Ambitan scooped up the dead body of the rat and tucked it into a pocket on the inside of his coat. Then, turning around he hurried back along his intended route, wiping the small traces of blood off of his hands to further dirty up his own clothes.
With a couple of bobs and weaves, Ambitan ducked through the stacks of garbage that threatened to collapse upon him at any moment. They wavered and swayed but by some miracle they never seemed to fall apart.
Eventually, after a minor mishap in which Ambitan had made a wrong turn due to him getting disoriented from his short detour, Ambitan managed to just barely scurry through the gate before the enforced curfew.
Shortly after Ambitan had managed to slip through the gate it started to descend from overhead. The poorly maintained gears squeaked and groaned in protest and the chains rattled as if they were but hollow bones in the wind. In increments, the gate descended, notch by notch as the gears turned. As it descended each notch the entirety of the wreck would shudder and pitch. Finally, though the gate descended all the notches before impacting the arid dirt with a choking dust cloud.
Unprepared, Ambitan caught a deep breath of the dust only to wheeze and pitch over in a coughing fit. The dust was raking against his throat and he could feel his lungs burning as the tears welled up in his eyes. The dust wanted to flow in but his body oh so desperately wanted to keep out and in doing so resulted in a battle that wreaked havoc upon Ambitan's respiratory system.
With the back of his hand, Ambitan wiped his eyes before forcibly standing himself back up through a heavy reliance on the shoddy crutch. Following that he proceeded to limp down the narrow, claustrophobic alleyways, making sure to keep his footsteps steady and his mind alert in the likely event of there being some form of trouble waiting on some doorstep or behind a random corner.
Turning onto Bayer Street, or at least the remnants of it following that drug lab explosion several months back, there was some nicely dressed folk. There was a group of them, most likely the second generation of the Upper Sector that got to enjoy their fine and dandy pampered lives.
The familiar, enticing twinges of resentment licked at the edges of Ambitan's consciousness chanting the oh-so-familiar question. For what had he done to deserve his current predicament? The Upper Sector folks liked to go on and on about their religion or at least from what he had heard from Greyson, a former Upper Sector businessman who had supposedly been run out of his fortune.
Apparently, the Upper Sector folks liked to preach and attend their religious gatherings. But from Ambitan's point of view, what use does religion have? The Upper Sector likes to thank the gods for their blessings while the poor wallow in despair. And they pray so desperately for any god to come and grace them with salvation to only struggle day after day. But Ambitan knew better. God or any religious entities most certainly didn't exist, or if they ever did they were most certainly dead. For what sort of god that received the ever faithful and fervent prayers of their people would let them wallow in the pits of hell?
"Or perhaps they simply didn't care for us folks," Ambitan bitterly thought to himself.
But that such philosophical and existential trains of thought were discarded, for what use does philosophy have when it wouldn't help Ambitan survive another day?
So Ambitan lowered his head before passing the rich folk, making sure to maintain a wide berth around them. If they so desired, they could easily have him killed for any sort of concocted reason. Who would care after all for some dirty, lowly slum rat?
But back to his primary objective, a fire. Ambitan had to find some way of killing the bacteria present in the rat or else he would die not too long after consumption.
However, there was a minor problem, fire as a whole was a very controlled thing in the slums, and while it was very easy to start one, it was also quite dangerous. Especially because due to what the Upper Sectors dumped down here, and the vast quantities of it, fire was prone to spread quite rapidly.
Therefore, there would be select people in charge of regulating the fires, and every now and then the fires would be fed with piles of garbage taken from the outside.
And while this seems like a nice and tidy system where a rudimentary government has been established to create some good in an otherwise bleak world it would most definitely not be. Corruption ran rampant like in any system, the Firekeepers were viewed as positions of power and status, and the various factions that had formed vied over these critical positions.
The Gnashers were but one of the factions, they were even a bit on the nicer end of the spectrum in comparison to the others.
So Ambitan scurried along through the cracks, today had been a hectic enough day as is. And quite frankly he didn't want to deal with the bullshit that came with queuing for the fire and getting gutted out of the goods he had painstakingly procured. But the other alternatives would be going to sleep tired and hungry…
"But there's always creating one of my own…"
Ambitan conjured up the treacherous thought, one that would get him driven out if it were to be discovered. To create a fire of one's own was to invite others' scorn. To be viewed as selfish.
But sometimes, in order to survive, you had to be a little selfish.
Setting himself to work, within the confines of his little hovel, Ambitan scanned the surroundings through the cracks in the thin walls, checking if any enforcers were stalking about. Hell, if anyone was about.
He wouldn't doubt for a second that if any of his 'warm and inviting' neighbors were to discover his current actions they would report him so as to receive a simple pat on the head.