Mercy’s Last Leap

Her name was Mercy, but that was just some cruel joke the universe decided to play. She had none to give. She was a walking, breathing contradiction. Soft, painted lips that spit hard, ugly truths. A body built for sin, all curves and sharp angles, but a mind that was wired for total goddamn war. She lived in ripped stockings and black nail polish, and her kohl-rimmed eyes didn’t reflect the light; they swallowed it whole. Her hair was a jet-black mohawk, sharp enough to take out an eye, and her laugh sounded like a bottle breaking in a back alley. Everything about her screamed danger, a beautiful, glorious, head-on collision. And that’s exactly why I wanted her. That’s why we all did.

We were packed like sardines in the back of some beat-up punk rocker’s car—a Ford Falcon, maybe, that smelled of engine grease, stale beer, and the kind of sour, desperate sweat that comes from kids waiting for a handout. We were strapped, our pockets full of whatever pills and powders we could scrape together, barreling through the neon filth of L.A., the whole city a smear of ugly, beautiful light outside the dirty windows.

The guys up front, they were older, meaner. Relics from a scene that was already dying. They had stories about the Dead Kennedys, about snorting speed off some guitarist’s amp at the Mabuhay Gardens, about waking up in gutters they didn’t remember crawling into. They were our ride, our ticket into the show. We didn’t have the cash, but we had the drugs, and in that world, that was a currency they understood. They got us through the door of some shithole venue held together by layers of graffiti and dried piss, and we just dove headfirst into the noise. Mercy and I, we dove in like two people who had no intention of making it to morning.

By the time the first chord hit—a wall of distorted, angry sound that felt like a punch to the chest—I was already floating. My brain was a cocktail of cheap speed and whatever else I’d swallowed in the car. Hands appeared out of the darkness, passing me pills, plastic cups full of warm beer, anything to dull the edges of the world. The pit in front of me wasn’t a crowd; it was a single, violent organism. A churning, roaring sea of elbows, steel-toed boots, and bodies crashing into each other like waves against a jagged rock. There was no rhythm, no rules. Just a raw, unspoken agreement that pain was part of the goddamn communion.

So I threw myself in.

It was pure, glorious chaos. A fist to the ribs that knocked the wind out of me. A boot to the shin that I knew I’d feel for a week. My heartbeat pounded in my ears, a frantic drum trying to keep time with the snarling guitars. And then—bam—some girl I’d never seen before, with eyes as wild as mine, cracked me right across the nose. A perfect, clean shot. The world exploded in a flash of white light. Blood gushed from both nostrils, hot and thick, painting my lips and chin in a mask of metallic misery.

I stumbled back, dazed, blinking the sweat and blood out of my eyes, trying to bring the world back into focus. The noise was just a dull roar now. And in that sudden, muffled quiet in my head, I had one thought: Where the fuck was Mercy?

I found her upstairs, on the balcony, perched on the railing like some dark, broken-winged bird that had forgotten how to fear. She wasn’t watching the band. She was watching the chaos she could create. She was taunting the boys below, laughing as they tried to impress her, hurling their bodies over the railing into the pit, expecting the churning mass to catch them.

They didn’t.

I watched one kid, then another, hit the floor hard, their stage-dives met not with waiting arms, but with steel-toed boots, sharp elbows, and the cold, hard indifference of the mob. They just became part of the wreckage.

Mercy didn’t care. Mercy fucking loved it. Her laughter was sharp, cruel, beautiful. She was egging them on, daring them to climb, to jump, to break themselves on the altar of her amusement. It was the purest, most honest thing I’d ever seen. She was leaning out over the edge, one leg already swung over the railing, ready to show them how it was done. And just as she did, some faceless shadow in the chaos behind her, maybe another one of her admirers, maybe just a random act of violence, ran forward and shoved her. Hard.

She went over.

I’ll never forget it. The way her wild, beautiful laugh twisted into something else in mid-air. Something short, sharp, and final. A sound that got swallowed by the noise before it even had a chance to become a scream.

The crowd didn’t cheer. It didn’t gasp. It didn’t even notice. The pit just kept moving, kept slamming, kept grinding its boots into the sticky, beer-soaked floor, utterly, completely oblivious to the small, broken body that had just fallen among them. One more piece of trash on a floor already littered with it.

That was the last time I saw her.

I don’t remember leaving that shithole. I don’t remember much of anything after that, except that at some point, my legs carried me out into the night and deposited me on a park bench somewhere in the guts of Hollywood. The night pulsed around me. The bass lines from the club still vibrated in my skull, and the echoes of screams hung in the humid air like ghosts.

I just sat there, head between my hands, the blood dried to a crust on my face, my chipped tooth a dull ache in my jaw. I was trying to understand how I got there, what the hell had just happened, and what was supposed to come next. But there were no answers. Just the buzz of the streetlights and the cold, hard fact of it all.

Mercy was gone. And I was still here.

Trouble doesn’t just follow people like her; it’s the goddamn air they breathe. It’s the gravity that pulls them down. It swallows them whole. And sometimes, if you’re lucky—or maybe just cursed enough—it spits you out on a park bench at three in the morning, still breathing, still bleeding, and still wondering why the hell it didn’t take you, too.