Challenge Twenty Three, a General fanfic

Sinjins
By Lady Arrin

He paced restlessly around the room, his eyes flickering between the window in the corner and the door. You never knew what these people were going to do next. They had tracked him down, threatened his family. He fingered the gold band around the fourth finger on his left hand, and a smile crossed his face as he thought of his wife and son, whom he'd left at home. He checked his watch. 8:57 AM. They had said nine. They were never late.

As for who “they” were, it was a complicated story that begins far before our character steps into view. “They” were a gang. Of course, there were thousands upon thousands of gangs in or around the area of Boston. But this one was different. It wasn't your run-of-the-mill drugs, sex, and violence gang. This group was filled with the elite and were called the Sinjin, which is Gaelic after some Irish Saint. Now why a saint? Because the Sinjin were all religious. Usually Irish, always Catholic, and always ready to die for what they believed in. The papers called them the Pope's Jihad. In a sense, they were. They were martyrs, ready to die and only waiting for a signal. They usually had explosive on their persons and always had four guns; placed stratigically on their bodies. The Sinjin were cold, violent, and ruthless. The leader, Alistair, had not always been called that. He'd changed his name upon seizing control from the previous leader in a bloody uprising; changed it from Jonathan to Alistair. Alistair considered himself exactly what his name meant. The Defender of Men. He took his job seriously and would not hesitate to kill a single person who got in his way.

The Sinjin were not only religious; oh no. They believed in both all-white and all-male supremacy. Once a young woman entered a relationship with a Sinjin she was in for life. Most didn't make it past two years; they disappeared and were never heard from again. All the members were childless except for Alistair, who (at twenty six) lived out on Beacon Hill with his nine-year-old son. Both he and his girlfriend had been seventeen when the boy had been born. The girlfriend, however, tried to run off with the kid (which didn't go down so well. Her body was now lying on the bottom of the river Charles). Alistair had implanted a story in the head of the boy about how his mother had ran away, because she couldn't deal with the responsibilities. He also raised the boy with Catholic and Irish pride being a centre of his son's life.

Their headquarters was an old building, typical, with the windows broken and boarded up. These men ranged anywhere from sixteen to twenty-nine, and once over twenty-nine, you stopped doing the missions and started creating them. There was a complex system of identifying the members which consisted of designs burned or carved into the skin. If the pledge didn't cry out or wince, they were in. It was as simple as that. If they did make a sound, they were sent out on a suicide mission.

Which brings us to where we are today. Now you might wonder why our character hasn't been given a name yet. Probably because he is about to die.

His watch beeped at precisely nine in the morning. He was tense, waiting. This was unlike Alistair. Then, a boy no older than seventeen walked in, holding a remote.

Our character took one look and held on even tighter to the rosary he had in his hand.

“No. Don't-” He didn't even finish his sentence. The windows blew out as the building exploded, the glass shattering into fragments that landed on the ice that coated the river below. For some reason, this man had ticked off the Sinjins. Two bloody corpses flew through the air, the one of our unnamed man going sideways and getting caught on the window frame. The unknown Sinjin, however, flew head-first through the window, going up into the sky as though going up to God himself. Some witnesses swore that they had seen a smile on his face; others claim that he had crossed himself. Sill more said that his hands had been folded, his lips moving in prayer.

The rosary followed the projectile motion of the boy who had been refused from the Sinjin's (and had therefor been sent on a suicide mission), except that it hit a single patch of water on the miles of ice. Fate? Perhaps. The body hit the frozen river with a sickening thud, even as the sacred beads sank down the river bed. Neighborhood people gathered at the edge of the river, standing between the ruined buildings with hoods pulled over their heads and scarves wrapped around their faces. Nobody wanted to be recognisable in an area where the Sinjins had hit.

Everybody knew it had been them. There was no doubt. It wasn't just the maniac grin on the face of the body, or the cross he'd born around his neck. It was those designes still bloody on his arms, which had never been finished carving. Every single person in this city knew what happened when you failed an initiation right. You died by your own hand, or they came looking for you. Only one man had managed to escape them and live. And his body was stuck in a window pane four stories above ground.