Little Mercy
I finally seemed to have rendered him at a loss for words.
After a startlingly long stretch of silence, he released a chuckle that seemed far away. There was an air of disbelief to him, as though he couldn't quite grasp that I, of all people, just gave away the location of one of his warehouses. I hadn't exactly told Blake its address, but I had given him enough that The Joker would have to be crazy to think his warehouse was safe. Especially considering that Blake was a brand new member of the Gotham police force.
The Joker moved fast, sweeping his hand down in a sharp arc. The cut was small and precise, right at the apple of my right cheekbone. I felt thin liquid slip down my face. Before I even had the time to register the pain, I had the wind knocked out of me as he hefted me onto his back. He towed my screaming form back to the bus. My leg and head throbbed with every step. My new cut leaked red down the back of his shirt. The stream intensified as more blood rushed to my head.
I pummeled and clawed at his back, but it wasn't until I aimed a hard elbow to where I suspected the kidneys were that he slid me off of him and into someone else's rough hands. I looked back and found the giant holding my struggling arms at my sides. He had to bend down to catch my hands.
My struggles were weak from windedness and I eventually just slipped my head back to rest on the giant's chest so I could glare. The Joker's eyes never left mine. His tone was taut, businesses-like as he addressed his men. Gone was the lilting grandeur, "Tie her up and load her and the money. Clear out the warehouse and move everything south."
"Boss? The south warehouse is half the size – " The Joker burst into motion so quickly I'd only just registered his movement when there was a dull thunk to my back. The left side of my face was misted with liquid. The man's fingers went slack around my wrists.
When I turned, part of me already knew what I was going to see. I'd seen multiple dead bodies that day. But their deaths were relatively bloodless, their faces had been covered. In that moment, I stood in the arms of a man with a knife buried to the hilt in his right eye and I could only stare. His muscles were still twitching, not caught up to the fact that his brain was dead.
His weight shifted forward after a suspended moment and I suddenly found myself trapped beneath his massive frame and the ground.
My terror at being pinned to the floor by a dead body was only maximized by a resounding chorus of laughter at my expense. My right cheek scuffed raw as I struggled to free one of my arms from beneath my stomach, but I couldn't so much as lift my body a centimeter from the ground to do so. My eyes must've been as wide as planets, my screams muffled by the body's flesh as it continued to twitch above me. The handle of the knife poked into the ground by my head, blood from the skewered socket dripping onto my hair.
"Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place!" The Joker mused between fits of shrill laughter, mocking tone resurfaced. His voice showed no indication of helping me.
I knew what The Joker must've felt and seen as he looked down at me. He saw something pathetically small, bloody and battered, completely at his mercy.
The skin of my forearm felt as though it tore completely off when I finally wretched my arm from under myself. I jammed my hand up between the body's head and mine awkwardly. I shoved. His shoulders moved so I was able to raise my own head, now free of his fleshy cage. I rested my forehead against my arm, suddenly fatigued down to my marrow and gasped into the cement.
I'd reached my absolute wit's end. I'd woken up this morning, tossed back a cup of green tea because I was trying to stay away from coffee. I armored up in makeup, hair and that stupid motherfucking skirt like any other day. On my only mildly infuriating drive to work, I'd thought about how the Chicago air would be better for my dry complexion than Gotham's air, and decided that I would need a new moisturizer. I wondered if the painters were done painting the interior of the house a shade called "buttercream." I'd strategically planned how I would go about packing the remaining necessities waiting to be packed.
It'd been such a good day before I'd been shoved around, threatened with gun, knife and fist, and stabbed in the leg.
The Joker clung to the side of the bus with a new wave of hysteria when I looked up at him. The scars protruded grotesquely from the corners of his red mouth, the oily black under his eyes seeping into his crows feet.
I didn't mean to say it, it came out more like a gasp than anything. "You fucking freak."
His laughter cut off sharply, his footsteps scuffed and the body was lifted off of me. I gasped in breath thankfully, only to have the giant's body replaced by The Joker's as he flipped me onto my back and straddled me.
In the ensuing mayhem, I saw the crotch of his brown pants pressed into my navel, his knees, resting near my ribs, strained the fabric of his pants. I could see up his nose, where his white makeup sloppily stopped and his nostrils began. He'd manhandled me in more ways than one that night, but this particular precarious position brought to mind another horrific image. Of another man, with khaki pants instead of brown, with a clean white smile instead of The Joker's yellow, the side of a wedding band pressed into my face instead of The Joker's glove.
Something overtook me. With an outburst that surprised me as much as him, I howled and launched myself upon him, fully knocking The Joker onto his back. I landed one punch to his neck and wound up for a second before the sound of another gunshot nearly stopped my heart.
I was pitched to the side with a twist of The Jokers arm. My head banged against the side of the bus. More gunshots.
I watched in a daze as the clown shielded himself from the raining gunfire against the bus to my left. He pulled a pistol from the waistband of his pants. There were other men flowing out of the warehouse in a steady stream, sticking the barrels of their guns through jagged holes in the windows and firing over my head. The police found us, I realized as oscillating blue and red fell across The Joker's ghostly complexion.
The gunshots seemed to last forever and, in my haze, I feared being shot if I tried to get away. I clutched my head to keep the noise out, but I still heard a clipped, "Let's go, gentlemen!"
The bus bumped against my back as they filed into it. The movement, though slight, seemed to break through the fog in my mind. There were no more men, all of them were either screaming in the bus or bleeding on the ground. I struggled to get vertical and limped to my fullest ability around the back of the bus.
Six policemen out of the twelve pointed their guns at me the second I came into view. I held up my hands shakily and the policemen quickly resumed shooting down the bus. Glass shattered and one form jogged up to me. I was relieved to see it was a female cop that propped me up on her shoulder.
"Get me away from him!" I pleaded with her when my breath finally returned. I struggled to keep my weight off my calf while I clutched her for dear life. She was tall, strong. She practically carried me toward the nearest car.
The policewoman put her mouth to my ear when we were about halfway but before she could speak something bit me hard in the shoulder. I opened my eyes to find myself at eye-level with an flashing blue and red car bumper. I clutched my shoulder and twisted onto my back.
All I could find in the color-saturated mayhem were two black eyes surrounded by lighter blackness. Both eyes were brimming with death, boring into me through the shattered window of a dingy yellow bus.
The eyes were clear, never leaving mine even as the bus rumbled away. Before the bus rounded the street corner, the clown split his red lips and lapped at his scars.
The policewoman helped me stand again as tires screeched and shouts became more distant. She was trying to talk to me. My eyes lingered on the street corner.
"He's gone."
The policewoman was older and beautiful, her skin dark and her eyes earnest as she gripped me tightly. She laid me in the back of a police car and pinched her radio. I let my head fall back onto the headrest as she spoke hasty words into her shoulder.
She arranged me with careful hands so I hunched forward on my thighs. Fingers weighed against my gunshot wound and I would've screamed had my throat not been so raw. "Do you know your name, ma'am?"
"Thank you. He's gone because of you. He's gone," I whispered to her emphatically. I felt tears welling, drying the back of my throat. I knew I was on the verge of hysteria and some part of me neglected to acknowledge that I was safe.
I could practically see her try to determine if I was going to pass out. "Yes, ma'am, he's gone. What's your name?"
I knew what she was doing, trying to keep my mind off the pain. She pressed a little harder against my shoulder and I gasped through tears, "Blaze Plissken."
"That's a pretty name," she lied, keeping her pressure on my wound. She started to speak again but I cut her off, "How did you find us so fast?"
"There was a 911 call from a gentleman who saw you stumbling down this street. He said you looked hurt. And there was a man with a mask following you, hurting you. And then we got another call, from someone on the force."
"Thank you," I whispered again, more tears running down my face. "He was going to hurt me. He was going to - " nausea scooped through my empty stomach when I considered how close I was to the unthinkable. More sirens crashed around us and new hands helped me up onto a stretcher. My throw up just barely missed the shiny shoes of the EMT. New questions came from new faces and I was unevenly pulled into an ambulance. I was nearing unconsciousness, I knew, but my sense of danger never dimmed. I knew I wasn't answering their questions like I should've, I knew they were trying to help. One of the hands pushed a needle into my arm.
I glared down at it and then up at the EMT shakily. He was young, his face creased with a neutral sort of concern. "I don't want to sleep," my words were already slurring. I blinked and faded into a synthetic rest, a part of my mind still reaching for cognizance.
