Talent Seth David-Andrew

The Ritzville Dogfight

By Seth David-Andrew | 2008

The Ritzville Dogfight Prologue.

The Big City is a rough place. Like any big city, it suffers from Jekyll and Hyde syndrome. The pretty side is just as impressive and comely as any other metropolis. There are beautiful parks, clean streets with happy people gawking at the tall office buildings and shopping at the quaint boutiques smashed up against each other. This is the part that gets all the TV coverage. All the festivals and parades and car washes and half-time shows happen here. Everyone enjoys a modest, comfortable lifestyle: six figures for half a day of work, Monday through Friday. Everyone enjoys clean restaurants and well-tended gardens.

On the other hand, in the "harder to get to" places, there are cramped and ugly slums. Tall, cold brick walls lined with dirty cracked windows, with half-broken fire escapes growing out the side. Dodgy graffiti stretched across the bottom, bullets stuck in intermittently from pointless scuffles of previous years. Broad shouldered boys patrol the corners, intoxicated by a life of resentment, confusion, and bias. They pack together, at least in pairs. That way they know they're not the only ones who chose such a depraved life, switching out sacks for torn, worn out twenty dollar bills.
There are families who can’t ever sleep with all their lights out. Fathers who never breathe sighs of relief, mothers who never let their children out after sundown. Children who always remember never to make eye contact, apologize for every slight touch of any stranger, and run from any fight.
In The Big City there's a place called Ritzville. It’s the one place that can even come close to being considered a safe haven. Ritzville is a slang term for the area, it isn’t a specific district or neighborhood. It isn't categorized by specific streets or the very prominent gang territory lines, but by the large concentration of pedestrians. All the single mothers and low-income families and salesmen and fast-food workers and upright citizens with moral fiber, flock to Ritzville. In a place as vast and ugly as The Big City, anyone who isn't under the heel of one of the various criminal organizations quickly understands that in order to maintain their lifestyle, they have to move to that last sanctuary.
It used to be that the entire Southern residential areas were considered Ritzville, it'd been that way for years. The crime-families had enough of the city to fight each other over, it didn't concern them. Lately, however, with the long years of raping every last penny from every street corner, their hungry eyes began to turn to that virgin district. Slowly at night, their dark, dirty fingers poked around the streets, wearing expensive clothes and sickly expressions. People started getting less friendly. More of the Ritzville family began to look over their vulnerable shoulders.
It wasn't long. Maybe a month after the shadowy filth started pacing the borders. The streets, the lines that separated the good people from the half-broken people started to lose their potency, no longer the unspoken boundary. Men started dying young. Drowned in the East river, found in cramped alleyways with bullets lodged in their necks and heads, strewn lifeless at the bottoms of tall buildings. The first few looked like terrible accidents, and were mourned as such. But after a while, people stopped coming near the bodies, touching them or taking them anywhere. Everyone realized what was happening. The corpses were becoming a sign. Everyone started leaving them as they were. They knew how those unlucky men had ended up there.
As soon as the turnover began, and the police force became privatized, it cost half a man's life savings just to get them to come out to their part of town to see what the commotion was about. Ambulances started becoming hearses, street sweepers for the dead. Driving slowly around town and picking up every poor bastard that found themselves walking against the current of family foot-soldiers that began to trickle through the streets of Ritzville. But by the time this danger was apparent, it was much too late to stop it. It was the other kind of family, rearing their unwelcome heads and cracking their eager knuckles. The fake families with no blood tie between them. Wild dogs with a common goal. No tie but their rules and allegiances and cold hollow eyes. They'd waited long enough. They'd given plenty of time for Ritzville to be appreciated by its inhabitants in its wholesome and untouched state. They were hungry, and they were coming to bleed dry the last little bright spot in the whole damn sprawl.
The Big City was coming to Ritzville.