The Brotherhood of The Black Rats

4.30 Ravens

The world seemed to fade between shades of blood red crimson light and the bleak darkness of nothingness. Grief and pain swirled through Spider’s mind like a pair of entangled snakes adrift in a sea of despair. As he hung weaving in and out of consciousness, all sense of time escaped his limped brain as though it had been taken from him in a cruel prank. Minutes dragged into hours, hours into days. Yet in the moments he spent awake enough to phantom his situation his thoughts turned to only another… Doc.

Had his brother gotten the message to the others before he had been… The cold hard knowledge of The Rezen’s fate hit the trickster like a sack of bricks. More painful than even the burning trails of slime that ran across his body. Even in his bouts of sleep he felt it. He could see his brother’s face as it once had been, even in the darkness. Memories of the time before the fateful accident that had turned the naive New Orleans witch doctor into the near omnipotent guardian angel, played like old movies warped by the passage of time.

In one they were still children, two colored kids growing up on the bayou of the mighty Mississippi river at a time when the color of a person’s skin was enough to condemn him for the heinous act of simply being born. Their mother was a Voo-Doo Priestess descended from a long line of Tia Dalma’s out of The Caribbean islands, their father… long out of the picture.

Spider couldn’t have been more than eight years old on the day he learned to fly, and Doc no more than twelve on the day he taught him. The pair of them had been scurrying about the French Quarter picking pockets and cutting purses as though the world between Bourbon Street and Toulouse was theirs to own and the tourists in town for Mardi Gratis ever their humble subjects.

The take had been going well that morning, Yet The Young Spider had let his guard down after nabbing a fist hull of flattened pennies from the pocket-book of an old woman. Each one had been engraved with some famous landmark or state sigil rendering them utterly worthless in actual commerce. Any other thief would of ditched the collection over the river, but not Spider. There was something about the process of turning something that was valuable into something that was not that struck a chord with the young pick-pocket; having never had much growing up, the idea of having more than enough seemed odd to him at the time.

He could still feel the warm southern sun on his face as he rubbed his little fingers over the engraved copper pennies that afternoon. His favorite had been the one featuring the statue of liberty. For the life of him he couldn’t figure out why, there was just something about its majestic design that set it apart from the kitschier of the bunch.

“Aw, Spider these ain’t worth spit.” His brother had said once they’d reached the safety of their back alley breezeway. “Turning pennies into pictures is just plain dumb.”

“But they sure are nice to look at,” said Spider “Look here, this one’s from New York City.”

Doc never got the chance to see his brother’s findings. Their moment of privacy, interrupted by the shouts of a local shopkeeper who’d been after their hides for going on two whole years at that point. He came at them like a like trained dog, unrelenting in his approch. Intent on trapping them in the narrow passageway.

“Run Spider!” yelled Doc when the grown man caught them. In a move that would cost them half the days take the older brother threw their heavy change purse at the brute, shielding their escape in a shower of coins and flattened pennies.

All these years later Spider still remembered how they fell through the air like metal raindrops on the hard stone ground. The boys ran as though the devil himself were at their heels and given the temperature of the south in those days he might as well have been.

What had been a lone angry brute soon turned into a mob of cussing locals and tourists eager to get their hands on the two colored boys causing a ruckus in the square. By the time they reached the old Magnolia Bridge even The Sheriff had joined the hunt.