#nova gothia

He ushered me over to the nearest window. I wanted to protest, to tell him that I would do anything he said but reconsidered opening my mouth. Better not provoke him, I figured. You never knew with these types.

Just last year, some gang had beaten the living daylights out of random people on the streets, not even far from my dive, sending poor shmucks—and I could have been one among them—straight to the hospital and to cemeteries.

As fucked up as this may sound, I considered myself lucky. Sure, I had some pistol-packing motherfucker sticking a gun to my neck and holding me hostage, but odds were, he just needed to evade the cops and we would go separate ways and never see each other again after this.

Knowing my luck, he might still murder me to leave no witnesses, because that is just the kind of shit-city we live in. But I had to hold onto some sliver of hope, so I stuffed that piece of cynical realism into the very bottom of the piles of depressing files that I kept locked away in the messy office of my brain.

Again, almost as if he was reading my mind, his grip on my twisted arm loosened. Not much, but still more than enough for it to be painful, just enough to convey that he was not quite focused on putting me six feet under, and more focused on the police officers walking around outside, casting light into the alleyways, behind dumpsters, through fences, and into shabby storefront windows.

We stood in the shadows behind a curtain in a darkened room, from where we observed.

Wait, no. Correction: he observed. I was not paying a lot of attention because my heart was trying to punch its way out of my throat and ears and rib cage, that’s how hard it was pounding. I was all racing thoughts and deer-in-headlights and helpless putty in his arms; the only part of me resisting was a tiny voice far in the back-most recesses of my mind, screaming at me to kick him in the crotch and run.

“I promise, as long as you don’t make no sound, I ain’t gonna hurt you,” he whispered into my ear. Hot, balmy, reeking of nicotine and vomit; deeply unpleasant. Just like the air of this city. “Gonna get the fuck outta here as soon as the coast is clear.”

The rest of the voices in my head, such as Common Sense and Voice of Reason, they all shouted down the tiny one yelling at me and insulting me for not putting up a fight. I listened to the overwhelming majority in my mind.

I uttered a miniscule grunt of approval, barely nodding. Instantly regretted it, as he had warned me about making any sound.

Luckily, he did not seem to have meant that too literally. And his attention was completely focused on the patrol outside. They crossed the streets, shining flashlights into every nook, cranny, and alleyway, causing entire walls plastered in graffiti and gang tags to flare up in sharp cones of light. Their silhouettes gave away that each of the two men had a hand resting on a holstered gun, ready for violent action.

“You ‘fraid o’ the dark?” my captor quietly asked.

I nodded, ever so slightly, cautious not to provoke him with any big or sudden movements in response. I had to show him that he was in control. That was what they told you to do on television, right?

Don’t be a hero.

“You should be. There’s dark shit in this city, darker than black. Darker than the devil’s fuckin’ asshole.”

“Mhm,” I agreed with him. A little bit too melodically.

“You know about the vamps? Bloodsuckers, hidin’ in plain sight, runnin’ half this city.”

I was about to emit the same auditory response as before, but almost choked on it.

Great. There went my hope.

This guy was full-on looney toons.

I barely knew what he looked like, had only caught a glimpse before he grabbed me, springing me while I was just going to get something to drink from the fridge—no idea how he had even gotten inside—but what little of him I had seen, I had not pegged him to be this type of conspiracy nutjob. He simply looked like one of those almost cartoon street gangers whose fashion had gotten stuck in an era from over a decade ago. Baggy pants, black leather jacket, bandana so colorful that I could identify it as green despite the shadows in my apartment. Tattoos on a shaven head. Mean stare.

But hey, guess the nutcases gotta be everywhere, right?

“Mhm,” I emitted anyway. Forced, but I don’t think he could have told the difference, even with the long pause that followed his question.

If making him feel understood would help me get out of this alive, I was going to agree with him on everything from ancient aliens building pyramids all the way to lizard people Illuminati puppeteering the government.

“Yeah, can’t escape the rumors. We all know, even if some o’ y'all ain’t seen it with your own eyes. But I seen ‘em. They’re out there,” he whispered. With reverence. Or deep-rooted fear.

He truly believed this crap.

“Those cops are vampires?” I finally spoke. Asked. A bit too much disbelief ringing in my tone.

The blood drained from my head. Only the tiny voice in the back of my head cheered me on, supporting the single only vestige of challenging this crazy gun-toting asshole, while Common Sense and Voice of Reason started screaming profanities at me inside my brain.

To my surprise, I neither annoyed him. Nor had I played into his breed of gonzo batshit conspiracy paranoia.

He clicked his tongue and shook his head. The grip on my arm loosened just a bit more. Almost enough that I could try to make a break for it. But the way my heart was pounding, I knew how badly I would tremble the moment I tried to do anything. I was always clumsy, see. I knew I would fumble and drop every damned thing, and probably get myself shot.

Or worse.

“Nah, those cops out there—they’re worse. No fuckin’ clue what they are, but they sure ain’t human. They’re against the bloodsuckers, I know that much. But they against normal people, like you and me. That’s why you need to keep quiet, okay? You should be more afraid o’ them than me.”

Honestly, I felt no more gradations of fear at this point. My mind was mired in a screaming abyss of terror, fearing for my life. I pictured the cops finding us and getting shot by them as this gangster used me as a living shield. I had seen too many bad action movies—bystanders were cannon fodder in all of those.

And I was the bystander here.

One officer stopped looking around on the other side of the street and let his gaze sweep across the block in which we stood hidden. Then he set into motion, following that gaze, and crossing the street, headed almost directly to my building’s front door.

“Shit,” both the crook and I breathed at the same time.

The grip on my arm tightened again. My heart raced faster than I thought humanly possible.

SQUEAK.

The front door of the building was pushed open. Thumping footsteps heralded the officer’s arrival, coming dangerously close to my front door on the ground floor. The other outside shot a glance down the street and followed his colleague.

Thud-thud-thud.

Knocking at my door.

“Be smart,” hissed the gangbanger in my ear. “Be cool.”

The iron grip loosened; the pressure lifted from my arm. The warm breath on my skin went away. He melted into the shadows, and blood rushed through my elbow, not much less painful but a huge relief compared to—

THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD.

I massaged my arm and tried to gather myself. I took a deep breath, let the cop knock incessantly while I exhaled, letting the fright quake its way out on that breath, releasing some of the tension and regaining a shred of control over my situation. Channeling my old theater kid vibes, I got into character. The knocking repeated, and I let it, not letting it rush me to the door.

My character now was pretending that I was being bothered in the middle of the night, just some random citizen who did not happen to have a hardened gangster hiding in my apartment, wielding a gun that could blow my brains out and—

THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD.

Calm.

Okay, enough of the knocking, enough of the channeling. I paced towards the door, forcing myself not to look around for my crazy captor. He had vanished into the darkness of my crummy apartment, lurking somewhere. Hiding. I did not even hear him.

When I opened my front door, I squinted in the blue light of the hallway outside. Did not even need to pretend because my eyes had fully adjusted to the darkness. The creepy glare from the fluorescent lamps legitimately blinded me, so I even shielded my eyes, rendering the perfect image of someone who had just rolled out of bed. Different sets of graffiti, ranging from decorative to defacing, greeted me from the opposite wall and door across the hall. Replete with some takeout trash discarded in the corner.

Cop stared at me.

Cold gaze. Scanned me from head to toes and back up. Locked onto my eyes. Like staring down a shark.

He spoke with authority, gravity, “Sorry to disturb you this late at night. We’re on the lookout for a dangerous perp hiding in your neighborhood. Have you seen a—”

“Nah,” I interrupted him.

Cleared my throat, filling the gap of my surprise conversation killer. Rubbed my eyes, ruffled my hair. The fluorescent lights, tinged blue and uncomfortable to look at because they were installed to prevent junkies from finding their veins and shooting up in the hallways, they flickered eerily.

“Just woke up. You think he’s around here somewhere, or?” sounded perfectly drunken with sleep.

Damn. I was doing good.

The other uniformed officer joined him in the hallway, crowding outside my door. Both staring.

Coldly.

The longer they stared at me, the colder my blood ran. Because I just realized that I had used a pronoun to describe the suspect as a “he”. Had the cop caught on? Could not be, right? Most crooks were guys.

They exchanged a glance, then focused on me again.

“May we come inside? To check if everything is in order—”

I blurted out, “No!”

Acting dazed, I blinked. “No,” I added, more softly. “Everything’s fine. I live alone.”

“All the more reason we should check to be safe,” said the first officer.

Before I registered what was happening, he had already pushed past me, making me bump painfully into the wall when he stepped inside my dark apartment. I complained, allowing my protests to swell in volume—for one, to stop them, because what the fuck? They had no right! And for another, I wanted my hidden hostage-taker to know that I had tried. As fucked up as it may sound, I was hoping to score some brownie points, or something.

The other cop persuaded me to calm down, I played along.

The two cops spread out, shoes thumping heavily against floorboards and old, stained wall-to-wall carpets.

One of them pawed around a wall and flicked a light switch. The lights went on, and the gangster was standing right behind him.

Things happened really fast, it was a sudden burst and blur of violence. Gangster guy had jammed a knife into the neck of the first cop, taking him by surprise. Still gurgling and dropping to his knees, the other cop had spun around to aim his suddenly drawn gun at gangster guy, but in a flash, they were wrestling and knocking over my couch and breaking my cheap IKEA lamp and smashing my TV as they rolled through the growing chaos of my trashed living room.

I had never been in a fight.

Despite the crime rates in this shitty city, I had somehow managed to lead a somewhat sheltered life, always staying out of trouble. I used to tell myself it was because I kept my nose clean and my head down—that the piranhas and sharks never smelled my blood, so they focused on other prey.

The reality, however, was that it was all random. Just a roll of the damned dice.

With delay, I covered my ears after the deafening gunshots happened, emitting bright flashes of light from the center of my living room, where a sea of glass and plastic shards had exploded and sprawled out underneath the two struggling men. Blood had sprayed everywhere, and the ringing, whistling sound in my ears blotted out my own scream for a few seconds.

The gangster rose to his feet above the cop he had overpowered. Shot him two more times.

Then he looked up at me with murder in his eyes. I screamed again and expected him to silence me with his next shots.

But when I followed his gaze, I saw the other cop was back up. Knife still sticking out of his throat, he exploded, spraying me with a shower of black slime. But he did not explode from being shot—something dark green, reminiscent of living mucus, kinda like the Blob in that old sci-fi movie—had exploded out of his upper torso. I could not even see a head anymore, just the rippling block of living jelly billowing out of his waist. Long black spikes grew outwards from its center, poking through the mass and dripping with something dark and slimy, just like the disgusting stuff that I was coated in.

I screamed. More. And shots ripped through the air, showering me with more slime. The gangster blazed away, landing five more shots in the half-cop, half-slime-monster-thing as it gurgled and flapped around and flew into the wall, crumpling into a heap and emitting awful belching sounds.

Like bones snapping and muscles tearing, the other cop in the living room underwent the same hideous transformation. Only the dark blue of his pants and black shoes remained—from the waist upwards he turned into this spiky forest-green blob of awfulness, flopping around like a fish, straining to get back up on his feet. The sharp black spikes shot out of the blob and looked like they could punch a hole through steel.

Gangster guy had crossed halfway through the room and shot him again five more times, still staring down the smoking barrel of his pistol, shoulders heaving, otherwise frozen in place for several breathless moments.

I must have stopped screaming along the way, for he finally ripped his stare off the dead cops—those things—and stared at me. Never pointed the gun at me.

“Told ya,” he said with a sneer, breathing heavily. “They ain’t human. That one was gonna jump ya any second.”

He pointed the gun at the one by the door.

Dogs barked outside in other apartments, voices murmuring, others shouting. The whole building had awoken from the bedlam of gunshots and screaming, now teeming with alarmed life. Some of them probably calling 911 out of fear for their own lives, even if they harbored no hope of getting rescued in time.

I spun around in a circle several times—getting dizzy, looking back and forth between the half-cop-half-abominations. The spiked jelly blobs twitched and wobbled, like some form of awful life was slowly returning to them, animating them.

My captor uttered a string of profanities.

He clicked something on the pistol, and its magazine came sliding out into his palm. He seemed to weigh it, scan it with burning eyes. Gauging how many shots he had left in it.

Those eyes then wandered up to meet mine. Without saying it out loud, that gaze was asking me if I was ready.

He slapped the magazine back into his pistol and something clicked.

If I wanted to live, then I would have to follow him outside, out of here, into the shadows. Or—I could try my luck on my own. No gun, nobody to watch my back. Just me, alone, against those… things.

Once more, as if he had read my mind, he hastily paced through the room, stealing the pistols of the officer-creatures he had gunned down. He shoved one into a pocket of his black leather jacket and tossed the other to me. I fumbled around with it, looking like a clumsy fool as it hopped in between my butter-finger hands and he watched the mad dance with widening eyes until I got a grip of it, clutching it in my fists.

I could have pointed it at him. But something told me it was wiser not to. He knew better than I did how to use a gun, and what would the point be? He may not have been looking out for me, but he certainly had no intention of shooting me like he had shot those creatures.

One of them twitched again.

A more violent spasm.

Something like a slow, long, disgusting burp rippled out from the folds of the slimy mass. Its spikes quivered, growing another inch. The gangster sneered at it and shot me another glance.

“This city is goin’ to hell,” he growled.

With a brisk pace, he approached my front door, stepped outside after looking up and down the hallway, and left. Never looked back to see if I followed.

I took a deep breath. Stumbled around to slip into my shoes. Took another deep breath and held it.

Followed him outside.

Exhaled.