The Scorpion Game

By Daniel Jeffries

The Scorpion Game
A science fiction mystery thriller

2011 Quarter Finalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award *

“This is lovely, dark, psychedelic science fiction that will take you somewhere completely unforgettable.”
– Marissa Vu, editor of the Nat Geo Science Book and SG

In 2458, on a continent sized starship with its own atmosphere and an entire civilization churning inside, the poor live in rotting organic cities and the rich live in massive orbital mansions drifting in the clouds. When a hooker plunges from the sixty-sixth floor of an opulent nightclub and a senator is found dead in his room, the police call on Lieutenant Durante Hoskin to solve what swiftly becomes a string of murders of the rich and powerful. Now Hoskin must stop a vicious and brilliant serial killer, who’s executing the elite, erasing their backup memories and exposing their lives to an angry public, before his society explodes in open class war.

* Under the working title ‘Slow Moon Strangle’

Contains mature content and themes. Not YA.

#biopunk, #mystery, #cyberpunk, #science fiction, #high tech, #sci-fi

• Language: English
• Publisher: Daniel Jeffries
• Release date: May 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301224388

Daniel Jeffries

Dan Jeffries is an author, engineer and serial entrepreneur. During his two decades as a consultant, he’s covered a broad range of tech from Linux to networks and virtualization. From time to time, he’s known to enjoy the finer aspects of drinking, smoking and screwing. He lives with his wife and two spirit animals in sunny southern California.

Book preview

The Big Dive

2458 Orthodox Western Calendar

5156 Universal Chinese Calendar, Year of the Dragon

New Diamond City, Snowstorm Clan Roving Starship Settlement

Ain’t much left when you fall from that high, said Sergeant Quinlin to a drenched, angry Lieutenant Durante Hoskin, who’d just bulled his way through the thick crowd and into the energy bubble that cut off the crime scene from the storm. Outside the bubble, the rain came down in hard, slashing sheets.

Why didn’t someone stop the rain? said Hoskin. Washed half the fuckin’ evidence away.

Got here too late. She picked a bad time to jump, said Quinlin.

As opposed to a good time?

Hoskin stood over the body, hands curled into fists, eyes flashing, his mustache etched into his sharp features, his salt and pepper hair slicked. Under a beaten black leather jacket his fierce red shirt stood out against his dark skin.

Hoskin looked down at the covered body. The rain had already done its damage. Bits of the girl’s flesh floated lazily in blood-streaked pools. Who knew what clues the rain had already carried away?

We live in a place where they schedule the rain and nobody can get their heads outta their asses long enough to call the fuckin’ Weather Center? said Hoskin.

Right. You ever call over there? Like pissin’ into the wind, said Detective Danuba Sugarhouse Quinlin. Quinlin, a tall black man with a thick ‘fro, wore a hand-stitched, cream summer suit in a time when mites could cough one up custom in a few minutes. After an hour of rain, his suit didn’t have a drop on it. He must have waited until they had the energy bubble up over the crime scene before even getting out of his car. Hoskin looked at him and shook his head.

Nice of you to get outta the car, said Hoskin.

Quinlin mimed brushing lint from his lapel, with a grin.

Well, whadda we got? Whadda we know? said Hoskin.

Jumper. Young girl, ligature marks on the neck. Hit legs first. Wisps caught the fall, called it in.

Jumped? Or pushed?

Guess we’ll find out.

Where’d she fall from?

Up there. Sixty-sixth floor.

Hoskin followed Quinlin’s finger up the side of an organic starscraper, stretching thousands of stories into the sky, its top hidden in the swirling mists of the troposphere, its flesh filled with bright little beads that twinkled, its diamond windows glittering like a trillion eyes. Squinting, he could barely see the smashed cathedral-style window, sixty-six floors up.

We got a John Doe upstairs. Team’s up there now. Story is she killed him and took a header, said Quinlin.

Who’s ‘she’?

Whore. But no embedded IDs, so she’s Jane Doe for now. Probably brought in on an entertainment visa. DNA’s not in the records. Machines are asking around.

Quinlin pulled back the sheet slightly and Hoskin saw the tiny, telltale blood tear tattoo of the Flower Smoke Girls, a group of high-class New Diamond City whores.

We got the playback? asked Hoskin.

Yeah, said Quinlin. A holographic film of a girl falling flared over his palm like a hovering flame. Microscopic wisp cameras, floating around the city like wind-blown dust, had caught the fall in excruciating detail and blasted a distress call to police, a patrolling suicide umbrella and an ambulance through the q-nets.

The umbrella got there too late, hurtling towards the tumbling girl, unfolding like an origami mushroom, but just missing. The girl caught the edge of the umbrella and it spun her wickedly. Zoomed in, Hoskin could see the animal terror in her eyes as she screamed like her face had ripped open. In disgust, he waved the film away and it disappeared.

Hoskin looked down at the lump under the white sheet. The sheet was cruelly short, barely covering the bulk of her shattered body, but exposing the hundred thousand bits of smashed flesh splashed like vomit on the ferroconcrete street. He could see the nanothreaded pavement had sensed her hit and softened, but from that height it didn’t matter.

All right, let’s see the whole body. Where’s the tech? said Hoskin.

Shook up. Sitting over there. Saw something she wasn’t ready for, said Quinlin.

On the sidewalk’s edge a chunk of shadow sat hulking, clutching a med-scanner and an old-fashioned digital caliper used to measure bruises. It was the new girl, Zara, a rookie crime scene tech. She had six arms, a hard black shell and a face featureless except for a mouth. Hoskin couldn’t remember if the shell was common to her Phyle. Posthumanity had fractured into thousands of daughter species and he’d long since given up keeping track of all of them.

You all right? said Hoskin.

Zara shook her head.

Just stay down until you’re ready. You’ll get used to it, said Hoskin. Takes time. He put a hand on her shoulder. You’re fine. It’s someone who feels nothin’ that I worry about.

Hoskin left Zara and walked back to the jumper’s body.

Not sure even you’re ready for this one, said Quinlin.

A crowd had formed at the edge of the energy barriers and white-uniformed, white-gloved police on biomechanical stallions kept the curious at bay. Hoskin could see the sinewy muscles of the silver steeds pulsing and rippling, their flaring nostrils checking for nanocontaminants and poisons in the air, their backbrains quantum-linked to massive storehouses of chemical and forensic data. Security drones hovered in circles over the crowd, pushing reporter drones back. A lot of the crowd had come from the nearby protests of the perpetually unemployed. Their holographic signs still glowed brilliantly in the slashing rain, Death To The Kleptocrats, Machines Will Steal YOUR Job Too. They’d come just to gawk. The callousness of the crowd infuriated Hoskin.

Show me what we’re talking about here, said Hoskin.

Suddenly a gaggle of reporter drones outfoxed security and blazed forward, ripping off quick pictures. Hoskin seized one of them and smashed it on the street. It burst, its guts black and oozing. Security pods blasted the others with a freezing gel that made them boulder-heavy and they tumbled to the ground. The pods scooped the rigid bodies up and dumped them into a hovering timeloop porta-prison.

Everyone back, now, shouted Hoskin, Push all these idiots back. This is a person, not some fuckin’ sideshow for your amusement.

The cops cranked up their personal energy shields and shoved the crowd, who fell back raggedly, sizzling and screaming when the current smacked their soaked bodies.

All right, show me the body, said Hoskin.

Quinlin bent down, took a deep breath and peeled back the sheet. You asked for it.

It took a second for what Hoskin was seeing to make sense. The image wouldn’t stick. That’s how the mind protected you, he knew: like when there’s a horrible wreck and everyone looks but nobody remembers what they saw. You had to look longer if you wanted to see, push past the shock until the scene started to piece itself together like a puzzle.

A young girl lay on the street, twisted half to her left, as if she’d turned over during a nap. Her autumn burned-black hair, dashed with red fiber optic rivets, spread out around her face, which was half-smashed like a splattered pumpkin, her teeth crushed to dust. Her red and black spidersilk kimono had fallen open obscenely. Her legs and torso looked like an overturned bowl of spaghetti, the flesh utterly shredded. Hoskin had seen worse gore since he’d transferred to the New Diamond City force twenty years ago, and in his hundred and fifty plus years as a cop, but what got to him was on her nearly-intact torso: hundreds of eyes, some of them caught in a frozen blink, some of them burst like busted eggs, yolks leaking. She had six small breasts, and on her stomach were three stretched vaginas, arranged in a triangular pattern, looking like they’d just thrown up.

What the fuck am I looking at here, Sugar? said Hoskin.

Don’t know. Worst I ever seen. Some kind of fetish. Gets worse.

How?

"Rape kit showed semen in two of the—"

Remind me never to ask that again, said Hoskin, looking down.

Millions of tiny brushed-on specks of diamonds clung to the girl’s exquisite, bioluminous skin like a snug dress, a signature of the city’s nearly three million prostitutes.

A deep-welled sadness swept through him. Beneath the spliced-in fetish mutations there was still a young girl: one who’d suffered.

She’s too young, said Hoskin. Can’t be legal.

He waved his hand over her like a magician, but the scan picked up no embedded IDs, just like Quinlin had said. Definitely illegal. Could have been brought in from any planet. Lots of whores didn’t register. They called it branding. Official estimates put the number of unregistered hookers at just under a million. That was New Diamond City alone and it was only one small part of a massive, continent sized, roving, organic and exotic energy starship called the Snowstorm Clan. The ship was one of fifteen in the universe, with whole civilizations churning inside of them, complete environments stuffed with an artificial microsun and an atmosphere that mimicked an ideal Earth in a bottle. Snowstorm started as a freewheeling, floating pleasure-palace for the rich, where anything went, so it had more whores per capita than some large planets.

Outside the bubble the rain battered the street. The artificial moon drifted slowly through rips in the cloud cover.

She got no blackbox. They can’t relife her, said Quinlin.

So what? Would you wanna come back to this? said Hoskin, like he was spitting out insects. Probably doesn’t have relife insurance anyway. Cover ‘er up.

He looked down at her again. I’ll make whoever did this to ya suffer, girl. I promise you that.

A Savage Place

The girl had fallen from an opulent, two thousand story nightclub called the City of Willows, the current hot spot for the velvet rope crowd. The light-tube up to the sixty-sixth floor went deliberately and maddeningly slow, so the pleasure seekers could soak in each level. Inside the soft column of light Hoskin paced and Quinlin lounged, smoking quietly, the cigarette draped from his lips.

On the first floor they saw gambling tables, magicians, fireworks and light cages bursting with exotic animals, fans and floating flowers, shifting microrivers suspended high above the crowds by translucent light, incense booths and bubbles. One flight up they saw ice cream parlors, photographers, holographic films flickering, praying mantises in cages battling, half a dozen restaurants and troupes of tumbling actors. On another they saw shooting galleries, fan-tan tables and whores in high-collared Chinese gowns, slit up to their thighs. Seven flights up were several rows of exposed toilets, where people squatted in the center of the room, while a naked crowd surged around them dancing riotously in the low gray light to Heliochord music that changed when it reacted with the minds of the revelers, so that each heard their own song and hallucinated wildly.

Quinlin closed his eyes, listening to a message on his internal nanonets.

"Big problem," flashed Quinlin, through an encrypted nanonet band.

"What now?" flashed Hoskin.

"John Doe ain’t no John Doe."

"That’s good."

"Not when it’s Kimball Turnbull."

"Councilman Turnbull? The junior Senator?"

"The very same."

"That’s a fuckin’ disaster."

They were halfway up now. The thirty-ninth floor disrupted time, slowing it and speeding it up to the music. Hoskin froze mid-stride and then raced around the elevator as the music shifted gears and hit him with a burst of time.

"This can’t get any worse," flashed Hoskin.

Quinlin shook his head, grinning. "You want me to remind you never to say that again now or later?"

More floors passed in a blur, all of them running together: astonishing strippers in columns of hot pink light; hovering dance platforms; hundreds of bands; a red light room where women of every color and Phyle stood behind glass like delectable pastries; a floor where it rained perpetually; love letter booths with poets who scribbled in the air like sky writers; seesaws; scorpions glowing in cages of soft light; mah-jongg; a Ferris wheel that took up three floors; a topless foxy boxing room with female brawlers whose nipples stood erect as ancient Indian temples and wet women in black boots with red whips to spur them; a rollercoaster that coursed through thirty levels like a mythological snake; a dark room where flashes of pulsing light showed a twisting orgy; a mask room, where Halloween perpetually reigned; bondage floors with hideous spiked tables and huge chains; a forest room with singing trees that sung when caressed by the artificial wind; six temples; an upside down room; a hololibrary; pill and sim rooms; novelty rooms; gift shops and two floors filled with living sculptures of angry Japanese gods and demons.

The elevator stopped at a black VIP door, chiseled with hard silver script. The script sizzled like burning fat and the door broke apart, a puzzle disassembling itself. It opened on a long, red-carpeted hallway that swept towards colossal arched doors covered in Cantonese characters.

A female dwarf in a tiny bikini and carrot-beaked mask said, This way, Detectives, in a voice like honey.

She pirouetted and started down the hall, rolling like a penguin, the men following. Suddenly, she stopped and waved her hand at the wall. A glowing door appeared.

You can’t go home again, she sang and snapped her fingers. The door burst open and she waved them in.

They stepped inside and started to move. The door popped open and the hallway was gone, replaced by a low-lit Tuscan room with an elevated canopy bed, trimmed with gold lace. Crammed in everywhere were cops, hovering forensic balls, and organic camera drones. There were muddy footprints everywhere.

Hoskin burst out of the elevator. Who made these prints?

A nervous cop with a twitchy lip flipped around. He had the elongated face of the Ando Phyle.

Lieutenant? said Twitchy.

I said, who made these fucking prints and fucked up this goddamn crime scene? said Hoskin.

The kid looked at his feet. "I—I don’t know, sir."

Well find out, and get every cop who is contaminating my crime scene out of this room now.

Yes, sir, said Twitchy, who darted away.

The bedroom spilled into a massive, open living room surrounded by giant, cathedral-style windows. Priceless imported paintings from the Hydra art movement of the early 2200s rearranged themselves on the ceiling, changing depending on who looked at them. Butter-soft leather couches circled a stone dipping pool with a nubile, golden-balled boy spouting water in its center.

Hoskin saw signs of a struggle: a shattered Indian vase; orchids with crushed stems; an overturned table; blood splatters illuminated by the gentle glow of a hovering diamond chandelier. Kimball Turnbull’s big body lay on the floor by the bed.

The rain and wind roared outside the busted central window where the girl had taken the swan dive. The shattered glass glittered.

Hoskin walked to the window’s edge and looked out. The wind was strong and he could feel it tugging at him. A sudden sensation of falling hit him, and for a moment he thought he could see the girl as she jumped in his mind. He took a few steps back and turned to look at the body.

The orca-fat Turnbull lay on his back. Tiny forensic spiders crawled his fat slowly, trolling for trace evidence. Hoskin walked over and squatted by the corpse. He sucked air through his teeth as he studied the body.

Some of the cops saw Quinlin and raised a shout, clapping him on the back and slapping hands. Shugggaaaa.

Whaddya say, Shug? said a bouncy, fat cop.

Light and sweet, baby, light and sweet, said Quinlin with a wink. Laughs, smiles.

Get over here. Stop fucking around, said Hoskin.

Aww, you never let me have any fun, mommy, said Quinlin.

Hoskin swatted the forensic spiders away and dictated to a steno-bot. His eyes snapped rapid pictures. We’ve got five irregular wounds to the torso. Height is consistent with a small attacker. Shredded flesh outlines, cauterized skin, probably from a fission blade. Congealed blood. Tissue around the wounds is inflamed…

He stopped, rubbed his wiry stubble and stood up. With a cocked head he examined the body.

Something’s not right here, said Hoskin.

His backbrain pulled up a crime recreator program. He let his eyes drift over the scene slowly and it went to work, pulling in all the details. The blood spatter, the wounds, the signs of the struggle all fed the system. It started to render the scene in 3D in front of him in quick flashes. He watched as a holographic ghost of the girl stabbed the man with five vicious strikes. She was shorter than him and the wounds were all at chest height.

Hoskin stood over the body and looked closely. The 3D playback glitched out when the victim collapsed. It tried to correct itself, but failed. Hoskin rolled the recreation back and watched the girl stab the guy again until it skipped and stuttered again, unable to get the angles of the fall right from the visual evidence. He blinked the program off.

It’s glitching. It thinks the guy should have fallen right here, said Hoskin, pointing to a spot a few steps away from where the body lay.

Just rip off a vSelf, check it out, said Quinlin.

Quinlin blinked and Hoskin knew he was fracturing up his mind into virtual copies. He could run the crime recreator with a dozen different inputs that way. Hackers like Quin loved the tech. They could get things done in a fraction of the time.

You use that shit too casually, said Hoskin. We ain’t meant to focus on fifty things at the same time. You miss stuff that way.

Nah. Exact opposite. You catch more stuff. Why you always got to do it the hard way? said Quinlin.

"The right way is the hard way."

Hoskin shook his head. He looked down at the awkwardly positioned body.

vSelves ain’t nothing but a tool. Use ‘em. Just use ‘em only when you need to. And I don’t need crutches, I already see what’s glitching it anyway. He pointed at the Senator. This ain’t right. This body was moved. Probably flipped.

Hoskin squatted and mimed how the killer would have turned the body over.

Yeah but how’d the girl do that? She was a tiny little thing, said Quinlin. Look at the size of this guy.

She could have used something for leverage or somebody else coulda got in here, helped her cover it up.

Or maybe she got augments?

Hoskin flashed down to Zara, the crime scene tech. "Check if our girl out there got any augments."

"You got it," Zara flashed back.

Latex oozed from the pores in Hoskin’s hands, hardening into gloves. He reached under Turnbull’s head. Hoskin flipped the enormous man like he was flipping a car. On the back of the Senator’s neck Hoskin found what he was looking for, or rather what was missing: someone had cut open the base of Turnbull’s skull and ripped out his memory stack.

There we go, said Hoskin. No blackbox. Now what whore stabs a man, cuts out his blackbox and then jumps to her death?

***

Who’s in charge on this floor? said Hoskin.

He’s already waiting for you, Detectives, said the dwarf, as the light-door opened onto another room, this one made entirely of dark flesh. Gnarled bone tables twisted up from the floor, their tops stacked with exotic drinks in heavy goblets. Blood-colored, curved couches lined the room’s edges, the couches crusted with strange couples. Six dwarf boys in living red masks writhed with a tall black man with no eyes. A fat woman with horns molested a short Asiatic man with feather ticklers.

Oily, leather-clad servos ferried drinks through the knotted crowds. Nude women stood at the center of every group. A fat woman stood, tethered to shockwires held by a horde of masked men, her fat rippling as they hit her again and again with electricity. Another woman had grotesquely augmented feet. Men cowered around her, licking them. A biomechanical sex toy strutted past, just legs and ass, then another that was just a torso with tits like asteroids, no head, no arms. Black sculptures of naked women in countless positions stood around the room. A mediawall flashed intense close-ups of twisting, plastic-wrapped bodies. The place smelled of oil and sweat.

A pack of dark men in shimmering spidersilk suits and grotesque biomech masks huddled together like a pack of grizzled hyenas. Behind them, hovering, shimmering red glowglobes threw out a violent light. Around them a cluster of genesculpted whores in babydoll dresses stood submissively on surgically-inserted heels like exotic grazing animals.

A maskless man stepped forward, flanked by two massive men and five obscenely dressed young women, their skin luminous.

Detective Hoskin, said the man, involuntarily gritting his teeth, like he wore dentures two sizes too big. He had a fierce face, as if chiseled from stone, and a fat artificial nose. He wore a dark red Mandarin suit with white cuffs that hung open to show a storm of holographic dragons goring each other on his exposed stomach. Tattooed rattlesnake skin covered his neck and chest, the scales oil-on-water shiny. He had prosthetic hands that looked heavy as sledgehammers, the fingers caked in thick jewels that flickered like jumping flames in the light.

Hoskin knew him. His profile flashed into Hoskin’s eye: Barrelhaus; friends called him Vaseline; half-Chinese, half-whatever, a mutt; brutal enforcer for the Mountain Snake Triad; rank 426, in line for Incense Master; notorious and ever-hungry pedophile. All of it unprovable, of course. Hoskin blinked the profile away.

How the little girls treatin' ya? said Hoskin.

Tasty as always, said Vaseline, and he bit the air. Bring 'em up young is how I say. Keep 'em tender. Like those little lambs they never let stand up.

He scratched his neck violently.

You got big fuckin' problems other than your love of little girls, Vaso, said Hoskin, smiling. You got a body upstairs and a body all over the street. But here's the best part: the girl's underage. You know what that means? Means we're gonna tear this fuckin' place apart. We're gonna expose everything. We're gonna flip you over and shine a light up your ass just to make sure you ain't hidin' nothing.

Go ahead, little piggy. I'll make sure I don't wipe, said Vaseline, scratching his nose and forearms. Flakes of skin erupted like dirty snow and whirled around.

And I’m thinking you’re a part of this too, said Hoskin. Maybe you got in there, saw what happened, tried to cover it up? Maybe snatched the blackbox off the Senator? Or you coulda set the whole thing up? Somebody wants the Senator out of the way and they call you?

I got no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.

One of the girls to the left of Vaseline looked scared. She stood gingerly, looking down at the floor, brushing back strawberry-blonde hair from pixie ears. The girl reminded him of someone, though he couldn’t think of who.

You all right, girl? Hoskin said to her.

She looked up, her Asiatic eyes wide. Me?

Yeah.

She looked away again, quickly.

She's tip-top, said Vaseline.

I don't remember asking you a goddamn thing. I was askin' her. What’s your name?

Sakura.

You all right?

"I'm—I'm fine." She didn't look up.

See? Just like I said. Couldn't be better, said Vaseline, smiling.

You open your mouth again and you'll be picking your teeth outta your shit, said Hoskin.

You don’t talk to me like that in my own place.

Vaseline lunged, a rhinoceros on fire. Hoskin’s nanonet systems flared red and he dogged a sledgehammer punch, nanonets assisting his muscles like computerized steering. Hoskin’s fists flashed with astonishing speed. A brutal right cross caught Vaseline in the soft tissue of his neck, the fist slipping slightly on the slick tattooed skin then digging in, the false middle knuckle cutting the flesh and releasing a surge of paralyzing chemicals that exploded through his blood stream and spread like a gasoline fire. Vaseline went rigid and the second cross dropped him. Hoskin leaped on him, a storm of spiders crawling from his suddenly stretched pores. The spiders expanded and bit into Vaseline’s hands, clamping them together. They chained together to form larger spiders. Hoskin’s pores snapped back to size.

Vaseline’s bodyguards charged forward like prize fighters but Hoskin and Quinlin’s gun hands flashed up, glowing fiercely with barely restrained energy. The megaloids stepped back slowly.

Now you shouldn’t have gone and done that, said Quinlin to Vaseline. Assaulting an officer.

Lawyers in the shadows bounded up and held glowing holographs of already-prepared lawsuits. You mean police brutality, said the shortest one.

Never heard of it, said Quinlin, with a grin.

I’ll add ‘em to my collection, said Hoskin, waving the lawsuits into his memory stack.

Hey, I gotta itch real bad, said Vaseline, unable to move.

Hoskin waved and one of the mega-spiders split in two. One of them crawled up and clamped down on Vaseline’s mouth, "Hey, He—"

Next time try moisturizer, said Quinlin.

Hoskin stood up, dusting himself off. He took Sakura’s hand. It felt incredibly soft. She looked up at him with huge eyes.

You really all right? We can help you. If they did anything to you we’ll make ‘em pay. You just let me know, said Hoskin.

Invisible nanosnakes slithered from Hoskin’s pores and crawled into Sakura’s. In seconds he knew they’d swim through her blood rivers and display a message across her eyes that only she could see. He saw it startled her, but he smiled and she relaxed. His message packet said Detective Dante Hoskin. Call me if you need anything. This number will reappear whenever you need it. His private number glowed in soft blue beneath the floating words before fading slowly.

No, sir. They treat me fine, she said, looking over her shoulder. Thank you.

The Lesson

2398 Orthodox Western Calendar

5096 Universal Chinese Calendar, Year of the Phoenix

Edgelands Ghettos, Snowstorm Clan Roving Starship Settlement

When he was only seven, Salaris Venadrik learned the most important lesson of his life as his mother screamed what are you doing? over and over again.

Never tell the truth.

Later on, countless circumstances would reinforce that lesson, but he first learned it that day when his mom screamed at him. Later, he knew that when he told the truth most people didn’t like him. They thought he was wicked or evil or stupid.

That day, so many years back, he’d sat in the long uncut grass that ran along the side of his apartment cluster, cutting apart one of the squirrel-rat fusions that ruled the Edgelands Ghettos. It was a quiet spot, one only he knew about. At least he’d thought he was the only one.

He liked to listen to the apartments dying, all of them wheezing and choking as their nervous systems shut down from lack of maintenance. It was a good place to get away from his father’s whippings and his mother’s episodes. His father had RDed from an overdose a year earlier so the whippings stopped. It wasn’t his real dad anyway, so he didn’t care. His mother didn’t believe in relifeing, so he Real Deathed. People died because God said they should, she said. That was God’s way, the natural way, the right way.

Sometimes he played with his little Anima doll there. He called her Reese. She had big eyes filled with brilliant, swirling colors that shifted depending on the angle you saw them from. He’d found the doll in the alley. He loved her eyes and her soft purple hair and the way she moved. She cooed whenever he pet her hair. She said nice things to him. Sometimes when mommy yelled at him he would pet her hair for hours and it made him feel better. He hoped mommy wouldn’t ever find her and take her, so he kept her hidden in a tiny rip in the wall outside his house.

But today he didn’t have the doll. Instead, he’d captured the little rodent, brought it to his secret spot and sliced it open from tail to neck using a small fission knife that he’d stolen from school. It lay there quivering, looking up at him, its eyes huge and round, staring at him in unbearable pain. He wished it would stop staring. He just wanted to see what it looked like inside, but it wouldn’t stop shaking. Just as he was about to slice into one of those hateful eyes, a shadow swept over him.

My God, what are you doing? What have you done, you sinful little monster? his mother screamed.

He turned and saw her.

I just wanted to see what it looked like, Momma.

She grabbed his arm and whipped him around. His knife almost cut her, could have cut her. Inside, he knew he wanted to cut her. He hated himself for thinking that. His stupid mind was always thinking stupid thoughts that wouldn’t go away. There were always these…ideas…that bubbled up from somewhere deep in his mind. His mom’s eyes blazed fiercely. He dropped his knife.

It’s not my fault, Momma. I just wanted to see what it looked like inside. I kept thinking it and thinking it and then I had to do it, so it would go away, he said, not able to look her in the eyes.

You evil, evil little creature, she screamed, her face hideous, vengeful, ugly. Wicked, wicked, hateful monster.

She laid into him, beating him viciously. He dropped to the ground and rolled into a ball, but it didn’t help. She was kicking him and kicking him. He wanted to reach out and grab his knife and make her stop for good, but he didn’t. He held that thought in. Later he would get her. One night he would take every knife from the kitchen and put them all around her while she slept, points facing her, and then stand there waiting for her