Dan

Rain hammered the entire area, covering the streets, buildings and Dan as he ran across the sidewalk. Not only did he wipe away the rainwater from his face, but also his tears. Harsh memories of his mother surfaced in his mind. The same group of gangsters, the same thugs responsible for her death from what felt like a lifetime ago were chasing after him now.

It had only been a few months since his mom’s murder.

Dan jumped over the hood of a parked vehicle and continued running. Even with the rainfall, the air still wasn’t any easier to breathe. It did little to quell the terrible smog. The area was the definition of a shithole in Dan’s view.

He stumbled as his heel sank into a pothole in the pavement. Shit weather, corrupt authorities and rampant crime were what the United States had become. Dan was simply living in one corner of the crumbling country.

He continued running as fast as he could. He turned the corner at the intersection and stopped beside a closed shop. Leaning against the wall, Dan forced a smile while looking up at the overcast skies. Somehow, some way, he would survive this mess. He always had. His entire seventeen years of existence had been like this, running and fighting.

He stepped away from the wall and continued running. Nothing set apart one street from another. It was all just a mesh of drab buildings with half the street lights flickering or outright broken.

Dan knew it was only a matter of time before the gang caught up to him. He’d counted six of them before the chase began. Dan pulled out his pocket knife and mentally braced for yet another fight against these assholes, drawing upon the anger and grief of losing his mom.

His life almost ended as he ducked under a sudden slash of a machete from an alleyway. As he lifted his head and turned around, he was warmly greeted by an all-black-wearing teenage girl, no older than he was.

“Good reflexes, as always,” the chick giggled. She spun the machete around as if it were a toy.

Dan stood his ground, knowing it was useless to continue running. The gang was already surrounding him.

The girl stared at him with the same glee as if she were seeing a puppy. She held up her machete and said, “Mine is bigger than yours, kid. If you give up now, we’ll make sure we break only one of your legs. I owe you for what you did to my boyfriend two weeks ago.”

Dan was always unsettled by the female members of this gang and how quickly they could swap between emotions. It didn’t help that the girl’s eyeliner was running down her cheeks in the rain. She looked, and was, batshit insane.

Dan gave her the widest grin he could muster. “He’s the same asshole who’d been stealing my mom’s and my groceries. I think the broken jaw I gave him will help him find God and turn his life around.”

The girl’s excitement shifted into a steeled expression in just a second. A group of three gangsters in matching clothing jogged up the sidewalk and stopped beside her. Dan felt the presence of two more behind him. It wasn’t too hard to hear their footsteps, even in the rain.

“So, what do you want to do with him?” one of her goons asked.

“I want him dead,” the chick said. “I was thinking of keeping him alive, but fuck that. I want his screams to echo these streets, just like his whore of a mother’s did.”

Dan narrowed his eyes at that comment. He was going to make sure that chick didn’t walk away from this fight.

“Well, it’s your call, but we’ll be blowing through weeks’ worth of fun, understand?”

“Don’t talk to me like a child,” the chick snapped. Then she looked at Dan. “Chasing down a rat is only fun for so long. When it keeps biting you over and over and always seems to slip out of your grasp, you start to lose patience.”

Dan guessed that was supposed to be a compliment. The chick and the rest of her crew were still too busy talking and placing bets on what they would do to Dan, so he took this opportunity to study his surroundings and enemies. He had four gangsters in front of him. All of them were similar in size and build to him. Dan knew he had no chance going up against all four of them head-on.

Then he had another two assholes waiting behind him. He turned his head slowly and glanced over his shoulder. One gangster stood behind him on his left a few paces away while the other stood about an equal distance away on his right.

If he played everything right, he could make it out of this. No matter what he had been subjected to while growing up, he had always survived. The chick with the machete was still going back and forth with the group in front of him.

Perfect, he thought.

Dan spun around and jammed his knife with all his strength into the throat of the gangster behind him on his left. He left the knife in the gangster’s throat as he fell to his knees gurgling, then dashed towards the other gangster behind him. Dan delivered the hardest punch he could across the gangster’s face and swiped the knife from his hand. He jabbed the blade several times into his abdomen before pushing him down to the pavement. The gangster didn’t get back up.

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The conversation between the remaining four halted as they stared at Dan and their two dead teammates.

“See? See! I fucking told you,” the chick said. “He’s too dangerous to be left alive.”

“He got lucky,” the other gangster said. “His luck ends here.”

“I hope you’re ready to die, kid,” the chick said, pointing her machete at him.

Dan stared back at her. He stuck up his hand and extended a particular finger at the group, displaying one of the most classic hand gestures in human history.

“Well, your two friends over here certainly weren’t,” Dan said.

Even with their bravado, the group didn’t immediately attack Dan. He knew he had tipped the odds in his favor, even if just a little bit. But now that he didn’t have the element of surprise anymore, he contemplated his next move.

Another few seconds passed, and the four gangsters in front of him still hadn’t made a move. Dan had just killed two of them and they knew that even with all their tough talk, they couldn’t underestimate him.

Dan continued scrutinizing the group, waiting for their next move. While Dan wasn’t afraid of a straight up brawl, being too aggressive would be dangerous for him, especially when it was four-on-one.

The two gangsters on the left began slowly distancing themselves from the others, gradually sidestepping off the sidewalk and out onto the street.

Instantly, Dan knew their plan. Instead of attacking all at once as a group, two of them would distance themselves while the chick and one other would attack him first. The other two would only step in if necessary. Even with how dangerous Dan was, it would look humiliating for them to have to jump him all at once to beat him. Even low-life gang members had pride, it seemed.

Dan glanced down at the sidewalk and noticed a decent-sized pebble down near his feet. He scooped up the pebble and whipped it at the gangster beside the machete chick. The grunt of pain told him all he needed as he dashed towards the two other gangsters spreading outward onto the street.

The only thing on Dan’s mind was to either kill or incapacitate the other two and hope it caused the remainder of the group to back off and leave. He never liked the action, only doing what was necessary to survive and get by.

Dan tackled the nearest gangster to the pavement and smashed the back of his head against the ground. The other charged him, but Dan was quicker. Dan wasn’t the biggest dude around, but the shoulder check he delivered to the other gangster was enough to knock him down.

Just when the situation began tipping further into Dan’s favor, something penetrated his right side and Dan felt a sharp pain.

Oh hell, he thought.

Breathing became a challenge and he coughed up blood. Something warm flowed down his back and down to his leg which told him all he needed to know. He Looked down and saw a machete buried into his side.

Whoever it was that had gotten him abruptly removed the blade, and Dan collapsed onto the wet pavement on his stomach. With the strength he had left, he craned his neck he could to see the machete-wielding chick behind him with his blood dripping from her weapon.

The chick spat a big wad on the ground while one of her teammates covered his left eye from the pebble Dan had thrown earlier.

“I can’t believe scum like him managed to take out four of our guys. Can you believe that shit?” she said.

Dan had no clue how serious the wound was, but judging from the strength rapidly draining from his body and the world itself becoming even more drab and discolored, he figured he was dying.

The voices of the gangsters faded away until they sounded like they were at the end of the block.

Using one last bit of strength, he rolled over onto his back. After staring at the overcast sky for a few seconds, he lifted his head ever so slightly to see his killer. If he was going to die here, he at least wanted to see who took him out. But by then, the chick and her one remaining teammate had already turned their backs on him and were walking down the street, getting farther away. Dan’s vision was fading.

“Dying really fucking sucks,” he whispered.

What happened next felt like something out of a dream. His ears began ringing for some reason, though he had no clue why. His vision faded in and out as his eyes wandered around his surroundings trying to get a sense of what was happening.

Dan saw the side of a building burning. Raging fires produced dark clouds of smoke that billowed out into the air. On the streets, he saw a few individuals carrying rifles. They were shooting at something that he couldn’t see. His vision briefly stabilized, and he saw the machete chick and her teammate lying on the sidewalk ahead, unmoving.

He glanced over to the gunmen on the street and managed to get a good look at them for a second before his vision became blurry again. From the little he gathered, they weren’t the same gang. These guys wore actual body armor, albeit strange armor, bulky and all-black. Spikes jutted from various parts of it and sharp razor blades extended out from the knee and elbow joints. Whoever these guys were, they reminded Dan of the over-the-top villainous factions in the video games he played.

The gunmen moved with speed that no human was capable of. Dan watched as one of the spiky gunmen sidestepped a burst of gunfire that hit the road. All of them were shooting at something on the rooftops. One by one, the spiky gunmen dropped dead from return fire that Dan couldn’t make out.

That’s when he saw it.

Something white dropped down onto the streets. Dan knew he must have lost a lot of blood, because he had to be hallucinating. He saw this white figure run rings around the last of the spiky gunmen before grabbing the gunman and body-slamming him into the pavement.

He had no idea what he had just witnessed or if any of it was even real. Dan leaned his head back and slowly closed his eyes. He didn’t see or hear much of anything after that, but he opened his eyes one last time and saw someone standing over him, looking down at him.

Through blurred vision, he looked strange. He wore a white mask with a black strip over the lower half of his face and a long white coat that looked oily from the heavy rain. Dan swore he saw what looked like heavy-duty body armor underneath the man’s coat.

The man didn’t say anything, or Dan just couldn’t hear him as he closed his eyes and fell asleep.