In one of the apartments located in the city, the air reeked of death even before Death itself entered on its own two feet. "Moore's" scent was a disgusting cocktail of salty sweat, cheap whiskey fermented in the pores of his skin, and old vomit that had dried on the corners of the frayed carpet. Moore was lying on his sofa, which had lost its original color years ago, staring at the ceiling where cracks in the paint drew distorted shapes in his drunken imagination.
He held the bottle as if it were his only child, raising it slowly, watching the filthy golden liquid sway inside. His hand was trembling—not from fear, but from the acute lack of alcohol that had begun to gnaw at his nerves.
"Everyone is a traitor..." he muttered in a heavy voice, his tongue sticking to the dry roof of his mouth. "The wife... the son... the city... even this cursed light blinks as if it's mocking me."
Suddenly, the unexpected happened. The thin thread of yellow light hanging from the ceiling snapped. A silence Moore had never known before prevailed. The neighbors' devices went silent, and the hum of the ancient refrigerator in the kitchen stopped. It wasn't just a power outage; it was as if the world had suddenly closed its eyelids.
"Damn it!" Moore screamed, his voice bouncing off the bare walls to slap him back. "Where are the matches? Where is that cursed fire?" He tried to stand, but his body weighed a ton with lethargy. He tripped over an empty bottle on the floor and fell with all his weight, his face slamming against the cold wooden floor. In that moment, amidst the darkness, he began to hear his heartbeat... then he heard something else.
Knock... knock... knock.
Three quiet knocks. They weren't violent; they were measured with a deadly coldness. Moore crawled toward the door, clutching a piece of broken glass, rage rising in his chest to mask his sense of fear.
"Who is the fool knocking at this hour?" He threw the door open violently, ready to empty all his malice into the face of the caller.
But what he saw made him freeze. In front of the door, in the darkness of the hallway—which was even blacker than his room—stood a youth. He wore a long coat, and his black hair fell over his forehead to cover part of his eyes, which did not resemble human eyes at that moment. They were black, still, like a bottomless well.
"Who are you, boy? Have you lost your way to hell?" Moore asked with bitter sarcasm, waving the glass shard.
The youth looked at Moore coldly; his eyes did not blink once. His lips parted into a small smile—a smile that never reached his eyes.
He spoke in a calm, steady voice, carrying the tone of someone who knows the end in advance: "I am Death... and I have come to take your soul."
Moore let out a hysterical laugh, his spit flying into the air. "Death? You? You lit—"
Before he could finish his sentence, the youth moved with lightning speed. Moore didn't see the fist approaching; he only felt the explosion of pain in the center of his face. The sound of his nose bones shattering was clear in the silence of the building.
Moore fell backward, blood erupting from his nose like a waterfall. He tried to scream, but the youth's hand was already settled on his throat, squeezing with a force that made his eyes bulge.
"Shhh..." the youth whispered as he dragged him inside the apartment and kicked the door shut with his foot. "Screaming ruins the fun."
With professional speed, the youth produced a sturdy rope and a rag soaked in a strange scent. He stuffed the rag into Moore's mouth, then tied his head to secure the gag, and bound his hands and feet to an old wooden chair in the center of the room. Moore was thrashing like a fish out of water, his bloodshot eyes overflowing with tears of terror, his massive body trembling under the weight of pain and shock.
The youth pulled another chair and sat opposite him. He produced a small knife with a precise surgical blade. The youth began to wipe the blade with a clean cloth, while his eyes watched Moore's panic with silent pleasure.
"Let's begin the countdown, Moore," the youth said, grabbing Moore's left hand. "Ten fingers... ten sins."
The torture began at a very slow rhythm. The youth dug the blade around the base of the nail, twisting it slowly, enjoying the sound of the tendons tearing under his pressure. Moore screamed behind the gag—a muffled scream stifled by the fabric—his body convulsing with a violence that made the chair emit a sharp creak. The youth severed the first finger, then placed it calmly on the nearby table as if placing a precious gem.
"Do you remember your son?" the youth asked suddenly, his voice becoming lower and more dangerous.
Moore stopped moving for a second, his eyes widening.
"The little one who used to hide under the bed when you came home drunk," the youth continued as he moved to the second finger.
"The one you made live in an endless hell, beating him with wires, extinguishing your cigarettes on his small back because he didn't bring you enough money to buy your poisons. Do you remember how his hands shook as he offered you the glass?"
With every word, a finger fell. Blood began to cover the floor, crawling toward the youth's shoes, but the youth did not move away; rather, he relished the touch of the warm blood.
"And even worse..." The youth paused, and the smile vanished completely. Raw features of hatred appeared on his face. "You killed his mother. The woman who was protecting him from you with her illness and weakness. You stabbed her before his very eyes, then in cold blood, you placed the knife in his small hand while he was crying, and called the police to tell them your 'deranged' son was the killer."
The youth leaned closer to the ear of Moore, who had begun to lose consciousness from the pain and bleeding. "He entered prison when he was fifteen. There, among the wolves, he spent his years seeing your face in his nightmares. Do you know what happened to him when he got out?"
The youth grabbed Moore's head and forced him to look into his eyes. "He came out broken. He found no place to go except that dark room you remember from the beginning of our story. He died, Moore. He committed suicide because he couldn't live in a world where you were alive."
The last word was like a bullet. Moore's body went limp—not because of death, but because of the truth that was heavier than the youth's knives.
"Now..." the youth said as he cut Moore's eyes out, then stood up, blood covering his coat. "I will leave you to bleed slowly. You will die in the darkness, just as you left your son and wife to die in your darkness."
The youth took the paper from his pocket and crossed out the name (Moore) with a thick, red line. He looked at the remaining names: (Ayr.. The City Gang..).
"One down... the rest are on the way."
The youth exited the apartment, leaving behind a living corpse breathing with difficulty in a room drowned in blood, while the city outside was still drowning in its greatest blackness, waiting for a dawn that might never come for some people.