Chapter One
October 28th
11:21 PM
The last swig tasted like piss. It always did. Rick tossed the empty, the aluminum tube scraping over the sidewalk. He tried to kick it and missed.
Whatever.
He walked on. He had other things on his mind, such as what a goddamn tease Chloe was. He couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t right, getting a guy all worked up like that for no good reason.
He lit a cigarette, slowing his gait a moment, smoke flitting into his left eye to make his eyelid scrunch up. He took a big drag, held it for a beat, exhaled smoke.
He thought maybe he’d go over to Chloe’s tomorrow morning, try to finish the deed. What did they call it? Consummate the relationship? But then he remembered that she had school. She was sixteen. He was twenty.
Whatever.
His tattered Sex Pistols t-shirt was no match for the chill in the October air, especially since he’d removed the sleeves so his tattoo would be visible. A skull wearing a top hat adorned his shoulder. It was smoking a blunt. He got it for free at a party, and it had the haggard look of a prison tat. He couldn’t remember whether the top hat had been his idea or not. He’d been quite drunk.
Most people probably thought it was a legit prison tattoo, and he was fine with that. Everyone around here thought he was a hard ass ever since he knifed a kid outside of a punk show. It was in the alley behind the corner bar. He didn’t like the way the kid was looking at him and went to slash his arm, but the kid moved and he sliced open his belly. Any deeper and some guts might have come spilling out, but no. It was just a spurt of blood. Just a flesh wound.
He spent two nights in jail, but he wasn’t charged. The kid wouldn’t cooperate with the police at all. No one around here would.
The violence cemented his reputation, though. It made him a known figure in the local punk scene. They started calling him Rick Dagger, fearing and revering him. The infamy even attracted girls, namely young, troubled ones. Most of them were big ol’ hippos and butterfaces as it happened, but not Chloe. She was hot. Too bad she was such a goddamn tease.
He needed more beer. A 22 oz. of Steel Reserve. That’d keep him warm for a little while. He had change stashed in the hiding spot back at his place but no money on him. Quite a walk, but whatever.
Panhandling paid for the beers. He liked to say that panhandling paid the bills, but it wasn’t true, technically. He had no bills. He lived in a squat, an abandoned house, with other vagrants. He scraped out enough to stay drunk and have cigarettes most all of the time. Sometimes there was enough to eat, too.
It had been this way for four years now. No school. No family. No rules. Just beers and shows and the occasional fisticuffs. He was surprised, sometimes, that he still had all of his teeth.
Before all of this, before his violent reputation took shape here in the city, he’d been a nerd. Worse than a nerd. Back in the suburbs, he’d been a laughingstock, an object of ridicule. It was bad enough before they started calling him SBI. He was nothing. A scrawny nobody from the trailer park with the physique of Jack Skellington. Then he got caught looking at tranny porn and made fun of mercilessly.
He didn’t know why he did it. He liked girls. There was something confusing about that blend of feminine and masculine, maybe. Something a little wrong. Something that embarrassed him terribly when the others found out. And they did. They all did. Word spread throughout the school.
SBI - Shemale Body Inspector. SBI agent Rick. Slick Rick likes chicks with dicks.
Lighthearted snickers led to taunts led to outright bullying. He got jumped in the parking lot next to the school, stomped by three big football players. Three cracked ribs and a broken nose that was still crooked to this day.
He quit school and moved to the city. He got so drunk that he fell asleep in the park those first few nights. Sprawled on a bench like some worthless bum, which he guessed he was.
Worse than no one.
Nobody knew him here, though. Didn’t know about SBI. Didn’t know about the chicks with dicks. They didn’t know anything at all, and in that way he was free.
So he became someone new.
He started spiking his hair, stealing punk rock t-shirts from other squatters. He panhandled enough to stay drunk and high most of the time.
No responsibilities. No problems.
Then he started picking on people – pushing them, punching them. Kids at shows and on the streets got bruises and bloody noses to remember him by. Better to be the bully than the victim, he figured. There was a natural advantage to always being on the attack, always being on the prowl. Like a shark that never stopped swimming, never stopped hunting its next victim. You could tilt all things in life your way if you stayed on the offensive.
He flicked his cigarette butt into the curb where it exploded into a spray of sparks, and he lit another. Home was only a couple of blocks off now.
He cut through a wooded path behind some apartment complexes. Mud filled the wedges and fissures where the asphalt had pulled apart, and he felt the soft spaces squish under his shoes.
Something rattled nearby, startling him badly enough that his shoulders quivered and goose bumps plumped upon the flesh of his arms. He knew the noise, the metallic sound of the chain-link fence shaking against the post. It was loud. Too loud to be caused by the wind. The quaking stopped as his eyes drifted toward the fence.
He snapped his neck around to look up and down the length of the chain-link barrier. Nothing moved, and it was hard to make out much in the dim glow from the streetlights glinting through the tree branches. All tree trunk shadows and dark shapes, one blob impossible to discern from the next.
The fence shivered again, a single violent shake that rang out for a long moment in the silence, and then there was a deeper sound. A laugh. A cartoonish, over the top cackle, but with a thick baritone that seemed out of place, made him uneasy.
Somehow his eyes knew where to look this time. They followed the noise to its source.
A man.
No.
A clown.
He could just make out the silhouette of the pointed hat atop the curly wig. The streetlights shined through the frizz of the hair enough that he could make out its orange hue, and for a moment he was reminded of the guy from Nickelback and his wavy mane.
A clown. A Nickelback clown. Maybe that wasn’t so scary, especially since he must be on the other side of the fence. Rick took a breath.
But it wasn’t on the other side of the fence.
The figure stepped forward, its laugh trailing off as it moved into a wedge of light along the edge of the asphalt. It stopped there, about ten feet from where Rick stood.
Rick wanted to backpedal, at least, if not sprint away, but he just stood, staring, his mouth open wide. The thin adhesive of saliva was the only thing keeping his cigarette connected to his bottom lip.
Red makeup smeared around the clown’s wet mouth. It looked sloppy, the lines jagged and haphazard in a manner that seemed to suggest they were applied with aggression. Roughly. Violently. The red stood out against the stark white makeup of the face. It was hard not to think of blood.
Rick swallowed in a dry throat, his Adam’s apple bobbing. His body went rigid, blood rushing to his core, a panicked animal response that left him lightheaded, neon pink splotches blotting his vision. He had to focus to keep from fainting, forcing himself to take slow even breaths until his head cleared a little.
Laughing earlier or no, this wasn’t a happy clown. The makeup etched a smile onto the face, but the lips themselves stayed flat for the moment, the brow scrunched as though annoyed.
The thing held so still that, for a second, Rick considered the notion that it may be a mask, but the clown blinked just then to shatter that thought just as it arrived. He realized that the eyes were opened too wide. Far too wide.
He broke eye contact then, his gaze swinging down to the oversized shoes. Unfastening his eyes from the clown’s seemed to unfreeze his body, and he stutter-stepped back a couple of paces.
So yeah. He should get going.
Something struck him in the back of the head before he could turn to run. A blunt object that connected with a metallic ping and knocked him over all at once, the side of his head bashing into the blacktop before he could make any attempt at catching himself.
So that was confusing.
He recognized the sound right away, though. He’d heard it once as a kid playing baseball when Tyler Gutowski whacked the catcher, Wes Stump, in the head with an aluminum bat. It had been an accident. Probably. Anyway, that kind of sound sticks with a person, he supposed – aluminum against cranium.
He couldn’t quite think straight from the blow, so he walked himself through the scenario: He lay on the ground, flat on his back, fingernails scraping at the asphalt as though to verify its reality.
Yep. It was real. Good to know.
But wait. What was he thinking about just before this? Something important. Baseball, right? No, before that.
Oh, right. The clown. Yeah. Yeah, he should get going.
He opened his eyes to find three clowns standing over him, one holding the aluminum bat, the others wielding knives. He didn’t realize that another kneeled just next to him until he felt the sharp pain in his left wrist. Teeth dug into the flesh there, piercing little stones with the wet flap of lips circled around them.
He screamed then, and they were all on him. Stabbing. Biting. Opening him up in any way they could.
He thrashed. He kicked and flailed, succeeding in shaking one or two off at a time, but he couldn’t pry free of all of them. Couldn’t get free.
The blades penetrated his middle over and over. Invasions. Intrusions. The hard metal made him seem so soft.
And the cold, October air touched the wounds, reaching inside the newly fashioned crevices torn into his skin. The wet red drained out of him, the warmth of his insides sliding over the places going chilly, not enough to keep them warm.
When the clowns leaned their heads back and laughed, he felt just like how he used to feel, who he used to be.
The clowns fed, but they weren’t sated. Not even close.
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