A Dozen Black Roses

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A Dozen Black Roses

By

Nancy Collins

A Dozen Black Roses

Copyright © 7996 by Nancy Collins.

All information pertaining to the World of Darkness Copyright © 1996 by White Wolf Publishing.

White Wolf Publishing

780 Park North Boulevard,

Suite 100 Clarkston, GA 30021

World Wide Web Page: www.white-wolf.com

For my husband, Joe Christ Always and Forever

AUTHOR'S NOTE

As this is a crossover between the world of Sonja Blue and the World of Darkness, there are matters of continuity that do not match up exactly with the respective universes; I have attempted to graft them together as well as possible. This story can be considered to be taking place sometime following the events detailed in Paint It Black. I would also like to give a tip of the hat to the following: Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars, Dawn of the Dead, and Warriors.

DEADTOWN

A considerable percentage of the people we meet on the street are people who are empty inside, that is, they are actually already dead. It is fortunate for us that we do not see and do not know it. If we knew what a number of people are actually dead and what a number of these dead people govern our lives, We should go mad with horror.

— George Gurdjieff

I believe in children

I believe in life

But I'd have to be deaf, dumb and blind

Not to see the strife.

Faces of death, faces of death

Faces of death all around me.

— Love Theme from Faces of Death 4

The city was founded over two hundred and sixty years ago by those who fled the intolerance of their various homelands. It sits at the head of an estuary, a stone's throw from the huge bay that first welcomed the settlers who came to this strange new world. Its proximity to water shaped its future, much as a

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) growing child is shaped by its environment.

From its earliest days the city's destiny was linked with that of sailing ships and those who ply the waves.

By the time of the American Revolution it was a bustling seaport and shipyard, its wharves busy with trade, legal and otherwise. The shipping companies that crowded the waterfront exported tobacco, flour, indigo, and fish to Europe, while accepting darker human cargo from the Gold Coast and beyond.

In the years that followed, the city's livelihood became even more tightly linked with the sea and the adjoining rivers that occasionally threatened to swallow it whole. Time passed. Ships were no longer made entirely of wood, so steelworks and oil refineries arose to build the battleships and freighters of the steam era.

Like all seaports, in the beginning it was a brash and roughshod town— but as the decades turned into centuries, it came to see itself in a more cosmopolitan light. As the city matured, it became more sophisticated in its pleasures, giving birth to opera houses, museums, and coliseums. The seminary birthed first colleges, then universities. There were ups and downs—fires and floods, recessions and inflation—but the city always recovered, just as a human body recovers from fevers and ills.

The symbiotic parasites who thought the city their own thrived, producing sports figures, surgeons, newspapermen, philosophers, statesmen and poets. The wheels of progress, industry, and business moved in sync without grinding against one another's gears. It was a city with a past and a future.

And then came the present.

Forty years ago the denizens of the inner city began to abandon the brownstones and row houses of their ancestors for the roomier, greener environs of the outlying suburbs. Soon the only people left were those too poor or disenfranchised to move. The neighborhoods began to decline as the working class gave way to working poor.

Thirty years ago the wheels of progress and industry began to shift as advances in technology made brute strength less and less necessary. The shipyards began to mechanize, as did the refineries and steel plants.

Fewer and fewer jobs were open to the unskilled and uneducated.

Twenty years ago the oil embargo drove the price of oil from two dollars a barrel to thirty-two.

Americans, no longer able to afford to drive the lumbering gas-guzzlers Detroit manufactured, turned to foreign imports. The demand for domestic steel dropped drastically. The wheels of progress were no longer lubricated and the gears began to grind loudly, sending sparks in every direction. Dockworkers, shipbuilders, foundry and refinery employees were laid off in droves. It became increasingly difficult for even the educated to earn decent wages once inflation turned a college degree into the equivalent of a high school diploma. Entire city blocks were abandoned and left to rot.

Fifteen years ago the federal government began cutting back on aid to the poor and disadvantaged stranded in the inner cities. The city was left to face its declining years bereft of services, neglected and abused. What had once been an industrial economy gave way to one based on services. College graduates found themselves underemployed, flipping hamburgers and changing sheets, while the poverty-stricken watched stockbrokers, investment bankers, and realtors drive their Beamers and Volvos into the slums to score cocaine. Crime rates soared. Political corruption was everywhere. Gangs began to proliferate, and with their growth, wars over turf escalated as well. At some point during the heated battles between Uzi-toting gangbangers, the city was delivered a mortal wound.

Cities are living things. They are born and grow, mature and age. Sometimes they even die. But cities, unlike organic things made of flesh and blood, bone and sinew, do not know that they are dead. The symbiotes that labor so busily within the carcass are often determined to continue the pretense of life long after its vitality has bled away.

Deadtown was the largest of the maggots thriving within the corpse.

Most of the humans dwelling within the city are unaware that there is a sector that the elected officials pretend does not exist. It is not located on any street map. Neither patrol cars, ambulances, nor firetrucks venture into this lost neighborhood near the river. Cries for help are often heard echoing from its dark alleys and twisting streets, but seldom answered—and for good reason. For this is the rotting heart of a once-vital city. And what better place for the children of the night to gather than in a city that is already one of the living dead?

***

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) was the place.

Although the "quaint" street fixtures might fool the unwary tourist into thinking they'd wandered into some attempt at a yuppie urban commercial center, the illusion was only momentary; piles of rotting garbage lumped in the alleyways and gaunt, ashen-faced derelicts lurching down the street were proof that the neighborhood did not boast a Crabtree & Evelyn.

Still, for a portion of the city that did not technically exist, The Street With No Name seemed surprisingly busy. Though most of the storefronts were boarded up, a handful of bodegas serviced a steady stream of solitary men and women.

She paused in front of one of the windows, peering in at the wall of faded Froot Loops boxes and expired baby-food jars that had been erected as a barricade against prying eyes. Whatever they sold inside, it certainly wasn't groceries. Her attention was attracted by the stutter and flash of neon from farther down the street. She moved toward it, keeping a cautious eye on the darkened mouth of the alley, where something mewled to itself and rustled like dry leaves.

In the middle of the block were a couple of bars and a liquor store that looked to be the only thriving businesses in the neighborhood. One was a titty bar called Dance Macabre; its logo was a woman cradling a serpent with a flickering neon tongue. Directly across the street was a pool hall called Stick's. Both establishments had knots of young men dressed in gang colors hanging outside on the curb, glaring at one another across the cobblestone road.

The stranger paused to watch the young men as they talked among themselves, drank malt liquor from forty-ounce containers and smoked reeking blunts, gun-butts jutting from their waistbands. Both groups seemed of equal size, their members a mix of white, black and brown—surprising, given the city's tendency toward unofficial segregation.

The gang loitering in front of the Dance Macabre wore black leather jackets festooned with chrome studs outlining inverted five-pointed stars across their backs. The gangbangers milling outside Stick's wore identical leather jackets—except that the backs were decorated with Jolly Rogers. Instead of legbones, however, the grinning skulls hovered above crossed spoons. Despite the intense, glowering stares flashing between the groups, neither side offered to move from its respective post.

A late-fifties Cadillac, its tail fins raised high like the dorsal of a shark, turned the corner. The suitcase-sized speakers blasted out hip-hop so bass-heavy it made the stranger's ribs vibrate in time with the beat.

"Here comes the Batmobile," announced a Hispanic youth with a blossom of acne across his thin face.

The gangbangers outside the Dance Macabre tossed away their blunts and bombers and pulled out their guns, moving to form a human corridor.

The vintage Cadillac pulled up to the curb. The windows were so heavily tinted they looked like mirrors.

One of the gangbangers sprang forward and opened the rear door. The first person out of the car was a tall, striking woman dressed in low-cut black leather pants and steel-tipped boots. As she turned to face the others, her black leather jacket swung open, revealing naked breasts with stainless-steel rings piercing the nipples. The right side of her head was shaved to the skull, while the hair on the left hung to her waist like a drape of black silk. Her features were strong and clean and would have been considered classically beautiful if not for the plethora of metal hoops and studs dangling from her nose, lips, and brow ridge. In her right hand she held a loaded crossbow. She quickly checked the perimeter, then gestured to her fellow passenger that the coast was clear.

An extremely pale young woman, her hair the color of smoke, climbed out of the back seat. She was dressed all in white, from her satin pumps and plunging silk evening gown to the mink coat she clutched like a life preserver. Her face was so perfect it looked more like a china doll's than a living woman's. Yet, for all her loveliness, there was something wrong. Her movements were jerky and deliberate, like those of a marionette, as the other woman hustled her toward the entrance of the club. Her lavender-colored eyes were as glazed and slightly out-of-focus as a tranquilized gazelle's.

"Mama! Mama!"

The woman in white froze in midstep, a flicker of emotion crossing her otherwise placid face.

"Ryan?"

"Mama!"

A young boy, no older than five, darted between the legs of the gangbangers. He was thin and ragged, but there was no mistaking where he'd gotten his coloration and hair. He made a grab for the woman's dress, narrowly dodging the archer's steel-tipped boot. The woman in white's eyelids began to twitch, like

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) those of a sleepwalker emerging from a dream. The archer cursed and made a grab for the boy, only to have him scoot between her legs and into the open street.

The archer pointed her crossbow at the pimply-faced gangbanger who'd opened the car door for her.

"Cavalera! I thought I told you dumb fucks to deal with that little cocksucker!"

The gangbanger she'd addressed jumped to something resembling attention.

"You heard what Esher said about lettin' that brat get near her! Don't just stand there with your fuckin'

thumbs up your ass! Get him! And take Cro-Mag with you!" the archer snarled over her shoulder as she propelled her charge toward the open door, revealing strong white fangs and eyes the color of wine.

Cavalera and Cro-Mag promptly sprinted down the street in pursuit of the boy. The kid had a half-block headstart, but their legs were twice as long, and within seconds they closed in on him.

The one called Cro-Mag, a hulking Anglo youth with a lantern jaw, made a flying tackle, knocking the terrified child to the ground.

"Way t'go, Mag!" Cavalera, the thin Hispanic with the skin problem, chimed. "Mebbe you shoulda kept playin' football."

"Nah. Can't read. If I wanted t'stay on th' team, I had t'take retard classes. Fuck that shit, man!" Cro-Mag grinned as he got to his feet. He held the boy by his shirt collar, dangling him above the ground like he would a baby rabbit. "What we gonna do with this little shit?"