In the Shadow of the Storm [SAMPLE]

2 | Fight

Cain || December, 2014.

The shouting could be heard in every corner of the prison.

Following the sound, many paths led through the disjointed corridors, each lined with silver bars and dark cells filled with agitated inmates, their catcalls mingling with the roars coming from farther along. The halls came to a nexus, level upon level of metal balconies encircling a single point where men and women in black uniforms walked their coordinated routes with automatic weapons strapped to their hips.

Most leaned on the railings to watch the festivities below.

The pit was ringed by steel walls and riveted doors, silver spikes jutting from the rim of the floor above to keep the rabble contained—and rabble there was. Ten men scrabbled in the confines of the enclosed space and they barely had room to walk, and yet they struggled and grappled with one another, bodies slamming into the steel to leave dents in the warped surface. Light from the covered fixtures played upon their bloody, twisted faces, gleaming on teeth too long to be in the mouths of humans. Dead eyes were empty but for the hunger that shook them, bleak and listless desperation curling once timid hands into white-knuckled fists.

They were dressed in rags, shirts loose over shrunken bodies and their feet bare on the filthy floor. Those smaller and thinner in stature, built like saplings with arms that could break under the barest breath of pressure, stuck to the room's perimeters and swiped at each other, biting and hissing. The larger of their number converged in the middle, fists thrown in pulverizing haymakers—targeting a lone, specific man.

He was a giant among them, seven feet in height with a body of wiry muscles and quick, unrepentant hands. His hair hung lank from his scalp and pooled about his heaving shoulders in a damp cloak of deepest black. A matted beard covered the sharp planes of his jaw, the bared teeth behind the hair straight, even, and white with sweeping canines poised above his bottom lip. Vivid eyes blazed under a furrowed brow, flashing emerald in the sterile light.

His assailants suffered. A man missing two fingers on his left hand grappled at the giant's shirt, tearing the worn fabric, and the taller man sent him spiraling through the crowd, his arm reduced to a twisted mess of splintered bones and sundered flesh. The others clamored over the howling man without regard for his presence or injuries, bare feet scrabbling for purchase on a floor soaked as crimson as seas befouled by punishing angels.

On the level above, men and women in their stark, buttoned uniforms balanced open coolers on the railings, and from them they dispersed frosted red pouches. The pouches sailed through the air and into the grasping, desperate hands of those who struggled below, brought down to greedy mouths with elongated teeth that pierced the synthetic skin of the pouches to suck the sweet nectar dry. The blood bags that weren't caught or were fumbled fell to the floor and burst like water balloons. The creatures who missed the flung pouches fell to their knees and licked the red juice from the filthy metal.