Handshakes Turn Into Fistfights
Posted: 20 Jan 2016, 00:40
The place was an absolute dump.
Outside, the brick was crumbling and the grime clung to the windows so thickly that the inside looked like a haze of dirt and smoke. Black dirt ringed the window, layered thickest against the pane and only marginally less opaque in the center of the glass. The sign, or what was left of it, dangled precariously from a single, rusty iron chain anchored into a bracket of rotten, peeling wood. White chips of paint flaked from the once-ornate extension to drift slowly to the sidewalk like tiny bits of ash. Only half of the sign actually remained attached to the end of the chain, squealing every time a breath of wind swept down the river and simply deeming the establishment “Bar.” The entire dilapidated structure looked ready to collapse into the river.
The glow of the lights washing into the street through the window was dim, not nearly enough to actually read the watch on his wrist. He could only assume, with nightfall only a few moments behind him, that it was sometime close to six. That was perfect. The “up-tights” were flooding into the bars, just starting the night. The “low-lifes” with little more to do than to sit around the bar and drink their days away were well into their drink by now. It was the latter that he was more concerned with tonight, the only reason that he had made his way down to the end of this dockside street. A place like this was where a man went for the kind of danger he sought.
Tonight, he was looking to die.
To be more clear, he was looking for another life. He was seeking something he knew, beyond doubt, to exist in this city. He had been a willing source of food for one, offering his own life up so that the girl might survive unmolested. Soon, however, realization had struck him. She, like the rest of her kind, would not age with the passage of time. She would be forever young, beautiful, strong. She would last a thousand lifetimes after he was dead and gone.
What, then, does a man do when he is trapped in this predicament?
His youngest cousin, still a typical tween herself, had nattered on about her romance novels enough to plant the seed in his head. Things were different here, of course. Vampires did not sparkle, and most of them were much less friendly or capable of comingling with people, but the premise was still the same. The core idea remained. So what does a man do, when the woman he loves is doomed to live forever, and he is assigned a short, mortal life meant to be spent and wasted away in a flash while she remains?
The answer was easy enough, honestly.
That man has to die, to become something more than just a man.
He had stood outside the bar for near an hour, watching the people coming and going. More the former than the latter. The few that did make their way outside stumbled into the gutter, some falling on their faces and not bothering to get up. They would likely sleep the night off there, or wake with their faces frozen in a pool of their own vomit. The people going in, though, had remained inside. The crowd was gathering. In numbers, this kind of ‘people’ found their courage, leaning on the strength of one another until they were a kind of communal badass. What they failed to realize was that if the center of that structure of courage was suddenly to vanish, then they all came crashing down like a house of cards.
Shoving the door open with a shoulder, the tall Quebec native pushed his way into the shady bar, the low din of a score of conversations snapping into a disturbed silence at his intrusion. Every eye in the room was on him. He stuck out like Christina Aguilera at a GWAR concert. The patrons here matched their beloved establishment, many of them caked in the same grime to a point that he could not help but wonder if, perhaps, they were a part of the building itself. Their state of dress was appalling, those lucky enough to own a coat wearing them in tatters over hunched and tired shoulders. A group of men sat in a dark corner, a large stack of greasy, wrinkled bills piled on the table among them, one of them holding a knife.
He only had one good eye, the other an open and ugly wound; red and raw and disturbing, like looking into the mouth of hell. A ratty knit cap clung to his scalp as he ran a thick, red tongue over toothless gums. The men at either of his sides stared at the newcomer with the same intensity, their heavy frames causing the booth benches to sag. None of them appeared to have shaved or showered in years.
At the bar, a small knot of women appeared to make themselves as visually appealing as possible, though falling abysmally short of anything attractive. The shortest one, a dwarf, sat between the other two. Her thick, curly hair fell down her shoulders in a scarlet tangle. She might have been pretty, had she not made herself so gaudy and over the top. Her lips twitched in a smile at the man in the door, her associates, a pair of blonde twins that appeared older than the building itself fighting a losing battle with their aging bodies both offering him gap-toothed smiles. Time had ravaged their once beautiful features, and to look at them now was only a sad reminder of lust that might have been. Leopard print clung to their curves in all of the wrong places, the three of them looking preposterous as a result.
One of the tables in the center of the room was hosting a card game. A broad man, nearly the size of the outsider, sat leaning back in his seat as he flicked a bone-white toothpick from one side of his dirty mouth to the other. The shift caused thick, ugly lips cracked and dry with the winter cold to ripple in a wave as they passed along the slender splinter. Stubble covered his face from ear to ear, thick and unchecked, like a sort of permanent five-o’clock shadow. The man to his left, a bent, elderly dock hand, stared at him through thick, bushy brows and a beard that covered his face, falling nearly to the greasy, splintered floorboards. He worked his gums in his mouth soundlessly, rolling something along his tongue before tucking it between his gum and lip again. He turned, and spat into the floor. The thick, brown ooze that left his mouth slowly trailed across the heavy slant of the floor into one of the many cracks in the wood.
The other man, sitting to his right, wore a ratty old flannel shirt. His head was shaved and polished to a fleshy sheen. It was probably the cleanest looking thing in the bar. Tattered jeans showed more flesh than they covered, his old boots nearly falling off his feet as his foot shifted against the floor.
Alton lifted a hand, pulling the cap from his head and tucking it beneath his arm. He was richly dressed, an expensive Armani winter coat hung from his shoulders, falling all the way to his shins. Lambswool lined the interior, broad brass buttons, polished to a shine, held the coat in place. Gloves kept his hands warm, made from genuine imported Italian leather, custom tailored for his grip. He knew, without a doubt, that he had a target painted right between his eyes walking into this place. He offered the room at large a smile, and made his way through the silence to the bar.
One of the twins moved to lean against his side, pushing a pair of over-large fake breasts against his arm as she tried to show what she really had to offer. The implants and injections made her aging face look too tight, her entire body had a sort of plastic look to it. She was barely holding herself together, and he doubted there was any part of her that had yet to see the knife. He waved her off without a word and looked to the bartender, a short, fat lout cleaning a greasy glass with a greasier rag. His hair had fled him early in his years, the thin wisps left to him combed over the mostly bald pate of his head in an attempt to grasp what little bit remained of his dignity. The greasy, unwashed strands of ugly brown stuck to his sweaty scalp as he offered Alton a glowering stare. His girth allowed him little room to move behind the bar, but as the Canadian man ordered a simple house beer, the tender moved with a surprising agility and precision, darting across the bar to the ice chest.
The movement came with obvious years of practice. The man was an old hand at this game, and that alone made him a man to look out for. Anyone that could survive a scene like this for long was bound to be a tough son of a *****. A single bottle of the cheap, pisswater swill only a bar like this one could call a beer slid across the dimpled and pocked bar surface to clap into Alton’s heavy hand. He offered the man his thanks, and pushed him a twenty dollar bill. “Keep the change.” he muttered, and lifted the beer before parting from the bar. He stepped around the timeworn whore, leaving her in a wroth and bewildered fit as she fell back into her stool with a flop of her flesh against the leather seat and a loud, distressed huff.
It was that moment that the rest of the room slowly returned to what it was doing. First to speak was the dwarf woman at the bar, snapping at the older woman for her inexcusable failure, or her stupidity for even trying, he was not really sure. It was clear, though, that the old broad had gotten herself into plenty of trouble for the evening. Maybe she would be the one to do it, to follow him out and slip a blade between his ribs. He stole a glance at the woman, shooting him a dark, murderous scowl. She was a candidate, for sure.
Quietly, the large, barrel-chested man moved back through the bar the way he had come, and stopped at the table with the cards scattered across its splintered and poorly treated surface. He said nothing, and kicked the fourth, and unclaimed, chair from the table and sat. It could be any one of these, if things unfolded like he planned. He reached into his coat, feeling around in the pocket against his breast for the billfold, flipping it open and laying five crisp, neat hundreds on the table. Five hundred dollars rested on the table, a fortune for the trio around the table. It was only a drop in the bucket, barely scratching the surface of his winnings, laid back for years now. Even that, now, was just a shade of what he was really gambling with tonight. He put his life on the line this time, completely unsure of exactly how the night might really end.
If they were anywhere, he would expect a creature so affiliated with the dark and seedy side of the world to be in a place like this one. He laid his life on such cursory knowledge, but such a great reward required an equally great risk. His night was going to end in one of two ways. He would meet dawn as a corpse, or he was going to be one of them. Either way, he was better off than living on like this, knowing what waited for him in the twilight years of his life.
He folded his fingers together and stared into the dull eyes of the big man in the center of the trio, waiting for his cards to be dealt.
Outside, the brick was crumbling and the grime clung to the windows so thickly that the inside looked like a haze of dirt and smoke. Black dirt ringed the window, layered thickest against the pane and only marginally less opaque in the center of the glass. The sign, or what was left of it, dangled precariously from a single, rusty iron chain anchored into a bracket of rotten, peeling wood. White chips of paint flaked from the once-ornate extension to drift slowly to the sidewalk like tiny bits of ash. Only half of the sign actually remained attached to the end of the chain, squealing every time a breath of wind swept down the river and simply deeming the establishment “Bar.” The entire dilapidated structure looked ready to collapse into the river.
The glow of the lights washing into the street through the window was dim, not nearly enough to actually read the watch on his wrist. He could only assume, with nightfall only a few moments behind him, that it was sometime close to six. That was perfect. The “up-tights” were flooding into the bars, just starting the night. The “low-lifes” with little more to do than to sit around the bar and drink their days away were well into their drink by now. It was the latter that he was more concerned with tonight, the only reason that he had made his way down to the end of this dockside street. A place like this was where a man went for the kind of danger he sought.
Tonight, he was looking to die.
To be more clear, he was looking for another life. He was seeking something he knew, beyond doubt, to exist in this city. He had been a willing source of food for one, offering his own life up so that the girl might survive unmolested. Soon, however, realization had struck him. She, like the rest of her kind, would not age with the passage of time. She would be forever young, beautiful, strong. She would last a thousand lifetimes after he was dead and gone.
What, then, does a man do when he is trapped in this predicament?
His youngest cousin, still a typical tween herself, had nattered on about her romance novels enough to plant the seed in his head. Things were different here, of course. Vampires did not sparkle, and most of them were much less friendly or capable of comingling with people, but the premise was still the same. The core idea remained. So what does a man do, when the woman he loves is doomed to live forever, and he is assigned a short, mortal life meant to be spent and wasted away in a flash while she remains?
The answer was easy enough, honestly.
That man has to die, to become something more than just a man.
He had stood outside the bar for near an hour, watching the people coming and going. More the former than the latter. The few that did make their way outside stumbled into the gutter, some falling on their faces and not bothering to get up. They would likely sleep the night off there, or wake with their faces frozen in a pool of their own vomit. The people going in, though, had remained inside. The crowd was gathering. In numbers, this kind of ‘people’ found their courage, leaning on the strength of one another until they were a kind of communal badass. What they failed to realize was that if the center of that structure of courage was suddenly to vanish, then they all came crashing down like a house of cards.
Shoving the door open with a shoulder, the tall Quebec native pushed his way into the shady bar, the low din of a score of conversations snapping into a disturbed silence at his intrusion. Every eye in the room was on him. He stuck out like Christina Aguilera at a GWAR concert. The patrons here matched their beloved establishment, many of them caked in the same grime to a point that he could not help but wonder if, perhaps, they were a part of the building itself. Their state of dress was appalling, those lucky enough to own a coat wearing them in tatters over hunched and tired shoulders. A group of men sat in a dark corner, a large stack of greasy, wrinkled bills piled on the table among them, one of them holding a knife.
He only had one good eye, the other an open and ugly wound; red and raw and disturbing, like looking into the mouth of hell. A ratty knit cap clung to his scalp as he ran a thick, red tongue over toothless gums. The men at either of his sides stared at the newcomer with the same intensity, their heavy frames causing the booth benches to sag. None of them appeared to have shaved or showered in years.
At the bar, a small knot of women appeared to make themselves as visually appealing as possible, though falling abysmally short of anything attractive. The shortest one, a dwarf, sat between the other two. Her thick, curly hair fell down her shoulders in a scarlet tangle. She might have been pretty, had she not made herself so gaudy and over the top. Her lips twitched in a smile at the man in the door, her associates, a pair of blonde twins that appeared older than the building itself fighting a losing battle with their aging bodies both offering him gap-toothed smiles. Time had ravaged their once beautiful features, and to look at them now was only a sad reminder of lust that might have been. Leopard print clung to their curves in all of the wrong places, the three of them looking preposterous as a result.
One of the tables in the center of the room was hosting a card game. A broad man, nearly the size of the outsider, sat leaning back in his seat as he flicked a bone-white toothpick from one side of his dirty mouth to the other. The shift caused thick, ugly lips cracked and dry with the winter cold to ripple in a wave as they passed along the slender splinter. Stubble covered his face from ear to ear, thick and unchecked, like a sort of permanent five-o’clock shadow. The man to his left, a bent, elderly dock hand, stared at him through thick, bushy brows and a beard that covered his face, falling nearly to the greasy, splintered floorboards. He worked his gums in his mouth soundlessly, rolling something along his tongue before tucking it between his gum and lip again. He turned, and spat into the floor. The thick, brown ooze that left his mouth slowly trailed across the heavy slant of the floor into one of the many cracks in the wood.
The other man, sitting to his right, wore a ratty old flannel shirt. His head was shaved and polished to a fleshy sheen. It was probably the cleanest looking thing in the bar. Tattered jeans showed more flesh than they covered, his old boots nearly falling off his feet as his foot shifted against the floor.
Alton lifted a hand, pulling the cap from his head and tucking it beneath his arm. He was richly dressed, an expensive Armani winter coat hung from his shoulders, falling all the way to his shins. Lambswool lined the interior, broad brass buttons, polished to a shine, held the coat in place. Gloves kept his hands warm, made from genuine imported Italian leather, custom tailored for his grip. He knew, without a doubt, that he had a target painted right between his eyes walking into this place. He offered the room at large a smile, and made his way through the silence to the bar.
One of the twins moved to lean against his side, pushing a pair of over-large fake breasts against his arm as she tried to show what she really had to offer. The implants and injections made her aging face look too tight, her entire body had a sort of plastic look to it. She was barely holding herself together, and he doubted there was any part of her that had yet to see the knife. He waved her off without a word and looked to the bartender, a short, fat lout cleaning a greasy glass with a greasier rag. His hair had fled him early in his years, the thin wisps left to him combed over the mostly bald pate of his head in an attempt to grasp what little bit remained of his dignity. The greasy, unwashed strands of ugly brown stuck to his sweaty scalp as he offered Alton a glowering stare. His girth allowed him little room to move behind the bar, but as the Canadian man ordered a simple house beer, the tender moved with a surprising agility and precision, darting across the bar to the ice chest.
The movement came with obvious years of practice. The man was an old hand at this game, and that alone made him a man to look out for. Anyone that could survive a scene like this for long was bound to be a tough son of a *****. A single bottle of the cheap, pisswater swill only a bar like this one could call a beer slid across the dimpled and pocked bar surface to clap into Alton’s heavy hand. He offered the man his thanks, and pushed him a twenty dollar bill. “Keep the change.” he muttered, and lifted the beer before parting from the bar. He stepped around the timeworn whore, leaving her in a wroth and bewildered fit as she fell back into her stool with a flop of her flesh against the leather seat and a loud, distressed huff.
It was that moment that the rest of the room slowly returned to what it was doing. First to speak was the dwarf woman at the bar, snapping at the older woman for her inexcusable failure, or her stupidity for even trying, he was not really sure. It was clear, though, that the old broad had gotten herself into plenty of trouble for the evening. Maybe she would be the one to do it, to follow him out and slip a blade between his ribs. He stole a glance at the woman, shooting him a dark, murderous scowl. She was a candidate, for sure.
Quietly, the large, barrel-chested man moved back through the bar the way he had come, and stopped at the table with the cards scattered across its splintered and poorly treated surface. He said nothing, and kicked the fourth, and unclaimed, chair from the table and sat. It could be any one of these, if things unfolded like he planned. He reached into his coat, feeling around in the pocket against his breast for the billfold, flipping it open and laying five crisp, neat hundreds on the table. Five hundred dollars rested on the table, a fortune for the trio around the table. It was only a drop in the bucket, barely scratching the surface of his winnings, laid back for years now. Even that, now, was just a shade of what he was really gambling with tonight. He put his life on the line this time, completely unsure of exactly how the night might really end.
If they were anywhere, he would expect a creature so affiliated with the dark and seedy side of the world to be in a place like this one. He laid his life on such cursory knowledge, but such a great reward required an equally great risk. His night was going to end in one of two ways. He would meet dawn as a corpse, or he was going to be one of them. Either way, he was better off than living on like this, knowing what waited for him in the twilight years of his life.
He folded his fingers together and stared into the dull eyes of the big man in the center of the trio, waiting for his cards to be dealt.
