The 24
th
of April is here again...if I had been more organised I would have had five new stories submitted for my fifth anniversary as a writer on Literotica.com!
Well, the dates might be off but at least you get the stories still. Enjoy!
–-
The Hollywood Files are a series of one-shot stories, completely fictional and purely for entertainment. No actual stars were slept with during the writing of this story.
I was running, feet pounding the pavement beneath me as I darted down a dark alleyway. Puddles splashed against dirty walls, cats and other urban wildlife scattered before me. I shouldn't have been out this late, or in this part of town, but I was, so I ran like my life depended on it.
Hmm, like my life depended on it...a poor choice of words, perhaps, because it really did.
I don't want to go into how I got here, not in any moving sort of Braveheart speech detail, but I guess it might help if you knew a little background. I live in one of the grittiest, darkest cities in existence, rife with crime of all types: theft, kidnapping, rape, murder. There were more muggings than police officers, and everywhere you went people were hesitant about trusting each other.
So naturally, as anyone would think, it seemed like the perfect place to start standing up to criminals, both petty and professional. That makes sense right? It did in my head. A local gang of muggers had been terrorising the neighbourhoods around my apartment, and with little planning I had armed myself and decided to take action.
Making my way down to the street, I confronted a group of thugs as they roughhoused a poor young girl. The four of them hadn't seen me when I stepped into the alleyway, a bat in my hand and some hockey armour on my arms and legs.
"Let her go!"
The thugs dropped the girl, turning to me with nasty looks in their eyes. One of them approached me slowly, sizing me up. He was almost a head taller and built like a brick shithouse. The girl scurried off, staring back over her shoulder at me as she rounded the corner. I was glad she had escaped, but I also quickly realised drawing all the attention to myself meant I had four fully aware bruisers advancing on me at once.
Right...element of surprise.
This is why Batman had ninja training. I didn't have ninja training. I didn't even have any training
period
.
"Ok, now what are you going to do?" the biggest of them said, cracking his knuckles very theatrically. When no good ideas came to mind, I puffed out my chest, opened my mouth to boom out an impressive speech about peace, justice and security, and promptly brought my foot straight up into his groin before swinging my bat at the man next to him, hitting him in the stomach.
Even as the pair of them doubled over in pain the other two leapt forward, drawing knives. At that point I decided to cut my losses and took off, with all four of them in pursuit.
So there I was, running through the back streets and alleys of the neighbourhood, any minute now expecting a blow to land on the back of my head and my life to end. As I rounded the corner I almost ran straight into a large black van with green markings on it disgorging more gang members.
Somehow I avoided their clutches and kept running, scaling the chain link fence behind the van. I landed on the other side as the thugs started to climb, but the alley contained two locked doors and a high brick wall, completely unscaleable.
I was trapped.
Trapped like a rat
. As if I needed more disappointment in my life I spied two rats scurrying across the alleyway and into a hole in the brick wall.
God damn it.
I turned to face my attackers, the one I had kicked grabbing me and pinning me to the wall, a metal pipe held across my throat.
"Got you now, you little shit," he hissed. His friends leapt down from the fence, most of them carrying some sort of improvised weapon. One or two of the gang members stood on the other side of the fence beside the back doors of the van keeping, which blocked any view from the street so no one would see what happened next. It was the end for me.
"Time to show you why we rule the streets..."
With a screech of tires the gang's van reversed suddenly, bowling over the two sentries and crashed through the chain-link fence without stopping, sending most of the thugs scattering for cover before the van squealed to a halt.
Dropping me like a sack of spuds, the leader approached the back of the van with one of his friends, their weapons held up. A moment later the doors swung open, knocking one of them flat on his back as a slender, black clad figure stepped out, kicking the other in the chin with a heavy booted foot.
I stared at the woman – and she definitely had the shape of a woman – as she stood over the men who were about to end my life, both of them out cold. She wore a long sleeved black outfit and a military-looking vest with a few bits and pieces of gear hanging from it. a hood covered her head and she looked up at me with piercing green eyes through a black mask that covered the top half of her face.
"Get in."
I hurried to climb into the van as she moved back through to sit in the driver's seat. I had time to shut and secure one of the two doors before the van shunted forward, sending me falling to the floor. I looked up in time to see one of the gang members raise his arm.
"Gun!" I yelled, as bullets pelted the back of the van. My rescuer planted her foot and the van shot out of the alley, skidding into the street and out of range. I sat up and inched over to the swinging open door, pulling it closed and locking it firmly. Light shone through the holes in the bodywork, evidence of our narrow escape. Moving to the front of the van and climbing ungracefully into the passenger seat, I took a look at the mystery woman.
I could see soft looking red lips set in a frown below her mask, while her light brown hair was mostly hidden by the black hood that was tightly fitted over her head. She was about average height, same as me, and while she was slim she was also very fit. Her clothes were skin tight with few loose ends or pockets to get snagged in a fight, and she wore fingerless gloves with hard points on her knuckles, as well as forearm guards made of the same armoured plastic.
"You shouldn't be out here," she said to me. "It isn't safe."
"No shit," I replied rather sarcastically. "Besides, I didn't plan on fighting all of them at once. They jumped me."
"Then you should have been prepared!" she yelled back. "If you're going to go out there you need to know what you're doing." She yanked on the steering wheel and turned the corner violently. "You were reckless. You rushed into a situation without sizing it up, without knowing the odds. You never do that." I was about to reply when remembered an article in the paper about a street walking vigilante. Few people had managed to get a photo or even see them, but those that had insisted it was a woman.
"You're her, aren't you? You're the vigilante, the one they call the Ghost." She didn't reply. I heard the screeching of tires behind us and looked in the rear-view mirror to see two cars coming up on us from behind. Someone leaned out of the side window as they got closer.
"We've got incoming," I warned. The Ghost glanced at her mirror, which was promptly shattered by gunfire. She gritted her teeth and turned the van again, almost riding up on two wheels as we screamed around the corner.
"This is why you don't take risks," she hissed.
I gripped the dashboard tightly as the Ghost weaved across the road, avoiding sporadic gunfire from the leading car. The passenger seemed to be the only member of the gang with a firearm, but even handgun ammunition was strong enough to punch through the doors and straight through the seats if they got off an accurate shot. The Ghost wasn't giving them that chance, wavering violently as the car bumped along behind them, almost jarring the shooter from the side window.
"I never should have gone out tonight," I said miserably, the full weight of the situation pressing in on me. "I never should have thought I could change anything."
"No, you shouldn't have gone out," said the Ghost. "If you hadn't these guys would be out somewhere else, raping or looting, instead of trying to kill us." I couldn't work out if she was being sarcastic, but despite the danger we were in I saw the corners of her mouth curl slightly, if only for a fraction of a second.
"But there is nothing wrong with wanting to change the world." Another bullet striking the van took her attention away from me.
"We can't outrun them in this," she said grimly. I heard sirens briefly in the distance over the sound of the van's engine straining to reach top speed.
"They'll scatter if the cops show up. We might even get some of them arrested."
"That's not an option for us either."