This is a story I'm writing while working on another story called 'Going Under,' set in the dissolving city of Los Angeles in 2030. I can't give away too much of the setting/plot yet, but you'll understand more when I get 'Going Under' loaded eventually.
****************

Max took in a deep, shaky breath upon nearing Psyche's door. This was it, he knew. The moment of truth. Do or die, try or don't, succeed or fail. He'd wanted to do this since...well, since he and Psyche had begun working together as partners, ans since he'd actually started feeling the odd, almost deja vu-like connection between the two of them.
His heart began to beat faster as he felt his palms go slick with cold sweat. Could he really do this? What if, when she opened the door, he froze up and got tongue-tied? What if she laughed at his feelings? She'd have a right to laugh, too, the youth thought grimly.
He swallowed and grimaced, realizing that his throat was completely dry and his tongue thick and puffy. Maybe now was too soon to tell her after all...he wouldn't blame her for slamming the door in his face, should that turn out to be the case.
A voice in his head was screaming, 'What the hell is WRONG with you? You like her, don't you? You want her, don't you?! So what are you waiting for, just knock on the door and tell her you love her! It really shouldn't be that hard, Casanova.'�

However, the sound of his blood pounding furiously in his ears drowned out that voice, replacing it with on that said, 'No, no, it's all a very bad idea. You know, maybe she just wants to continue being friends ' what if she rejects you? If she turns you down, could you live with that kind of rejection?'�

Max gritted his teeth together and sank to his knees, clutching his head in frustration. How could he tell her that he loved her? He was seventeen now, not the ditzy, withdrawn kid he'd been at fourteen when he met her; he should know how to do something like this by now. The gagster had coaxed the most valuable of secrets from other gangs' authorities, seduced some of the hardest-to-crack women into giving him exactly what he wanted, and sneaked around the most heavily guarded weapons bases without getting caught.
Hell, why couldn't he do this?! He choked out a muffled sob from behind his hands, wishing for the roar in his head to subside so he could think. Christ, he hated the feeling of helplessness!

Over the said roar in his head, he didn't hear Psyche's door swing open. But he did hear her voice, clear as a goddamn bell, address him.
'Sneak, what's wrong?'�

Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit, SHIT! Well, it was now or never. Yes, now. He was going to stand up, look her in the eyes, and tell her that he loved her. She would understand ' she'd have to, they'd worked together for four years, they read each other like open books, of course she'd understand...Oh, hell no.

The youth stood up, lowered his hands to his sides, and forced a grin. 'Migraine,'� he muttered, jamming his white-knuckled, sweaty fists into his Cargo Pants pockets to keep him from punching himself in the face.
'Okay, try again,' Voice one prompted. He took another deep breath in failed attempt to calm his nerves.
'Lorie, uh...'� he began, but stopped when he noticed Psyche's breath hitch. He hadn't called her by her real name in over two years; she definitely knew something was up now.
'...Uh, Phobia's looking for you,'� he blurted.
Shit! His eyes widened slightly before he turned on his heel and disappeared down the hallway, leaving Psyche standing in her doorway, blinking in puzzlement.

Though he had originally meant to go to his room, Max kept running even after he'd passed it, chanting expletives to himself in his episode of self-loathing. He didn't notice Phobos, the leader of the gang, rounding the corner in front of him until they collided with each other head-on. Being the younger and lighter of the two, Max was knocked off his feet while Phobos, hardly phased, made a fuss of dusting himself off.
Once the youth had jumped to his feet again, the dark-haired, rugged gangster asked, 'why so pissed, man? You're acting like Phobia on a bad hair day.'�

Max squared his shoulders in indignation and snorted, crossing his arms. 'It's nothing,'� he growled, and even if it wasn't nothing, I sure as hell wouldn't tell you about it.'�
Phobos held up his hands in mock surrender. 'Jesus, go change your damn tampon already!'�

'Shut up, Phobe,'� the younger teen snapped, his hands balling into fists at his sides. Phobos pretended to think carefully about something before saying, 'You know, the last time you were like this was when Rayn dumped you for that one other gang's head honcho,'�
Dreading what Phobos might say next, Max tensed.
''This wouldn't have anything to do with Dementia turning you down or something, would it?'�

In that one moment, the brunette male's suspicions that Phobos didn't have a clue were confirmed; how the hell could he possibly have seen Max with a crazy, bipolar, redheaded bitch like Dementia?! However, he decided to play along. He was good at that. On went the mask of shock and dismay.
'Fuck, how'd you ''� He gasped and allowed his expression to change from shock to rage. 'Look, Phobos, just stay out of business that isn't yours! This doesn't concern you, asshole.'�
With that, he turned abruptly and walked stiffly to his room, making sure to slam the door behind him as loudly as possible for effect.
Good. He was alone. Finally, he could think and regroup.

Hands jammed in his pockets again, Max began to pace the scantily cluttered floor. Back and forth, back and forth, his steps created a calming, even rhythm. It didn't matter that he hadn't been able to tell her just yet; the atmosphere hadn't been quite right at the time anyway. He needed to plan now, needed to time everything perfectly.
He had to make it so that she'd know and understand his feelings for her. First he would need '

His thoughts were rudely interrupted by a siren erupting to life in the heart of their underground headquarters. A walkie-talkie clipped onto his belt began to broadcast Phobia's commanding, take-charge voice. 'Psyche, Sneak, the two of you have a date with a Bang in sector seven, near where the Hollywood sign used to be. Some of our people can't take it, and they need backup from the best. Get in there, take down their commanding officers, and get out. Do you copy?'�

He snatched up the walkie-talkie and held it to his lips, his eyes scanning the room for any weapons he might need. 'Copy, Boss. On my way.'� He paid little attention to Psyche's voice echoing his statement over the transmitter.
He found his shiv shoved underneath the makeshift bed, his pride-and-joy .9mm inside the pocket of a thrown-aside pair of Jeans, and a few cherry bombs he took with him to Bangs 'just in case.' After deciding he was ready, he opened his door and took a step out before realizing that he was face-to-face with Psyche, who'd obviously been waiting for him.
She was armed with her two trademark Barettas, as well as a smaller shotgun, two throwing knives clipped to her belt, and a shiv similar to his. She didn't mention what had happened earlier, though her eyes expressed she wished to do otherwise, and smirked. 'Ready?'�
'Always,'� he replied, breaking off into a run toward the exit. Psyche matched her pace with his, never far behind him as they made their way across the ghost town-like city. They ducked and darted behind and between buildings, weaving in and out of things like some invisible pattern.

It wasn't long before they reached the scene ' or the borders of it, anyway. Bodies were scattered about the street, most of them already dead but some still with a few breaths left in their lungs. Psyche snorted and frowned.
'If there was a Bang here, it sure as hell isn't anymore.'�

Max nodded, his eyes narrowed t a building's shadow too dark to see into. Something didn't feel right...
And then something in the shadows shifted. He whipped the .9mm from his pocket and fired off a shot at what had moved.
A scrawny, stray cat scurried out into the smoky sunlight, looking in his direction and blinking its wide eyes once before trotting off to find food in another alley. Max, unconvinced, kept the shotgun out at arm's length, still aimed at the building's looming shadow.
Psyche stepped to his side, her hand resting on the handle of one of her Barettas. Before either of then knew what was happening, they'd been surrounded by a bunch of rugged, rough-looking gang members. Max decided after a moment's scrutiny that they weren't from the Underground alliance...this had to be one of the newly formed gangs. The suspicious shadow shifted again, and a figure stepped out from it to face them. A muscular, Asian man in his early twenties coldly glared down the two teenagers. He casually pulled two shotguns from his baggy Khaki pants and pointed them at Max and Psyche, aiming at their heads.
'Sorry you missed the action, guys ' looks like you wasted your time in coming here, seeing as how you're both about to have your heads blown off.'�

In a single, fluid movement that only a record-breaking female would be capable of, Psyche drew her Baretta, fired it at the Asian, and threw both herself and Max to the pavement. A split second before the bullet collided with his chest, the older man fired his own weapons at the spot where his targets had been only nanoseconds earlier. The bullets whizzed past over the teenagers, striking instead two of the Asian's lackeys.

'They don't call me the fastest draw in California for nothing,'� Psyche muttered once the man had fallen, springing to her feet and throwing a punch to the ear of a stocky woman in her mid-twenties charging at her with a brandished knife. The woman ducked out of the way and whirled around, slashing effectively at Psyche's wrist as she glided past. The blond uttered a scream through clenched teeth, dropping the Baretta and clutching her bleeding wrist with her other hand.
Meanwhile, Max was dealing with a nineteen-year-old African American looking as though he'd been raised on steroids alone. The older teen was armed only with a four-foot-long metal pole, but he used it with supreme expertise. He lifted it over his head before swinging it down with a grunt towards Max's head. Max quickly dropped to the ground and rolled out of the way, then leaped to his feet, unsheathing his shiv and slashing diagonally down his opponent's shoulder. The darker-skinned boy swung the pole diagonally upward and deflected the blade before it could touch him.

A skinny Latina decided to join in the fun, doing a few front flips to distract the spiky-haired teen before aiming a kick at his jaw. Max intercepted the kick, grabbing the young girl's foot and jerking her forward before releasing her, causing her to lose her balance entirely and fall onto her back.

A roundhouse kick to the woman's head had been enough to knock the older female unconscious, but now Psyche was surrounded by two younger teenage twin boys with wooden baseball bats, ad another man in his early twenties who was swinging a makeshift shiv at her middle. She was having trouble enough darting out of the jagged blade's path, let alone being forced to dodge swings at her head from the bats. She drew one of her throwing knives and flicked it in the direction of the boy nearest to her, gritting her teeth against the sound of metal cutting deep into flesh, but winging a prayer of thanks upward that it hadn't been her.

Her wrist, still bleeding, had gone almost completely numb a few minutes before; she guessed that one of the main arteries had been severed ' not that she had much time to think about it; she was far too busy ducking and dodging the swings from the bat and shiv to pay much attention to anything else.
And though one of the boys was already down and she was doing her best to fend off the other two, she was ' slowly but surely ' being cornered into a nearby alley.

Though the Latina was no longer a problem ' she was still laying motionless on the pavement ' Max wasn't faring too well. The metal pole had struck him four times so far; twice at his shoulder, once at his ribs, and once at the back of his head. IT seemed that he was fighting off the dizziness, pain and nausea more than the huge African-American, but that didn't stop him from throwing a few good punches to the guy's eyes and mouth.
Then came a kid the same age as he, bearing the shiv that had been thrown from his grasp a few minutes prior. The kid charged at him, setting up to swing the shiv across Max's chest. The black-haired teen ducked and rolled to the side, tripping the other kid and causing him to fall, driving the blade through his own chest. Max grimaced, swallowing the vomit rising in his throat and forcing the muscles in his legs to propel him upward again only to be knocked off his feet when the end of the black guy's pole hit his jaw.

Now, added to the dizziness and nausea, he had black and white spots dancing in front of his eyes, blurring his vision. Oh, joy.
He thought he heard a familiar voice scream his name, but was too mentally displaced to connect the thought with the conclusion that Psyche might be in serious trouble. A few gunshots went off in the background before all was mostly silent except for the sound of his own pulse pounding out a panicky morse code message in his ears.

Then he became consciously aware of the fact that he was being lifted up by the front of the collar of his shirt. He continued to be elevated until his feet were no longer touching the ground. A first then appeared from nowhere and threw itself at his eyes. The blow sent him flying backward a few feet before he crashed into the ground again, a part of him amazed that he was still breathing.

And, oh, had he been incredibly stupid to think that it was over. Just as he staggered to his feet again, hocking a bloody loogey at the ground, the pipe swung forward at his ribs. The crunch of bone accompanied his agonized scream as the teenager fell to his knees, his numb arm groping around for his .9mm. He cursed when he didn't find it, but then he did find a tacky, bloody shiv ' his shiv in fact, stained with his blood. He didn't waste any time in thrusting the blade upward at the looming African-American's throat. A few helpless gurgling noises were all that Max heard before complete silence; before long, even the roar in his ears had subsided to nothing but a subtle buzz.

His entire body was aflame with pain; yet somehow he found the strength to get back up and see how Psyche had fared. He struggled to force himself upright, closing the one eye that wasn't already swollen shut against the wave of fierce lightheaded nausea, then limped across the street to the alley he'd glimpsed Psyche being backed into.

At first he didn't see her ' but then he noticed a matted clump of reddened ash-blonde in the back of the alley, behind a pile of stacked scrap metal and rubble. Max sidestepped the three lifeless bodies on his way to the heap, half-dreading what he was going to find behind it.
But the suspense and tension was far too much for him to prolong, so he edged around the pile with his good eye narrowed to a slit ' he was genuinely afraid now for his friend, a rare emotion he hadn't experienced in so long.

There she was, her blonde roots stained red from a blow to the top of her head, her skin ashen and ivory ' and dead. Her eyes were half-open, her lips parted slightly in some unfinished whisper. A long, deep gash from someone's shiv still bled slightly on her stomach, and her shoulder had been pierced through completely ' probably from the same weapon.

Suddenly, Max could hold it in no longer. He fell to his knees, turned to the side, and retched. Each time he thought he'd finished, his groggy mind would stray to Psyche's dead expression and his stomach would lurch again. Such was the case for several minutes until all he was doing was dry-heaving. He blacked out then, after the nausea wave cleared, hours before any help would arrive.

***********************

'C'mon, you prick, they're around here somewhere, so hurry up. The sooner we find them, the sooner we can go back home, the sooner you can go eat. Savvy? Phobia and Deimos, the sandy-haired sixteen-year-old homosexual, had been picking their way through the battle scene for over an hour now, searching for any sign of Psyche and Sneak. Night had fallen long ago, and Phobos was complaining about the food he'd left back at Fear's headquarters. The female gingerly skirted around a mangled, bloody body and grimaced in disdain. Deimos, who surprisingly made a far better tracker in the dark than his female counterpart, knelt down beside the dead body of a muscled African-American who had a shiv blade pierced through his throat. 'This is Sneak's shiv,'� he said in a low tone to Phobia after a moment of studying the designs etched on the blade's handle, then began searching the ground for some kind of visible trail to Sneak's whereabouts. After a while longer of scrutinizing the area around the body, his efforts were rewarded with an unused cherry bomb laying in a pool of blood, which led to an almost direct path ' of blood, some puddles still tacky ' leading to an alley a few meters off.

Phobia bit her bottom lip nervously and silently stalked over to the direction Deimos pointed her in, sending a silent prayer winging heavenward that the two younger kids were all right.
Deimos swallowed his rising dread and followed after her, trying not to think of what they might find inside the alley. At the entrance of the alleyway was the body of a fourteen-year-old kid, dead eyes wide and glazed. A throwing knife was embedded in his heart. Two more bodies lay where they'd fallen at random, both with bullet holes lodged in their skulls.

'Jesus Christ,'� Phobia swore as her breathing hitched. She ran farther into the alley, dropping to her knees in front of a dark, bloody figure. The spot was rank with sour vomit ,but that was farthest from the female's mind at the moment.
'It's Sneak...'� At first she didn't recognize him; the hair nearest his face was matted with dried blood from a gash that stretch from his ear to his right eye, which was swollen shut.
'Oh god...Sneak...'� she bit her lower lip so hard it drew blood that she thoughtlessly licked away as she trailed her fingers along his broken jawbone, rare tears springing to her eyes. She realized how cold his skin was. Finally, she gently touched the side of his neck, praying for a pulse. 'Christ, he's alive!'� Relief and shock washed over the eighteen-year-old as she felt the weak, slow beat somewhere beneath his flesh.

Deimos had been carefully making his way around the opposite side of the alley, hoping that he wouldn't find Psyche in similar condition as Sneak ' or worse. But then he looked behind the stack of rubble, and what he saw made him utterly sick to his stomach.
'Goddamn,'� he muttered faintly, holding an arm out against the side of one of the buildings for support, 'She's...she's dead.'� Even in the increasing, near-pitch darkness, his sharp eyes could tell by the ashen tone of her face that she was dead ' and had been that way for a while.

As soon as she glanced over at Psyche, Phobia's heart skipped a beat. She closed her eyes and simply breathed shakily for a moment before reopening her eyes and lifting her head to look Deimos in the eye. 'These things happen,'� she told him, unable to keep her voice from cracking, 'but Sneak won't have much of a chance if we don't get him back to headquarters.'�

'I know,'� the sandy-haired teen whispered, his eyes still glued to Psyche's lifeless form. With a heavy sigh, Phobia took a few steps to get to her male counterpart, reaching for his hand, slick with others' blood, and taking it in her own.
'We don't have time to let this effect us right now. I feel the same way you do about this, but unless you want Sneak to die too, we need to get him to the infirmary and have Doc take a look at him.'�

'Y-Yeah,'� Deimos said, barely loud enough for Phobia to hear him, 'I can't...can't believe she's dead ' '�
The blue-haired teen sighed in exasperation and slapped Deimos on the side of his face. 'Snap out of it, man! Don't you think I feel the same goddamn way?!'�
He swallowed and nodded, not making any sound as he followed Phobia over to Sneak's limp frame.
'Careful'' Phobia warned, calmer now, as he slipped his arms beneath Sneak's back and prepared to lift him. ''We don't want to hurt him any more than he already is.'�
A moan from the unconscious teenager seemed to only add emphasis to her statement.
She helped push Sneak gently into Deimos' arms, grimacing when the younger youth's head simply rolled back, weighted by gravity, as though dead. After situating his head so that it was supported on the muscular, younger teen's shoulder, she led the way out of the alley.

Want to comment on this Short Stories? Sign up to Edit Red and you will be able to comment on Short Stories and get access to: Upload your own stories and poems, get readers and their feedback, promote your work...