Chapter 12: To Organize the Mayhem I

Tick-tock, the clock would tick. Silently, the hand would turn.

Tick-tock, unstopped it went on. Silently, it made a full one.

Silently, it returned to its starting place.

Silently, it turned once again along the very same course.

No amount of ticking could change that.

Silently, towards a never-changing destination. No amount of ticking would get even a peep out of her.

Tick-tock, and time would continue to pass.

The faint sound of a jaw cracking against her knuckle. That was the first thing since she’d left for her ‘part-time job’ that didn’t look like it was part of a laid out play. It didn’t echo in her head and leave just as easily as it had entered like the taunts, the moans, the glass breaking to the rhythm of the bass. It was real, it was happening right at that moment, no doubt about it.

He stumbled against the stone wall right next and fell down, the impact shattering his nose like a faulty piece of pottery. It was a great delight to behold. Now there was some woman behind him. She opened her mouth, trying to bite her in an inebriated stupor, but all she got was a mouthful of the girl’s elbow. Her teeth didn’t last very long.

There was another fool at the end of the room, likely the weakest among that trio. She nearly ripped his torso in half with a single slash of her claws, and crimson fluid splattered everywhere, leaving him to wheeze on the floor and her to carry on for the rest of the night with her clothes covered in muck and a stench that would be unbearable by the time she got home.

It didn’t matter much to her though. Neither did the man’s suffering or those other two’s, for that matter. Nothing really mattered. Any pain they felt was only a passing sensation that spanned for an hour or so. Regardless, in about sixty minutes at most, the woman’s teeth would have grown back, and so would the buff ruffian’ nose as well.

Depending on his luck, the third guy’s two halves would either reattach themselves back on their own, or the necessary parts would grow back spontaneously from whatever portion his head was a part of, leaving the other one to rot away like a lizard’s shed skin. It would be slightly uncomfortable if he was awake, as well as take an awful amount of time more if it happened through the second process, but, in the end, he would be as alive as the others in less than three hours at least. And too bad for his pants, too.

Nothing mattered. Not in that city, not in the whole UDS. That was why…

She laughed out loud for nobody in particular. It felt great. The crimson splashing everywhere, the screams, the suffering, it all felt so natural and earned. To revel in the very same carnage one should be fighting against… That was how managing gangs did things. Haema had certainly been the greatest gift man had ever received. With it, human life had effectively been turned into little more than a game. No matter how many pieces she broke someone into, how much they cried or yelled, or how much blood they shed, soon it would all be back to normal again.

And so, whatever happened in the long nights, stayed in the long nights. Repercussions were nonexistent, and people would be impossible to identify after all was said and done.

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It was her paradise. Everyone’s paradise. Somewhere they could do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, so long as the sun was down. And the moment it was up, all would have been forgotten. All damages would have been gone, carried like dust by the wind.

But of course, she could not fully indulge it, lest she lose control of it in her own stupor. In much the same way a drug dealer getting addicted to the very product they sold was poor form, there were limits she needed to hold herself up to.

She was not a participating member of Seagate City’s moonlit paradise of hedonism. She was its master. She was the hired manager, for better or for worse.

It had been a random, shady restaurant they were hitting up, right in the middle of the Center. It had a sort of edge to it, as though the premises were inspired by some old culture from before the war. She couldn’t really tell which of them it was, though, and neither did she care. Now there were only cracked walls, barely hidden behind thin layers of ripped up blue wallpaper, overturned tables, spilled bowls and plates everywhere, and the unmoving bodies of several instigators and victims alike, lying next to the countless ruined booths. She had taken care of the suckers before any of her forces had arrived, and although this time she might have been too zealous, she assured herself it was all for the sake of keeping the order in her territory. The Phantoms’ territory. Looting, robbery and fee collecting were operations to be conducted solely by them, who ruled the city, not some nobodies who fell down after a single hit.

She could admit that the state she’d left the establishment in wasn’t exactly the prettiest of sights, but in the end, it would all be undone. Personal damages would be gone, property damages could be fixed by the board with some pushing and negotiating. She was all set to leave.

Much like a wish granting genie, haema brought forth to reality any and all of its users’ desires through their own bodies. Few were the men who weren’t afraid of death. So they became invincible. Several people would wish for pleasure and release. To escape from their dreary lives. Thus pleasure and release they felt. General fears and inhibitions followed the same path, common sense and logic went away with them by proxy. Those who needed strength, got it in immeasurable amounts.

There were only three basic concepts that haema could not override no matter how much one’s mind would be flexed: regular cellular aging; the human organism’s basic composition, form and durability; and, of course, the concept of pain, although it could be numbed down to a manageable degree.

And that was how it was. In the shade of the night, death was no more. Or at least, that was how it should have been, until the freak accident she’d witnessed two weeks ago. There had been death in her paradise. At the time, when she’d seen Vince in that state, she had felt a strong urge to throw up. Her mind had raced. Showing weakness in front of other Phantoms would be the end of her name, and she had fortunately kept things to herself. She had, however, noticed just how shook the others were as well. A real human corpse was something she had not seen in a long time.

Ever since then, there had been three more cases. And then, yet three more followed. They’d been too late for all of them: Rafael Regan, 23, Amanda Curie, 31, Saanvi Jackson, 26, going by their legal names.

She had found one of them only two hours prior, their body in a similar state to how Vince and the others’ had been.

The other two were killed during the day, six hours prior. One, singular bullet in the head, each of them. No witnesses on site. Aaron had been able to retrieve their bodies through sheer luck.

Even for managing gangs, executions during daytime were out of the question, enough to warrant blunt termination and erasure of the perpetrator without so much as a trial or even a funeral.

And yet, the killer just wouldn’t stop…

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