Monsters

Yay thankee for comments ppl! Apologies for what might seem slow-paced in this chapter but I'm trying to build up the character a bit so she doesn't just seem like a.... well, ok, a shit character :D.
And yes, I DID call her Sally GORE. I couldn't help it. It's my tribute to all the god-awful names of comic book characters.
Hope you continue to like it, and uhhh... YAY! DIG IN! REVIEW to gimme better skills so I will not annoy!
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When Sally woke up, it was to be sick.
When her consciousness had clawed its way out of the sticky blackness she had only a few seconds to turn on to her side before bile rose up. Gagging, she spat the vomit out, feeling the cold thin starchiness of a pillow against her cheek. Her senses sluggishly tried to drag her back down into the sedative of nothingness, and she felt her lips twist in a smile.
Yes, down, away, disappear. Sleep for a few days and you won’t even remember... That was how it always worked.

JOKER.

She lurched upright with a sharp strangled noise of panic, mind reeling as it tried to take in its bearings. Her eyes finally focused on a face, off to her left. He stood up and cautiously approached, and it was then that she noticed he was dressed as a police officer.
‘Lieutenant, she’s awake! Take it easy now. You’re at Gotham West Hospital. Just take it easy.' His placating tone made her all the more suspicious, and she felt tension along her arms. She was tied to the bed with restraints. A bubble of hysterical laughter rose up in her throat and burst before she could help it. She jangled her wrist for confirmation that she was in fact, feeling what she thought she was. But yes. She was manacled to the bed. The officer’s wary gaze stayed with her as he went to the curtain and stepped outside to talk to the Lieutenant. She wasn’t sure if it was an attempt at mind games that they didn’t lower their voices.

‘So what’s the situation?’
‘Guy who lives on Quarter rings in saying he’s heard gunfire. Big surprise y’know, it’s the Narrows. When the boys get over there, all they find is this girl passed out in a room full of corpses. Nine of them, three hookers from St. Barnadas Street, and six guys – Denny Atherton amongst them. Meanwhile she’s covered in blood and totally out of it. Blood tests come back show she has enough booze in her system to down a bull. Now some of the bodies had gunshots wounds, and we couldn’t locate the guns in question. The ones that were stabbed though, nearly all matched this weapon...’ Sally heard a shuffle as the officer no doubt brandished her knife in an evidence baggy at his superior. ‘And her fingerprints are all over it.’

‘You say NEARLY all the knife wounds match that?’

‘Yes sir, but not all.’

‘Is she stable?’

‘Slight concussion, a few knife wounds to her forearms and legs, severe bruising. She’s been stitched up, she should be good for questioning.’

‘Record?’

‘Nothing sides from being pulled in a few times for vagrancy and prostitution...’

Sally frowned and wriggled her toes. She didn’t remember being stabbed. She never did. And after, last night....

Her mind recoiled. How could she have noticed anything other than the Joker last night? What would ever be real again after that?

She saw his face lurching out of darkness to stop inches from hers and her insides twisted until she physically doubled, unable to even defensively cover her stomach with her chained hands. She had lost whatever it was the police officers were saying as she replayed him in her brain, against shut eyelids. He was locked in there now, surpassing every other nightmare or memory that made her scream in cold sweats. She felt something like the hysterical anger which she normally kept in check licking up in her brain like a flame. He was sat in the centre of her chaos like a King, and nothing, NOTHING, not even the rapes, the beatings, could usurp him now. Just imagining his face was enough to make her heart seize up with feelings so fundamentally huge and painful she didn’t even know the words for them.

She heard the curtain rungs stir and looked up to see a lean-faced man with grey sprinkling his hair walking over to her bed. He was holding a manila folder that she could only guess had her record in it.

‘So. Miss.... Gore? Hmm, how appropriate.’ He scoffed with no real humour in it as he peered through her file. She simply watched him. ‘This is a bit of a step up for you, isn’t it? Butchering successful drug dealers? Has business really been that bad?’

She couldn’t help it. She had to smile.

‘What’s so funny?’ he said dryly, raising his eyebrows. He wasn’t fazed by a slightly nuts little girl. He’d seen far worse in Gotham.

‘Sorry. Your questions fall a little short of the mark after the night I’ve had. I met someone,’ again that moment when her insides sparked with terror, ‘who has a far finer gift for interrogation than you.’

‘Well why don’t you tell me about this bad night of yours?’

She let out all her breath, slowly, and clanged her hands against the metal edges of the bed again. What did it matter what she told him? He would believe the bits he wanted to believe and would string her out to dry on whatever was left, and there was plenty left. Fingerprints and bodies, and her. It had never happened before. She hadn’t let it happen before.

‘I had the pleasure last night, of meeting, the Joker.’ She managed, the word sticking on her tongue as she forced it out.

His eyes widened momentarily before he controlled himself. He wanted to remain sceptical then. Fine. He nonetheless pulled a small recorder from his pocket, and proceeded to turn it on.

‘So you’re saying that last night you... met the Joker?’

‘Yes. He killed Den and... Ryan, the crackhead. His men shot a few of the others.’

‘I see... So how did your fingerprints come to be all over the one weapon remaining at the crime scene?’

‘Because I killed the other ones.’

He stilled and took her in slowly. ‘You admit to stabbing the two prostitutes, Karen Bogel, Jessica Alstem, and the...’

‘Yes. Apart from the guy who had his head cracked open. Someone else did that. I didn’t see who.’

‘You killed all of these people.’

‘Yes.’

The pause was longer this time, and Sally concentrated on looking at the dried blood underneath her fingernails, dull and dark against the white bedspread.

‘Why?’

‘The Joker said whoever survived he would let go.’ A niggling thought in the back of her brain told her that this was not right. He had said they had to survive. What happened once they had, had never been exactly clear. .

‘He said he would let you go if you killed all those people?’

‘He said it to all of us. Battle Royale. Don’t die.’ She murmured, more to herself than him now.

‘And so why was there no sign of him when we arrived?’

‘I don’t know. He knocked me out.’

‘He knocked you out? But didn’t kill you, doesn’t that seem strange to you?’

‘No, he was.... He was pleased with me....’

The absurdity of it was not lost on her. The words jarred, didn’t make sense to her. She had relied for so long on being a nobody, one of the hundreds of lost little girls of Gotham. People did not ask the faceless people trudging through the Narrows why they were crying, why they were bleeding. It had kept her safe that everyone, the world itself, was at arm’s length. She could get on with what she had to do to stay alive while the indifferent world chugged away to its own rhythm.
Having someone pleased with her for what she.... DID, was not something she could fathom. And the strange reaction in her chest was making her all the more uncomfortable.
Lieutenant Sharpe looked at her cautiously. She was gone, she was somewhere completely other in her brain. Her eyes had the low-lit gleam of someone who didn’t know what was going on around them.

‘So you just happened to survive this alleged altercation with the Joker, and just happened to end up in a room full of bodies.’

‘He knew about me.’ She murmured, barely perceptible. He leant forward.

‘Knew about you?’ The silence was taut and thin. She did not look at him. ‘Knew What about you?’.

He was up and out of the curtain in one movement, beckoning the officers from further down the corridor. ‘Call Fallon at the precinct, I want a list of cold-case knife homicides in the Narrows over the last ten years. Jack, find the doctor and see if we can get her cleared to leave. I want to get her down somewhere with bars, quickly.’

Sally looked around her in search of possibilities. She wriggled down on her spine, inching downwards along the length of her bed, hoping to gain an inch of friction that could help manoeuvre her, despite the straps holding her down, off the bed. Instead she received the Lieutenant wondering back through the curtains. He sat back down, looking more flushed, more flustered. But quietly so.

‘So, d’you want to tell me about why the Joker might “know you”? Know about you, recognise you?’

She treated him to the smile.

‘I do good rates. And I can bend in to positions that would make a pretzel blush. Want me to show you?’ She asked innocently, wriggling her restraints and flashing him a broad grin. Brain thinking of looking suppliant, whilst heart thought of tendons and veins.

He looked her up and down, his gaze wary, considering. He shook his head ponderously ‘No... no thanks sweetheart. I don’t want to get my dick bitten off.’ He replied, turning aside to murmur words with an officer who had just entered.

‘Awww, but that’s my party trick!’

The Lieutenant took another long, hard look at her. There was something not right about her. He should have seen that immediately. Her eyes had all the sharp, bright intensity of an animal.

A doctor hurried in to the room, his face etched with clear irritation. ‘I hope you understand Lieutenant that it is not this hospital’s policy to release patients as quickly as you’re demanding...’

‘Believe me doc., you’ll be delighted to have her out of your hair. She’s fine enough to threaten to castrate me, she’s fine enough to leave.’ The Lieutenant interrupted, taking some handcuffs from the back of his belt as the doctor started undoing the restraints. As one restraint was removed, the handcuffs were applied. Sally had to hand it to him, he was being cautious. She didn’t have any opportunity to try anything.
She felt quite absurdly calm, as she was led out of the curtained off area she had been in, and out into the ward. For the first time she noticed the pain, the deep burn of the newly stitched flesh on her arms, the aching head. She felt the pain with a distant fascination, trifling as it was compared to previous agonies that she had simply had to deal with. She had learnt the hard way that seeing pain as an experience was the only way to master it.

For the first time since the.... THING that had been last night, she felt on familiar territory. Cops or no cops, getting out of sticky situations was something she had done countless times. Disappearing into the million strong populace of Gotham came as naturally to her as breathing.
The Lieutenant was behind her, while the two officers remained in front, one of them steering her along by the elbow. She scanned the busy hospital ward, nurses moving speedily from one bed to the next, attaching IV drips and administering pillow talk. She felt the wary gaze of the patients around her – a police escort for a handcuffed woman in a tiny blood-spattered skirt was enough to merit anyone’s attention.

Soon enough they were out of the double doors to the ward and travelling down the cramped corridors of the hospital, jostling between hurrying doctors and gurneys. Sally guessed the ward she had been in must be close to the A&E from the amount of action that was occurring. With the level of chaos that Gotham’s criminals created, A&E’s all over Gotham were commonly overflowing with the fatally injured. The walls were lined with gurneys so heavily there was barely room down the middle of the corridor for two people to walk abreast.

The cop in front of her’s neck muscles tensed as he tried to steer her through the amassed bodies, the noise reaching fever pitch as injured patients moaned in agony and panic. He was nervous. The double doors ahead of them slammed back into the walls as two gurneys came flying through, surrounded by doctors and nurses. From what she could see they were desperately trying to stem blood flow from a man’s chest, while the second was a charred mass of burnt flesh.

‘Clear a way! Clear a way people!’ shouted one of the doctors as the first gurney bore down on them. She heard the Lieutenant behind her growl in irritation before stepping back and away from her, flattening himself to the wall. The officer holding her tugged her handcuffs to in between two beds, making room for the gurney.

It was all she needed.

As soon as the first gurney passed she flipped both of her cuffed hands over the officer’s restraining wrist, breaking his grip. Clutching his shirtfront, she barrelled her forehead into his nose, sending him crumpling to his knees. Her knee went up to meet him just as quickly, impacting his jaw with a sickening crunch before he collapsed to the floor.

The other officer turned, his mouth a wise ‘O’ of surprise as Sally hopped back to gain some momentum before slamming her full body weight into his stomach through her elbow. It was enough to wind him and she shoved him in between the first gurney and the second. As he was slammed into by the second gurney, pinning him in place, she scrambled on to the nearest gurney that hemmed the walls, ignoring the shrieking patient upon it as she rolled over them, and ran. The screams began, as the officer frantically tried to free himself from between the doctors and patients. Dodging through the stretchers and nurses was no easy task, but Sally was working on pure adrenaline.

‘FREEZE!’

She was counting on the Lieutenant not risking firing in such a crowded corridor, and it paid off, however briefly. She didn’t want any of these people thinking long enough to stop panicking and actually try and STOP her. The sound of her boots drumming on the floor matched the pace of her heartbeat as she span a corner into a less crowded corridor and finally managed to break into a sprint, knocking an intern flying as she hammered past. She didn’t dare to look behind her.

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It had not been part of the plan, still being in the hospital several hours after having escaped from the police, but then Sally had never been particularly good at planning. But, much like the backstreets of the Narrows, there were empty corridors and maintenance closets which were ample areas to disappear in to. Of course there was the problem of the cuffs. A woman trawling around town with her hands tied wouldn’t last two seconds, and Sally was more than willing to wait it out as long as it took for her to find a way of remedying this. Fortunately the time she had spent hiding made it apparent that there was no police presence in the building anymore – clearly they had presumed she had headed for the nearest way out.

After much searching she eventually found an emergency exit that linked up to a stairwell. Nothing but cold concrete and silence followed her down the dark flights of stairs, and the sound of her own light breathing. When she could go no further she opened the door she found at the bottom, entering the basement. The grimy light afforded by intermittent yellow bulbs overhead meant there was more shadows than anything else down here. Packing crates and grimy paint-streaked concrete was all that greeted her in the visible surroundings, but she guessed that the basement must stretch across thousands of feet, and kept moving. The maintenance team had to have left some kind of equipment down here somewhere that could be of use to her. In the mean time she searched, and listened to the quiet clump of her boots in this echoing stone dungeon.

After half an hour of searching, she came across a door marked ‘Private’ at the bottom of another flight of stairs. Slowly entering, she gave a sigh of satisfaction. Hammers, chisels and screwdrivers littered a messy workbench, as well as various more heavy-powered machines. ‘Woohoo, a playground of metal... ‘ She murmured absentmindedly to herself as her eyes fell upon the bandsaw. The likelihood of unintentionally cutting off her own hands was present, but it was better than wandering around in handcuffs until she was arrested again.

The machine churned to life and she stared at the whirring blade sceptically before stretching her wrists out in front of her, face pulled back in a rictus of expectant pain. Sparks flew as metal met metal and a shrill whine emitted from the blade, and then the saw was clean through the chain. Sally considered the two remaining cuffs on her wrists before shrugging and turning to the work bench. She picked up a screwdriver and inspected it. ‘Well at least it’s rusty. I can tetanus people to death with it.’ She murmured.

It wasn’t a knife, but it would have to do. She tucked it into her boot, filling the place where her leg had tingled at the absence of a blade. She hadn’t been without a knife for years.

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‘JESUS Sally, you look like Hell!’

Sally glowered at the blue-haired man sprawled against the doorjamb in front of her.

‘Lords name in vain Chaz, Hell it is for you. And I look a shitload better than I did last night.’

Chaz scratched his naked chest absentmindedly as his shrewd gaze took in the cuffs on her wrists. Chaz didn’t miss much, so there was no point in trying to hide it from him. She heard loud shrieks of laughter over the buzz of the television in the murky recesses of his flat. Some of the girls were there. It would make talking all the more difficult.

‘I need a place to crash. Two nights tops.’ She said, not wanting to waste time bullshitting in this corridor where anyone could hear them.

‘What’s going on daddy? Who’s at the door?’ a sickly sweet voice cooed.

‘Hey! Get dressed and get back out to fucking work!’ Chaz retorted. Pimps were not normally Sally’s port of call, but that was the point. She didn’t want to be anywhere that people would presume she would be. His gaze returned to her, hard and flinty.

‘No chance babe. I’m guessing those cuffs aren’t from a sex game gone wrong, and I don’t want any trouble at this address. Business first, y’know?’ he said airily, already resting one hand on the door to close it in her face.

Sally nodded slowly, the sneer struggling to stay off her face. ‘Can I get a shower then? I’ll be out in ten.’ she continued, as if she hadn’t heard his refusal. He frowned and they locked gazes for a long time. He knew he couldn’t fuck about with her like he did most of the pieces of fluff that passed for hookers around here. Sighing, he shoved the door fully open. ‘Ten minutes. Get your filthy ass in here.’

Beckoning her into the messy kitchen, he leapt on to the counter and rummaged through a drawer. Amidst all the cutlery was a ring of keys. Taking her wrists he began systematically going through them, trying each on the locks to the cuffs. He finally let out a hiss of success as the cuffs clicked, and removed the second. Sally nodded in thanks before heading to the bathroom.

As the water cascaded over her, making Sally feel relatively human again, she considered her options. There was no reason to leave Gotham – she was one person in millions, and if the police force couldn’t even find people who masqueraded about in bat costumes, then she had little to fear when she had always made a point of going unnoticed. It was simply a case of finding somewhere, anywhere, to sleep for the night. If there was one thing she needed right now it was sleep.

Rinsing shampoo out of her hair she glanced out at the screwdriver she had placed as close to hand outside the shower as was possible. It was only as she began meticulously trying to scrub the blood from underneath her fingernails that she realised she hadn’t thought about killing those people for a second since she had woken up. Mind and body normally remained sandblasted with shock after she had killed – the only way she had ever dealt with it was via drinking herself into a stupor. And when she awoke the guilt was always gone, what she had done clinging on the edge of her memory like an unpleasant dream, part of the hangover that disappeared just as suddenly as the guilt. And she would continue, and she would go on, as she always had done.

But this time... Had she really been trying to survive that much, that even guilt was a luxury?

She spat a curse and physically recoiled as her brain tried to conjure up an image of the hooker she had killed first, the one who could have been as young as sixteen. Wet hair whipping about her face, she jammed her fists over her eyes and pushed the face away, violent anger stirring up in her, caustic and red hot. Fury at the girl, the little BITCH, trying to force her way back into her brain, to remain living through her guilt, fury far more virulent and powerful than anything she had felt whilst actually killing her.

Flinging open the shower door, she noticed a pile of clean clothes. She wasn’t surprised that Chaz had wandered in – pimps weren’t exactly renowned for their respect of female privacy. She peered at the underwear he had given her sceptically, but put on the black lacy affair anyway, along with the accompanying bra. She was relieved he had given her jeans as well – the nights were too cold for her skirt. Granted the jeans in question were skin-tight and black-and-grey leopard print, but she hadn’t been expecting anything demure when she came here. Balling up her old clothes and shoving them in a plastic bag from under the sink, she threw on the top before going to pick up her screwdriver. She stopped dead in the middle of the bathroom, the bottom of her stomach dropping out.

Her screwdriver was now upright, the tapered edge dug deep in to the wood of the window ledge. Beneath it was a butterfly, its wings still twitching. She stepped forward slowly to the open window, flashing a glance outside, as she dislodged the screwdriver, and reached for the red-backed card that the butterfly had been pinned on. She knew what it would be even as she turned it over.

She was not as scared as she thought she would be, although her heart did set itself at a mad rhythm as soon as she saw the Joker printed on that card. For some strange reason, it hadn’t even occurred to her that the Joker would come anywhere near her again. An odd, hysterical noise came from her throat as she turned the card over in her hands. It was almost a laugh, but not quite.

‘Great, great.... This is, this is just..... mmmhmm, yeah, GREAT.’

She was still alive. He didn’t want her dead, yet.
She wondered what the purpose to all of this was. She had been completely vulnerable, and he had done nothing. Maybe he had wanted her to know that; a wave of nausea coursed through her at what this meant. She imagined him watching as she dressed.

And then she was afraid again, acutely, painfully afraid. He was not like the men she had killed. He was something else altogether. And amidst that ventricle-bursting fear there was a kind of awe in that, a horrible awe that made her sick. She had seen madness, and she had seen cruelty, and violence, all of her life. But him...

In that moment he struck her as something limitless, as all-invasive and absolute as a fire. She didn’t know if it would be possible to avoid him, certainly not whilst avoiding police at the same time.

Hair still wet, she quickly smeared black eyeshadow on and a slick of red lipstick before heading out of the door. The best bet was to pick up a punter who would pay for a shitty hotel room for the night. Now more than ever, she needed somewhere to lay low. Chaz rounded the corner as she was just at the front door.

‘Sal, hang on. Shit I’m going to regret this.’ Grabbing the huge ring of keys, he unhooked a car key.

‘Cars on the corner of Jacobs and West. You can crash in that for the night. Her plates aren’t exactly virgin so if the cops talk to you, I’m saying you stole it.’ He said briskly, tossing her the key. Sally caught it and turned it over in her hands. It wasn’t a room, but it was better than touting for business tonight.

‘I owe you one.’ She said finally, smiling slightly.

‘You owe me a blowjob.’ He retorted before wandering back into his living room.


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FEAR NOT! MORE JOKER IN NEXT CHAPTER! REVIEW, GIMME OPINIONS WHICH I LOVE SOOO DEAR!