(This is a short filler scene that came to me after a conversation I had with a fellow writer. There's a picture of Daniels on the Internet of him holding two shot glasses and looking very shocked, which I'm assuming is from a deleted scene that never made it into the film. Obviously I can't help but write a little about it now. The time that elapses from when he leaves Henderson to when he returns to the room seems pretty fast to me, so I wanted to avoid writing a long, drawn-out oneshot. I used the novel for reference as well (which is where the spleen anecdote comes from; I really couldn't resist mentioning it XD). At some point I want to tackle writing Daniels's final moments, but I haven't figured out how to go about it yet.
Daniels/all other characters: (c) Stephen Sommers)
Last Call
"Get me a glass of bourbon."
He nodded and opened the door. "Right."
"A-and a shot a' bourbon!"
"Yeah, okay."
"And a bourbon chaser!"
Eyes rolling, jaw clenching. "Yeah, yeah! I'll git yer Goddamn bourbon!"
If Henderson had said anything else to him, he didn't hear it. Daniels had been in dire want of a drink for the last several hours and now his patience had run out. His body craved it, begged for it as a ravenous mutt pleads for a marrow-filled bone. "An' I need a shot of just about anythin' at this point," he grumbled as he headed into the hotel casbah.
Even more than the alcohol though, he needed to clear his head. Clear it of losing his best friend Burns to that life-sucking leech of a bogeyman that they were running from. Of being stuck in hostile country with a badly injured arm and an ammunition box that was just about to run out. Of O'Connell's vague threat to remove his spleen if he failed to adequately babysit that feisty Carnahan woman. He reached into his pocket, contemptuously gripping the room key that clanged about in it. That thing wants my spleen anyways. What the hell am I worryin' about him fer? he thought to himself more sarcastically than gloomily.
Daniels wasn't surprised at how dead (for lack of a better word) the casbah was as he sidled up casually to the bar. It was empty save for a lone bartender and a few watery-eyed patrons who were perhaps too inebriated to take notice of the supernatural events occurring just outside Fort Brydon's gates.
He haggled with the Arab barkeep for several irritating moments due to the obvious language barrier between them. "Whissss-keeee. Ya got that?" he sneered acidly. He snatched up the shot glass and downed it quickly, the alcohol warm and thick in his throat. Soothing to his edgy nerves. He then signaled for another.
Any kind of liquor usually proved to be a welcome tenant for the vacancy in his stomach, but it was whiskey that held a special place in Daniels's heart. He was partial to whiskey of the white, moonshine variety, the kind that you typically found brewing in someone's bathtub or bottled up in a dark, civilian cellar, away from the greedy clutches of the Eighteenth Amendment. Luckily for Daniels's less-than-discerning palate, he was able to adapt easily to foreign alcohol.
He sat there idly for the next several minutes and let the liquor filter through his system as he looked around the stuffy but ornately furnished casbah, the faint glow from the Moroccan glass lamps lazily hitting off his roving eyes. Once more, he felt that familiar plague of homesickness pulling at his chest. It flooded his foggy memory with images of being in the rickety roadside saloons back home, surrounded by heavily rouged calico queens as they cheerily obliged in filling up his tankard for the fourth or fifth time while The Yellow Rose of Texas wailed off-key at the saloon piano in the background. Most of those wells were now dried up and he had since then traded the streetwalkers for his fiancée Gracie. Thinking about her made him all the more wistful for American soil.
"Jesus Christ..." He groaned loudly, rigid fingers raking through the charcoal depths of his sweat-dampened hair, feeling the warm blush of gin blossoms blooming on his face. This ain't no time fer gettin' distracted, boy. You know that. He sucked back a third shot, shaking the images from his head, and finally requested Henderson's bourbon.
Two shots were all Daniels asked for, considering it was all he could and would carry. "Chaser my ass," he groused. Henderson had always been extraordinarily fond of bourbon in particular, for as long as Daniels could remember. Chewing and smoking whatever tobacco he could get his hands on was Henderson's main vice, but the bourbon certainly came in a close second.
Shot glasses in hand, Daniels headed back to the room.
The door was wide open, from what he could tell. An otherwise innocuous slip of the mind if they weren't already trying to keep a certain undead terror from flushing them out of their foxhole. Voices, noisy but indecipherable, the Carnahan woman's among them, flowed past the threshold as his legs moved him toward it at a pace much quicker than he intended them to. Goddamnit, thought I'd beat 'em back.
He stepped inside, the voices gone silent as he felt three pairs of eyes staring at him, wide and alarming. Daniels flinched back visibly, unnerved by how intense their gazes were. "The hell's goin' on in here?" he demanded.
Not a word. Not from O'Connell, not from the Carnahan siblings. Silence.
"What?!"
And his eyes then wandered to the floor.
Glass. Slipping from his clammy, trembling hands and splintering into pieces of all shapes and sizes. Dark liquid bleeding from jagged shards and splattering on his boots.
Daniels went completely numb. Muscles, bones, wounded arm, pounding heart; everything. He barely heard the words O'Connell spoke to him as he tried to get his attention, tried to pry his eyes away momentarily from the remains of what was formerly his friend, Henderson. Limbs splayed on the floor, skin withered away like old leather from the frozen scream on the sunken face. Dead.
He felt the color drain from his body, the hard realization hitting him like a locomotive sock to the gut. Christ in Heaven!
"I'm next..."