Fan Fiction ❯ City of Ghettos ❯ The City ( Chapter 1 )

Author: LadyJessy

Website: http://www.geocities.com/ladyampris

Authors notes: Not complete. Reviews WILL inspire me to write more.

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The City of Ghettos

It had been twenty-two years since I'd last seen this city. I was born as an Insider and spent the first sixteen years of my life surviving on these streets, avoiding the Outsider polices that occasionally dropped in to have a little fun or other Insider gangs like the Crimson Razors or the Vipers. I never met my parents and I learned early on that I could only rely on myself and no one else, a rule I had stuck to for the past thirty-eight years of my life.

The city hadn't changed much from the God forsaken Hellhole it had been when I left. The surrounding buildings were in just as bad disrepair. Although there had been taller buildings during that long ago time when this was actually a respectable city, nothing over two stories stood now. Graffiti decorated every available surface. Years worth of paint built up so that I could not tell the original building color. The bright, painted gang colors gave off a false sense of cheerfulness to this desolate city. Windows of unbroken glass had been a commodity here even before I was born and you considered yourself lucky if you could curl up and sleep in a building that didn't leak. If you were unlucky, you had to sleep outside, covering yourself up underneath the mountains of garbage that littered the streets in order to keep yourself warm. It was always cold in this city, no matter what season it is. You wouldn't think it's possible, but at night it can get even colder. Today it was cloudy, not even letting the sun shine in to attempt to warm this desolate place. The impending downpour was threatening to turn the grime of the city into thick, sticky muck.

Damn, I hated this place.

I carefully picked my way down the street, trying to step over the remnants of years old trash, looking for a bare patch of concrete that I could step on so that I didn't have to touch the surrounding refuse. I winced as I heard a distinctive squish underneath my sneaker and decided I was better off not knowing what I had stepped in this time. I knew I'd have to burn these shoes-new shoes too!-when this trip was over. It couldn't be over soon enough as far as I was concerned.

Something screamed as I stepped on what appeared to be a grotesque, beige pair of chopsticks. Instead, they turned out to be someone's very skinny fingers. To my left, the mountain of rubbish seemed to rise up off the ground as the man-at least, I think it was a man-laying underneath roused himself enough to pull his dual digit hand back to himself. It was a sorry excuse for a human being, that was for sure. What was left of the man's hair was twisted and matted to his head in such a way that he'd have to shave it off in order to untangle it (I speak from experience on this one). His body was a nasty shade of brown, but it wasn't because of his ethnicity or tan. I honestly could not tell where the filth stopped and the skin began. He was dressed in only a few rags, the same shade of his skin, which hung by mere threads on his emaciated frame.

After a moment, I realized he was cursing at me with explicatives that I hadn't heard used since I'd left this place. His foul language stopped immediately, however, when he got a good look at me. I'm sure it was the clothes that did it. I was dressed in a pair of nice black jeans-no holes in them-and a sleeveless black T-shirt. Over it all, I wore a matching leather jacket for protection from the cold rather than style. The Timex watch I wore read 3:17 pm. Even though I was nowhere near as dressed up as I normally am, there were very few Insiders-only the most prosperous gangs like Shinigami and Grim's Reapers-could afford clothes like mine. Of course, the diamond stud in my ear-I couldn't bring myself to take it out, even for this trip-was something that no Insider would have. This could only mean that I was from the Outside and everyone in the city knew that Outsiders meant trouble.

I could almost see the wheels turning in his feeble brain, working all this out for himself. It only took three seconds for this all to click-the man had to be smarter than it looked in order to survive on the streets as long as he had-and then it took off with astonishing speed in which ever direction was opposite me.