streets that surrounded it. Not even the threat of hell for all the wrong that she had done was a greater source of fear than whatever it was that she just experienced.

She was relieved to have it away from her and completely exhausted once it was over. She wanted to check for wounds and blood, but she could barely move. She could still feel the sting of the tentacles crawling all over her body. She felt like she had no energy left, just nothing, nothing left to fight with, no energy left to breathe, and nothing left to give. She felt weaker than she'd ever felt before.

Darkness shrouded her world. Every corner her unfocused eyes fell upon held a dark and shadowy figure lurking, looming, and waiting. Her head swam with wild ideas and conjurings, her eyes moved catawampus about in her head as she muttered senselessly to herself and the only being listening. Confusion reigned supreme in her shattered mind. All her misdeeds, all her wrongdoings, and there were plenty, swam forward in her mind. She prayed, spending the last of her energy and using the last of her will to call upon her God and Savior, to which came the reply from the darkness. "Your God can't save you now."