Necropolis Read Online Free Page A

and Russell Crowe in something entitled Shane Comes Back .
    No escape. Even the sky was wrong, swirling and out of focus behind the magnetic Blister. The whole thing, the combination platter of styles and periods, made me want to curl into a tight ball right there on the cold street.
    I’d busted this crack fiend once. He’d been a real hardcase, back from a two-week suicide run during which he’d stolen his grandmother’s silver, gotten kicked out of another shelter and flushed his last chance at redemption down the crapper. I remember him telling me, as the cuffs clicked shut: “I got no place to go that I understand.”
    Now I knew what he was talking about.
    My body started shaking.
    C’mon, Donner, get it together. You’re not a civvie.
    I had to treat this unknown like those dark hallways I’d faced as a cop. Putting one foot in front of the other, trusting my reflexes and my judgment to get me through.
    But what was this body? Was it really mine? Every muscle felt stiff and unwieldy, every contraction forced. I looked down at the bizarre coal-black nails. My eyes shone a freakish gold and my hair was Andy Warhol white. And what about my mind? I couldn’t summon up the last day of my life. What was here that I actually could trust, even within myself? At least, before, when everything around me went to shit, I still had myself. Could I still count on myself?
    Approaching paralysis. Let’s go, I told myself. One foot in front of the other. You do have somewhere to go. An address in your pocket. A new apartment. Start with that.
    I moved. A foot, then two. Slowly, and then more surely.
    Things actually might’ve been okay if the old woman hadn’t screamed.

    ***

    She lay on the sidewalk fifteen yards distant. Her hose were torn, her skirt ridden up to reveal a girdle that looked like a medieval torture device.
    Surrounding her were five young reborn freaks. Their dreadlocks were spiked whole feet into the air by immense amounts of gel, forming actual two-dimensional words and images. One hairdo was shaped like a hand with its middle finger extended. Creative. Another said, inexplicably, MAURY LIVES! Their faces were tattooed black around the eyes and nose to look like skulls. Goth and punk, with a dash of Night of the Living Dead thrown in for flavor.
    They tore the purse from the woman’s grasp and bolted away, shouting and waving fists.
    I moved to the woman before I was even aware that I was in motion. Instincts apparently still intact. Reflexes weren’t so awful, either.
    I reached down a helping hand. She saw me. Took in my eyes, my hair. Screamed again.
    Then, from behind me: “Step away from her, corpse.”
    I turned. Almost a dozen pedestrians had stopped. I didn’t know who’d actually spoken, but it didn’t matter. They all had the same look. Not too hard to recognize hate.
    Two cops encased in riot gear pushed their way to the front. No, not cops. Private security? They were bulging and steroidal. One tall, one short. The word SURAZAL was emblazoned across their body armor in block white letters.
    I straightened. “Three white males, heading north on foot—”
    The cops surged forward. I briefly hoped they were going to help the woman. Instead, they grabbed my arms. Their strength was legit. They moved me across the ground like I was an empty sack of clothes, toward an alley. Angry shouts of encouragement followed us in. Then we were deeper between the buildings, all witnesses gone.  
    Going to get bad fast now.  
    I tried anyway. “Hey, boys, hold on—”
    They threw me through some trash cans. As my new clothes were coated in garbage, part of my mind was thinking, metal trash cans, not plastic, hey, even the trash is retro.
    I tried to pick myself up, brush myself off, but my body objected. My legs went south and I staggered back down into rotting egg shells, old tampons and coffee grounds. The cops sneered through their visors.
    “What’s wrong, reeb,” Taller said. “Legs don’t