Chapter 3: The Rules of Ruin

Chapter 3: The Rules of Ruin

The screaming, silent faces were burned onto the backs of Liam’s eyelids. They haunted his waking moments and turned his fitful sleep into a gallery of horrors. But it was the Collector’s cheerful, dismissive words that truly obsessed him: You aren’t ready yet.

The phrase was a key, a code he had to crack. It meant there was a metric, a system. This wasn’t random. The former project manager in him, the part that lived for data and predictable outcomes, seized on that single, maddening clue. The Collector was harvesting souls based on a specific set of criteria, and Liam, for all his misery, hadn't met the qualifications. To understand the monster, he had to understand its methods.

This meant abandoning the last bastion of his old self: his pride. He could no longer be an observer, an outsider temporarily inconvenienced. He had to go deep. He had to become one of them.

His first stop was a sprawling tent city in what was once a public park, now a sea of mud and blue tarps. The air was thick with the smell of damp earth, woodsmoke, and unwashed bodies. Here, despair was a dull, chronic ache, a long-established way of life. He approached a group huddled around a sputtering fire in a rusted oil drum, his heart pounding with the awkwardness of a man trying to infiltrate a foreign country.

"I was under the Oakhaven Bridge," he began, his voice sounding hollow and rehearsed. "Did you hear what happened? People… disappeared."

He was met with suspicious stares. A woman with a hard, sun-beaten face laughed, a harsh, barking sound. "People disappear every day, new-blood. Cops, sickness, or they just get tired of it all and walk into the river. You got a smoke?"

Liam had nothing. He was dismissed with a collective shrug, the conversation turning back to gossip and complaints about the last meager handout from a local church. He spent two days there, listening. He forced himself to sit with them, to accept a styrofoam cup of watery soup, to stop seeing them as a homogenous mass of misery and start seeing the individuals. He learned about stolen blankets, sick children, and the constant, grinding fear of being cleared out by the city. But when he brought up the strange man in the suit, he was met with silence or scorn. He was asking the wrong questions. He was looking for a headline event in a world built on slow, quiet erosion.

He moved on, his desperation growing. His investigation led him to a soup kitchen line that snaked around a grimy brick building downtown. Here, the despair was sharper, more acute. It was the frantic hunger of people who didn't know where their next meal was coming from, a transient population that flowed through the city's veins like bad blood.

He stood in line for an hour, the shame of it a familiar, bitter taste in his mouth. Ahead of him, an old man, thin as a rail and wrapped in a coat that was mostly holes, began to cough, a deep, wracking sound that shook his entire frame. The man stumbled, and Liam instinctively reached out, steadying him.

"Easy there," Liam said.

The old man looked up, his eyes watery and clouded with age. "Thanks, son. The damp gets in the bones." He leaned against the wall, catching his breath. His name was Jonah, and he claimed he'd been on these streets since the factories closed down thirty years ago.

Liam decided to try a different approach. Not a direct question, but a story. "I saw something," he said, his voice low. "A man. He offered people a way out. Gave them tickets."

Jonah went still. His watery eyes sharpened with a flicker of something ancient and fearful. He glanced around, as if worried they'd be overheard. "You don't want to go looking for him," he rasped, his voice barely a whisper. "You don't want him looking for you."

A jolt went through Liam, cold and electric. "You know him."

"Know of him," Jonah corrected, his gaze distant. "He's a story. A ghost story the real long-haulers tell when things get bad. The Ticket Man. The Man in Two Suits. Got a dozen names. They say he's like a vulture. He doesn't hunt. He waits."

"Waits for what?" Liam pressed, his heart hammering. This was it. The start of the rulebook.

"For the end of the line," Jonah said, his voice grim. "Not for one person. For a group. He don't show up for one man's bad day. He shows up when a whole camp gets the eviction notice, and they got nowhere else to go. He shows up after the shelter burns down and takes the last warm beds in the coldest week of winter. He shows up when hope ain't just gone, it's been ripped out, root and stem, for everyone all at once. He smells it, see? That moment of… finality."

A profound, collective hopelessness. The words clicked into place in Liam’s mind. That’s what the Collector was feeding on. That was his metric. The group under the bridge had been small, but they’d been a unit. Maybe there had been some event he’d missed, some final straw that had broken them all at the same time. His own despair, deep as it was, had still been selfish and solitary. He was still clinging to the idea of a future, the fiction of his temporary situation. He hadn't been part of their collective surrender. That's why he wasn't ready.

"Has he been seen recently?" Liam asked, trying to keep his voice steady.

Jonah shivered, pulling his tattered coat tighter. "Word is, that old textile warehouse over by the docks? The one the cops finally cleared out this morning? Threw about twenty people back onto the pavement with nothing but the clothes on their back. A real nasty business. If the Ticket Man is sniffing around anywhere… it'd be there."

Liam's blood ran cold. He didn't even wait for the soup. "Thank you," he said, turning and breaking from the line. He had to go. He had to see. He had to know if the theory held.

He ran, his worn shoes slapping against the grimy sidewalk. The warehouse district was a graveyard of industry, all rusting metal and broken windows. He found the building Jonah mentioned easily enough. The front was littered with the detritus of a forced eviction: broken furniture, soggy cardboard boxes, a child's tricycle with one wheel missing.

He slipped through a gap in the chain-link fence and crept around to the back, peering through a shattered window into the cavernous, dark space within.

And his heart stopped.

They were there. A huddle of about fifteen to twenty people, shivering in the gloom, their faces etched with a despair so profound it was almost a physical presence in the room. And standing before them, bathed in an unnatural stillness, was the Collector.

His bisected suit was a stark slash of order and chaos in the decaying warehouse. The cheerful, predatory smile was plastered on his shadowed face. In his hand, he held the familiar stack of cream-colored tickets.

Liam was too far away to hear the words, but he knew the sermon. He could see the seductive promise in the Collector's posture, the gentle tilt of his head. He was offering an end to their pain. And they were accepting. One by one, they stepped forward, surrendering their last, pathetic trinkets.

Liam wanted to scream, to smash the window, to warn them. But his throat was paralyzed with a terrible, helpless awe. This was it. The final stage of the process.

As the last person received their ticket, the Collector paused. He turned his head slowly, deliberately, and looked directly at the broken window where Liam was hiding. Across the fifty feet of darkness and despair, their gazes locked.

The Collector’s smile widened, becoming a ghastly, knowing slash in the shadows. He saw Liam. He knew he was there. There was no surprise in his expression, only a triumphant, mocking amusement. He gave Liam a slow, almost imperceptible nod—a greeting between reluctant acquaintances. A nod that said, Now you understand the rules.

Then he turned back to his flock and tapped his dark, light-absorbing cane on the concrete floor.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Silence fell like a guillotine. The tickets glowed. And as Liam watched, his fists clenched in impotent rage, another twenty souls shimmered, dissolved, and vanished from the world, leaving nothing behind but the faint, screaming echoes he knew would soon follow.