#gutterpunk

I cursed like a drunken pirate captain who had been mutinied against while the little metal screws continued to defy me. I shuddered with joy when I felt the screw finally loosen somewhat. Trembled even more thanks to that.

No, really—thanks, body. Betray me more while I’m winning, why won’t you?

My quivering fingers finally found purchase on the screw; I had exposed it just enough to twist it out completely with my fingertips. Frantic spins increased the space I was afforded to unscrew it, and the tiny chime of the little metal peg hitting the hospital floor was music to my ears.

My stomach knotted into a pit when I yanked at the metal bar, only to find it wouldn’t budge. I had hoped that one screw loose would have been enough to lift it and slip the cuffs out. Peering over the edge and seeing I had to unscrew one more to accomplish that feat was all it took to feed my despair.

Ten minutes left.

I was sweating bullets.

The ads on television had been going on for minutes, and a choir of kids was singing in the most annoying way I could possibly imagine. I mean, it might not have been annoying at all, but given that I was struggling to survive here, and it did the equivalent of pouring gasoline into the fire of my despair and frustration, it might as well have been nails on chalkboard.

When the cup slipped again and frayed yet more, I swore out loud and wished all sorts of awful deaths on the people who had made all these lousy low-budget ads.

Shuffling of someone’s feet outside the door to my room made me freeze like a deer in headlights. Had Brubaker returned early? Was someone going to catch me and stop me?

Nope. Just someone shuffling through the hospital at night for whatever damned reason. And now I had lost another two minutes.

Down to eight.

The cup slipped again. Frayed more. It would only survive two or three more of these slips, then I would be shit out of luck. I had to force myself to steady my hand because it was just constantly shaking now, and I could not afford to shake any more, or I would slip again.

While some annoyingly cheap ad with the most annoying voices for some lawyers named Hanson and Hanson repeated on the television set yet again on this third ad break in the same damned hour, I slipped. I snarled and hurled the remote control at the TV set and was back to desperately fumbling with the cup and the screw before the remote had even clattered to the floor.

Last two tries. Also, only five minutes left.

“Ohmygod-ohmygod-ohmygod-ohmygod,” I started muttering in a panic when the cup slipped again. Frayed again.

Not even an inch of unfrayed rim. Last try.

The screw popped.

I almost screamed with joy, though it probably came out more like relieved wheezing. I dropped the cup, and my trembling fingers went to start unscrewing. My blood ran cold when I fumbled, and it felt like the screw went back in tighter for a second. Then I found purchase and by the time I had gotten halfway through to spinning out and removing the screw, a rushing sense of relief filled me with liquid fire.

The screw chimed as it hit the floor and bounced. The handcuffs clicked against the metal bar as I started wrenching it around. Finally, I could move it. Finally, I could loop the end of the cuffs down the length of the loose metal and free it.

Free.

My mind blanked as I had not thought this far. What the hell was I even going to do?

Two minutes left. Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck—

The monitor was beeping like crazy. Made sense—my heartrate was through the roof.

I yanked away all the cables and ripped out the needles that were still in my body. The short stings were nothing compared to the rest of my pain. The monitor flatlined as it had no more pulse to read from me.

She’s dead, Jim!

Swung my legs over the side of the bed and found that the floor was icy cold against my bare soles. No time to care.

Where were my clothes? No time for that either.

Someone shuffling through the hallway again. Damn it. Brubaker was early.

In a haze of panic, I hustled to grab something—anything—that I could misappropriate as a weapon for self-defense. All I came up with was the flower vase on the table by the window. It would have to do.

The pitter-patter of my bare feet may have given away that I scuttled over to hide behind the door, but I had no time to care.

The door opened—

SMASH.

The bright white creamware exploded into countless shards over a human head, water and flowers flying all over the place, and I realized only with growing horror that I had just brained the very friendly nurse with the southern drawl who had been so nice to me.

After she crumpled to the floor, she groaned in pain, sprawled out in the mess of flowers and water. I only machine-gunned out a pathetic and frantic “OhmygodI'msosorry—” before fleeing the room like the chickenshit I was.

A man in a white coat standing at a desk with a phone down the hall peeled his eyes off the glow of a tablet in his hands to shoot a glance at me, only to do a doubletake and arch a brow as he saw me standing there. I had no idea what I looked like, but I’m sure he was concerned, or something.

My racing heartbeat and the rushing of blood in my ears blotted everything out and I ignored the doctor’s shout, indecipherable as far as my panic-addled brain was concerned.

I ran down the hall in the opposite direction. Everything began to hurt again. I clutched my belly where they had stitched up and bandaged the bullet entry wound and dreaded what might happen if it broke open again, with my mind circling back and forth between that fear and the dread over believing that it had in fact broken open again and that I’d bleed out before anybody caught me.

Deep breaths. Breathe, Kelly.

I pushed through the door of an emergency exit and gasped at how cold the floors of the stairwell back here were and descended them in headless hurry. I had gotten down several flights before I heard someone bang open the door I had used and shout after me.

“Hey! Wait!”

I would not wait, fuck you very much!

I peeked out of every tiny round window on every door on the way down, only ever casting a quick glance to assure me that I had not reached ground floor yet.

Again, the doctor shouted, “Hey!” The hurried footfall of his crocs echoed down the stairwell from above.

When I finally found an exit from the hospital, four stories down, I ripped it open and kept running. I ran right past a reception desk where a tired-looking staff member looked up from a book, likely due to the attention I was generating with my frantically flailing arm, the slapping of bare feet against the floor, and running around in a hospital gown—was my ass bare? Ohmygodmyasswasbare—and she did the same kind of doubletake as the doctor before.

She stammered after me, “Woah, hey, uh—”

I thumped right into the sliding doors, which only opened with delay, and then I ran outside. The concrete and asphalt outside were less cold to run on barefoot, retaining some of the day’s sunny heat.

I did not know where to go from here. I was not even sure what hospital I was at. A quick glance behind me at a huge glowing sign said it was Gramercy Medical. Never heard of it. I dithered, spinning around until I got even dizzier than I probably should have been from the bad condition I was in, and ran in a random direction.

A parked car honked its horn and flashed its headlights. I scrambled to stop and turn and run the opposite direction until I saw the window roll down on the driver’s side, and a hand reach out, and wave at me, and poke their head out, and it was—

I had to squint.

“D?” I called out, so high-pitched that I felt embarrassed almost immediately.

“Kelly! Get over here!”

The car sprung to life and the vehicle lurched forward once I had already run halfway across the street towards it, patting a hood of a car of which the tires screeched because I had run right into traffic like a dumbass. The driver of that car honked their horn and shouted a string of profanities at me. I did not particularly care and fled to the car D was driving. A shadow leaned over to open a door to the backseat, and I hopped in.

A sharp pain in my belly region was a harsh reminder of my sorry state and I whimpered, eliciting a concerned look from the person I was sharing the backseat with: Boombox.

“Damn, woman! You okay?”

I snapped at him, “Do I look okay?”

D did not even look back. He just revved the engine and made the car’s tires screech as he cut across the street outside the hospital in a sharp U-turn, provoking more people to honk their horns in response to the countless near collisions.

Boombox’s eyes went wide with shock over my reaction and I’m sure my face fell as quickly as my heart dropped into my pants.

I blurted out, “Fuck—I’m sorry, that didn’t come out right. I’m not okay but thank you for asking.”

I hugged myself and sunk into the seat and winced over the pain above my belly as I twisted in my seat to look back at who was following us.

A doctor and a nurse had exited the hospital’s front entrance, standing in the bright glow of the reception area on the sidewalks and traffic circle in front of Gramercy. We were already too far for me to really make out any specific features aside from pink crocs, but the doctor flung up his hands in frustration.

I was not really concerned about them, though. I looked around for any sign of Detective Brubaker or police.

And when it dawned on me that he may have been late, anger started welling up in me. How dare that son of a bitch—or was it… son of a succubus? Never mind. How dare he be late? After all I had been through to escape from him? One of the dumbest parts of me had wanted to see him frustrated, showing up at the last minute and seeing me get away. I would have liked to flip him off, too.

Then again, he was some sort of hell spawn who could manipulate light and darkness and may or may not have been a living pile of insects.

Yeah, so, on second thought: probably better off this way.

Boombox was staring at me in disbelief as I turned around and shot him a feeble smile, then I looked for eye contact with D in the rearview mirror. His face was plastered with three Band-Aids, one prominently across the bridge of his nose.

“Thanks guys,” I groaned. Relieved, finally. “Thanks for comin’ to get me.”

D furrowed his brow, cleared his throat, and broke off eye contact.

“Uh, we were actually here to bust out Rocco. Didn’t even know you were here, Kell’,” D admitted, mostly muttering. It took me a moment to register the reigning emotion behind it: shame.

“Gee, thanks,” I said, letting the words stretch out enough that they could drip sufficiently with sarcasm.

Boombox avoided eye contact as well.

I did not want to be hung upon it, but it did sting. The thought that nobody would have come for me.

“Did you see the boss in there?” D asked.

“Nah, I just had to free myself from my bed that I was chained to before a demon-man wearing a human-skinsuit returned to fucking murder me.”

I myself was surprised over how angry I was, and how I was airing it. The boys of the South Side Kings gang probably did not deserve my attitude, but can you blame me? For one moment, I had felt like someone had come to save my ass, and it turns out I just happened to be at the right place at the wrong time.

Yet again.

The questions Brubaker had asked while grilling me in the hospital echoed in my mind.

“Julio ‘Loco Rocco’ Rodriguez is the alleged mastermind behind the South Side Kings. Have you been a member for long?”

Yeah. No. I was not a member of the Kings. I was just Kelly Romero, useless loser who had been sucked into this vortex of insanity, this maelstrom of gangs and mob syndicates and vampires and now motherfucking demons, too.

“Demons now, too, huh?” Boombox asked. “So we got vampires, and slime monsters, and demons, and, uh, what’s next?”

“No-no-no-no,” I corrected him, working myself up into a new fit. Not a cold sweat kind of panic, but one where I suddenly feared for someone else. The words cascaded out of me like waterfall. “I think the slime monsters are the demons. Or the demons made the slime monsters—or something. Fuck it. This police suspective—uh, detective—h-he said he was an angel or demon or both and he said that he’d ‘elevate’ me, and I think he meant exactly what had been done to those cops who turned into spiny-ass blobs from the waist up.”

Both guys went silent. D glared at Boombox through the rearview mirror, then stared back down the road.

“Fuck,” D muttered. He was taking sharp turns, playing along in traffic, but gaining some distance.

“Shit,” I hissed, growing more frantic again. “We need to go back. If Rocco is in the same hospital, then the detective is gonna go for him too! He might have gone for him first! Go! Go-go-go! Turn around!”

I started slapping the driver’s seat and shaking it impatiently until D shushed me with a series of increasingly growled Okay-okay-okays. He took another sharp right turn at a traffic light, and I sensed how we were circling back to the Gramercy Medical Hospital.

Boombox shoved a sleek, small machine gun into my hands and gave me a nod.

I shook it and asked, “Do we have the Star Wars gun?”

D answered, “Nah, it’s with Baby Joker. We had to hustle to clear out the crib. Vamps know where it is now. It’s compromised.”

Boombox added, “Funboy thinks the vampires aren’t all together.”

“What?”

“He thinks they in different groups, like our gang outfits 'round the city. Like they ain’t workin’ together. Bateson was a vamp, but she sent us the Star Wars gun to kill another vamp. We startin’ to think Funboy’s onna somethin’,” Boombox said while rubbernecking to see if we were being followed. “Yo, Kell’, where are you clothes?”

“Don’t know. I didn’t really have time to ask around for my clothes on account of running outta there for my life. Oh, yeah—better give you guys the heads up. So, this demon detective guy can make lights go out—”

“Wow, he can use a light switch?” Boombox asked with even more sarcasm than I thought possible.

I ignored that, “He is also made of insects or something? And he’s got like Jedi powers, I think.”

“Sith,” D calmly said from the front.

Boombox and I both asked almost simultaneously, “What?”

See, Boombox was not a nerd and genuinely did not know. I, on the other hand, did not want to admit to being a nerd and getting that reference. I was surprised D knew, but on second thought, I barely knew him. We had only met two nights ago.

D refused to elaborate and focused on driving.

The car’s tires emitted a little screech as D brought the vehicle to an abrupt halt, causing us all to bob forwards and then back into our seats. I gritted my teeth and flinched as the pain in my belly region flared up again. Only with delay did I recognize that we were behind the hospital, at a separate entrance. And the bandages across my torso had reddened. The sight of it made me feel sick to my stomach.

We got out, but I stumbled and had to brace myself against the side of the car to stay standing. The dizziness spell was back, and I was about fifty fast spins away from ejecting my stomach contents onto the Tarmac.

Took me a moment to realize that both D and Boombox were staring at me, having stopped dead in their tracks.

D said, “Maybe you should wait in the car. You ain’t lookin’ too good.”

“And yo’ ass is bare, yo,” Boombox added, resting a shotgun against his shoulder.

D backhanded him in the chest and shook his head, frowning at him with obvious disapproval.

I wanted to protest but then ended up covering my mouth and fighting back the urge to throw up. So, I did the opposite and nodded in agreement and gave them a thumbs up.

“What’s this detective motherfucker look like?” D asked.

I shook my head. Managed to eke out, “Like an asshole.”

D arched his brow again.

I swallowed. Bitter taste. Bad. “Trench coat. Like some asshole from a TV show. Unkempt, hasn’t shaven in days, and when he did, he did so badly—I don’t know. He looks like an undercover cop, I’m sure you’ll recognize him easily. Trench coat. Asshole.”

I waved a hand dismissively and convulsed, fighting another wave of nausea. I collapsed back down onto the fuzzy seat, hoping it was clean enough for me to sit my bare butt down onto it.

The two young men nodded and pulled up their bandanas to cover the lower halves of their faces. They turned and jogged over to the back entrance of the hospital, where sliding doors opened, and they vanished into the bright glow of the Gramercy Medical’s insides.

I slowly hobbled around the car, glad that traffic back here was non-existent. There were a few parked ambulances, and the extent of other moving vehicles was limited to the ones crossing by the respective mouths into this short back road.

Fumbling around with the lock by the driver’s seat, I flipped the trunk to check if there were any spare clothes that I could scrounge up to wear instead of the flimsy hospital gown which was open on the back.

I muttered some more curses when I found the trunk to be filled with all sorts of guns and ammunition. There were also some knives and machetes. And chromed metal stakes like the ones that had come with the Star Wars gun.

All I found was a hoodie. It smelled like sweaty socks and motor oil.

I groaned as I slipped on the hooded sweater to the tune of my pain—not only coaxed out by the recurring stings in my belly region, but everything else was hurting like hell. I was covered in all sorts of black and blue spots and tiny little cuts, and they would not ease up on reminding me that I needed to lie down and sleep for one hundred hours.

Anyway, I guess the hoodie was better than nothing. And I could not believe I was thinking this, but I hoped people would look at my boobs first before noticing that I was barefoot and pantsless.

I almost keeled over again and hobbled my way back into the backseat where I sat down, leaving the door open. Just in case.

That case came sooner than desired. I only closed my eyes for a second and the world began to spin even worse. I could not fight it any longer and retched as I hurled up a bunch of acrid water and something that looked like tapioca pudding, splattering the ground outside the car.

After several bouts of coughing and spitting and swearing again over the pain in my belly region from the bullet wound and tears blurring my vision, I sat back into the car again and hoped that was the last of it. But it was not that one of those vomit sessions where you feel better afterwards. I felt just as wretched as before, if not even more.

However, it did seem to have lifted some weight off my shoulders and I closed my eyes again, letting my head drop back against the seat with a tired sigh.

I almost missed the car pulling up, alerted only by the sound of its tires screeching before it braked and stopped near the back entrance of the hospital.

Brubaker clambered out of the driver’s seat door and instantly stormed inside.

Also, I don’t know if you think it’s weird that I felt this way, but I got really angry over the thought that demon-detective-man had been this late. Sure, he was going to kill me or do something worse like turn me into one of those slime things, but I had busted my ass to get out of there in under an hour because that’s what he said I had. I hate it when people are late. (Even if I usually am. That is beside the point. Shut up.) That stupid son of a bitch either lied or forgot about the time and I felt deeply insulted either way.

That aside, I don’t know what I was thinking. At this point, I believe I had fully fallen into the groove of giving a damn about the Kings, even if I was just some rando who had tagged along with them. Or I wanted to watch their backs because I figured nobody else had mine and we were here together, stuck in a city that was apparently secretly overrun by monsters.

On the way over to the entrance to tail Brubaker inside, I stepped on a pebble or something else that hurt my foot. I hissed every other step of the way.

Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckmotherfuckerfuck—

Brubaker had stopped to talk to a nurse in the hallway, and I skidded to a stop, pausing by the door. But the sliding doors’ sensor had already caught me; the doors automatically opened with a loud WHOOSH, and I groaned and tried to hide, but it was already too late.

Brubaker turned and stared in my general direction, those piercing blue eyes scanning the back entrance and transfixing upon me. The smirk that crept across his face was downright demonic.

The nurse yelped in surprise as he shoved her into a doorway and pulled a pistol.

I closed my eyes and pulled the trigger and blazed away with the gun Boombox had given me. The weapon automatically belched out dozens of bullets and deafened me with the cracks from each shot.

When I opened an eye to survey what I had done or to see how Detective Brubaker would massacre me, I found that I had miraculously gunned him down. I had also devastated the hallway, evident from one of the fluorescent lamps dangling from the ceiling and bullet holes all over the place and the detective on the floor in a growing pool of tar-like black fluids.

A loud DING heralded the opening of elevator doors from which D and Boombox emerged, dragging an unconscious Loco Rocco as they carried him by an arm over their shoulders each—and I was once more surprised at how short the “boss”, Rocco, was in comparison to them. His feet were just dangling off the ground between them every time they lurched forwards. Roc was also wrapped in countless bandages and gauze, and dressed in a hospital gown, just like me.

D and Boombox’s eyes stretched as wide as saucers when they did a doubletake each at me, the dead detective on the ground, and then at the police patrol car pulling up with flashing lights behind me. The nurse peeking her head out from the doorway she had been shoved into had terror written all over her face, as well.

The mayhem that followed was spectacular. I was not thinking clearly, so I just swiveled, fell on my ass, and shouted in pain at the same time as I was pulling the trigger. I missed the cops and their car completely—I shot every single bullet over them and probably vandalized the building across the road.

You ever wonder what people feel like in the action movies when someone shoots guns out in the open on some street, and busts the windows of places that are not important to the story? No? Well, neither was I, and this was not an action movie. But I’ll get back to you about this particular instance. Not all coincidences are funny.

Boombox was suddenly by my side to perfect what I had intended.

“Y'all motherfuckers ain’t takin’ us alive!” he shouted. I wished he would speak for himself, but I was in no place to contradict him.

He fired his shotgun at the patrol car, jerked the weapon’s pistol grip pump, blasted them again, rinse repeat. His shots scared the officers in the car into scrambling out the backside of the vehicle to take cover from him.

Rocco grunted as he struggled to drag-carry Rocco on his own right past us, heading towards our car.

The moment I had managed to get back up onto my feet, I saw that Brubaker was doing the same and I froze.

There I was, the deer in the headlights again.

Worse: buzzing and susurrant swarms of writhing insects—centipedes, cockroaches, wasps, I don’t even want to think about all of them in detail—were spilling out from the places I had shot him. Every bullet hole a doorway to hell from which living suck crawled and festered outwards.

The nurse screamed as the swarm swelled and engulfed her. The lights were drowned out by the tide of insects exploding outwards from Brubaker’s body. Even though part of his lower jaw was missing—or because of that—his toothy grin looked especially hideous.

Demonic.

The avalanche of insects began to blot out the lights in the hospital corridor. It only now dawned on me that this was how he may have been manipulating the light in my room and it made me shudder while I scrambled backwards, tripping, falling, getting back up—just away from this nightmare, as quickly as possible.

Doing the same, Boombox choked out, “Holy fuckin’ shit!”

I only screamed. We all ran. I mean—I stumbled, mostly, and Boombox grabbed me by the arm to drag me along. My belly hurt. He fired a shot behind us as if that would stop the tide of insects, though glancing back, I saw his shot had made a humanoid silhouette inside the insect swarm stagger and slow down as Brubaker walked behind us, the epicenter of this writhing cloud of awfulness. All I could make out of his form was his hideous grin. The buzzing of the swarm got so loud that I could hear it despite the ringing in my ears from our many gunshots, punctuated by D firing at the patrol car to force the officers to stay in cover.

I expected to flinch and duck or even get shot by the patrol officers, but they, too, began to join the chorus of screaming. The swarm engulfed them and their car and one of them collapsed beside the vehicle, flailing about with all his limbs to no avail. The sheer number of insects was so immense that I immediately lost sight of him but instinctively knew that he was suffocating on cockroaches entering every orifice. I felt the urge to throw up again, but the urge to get the hell out of here eclipsed every other feeling.

Car doors slammed, tires screeched, Boombox drove now. I was on the passenger seat, D and the still unconscious Roc in the back.

A cloud of living darkness mercilessly followed us.

I was not even surprised when a bright red and fiery explosion erupted in the tail mirror—D had tossed a grenade out a window at the swarm. There was no way this was going to work, I figured, but the swarm dispersed, millions of insects scattering in every direction over asphalt and through the air. I could not make out Brubaker or any other humanoid shape when the flames had cleared. The cloud of darkness shrank behind us while Boombox stepped on the gas and broke every speeding limit on the planet.

I still could not believe that a simple hand grenade would kill an insect-swarm-demon, but it evidently had worked. And once more I felt angry. I would have expected more from Detective Asshole.

See, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking we’re stupid: stupid for fighting monsters that could do incredible things, unimaginable things. Stupid because we could have just run out of town. Stupid that we were bringing simple guns to superpowered-fights. And I am inclined to agree with you. To some degree, at least.

Yes, we were fucking idiots. But that was our superpower.

Like Roc once said, they never saw us coming.

Now, I am also open to suggestions. If you have any better idea how we’re supposed to fight vampire hordes and a demon invasion, I’m all ears. If you’re listening to me ramble about all this, then you know how to reach us, baby.

Otherwise, stay tuned to Rebel Radio—your line on bringing the fight to these awful playa-hating motherfuckers.

My story continues after this brief musical intermission. Also, I think I heard something outside.

We’ll see.