FASTER THAN GOD
By Jashi (also known as where the streets have no name. Read my author profile!)
I do not own xXx. Sorry for taking so long.
CHAPTER FOUR:
(TROY'S POV)
So they've granted me a day. A single day before my life ends and I become a toy of a government agency to protect 'freedom'.
If I have to protect freedom, why do I have none of my own?
I love to drive cars. That's really all I've cared about all the nineteen years I've lived. I learned to drive a week after I'd turned ten years old because I joined a gang called the Killers. I had to jack cars, drive cars, race cars, steal cars, my life became all about cars. We were a small gang and lived on a street called 44th. I'm always yelling at racers to "go back to 44th Street and learn how to drive" because in my mind, the people there were always the best. The gang members accepted me. They were my mama, my father, my sisters, my brothers. Then they died. They died.
Except for me, Benji, and Lena. We were left.
It was a huge fight against a rival gang, the Vipers from the East Side Apartments. I was fifteen. Benji was fourteen, and Lena is a month older than me. The Vipers were fed up with us and our races and our success with cars. So they showed up one day at the shanty on 44th Street that was ours, the place I'd called home for a long, long time. Some of them had handguns, Remmingtons and Magnums, stupid little handguns that shouldn't have been able to kill but did. One of them had an AK-47.
I hate that word. It's not even a word, just two letters and two numbers and a hyphon.
I never say it. I say 'automatic machine gun'.
Because that gun destroyed my whole life.
They jumped the gang and they had no idea what to do. They killed Stev, Halden, Alice, Helen, McGonag, Johnny, Marks, Dan, Sheila, Jones…they were all full of bullets. Pumped with lead. Benji, Lena, and I had been out. I forget what we were doing.
We came in at a run because we noticed the door was full of bullet-sized holes. There they were. Asleep, it looked like. All except for Jones. He was dying. I ran over to him. He'd been teacher to learn how to drive, jack, race, steal anything you wanted to do with cars. He was crying in pain.
I said, "Jones, Jones! God, what happened?"
He could barely talk. "…came in…no warning…AK-47...Troy…"
His eyes filled with blood and it was the most terrible thing I've ever seen. He said my name one more time, as a cry of pain, of loss, of want of redemption.
"JONES!" I sobbed, and he died, my teacher.
I guess I swore then to do everything I ever did with a car in his name. I took his ring, the gang ring we all had, a gold ring with the letter "K" engraved in it. It was thinner and wouldn't be noticed very easily as a gang symbol. We decided to take their rings in remembrance.
I wear Jones, Alice, and Marks around my neck on a chain.
But I still wear my own Killer ring around my finger. If I met a Viper today, Benji asked me once, would I kill him?
Hell yes.
I may still be carrying around the weight of the revenge I want, but I've come to terms with it. To a degree.
Benji was always the peace-loving one. Lena was always wild and bright, but she never was fond of firing a gun either. And me, you ask?
I was never that violent.
I never really have been.
But then I had to go and race on the other streets. I had to learn how to fire a gun, how to get drugs. I knew how to get the weed and the snowy crack everybody loves so much. But angel dust? LSD? New stuff. Firing a gun wasn't hard. I knew how to fight. Hand-to-hand kind of shit. I can punch a man out. I got the balls to take someone on.
Lena, Benji and I have been stuck together all this time. Stick together, never give up, all for one and one for all, right? Right. Maybe. I don't know now. Now it's Mr. Xander "xXx" Cage. Oooooh, I'm gonna shit my pants I'm so fucking scared of (gasp) XXX.
He's just another extreme sports-type man who thinks he's some kind of James Bond-type womanizer with the muscles the size of a two liter bottle and an ego the size of the Empire State Building. Halden was kinda like that, only he was nice. And he wasn't a womanizer. He liked this one chick who belonged to the Skulls, a friend-gang. I don't really remember her at all. It WAS six years ago that I last saw her. What am I now, twenty? Twenty-one? I think back to what year I was born and do the math. Hey, I'm twenty-one. Dude. I didn't know that. But what time is it now? I'd think it's about four or five o'clock. Or as Lena would say in her smart-ass way, "Time for you to get a watch, Ruse."
I need a shower.
Warm water, a bar of prison soap, steel sink, and half a bottle of Walmart's own brand of shampoo await me in an adjacent room.
Ah. Just like home. Any towels? Hmm.
Open the cabinet under the sink to find a couple gray towels. Throw one around the bar on the shower and another over the top. Take no chances when you bathe. Tiny little mofo of a shower, but anything is good. Turn it on, strip quick and jump in despite the cold of the shower.
It gets warm after about three minutes, and I squirt a good two-thirds of what's left of the shampoo on my head. Ah, SOAP! I feel clean as I rinse it all out of my hair. I pick up the bar of soap and sniff it and an unpleasant smell hits my nose. Soot and gasoline. I smell these on a daily basis, but not in a shower. Taking a closer look at the soap, I sniff it again, and suddenly ZINGBANGWAKEUPRUSEANDGETWITHTHESTORY I jump out of the shower with my towel wrapped around me, turning it off and grabbing my clothes, shutting the door and dressing faster than you can say "What?".
That was Xander's shower. Who else's shower would have only a half-full bottle of shampoo and dirty-smelling soap? Someone else's, apparently. And Xander probably took a shower after delivering me to Gibbons, and what do you smell like after a car wreck? Like soot, gasoline, ashes, oil, and fire. And sometimes you have black all over you.
There is a clunk and my door opens. Xander Cage steps into my use.
"Now, Ruse." he says seriously, "why the fuck were you using my shower?"
___to be continued____
