The Crow: Wait and Bleed
Chapter Five:
Shadow:
"And when I stop and think of spring,
All the joy your love would bring.
Then I'll be remembering,
The Shadow of your smile."
-Frank Sinatra
Joseph closed his eyes. When he opened them he was somewhere else. Something had happened, and he didn't quite understand it. He lay in the middle of a street. He lay flat on his back and he sat up and looked toward an alleyway. "What the Hell am I doing here?"
"You shall see," said the skull cowboy as he appeared from nowhere. Joseph looked over to him and he saw the Cowboy standing beside a wall. "You shall see," the cowboy leaned back onto the wall and lit his cigarette.
"I still don't know who the hell you are," Joseph began to protest as he got up, but he was stopped. He was stopped by a deafening sound that rang through his ears as he clutched them and fell to a knee in pain. "What the hell was that?" he asked the cowboy when the pain subsided.
"Go see for yourself," the cowboy responded motioning to the alley.
Joseph slowly began to walk into the alley way and he could feel the cowboy walking closely behind him. Joseph peered down the dark alley and saw two figures, a man and a bleeding woman. The man huddled over the woman as he beat her, raped her, and made her scream. Each scream echoed as a painful memory in Joseph's mind. He stared at the girl's face, not knowing what to do. There he saw. He saw the face of his beloved Eimly. She was smiling but that smile faded into a shadow of pain and sorrow. And then the man noticed Joseph.
"Get the fuck out of here man!" he screamed, but Joseph stared at her face and paid no attention to the man. He didn't even hear the man. "Get the fuck out of here I said!!! FINE YOU KNOW WHAT FUCKER???!!!!!" The man said as he began to walk towards Joseph, releasing his grasp of the woman.
As the woman fell she said "Help me," and reached out for Joseph. Then her head hit and poured blood as she began to loose her life.
Joseph turned right before the man had reached him. He had been asked to help. The man had found a beer bottle and broken it. "FUCKER!!!" The man screamed as he buried it into Joseph's chest.
Joseph looked down at the beer bottle plunged into his chest and then looked back at the man who had put it there. Joseph grabbed the neck of the bottle, and as he jerked it out, used the back of his hand to hit the scared criminal and knock him to the ground. "What the HELL ARE YOU?" the scared man asked.
Joseph, "One hell of a nightmare." Joseph said as he kicked the man in the face and proceeded to stab the man to death with the bottle. Joseph dipped his fingers into the blood of his first victim, and place them above his eyes. He came straight down and formed almost ritual paintings. He came to his lips and formed almost a mock shadow of a smile.
And as the skull cowboy watched on he couldn't help but comment, "Oh Hell yeah."
TO BE CONTINUED
THE REAPER
