Roleplayer Guild - Forum Roleplaying Games

The bar was dim, filthy, and smelled horrible. Century-old music from the days when music still existed commercially played from wall-mounted speakers, and almost everyone inside was an alcoholic, a junkie, or both. It lived up to Dean’s expectations.

He entered, thinking maybe he could make a plan. Something cool, calculated.

Sometimes he liked to pretend his hobby—he still hadn’t found a better word for it—had rules. A structure. A formula you could follow if you wanted to hunt down and kill criminals. The truth was, it was far from structured. When Dean became passionate, all hell broke loose. And that was the way he liked it.

Hell, that was the way Thea liked it. That was the way all they all liked it. Maybe it was why they always left him in the end, too.

Right then, however, Thea and that bar were worlds apart—literally. He could feel the cold sleek shotgun pressed against his abdomen, snug, secure. It was his strength, it was his cross, and damned if he needed any woman when it was in his hands. It was almost erotic, almost sinful, and he needed it more than he would ever need Thea.

The bartender eyed him as he walked in. Why not? He was tall, groomed, and maybe his clothes weren’t so expensive but they weren’t the filthy rags the mindless junkies wore. He looked like an average joe, as they used to say. Dean approached him with a neutral expression and took a seat at the bar.

“Spirits. On the rocks,” he said, sliding a few metallic chips across the grimy counter-top. The bartender swept them up greedily and went about pouring him some foul brew that reeked of something he couldn’t quite describe. Dean took a mouthful, beat down his gag reflex, and took a look around. The bar was populated by a few drowsy addicts, boozers, a dealer or two and a couple of bored hookers, and he had to consider whether or not he actually had enough ammunition.

He hoped so. He wanted to be the only one to walk out alive—and into a cleaner world.

His cellular buzzed in his pocket. He withdrew it, saw Thea was calling, cancelled it, and shoved it back where it came from. Have a little patience, shit.

A rugged type with an eyepatch sauntered in just then; complicating the whole scenario more than he liked, because with some of them you could just tell they were going to be trouble. Some of them had a little something else, that predator’s instinct, and they weren’t just going to be slaughtered like the rest of the lambs.

Change of plan: kill eyepatch first, then do the easier game. He watched out of the corner of his eye as eyepatch ordered a beer. Dean sat for half a minute longer and rose from the stool, leaving the rest of his drink untouched.

It’s time, that familiar voice piped up in his mind. Time to blow ‘em away. His blood began to rush. He felt like electricity was coursing through him. He turned, stepped toward eyepatch, and brandished the shotgun, his face darkening with passionate malice.

Some people said cops had programmed reflexes, that they could spring like a steel trap at the slightest provocation, that they moved like machines. Dean had never seen a cop, and it was probably bullshit anyway.

But sweet mother of fuck, pray forgiveness, Eyepatch was just like that.

Even moments afterward, he couldn’t remember getting shot. The sequence of his memory was vague, dreamlike, and dominated by his present agony. He screamed, swore, staggered and fell, letting the shotgun clatter forgotten from his hands. His leather boot bore a blackened, smoking ring where the bullet had ripped through it, and blood oozed from the wound in regular spurts.

There were more gunshots after that, but he was too absorbed to take notice. He’d been shot. He stared at the wound for what seemed like hours, engrossed by the horror of it, confounded by disbelief. Next he was outraged—outraged at the injustice of it all. Instantly he hated this criminal more than he hated any other, because he had defied God’s will, had refused to die like he was intended.

Dean looked up at Eyepatch. Looked straight down the barrel of his pistol.

“What do you want?” Eyepatch asked him. Dean was almost slavering. Had he been able, he would have torn open Eyepatch’s throat with his bare hands.

But then a little voice spoke up in his head. It told him to calm down, made soothing noises. He listened to it. His rage subsided, and where it had once seethed and driven him almost to the brink of madness there was now nothing but tranquility. And a cold, insidious will that began ticking over, plotting how he could get the upper hand on this whoreson.

He forced his best smile, all white teeth and charm. “Buddy, it was a misunderstanding. You look like a dealer that ripped me off last week.”