Fallen Angels
In the dark of night, the black-clad gunslinger stood before what looked like a fire-exit door at the bottom of a stairway, a story below street level in the side of a downtown building. A red neon oval had been installed on the door, and it glowed with a sullen, lurid heat. The thump of a bass beat vibrated almost sub-audibly up through the ground. In the light of the hellish strobe, he stared at the door,
Zero's one of those clubs that most people only hear rumors about. It moves around the city from time to time, but it's always as exclusive as a popular nightspot in a metropolis can possibly be. There were always other rumors as well, ones creepy enough to gain the attention of the Gunslinger.
Enough to have cut into his hunting time for this. From his inner pocket, an iron key he had killed for was slipped in, turned and opened the door. A wash of heat and smoke heavy with legally questionable substances pushed gently against his chest. Somewhere behind the red-lit smoke, heavy techno music filled the air and made the floor tremble.
The Gunslinger moved on, walking down a hallway that got darker, louder, and more illicitly aromatic as he went. It ended at a black curtain, and he pushed it irritably aside to reveal a few more feet of hallway, a door, and two politely formidable-looking men in dark suits standing in front of it.
One of them lifted a hand and told him, "I'm sorry, sir, but this is a private-"
The heavy music masked the gunfire, both suits falling and writhing as the properties of Baskerville and Samael burned the monster's from the inside out. If anything, it meant he was at the right place. Spurs clinking, he stepped over the bodies and threw open the door.
There was no white light inside Zero. Most of it was red, punctuated in places with pools of blue and plenty of black lights scattered everywhere so that even where shadows were thickest, some colors jumped out in disquieting luminescence. Cigarette smoke hung in a pall over the large room, a distance-distorting haze under the black lights.
He had entered on a kind of balcony that overlooked the dance floor below. Music pounded, the bass beat so loud that Lucifer could feel it in his lower stomach. Lights flashed and swayed in synchronicity. The floor was crowded with sweating, moving bodies dressed in a broad spectrum of clothing, from full leather coverings including a whole-head hood, at one extreme, to one girl clad in a few strips of electrical tape on the other. There was a bar down by the dance floor, and tables scattered around its outskirts under a thirty-foot-high ceiling. A few cages hung about eight feet over the dance floor, each containing a young man or woman in provocative clothing.
Stairways and catwalks led up to about a dozen platforms that thrust out from the walls, where patrons could sit and overlook the scene below while gaining a measure of privacy for themselves. Most of the platforms were furnished with couches and chaise longues rather than tables and chairs. There were more exotic bits of furniture up on the platforms, as well: the giant X shape of a St. Andrew's cross, which was currently supporting the bound form of a young man, his wrists and ankles secured to the cross, his face to the wood, his hair falling down over his naked back. Another platform had a shiny brass pole in its center, and a pair of girls danced around it, in the middle of a circle of men and women sprawled over the couches and lounges.
Everywhere he looked, people were doing things that would have gotten them arrested anywhere else. Couples, threesomes, foursomes, and nineteensomes were fully engaged in sexual activity on some of the private platforms. From where he stood, he ould see two different tables where lines of white powder waited to be inhaled. A syringe disposal was on the wall next to every trash can, marked with a bright biohazard symbol. People were being beaten with whips and riding crops. People were bound up with elaborate arrangements of ropes, as well as with more prosaic handcuffs. Piercings and tattoos were everywhere. Screams and cries occasionally found their way through the music, agony, ecstasy, joy, or rage all indistinguishable from one another.
The lights flashed constantly, changing and shifting, and every beat of the music created a dozen new frozen montages of sybaritic abandon.
The music, the light, the sweat, the smoke, the booze, the drugs-it all combined into a wet, desperate miasma that was full of needs that could never be sated.
That's why the place was called Zero. Zero limits. Zero inhibitions. Zero restraint. It was a place of perfect, focused abandon, of indulgence, and it was intriguing and hideous, nauseating and viscerally hungry.
Zero fulfillment.
If the man he sought was anywhere, it would be here. And with a sneer, he made his way inside like wrath personified.
@Michale CS @Gands
