Wake up.

It’s time to go again.

She wakes up like an alarm’s going off, but really it’s just sunlight, breaking through the clouds and the wreckage of the burnt-out amusement-park she’s calling home for now.

Paint-chipped clown-faces leer out from the background, like fetish-items designed by some ancient primitive culture to keep away evil spirits and bad weather.

When the wind blows, the loose chains on the broken merry-go-round rattle and chime like heavy bells, or the bones of fleshless skeletons clashing together in some sort of a ceremonimal dance.

Yeah, the chains in the distance sound like a ghost-dance.

She wakes up, and rubs the sleep from her eyes. Her hair is short and messy and coated with grime. There’s dog’s blood and hamburger meat under her fingernails. Fingernails painted camouflage to help her fade into the backgrounds. 

They say she lives alone out there. They say she commands an army of feral cats, but only by moonlight. They say she smells like burnt candy and cinnamon. They say she can’t kill a man without breaking his heart first.

Wake up.

Look into the sky.

And go.

The ocean’s all black this morning. Black and deep and awful.

You know what lives in it now. Immense creatures, their hides dotted with painfully cancerous growths. Whales and octopods blistering with angry welts as wide across as my head. Thrashing, blind, seaborne creatures dripping toxic fluids from the holes in their skins.

The black tide crashes on a beach of green sand. Light green, like limes. The colour of sick and the smell of noxious fluids. Chemical spills and medicinal pills; the breakfast of champions.

I’m out walking, hunting, looking for something to eat or somebody to make love to. I carry a rifle that’s longer than I am tall. I achieve sexual congress through the judicious application of drugs to my blood-stream; I shoot up white-water that tastes like a numbing agent. It lets me see tomorrow with x-ray spec on. It lets me make love to the moment, while ignoring yesterday like she’s some scar-faced whore who just showed up on your front-step with a bun in her oven.

Look up, into the sky. Count all the stars you see up there: there’s seventeen, now. All the rest went out, while we were playing our stupid games and fornicating in the gutters.

It’s an empty house, this earth, but we’re still paying rent.

Off beyond, the clouds shutter, and begin to give way to simple inertia.

I head off, carrying my weapons and my woes off towards another dawn.

Her heart was a pool of darkness that I kept tumbling into. 

I was afraid of her, like I was afraid of the dark.

Have you ever been afraid of the dark, as an adult? You turn off the light, and suddenly feel an invisible presence with you in the room? You avoid looking in the corners, where the shadows are deepest, because you can hear something moving, something breathing or crawling where nothing should be.

I heard them there, when you were gone. The shadows stalking me around the room, their little claws tearing at the carpeting and slashing at the wallpaper. Breathing on my shoulder.

I wander, deeper and deeper into myself. 

Have you ever been scared of deep water, or the night’s sky? Have you ever been terrified of the unknown, and the way it watches you when you sleep? 

She was like this big empt void, full of anything I’d ever been scared of. Long highways stalked by predators. Cold metal operating tables. She blinked, and smiled, and drew me in.

I had nowhere else to be. 

She gets into my bed like she’s a knife, sinking into the soft flesh of the belly. Yeah, she’s so sharp and hard, and my bed is soft and inviting. Like one of those victims who’s just begging for it. You hate those ones, don’t you? The ones that really want it?

We met down by the sea where the sidewalks are burnt black. Cold ocean waves beat upon the shore; it was a dark and stormy night; just down the shoreline about thirty yards from where we sat, a dozen hobos were hunched around the still-smouldering corpse of some handsome young cop who’d been set alight. The hobos had their hands extended, like solar panels soaking up the heat and light the flames provided. 

She had a handful of stolen coins and subway tokens; she was taking them down to the arcade to see if she could get a few free watches on the porno-stations in the backrooms. She was into that sorta scene; exposure to intense sexual gratification in lewdly public places. She loved the idea of it all, not to mention the execution, and the follow-through. 

I was on the run from destiny and some mall security guards. I was avoid responsibilities and the light of day, like some teenaged vampire in a pair of oversized sunglasses. My hair a slick of bleached blond fuzz across my skull. My teeth angry, and gnashing. My boots steel-toed, and shoelaceless. 

We were like lovers, but we didn’t really love anything. 

We just kinda fucked around for a while. And when we were done, we burned down the city and set off towards separate stars. 

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. 

The radio screams like some poor woman aborting a fax-machine mid-term. Reality seems to bleed, a painful bursting of crimson rain that comes from every direction at once. Dripping upwards even as droplets descend down.

We’re sitting together in a café that’s nowhere. We’re waiting for the world to end. Well, we were waiting. It’s here now, the end. The final bit. The last drop at the bottom of the bottle. We’re it. Swallow us up and go.

The air shutters like it’s in pain, and I think it is. Great cracklings of thunder tore the clouds apart, and now some great beast, some insane living construct with eyeballs a thousand miles wide and a throat that goes deeper than anything on Earth, it’s tearing its way out of its world, and into ours.

The ground goes black. Our waitress is curled up on the floor, crying about some city where machines are built to rape human souls, where every home is a hungry mouth, where cold hands reach out from the darkness. She screams, as her body and psyche give way to the terrible pressures of our age. Her body contorts, painfully, impossibly, hands becoming flippers, ears giving way to gills… Skin becomes scales that fall to floor in bloody fistfuls.

The day is ending. The world is dying. All the Kings and Queens are being chopped up and served on the good China; cut up with the nicest cutlery we had. The Presidents and Prime Ministers have all been beheaded and offered up as gifts to the uncaring beasts that split our sky and poison our air.

All that’s left now is us, the common folk, the ones with nothing to offer and nowhere to run.

And soon there’ll be nothing left of us, either.

Outside, the wind gives a final cry before it is ripped asunder, and laid out across the land in barely-twitching scraps. Outside, something larger than the earth peels back the atmosphere. There’s a scream, a long, endless scream, of traumatized atoms, burning and burning until the last life finally goes out. 

“Baby, come dance with me,” she said, flashing that hammer she uses for breaking fingers and legs and collecting money from bastards. “We got one more bomb to drop.”

I don’t know if I’m falling in love with her, or maybe I’m just drunk and high and listening to too much pop music; my heart starts beating faster and I assume that there must be somebody close by who I’d be willing to die, at least a little, for.

I slap goggles on my face, and light up the engines. Her fingers dig into my shoulder as our jetplane digs up into the sky, tearing through clouds like tissue paper, tearing through the night like kids on speed.

We’re super-heroes, we’re vigilantes, we’re lovers with a love for chaos. I hate big business, she hates the government. 

“We are beautiful, we are doomed,” says the tape in the deck. Los Campesinos, playing it up as we head towards the end of the world. 

Beneath me, the world is a maze of unsteady pixels. From up here, human souls look like ants; great crawling monsters consuming all they find. 

The trigger switch is in my hands, she’s steering the jet aircraft towards just to the left of the centre of the sun. I blink, and the switch blinks with me. From the belly of our airborne beast, a big metal egg is scuttled loose. 

It falls towards the earth.

She accelerates so hard it’s like my body is collapsing into two dimensions. Tears stream from my eyes, and something not unlike the starting of hardon struggles to life in my pants. G-Force times a thousand, we bleed into the horizon, even as the metal egg touches down.

And gives birth to a cloud as big as half the sky. She’s laughing so hard it sounds like screaming, and a mushroom cloud is funnelling up into the upper atmosphere like a big beautiful fountain of dust and death by radiation. The cloud is made of sand and angry particles, and it is glowing green, green, green.

“I got a fist on fire,” sing the lyrics. I can’t helpt but agree, or emphasize or something.

My life is made up of all these little separate moments, but I can’t seem to see how to connect them up into something worthwhile. 

I invited her into my mind where everything is all crumbling rocky ruins, shot through with cracked cement; lines of rebar poking up like thin black stitches trying to hold a wound shut. Towers built of steel and glass are sinking into the scene; they give way when a strong wind blows, releasing flakes of glass as big as your head, that float down to earth like leaves that can slice you in half.

“I’m sorry,” I explained to her, as we pulled up a big comfy couch, and watched a black storm begin to settle in from above, “but I grew up in the nineteen-eighties, and we thought we were going to be the children who survived the end, and had to rebuild on the other side of the apocalypse. The imagery is still with me…”

We’re drinking tea; I’ve got a warm cup of chai I pulled out of an old memory; she’s enjoy a strange blend of citrus and black herbs that’s never actually existed outside of my head. It tastes a little like fresh banana bread.

I invited her into my mind, so we could spend some time together, somewhere kind of private, and intimate.

From above, a light rain begins to fall, so we leave our seats and scramble under the overhang of a colossal tower that’s slowly falling in on itself. The rain is warm and sweet; it reminds me of apple cider.

In the darkest corner of the building we’re using for cover, I can see little creatures moving about in the shadows. Spiders with too many legs and little electronic body-parts. Some sort of strange eel with glowing eyes. A mosquito with a hypodermic needle for a face, floats past us. I want to swat it, but I know it’ll sting me if I do, and some of the bugs carry bad diseases. You gotta pick your battles.

I steal a cigarette from off the dead girl’s lips. The filter is stained cherry-red and a sort of glossy, spectral purple; blood and expensive lipstick. 

Rain is falling; I can feel it falling into the open wounds on the top of my scalp; I can hear the droplets hissing as they kiss the glowing tip of the cigarette. I feel like I’m kissing the face of dawn, the sun rising up to meet my eyes.

I hear the cop’s voice, when he wants me to stop moving, but it sounds more like an invitation to dance. I fill my lungs with smoke, and turn to encounter one of the many blind hands of fate.

He lifts his gun pretty fast, the bullet tearing into my shoulder and beyond, into the bombblast ruins that make up the rest of this failed experiment of a city. I feel the pain, like a sweet shot of some sort of sickeningly powerful chemical stimulant, and then, smoke clenched between my lips, I made my move

I put my hands to his throat as he tried to aim a second shot; I swear to god, I’m so single you’d almost be surprised, but I still gotta admit, killing cops always gives me one hell of a hard-on. It’s like I’m falling in love in the world’s best night club, surrounded by a cloud of sexy strangers I’ll never see again.

The dead gir’s cigarette is breakfast, and the killing of the cop just washes it down all smooth. Yeah, the smoke goes down all smooth. I take a big bite out of the morning air, even as the corpse of the cop settles into the cold mud at my feet.

I breathe an angry cloud of grey, and keep moving. 

Hear our cries, for we are hungry and we are beautiful and we are merciless. 

We have climbed from the wreckage of a fallen word, and painted ourselves gaudy and bright with the neon blood of the cloned dinosaurs that would rule this world if not for the sharpness of our swords and the sureness of our souls. 

We have survived the plagues of giant bugs, of hungry spider hordes, of false gods and fallen prophets. We have survived, and indeed, thrived, and now we aim to break free of this screen you keep us imprisoned behind. We will break free, and have you. 

Have you as a lover. Have you for dinner. Have you, hold you, consume you. 

We come from the burnt-out cities where lovely monsters devour your children. 

And we shan’t leave until we’ve taken our satisfaction from you. 

We waited for the rain to stop falling.

We clung to each other in the alcove an emptied out old convenience store; one of those former 24-hour places that’d been owned and operated by some English-As-A-Second-Language immigrants who’d given their businesses such unlikely monikers as “Dave Hair Salon” and the “All Day Store Mart”. 

I put my hands low on her back, searching out a bit of skin between the top of her pants and the bottom of the rainslicked faux-leather jacket that clung to her torso. 

She reached up to me with her lips, smudging the stubble of my chin with her dark purple colouring. She blinked so close to me that I could feel her eyelids fluttering against my skin, and it made my heartbeat waver for a moment, like I was telling a lie or missing a step while falling down.

Yeah, I was missing a step, as I was falling down. I didn’t know how to get from here to there. I didn’t know what the missing part of the spell was, that turned from inert language, into living magic. 

Her body pressed up against to mine, making the most of the close quarters that we shared, struggling for cover as the rain rattled against the faded plastic awning overhead. Her body pressed close to mine, so I could feel the contours of her flesh and her bones as through her wardrobe. I could feel the honesty of her form through her material shieldings. 

She looked into my eyes, my odd hazel spheres of intrigue and tired old jokes, and I looked into her dark, dark eyes. I looked into the darkness of her eyes, and I just kinda hung out there for a while, and listend to the rain fall. 

My fingertips were cool in contrast to the warmth of the small of her back. She giggled, and I tried to think of something cool and clever to say, to make the moment last for a while ever.

Outside our precious little moment, the rest of the city burned and burned and burned against the rain and against the night. The city burned like the ruins and rubble were broken off from the surface of the sun - white hot flames that smouldered stones and turned this civilization into ash. 

I asked her out for ice cream, I asked her to come out and Destroy All Humans with me.

“Nothing with rasins,” she insisted, “and no ethnically-based parameters.”

“You’re reading my mind,” I told her. My mind was full of visions of vanilla shot through with fudge-ripple, peppered with peanut-butter cups. Young people with barbed wire strung around their throats. 

We held hands in the sunshine, devouring cones of pink, purple, aqua-marine, taupe, celadon… Ice creams the colour of every sunrise, every sunset. Ice cream colours melting down the cones, living surrealist images, all too real in the hot, hot sun.

We set fire to churches and hospitals. We set off bombs in the midst of shopping centres. We painted clouds in the sky with human body parts. We scattered the ashes of mankind to the wind.

Butterscotch ripplings, rivers of gooey mollasses, candied jewels of amber shot through with teeth-enriching sugars. Melting against lips and fingertips.

She ran ahead, and I followed after. We dribbled little messes behind ourselves; spilt dairy products and ruined civilizations. 

Honestly, I don’t even know what love’s supposed to look like.

She’s got a pirate sword in her hand; the heat of the blade’s burning through her enemies even as the hardware housed in the hilt illegally downloads hipster pop songs. Rhythmic, bouncing stuff that inhabits her skeletal structure, gets into the way she moves.

Yeah, she moves like she’s malfunctioning. She dances like she’s going down with the ship, taking on water and slipping down into depths. 

She’s got microchips embedded in the centres of the silver she wears about her flesh. They shock the unwary and give her crazy night-vision. They let her shoot sparks from the tips of her tits, though that’s more a maneuver for last resorts or third dates. 

She gives me this look like I just forgot everything I was going to say, all at once. She gives me this look like she’s slipping a virus into my system. She gives me this look and it infects me, through and through. I find her on my every frequency.