In the depths of the Hive there is always work, gangs vs gangs, nobility trying to cause a scandal. You just have to find the right person. Marben was one of those people, a dishonoured military man but with some skills to get tasks done. For the past 3 years Marben has made a name for himself ‘The Dusk Killer’ more of a trophy name thanks to certain jobs.
Several tiers below the hive where the sun doesn’t even reach the slums are always covered in damp slurry and the air almost has the taste of rust thanks to the ageing equipment and lack of mechanicus maintenance. Within one of the millions of alleyways is a small watering hole, the smell of unsanctioned brews being concocted. “It's definitely him, look at the picture” two men were coercing with one holding a partially torn poster; Wanted dead or alive, extremely dangerous by order of the Planetary Arbiters. The poster had a poorly drawn close up of a male with long brown hair, crooked nose and a scar running from the centre of the lower lip past his chin and curled towards the neck. The poster also gave a description of a Male with average height and average build, commonly seen wearing a long leather coat and black undergarments. The second man took a look at the poster before looking across the rundown ‘bar’ to a table where a single male sat. He was smoking, as he took a drag his head lifted and the dull shine of the indoor light cast a shadow of a scar on the lower face.
The two men continued to bicker as the single man calmly sat and smoked. It seemed the men came into agreement, nodding together before standing up one blocking the door and the other approaching the table “We know who you are, now whats it going to take for us not to kill you?” said the hulking man, his hands clenched. “This” The man replied before a laspistol blasted from beside the table colliding with chest leaving a gaping hole, the clothes crisped up beside the cauterised flesh as the corpse dropped to the floor. The second man, shocked, decided to run than fight screaming in the streets for some sort of law enforcement. Marben stood up unquivered by what happened, was it the tranq liquor? Unlikely, his callousness and lust for death were more of a role to play. As an acting guardsmen his fear was stripped from him as was his morality and care for most beings. Marben became cold, almost a psychopath with little regard for the what's and whys of his orders; the only satisfaction was the killing. He began to crave more and swifter deaths as if he became blind drunk and whatever was in front of him was the target. Unfortunately these ‘tendencies’ were not appreciated by his fellow comrades which has led him towards this new path.
Even the Law could be swayed, the incorruptible, corrupted. It was something even the high and mighty dared not consider, lest it worm its way into their heads as well. For Viktor, however, consideration had long since come and gone, though he had not quite yet thrown off the disguise. He still wore the badge of local Enforcers, though routinely dealt in bribery, turning a blind eye, and even the odd 'convenient' arrest. Minor ways to pad his pockets, improve his station, stepping stones leading ever closer to the abyss, though he knew none of this yet, all he had known was casual corruption. After he was officially relieved of duty, well, he and those more loyal to the credits than the Imperium had gone a bit mental, the badge still worn out of spite rather than obligation.
The idling truck, bearing the local noble's coat of arms as an impromptu, and false, badge of office, cast stark light onto the noble estate's front gate. While several men idled about, one stood out, one hand holding a vox headset up to his ear, the other resting on a slung combat shotgun. The man's form was hard to make out, dull green greatcoat concealing much until facing him square on, revealing a mix of carapace and flak armor, salvaged from otherwise more fitting people, the carapace only covering the vitals of his torso and upper legs. The sides of his head were buzzed, though the greying hair was slightly visible despite this, brown hair well kept on top of his head, swept to the side in one smooth motion. Abruptly tossing the headset of the back of the truck, he ran a hand through his ample beard, smoothing it out as he started walking towards the estate gate, noting how well the men followed his orders, one nodding as he approached. "Viktor, what's the word, we getting paid or we nailing that fat bastard's family to the gates next?"
Viktor, the man in the greatcoat, glanced at the gate. A younger man was crucified to it, still twitching and groaning, barely conscious, crude marks carved into his chest as he dangled and slowly bled, a drawn out execution. The sounds of continued looting, shouting, and the crescendo of a burst of gunfire from within the estate was slowly dying down, meaning Viktor's men were wrapping up. At last, Viktor smiled lowly and produced a dataslate, the glowing green indicating that the transaction had been confirmed. The man who had asked Viktor about pay in the first place was practically salivating at the prospective next payday, and what that could buy him back in one of the Hives on the planet. "Paid in full, once the others drag our employer's rival out here, I'll string him up myself. After that, well, time to see who pay's up next."
In practice, Viktor could not care less about the pay, not really. Every noble family he nailed to the gates of some private estate, every clerk who's card he punched a bit more literally than they might like, destabilized things further. Even a blind man could see it, the local Arbites crackdowns back in the Hive coming less often as they were so busy investigating the rash of violence in so many seemingly random places, and the sheer intensity and drawn out nature of such executions, that they were getting drawn away from the real problem. The main Hive would soon erupt into an orgy of violence, something that his employer's didn't seem aware of, only concerned about bumping off their potential rivals, by any means necessary. All it had taken was that one, desperate useless waste of flesh paying Viktor and his goons to finally set his planned revenge back into motion. His thoughts were interrupted by shouting, laughing, and the smell of freshly soiled trousers. The head of the family, it seems, was finally dug out of his little safe room. That Heretek code had worked after all, he'd have to 'lose' one of his men to that wretch in compensation after all. Still, once the man was dragged forward and forced to his knees, Viktor planted a swift boot into his gut to shut him up, the wheezing much easier to talk over.
"Stop trying to pay us off, it ain't going to get you anywhere. All you nobles, playing at leadership and pretending you have power, reveling in its empty promises. Look where all that power and prestige got you, so fat I'm not sure your concubine's guts can hang you long enough to strangle. Good thing I ran some spare wire through them, eh? Get him under the lamp post." The fat noble struggled and started shouting curses, how the other families wouldn't let this stand, how he had friends, allies in power, that they would all rot if they were lucky, yadda yadda yadda. The fat fuck didn't see his precious concubine's corpse under the lamp post, her guts spooled like rope, a grisly noose prepared already. True to his word, Viktor had one of his men run some cable through them since it was well know how hefty this one had gotten. He only stopped shouting and ranting when the lukewarm intestine was put around his neck, and with a grunt, Viktor hoisted him up, nailing the end into place with a stake. The man kicked for longer than he thought, and from the grumbling, several men had lost best on this too. Good thing Viktor didn't make blind bets, and he took satisfaction watching the life flee the man's eyes, the kicking dying down to twitching death throes, to nothing.
"Right, set the promethium trails and let the place burn, let's see if the pyre burns any higher this time. Leave the corpses here for the Arbites to find and panic over. We got our pay, and the sooner we get back to the Hive, the sooner you lot can get to spend your pay and I can get our next job in line." The men seemed keen to that, meanwhile Viktor climbed up into the driver's cabin, his second in command driving as the group tore off into the night, the looming Hive city, at least half a day's trip at speed away, still looked like it dominated the skyline. The XO rambled on about this haul and how far ahead it would put them, but Viktor tuned him out. Another job like this, and the whole rotten facade the Imperium had propped up, had convinced him to prop up for so long, would come crashing down. The Law and Order they so desperately craved, well, would vanish like the myths they were. Also he figured he knew which man to give to the Heretek, he'd gotten himself shot like an idiot by the estate's personal guards. He'd make a nice tribute to that Heretek, keep up his end of the bargain and all that. He had taken to enjoying his work now, more so than he ever had propping up the rotting house. Few more kicks, and it would go up like a damned funeral pyre. After that, well, he had enough credits stashed away to pay off a Rogue Trader he'd met and been bribed by he could hitch a ride with. Seems there was more to do for a man with talents like his, especially if he would denounce the Emperor. Sure, that was easy, what had that so called God ever done for him, really? Got him fired, that's what, just for making his own personal life a bit easier. And if he got to enjoy burning the whole rotten power structure down, well, all the better right?
As I toil away at numbers and figures my hands look like someone else's. These are the hands of an old man. The hands of someone fit to do little more than pull at a blanket and shake involuntarily. Where has the strength gone? Where are the veins near to bursting through the skin. The hard calloused knuckles. The cracked fingernails, dirt and blood still worked in deep, almost impossible to keep clean. What are these thin pink appendages growing from them? They cannot be my fingers. They are too small. Too soft. Too clean.
These cannot be the hands that waved along reinforcements as I ducked under the wild fire of Orcish hordes gibbering at the moon as they rushed our encampments. Certainly these hands could never choke the life out of a traitor. They're not fit to scrabble up embankments, to dig and scratch at the dirt furiously that I might find some meager cover. These hands look inexperienced. Surely they've never been coated in the blood of my brothers, holding flaps of skin against leaking innards while we wait for medical evacuation. These dainty little hands have never dutifully closed the eyes of a fellow Guardsman for the final time. They've never signaled a firing line to execute deserters.
Each night stretches on, the minutes ticking by at a snail's pace yet somehow the hours rushing. I need to rest. I am not the man I once was. I no longer rise with a start from my bed and hurry on my way to make the Emperor's will manifest. These days the rising is a process all it's own, particularly on the nights when I have been unable to find myself the release of slumber. Those nights grow more and more common.
I lay in bed or recline behind my desk and ponder where I have failed that the Emperor deems I must continue on. I have done so much and ventured so far but still my work is not done.
Despite its designation as an agri-world, like the majority of Imperial Worlds Arishe 42.9 maintained a facility for the development of corpse starch. For the most part this was so that it could be used in the creation of fabrics and clothing since unlike the standard Hive world, Arishe 42.9 could actually grow and sustain other food products, but some corpse starch would still end up on the plates of those living on the planet alongside the occasional shipment off-world to one of the other planets in system that for logistical reasons needed some extra corpse starch in a hurry.
Of course, like all industries, workers were required in all stages of corpse starch production. From gathering the bodies of the recently deceased all the way to shipping the final product of corpse starch to whatever end it needed to go to. Jim was simply another cog in the machine who's job was, once a body had been properly stripped of their belongings, bionics and other mechanical parts removed and then cleaned, to take that body and convert it into its most basic parts so that they could be sorted, treated in the correct manner and used to the fullest. Skin sent down one chute, bones in another, muscles and meat sent along the belt. Anything that didn't belong in the human body that was missed by earlier sweeps got tossed in a bin to be sorted out later.
It was bloody work, but Jim took a sense of pride in being rather good with the chain cleavers and meeting his quotas. Then one day, he accidentally slept in; He had been a little feverish and his body had refused to let him get up without an extra half an hour of sleep. While good for his health, this resulted in Jim being late for work and needing to skip the morning meal in order to have a chance of meeting deadlines.
It wasn't so bad at first, but after a few hours of physically demanding work that required one to stay focused or risk adding a little more meat to the belt, Jim had a rather... strange thought as hungry threatened to distract him at bad times. The body he had been working on was a fatter then normal person, why not take a small amount of meat from it in order to give him the energy and focus to make it through to the next proper meal. Sure, the headgear they wore was meant to discourage such an action but it wouldn't be difficult to bypass it if he tried. Not wishing to lose an arm due to a moment of distraction, Jim took a handful of raw meat and slipped it past his face mask.
For a moment he thought that it would be wrong to ate raw human meat. Disgusting. But once it was actually in his mouth and he was eating it, he honestly didn't have the words to describe the sensation. It was so rich... so juicy. It was honestly one of the best things he had ever tasted before in his life. Only the threat of an overseer stopping by to 'motivate' him to keep working prevented Jim from continuing to eat from the corpse and getting back to work. But as time passed other opportunities to sneak a handful presented themselves and there was a part of Jim that wanted to make sure that the earlier taste hadn't just been a strange fluke.
It hadn't been. Once the shift was over and he had the next proper meal Jim couldn't help but find it... bland. Lacking somehow. He still ate it, but it just didn't have that same texture and taste that he had experienced earlier. As time past and other shifts came and went, Jim found himself sneaking little bits of meat whenever he felt he could get away with it. He always seemed to be more energetic and focused whenever he had at least one morsel stolen from the production line and soon the idea of going a shift without a fix was just madness to him.
The fact that he was processing bodies faster then before at a high quality of success was an added bonus to this arrangement; Where before he had been meeting quotas and deadlines, now he was taking to the task with such zeal that he was actually surpassing quotas of bodies being processed a day to the point where the overseers had noticed and were using him as an example for the other workers to follow.
It was around this point that what Jim had originally believed to be his own impulses revealed that wasn't the case. A voice that materialized in his head, speaking to him of rites and rituals and the secrets of blood and muscle. While initially Jim had been privately concerned by the discovery that something or someone was speaking to him inside of his mind that wasn't himself, he couldn't help but find himself trusting it and its advice. After all, following its guidance had worked out wonderfully for Jim so far; He was physically in the best shape of his life, his mind felt sharper then ever before and the overseers hadn't beaten him for months. Whatever it was, it clearly had his interests at heart.
So after his shift, Jim found some unemployed dredge in an alleyway that was eating something likely ransacked from a garbage pile and introduced them to the business end of a chain cleaver. The process was messy, but apart from the screaming of the soon to be corpse there really wasn't much difference between it and Jim's shift work. With the ritual that the voice was informing him of, Jim enjoyed the greatest meal he had ever had in his life.
The voice itself, a roaring inferno of a fiery tone that felt like it could shake the world just by yelling, affectionately bestowed upon Jim the title of Butcher. There would be more to do in the future of course, but in that very moment Jim felt such a deep sense of contentment with himself that the idea of his life before almost made him weep.
The dredges of the Underhive, a place where the foulness of man runs rampant. Where the cesspool of sin cumilates and profilerates itself in a variety of forms, within all that are cursed with the unfortunate circumstance of living there. From those that domineer their fellow less-fortunate man to those taken advantage of, each find their own way to cope with their dreadful existence.
Ishmael Consanin was one of the unfortunate multitude to into existence within the slums of the Underhive. A child born of a gang enforcer forcing themselves onto his mother while working within a labor-camp under the local gang's control to earn scraps to live by, the beginnings of Ishmael were already marked with the disgusting taint of sin.
And forced to toil away to live by during his earlier years to live by the same scraps his mother did, the ideal of having control something, anything would come to his wretched life.
First as a child, it began when he had his spare moments of free-time. His hand caught a squirming insect within his hand, one of the many that infested the squalor he lived in. It writhed and stayed within it's grasp, just he did in the labor-camp, but unlike the labor-camp, Ishmael held every aspect of control over the little vermin.
Those sunken eyes of his would stare at his catch, watching it move helpessly about. Until he got bored of it's writhing, and began pulling it's limbs off one by one. Boredom alleviated by watching how much dominance he held over such a miniscule and insignificant creature, and how it reacted to whatever torture was inflicted onto it.
But insects could only express so much with their body and instincts, and so a growing Ishmael would turn to larger vermin in time, the ilk of rats and their sort. The agonies he inflicted onto those creatures were given reactions in ways a mere bug never could. Blood, crying squeaks and the fervent attempts to gnaw and claw at his malnourished hands made it all the more engaging for the teenage youth.
And by process of evolution of his wicked desires again, did that gaze of his rise from mere animals which responded off of instinct, to his fellow man. It was by this time he reached adulthood his mother had already died, and by cursed miracle, had he found himself within the very same gang that oppressed him and his mother when he was younger, and still did as the bottom grunt of their operations.
But what did he care if they once worked him to the bone? Control... self-gratification from seeing those creatures beneath him be manipulated by him to his whim was the perverse obession that held within his mind now. The gang was now only seen as a way to finally reach the next level of that craving, one that would be the indulgence to send him spiralling over the edge.
Ishmael Consanin, one of many enforcers of the labor-camp walked through the lines of the down-trodden souls that worked for their next scrap of sustenance, his eye falling on one woman evidently too 'slow' in her work.
One out of the many slaving away wouldn't be missed, not that Ishmael would take take too long anyway...
