Suffocating under the weight of the rain as it pours down, saturating, permeating every shadow and hollow, puddles of water tinging red as streams of blood flow through. Some is their blood. Some is mine. I manage to raise my face a little from the wet stones of the alley, feeling cuts in my skin. How long have I been out? Minutes? Days? Through the rain and mist and miasma I can just make out the shape of my hand in its iron-banded glove, lying a world of two feet of me. I try to move it, and the fingers twitch, but there's no strength to raise the arm ... was I shot there? I don't know. My memory's gone again. This is a bad sign.
Eyes travel down along the ground, trying to focus through the haze of pain and of reality, agony creeping in on the edges of my vision as a tangible blurring, rain turning to mist as it spatters on the street, droplets impacting against the stone and exploding into thousands of water particles. I know the distortion is shock-induced, but it doesn't help. Straining my eyes, I make out the forms of corpses by the shape of the rain spray. My handiwork? I can't be sure. I think I feel bullet holes, just under my ribs, that telltale penetrating cold of winter air infiltrating your guts. Am I leaking stomach acid onto my lungs and intestines right now? Or is it just a gust of cold wind? With my huge cloak torn and wrapped around me, I can't see my torso to make sure. Fuck.
That bit of awareness manages to squeeze another drop out of my adrenaline, which I can tell has been pumped dry for a long time. What the fuck have I been doing here? This doesn't seem like a normal gunfight. Ever since that fucking mark on my arm started growing, my life has gone to shit. Not to mention the other crazy shit that goes on, my memory has begun to shatter whenever it gets a mind to. Putting it back together is a long and torturous process; the answers don't come to me for a long time.
If they come at all.
The adrenaline starts to seep in. The miasmatic cloud around my brain fades from opaque to merely translucent, and I manage to get a better hold on things. I feel the deluge of rain battering my cloak to my back, the unevenly paved stones of the alley against my face and stomach, and establish that I am lying facedown.
