Post by Zombie Jesus on Aug 21, 2009 17:13:23 GMT -5
The dense black of night covers the sky like a thick blanket, to hide those who would haunt the world of man, covering in the absence of light the things that take comfort in the shadows and darkness, and for those that just want to get away. This evening is no exception for something this way comes in the night. Like a beacon that flashes into the night, pulsing forth its light to bring out the shadows, the moon shines its haunting light down upon the earth and illuminates this lonesome, soulless stretch of road. The silence of night with the exception of a slight wind is all that can be heard. Coming into focus, the top of a dry-rotted post of a long-aged wooden fence stretching for as far as the eye can see on the right side of this long-forgotten back road in the palmetto-covered woodlands of the coastal swamps that surround parts of the east coast. Taking a deep view of the area, the moon lights the darkness across the grassy-green fields that seem to glow a blue haze in the light of the dark skyline. We see something is approaching on this once ghostly road. The sound of an engine roaring like a beast in the pursuit of prey explodes into the night, as the headlights of an automobile pierce through the darkness. The glare of the light is cast back from the reflection of the eyes of an owl that turns his head while sitting on the wood of one of the posts. As the truck zooms by we see that it is a large F-250 Super Crew 4x4, cloaked in black so dark even the shadows seem to envy it. The truck passes, leaving only a view of its tail lights fading off in the distance like flares in the night, zooming off down the road, fading into a dimly lit exiled sky.
Inside the cab of the truck, wrapped in its gray interior, sits the longhaired frame of the violent GIW superstar known as Salem. Driving with a tan and white colored pitbull beside him in the passenger seat, the dog sits with his head lowered as he looks over surreptitiously at his master’s face hidden by the darkness. Salem’s bags are tucked behind his driver’s seat in the back. He watches the road, looking to the speedometer and then out into the window to the trees as they pass by. He is dressed casually, wearing faded boot cut blue jeans, work boots, and a black T shirt. The dash lights are all that light the automobile inside with an eerie greenish blue haze. The man known as The Horror Show the world over is right now in this place of serene surroundings, a place known to no one aside from he and his dog. Between them he’s just Salem, and his duties of being a world-renowned berserker in the squared circle, though ever present on his mind, are being pushed to the back of his head as he tries to clear his mind of anything and everything, especially GIW and what he considers a personal loss after having Jezebel Saint taken this past week. But those thoughts, those moments he ripped into her dressing room to find it empty, they haunt him, coming back to him as well now as his thoughts of taking out Mickey Dragon and that gutter slut whore doctor of his. A muscle-bound tattooed arm reaches toward the knob on his radio and turns up the volume. The sounds of Johnny Cash's "I Walk The Line" fill the truck with a familiar but somber tone pushed through the truck’s speakers…
"I keep a close watch on this heart of mine, I keep my eyes wide open all the time…"
He nods his head with the song, his lips moving with the lyrics and for one of the few times in a while he seems to even grimace at the lines that come next.
"…Because you're mine, I walk the line."
The buttons on the satellite radio glow an orange hue against the black and gray darkened interior of the truck. Salem reaches once more for the controls, this time instead of the volume he changes the settings. The sounds of Down’s "Ghosts Along The Mississippi " blare through the truck. The guitars rift off and lead into a mass of sound after some time, the drums echoing through the massive jacked up truck, the chords of music bleed from the bass in the truck. The unclipped ears of the white and tan pitbull raise up and its head turns, looking to the dash and then to his master’s shadowy gaze.
"In the mornin' it takes me quite a while to clear my head… And as the day moves on I find it hard to smile and something said”
Salem’s hand on the wheel, his head nodding a bit as he accelerates the truck down the road, caught up in the music. Salem smirks bitterly in the darkness of the cab, his free hand ruffling the fur over the dog’s head and then grabbing the wheel and jerking it to the right. The truck slides around another corner on the road as he heads up this lonesome stretch of dirt that exists as the separation between two sides of a bayou. The music plays on, a certain set of lyrics that seem to snake their way past his mindset and stick.
“So I took control priority number one and that's me… that cut the dragons head off and put away my gun, So let it be, So let it be”
In the distance, the massive home stands nearly hidden by the surrounding trees and swamp-laden area. A river running in the distance behind the age-worn homestead flows slowly. The headlights of the truck bounce off of everything around as he rounds the bend. Rounding the bend in the road, he can see the glimmering reflection of the river's shores behind the house as the moon’s rays break through the trees, scattering over his windshield. The roar of the engine drowns out almost anything else.
”Home...”
The large black F-250 slows down as it pulls into the long gravel driveway and onto the property, Salem slowly making his way to the house. The road that leads to the house is cascaded in shadows from each side and above by over hanging oak trees with their branches creeping across the road to grasp together on either side. The house itself, stands two stories high, built and rebuilt before his or even his father’s lifetime, is covered with the cracks of aged paint and wood from an unforgiving sun’s fire-filled gaze, and blanketed under strands of vines that try to choke out the site of the cracks. Inside are all the modern conveniences a famous superstar’s expense plan can afford. The décor of the house is an oddity and almost nightmarish: voodoo, pirate and occult artifacts. To Salem’s pleasure, the massive house looked more like a home from The Munsters, or The Addams Family with a twist of southern culture on the skids.
Salem pulls the truck around to the back of the house, turning off the roaring diesel engine and opening the door as he steps down from the truck and grabs his bag, moving aside as the muscle bound solid shape of his dog leaps out the door and lands on the ground at his feet. As if remembering something, Salem jumps back up into the truck and reaches across his seat to pick up his black thin shaped cell phone and, putting it in his pocket, he closes the door.
"Home Again, Home Again Jig Jiggedy Jig…” He says as he looks to the dog sniffing around off to the side of the house.
“Honey I‘m home…” his voice a somber one as he pauses for a minute and grimaces. He seems still like he’s in a haze or out of his mind.
Salem allows his eyes to bathe in the silent serenity of it all as he peers out over the land around him, letting his duffle bag drop to the ground at his feet. A whisper in the night comes in the form of a gentle wind that blows in waves across the grassy fields and palmetto covered low lands. The grass dances in a blue hinted hue under the light of the moon with the sounds of the river in the distance moving along. He was home off the road but no smile crosses his face as he was yet to finally be able to get some rest, to get rid of those thoughts in his head. He still felt the ever-burning sensation that was left behind by the recent occurrences in the battle between Sleaze & Brewtality against The Covenant. His failings rage inside of him: his failing to get his hands on Mickey Dragon, or even the half drunk, all pint-sized mealy-mouthed Irish bastard, Raenius, for what he considered a betrayal by his brother; the all but irrelevant Dirge, and the uppity blonde gutter whore known as Chassie Fear, who seems to wrongfully be under the assumption that owning expensive material objects buys class. His keys jingle in his hands as he turns around, ready to unlock the door not even bothering to turn the truck’s security alarm on. Who would get close enough to the truck way out here? He picks up his black duffle bag and makes his way up the wooden steps that lead toward the massive double doors.
Salem walks in the doorway, the comforting warmth of his house soothing him a little. It was a two story museum more then it was a house, made to look like an aged rundown homestead. Once the home of pirates and a later acquisition by the Union army; after that it was seized by the Confederacy and they shuffled it around in so much paperwork they never noticed it missing when it was sold to his family after the Civil War had come to an end. A very few really even knew it existed and less knew how to even find it, all specifications he found desirable. He shuts the door behind him and finds himself at home at last.
The door closing behind him shuts out what little light was coming into the unlit manor and the sound of the lock as it click is nearly deafening in the silence of the house. His mind races with thoughts, all of them rushing him at once, as if the echoing screams of nothing from the house act like a sensory deprivation chamber. His bags drop to the floor in conjunction with his heart as the silence and the darkness take over. A flash of screaming and echoing as he chased down a car, its taillights tearing off into the distance, chasing them until his feet blistered and cracked from his flesh, running until his feet bleed and he could run no more. He could almost feel his hands gripped tightly around the shaft of the axe handle as he swung like a madman, trying to splinter the door into pieces so that he might get his hands on Mickey Dragon or his slut doctor. His throat is still raw from the screaming as he searched violently through the arena, tearing apart locker room after locker room, ripping through the building in his mad search. The echoes of officials screaming threats as in his bloodlust he mangled a cameraman and put a referee through a bathroom mirror whilst they tried to restrain him.
His red-tinged eyes close tightly, burning from the sleepless days, perhaps now the first he had closed his eyes since that moment, since the vision of her being taken had burned itself into his mind. The smell of her perfume and cigarettes still lingers on his clothes mixed in now with the stench of sweat and a bathless week. The taste of her lips are still prevalent on his own. He bites his lip in anger, but it is reminiscent of the way she once tugged playfully at his lips, biting them. The morning of the show, hours before the travesty came to be, they had lain in bed, his leg over top her left leg as she faced him and her right snaked between his, curled together coiled in bed, her hair… the sweet smelling crimson locks laid over his chest, hiding parts of her face at times. Across his chest he could feel her breathing while she used him as a pillow in the morning hours. His fingers traced through her hair, parting it and pulling it from her sleeping face, the scarlet strands bleeding between his fingers, flowing over his hand as it tightened slightly. He could almost feel her hair between his fingers now as he balls his hand into a fist, his knuckles turning white and cracking as he screams into the night, breaking the heavy silence of the house.
“Jezebel!!!” he screams in a voice gone raspy, a voice that sounds like someone grinding blood soaked gravel.
His bloodshot eyes slowly open, and he still halfway expects to see her hair intertwined around his fingers, grasped in his hand. But nothing…
A few hours have passed and we find Salem outside on a screened in porch that encompasses the back of the house, sitting shirtless on a dilapidated fabric covered couch found on the porch, one of his legs drawn up and resting on a table in front of him, the other on the floor. His dog lies on the floor curled up at his feet, and the black of night reflects back in his dark hued eyes, his face still covered in shadows. The porch light and he sits in the darkness, seeming to welcome it. A slight breath of cool air radiates from a small black and white electric fan sitting in the corner of the room on a shelf. He enjoys the breeze as his hand wraps around the cold body of an ice filled glass with a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label resting on the table beside it. Somewhere in the house, a black record turns on a table skipping under the needle of a record player. The song at the time was “Whiskey Blues” and it was by all means a brilliant anthem to the ways of the heartbroken, the lost, and the hopeless by Muddy Waters.
“We’ve got a show this week, Otis.”
The dog looks to him, raising his head before huffing and laying it back down. Salem thumbs over the glass the water droplets slipping under his thumb.
“Yeah That’s what I said…”
He answers half hearted jokingly.
“Words can’t begin to describe what’s going on in my head right now… and Dragon I wouldn’t want to be you when I figure them out. Because a thousand different voices are screaming in my head right now wanting to be heard and each and every one of them wants your blood.
He pauses for a moment as his head drifts back to the back of the couch.
“You’re a damned bag handler… just some punk ass kid who didn’t know the first thing about being hardcore till Raenius discovered you in some gutter where you wound up after uCw closed it’s doors. At what point did wrestling mid-card and curtain jerking with Mitch Fierce make you supposedly so damned nuts huh? A poser… a white collar fuck up trying his best to act like an inmate in an insane asylum. Wanted so hard to be like Raenius, for everyone to respect you, look at you as something to be afraid of, when behind the crack in the liar’s smile is still some mid-card emo kid who wants to be a big boy, who wants to walk out in the fucken yard and be noticed. Well give yourself a round of fucken applause junior, cause you’re noticed. Ya got my attention and I see you… as a matter of fact at this moments I can’t close my eyes for even a second with out you being all I see… now what the fuck are you going to do!?!? You can’t even comprehend the repercussions of your actions can you, you little prick? You Can’t see past the flames in front of your face to realize you got a devil crawlen out of your ass singing a fucken show tune while you prance around in this hell around you that you’ve found yourself in… a hell that you’ve created.
The ice collects together in the glass and forms one structure in the bottom of the tumbler. The ice rattles around a little, swishing bare and exposed to the air, once drowned in scotch whiskey. Salem looks to his dog and smirks then looks out across the delta to the rivers running by. His foot shifts a bit and he leans forward putting the glass on the surface of the table, that all too known sound of a glass touching a wooden table top, the ice cubes breaking loose from one another and shifting in the glass as he does so. Wrapping his hands around the neck of the black labeled square shaped bottle, he pops the top off and pours himself some more, stopping just before the rim of the glass, the ice dancing again in the golden-brown pool of scotch. Salem puts the bottle back on the table but leaves the glass for the moment.
“This week though, this week is gonna be hell, but not for Mickey, this week he’ll share his special place with his Bimbo Barbie. Because someone in the GIW office doesn’t care much for the Covenant, and decided to give me a one on one match with Chassie Fear. Now Mickey Dragon’s going to have to watch
as I take my revenge for his stupidity out on her. Mickey’s got no choice but to watch me snap her pretty little neck because of his actions.”
Salem reaches down and takes the glass picking it up and slowly takes a sip as it touches his lips. Thunder pops in the distance, a faint afterthought to the lightning.
“Me and Chass, we go way back… don’t we Chassie? I’m not talking about some bullshit plug and go with Bloodhound while you were just another ring rat runnen around uCw locker rooms. I’m talken about the real shit mamma, I’m talking about the nights you spent by Jarek Magnum’s side after I damn sure tried to end his career. That little number earned me and Bryson our pinks slips from Showtime… or whatever the fuck you want to call it. But it gave birth to something bigger and better… it birthed the greatest stable known to man… the blood of your husband bathed the alter in which we ushered in Thee Order of Chaos, a family that I believe your beloved leader Raineus still belongs too. But it also showed the world the cruelty and the suffering that I can bring forth onto others. They drug your husband from that ring on a stretcher… they mopped your husband up from the parking lot in the back… they had to pressure wash him from the pavement. And you are so fucking sad that you would side yourself with a man who sat in the back and helped plot it? Are you such a leach on society that you would feed from the droppings of an animal who was once part of the pack that eviscerated the man you cling to at night?!?!”
Salem drinks from the glass this time tilting it back and takes a few full sized gulps. Salem puts the empty glass back on the table with a slight but sudden thud.
“I don’t mean to reopen up old wounds or dig up the past, but you know first hand what I’m capable of. You saw it every meal that you wiped from your husbands lips, because he couldn’t. I relive that moment too… we all do. The still shots hang over a desk in my office, along with the pink slip. It’s not you, you understand that right? This isn’t about Bloodhound, our past, this isn’t about Jarek… this is about the company you keep. See this isn’t about uCw… that was the past… this isn’t even about GIW quite honestly… this is about those who you call friends. This is about Jezebel…”
Salem leans back against the back of the couch watching out through the screen over the surrounding marshlands still illuminated by the cascade of the moon’s falling rays over the costal plains. His voice chokes up a bit at the mention of her name.
“Chassie this about suffering, this is about agony… and retribution. This week, I‘m going to make what I did to your husband seem like a day in the park compared to what I‘m going to do to you, and then we‘ll test your love. We‘ll see if he wipes your lips after meals with a sponge like you did his. We’ll see how he enjoys wondering what happened to you, and what the fuck will be going through his mind… to hear YOU scream!!! It‘s about time Chassie someone introduce you to the meaning of Fear. ”
Salem huffs a bit, but swallows down the lump in his hoarse throat, raw from anger, wet again from the booze.
“Raenius wanted everyone to play nice… wanted me to come into this fed and just join up with his crew, but Jez, and I aren’t known for just falling in line and going with the flow. We shook things up and you guys couldn’t handle it. But then you went and just got plain ass stupid. You done went and stepped off into a dark and dismal abyss you ain’t never gonna get out of. I tried to be a good brother, and I even offered to listen to what Rainues had to say… but when I got there…”
Salem sighs.
“When I got there, well we all know what happened from that point. But now it’s time to move to the next chapter… and the end of our little story. The End song for Chassie Fear… and the beginning of the end for Mickey Dragon; because I’m going to make him suffer for a long, long time to come. It started out as business… more money you know? And then you went and made it personal. And now we find ourselves in places we never expected to be. And we find ourselves making deals with people we never expected to see… now we enter the blood ties.”
Salem looks to the table top and picks up the cell phone seated next to his foot, his eyes having been glancing over it time and time again. Flipping it open, he scrolls through the phone until finding what he wants, or by the look on his face, doesn’t want. He grimaces as he presses the “Call” button and listens to the ring, half hoping that he won’t pick up.
“Hey, Jez, what’s up?” a male voice cheers into the phone. Salem clears his throat.
“It’s not Jez, man… it’s me.”
The silence on the other end is deafening.
“What do you want?” the voice on the line has taken on a whole another tone. Salem makes a face at what comes next.
“I need your help… it’s about your sister.”
Another long silence and then the voice comes again, this time very serious and even somewhat dark.
“I’m listening.”
As the scene begins to fade, shadows moving in and almost obscuring the view, we see Salem, still on the phone, reach beside him into the darkness and pull out an object. He places it beside the bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label as the camera fades. Leaning against the bottle is a gray leather mask. The sounds of the music begin to drift off.
The scene Fades to Black.
Inside the cab of the truck, wrapped in its gray interior, sits the longhaired frame of the violent GIW superstar known as Salem. Driving with a tan and white colored pitbull beside him in the passenger seat, the dog sits with his head lowered as he looks over surreptitiously at his master’s face hidden by the darkness. Salem’s bags are tucked behind his driver’s seat in the back. He watches the road, looking to the speedometer and then out into the window to the trees as they pass by. He is dressed casually, wearing faded boot cut blue jeans, work boots, and a black T shirt. The dash lights are all that light the automobile inside with an eerie greenish blue haze. The man known as The Horror Show the world over is right now in this place of serene surroundings, a place known to no one aside from he and his dog. Between them he’s just Salem, and his duties of being a world-renowned berserker in the squared circle, though ever present on his mind, are being pushed to the back of his head as he tries to clear his mind of anything and everything, especially GIW and what he considers a personal loss after having Jezebel Saint taken this past week. But those thoughts, those moments he ripped into her dressing room to find it empty, they haunt him, coming back to him as well now as his thoughts of taking out Mickey Dragon and that gutter slut whore doctor of his. A muscle-bound tattooed arm reaches toward the knob on his radio and turns up the volume. The sounds of Johnny Cash's "I Walk The Line" fill the truck with a familiar but somber tone pushed through the truck’s speakers…
"I keep a close watch on this heart of mine, I keep my eyes wide open all the time…"
He nods his head with the song, his lips moving with the lyrics and for one of the few times in a while he seems to even grimace at the lines that come next.
"…Because you're mine, I walk the line."
The buttons on the satellite radio glow an orange hue against the black and gray darkened interior of the truck. Salem reaches once more for the controls, this time instead of the volume he changes the settings. The sounds of Down’s "Ghosts Along The Mississippi " blare through the truck. The guitars rift off and lead into a mass of sound after some time, the drums echoing through the massive jacked up truck, the chords of music bleed from the bass in the truck. The unclipped ears of the white and tan pitbull raise up and its head turns, looking to the dash and then to his master’s shadowy gaze.
"In the mornin' it takes me quite a while to clear my head… And as the day moves on I find it hard to smile and something said”
Salem’s hand on the wheel, his head nodding a bit as he accelerates the truck down the road, caught up in the music. Salem smirks bitterly in the darkness of the cab, his free hand ruffling the fur over the dog’s head and then grabbing the wheel and jerking it to the right. The truck slides around another corner on the road as he heads up this lonesome stretch of dirt that exists as the separation between two sides of a bayou. The music plays on, a certain set of lyrics that seem to snake their way past his mindset and stick.
“So I took control priority number one and that's me… that cut the dragons head off and put away my gun, So let it be, So let it be”
In the distance, the massive home stands nearly hidden by the surrounding trees and swamp-laden area. A river running in the distance behind the age-worn homestead flows slowly. The headlights of the truck bounce off of everything around as he rounds the bend. Rounding the bend in the road, he can see the glimmering reflection of the river's shores behind the house as the moon’s rays break through the trees, scattering over his windshield. The roar of the engine drowns out almost anything else.
”Home...”
The large black F-250 slows down as it pulls into the long gravel driveway and onto the property, Salem slowly making his way to the house. The road that leads to the house is cascaded in shadows from each side and above by over hanging oak trees with their branches creeping across the road to grasp together on either side. The house itself, stands two stories high, built and rebuilt before his or even his father’s lifetime, is covered with the cracks of aged paint and wood from an unforgiving sun’s fire-filled gaze, and blanketed under strands of vines that try to choke out the site of the cracks. Inside are all the modern conveniences a famous superstar’s expense plan can afford. The décor of the house is an oddity and almost nightmarish: voodoo, pirate and occult artifacts. To Salem’s pleasure, the massive house looked more like a home from The Munsters, or The Addams Family with a twist of southern culture on the skids.
Salem pulls the truck around to the back of the house, turning off the roaring diesel engine and opening the door as he steps down from the truck and grabs his bag, moving aside as the muscle bound solid shape of his dog leaps out the door and lands on the ground at his feet. As if remembering something, Salem jumps back up into the truck and reaches across his seat to pick up his black thin shaped cell phone and, putting it in his pocket, he closes the door.
"Home Again, Home Again Jig Jiggedy Jig…” He says as he looks to the dog sniffing around off to the side of the house.
“Honey I‘m home…” his voice a somber one as he pauses for a minute and grimaces. He seems still like he’s in a haze or out of his mind.
Salem allows his eyes to bathe in the silent serenity of it all as he peers out over the land around him, letting his duffle bag drop to the ground at his feet. A whisper in the night comes in the form of a gentle wind that blows in waves across the grassy fields and palmetto covered low lands. The grass dances in a blue hinted hue under the light of the moon with the sounds of the river in the distance moving along. He was home off the road but no smile crosses his face as he was yet to finally be able to get some rest, to get rid of those thoughts in his head. He still felt the ever-burning sensation that was left behind by the recent occurrences in the battle between Sleaze & Brewtality against The Covenant. His failings rage inside of him: his failing to get his hands on Mickey Dragon, or even the half drunk, all pint-sized mealy-mouthed Irish bastard, Raenius, for what he considered a betrayal by his brother; the all but irrelevant Dirge, and the uppity blonde gutter whore known as Chassie Fear, who seems to wrongfully be under the assumption that owning expensive material objects buys class. His keys jingle in his hands as he turns around, ready to unlock the door not even bothering to turn the truck’s security alarm on. Who would get close enough to the truck way out here? He picks up his black duffle bag and makes his way up the wooden steps that lead toward the massive double doors.
Salem walks in the doorway, the comforting warmth of his house soothing him a little. It was a two story museum more then it was a house, made to look like an aged rundown homestead. Once the home of pirates and a later acquisition by the Union army; after that it was seized by the Confederacy and they shuffled it around in so much paperwork they never noticed it missing when it was sold to his family after the Civil War had come to an end. A very few really even knew it existed and less knew how to even find it, all specifications he found desirable. He shuts the door behind him and finds himself at home at last.
The door closing behind him shuts out what little light was coming into the unlit manor and the sound of the lock as it click is nearly deafening in the silence of the house. His mind races with thoughts, all of them rushing him at once, as if the echoing screams of nothing from the house act like a sensory deprivation chamber. His bags drop to the floor in conjunction with his heart as the silence and the darkness take over. A flash of screaming and echoing as he chased down a car, its taillights tearing off into the distance, chasing them until his feet blistered and cracked from his flesh, running until his feet bleed and he could run no more. He could almost feel his hands gripped tightly around the shaft of the axe handle as he swung like a madman, trying to splinter the door into pieces so that he might get his hands on Mickey Dragon or his slut doctor. His throat is still raw from the screaming as he searched violently through the arena, tearing apart locker room after locker room, ripping through the building in his mad search. The echoes of officials screaming threats as in his bloodlust he mangled a cameraman and put a referee through a bathroom mirror whilst they tried to restrain him.
His red-tinged eyes close tightly, burning from the sleepless days, perhaps now the first he had closed his eyes since that moment, since the vision of her being taken had burned itself into his mind. The smell of her perfume and cigarettes still lingers on his clothes mixed in now with the stench of sweat and a bathless week. The taste of her lips are still prevalent on his own. He bites his lip in anger, but it is reminiscent of the way she once tugged playfully at his lips, biting them. The morning of the show, hours before the travesty came to be, they had lain in bed, his leg over top her left leg as she faced him and her right snaked between his, curled together coiled in bed, her hair… the sweet smelling crimson locks laid over his chest, hiding parts of her face at times. Across his chest he could feel her breathing while she used him as a pillow in the morning hours. His fingers traced through her hair, parting it and pulling it from her sleeping face, the scarlet strands bleeding between his fingers, flowing over his hand as it tightened slightly. He could almost feel her hair between his fingers now as he balls his hand into a fist, his knuckles turning white and cracking as he screams into the night, breaking the heavy silence of the house.
“Jezebel!!!” he screams in a voice gone raspy, a voice that sounds like someone grinding blood soaked gravel.
His bloodshot eyes slowly open, and he still halfway expects to see her hair intertwined around his fingers, grasped in his hand. But nothing…
A few hours have passed and we find Salem outside on a screened in porch that encompasses the back of the house, sitting shirtless on a dilapidated fabric covered couch found on the porch, one of his legs drawn up and resting on a table in front of him, the other on the floor. His dog lies on the floor curled up at his feet, and the black of night reflects back in his dark hued eyes, his face still covered in shadows. The porch light and he sits in the darkness, seeming to welcome it. A slight breath of cool air radiates from a small black and white electric fan sitting in the corner of the room on a shelf. He enjoys the breeze as his hand wraps around the cold body of an ice filled glass with a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label resting on the table beside it. Somewhere in the house, a black record turns on a table skipping under the needle of a record player. The song at the time was “Whiskey Blues” and it was by all means a brilliant anthem to the ways of the heartbroken, the lost, and the hopeless by Muddy Waters.
“We’ve got a show this week, Otis.”
The dog looks to him, raising his head before huffing and laying it back down. Salem thumbs over the glass the water droplets slipping under his thumb.
“Yeah That’s what I said…”
He answers half hearted jokingly.
“Words can’t begin to describe what’s going on in my head right now… and Dragon I wouldn’t want to be you when I figure them out. Because a thousand different voices are screaming in my head right now wanting to be heard and each and every one of them wants your blood.
He pauses for a moment as his head drifts back to the back of the couch.
“You’re a damned bag handler… just some punk ass kid who didn’t know the first thing about being hardcore till Raenius discovered you in some gutter where you wound up after uCw closed it’s doors. At what point did wrestling mid-card and curtain jerking with Mitch Fierce make you supposedly so damned nuts huh? A poser… a white collar fuck up trying his best to act like an inmate in an insane asylum. Wanted so hard to be like Raenius, for everyone to respect you, look at you as something to be afraid of, when behind the crack in the liar’s smile is still some mid-card emo kid who wants to be a big boy, who wants to walk out in the fucken yard and be noticed. Well give yourself a round of fucken applause junior, cause you’re noticed. Ya got my attention and I see you… as a matter of fact at this moments I can’t close my eyes for even a second with out you being all I see… now what the fuck are you going to do!?!? You can’t even comprehend the repercussions of your actions can you, you little prick? You Can’t see past the flames in front of your face to realize you got a devil crawlen out of your ass singing a fucken show tune while you prance around in this hell around you that you’ve found yourself in… a hell that you’ve created.
The ice collects together in the glass and forms one structure in the bottom of the tumbler. The ice rattles around a little, swishing bare and exposed to the air, once drowned in scotch whiskey. Salem looks to his dog and smirks then looks out across the delta to the rivers running by. His foot shifts a bit and he leans forward putting the glass on the surface of the table, that all too known sound of a glass touching a wooden table top, the ice cubes breaking loose from one another and shifting in the glass as he does so. Wrapping his hands around the neck of the black labeled square shaped bottle, he pops the top off and pours himself some more, stopping just before the rim of the glass, the ice dancing again in the golden-brown pool of scotch. Salem puts the bottle back on the table but leaves the glass for the moment.
“This week though, this week is gonna be hell, but not for Mickey, this week he’ll share his special place with his Bimbo Barbie. Because someone in the GIW office doesn’t care much for the Covenant, and decided to give me a one on one match with Chassie Fear. Now Mickey Dragon’s going to have to watch
as I take my revenge for his stupidity out on her. Mickey’s got no choice but to watch me snap her pretty little neck because of his actions.”
Salem reaches down and takes the glass picking it up and slowly takes a sip as it touches his lips. Thunder pops in the distance, a faint afterthought to the lightning.
“Me and Chass, we go way back… don’t we Chassie? I’m not talking about some bullshit plug and go with Bloodhound while you were just another ring rat runnen around uCw locker rooms. I’m talken about the real shit mamma, I’m talking about the nights you spent by Jarek Magnum’s side after I damn sure tried to end his career. That little number earned me and Bryson our pinks slips from Showtime… or whatever the fuck you want to call it. But it gave birth to something bigger and better… it birthed the greatest stable known to man… the blood of your husband bathed the alter in which we ushered in Thee Order of Chaos, a family that I believe your beloved leader Raineus still belongs too. But it also showed the world the cruelty and the suffering that I can bring forth onto others. They drug your husband from that ring on a stretcher… they mopped your husband up from the parking lot in the back… they had to pressure wash him from the pavement. And you are so fucking sad that you would side yourself with a man who sat in the back and helped plot it? Are you such a leach on society that you would feed from the droppings of an animal who was once part of the pack that eviscerated the man you cling to at night?!?!”
Salem drinks from the glass this time tilting it back and takes a few full sized gulps. Salem puts the empty glass back on the table with a slight but sudden thud.
“I don’t mean to reopen up old wounds or dig up the past, but you know first hand what I’m capable of. You saw it every meal that you wiped from your husbands lips, because he couldn’t. I relive that moment too… we all do. The still shots hang over a desk in my office, along with the pink slip. It’s not you, you understand that right? This isn’t about Bloodhound, our past, this isn’t about Jarek… this is about the company you keep. See this isn’t about uCw… that was the past… this isn’t even about GIW quite honestly… this is about those who you call friends. This is about Jezebel…”
Salem leans back against the back of the couch watching out through the screen over the surrounding marshlands still illuminated by the cascade of the moon’s falling rays over the costal plains. His voice chokes up a bit at the mention of her name.
“Chassie this about suffering, this is about agony… and retribution. This week, I‘m going to make what I did to your husband seem like a day in the park compared to what I‘m going to do to you, and then we‘ll test your love. We‘ll see if he wipes your lips after meals with a sponge like you did his. We’ll see how he enjoys wondering what happened to you, and what the fuck will be going through his mind… to hear YOU scream!!! It‘s about time Chassie someone introduce you to the meaning of Fear. ”
Salem huffs a bit, but swallows down the lump in his hoarse throat, raw from anger, wet again from the booze.
“Raenius wanted everyone to play nice… wanted me to come into this fed and just join up with his crew, but Jez, and I aren’t known for just falling in line and going with the flow. We shook things up and you guys couldn’t handle it. But then you went and just got plain ass stupid. You done went and stepped off into a dark and dismal abyss you ain’t never gonna get out of. I tried to be a good brother, and I even offered to listen to what Rainues had to say… but when I got there…”
Salem sighs.
“When I got there, well we all know what happened from that point. But now it’s time to move to the next chapter… and the end of our little story. The End song for Chassie Fear… and the beginning of the end for Mickey Dragon; because I’m going to make him suffer for a long, long time to come. It started out as business… more money you know? And then you went and made it personal. And now we find ourselves in places we never expected to be. And we find ourselves making deals with people we never expected to see… now we enter the blood ties.”
Salem looks to the table top and picks up the cell phone seated next to his foot, his eyes having been glancing over it time and time again. Flipping it open, he scrolls through the phone until finding what he wants, or by the look on his face, doesn’t want. He grimaces as he presses the “Call” button and listens to the ring, half hoping that he won’t pick up.
“Hey, Jez, what’s up?” a male voice cheers into the phone. Salem clears his throat.
“It’s not Jez, man… it’s me.”
The silence on the other end is deafening.
“What do you want?” the voice on the line has taken on a whole another tone. Salem makes a face at what comes next.
“I need your help… it’s about your sister.”
Another long silence and then the voice comes again, this time very serious and even somewhat dark.
“I’m listening.”
As the scene begins to fade, shadows moving in and almost obscuring the view, we see Salem, still on the phone, reach beside him into the darkness and pull out an object. He places it beside the bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label as the camera fades. Leaning against the bottle is a gray leather mask. The sounds of the music begin to drift off.
The scene Fades to Black.