RE: QUIETUS [S!5] [Round 3: Deluge]
07-17-2017, 01:21 AM
I’m a jealous, jealous, jealous girl- if I can’t have you baby, no one else in this world can.
Sonora whined, rattled, sniffed, licking her wounds with a long black tongue as she slid under the water, crawling along the canal bottom. She trudged through broken bottles and discarded knives, the occasional skeleton or two, picking clean what was edible as she went. Ice crystals rasped inside her, grinding into her liquid muscles like freezing needles. She ached. She was cold.
But my love, he doesn’t love me- he makes me feel like nobody else-
She had excised what she could- spat back at him what he had given her- but she was diminished. She hurt, and to grow again she would need to feast, and feast long. Her head breached the surface and she let her jaws loll open- and how do they taste?- and breathed the city in- rain, rain, rain, and smoke, and brick, and blood. She smelled glass and fire, gasoline and rotten wood. She heard the echoes of a thousand waterlogged hearts, beating even as they drowned.
You’ll ask me to pray for rain.
Through the canal a dark shape drifted under the water. A few of the tenement dwellers, hiding from the rain in their shacks, heard a distant birdsong mixed with static and weeping cellos. A few of them, those still awake in the endless night, looked out from behind their curtains.
Cade Silverheart was one of the watchers. He sat behind smoke-stained drapes, once a pale pink but now a muddied and stained grey, holding them aside with two scarred fingers. The butt of a cigarette dangled from his lips, smoldering feebly. Watching was his hobby, these days. He’d watched the city for forty-seven years, seen its long decline from a glittering treaty port to this sad ramshackle as the water rose and rose, overtaking the docks and the jetties. Now he only watched out of habit, even though all he ever saw was rain.
The distant crash of a collapsing building echoed through the slums. His ears pricked.
Cade had always had a talent for noticing what others didn’t, even when they seemed commonplace. Even as a child he’d noticed subtle things-- a window left just slightly too open, a footprint smudged in an unusual way. His talent had led him to the police, briefly, and then to private detective work, even more briefly. Both had ended badly.
He got up from his battered chair- a relic of his old office, the nameplate smeared beyond recognition- and shrugged on an equally ragged greatcoat. He folded up the collar, feeling that it was still damp from yesterday. Nothing ever really dried in the city. Even the walls seemed to sag with moisture, as though the years of rain were too much for them to bear.
Outside, it wasn’t much drier than the inside of his little apartment. He’d stopped paying rent months ago; no one had noticed. His landlady never seemed to leave her rooms. Cade only knew that she was still alive by the piles of bottles that appeared outside her door. He stepped over a rain-swollen gutter and headed to the canal, taking a match from its soggy book and lighting up a new cigarette. He let the butt of the old one fall to the ground. There was little risk of fire, these days.
As he walked he strained his ears for the typical sounds of the city: howling sirens and distant cries, indistinguishable between laughter and tears. A dog barked at something scurrying through the street. Someone smashed a bottle; someone else screamed. Distantly the sounds of the neverending celebrations reached him: cheery music and thundering dreams, women laughing. He rarely went to the high rises, the part of the city least touched by the water. Somehow he preferred the darkness of the slums, with all their filth and melancholy.
At his hip, Cade’s radio flipped on. He’d kept it when he left his beat. It had been useful to him as a PI, and a curiosity as a drunk. It was old, older than should still be working by rights, but work it did, and it let him keep tabs on the city’s police- what was left of them. Most nights it was silent. Right now it was crackling like a fire with frantic chatter. It seemed to echo off the canal, hissing and whispering.
“Roger that, Green-19. Do you see anything that could’ve caused the collapse?”
Cade stopped under a broken streetlight, pulling his hat down low over his eyes. Rain dripped off its brim.
….”Understood, Green-19. Keep searching for survivors, just in case.”
The collapse. It wasn’t unusual for buildings to just fall apart like wet paper, ruined by the storms. Most of these slums had been built only to house sailors for a night or two, along with the whores they bought.
The radio fell silent and Cade chewed his cigarette. He had no business being out. The boys who were still on the force from his days as a beat cop wouldn’t welcome him, if they recognized him at all. Green-19 wasn’t a patrol he was familiar with.
”HQ to Green-19. Can you describe it?”
“...A metal crab?”
What?
”Roger that, Green-19. Confirm your position…. Understood, Green-19. We’ll send a cart over as soon as possible.”
Cade turned down the volume. He knew exactly where the carts were headed. He’d passed the now-ruined building a hundred times- usually stumbling home drunk, but he still knew where to find it sober. Mostly sober, anyway.
It wasn’t his business, but it had to be somebody’s. Somebody needed to care about this sinking city, and it might as well be him.
Sonora whined, rattled, sniffed, licking her wounds with a long black tongue as she slid under the water, crawling along the canal bottom. She trudged through broken bottles and discarded knives, the occasional skeleton or two, picking clean what was edible as she went. Ice crystals rasped inside her, grinding into her liquid muscles like freezing needles. She ached. She was cold.
But my love, he doesn’t love me- he makes me feel like nobody else-
She had excised what she could- spat back at him what he had given her- but she was diminished. She hurt, and to grow again she would need to feast, and feast long. Her head breached the surface and she let her jaws loll open- and how do they taste?- and breathed the city in- rain, rain, rain, and smoke, and brick, and blood. She smelled glass and fire, gasoline and rotten wood. She heard the echoes of a thousand waterlogged hearts, beating even as they drowned.
You’ll ask me to pray for rain.
Through the canal a dark shape drifted under the water. A few of the tenement dwellers, hiding from the rain in their shacks, heard a distant birdsong mixed with static and weeping cellos. A few of them, those still awake in the endless night, looked out from behind their curtains.
Cade Silverheart was one of the watchers. He sat behind smoke-stained drapes, once a pale pink but now a muddied and stained grey, holding them aside with two scarred fingers. The butt of a cigarette dangled from his lips, smoldering feebly. Watching was his hobby, these days. He’d watched the city for forty-seven years, seen its long decline from a glittering treaty port to this sad ramshackle as the water rose and rose, overtaking the docks and the jetties. Now he only watched out of habit, even though all he ever saw was rain.
The distant crash of a collapsing building echoed through the slums. His ears pricked.
Cade had always had a talent for noticing what others didn’t, even when they seemed commonplace. Even as a child he’d noticed subtle things-- a window left just slightly too open, a footprint smudged in an unusual way. His talent had led him to the police, briefly, and then to private detective work, even more briefly. Both had ended badly.
He got up from his battered chair- a relic of his old office, the nameplate smeared beyond recognition- and shrugged on an equally ragged greatcoat. He folded up the collar, feeling that it was still damp from yesterday. Nothing ever really dried in the city. Even the walls seemed to sag with moisture, as though the years of rain were too much for them to bear.
Outside, it wasn’t much drier than the inside of his little apartment. He’d stopped paying rent months ago; no one had noticed. His landlady never seemed to leave her rooms. Cade only knew that she was still alive by the piles of bottles that appeared outside her door. He stepped over a rain-swollen gutter and headed to the canal, taking a match from its soggy book and lighting up a new cigarette. He let the butt of the old one fall to the ground. There was little risk of fire, these days.
As he walked he strained his ears for the typical sounds of the city: howling sirens and distant cries, indistinguishable between laughter and tears. A dog barked at something scurrying through the street. Someone smashed a bottle; someone else screamed. Distantly the sounds of the neverending celebrations reached him: cheery music and thundering dreams, women laughing. He rarely went to the high rises, the part of the city least touched by the water. Somehow he preferred the darkness of the slums, with all their filth and melancholy.
At his hip, Cade’s radio flipped on. He’d kept it when he left his beat. It had been useful to him as a PI, and a curiosity as a drunk. It was old, older than should still be working by rights, but work it did, and it let him keep tabs on the city’s police- what was left of them. Most nights it was silent. Right now it was crackling like a fire with frantic chatter. It seemed to echo off the canal, hissing and whispering.
“Roger that, Green-19. Do you see anything that could’ve caused the collapse?”
Cade stopped under a broken streetlight, pulling his hat down low over his eyes. Rain dripped off its brim.
….”Understood, Green-19. Keep searching for survivors, just in case.”
The collapse. It wasn’t unusual for buildings to just fall apart like wet paper, ruined by the storms. Most of these slums had been built only to house sailors for a night or two, along with the whores they bought.
The radio fell silent and Cade chewed his cigarette. He had no business being out. The boys who were still on the force from his days as a beat cop wouldn’t welcome him, if they recognized him at all. Green-19 wasn’t a patrol he was familiar with.
”HQ to Green-19. Can you describe it?”
“...A metal crab?”
What?
”Roger that, Green-19. Confirm your position…. Understood, Green-19. We’ll send a cart over as soon as possible.”
Cade turned down the volume. He knew exactly where the carts were headed. He’d passed the now-ruined building a hundred times- usually stumbling home drunk, but he still knew where to find it sober. Mostly sober, anyway.
It wasn’t his business, but it had to be somebody’s. Somebody needed to care about this sinking city, and it might as well be him.