WARNING: This chapter contains rape
Prologue
October 30, 1994
Again and again that flesh which she reviled merged with her own. She was helpless to prevent it. Just as she'd been helpless beneath the previous four who had so
They'd broken into her home. They'd stripped her down to nothing. They'd beaten her. They'd tied her to her own bed, a place that was meant to be the safest in the world. They'd cut her face, they'd cut her tits. They then one-by-one raped her.
They'd left no dignity to her mortal soul, yet still she protested, attempting in vain to free her legs which two of the men held down. It was to no use and soon that vile flesh merged with her own a final time as the urchin finished his go.
"Ah, yeah…" The last of the five men pulled up his trousers and looked down at the woman. He spoke with a British accent and reeked of cigarettes and cheap liquor.
The woman looked up at her captors with wild, pleading eyes. Beaten, and raped for the past three hours, she still had enough fight in her to struggle –albeit weakly- at the ropes that bound her.
Violation. Shame. Despair.
"Bitch has spirit, I'll give her that." One smoking a cigar said, although his Brooklyn accent choked his words. He wore a full suit and a bowler rested atop his balding head. "What do ya think the spirits have to say about this one, Shaman?"
The man known as Shaman was tall and slender, almost coming across as a walking skeleton. He wore an open, multicolored vest with zig-zag patterns of orange and green. A necklace with the skull of an indeterminable bird of prey rested against his flesh.
"The Spirits will take this one as a worthy sacrifice. She shall feed them well." He spoke with cold detachment. His mind seemed to be elsewhere as he hardly acknowledged the other members of the gang.
"You all heard the crazy nigger!" The man dropped his cigar in from of the woman before stamping it out. "Time to appease the spirits!"
The woman struggled at the ropes as the man drew a revolver from his shoulder holster. As he did the man with the British accent removed the tape that had covered her mouth. She was too weak to scream, but even if she could she would have resisted the urge. There was no escaping this fate. Just as when they had raped her she would be powerless.
Krr-ik! The man's thumb cocked back the hammer of the revolver, leveling its sights on the woman's head.
"Any last words?"
All he got from the woman was a defiant stare. Her brown eyes were lit with fire, yet she didn't move to plead, or even to insult her captor. Her spirit was strong, having endured all that had been brought against her. That was the one thing these men couldn't take away.
"Dumb bitch, this is your last chance to say what you think of me and my boys."
Nothing. She wouldn't give him the satisfaction of the knowledge that they'd broken her. That was the only power she had left in the world. She held onto it to the very end.
Two shots from the .357 Magnum were all it took to put the woman down for good.
"Let's get out of here."
Like a night watchman a single black bird had watched it all unfold in cool silence. It observed the events with silent and an air of calm, but it didn't view the acts of men through a lens of apathy.
The bird was unlike any other known to man. Its eyes which saw beyond the reaches of physical watched the life within each individual flicker like candles in the night.
As the woman's fire died, becoming a faint flicker, the men left, and the bird planned. It was on this observer that the The bird was the Crow. Death's collector on Earth.
Landing in the bedroom the crow pulled the light from the corpse as a flowing, liquid string. Coiling the life force of the deceased in its talons the noble bird took off.
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Two weeks later. A funeral was had. A body was buried. Only a few attended.
The woman's parents were dead, and she had no siblings. Coworkers, and brief acquaintances with a sense of duty to pay tribute to the woman they'd known in life only in passing. In light of her violent death they had felt it proper to attend, if only to show pity to the pain endured by the body through rape and bloodshed.
Her life had been one of obscurity. No one knew her, no one had cared to know her…
Everyone except for the reporter who had loved her, who was the last stand beside the cemetery's most recently occupied plot. Her eyes were dry for she had already shed as many tears as one mortal shell could in the name of another lost. She had loved the woman who now lay dead and buried; Loved her with all her heart and soul. And now she stood at her lover's final resting place after only two years of shared passion.
The Crow knew her pain, and watched the reporter's silent despair from above. It understood her pain, for it had already decided how to return stability to the anarchy which had consumed the streets. When mortals lost control it required intervention. The Crow was the voice of the suffering, the eyes of the eternal. When the time was right all would be set right, and it would be done when the Crow decided.
But for now the bird waited. Waited for the right time to set the wrong things right.
00000
Author's Note: For a comic book themed website I've signed on to review the entire Crow movie series. I'm a big fan of the original graphic novel and movie so it felt proper for me to tackle it. While watching the three sequels to the original movie I constantly asked: "Is it really that hard to right a decent Crow plot?" This is my answer on the plot I would like to see in a Crow comic or sequel if I had the choice.
This is just a short side project so my chapters will be short. I'm writing this more as an attempt to capture emotions in short bits and pieces than as a lengthy narrative.