He woke up sometime during the night to the stark and sad quality that was the sound of a baying wolf.
It had broken his sleep and had him walking carelessly in the nude for the window, the one left wide open to catch the sounds and smells of this desolate landscape while he slept every night. The sounds of warfare, of terrified screams, of the rolling thunder that was the passing Rave; all things of comfort. Feeding his dark romance.
It was as if he had been weened on lotuses, in fact, that is what Brentan had often said. "He got the lotus, and I got the tit!"
Andy stared at the black sky, its forgetful and painfully slow cloud patterns, and pulled down the curtains before he headed back to his bed stretching - though it was there, pulling back the sheet left in its tangle, that he realised that he was itching for a smoke. So he pulled on his khaki's, pink slippers (shh, don't tell anyone) and headed down the stairwell to watch any commotion, any fights, any women getting chased out of a bar down the furthest end of the street, while he lapped up the safety of distance, a voyeur's humour, as he sucked down the bland but refreshing green laced hit with eyes half open, his hair all over the place.
But no.
No chilling by the outside brick wall watching the stories that no one else saw but night owls and sickos like him. Someone else thought he made an amusing study.
They had left a mutilated rabbit at his door. How thoughtful! Really, just too kind, all muttered in his head as he reached down to lift the white rabbit up, floppy and warm, its snowy-white, amazingly soft coat wet with blood. As he stood there, he felt like he had gotten the raw end of a joke, felt like he had reached into a top hat and found exactly what he was supposed to, only, it wasn't so much a a fancy trick as a well planned means to piss him the hell off.
He strode out onto the road and looked around madly, his scrawny chest laboured with an angry man's breath, mandibles popping, so too the veins in his neck and temples.
He clenched the lifeless wabbit in his hand and shook his head, walked over to a bin and tossed it in.
Andy wasn't a sentimental guy, memento's really didn't do it for him.
Especially memento mori's.
He chalked it up to two people. He couldn't imagine the gunslinger doing it, but maybe one of her hired hands had.
Or that Norse bitch who had called him a bastage! No, this he would not get over or forget. He had only been so helpful after all!
Stepping on his cigarette with a definitive stomp, grinding it right down into the wet tar beneath his fluffy pink slipper, Andy made a howl of his own. It rang out in the dereliction, it echoed in the broken timbers of fallen buildings:
"YOU ASKED FOR IT."
He listened to his own voice bouncing off the walls until he could no longer bear the cold, the smell of something dead on his hand and the sound of fear so heavy in that frustrated scream.
Then he went back inside, and Andy did not sleep, he did not smoke again. He sat on his beanbag gripping his carving knife, plotting. Waiting for someone else to leave a token.
Looks like it was his turn to play butcher.
