Book One: Wild In The Streets
A transgressive new book series that blurs the lines between crime, horror, dark fantasy, and suspense
Date Published: 05-01-2022
Publisher: No Sell Out Productions
Lawlessness. Rampant crime. Ruthless gangs running wild in the streets. Welcome to Punk City... city under a perpetual moonless and starless night. The city of the Hell Bound Kids: one of the many gangs warring for control of Punk City’s hellish streets. A transgressive new book series that blurs the lines between crime, horror, dark fantasy, and suspense.
For the record, I had nothing to do with the Hell
Bound Kids. Abraxas would have you believe I’m the one responsible for the
murder spike and reduction in output, when in fact, it was his gross
mismanagement of the city that caused the situation with the Kids to spiral out
of control.
—The Architect
It was another night full of the usual
suspects. Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes” was playing on a pirate radio station
when the dispatcher with the androgynous voice deadpanned over the rover again.
Detective Gacy grit his teeth.
He hummed “La Vida es un Sueño.” He focused
on the rumbling engine of his unmarked Crown Vic... the bumps in the road...
the interminable vanishing point ahead... even the cold dew soaking through the
rain-streaked glass of the shut windows; but nothing helped block out the
grating voice.
The dispatcher was only a lesser symptom of
the unending grind of Gacy’s job. A job which dragged the Detective back night
after night, preventing him from reaching his final destination. Its
omnipresent shadow loomed over his head beginning the moment he departed Central
Division. Taunting him: ‘The countdown’s begun. Soon, the Beast will
find you. Dangle that well-deserved rest in front of your face. Only to snatch
it away at the last second and saddle you with another homicide case. Another
murdered Kid.’
The unnerving voice of the dispatcher
yanked Gacy back to the city under a starless night.
It was an American city of the 90’s
by all outward appearances (or most of it at least, molded from that decade).
Some parts appeared to be a mash-up of different decades, different eras,
beginning somewhere in the 1960’s, 1970’s, or thereabouts, and ending in the
2030’s; but in truth, the city had existed only for fifty years, and for only
five eras: from Gold, to Silver, to Bronze, to Iron, to the final and present
era of Iron and Clay. There was no moon—no stars. Only a black cloak of night.
In the scarred streets lingered an unnatural emptiness. Streetlights reflected
the tired body of the cruiser off the oily rain-slick streets and gutters. The
drizzle relented an hour ago; now the dirty mixture of pollution and rain
curdled the night air with a sweet-n-sour odor of sugared piss. The mists crept
in from the sea, crawling over the city.
The request came again, with it, the
weight of his responsibilities: a job that he couldn’t scrape off his shoes.
Gacy snatched up the mic. “Yeah. 53,
go ahead.”
“233 28th Street. Anonymous call
reporting 187 in the alley. First responders are on scene with the new Medical
Investigator.”
“10-4.”
The Detective slammed down the mic.
Hitting the brakes, he whipped the cruiser around, skidding to the other side
of the street, the car’s reflection streaking again alongside the vehicle,
through the gutters, bending and refracting in myriad colors under the
streetlights, beneath the bright lights of the hulking Miesian glass and steel
skyscrapers. East to west, Minos Highway crossed the black heart of the city.
All the minor streets flowed to Minos, as though black arteries to a blacker
aorta pumping pain and misery in place of life-sustaining blood, then the
Highway disappeared, evanescing to the infinite black skyline.
South on Paradise Road, Gacy passed
through Downtown and the recent Gaslight quarter.
It amazed him what a good job City
Management had done cleaning up the area. Downtown—where most of the Adults and
Projections lived—was no longer the ancient relic of bygone years. The new and
improved was nothing like the old and squalid, when block after gang infested
block of porn shops, liquor stores, and flophouses once crowded the chaotic
streets. Before the City Management gentrified the locality, turning it into
the Gaslight. And the pricey bars, hotels, and restaurants supplanted the old
with the new. The college kids, yuppies, hipsters, socialites, and tourists
replaced the bottom feeders. Gacy thought, even if they are
mostly Projections, they’re still a better class of Projection.
It was another section of the city
the Adults had reclaimed from the Kids, using crafty city ordinances to push out
the punks. The city blocks of towering high-rises crowded the Gaslight. The
usual Saturday night Projections were strangely missing. Mists or rain, the
carousing Projections always came out in droves at this late hour. No vagrants
camped on the damp sidewalks or huddled in doorways. No street traffic.
Everything as still and silent as the grave.
Then, just like that, Paradise Road
curved east, the streets transitioned. Downtown shrank away in fear and
loathing. The glowing high-rises no longer rose up through the gray caliginous
zone between the harsh luster of the Gaslight and the starless night pressing
the bright lights down. Gacy reached the borders where the edges blurred; and
the orderly streets conceded to a cesspool—to the Southeast sector beset by
murderous Kids and worse.
* * *
The murder in the alley appeared to
be a standard gang-related homicide. Patrol cars were collected at the entrance
with high beams aimed into the alley. Ambulance waiting in the street. Yellow
crime scene tape strung across the entrance.
Right now somewhere in this city a
Kid was bragging about the killing.
By the look of things, the case
would be routine. Tomorrow, Gacy would net the suspect after the briefest
investigatory work. In forty-eight hours, seventy-two at most, he figured he’d
have the case solved, the last of the paperwork wrapped up.
Gacy donned a black windbreaker
with ‘Gang Unit 416’ in white letters across the back. He clipped his badge on
his belt. Next to his holstered Glock 22. His unclean sneakers made small
splashes in the dank street, muddying the cuffs of his blue jeans. The Berries
and Cherries swept the alley in a hypnotic panoply of red and blue that flashed
over his salt and pepper hair, pocked cheeks, and face as pale as a ghost.
The first responders fell into two
usual categories: busy ants working the crime scene, or lazy sloths watching
the others work. Some snapped pictures and gathered evidence into plastic
collection bags, some placed numbered yellow cards at points across the muddied
ground, but most stood by and watched, or they gossiped with the paramedics
waiting next to their gurney for authorization to remove the body.
“Detective Gacy?”
The new Medical Investigator waved
Gacy to a dumpster stuffed with garbage bags spilling over the side. At least
two week’s worth of trash ignored by City Management. A cop was hunched over
the pile, taking pictures of a body sprawled in the heap like a person half
sunk into a rancid morass of filth and plastic.
The MI waved again—friendly enough;
yet agitated Gacy wouldn’t respond. Gacy took a half-empty tic-tac container
from his pocket. Dumped a palm full in his hand. The more he studied the MI,
the more the man resembled a white stick figure in tan khakis and a black
Coroner’s jacket.
Finally, the MI came to Gacy. “You are Detective Gacy, right?”
Gacy popped the tic-tacs like
Oxycontin. “Yeah. You the Medical Investigator that transferred from South
Division?”
“Guilty as charged. Laurence Simms,
but you can call me Larry.”
He pushed his wired-framed glasses
up off the tip of his pointy nose.
“How ‘bout I just call you Simms.”
“Sure, whatever. Works for me.”
Gacy stuck out his hand.
“What’s the problem, Simms. You
don’t shake hands?”
“Uh, not at all.”
Simms extended his bony
limp-wristed hand and Gacy grabbed it with an iron grip and squeezed.
“Name’s Juanito Gacy, but you can
call me Detective, or Detective Gacy.”
Gacy let go.
Simms massaged his hand.
“Alright, Simms.” Gacy clapped his hands,
rubbing the palms together. “What’re you waiting for? The second coming? Let’s
get this horror show started.” He licked his chapped lips. “Show me the
goodies.”
“This way, Detective.”
They ducked under the crime scene
tape. Simms led Gacy to the trash stuffed dumpster where the cop busied himself
taking pictures. In the flashes lit up the body of a teenage Kid. The rats had
already beat feet, but the roaches, crickets, and other creepy crawly things
skittered about, regrouping between bursts of light to protest the insensitive
prick with the camera.
Something about the Kid unsettled
Gacy. The cop snapped a few more pictures and left. Simms shined a mag light on
the body—the face blown-out, twisted into a final, silent scream.
It looked as though a .45 to the
back of the head had killed the teen. But there was no way in hell the same
caliber bullet caused that much damage on exit. Which raised the perturbing
question. What destroyed the Kid’s face?
The end of a metal fence post,
perhaps? Someone, or something, punching through the back of the boy’s head?
Something using the dead boy’s body to open a gateway into the city for
nefarious purposes...
Gacy chuckled.
Too many late nights drinking
scotch, listening to records. Binging crime and horror television shows when the
city’s problems weighed heaviest on his shoulders and he was a prisoner to
insomnia.
Maybe I need to cut back.
He squatted, prodding through the
clothes with a pen.
The gaping hole in the Kid’s face
left little of him to recognize. The right eye had been blown out and tatters
of the left eye, mouth, and left nostril peeled back into quivering meat flaps.
In twenty-two years of
investigating thousands of homicides in the city, being privy to a wide gamut
of gruesome murder methods and details, Gacy’d never seen anything like this. Twenty-two years... and that didn’t even count all the years
he lived in the city as a Kid before joining the police force. Seven more months, I’ll be celebrating year twenty-three
(and upgrading the vintage of his scotch). He shuddered to think of how many
more years the Powers That Be would keep him there doing the same job.
The light fell across a tattoo of
an Aztec sun on the inside of the Kid’s left forearm.
The Sun God Huitzilopochtli. It
meant the Kid believed in an afterlife. Gacy wondered if the belief had done
the little psychopath any good.
The pen touched a spot where the
blood pooled on the boy’s baggy Freshjive t-shirt.
“What a mess. Chalk up another
statistic. So what can you tell me, Simms?”
Simms snapped on a pair of latex
surgical gloves:
“And survey SAYS!...
Ricky Gonzalez, a.k.a Butcher Face. You think he got that name before or after
the number they did on his face?” Simms smirked, but Gacy wasn’t amused. “Never
mind. As I was saying, seventeen year-old with a forty-five to the head.
Entry’s through the back, close range, execution style.” Simms turned the head,
spilling out some glistening red meat and bits of skull, and showed Gacy the
gore-soaked entry wound. “A can of gold Krylon spray paint was found near him.”
Simms gestured to card number four
where the can had rolled a few feet away. Then to the letters—TGH—spray painted
in gold across the dumpster. The lower case ‘T’ ended in a curly devil’s tail,
pointing to the small stencil of a golden, open-palm hand. “Why am I not
surprised to see the Hands... handiwork,” he
snickered. Gacy still wasn’t amused. Simms sobered, clearing his throat.
“Paint’s still fresh.”
Gacy reenacted the events. “So, he
was kneeling down, tagging the dumpster, and whoever killed him snuck up behind
as he finished.”
“Correct-o-mundo.”
“You ever seen a forty-five do that
to a face on exit?”
“Nope, sure haven’t.”
“You don’t think that’s a tad bit
strange?”
Simms smiled, “Yep, sure do.”
“I know.” Gacy shrugged, rolling
his eyes. “I mean—all things considered.” He thought on it some more. “Maybe
the Kids have reverted back to their old ways. Harvested him with some kind of
new technique. New toolkit.”
“Possibly. But with a wound like
that? I doubt it.”
Gacy rolled around the last of the
tic-tacs in his hands like a pair of dice.
Most of the grime washed away in
the rain, pushing muddy deposits of trash against the wooden fences and cinder
block walls.
Garbage bags lay piled against the
graffiti fighting for space on the scratchy wood fence.
Over time, so much graffiti had
been painted on the fence, the jumbled writings at first appeared little more
than a tangle of lines. However, upon closer inspection, a history started
slowly forming in the scrawl—a sordid record chronicling the stories of every
Kid who’d ever tagged there. The more Gacy deciphered the more he elucidated:
their pains... their angst... their triumphs and defeats—but above all—their
unrealized potential wasted in hopeless pursuit of a happiness that forever lay
outside their reach.
Gacy thought of the can of gold
spray paint found on Gonzalez.
The graffiti covered the fence like
dogs marking their territory; yet Gacy could find no gold paint, except a thick
golden line through the red letters—HBK.
“Dios nos ayude.
Look,” he gasped, dropping the tic-tacs as he touched the golden line. “Shit.”
Some of the paint rubbed off. “Hijo de puta, if this means what I think it
does, we’re gonna have our work cut out for us.”
“Gee, and after City Management
swore the implementation of the new system would mean less
work.”
“I don’t know what it was like for
you in Nordhiem, Simms, and I don’t care. But Aztlán District is a powder keg
and always will be one. Whole city is. By design. Regardless of whatever system
City Management implements.”
“You don’t say? Well I’ll be dipped
in shit and rolled in bread crumbs,” Simms chuckled. He fingered the gaping
hole in Gonzalez’s face. “I’m going to let you in on a little secret, Juanito. Before you get too carried away with your role.”
Gacy glared.
Simms looked up, smirking. “It’s
all just a frightful illusion.”
About the Authors
Manson
Manson loves and hates everyone equitably. Though she'll read just about anything, she enjoys weird shit like Hunter S. Thompson. She also likes crime fiction, the occult, horror, transgressive, science fiction, and dark fantasy.
Anthony Perconti
Anthony Perconti lives and works in the hinterlands of New Jersey with his wife and kids. He enjoys well-crafted and engaging stories from across a variety of genres and mediums. His articles have appeared in several online venues as well as some indie press magazines such as Three Crows Magazine, Grimdark Magazine, Dark Matter Magazine & Pulp Modern. He can be found on Twitter @AnthonyPerconti
Sebastian Vice
Sebastian Vice is the founder of Outcast Press devoted to transgressive fiction and dirty realism. He writes a regular column for A Thin Slice of Anxiety called “Notes Of A Degenerate Dreamer,” and has poetry and short fiction published in Punk Noir Magazine, A Thin Slice Of Anxiety, Outcast Press, Terror House Magazine, and Bristol Noir. His flash piece “One Last Good Day” was nominated for Best Of The Net 2021.
Joe Haward
Joe Haward is an author, poet, and heretic. As a freelance journalist his work challenges religious and political corruption. Writing horror, noir, and transgressive fiction and poetry, his work can be found in various places. His debut poetry collection, Heresy (Uncle B. Publications) drops in 2022. Find him on Twitter @RevJoeHaward or at www.joehaward.co.uk.
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