She wasn’t religious, I just liked her best on her knees.

We got together to hurt people. We were in love. With hurting people.

I’d track them online. Young men who laughed about rape online. Teenagers with nothing better to do than hassling others. Bored, useless human beings, spreading pain.

Me and my friends. Imagine a crowbar, biting in to somebody’s face. Imagine a young voice that had been laughing, now choking on blood and tears as it swallows a tooth. 

I’m a specific kind of sadist. I most enjoy hurting those who are like me. Those who enjoy hurting others. I get off on the brutality, and the balance to it. I try to stand at the centre-point, and let instinct take over.

I just want to hurt somebody.
Somebody who’s got it coming.

I want to burn this fucking world down.

I wrote my friend a note: Sometimes I don’t know. Sometimes this stuff upsets me so much… People are always like “Hank, you’re so angry…” And I’m like, “Yeah, I live on planet Earth where teenagers gangrape and laugh about it to their friends, where Africa is full of child-soldiers and AIDs babies, where the sex-slave-trade is a billion-dollar industry.”

If you’re not angry, if you’re just happy with the world the way it is? If you think GOD put you here to live an awesome life while everybody else sinks into a cesspool of blood and hate, then maybe you’re the piece of shit. Maybe I’m mad at you.

I didn’t sign it, but he knew it was me that sent it.

We fucking marched right into that ice cream parlour, and we went to work. 

She had a pick-ax, dirty with grime and miner’s sweat, and she knew how to use it: quickly, and with purpose. Up and down like a metaphor for emotions or sex, she raised and lowered the thing. Glass shattered, and spurts of iced creams dotted the walls like sex crimes turned to graffiti.

I had handguns, one settled snuggly into each of my palms. I felt the recoil sting my flesh as the guns went off in tandem bursts. If you don’t aim right, the bullets just go straight through stuff. You have to direct the bullets to the target, if you want to see things blow up.

The cash register exploded in an ugly eruption of small metal bits and loose change. Dollar bills on the floor, keypad digits on the far wall.

A siren was going off, or maybe that was just the noise inside my head. They make drugs for that sort of thing, you know? Good drugs. Drugs that come in shiny clean bottles. Drugs that taste like candy. I love drugs. I’d love to have some drugs. But I cannot. My mind may be aching, but my body is a temple. And it craves only ice cream.

Yeah, big handfuls of the stuff, gone gooey from the heat of exposure to the world. I put down a gun so I can cup a mouthful up to my face, chocolate hazelnuts running down the sides of my face. It’s like I’m smeared with the ambrosia of the gods, like I was eating out the crotch of some great chocolate bitch-goddess from on high. I feel charged. Full of life, and light. Yeah, I’m all lit up from the inside, like how serial killers get with they snuff their prey. 

I know she’s killing spectators, somewhere in the background. I can hear them screaming, and I know the sound that pick-ax makes when it tears a person’s stomach out through a hole that was carved in their ribs. 

I know. Times like this, I feel like I know everything. I feel like my brain is as big as the sky, and that it holds all the stars you can see above you, and stuff on beyond from there, too.

I know stuff. So much stuff.

I just don’t know much more time we have before the cops show up.
Then, things are gonna get ugly.

Outside, the darkness is growing.

Neon lights shatter and pop, raining plastic and glass down across the streets.

CODENAME: Agent Girl pulls on a fresh mask of insect skin, down over her own face. She stares out through its multitudinal compound eyes, seeing reality broken up into a billion twisting fragmenting fractal patterns.

The world is light now.

The world is growing shadows.

She’s got razor-wire for teeth and a cat’s claw for a clit. Her skin is harder than diamonds, but soft to the touch. She’s impenetrable, emotionally.

Agent Girl carves her name in living flames as the city burns down. She picks out her lovers from the crowd with a finely-tipped dart. She flosses with their entrails, and sometimes even laughs at their jokes.

CODENAME: Agent Girl.

She knows how to find you, and worse yet, how to get to you.

All she needs is a reason, and on nights like these, she’s often a little bored. 

“Baby,” she breathed, “you set me on fire.”

And it was true. I did.

Well, I sort of did. I’d have to admit, the gasoline did most of work. 

This was a story of bullets and bitches. This wasn’t a spy-story or some classy noir adventure. This was grit and shit by the pound. This was the love of a hammer’s touch. 

We were here to blow the world away. We were broken like promises and addicted to oxygen like junkies. We were fucked up, and fucked around, like bunch of whores in a rotating restaurant. 

She told me she could take it, so I took it from her. I took everything she had - all her pain, all her rage, all her money, all her lovers. In return she gave me head; a hand-job masquerading as a hand-out. 

I was hard up, and she was hot as hell. 

Hot as hell, and burning all night. 

I was a self-taught knife-fighter.

I wanted to be a pirate, or a money-collector for a Mexican drug cartel. I wanted men’s breaths to catch in their throats when I walked past. I wanted mine to be the shadow of death. 

We were all wartime babies. There was always some conflict, blowing smoke against our doors. All our lives were counted and cashed. We were less a generation and more like a postage stamp for mailing annihilation to far-away countries. 

I took my secrets into the shower with me, and washed them away under a warm stream of water and poison gasses. I knotted a rope from my own hair, and used it to hang my captors. 

I broke down walls and took lives.

Just so I could be here, now, with you.

I want to hear the Rolling Stones playing, as a helicopter drops me and my ak-47 off behind enemy lines. 

We’re somewhere dangerous. A jungle, on the edge of a city. Cracked concrete and thick mud. Snipers hidden in trees, and peering out of blacked-out kitchen windows. 

I’m one of a team with killers, jokers, malcontents, and guys who look like they’d be more at home in a maximum security prison, than out loose on the streets. 

We’re hunting for something. We’re like Dream Warriors, stuck in a vision of constant war. A never-ending battle full of young lives. We’re trying to capture a flag, or maybe just find our way out of all this mess.

I remember real life. Marching to work. Taking my post behind a cash register. Firing off helpful suggestions all day long. Burning a path through time to my all-important lunch break. Hiding behind dumpsters full of trash, sneaking cigarette breaks as the rain pours down from on high. Eat a snack, smile at some girls.

I want to hear Mick signing hits as I lumber through the woods, both hands on my metal. I want to hear Satisfaction and Jumpin’ Jack Flash. I want to hear heavy-duty weapons-fire, tearing through this world. I want to be ready, willing, and able.

I want something to happen. 

Sometimes, when somebody’s aggressively honking their horn out in the street, I invision myself in a ski-mask, smashing out their back window, threatening them, and then running away. 

But still. Masked Vigilantes are a bad idea. So I stay inside with my cup of tea.

I was a naked electrical signal.

I got dressed up in a robot body.

I pulled it on slow, feeling the metal bits cloaking my haze of angry electrons. I filled it up like lightning filling a bottle. I made it want to burst. I brought it to life, like a kiss from God.

Billions of lines of ongoing code, representing my every thought and emotion. Flashing little lights communicating bravely, incessantly. A tickling sensation where my mind should be. 

It’s like brain-death, feeling these thoughts slip away, slipping into something else, taking on another form. Reborn again in metal. Reborn as an angry glowing god, with hands made from rock and eyes casting a deadly red glow. 

I feel like a demon, cast out of hell. An angel with wings on fire.

I feel like I’m on drugs, or like my body’s plugged into the wall, feeing off the household frequency. Like a vampire, getting fat off the power company. 

I flex my robot body, and I move out into the world. 
We take it all by force. 

She shot me in both legs – a bullet in each kneecap – and sat down beside me, her gun-barrel smoking like a surly teenager.

I guess I cried and I screamed a while. I remember her laughing, because when she laughs, it sounds like little angels, farting. There’s this twinkle in her eye, when she laughs, that I’ve learned to hate. If it was possible to burn a person alive with the power of pure hate, she’d be two charred bones and a bad smell.

Instead, she’s reading me poetry and whispering secrets like, “Nobody really dies up there, in space. They just rotate around, getting older and older, and hungrier and hungrier.”

I slip away for a moment, dipping into unconsciousness. I come-to with a burning sensation down my face, and realize that she’s shot me again. This time the bullet took about a half-pound of flesh with it, off the side of my face. The left cheek, mostly, and some bone.

I moan something. Maybe her name. Maybe for forgiveness.

She tells me,  “You do it better than all the boys,” by which she means that I bleed and die quite well.

At least it’s a compliment, right?

I stumble through the streets, stuttering automatic-weapons-fire like I’m screaming obscenities at a crowd. I think I am screaming; my voice is tearing through my throat like I’m screaming fire. Spitting fire as I hurl little lead stones the size of death, all through the air. 

You have to take a moment, to try to savour those perfect moments.

Sirens screaming, fires blazing, the sewer system exploding beneath our feet. Everything burns if you apply enough want. You could set a whole town on fire, just for laughs. Brutal simplicity; me + you = nothing.

I take a moment to smell the air, as it catches on fire. Yeah, take a sniff of the morning air, catch a beam of the morning sun, and then just walk away, leaving streets full of broken corpses, crying to their false gods. False fucking gods. No false gods have I, mind you. I worship only the kinetic bliss of the bullet, and the sting of stab to the face.

“My heart,” I exclaimed, spitting blood through my lips. “My heart!” I shouted again. “You’re crushing my heart with your awful robot claws.”

She looks over at me like a bad cat with sunshine on her belly. Like she’s lazy and cruel at the some time. Like she’d cut me up just to see what my blood looks like in the daylight. 

There’s robotic pistons whirling to life, deep within her. I can hear them emanating from her crotch when she crosses and uncrosses her legs. 

I spit blood on the floor, and lean forward like I’m going to fall to my knees. But somehow, I stay standing. Almost like a man, I stand on two feet, and stare up to where I think the sky used to be. Yeah, there used to be a sky above my head. Now there’s just her.

She’s so fucking cool. She’s so fucking sexy. Her heart is a burning iron sun; I can feel it glowing, radioactive and hot, just under her perfect breasts. 

“My heart,” I say one last time, and then she rips it out. 

The meat tears from my body, and spit out onto the floor. 

She was driving down the road at a million miles an hour, her car making a sound like a billion lawn-mower engines choking down gravel. She saw me hitchhiking, and she slowed down, to offer me a ride.

Her car had been bright pink, once upon a time. Now it was red like dried blood and rust. It was caked with dust that faded from canary yellow to shit brown. There was black mould growing on the silvery chrome of the back bumper. The upholstery had been shot and burned; the seat-covers were stitched out of expensive-looking silver leather, which’d had nacho-cheese and french-fry grease slathered all across. There were old take-out-food boxes in the back, and stray rounds of ammunition being held in empty drink cups, in the front. 

She smiled at me as her car stopped, the purple of her lipstick smearing on the filter of her bright red cigarette; it smelled more like marijuana and monkey-hide, than tobacco. Her hands were covered in cuts, and a patch of bruises ran up her neck, to just under her right eye. She smiled, oblivious to her own injuries. 

“It’s too nice a day, for walking,” she shouted at me, over the rumbling of her vehicle’s engine. 

So, I slid inside, and she tossed me a can of beer; it was as warm as blood and it smelled like aluminium and cat piss. I drank it down easy enough though, the can pissing its guts down my throat like my guts were on fire.

She smiled even wider as her foot went back down on the accelerator, and the car burst forward on the road like an awkward orgasm spurting wildly away. 

She’s listening to one of those hard-boiled dramas on the radio as we drive down streets of pale black. Streets lined with buildings that look like surrealist disasters; concrete melting like cakes in the rain. The radio breathes heavily, “I got a cruel streak as wide across as it needs to be. I got no consideration for others, and I got no patience for the foolish, for those who I suspect may have turned against me some time when my back was turned.”

We were living in one of those great, frozen-stone cities that float over the ocean like so many cement soap-bubbles held buoyant by some stray breeze. Held aloft by big ideas and lovingly expressed emotions. 

This is the city where dreams come to die. It shows up on maps as a splotch of coffee or ink. The locals call it Shade City, a quiet little metropolis full of failures and the sort of men who’d love nothing so much as to stick their wrinkly, grey little cocks into the dreams of anybody else. Fuck their dreams, their memories, their melting-into-mold apartments. Men with heavy raincoats, bulky men with thick, meaty hands, and cold, dead eyes. 

Our car is lined with lead and smells like an oil fire. The woman in the seat next to me has dark green hair and a golden patch over one eye. The woman in the seat next to me dreams of the darkness of the deepest parts of the sea. 

I don’t remember my dreams anymore. I just wake up, in strangers’ rooms, covered in sweat and stolen booze. I just wake up, hating the dawn and frozen from the insides out. Every morning. There’s blood on the pillow and cum on my thigh. My muscles are sore and my belly seems to be full of something that was eaten raw. 

We are the darkness that takes to the streets in the night. We are empty shadows compelled by hunger and lustful little ideas. We are the kids in town who suit up all snappy with gorgeous gear that looks like we stole it from sixty years ago. Yeah, Retro Noir, like a nineteen-sixties switchblade set loose in the night. 

Loose, motherfuckers. Loose in the night. 

I expected her to be birthed like an angel, but in truth, she looked somehow more like a fly, crawling and devouring its way loose of the maggot-shell that was once its true form. 

I thought there’d be feathered wings, not those thick-veined things, a grotesquely deformed face distorted with multiple rows of compound eyes. Her mandibles cackled hideously in the still dawn air, as I watched the beast, a housefly some hundred and sixty pounds in weight, crawling her way out of her own corpse, and into our world. She let out this laugh, as she emerged, and the sound of it chilled me to my bones. I felt my balls shrink up towards my abdomen. 

Down the wall of the shack she slowly crawled. Her spit was bubbling black acid, burning everything it touched. Her arms and legs were an uneven number of dark, grasping limbs, coated in heavy dark hair. She smelled sickening and organic. Like something rotting, and bursting with rotting life.

My girlfriend took my hand as we watched the thing crawl down towards us. “I hate so many of your ex’s,” she said to me, and then we both went for our guns.

The bitch up top dropped her hold on the wall, and fell towards us, shrieking. 

Time froze for us, as our hands filled up with gun-power.

Everything, in that moment, was electric, and alive.

And then the fury came on. 

Well, slit my throat and throw my heart to the sea; I thought we were done here, but here you are, yet again, back again. 

Here you are in my home, where I come to sleep. Here you are, in my line of sight. Here you are, you got me on in your mind. I feel half-crazy from the intimacy; can’t you hear the knocking of my nervous knees? 

I was hoping… fuck I was hoping. I was hoping we’d make it happen, you and I. 

I hoped that maybe I’d find a way to speak my mind and you’d shoot of your mouth, shoot my mouth full of blood holes. Listen to my tongue bleed. I’ll drip little drops down into your ears.

I’m… this old. This big. This colour. This size and shape. I taste like this sentence sounds. I feel like these words feel in your head. I smell like these sentiments. I act like this idea, this one right here, this one I’m writing right here.

I wish… I wish I could survive this you. 

But you’re…

Something longer and darker and stranger than just survival, aren’t you? 

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you taste like something much sweeter than just survival. 

You could fucking light me on fire,
And I’d just keep burning for you.