The skyline of a once proud city sat sulking under grey clouds as smoke, dark as night, blossomed from the streets below. After a series of harsh beatings, it sat a husk of it's former self, but not quiet. It was never a quiet city.

Even after nobody shopped here.
Even after the transit stopped running.
Even after the businesses shut down and the buildings were left to crumble. 

No. It was not a quiet city. Today would be no different.

Like rodents, men filled an otherwise abandoned street below. Men wearing broken cross tattoos and men wearing red filled the space between the ruins and debris. They all had arrived to sort out their differences. They had not seen the whites of each other eyes when each side unleashed a cacophony of gunfire. Gunfire, and screams of death.

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In a place not far away a man's eyes flicked open. This wasn't just any man. This was a dead man...or...a man who was sure he should be dead.

Before the blade had come down on his neck, he yearned for as many seconds of his precious life as he could buy, but after the first attempt at beheading him, he wanted nothing but the release of death.

All he could remember was the pain, the blood running down his back, and the masked figures in the graveyard, murdering him and many others. He didn't even remember who they were.

He picked himself up off the ground to observe his surroundings. Concrete, on all sides. No windows adorned the room, but it was lit by many candles set off to the side, burning and melting on the ground. He spotted a doorway, through which he saw a staircase leading upwards. But perhaps the most important, or most alarming, of things he noticed right away, was the other person laying on the ground not far from where he was.