Gads his head hurt. It throbbed, pulsing behind his eyes. He tried to pull a hand to his head to help keep the ache at bay, but he could not. Nothing was working, and it all hurt.

It came back to him. The walk to work at the prison. A sudden tightness around his throat, like a large snake had wrapped around him. Then nothing.

Blinking his eyes open, his vision swam and blurred. Shaking his head was a mistake, rattling the pain into a pitch. He blinked again and everything came into view ? upside down.

The room was tidy and tight. Light reached to its floor corners that faded above his head. He looked up at his feet tied to a chained hook. Wiggling his fingers, his hands were tied as well. Panic heightened the pulse pounding behind his eyes and in his ears. The desperate attempt to get his bearings set him to swinging and turning.

Then he saw him. Hair the color of rust, his clothing dark and meant for a fighter of ages gone by. The eyes were so clearly green even in the lone light from above. ?I know you.? That was not exactly true. He had seen the man around. He was associated with some of the Holding Houses, those holier than thou righteous ones that thought they were the city?s gift to justice. He spat at the silent man?s face.

The man did not flinch. When he spoke, the words were dispassionate. He held up a pocket watch. ?Borrowed this. Interesting precise machine of gears. I am told it keeps very good time.?

?What? What do I care? What do you want?? Panic and the hanging upside down made him vomit in his mouth and he let it dribble out.

?I have always wondered,? the rusty haired man began drawing out a knife from who knows where. It seemed to simply fit in the man?s hand. The watch dangled from its chain in counterpoint to the stillness of the knife. ?Just how long it takes.?

A flash of metal, the bright sting of pain across his throat; choking, gasping, and nothing while his blood poured from him, and he hung like a pig to slaughter.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

There was a clock ticking. It did not sound right. There were gaps in its rhythm. It was too even. Gerald, Gerry by his prison guard mates, stretched his eyes open. His mouth was cotton, jaw full of needley pain, and eyes blurry. Gerry blinked twice. He did so again. Focus came and went, but one thing he knew for certain: he was not home.

The room had one light above him. A small grate in the wooden floor corner was accompanied by a tin pail, rusted at its handle and lip. Against the wall was another cot like the one on which he sat. The body stretched out along it was familiar in the pale hair and rolls of flesh like horizon hills. ?Mike?? His voice was louder in his head than from his mouth.

Looking around again, focus clearing more each time, he saw the rectangle of a door. It had no window. There was no latch or handle. It was a metal layered square in the wall. ?Mike, wake up!? He croaked and coughed on the dryness of his throat. ?Dammit, I need some water.?

?Not today,? the voice came from behind him.

Gerry?s legs did not work like he had expected them too. The startled rise became a fumbling fall to his knees. He scooted back to Mike?s cot and punched the fellow guard in the kidneys.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

That sound kept on around them. It came from everywhere, but Gerry could not find the source. Mike groaned as he stirred. ?Gerry? What the hell??

?Oh, not quite,? the voice came again, teasingly humored by what they had to say. A man stepped from the shadows. There was no sound to his movement. The clothing should have made some sort of sound, but the dark cloth rippled and shifted like smoke and stayed silent. ?But there is an idea. Only, I am unusually sensitive to those being burned. I will do it if I must, but the outcome is too predictable.?

?What?? Mike grunted as he rolled himself to sitting up, thick legs in their dark pants bumping against Gerry who still sat on the floor by the cot.

?We are going to try something new today.? The rusty haired man smiled and his eyes went sharp as cut emeralds.

Gerry and Mike could see they felt the same way about this idea. This must be why the others had been disappearing. Others that had joined them in their free dealings at the prison. It had been difficult not to notice who was no longer showing up at work. Who disappeared without a trace. There are been four of theirs gone. Now there would be two more.

Panic took over from disorientation. There was no way out of the room, but Gerry looked again and again for it. ?Why are you doing this??

?Why Gerry, for information, of course. It is time your body served a better purpose than dominating those put in your care. Today, we are going to learn about falls.?

Mike and Gerry had worked together for a long time. They could read the cues from each other, and both of them were thinking to themselves they could take this guy out. In a push from cot and floor, they rushed the man high and low.

He wasn?t where he had been and they barely drew up before slamming into the wall. The man was walking slowly away from them. ?Do not ruin my experiment by making me damage you in the beginning.? The man now stood between the two cots.

Another silent agreement, they tried again, this time one angled on to the other?s straight ahead attack. The reward for the attempt was blinding lights of pain in their minds. Gerry felt his knee snap having been kicked out of its proper angle. Mike collapsed curled up around himself, his pain a more sensitive region.

?Pity,? the man said. ?But I think I will still get what I need. I would hate to have set the floor in motion without having a proper experiment. It does take some time for the gears to rotate around and release the mechanism that holds this floor up. Interesting pit I discovered. It likely had some real use in by gone days, but now just part of the Tunnels, languishing below.?

The floor rocked. ?Ah, we are coming near the time.?

Gerry tried to track the man, but between blinks of agony he was gone. The door never opened that he heard, but still it was closed. Only he and Mike remained.

The floor shifted again, violently rocking to another side. Black gaps formed where there should have been solid walls to floor.

Tick?Tock..

A shrieking grind of metal against metal, the floor trembled, shook, teetered and then plummeted. Air ripped from Gerry?s lungs as he tried to scream. It was forever and not when the fall stopped and his head crashed against the floor. Whimpering from somewhere?distant, fading?nothing.

Mike blinked open his eyes. Gerry?s head smashed like a melon. Blood crept along the wood grain of the floor and between the slats. He turned to look up, red watery visions of stone walls tall up to a pinpoint lamp light. The light was blocked by a looming shadow. ?Pity,? he heard. Glint of light, metal reflection, and nothing.

Jimmy knew they were in trouble. Not from the law, no those people were on their side. The Watch was trying their best to find out what had happened to the other guards who just vanished. Trouble was, Jimmy and the rest, those still left and always looking over their shoulders, sweating stink all the time and never drinking alone couldn't help. What were they supposed to do? Answer they didn't know why they were targeted except for maybe those times they had abused their positions? That from time to time, times too often, they found some of their female prisoners too tempting; too luscious to just watch through cages?

There was no trail either. Nothing left. It was just as if the others had been sucked away. Nobody said that could not happen. What they said was it was odd it was the prison guards, one after another.

Knowing all of this, Jimmy had decided he and the others needed to take matters into their own hands. If they made it difficult, banded together, maybe whatever it was would think twice, get tired of waiting. That was why Jimmy was heading to the run down house on the edge of the warehouse district. They would live there, eat, sleep, walk to work together in groups, and survive.

The pack on his back was heavy with his gear, and still he had been sure to pack only what he needed for a week or so. Surely it would be over then. It would show whatever or whomever this was that they wouldn't get at them so easily.

Cold made his hands ache, and he rubbed them together, tucking them beneath his armpits as he turned down the street. The house halfway down that road. Cans of garbage waiting for the pick up waited at curbsides beyond bent and abused iron gates. Steam rose from sewer grates in the sidewalk like little engines that could.

Jimmy walked on. So close when he stepped on one of those steaming grates and it flipped. His leg slid down and his stomach trapped him with the bag on his back between grate and cement. "Help!" He cried out, hoping some of his companions were already in the house and would hear him. He doubted anyone else would.

But he was wrong. A figure came from one of the alleyways and walked then hurried to his side. "Got yourself caught there. Here, let me help you." The hand that gripped Jimmy's was strong and calloused. This was a man who knew work.

After a moment, the man had gotten Jimmy free of the grate accident. "Thanks, pal." He glanced to the house. No one had stirred. He must be a little earlier than them. "Say, want to come in and have a drink?"

"You know," the man smiled and offered his hand to get Jimmy from sitting on the sidewalk to his feet, "you would think a man who is gathering with others for protection would be a little more cautious of who he asks into his home."

Jimmy froze. In the blink of an eye, the man punched at his throat. The snap and pain made Jimmy want to gasp and scream, but he could barely breath at all. Choking, working his mouth to try and make air at least enter and leave as it should, he started to scramble away from the man.

It was a futile hope as he felt hands grip his shoulders. The sharp tightness, he thought the man had claws, but when he looked they were hands as his own. The grate was open again, and he was shoved through. The man following to jump down. "Now," the man said, a glint from above catching on green eyes when he looked up to adjust the grate, placing a metal spike into the edge of the cement evidently meant to keep the grate safe. "Now, we learn. Here, you see, the sewers and the Tunnels have this interesting intersection." He gripped Jimmy's shoulder and drew him up to his feet.

Breath continued to be difficult to pass through his throat, feeling swollen and raw. Something tickled and trickled through it that brought gagging he could not control. A noise like a waterfall echoed off the dripping stone corridors. The man drew him to a short stop. "You see, here, the pumps press water from the bay through the place in the sewers that run just beneath this tunnel. But the grates make it an interestingly dangerous place, particularly when it has been raining for a time. You are very fortunate it has not been raining."

Jimmy could not see how he was fortunate. Not at all. He was crying, praying, doing whatever he could to try and survive this. He was going to see this man hanged, and none of this could he speak or threaten. But it didn't matter. The blow to his back stole what air he had squirreled away, causing his feet to slide along the slick stones and he lost his footing, falling into that gap between walls where the grates allowed the water to rush through.

His body convulsed, lungs tried to draw in air in an automatic gasp from the water. All that he sucked in was the mucky brine of bubbling bay water. The swirl of currents drew him down and the pressure to try and breath increased as he fought to get back to the top again. Another current pulled him in a different direction. He lost the thought of up and down. His head crashed against the iron of the gate, and more water saturated his lungs.

There was no more thrashing in the churning waters where the man stood and waited until the pumps shut off in half an hour. Then he drug the body and draped it over his shoulders like a slain animal. And like a slain animal, it would be taken to the butcher for its final processing.

There was no thought, only instinct. Each move fluid into the next as he defended and attacked as if he could foresee what each man would do, anticipate, and exploit that knowledge into a bloody conclusion. Pat was the next to fall. His belly opened as a fish at market, eyes wide and unseeing of the red illuminated ceiling.

Patience. It was Ewan?s winning trademark. When others panicked, when anger or fear drove to desperation, it was patience that kept him in control while the gift for death sang free inside him, uncaged. It was not a rage when set free. It was a questing, seeking, driving force, pinpointed upon the destruction of another.

Jack?s arm that had supported the gun drooped at his side with the dark slick of blood drawing his blue shirt black. The sword he had picked up was obviously uncomfortable in his hands, but he had been wise to follow Joe?s lead , staying back behind the others. But now there was no place to hide from those twin blades. Joe?s attacks were getting feral, driven to overcome, to win, and it left Jack outside the plan.

Ewan drew his blades out to the side and darted between the men. Joe took the gambit and Jack paid the price. All that muscle in Joe?s strike severed Jack?s head from his neck. The body fell with a thump and the head cracked against a chair before rolling to a stop. Ewan kept his right blade moving in the step through, not caring about the bodies around his feet any more than he cared for other obstacles to his balance. The metal found flesh and stopped. In the completion of his stepped circle back around to face Joe, he pressed further sending the blade beyond the muscle, between ribs, into lungs and out the back. Joe coughed. His face was rigid and gruesome with the pain. Blood spat out, borne on that cough. Ewan did not draw the blade straight back out. Instead he changed the angle of his grip, and tore outwards to the side of the body, slicing and pulling tissue as he went.

The room was drenched in crimson. A stench rose in the air from a chimney rarely used. Neighbors hid from the fright of that smell and sight. The Watch came upon this smell and sight themselves hours later and searched the house, but nothing was found in that abandoned house but a blood coated living room and ashes in a dying fire.