My Kind of Town: Chapter 1

My blood is as cold as ice as it leaps the gaping, broken wounds that are now apart of my body's colorful display, oozing mercilessly across the pale floor etched in silver and glimmer with the marble stone, filling cracks and fissures as easily as one can feed their own gnawing hunger.

It hurts, that's for sure, and my .22 hasn't been useful since I got it. Why I had, I hadn't been sure, but I am sure it had something to do with the fellow who had sold it to me – a sort of weaselly, sniveling fellow with a bit of a ratish expression when he'd said I'd been interested in something with a bang.

I should've known I'd been set up. There was nothing but useless blanks in the damn thing and I'd found out the hard way. A way so hard half of my rib cage was screaming and my skin across said ribs was filleted like so much French style rib, raking against the scrounged up meat up what should've been my right arm. Perfectly useless now, of course.

The wind is heavy and breaks on my face, and I know it really is only a matter of time before this thing hunts me down, mercilessly intent on seeing my face every last moment as it kills me, inch by inch.

Shrikes.

Fuck. I really hate them.

Heaving, I manage to throw myself over the back ledge, opting that there may be something down below to catch my fall. And if not... Oh well.

It's a satisfyingly painful crunch that tells me I'm still alive when I hit the rain soaked street, landing with timeless effort in the gutter after rolling half my way down to it from the incline of the hill. This place is made up of winding streets and dead lights, blown out from one too many joyrides where the passengers all have more weapons than a small army and most people know to move the hell on out of the way.

Most.

Just my luck, really, that one of these small armies manages to drive by while I'm trying to heave my mutilated form out of the causeway, stinking of rotted plant debris and mud.

Broadsided, and with some powerful shit too.

I'm sent flying, but I can't help but to wonder if I do die, where would I go?

Right back to where I started, maybe. This IS Hell, with its winding streets, greasy feel and nightmarish ghouls hiding right where you don't want them to hide. Bigger and badder like all those times before, or simply the opposite, as nice as you could ever want as they sweetly  lick your eyes like candy-pops, using your fingers as edible utensils to gouge out your own innards.

Pain. It's all I can think of, really, so much numbing pain that all else goes away. This sort of blissful atmosphere you can't get anywhere else except when buried into mindless pain, every part of your body aching for something, anything to just come along and kill it so it will end. But it never does and you have to watch down all the winding roads your pain run headlong like some drunk about ready to slam into a half-brained child playing with a gold and blue ball.

Bouncing.
Bouncing.

And there's no control.

Feebly, I barely managed to twitch, my eyes trying their damndest to open.

Fuck, get up!

Get up, you crazy bastard, it's the least you can do for those fucking Shrikes, otherwise they'll never leave you be. They'll keep hunting you until you drop and you want to drop before then, before they drain you of your heart and soul, leaving you nothing more than a corpse and plaything for the worse monsters that do all sorts of horrible things to little girls with bouncing toys.

The mud and the world is thick, heavy, a sign of the times as there are nothing more than great towers and pointless architecture that reaches out to the sky like so many groping fingers to a sun that never rises, the rain in this realm eternal and rotted, smelling more and more like the sick refrigerator ice box stench the more it falls.

I keep running, running until I can't, and then I crawl, crawl past tombstones and gnarled old trees like so many highbrowed old men at the universities, scorning me, laughing at me. Unwilling to help with their needly, snarled fingers and lack of hair.

I know it's cold, but I can't feel it.

I can't feel it even when I drag myself a mile over that endless cemetery, the sounds of the street so far away and yet right next to me.

Right next to me as those fucking bastards come back who took a shot at me earlier. And they've got more this time, the Shrikes are egging them on. They know I can't die, not yet.

Not without...Him.

GET UP.

I can barely breathe if I could at all, blood and injury having disfigured my face beyond repair as I scramble, slowly, as if through an entire lifetime to my feet.

The weight on my shoulders is heavy as I stare through the black, oil-slicked rain to the faces and broken down vehicle that steams heat and fire.

Blonde hair, blue eyes.

Oh god.

I can't help but crack a smile at the choice the Shrikes have made. An imitator, I'm sure. Someone or some thing programmed to look like that which caused me the most trouble, that which hurts more.

I spit blood out as I sway on my feet, barely managing to raise up my sleeve to wipe my face, only succeeding in making it dirtier as the fucker walks towards me, impassive, better than me. Always better. More cultured, more fine. More...everything. The rain doesn't seem to touch him, the mud has no effect on his boots or his clothes, perfectly and effortlessly black and white.

And me...?

I laugh as I raise that bullshit of a .22 into his face and fire.

Fuck the rest of the world. Fuck you all.

If I live or die, I don't know. I told you the .22 was useless, didn't I? I bet that rat-faced shit head who calls himself a man is gleeful piling over his money right now.

I hadn't wanted the .22 specifically, just the bullets.

Useless, stupid, ineffective bullets.