the ritual of a caveat

Rando ran out as soon as he went in.  Black gray smoke hazed the room, drifted into the pools of liquid that swelled in the men's eyes and didn't filter as they swallowed it in short breaths.  Solemnly they pretended not to choke on the ashes.  There was a red glow emanating from the decay at the front of their room.  The last part of visible skin was the patch of tattoo, branded over with the insignia of the east side gang.

  you' wouldn't dare, this caveat warned.

Joseph was made a whipping boy, wrapped up in a tawny, gamboge, golden shrine.  And the smell was acrid, the snap of sizzling fat, enough to make a man curl up in fetal position.  A scent like animal but with a white pungency that churned everything in the centers of them, like their muscles organs bones and souls were all molten.  Some didn't have shirts to cover their mouths, those who did wouldn't dare.  They had to breathe their brother in.  The men pounded on their chests to withstand the causticity.  

They despised the shivers this display incited.  It made them want to hide, to relinquish no more of their brothers to the street wars. And they detested the feeling. The blood dripping in red through colored flames that turned it black.  And hard.  And viscous.  Joseph burned like ritual, and like ritual they prayed again,

Kill the fucker who did this!  The voices came through the air, sharp as the flames.