Trash, a whole lot of trash, every kind of trash you could imagine. From food to electronics and beyond. I think I might've seen a trailer house or two. Seeing this dump of a city was not a good first impression. But hey, who am I to judge? I just woke up here. Alright, I was judging a little… maybe a little more than a little.
As I gazed around more trash seemed to pile up, I paused. Was that a dead body? Not my problem.
I climbed up a pile of garbage nearly losing my footing a couple of times as I avoided some of the more distressing trash. At the top of the pile, I could see the edge of the dump, no fence. Maybe this wasn't an official city dump? You know like it was just some empty field that the citizens decided would be the dump one day.
My musing would have to be cut short for I was not a fan of hanging out in the dump. Cool kids don't hang out in dumps.
From my vantage point on the pile, I could see most of the city. Skyscrapers loomed before me at least a few miles,s away, I was in what could only be described as vaguely residential. Vaguely meaning it looked so run down I wasn't sure anyone lived in the immediate vicinity.
The city was built around a bay, surrounded by low hills and a couple of mountains. Nice location, not so nice city. The bay did not look normal if my eyes weren't lying to me there where we sunken ships in it. Who just leaves sunken ships in a bay? I mean bad city management.
No matter how much I wanted to just turn the other way and leave the city behind I knew I couldn't.
I would sooner die of exposure to the elements than find a nicer city. Speaking of the elements there was a slight dribble of rain starting up.
I frowned as I made my way down the trash pile. some of the stuff in there I was pretty sure wasn't allowed in dumps.
On my way down I looked around the landfill. A bulldozer lay abandoned not far from me. It was rusted down to the core, trash spilled out from every crack in its frame. I wondered who placed stuff in the bulldozer.
It wasn't long before I found the fence, it lay against the ground. At one point it had been the barrier for the landfill. As the dump grew it began to push against the flimsy chain-link fence one day bringing it down.
Once I found who was in charge of this city I was going to have words with them.
The rain had picked up considerably. I wandered through the area that I had described as vaguely residential. It was mostly a mix of small apartment complexes and duplexes. The place looked like the bad side of town, peeled paint, broken windows, and barred up windows.
I stumbled along the cracked sidewalk, careful to avoid the monster-sized potholes. The last time maintenance was done on this part of town had to have been around thirty years ago.
As the sun lowered in the sky my pace began to speed up. I knew in a place like this a criminal element would emerge at night, and I would rather not get mugged. How I knew this I had no idea.
Gunshots rang in the distance, and someone yelled. Then silence, only to be broken by a police siren. A few more gunshots, more yelling, silence. Somewhere in the back of my head, I felt a certain familiarity with these sounds. I reached out to the memory only for it to shrink out of my reach.
In a city that looked this trashed either the authorities were always busy or never busy.
My thoughts were interrupted by a door being slammed to my right, I quickly found what made the sound. Short Asian women walked down the steps from one of the duplexes. She seemed rather oblivious to be living in an area like this. She walked on down to the very edge of the sidewalk.
The Asian lady turned to look at me, what I could only describe as pure horror covered her face. At the look she gave me I stopped, tentatively I took a step forward. The woman stepped back, there was something wrong here. One more step forward on my part sent her screaming back to her duplex. She tore up the steps nearly face planting more than once.
Behind her, the door to the duplex shut with a heavy thud. I could hear the sound of the multiple deadbolts lock into place.
I shook my head this was one weird place. I was pretty sure I didn't look that hideous.
I walked along at a brisk pace, not wanting to stay in the light rain for an extended period. All the while I looked for a place to shelter me, temporarily of course.
By the time I finally settled down in a half-demolished apartment complex torrents of rain shelled the area.
I made my way through the mass of crushed concrete and wood that made up the majority of the demolition site.
My shelter came in the form of a lone wall that was barely standing. An equally shabby canopy extended from the top of it, a remnant of the second floor.
The improvised shelter that I found would protect me from the rain. Of course, that was only given that the wind direction didn't change.
I leaned against the wall pondering my situation. I didn't know who or where I was, or even when I was.
I reached out searching for my memory. I drew back with a flinch. Every time I tried to touch a memory it was like touching a boiling kettle.
Lost, I was utterly and entirely lost. Even my name escaped me, a candlelight miles away, indistinguishable from the utter darkness everywhere. That was how my mind felt, dark and empty.
I pinched the bridge of my nose or at least I tried to. When my hand got to where my nose should've been there was nothing there I had no nose? I will admit that at that moment I panicked. My hands roamed across my face looking for features that just weren't there.
My face was a completely blank slate. Where my mouth should have been there was nothing, same with my eyes and nose. My hand ran over my scalp, I had no hair.
I looked down at my hands long thin gray hands attached to my forearms. But it was all wrong, it was gray, blank, and lacking in any sense of feature.
My entire body looked like this, gray and formless.
I felt like throwing up, but how could I throw up if I had no mouth?
I fell against the wall with a thud, it had dawned on me. The way the lady looked at me, heck even I would be scared if I saw some gray human-like thing looking at me.
But how could I look if had no eyes? No, I must've missed something. Still, my hands only confirmed my panicked thoughts from earlier, I still had no face.
Was I some kind of demon from the nether world? Maybe the lady was right in her terror. I shrunk down the wall, what was I?
Even in its broken state, my memory told me that I had been nothing but human my entire life. It was bad enough that I woke up in a landfill, but now I wasn't even human.
At that moment I was crushed, what was I going to do? Someone who couldn't even remember their name.
Then the blast hit me throwing me through the wall behind me. Time slowed as I crashed into the wall, the weakened cement wall threatening to come down upon me. Red liquid, blood, exploded from my chest covering the ground around me.
Someone laughed before rattling something off in a foreign dialect possibly Chinese. More laughter followed, I heard the pump of a shotgun.
Great now armed Asians were trying to kill me.
With almost no effort I stood up, one slug wasn't going to kill me.
I was more prepared for the second slug, this one didn't even make me stagger. It passed right through my chest hitting the wall behind me.
I would have smirked if I had a mouth, but I felt my face twitch.
Before me four very concerned Asians stood all of them had some combination of red and green. Only two of them had firearms, a pump-action shotgun, and a flimsy pistol. The other two had hatchets.
The one with the shotgun pumped his weapon raising it to shoot me again, I wasn't having any of it.
Time slowed, the man with the shotgun was lining up the sights. The pistol discharged, the weak round slammed into my chest doing no damage.
At that moment I exploded, surging forward I dodge the shot from the shotgun. Right as I touched the barrel. I gave the man no time to react as I spun the gun around, hitting him in the chin during the process. Holding the weapon inverted I shot him in the foot, hardly feeling the recoil from the high powered gun.
Next was the guy with the pistol, I turned to attack him, momentarily forgetting the two men with hatchets.
I paid for that mistake, a hatchet buried itself into my right shoulder, a wound that should have destroyed the use of my arm. It only served as a slight hindrance to me.
Ignoring the hatchet in my shoulder I rushed for the pistol-wielding guy. He barely had any time to step back before I grabbed the slide of the pistol. In his panic the man fired the pistol, as the slide went back it tore some of my hand with it.
This action was only a slight hiccup in my killing spree. I soon acquainted the man's face with my fist. The punched knocked out some of the guy's teeth, shattered his jaw, and I think I may have heard the audible snap of his neck as he flew back.
I turned back to the hatchet-wielding Asians. Now only one of them had a hatchet, the other had a small switchblade, and a stain in his pants.
The one with a hatchet got over his fear, and with a war cry, he rushed at me. I was ready.
Hatchetman swung his weapon over the top hoping to catch me in the head. As he brought it down I seized his arm, twisting it around before using his momentum to flip him onto his back.
He was screaming until he hit the ground, then he shut up. I paid him no heed.
The last one overcome with fear scrambled out of the demolition site while shrieking profanities.
I wasn't going to let him getaway. The debris was less of an obstruction to me.
The thug was sprinting fast, fast enough to be an Olympic runner. He only made it two blocks before I caught up to him. I could hear his labored breaths, as he began to slow.
I jumped forward, tackling the running man. There was a wet crunch as his nose made contact with the sidewalk.
I made a move to put him in a chokehold, but he recovered fast. The man rolled out of my reach, slipping free from my grasping fingers.
His actions spoke of experience in this kind of combat. But hey, I bet he never had to fight some sort of pseudo immortal alien.
I was still on the ground when he came at me slashing wildly with his switchblade. Even on my knees, he was no match for my fighting prowess.
After dodging a few slashes, I moved in. I gave the man no chance as I lunged into his belly. He stumbled backward and fell.
I struck him hard right in the middle of the face. His face was already a bloody mess but after that one strike he was finished, his face was a squashed grape. It didn't even remotely resemble a face anymore.
I raised myself to my feet, the rush from the fight was over. It registered to me what I had, from the first shotgun blast to the last punch. I had killed four men quickly and efficiently.
I wasn't just any pseudo immortal alien. I was a pseudo-immortal demon alien killer.
I thought about taking stuff from the bodies of the four men I had killed. In the end, I didn't want anything they had.
None of them had money, all of them had a pack of cigarettes though. Guess they didn't believe in healthy lungs.
Their weapons were useless. Both of the guns had no ammo, and none of the thugs had any extra ammo. One of the hatchets was missing its blade, not sure what happened to it. The other hatchet was so dull it could've been considered a stick with a piece of metal attached.
And I wasn't going to loot bodies for clothes. I could kill people without a second thought but taking clothes off a dead body, nope.
The rain had stopped sometime during the fight. The sun was just setting, not wanting to stay in the same place I moved on further into the city.
As I walking more into the city and the sun dipped below the horizon. While the building became nicer the spray paint red or green 'ABB' never went away.
I had moved on from the slums to a not so slums district. But all in all still in the slums, at least in this area there were some cars. The cars were worn but still worked from the looks of it.
Not many people were out and about, but I could hear the normal city noises. You know the normal screeches and horns from the cars, maybe a little yelling, the first responder sirens, and the gunshots.
I must have zoned out as I walked. When I looked at the cityscape around me it had changed again. Now I was actually in a residential area. The houses still looked bad but they also looked like the residents did something to care for them.
The roads became wider, now two-lane rather the typical one and half lane roads. Even the sidewalks didn't have as many cracks, they looked to be only several years old rather than thirty plus years.
But otherwise, the cityscape still had the look of a city that was barely hanging onto the rope of life.
Hey at least all the edge people I had passed earlier were gone, this area looked like the residents slept at night.
I continued on my way, only stumbling a little on the rough sidewalk; it was better than the last but still bad.
Ahead of me, someone was walking towards me. Hunched over, their face was illuminated from what looked like a phone. Faded jeans, worn sneakers, ratty sweatshirt, without a doubt they came from the lower end of the economic spectrum.
They looked up from their phone, stop stared at me for a full second. Before promptly jaywalking across the street. So that they wouldn't pass me on the sidewalk. The pedestrian kept looking at me over their shoulder.
Man, some people are just rude, oh wait I may have still been covered in blood from the last guy I had killed.
I just nodded my head and continued on my way. I think the nod sent them off as they were now jogging away. I huffed, what a coward.
I sat down next to a wooden power line pole. Maybe if I just rested my head for a bit, my mind wouldn't be so jumbled up.
I didn't feel tired, but I had heard that not being too tired meant you were overtired. Don't ask me where I heard it.
In a moment I was asleep, as soon as I thought I needed to sleep I was asleep. It seemed as if I had an off switch.
Just flip the switch and the eyes close. Except I didn't have eyes or a face.
Even though I was asleep I could almost still feel the surrounding area.
I was then broken out of my sleep, it felt like only a few seconds had passed but I heard it.
"Hey, you awake?" the voice was firm, but not unfriendly. Had the tone of someone who was incredibly stressed.
Again he called out. "You awake?"
My not eyes opened, the imposing figure almost made me jump, but his vest stopped me. Imprinted on his chest was one word Police. Police officers had authority over me.
Somewhere in the back of my head, was the phrase respect those that have authority over you.
Listening to the voice in my head I responded. "I'm awake officer…?" I trailed off in the end.
The police officer in question replied without a pause. "O'Neill, its officer O'Neill." His face remained passive.
There was a pregnant pause before he added on. "You some kind of new cape?"
I was confused, wasn't a cape something that was worn around the shoulders usually.
"Cape?" if I had eyebrows one would have been raised, but I did my best with a facial twitch.
Officer O'Neill frowned. "You know superheroes and supervillains?" I shook my head in the negative.
He sighed. "Superpowers?" this made me pause, the only way I could have healed after two shotgun shots were with superpowers.
I nodded my head slowly. "Yeah."
The officer scowled at the ground. "Alright, I'm going to bring you down to the station."
I swallowed. "No arresting?"
He chuckled "Not yet. You haven't done anything" "What's your name?"
This made me freeze. "I don't know? I can't remember much..."
The Officer's eyes widened momentarily. "Do you have any weird tattoos?" he gave me a once over.
That was the strangest question to ask, but I responded in the negative. I had looked at myself earlier, no strange tattoos on me. My response calmed him down a bit, but he still seemed on edge.
"Alright, in the back of the cruiser." Noticing my pause he added. "You're not under arrest. At most, we'll just ask some questions."