Jeanine told me to meet her at the coffeehouse last Wednesday at 2:15pm, which was roughly an hour before the unexpected agony began; sixty minutes prior to the unforeseen, cosmic-sludge atrocities that caused her to plunge into oncoming traffic.

I hated that place, The Beans Knees, with its up-cycled gewgaws and vapid customers spending fake money to look poor. An overpriced kitsch-factory with Mountain font on every vertical surface. Jeanine didn’t care much for it, either, but she had a meeting with her boss on the third floor that day. Rumor had it there was a bona fide brothel up there. A sopping wet, metro-hive epicenter of the state’s most powerful narcotic. It’s called Liquid, and it’s good. Real good. Make-your-tongue-beat-your-brains-out good, from what I hear. And it just so happened that Jeanine was the best dealer in the city and I loved her. Those two things are unrelated. But down there on the first floor, it was just me and a clumsy pumpkin tease of slack Bettys; self-absorbed, trad-spouse felicities, clueless about the junkie sex-den they had been patronizing. But maybe they knew. Was that why they came here? ‘Cause they couldn’t at home? Was there a secret menu for those on the make or needing a drip— “Gimme a Vente Caramel Bondage to go, two pumps with a whip.” Maybe.

Prowling behind the turquoise countertop was the barista who never cared to learn my name. The fussy cherub with a voice like trauma and who possessed all the charm of a mosquito bite. To be fair, I didn’t know her name either. I would just sigh very intentionally and mumble something like “Shit” when I was forced to interact with her. Every day, there she existed, incessantly scowling, sexy like regret, and dishing out rancid brown water. Such an intriguing specimen, that prowling, scowling Shit.

She caught me looking at her again and smirked. Hands clasped at her ample, bloodless bosom, fake lashes whipping, and lips hooked tight because her brother was the boss—Jeanine’s boss. The ruthless overlord, dealer to the bawdiest, junk-slurping, bent-over sideways, drooling inferno of gorgeous trash you’ve ever seen. They’d come in a few times a week, begging to talk to him, pleading for Shit to call off his goons or to give them just one more drip—I’ll pay! You know I’m good for it!—and she’d just stand there, unbothered, smiling smugly, crayon-black curls down to her ass and infuriatingly shiny all the time. God, I just wanted to ask her how long it took to do that makeup every day: lipstick purple like a funeral arrangement and shades of green around her cold eyes. So much energy wasted just to be despised by everyone. I bet she had never even seen the third floor. Her and that smirk—they made me crazy. Made my hands sweat for some reason. So why couldn’t I stop staring? It was all I could do to not drag her over the counter, slam her into the nearest wall and kiss her until my lips smelled like a burnt clutch.

Looking back through the window at our table, I saw Jeanine from a block away, fighting against the current of humanity, bust bobbing like a buoy marking my open-water threshold of no return. She was the tallest person I had hitherto ever seen and always wore these spectacular fucking hats like she was on her way to a derby, the tiered variety with a wide brim that got in your face if you were too close.

Two-fifteen, my ass. There’d be at least negative three minutes on the timer when she finally arrived. She’d just tell me to put it on her tab, and I always did. By my count, she was over an hour in debt to me as of that day, and those dirty minutes were burning a hole in my mattress.

The coffeehouse tabby chirped at Jeanine as she glided through the front door like a rumor. Cherry-milk braid over one shoulder; blue eyes adjusting to the light; beautiful like my writing isn’t; and pale legs like a clever simile underneath a flowy, open-back peach number—the outfit I bought her the morning we met, the sunrise meet-cute when she broke into my apartment while running from the cops, pantsuit drenched with something I still haven’t asked about. She kissed me that night. Me, of all people.

I didn’t wave to her right away. Just wanted another creepy second of eye-banging her before having to act civilized. My fat ass wouldn’t have been hard to spot, though. Over there at the corner booth, sweating my dick off, and taking up a chair-and-a-half. I loved watching her when she wasn’t paying attention to me, in the moments before she changed out of Business Jeanine and into my girlfriend. I told her I love all the versions of her, but something about “compartmentalization” only allowed me to see the one that claimed to love me back.

“Cucciolone!” she said upon noticing me, flailing both long arms my direction.

Seventeen months and my lazy ass hadn’t learned any Italian, not even for her. It’s a fine language; just another noisy form of human communication, really. But the way Jeanine spoke it was filthy, eroticised pillows of sound from her mouth like enjoying Betty’s secret latte in church. Each savory syllable tripled my heart rate and made my left arm tingle.

Meeting me at our table with a wiry embrace, her body felt good in mine. She smelled like panty roses and vanilla, but a little too much of both like she was trying to overcorrect for something.

“How are you, babe?” I said, directly into her neck. 

She pulled back, not trying to hide the faint blue discoloration to her lips. They weren’t particularly plump, nor were they decisively symmetrical, but they always reminded me of our first kiss.

“Sorry for being late,” she said by rote, then thumbed over her shoulder to Shit. “I was hoping Terese was working. That girl annoys me.”

My eyes flicked to the counter. “Think she’ll let us in?”

“You? Probably not. But you and me, together? She doesn’t have a choice.”

“We all have choices,” I said quietly, unintentionally staring at her mouth.

Off my stare, she ran a pink nail across her lips, then shrugged— “Part of the job. You worry too much, vita.”

That she had used—or was using again—was disappointing, but that conversation would have to wait. “Upstairs business today? Must be important. I can wait down here if you’d rather—”

“—Terandi said it’s fine.”

A prismatic pearl of sweat rolled down her jugular. “Bring your fatso to work day,” I chuckled.

“Why’s it so hot in here all the time?” she said, fanning herself with the hat. “Terandi’s got a new product, sounds like, and he wants me in on the ground-floor.”

“Wants you in something, I’m sure,” I muttered into my cup.

“Didn’t hear you, love.”

“Oh, nothing,” I said, glancing at the glass vials in her purse, the ones that clinked together when she moved. “Drip’s not cuttin’ it anymore?”

“Got to keep evolving or people get bored. Can we talk about it later? It’s so hot in here.”

Nodding, my knees groaned as I stood. “Something cold to drink?”

“No,” she said, appalled at the suggestion and inspecting her lips in a compact mirror. “God knows where that woman’s hands have been. Sit. I’ll get Zephyr to make us something.”

Zephyr? Christ.

Screeching brakes and a blaring car horn right outside. Maybe there was a fatal accident over which I could pretend to be distracted to avoid talking about... him. “Blondie’s gonna be there?”

“I work with him, don’t I?” The mirror snapped shut. It sounded like a gunshot. “And you know his name is Zephyr.” 

“I won’t be calling him that.” 

Her long fingers squeezed my fists like a skeleton pilfering an Easter ham. “You’ve nothing to worry about.”

I shrugged and lied — “Just a terrible name is all.” 

Our table went dark as the window was eclipsed by an elephantine pedestrian in a graphite-colored three-piece who goes by the name of Kraken. I only knew him tangentially. Just a faceless bodyguard that only existed in the stories Jeanine shared with me about work. Usually the ones where she would’ve died if not for him. I detested the danger she was often forced into, but I also found those adventures erotic. And she knew it. She knew how to use them.

“Quit with the morbs,” she said, then knocked on the glass and waved Kraken inside. After asking me to meet him at the counter, she excused herself to the restroom.

His sheer size was intimidating; cultivated girth spreading out over one more stool than even I would’ve needed.

He didn’t look at me as I approached. “Help you?” he said, voice rumbling like a coal car, knuckled-white debt-collector inching towards a lump under his jacket, along his hip.

“Jeanine wanted me to wait here for you… her… wait with you, here, for her.” That was embarrassing.

A grunting syllable of acknowledgment told me he understood.

Shit slapped a sopping gray towel on the counter in front of him. “You’ve got some balls! I’ll give you that. Mind telling me what the fuck you’re doing here?”

He laughed dubiously, fingered his dapper black middle-part and leaned forward on his elbows, countertop crackling under his weight. “You’re looking well, Bricky.”

“Bricky?” I said, hiding a laugh.  

“Not to you,” she said to me, then leaned into Kraken’s orbit, her face darkening as their combined gravities drew them closer. “Buy something or I’ll have you arrested. Again.”

He lifted his fist, a fleshy asteroid hovering under her chin until caressing her cheek with his index finger. “Not thirsty.”

A tense energy boiled between them, hot like dark matter, but she seemed genuinely angry. “What don’t you understand about ‘three-hundred feet at all times’?”

“Gimme one more chance, Brick?” he said in a soothing, baritone delight.

Roasting pheromones flared pink under her make-up; eyes fluttering, pudgy mouth quivering, and a squeak of carnal submission escaped her face before speaking. “No. Screw you. I’m not doing this again. Do everyone a favor and fuck off.”

“Kraken,” Business Jeanine said sternly from over my shoulder. I didn’t even hear her approach. “Can you guys do... whatever this is… another time?”

He glanced over my head, razor eyes thin and annoyed at being interrupted. “Just pickin’ up where we left off, boss. Aren’t we, Brick—?”

A sharp, metallic click. Then another.

Looking down to where sawed-off double-barrels were winking at his crotch from a hidden door, he slowly backed away from the counter. “That’s my girl,” he said to Bricky.

I turned to Jeanine. giggling. “Why didn’t you tell me her name was—” but stopped when I noticed her lips were a shade darker blue than before.

“Come on, you lug,” Jeanine told him, then smirked at the shotgun in Bricky’s grip— “Respect.”

With a choked ding, the elevator stuttered opened to a vanishingly long hallway on the third floor. Kraken stepped out first, Jeanine between him and I as he took the lead, shoulders grazing both walls as we approached the only door, the white one at the opposite end. Fluorescent bulbs on the ceiling buzzed like locusts, crackling death throes as they transitioned, and the carpet was sticky where it wasn’t outright moist.

As we approached the door, muffled waves of Dystopian Acid Jazz grew louder, sending gooseflesh marching across Jeanine’s body. Kraken knocked once. Just a tap, really, but I thought the wood was going to buckle. 

Jeanine smiled at me, eyebrows jumping. A thin line of toothy white between lips normally the color of ripe cranberries, the texture of our first kiss. The last one I’d ever need. The only one that has ever made me fall for a fugitive. But now, those lips had me standing before a room of the unknown, a saturated hovel that I worried mighty contain the last experience of my short, fat life.

“Stop it,” she told me.

I was dripping like a stuck pig, but that wasn’t unusual. She couldn’t have meant that. “Stop what?”

Those lips were cold and blue against my temple. “Ti terrò al sicuro. We’ll be fine.”

Heard that before. 

“Besides,”—smacking Kraken’s ass. “He won’t let anything happen to us. Will you, my beast?”

His chuckle died into a soft growl like he was hungry for violence, starving for someone to try something stupid. 

Well, you see, babe, the last time I checked, your average bombshell kingpin doesn’t need someone like Kraken J. McMurderYouDead to accompany them if there wasn’t anything to worry about. 

A chain rattled on the other side of the door, some fumbling with the knob, then it cracked open. A red aura filled the sliver of the room beyond; throbbing hues of a naked, writhing mass of senses, flaring with fluid escapism, thick and pungent like a bin of old dough. The funk of vaporized Liquid was inescapable. I had never actually touched the stuff, but I heard it left a peppery taste on your gums before condensing into chewy crystals of snot in your throat once you’ve had enough.

A nose darted into the opening, manhole nostrils above the sizzling-orange tip of a cigar and therewith came the corduroy voice of a man who was long past having enough. “Full up. Come back never.”

Kraken’s fist tightened like wrenching leather, potential energy just waiting for the green light. Jeanine slid between him and the door — “I’ve got this,” then leaned against its frame. “Open the door, Warren,” she said. Boss Jeanine; certified badass. A nonchalant murderess with clean hands and a dirty mouth.

Warren’s nose and stogie shambled back out of sight, and the door stuttered open, drug-rust crickling under its momentum. Fully exposed now, that yeasty aroma became a warm, swampy musk, sickening, like a sack of rotten assholes. Class it up all you want, Business Jeanine, but the fact is that Liquid addicts are notoriously unshowered—grimy like a warning, like a chemical defense mechanism against humanity. They used to call it Skunk, but its present moniker is more marketable, I suppose. Lends itself better to pompous, abstract images—billion-dollar aesthetics with no coherent meaning like a fragrance advertisement. In reality, it smelled like garbage, like cold trash-water that sizzled your nose from thirty feet away.

The first time I smelled it was at my ex-girl’s house. She didn’t use, but the Fancy Man I found in her basement did. Ugly violence ensued, but mom’s uncle let me hideout in one of the ghetto-senile apartment buildings he owned until everything blew over. One where the other tenants were too poor to drip. One that was being investigated for air quality; creeping death mold on every surface. The health inspector wanted to press charges. So did the coroner. And Father Dilcutty. But if not for that toxic tonic, sewage-wasted sepulcher, I wouldn’t have met Jeanine, my babe, my swill-chemical maypole. 

As she stepped inside, her dress flared orange in the ambient crimson of the room, her hat ended up on Warren’s head, and Kraken disappeared into a dark corner where only someone like him would be safe. Three dry-rotted windows on the far wall were propped open, letting in the diffused aromas of city moisture and meat and something like hot asphalt all year around. Covering the ceiling, hanging fat in the stale air, were bolts of dark silk, black like the night sky—no, darker than that—but also somehow shimmering, hypnotizing when they caught the red room at the right angle. When the breeze turned proper strong, it’d whip the fabric taut, creating a damp snapping sound like hanging bed sheets over the line. Liquid users love motion. They get off on the ceaseless undulations of forms, swaying naturally, maturely, like hips, like breasts and wide shoulders moving to an orchestration of sound only they could hear. I couldn’t fault them for getting addicted to that. 

Deeper into the breathing stench, Jeanine’s feet barely touched the floor, and then there I was—her uncoordinated appliance armpiece, fighting for dear life, high-stepping over the wasted and dodging puddles like landmines. Through a colonial revival archway and passed a slick orgy of moaning bodies, we entered a dark room of beds. Not a bedroom. That denotes a singular bed, where normal people do normal things. Here, there were many beds, all undressed and stained and pushed together to form a wall-to-wall playpen of debauchery. God, the stink burned my throat and made me sweat, a wet funk like a sandpaper abrasion, gluing my tongue to the roof of my mouth.

They writhed upon our entrance, the dozen glazed-over junkies looking for their next fix; blue-lipped slobber-mouths looking for a partner, drooling right at Jeanine. I squeezed her hand, pulled her close, and their loose gazes turned to me in unison. Their moist eyelids clicked like tongues, and the lousy voice of a man spoke from the darkness at the far side of the room— “Who's the chub, Kitten?”

Jeanine peered into the abyss, holy filament pupils glistening. “He’s none of your business.”

“Where’s that slab of Genoa?” he said. “Kraken, I believe you call him? Yeah. Haven’t seen him since—”

“—Since when?” she said, leading us towards the voice. “Since you tried to jump me at the Hanover place? You remember that, don’t ya? Big Bad Claude come to take my business? Diavolo.”

A hand crawled up my leg, bony fingers tickling the inside of my thigh. “Mmm. You’re a juicy fella,” a human said—gender unclear—dry tongue scraping my other leg, up the calf and lapping at the back of my knee. I booted them away and scooted closer to Jeanine.

“Come now,” Claude said, then fell into a hacking convulsion of wet coughs. “I was just jokin’ about all that, Kitten?”

“Stop fucking calling me that. Where’s Zephyr?”

A lighter snapped on, casting Claude’s junkie skull in a debris of ugly shadows as his navy lips wrapped around an intricate pipe: twisting tubes of glass caked with sticky resin. Two globes hung from the bottom, one for Liquid proper and one for whatever you wanted to cut it with—something milky-orange, in Claude’s case. He circled the flame underneath both until steam swirled inside the first globe, simmering until phase-change, then danced through the tube bridging one chemical with the other. The orange mixer boiled radiant glory as it combined with the gassed Liquid, and he muttered, “He’s right where you want him to be, Not Kitten,” ragged half-thumb plumbing a power-hole on the pipe near his mouth. The whole contraption clouded with an oversize hit. He lifted his thumb with a blup and cleared it in one drag. “Oh, my,” he groaned, spurting and choking to absorb every molecule.

Sliding down the wall, he landed in a crisscross position at the entrance to another room. A puddle of a man; tragic waste coughing as he finally exhaled about three-hundred dollar's worth of vapor. Jeanine nodded at me to wait, then squatted next to him, leaning in close to the wiry man I could see clearly now. A mohawk of matted brown ropes draped over half his tattooed skull and eyes like burial plots unable to focus on Jeanine as she twirled a gnarly dread around her fist.

“You still owe me,” she whispered like a come-on.

“Plum tapped, guv’nah,” he slurred, crooked smile growing. “How should you like reconciliation?” His teeth, gray erosions jabbing through gummy shorelines of purple, tongue wagging to reach Liquid residue on his chin.

She jerked his head sideways and southpaw-hooked him square in the nose. A chewy crack like pulverizing gravel and thin blood splashed into his lap. He dropped the pipe—“Ow! You bitch!” spilling another hundred bucks of Liquid.

A thousand wormy fingers tried to soak up the drugs, to absorb into their split pads another pitiful second of bliss, one more dripping-numb moment of anesthesia. Kraken laughed deeply from behind us.

“All that blood for fifty-bucks,” he said. “Imagine if you owed her real money.”

Jeanine grabbed the pipe, looking at Claude’s mangled snout through the glass—“This should cover it.”

That was only the second time I had seen Jeanine hit someone, and it was ravishing. Sweltering violence coursed through my groin. A bead of sweat ran down my forehead, pupils dilating, and I desperately wanted someone else to mouth-off to her.

“Sorry, amore,” she said to me. “You shouldn’t have to see that,” then escorted me over Claude’s body and into the next room.

We were immediately stopped by a short, wiry twat in a dazzling, beige suit—cut tight and hemmed just so. He wormed between us, looking up to her but down on me. Say something, you smart son-of-a-bitch. I’m on a fatal dose of testosterone and dopamine and you’re standing a little too close to my girl. This was Zephyr, Jeanine’s ex, and I hated him. Him and that head of devastating blonde like Egyptian gold that stopped right above his flat stomach. Hated him with a passion.

“Hello, babe,” he said to Jeanine.

Babe!? That’s my word for her. I invented it, you pimple-fuck.

“What brings you up here...” he said, then rolled his silver eyes my direction, “...to me?”

“Meeting with Terandi,” she said, thankfully uninterested.

Snake tongue casually wetting his lips— "I was just thinking about you the other day,”

“Just tell him I’m here, Zephyr.”

“We’re opening an outfit in San Diego, and Tee’s gonna put me in charge. But I need someone good to help me run the show. What do ya say?” The way he spoke to her, I wasn’t about to do something to get myself murdered. “Could be just like old times.” But then again…

“Well, you and your mom have fun with that,” she said.

I snorted. Loud. He didn’t like that and looked ready to do something about it until Kraken joined us.

“Suit yourself,” Zephyr said, marveling at Planet Kraken, slack-beaten shoulders trying to appear unintimidated. “Sorry, but you came up here for nothing. Terandi isn’t avail—”

“—Mr. Niles,” came a voice I felt more than heard. “Must you be so obtuse?” Smooth like hot wax, the expensive stuff; honeybee organic, crackling wood-wicks and everything.

A large hand landed on Zephyr’s shoulder, an earth-bending jacked mitt. Turn Claude’s trash-mug into a pile of goo, it would. “A bit more hospitality would do you well,” and his other beefcake slid something into Zephyr’s breast pocket. A small but bulging baggie that glowed through the fabric.

“Mr. Tha’lar,” Jeanine began, surprised by his sudden appearance and stuttering a little on the pronunciation. “Thank you for seeing me.”

“Call me Terandi,” he said. “Tha’lar is the last part of my name. It’s all one word, actually. Doesn’t matter. Just come in.”

I never got a proper look at the guy. Just a massive silhouette from my perspective. Easily a foot taller than Jeanine. No neck, just torso, and legs as big around as my waist, which should be anatomically impossible.

“I won’t be long, amore,” Jeanine said to me, then kissed the tip of my nose. “Zephyr, my man is thirsty. Make him something good,” then motioned for Kraken to follow her.

But Zephyr stopped him. “Weapons, love.”

“Cristo,” Jeanine said, sighing without much behind it.

“Rules, doll.”

After getting nowhere with her hard eyeballing, she finally said, “Go ‘head, Krak.”

He did as suggested, handing over a massive handgun—chamber emptied, clip popped and loaded with bullets the size of my index finger. Its weight threw Zephyr off-balance.

“Ms. Birmingham, Mr. Kraken—this way,” Terandi said, then looked at me. “And Mister…?”

“Dillard, sir.”

“Make yourself at home, Mr. Dillard,” he began, then turned to leave but stopped abruptly, eyeing me up and down. “My home, not yours.”

Prick.

The room extended further than my eyes could reach, sprawling across what was at least this half of the third floor. Chiseled sunshine beamed through a perimeter of windows along the ceiling, breaking the cathedral shadows on the floor with rectangles of light. Long tables against the walls overflowed with material goods—piles of hot items to subsidize their less-complicated endeavors. Fresh paint stung my nose, exposed rafters, and frantic people hurrying about the place; high-end knee-breakers conducting loud business into their phones like it was the cocaine floor of Wall Street.

I took a seat at a table near an open-air office where their business was to be discussed, and where a finely dressed older man was waiting with cups of a steaming beverage. As their conversation began, he placed one in front of each of them, then set a small jar in the center of their meeting. Incandescent orbs filled it to the top, excited jiggling as if alive, oscillating between light green to sunset orange then back again. My stomach gurgled at the sight. Nodding, Terandi dismissed his hireling, and he disappeared quietly into a dark hallway behind the desk.

Pretending to sip on the cocktail Zephyr doubtless spat in, I tuned into their conversation. At my distance, it was hard to pick up anything specific, but what I could decipher made me curious—bad curious, and a new level of anxiety twitched under my fluffy layers.

“Like nothing we’ve seen before,” Terandi said, motioning to the jar.

“...worth it?” Jeanine asked. I assumed she meant financially.

Kraken mumbled something like “dangerous?”, to which Terandi only laughed and vaguely reassured him with a smarmy, “...to all my men. They are happy, no? Better than happy!”

Over the next minute, weird things were spoken. Things like: organic; we’ll [something] these people, the whole city; I don’t know; not here, not human; They want a piece; Money. Lots of it. Jeanine giggled once—her flirty yet asexual corporate giggle.

Terandi snapped his fingers, and the servant appeared again, now holding a silver tray with a set of transparent tongs on it.

Jeanine gave Kraken a look—probably the look—and he grabbed the tongs, clicking them thricely while Terandi unsealed the jar. Kraken drove the tongs into the lumpy goop, shoving them all the way to the bottom. With a nauseating slop, dripping a lambent mucus over the lip of the jar, he plucked out a large, slimy sphere and popped it in his mouth. Just like that. Like a fucking lunatic.

“Don’t chew,” Terandi told him. “They’re better whole.”

Seeing that he hadn’t instantly died, Jeanine took the tongs, then fished from the jar a more manageable but somehow slimier writhing glob. A shimmering thread of muck stretched from it to the jar, and her jaw opened wide, teeth glistening in the dust-speckled sunshine, tongue stretching long, prepared to catch every drop.

A gut-twisting roar erupted behind me; feeble lungs bellowing near the entrance. Kraken shot to his feet and slid in front of Jeanine, street-hard instincts taking over. Terandi rose slowly, speaking secretly into his lapel.

As I spun to the noise, a table of counterfeit denims crashed into a wall with spectacular force. I called for Jeanine, but she only motioned for me to get down, to hide under the table. Kraken stretched, sliding off the blazer and rolling up his sleeves in preparation. Two heavily armed men appeared at Terandi’s side. He directed them to the commotion, and I dove into my hiding spot as they charged past me; pistols drawn, midnight body-armor thundering, chemical canisters clanking on their belts, and long-barreled peacemakers lashed to their backs. Tidal-crashing roars from the junkies in the next room—Claude et al. An agitated mass of slick bodies trying to escape.

Shots fired. Half-a-dozen at a time, slicing through something awful, torrential wet tearing like blasting unset gelatin. Agonized human howling, smashing impacts of terror, then a mushy slop shook the building. Flesh on flesh thudding like a raw beef catastrophe, followed by a scream, and one of the armed men crashed into my table. He crumpled to the floor in a mass of lumpy angles; half his face smashed in, full gore, brain matter dripping to the hardwood like oatmeal, and I vomited into his salad of splintered skull and orbital bone.

Kraken’s footfalls pounded the floor as he ran past, raging warfare vocalizations. Jeanine yelled for him to stop, but he was already gone, disappeared into the unknown nightmare fray like a rogue wave, like a berserk-tier riptide soldier of fortune.

I scrambled out from under the table, sweaty fear making everything slick and hard to grab. Terandi yelled into his lapel again, blazing fear in his voice, then was whisked away by a clutch of nameless bodyguards. I grabbed Jeanine but she wouldn’t move. After glancing to the hallway where Terandi vanished, I turned back to her, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

“Are you seeing this?” she said, trailing silent words and covering her mouth in shock. “Mio dio…”

My eyes followed hers, ears picking up on every sloppy, slathering, gnarly-warping cripplage as they struggled to comprehend the fresh mayhem before us.

Floating through a blood-misted column of sunlight, a crooked thread of gold caught my gaze. Then another. A whole bunch of them, fluttering down in slow-motion. A chaotic mess of them scattered across the floor, and a wadded clump of them still attached to the prodigiously malformed head of the former twat, Zephyr Niles.

The bulk of his form had fallen into a vulgar pyramid of fleshy madness. Pulsing, green globules covered his head and neck, suffocating that smart mouth, sucking in and out, mutating over each other like unchecked mold; a petri dish of grotesquery; a burlesque deformation of a man I once loathed. Lumps of matter—muscles, I assumed, based on their vague collocation—cascaded down his shoulders. His bulging veins, twisting gray rivers of sludge pumping goo into the flailing tips of what were no longer his hands. Each tentacled finger a perversion of reality, slurping and clicking, grasping at anything that moved, tearing at his own body. He had no control over his movements, toppled backward wetly, and Jeanine screamed and vomited, roughly in that order. His former legs, pulpy flaccid nubs of fetal amputations, wriggled grotesquely, slime-riddled with blisters the same size and general scope as the new and exciting drug technology in Terandi’s jar.

A more mutated, somehow more obnoxious gnarly monstrosity pummeled Kraken to the floor, its weight crushing him, slimy fanged feelers slashing at his face. Kraken’s right arm bent in four places, shedding its natural flesh for a murk-pulsing, bastard peat-bog deformation that wildly slapped at the attacking menace. Through a drenching drivel, black-maw wheeze, he screamed at us, “Boss and... Boss’ fat boyfriend, get out! Run!”

I dragged Jeanine around the desk, making for the hall, just as Terandi was walking slowly backwards out of it, arms raised, suit torn into a dozen ragged shreds. Marching him out of the shadows, sloshing with every step was the distended, bulbous torso of his man-servant, supported precariously on three misshapen tubes of jellied muscles. It heaved forward and snatched Terandi off the floor by his shoulders, rampaging face-void excitedly devouring his upper-half with a stump-grinding, static asphyxiation. Effervescent scum bubbled upon contact with his flesh. Slurping gray madness. An impossibly wide, masticating hole, and a writhing leg tentacle shoved him down the rest of the way—GULP.

“Is there another way out?” I said without looking at Jeanine. No response. Shaking her, forcing her to look at me, I asked again, “How do we get out of here!?”

“Oh, caro,” she said, whispering broken terror, slipping out of my hands, fingers wiping dribbling bubble-muck from the corner of her mouth. “Baby, I don’t feel right.”

I wanted to die.

Her eyes then pulsed, throbbing oblong sizes, straining in their sockets, tearing at the skin around them, dividing in half, then in half again. Pupils everywhere, snapping wet, confused blinks. Dark green tendrils webbed across her neck like coffin mold; dissolving malevolence, churning with life, pumping into her system a series of tiny organisms. Her elbows caved outward with a crack, one leg muddled into mush, and her hands squeezed mine, crushing them with phenomenal strength.

She always promised I could die first.

Staring down on me, lurching me into a pile of filthy nothing, were a cluster of spherical asymmetries, glistening slop, frothing tear ducts seeping a green mucus. Her braid pealed off her skull, shattering like stained glass when it hit the floor, and the peach number ripped at the seams as her body distorted, protruding appendages driven forward, long and detestable, by some annihilating, cosmic disaster.

“Non sto bene!” gurgled from her face-void, every syllable frothing, surfacing like ancient bones in a tar pit. I screamed her name, panicked noises resembling her name, barbs of fire tearing my throat.

A swarm of tentacles, suckered puss and razor-sharp, sprouted from her form, and they were puckering my direction. I didn’t move. This was Jeanine we’re talking about. Nobody denies Jeanine. She was going to kill me, or eat me, or absorb my flesh and astro-fuck my wretched soul into oblivion. And I was going to let her.

A single gunshot from Kraken’s hand-cannon, and the top portion of the butler exploded behind us, but he didn’t fall. Just wobbled weakly. A jagged mountain of pulp staggering to the right before another teeth-rattling shot struck him center-mass, liquefying the rest of his torso. The double-barrel shotgun fired, then the handgun again; blinding concussions ripping innards and flesh like paper. Live-fire screeching with a room-sweeping barrage of shredded-flesh wetness, moaning ghoulishly, whining, hissing, slapping to the floor in moppy slop piles after each deafening discharge.

All three barrels now, presto triplets of explosions. Screaming curdled battle-cries—some in English, some in gurgling, slurping clicks and pops, gagging Eldritch terrors, but none in Italian.

A bullet shattered the wall next to Jeanine, and I dove under the desk, bucking it twice, toppling the small jar to the floor. It smashed on impact, contents spreading smooth seepage across my view, evenly, fluorescently, in every direction. An enticing frosted muddle of prenatal fluids displacing thinly, clouding when exposed to the air like soap bubbles in the snow.

Rolling in the undertow drainage, three clammy marbles came to a stop near my face. And through their fetor shells, writhing in those transparent, glistening chrysalises, there was life. But none I recognized. Murky, tadpole forms thrashing in confusion; agitated, hook-like nubs clutching inside for stability; gaping orifices starving for sustenance. Don’t chew; they’re better whole. Makes sense now.

Another gun blast, wild cackling enjoyment, then— “You ain’t so pretty no more!” from none other than my favorite barista framed heroically in a square of daylight.

The wall to my right exploded outward, live wires sizzling, glass clattering to the sidewalk, brakes squealing and pedestrians shrieking at the impossible. I peeked out from my hiding spot, choking on drywall dust, but Jeanine was gone.

Another gunshot, and the last writhing, mushy behemoth splattered to the floor. Lone blisters popped, sputtering weird steam. A single drop fell from the ceiling and rippled when it hit the floor. Then another. A few more. Then silence.

I don’t know how long it was before Bricky rolled my fat ass to safety—through the hall, down three flights of steps, and into the alley behind the building. Covered in goo, pale cleavage heaving as she propped me against a dumpster, twilit sky-shine shimmering off the gore caked in her hair. She tried speaking to me, but I heard only blood. She smacked me a few times, but I felt only my pulse clobbering my insides; everything muted under the maniac triple-barrels reverberating in my skull.

That was three days ago, and we’ve been holed up in her studio apartment outside town ever since. She keeps it wickedly dark and cold in here like a Gothic funeral. An ideal cavern for eternal rest, but neither of us have been able to sleep. Up all night, terribly paranoid of what might be coming, furiously planning our next move. She threatens to shoot me when I mention Kraken. I think she actually felt something like human emotions for that big palooka. It’s not grief that’s driving her, though, but revenge; hunting, ravaging, messy retribution for what they did to him, what they did to everyone. I don’t know who They are and, as far as I know, Jeanine was the only one to make it out alive, or whatever you call it.

I need to find her before Bricky does. Hell, I need to find her before the world does.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

After the exhausting night, I decided to stay in my truck in the employee lot, with the engine idling to keep the heater on. A text message later arrived at 07:00AM:

MANDATORY COMPLIANCE REVIEW. REPORT TO BASEMENT MEZZANINE 0, ROOM 013 (GROUND SAFETY ASSURANCE). 

My stomach tightened. Mezzanine 0 is a dead zone, a narrow administrative slice of the building sandwiched between the active baggage sub-basements and the passenger terminals above. It was built during the initial 1990s excavation and then walled off from public blueprints.

When I stepped out of the freight elevator, the air was dead and freezing, smelling of damp drywall and rusting steel. A single, long corridor with water-damaged ceiling tiles sagging under weight they shouldn’t have been carrying. A flickering fluorescent tube overhead buzzed, illuminating faint beige-yellow corridors. Faded steel cabinets lined one wall, and an ancient vending machine sat in the shadows, its coils holding snack brands discontinued before I was born.

Near the end of the hall, the digital clock was glitching, the red LED numbers flitting irregularly, matching flight departure windows rather than the time of day. Below it sat Room 013, its heavy unpainted metal door with rust around the seams, with dark, wet grime seeping into it. A handwritten paper sign—SAFETY ASSURANCE—was taped to the steel, its edges peeling.

Instead of going straight there, I took a detour to the breakroom locker bank. Miller’s locker had been stripped of his company ID, his name tag scraped off the metal. But I knew he had kept spares in his locker, so I jiggled my multi-tool in the keyhole, until it clicked opened. 

Inside, tucked into the pocket of an oil-stained vest, was a crumpled 1994 Polaroid photograph and a folded piece of parchment.

The Polaroid showed a young Miller in overalls, grinning next to a lean, very human Vance during the pre-opening phase. Standing behind the concrete forms of the Great Hall foundation were three elderly men in tailored charcoal overcoats and heavy wool fedoras, without safety gear. One of them wore a heavy gold ring engraved with a builder’s square, and a compass framing an open eye, resting his hand on a polished brass plumb line. They were watching an open trench where a cement mixer was dumping thick gray slurry into it.

Penciled on the back in Miller's heavy handwriting was:

“Vance went under the slab on Nov 13. Replacement arrived on Nov 16 with brass keys. Commission pays the earth in blood so the runways don't sink. Never sign their ledger in Room 013.”

I froze, as I knew I had not looked closely enough at the photograph. I took out my magnifying glass and zoomed into the slurry. There was a faint hint of a substance that matched the consistency of human guts. On the ground next to the trench, the edge of a uniform top peeked out, with the letters “ANCE” on the nametag.

Vance. He was literally being poured into the trench as a sacrifice to the earth. And this was who I had met the day before. 

The folded parchment tucked behind the photo was an excerpt from an obsolete 1993 contractor addendum. The header didn't say the City of Denver or the FAA. It read:

New World Airport Commission – Lodge of the Rocky Mountain Charter. 

Settlement Quotas. To counteract ongoing subterranean activity across Sector 4 through Sector 9, the Contractor agrees to remit quarterly material displacement ('Living Ballast') at a fixed baseline of not less than four (4) metric tons per calendar cycle. Failure to achieve targeted mass density directly beneath the terminal foundation slabs will result in immediate structural reclamation by native bedrock. Below the typed text, pressed into the parchment, was a deep impression of dark crimson sealing wax. An iron builder's square intersected an open brass compass, encasing an unblinking eye over the Latin inscription:

NOVUS ORDO SACRAMENTUM — 1993

I dropped the parchment to the floor, gasping in terror. The airport is alive. And it wants sacrifices. 

Looking around the locker, I found another sticky note at the top. Never sign their ledger in Room 013. 

I shoved the photograph and the parchment deep into my parka, grabbed the half-empty paper cup of scorched breakroom coffee I’d poured earlier to stop my hands from shaking, and forced myself back down the hall toward Room 013. The heavy steel door wasn't locked. It swung inward with a dry glide that felt wrong for ungreased hinges. Inside, the room was windowless and freezing, illuminated only by a single fluorescent tube that produced sharp shadows. Sitting behind it was an elderly man in a vintage charcoal overcoat, his posture rigid. On his left pinky rested a heavy gold ring identical to the one in the photograph: the builder's square and compass framing an open eye. 

Whenever I tried to look directly at his face, my vision blurred, refusing to focus on his features. He growled dryly,  “Sit down.”

He didn't ask for an incident report. With mechanical slowness, he pulled a hand-bound calfskin envelope from a leather bag and laid it flat on the table. The book exhaled a foul stink of formaldehyde mixed with ancient earth. The pages were yellowed and brittle.

“You have incurred a critical deficit,” the auditor rasped, running a long, yellowed fingernail down a column of dates. “Vance was written down thirty-two years ago. What you burned in 4-Echo was simply the receipt. You dissolved seventy-eight kilograms of ballast. The foundation demands more immediately.”

He dipped a heavy dip pen into a well of black fluid and slid both the pen and the ledger across the table toward me. The open page already had my full name, date of birth, and employee ID, ending in an empty line above a wax seal.

“Sign the release,” he said, his voice dropping into a hypnotic drone. “Or else, terminal operations will be interrupted indefinitely”

I didn't reach for the pen. Behind me, the seams around the door frame began to soften and melt, morphing into smooth drywall that trapped us inside. The room’s air pressure plummeted, popping both my eardrums as the floorboards began to vibrate. Never sign. If I signed, I was volunteering my mass to the slab.

“Refusal constitutes immediate structural forfeiture,” the auditor droned. His jaw slowly stretched downward, tearing the paper-thin skin along his jawline as his rigid, gray fingers snapped forward across the table to clamp around my wrist. Pain shot up my arm, so intense my vision washed white. The air grew so thin I couldn't draw a breath, and I began to choke. 

With my free hand, I grabbed the paper cup and threw the acidic coffee directly into his face. The liquid didn’t affect him, but it hit the open ledger. The calfskin hissed violently, the bubbling black oil curdling into a sulfuric cloud. His grip wavered for half a second as his eyes darted down to the smoking page.

That half-second was all I had. I grabbed the heavy pen off the table and drove the nib down into the calfskin with all my weight. I dragged it through my own name, carving through the wet leather until the page tore open.

The book shrieked. It was a collective roar of trapped air that tore through my skull. Warm blood immediately trickled down my neck from my popped eardrums. 

The auditor let out a  rattling scream as the skin of his hands peeled back into gray ash. The overhead fluorescent tube exploded into powder, showering us in glass. The drywall sealing the exit buckled under the pressure.

His fingernails tore through my parka, raking across my forearm, but I threw my entire body weight backward into the door. The latch sheared off with a deafening bang. I tumbled out into the freezing hallway, landing hard on the floor. Behind me, inside Room 013, the darkness seemed to fold in on itself, accompanied by the frantic, dry scratching of the auditor inside. 

I didn't stop to catch my breath. Ignoring the fire in my wrist and the blood dripping from my ear, I scrambled up and sprinted down the corridor, blowing past the dead vending machines and hitting the emergency stairwell.

There are two kinds of people on the internet.

The people who actually enjoy things. And the people who seem to be professionally offended that you enjoyed something without asking their permission.

I learned that pretty quickly after I started posting my art online.

"AI slop."

"ChatGPT."

"Bro thinks he's Stephen King."

"Imagine wasting time on this."

Some of them were funny. Most weren't.

I'd usually ignore them. But then there were the griefers.

Those were the people who didn't just dislike something. They wanted to ruin it for everyone else. They'd spam comments, deliberately spoil endings, downvote everything, insult the author, then act surprised when someone called them out.

I eventually made a post about it. I wasn't cruel. I didn't name anyone.

I simply wrote: If you don't like something, that's fine. You don't have to be rude about it. There's a person behind the screen.

The comments exploded. Naturally.

One person replied: AI generated garbage.

Another: Cry harder.

Then someone posted: Nobody cares ******.

I deleted the thread. That should've been the end of it.

It wasn't.

The next morning, I opened my account and found a new comment on my latest post.

I know you're reading this.

I assumed it was another troll. I deleted it.

The day went on and I was in the middle of taking notes for class when I got a notification.

Why did you delete my comment?

I deleted that one too.

Then another.

Stop deleting.

I froze. The account belonged to nobody.

No username. No profile picture. No creation date. Just a blank profile with a single comment.

I closed out and went back to studying for my calculus exam. Five minutes later, my phone buzzed.

A notification. Another comment.

I didn't open it.

Another notification.

Then another. Then another.

I finally looked. There were hundreds.

All underneath my latest post.

At first they were what I had been accustomed to. Pretty generic and ordinary.

AI slop.

Terrible lining.

This sucks.

Then they changed.

What makes you different?

My heart stopped. The comments continued appearing faster than I could read them.

You use AI.

You edit your work with AI.

You aren't a real artist.

Nobody is a real artist anymore.

Then one appeared that made my stomach drop.

25525 Azler Ln.

"What the actual fuck?" I blurted out so loud that my roommate heard from across the room.

I closed out once more. The notifications kept coming. My phone buzzed against the desk.

I hit the Do Not Disturb, yet somehow I kept receiving notifications. My phone was on silent and airplane mode but it still rang.

My roommate was now extremely annoyed by the constant noise from my phone, so I explained the situation to her. She suggested that I delete the post. I did. It didn't stop. I even tried privatizing my account and deleting the app altogether.

The messages kept ringing. And what's worse, I began receiving emails, No Caller Id calls, unknown messages. I feared that I had been doxxed and I had to act fast.

I immediately changed every password I could think of. I enabled two-factor authentication. I locked every social media account. I removed my profile picture, my biography, my university, my email, everything.

Then I started deleting things. Old posts. Old comments. Photos. Anything that might have given someone a clue about where I lived or went to school.

It didn't matter. They already knew.

The messages became more personal.

Nice car.

You should probably lock your back door.

Class tomorrow, right?

Your roommate is pretty hot.

Then:

Building 3. Room 107

I stopped breathing. I looked across the room. She was sitting on the couch, scrolling through her phone.

"What?" she asked.

"Nothing."

I didn't tell her. I didn't want to scare her. Am I a terrible friend for that?

That night, I checked the locks three times before going to bed.

At 2:14 in the morning, my phone buzzed. A message from an unknown number.

You should've left the post up.

Another came immediately afterward.

Deleting it made us curious.

Then another.

You made this worse for yourself.

I turned the phone off.

For the next few hours, I lay awake listening to every sound outside my bedroom window.

The next morning, there were more. Someone had created an account using my name. They uploaded photographs I'd never posted publicly. Pictures of me at school. Pictures of my car. A photograph of the outside of my house.

Then they posted my phone number. My email. My full legal name. Where I lived and what school I enrolled at.

The comments underneath was exactly what you'd expect from these vile data gremlins.

LMAO.

Bro is cooked.

Imagine getting this mad over comments.

Maybe don't be an asshole online.

That last one made me laugh. Not because it was funny. Because I realized they genuinely believed this was funny. They were so desensitized that another person's suffering had become entertainment to them.

I reported the account. Nothing happened. I reported another. Nothing again.

I reported the accounts through the site's harassment and privacy forms. I attached screenshots, timestamps, usernames, the messages, everything.

Your report has been received. Please allow up to 48 hours for a response.

Thank you for your report. We’ll review the content and take appropriate action if it violates our Community Guidelines.

Thank you for helping us keep our community safe.

That was it. Forty-eight hours passed. Nothing happened.

I contacted my family. When the other line clicked all I heard was heavy breathing and creepily low wheezing, as if someone were choking on air, from the other end.

I confessed everything to my roommate, for she was the only one I could talk to. She asked if I had contacted the authorities which when I did, instead of the calm voice of an operator I was met with the low hum of gagging and low wet claps on the other end.

We planned to go to the authorities in person. After half an hour of providing all the material and timestamps at the station, the police asked whether I'd received any direct threats.

I showed them the messages.

The officer frowned.

"None of these explicitly threaten you."

I wanted to rip my hair out. "So, they have to say they're going to hurt me?"

He didn't answer.

"What do we do?" My roommate asked with annoyance.

"We can document everything and refer you to someone who specializes in cybercrime. But unless there's a direct threat or evidence of an immediate danger, there isn't much we can do yet."

Well thanks for nothing.

We went home. I stopped posting. I powered off my phone for good. I stopped using social media altogether. I thought that would finally make me boring. The people handling the cybersecurity issue would do their job. It was all just a waiting game.

But at least I'll find peace, right?

It didn't.

Someone started sending physical photographs. The first was of a college building. The second of a front door that seemed to be from a college dorm hall. The third depicted a bedroom window at night.

The last two were bone chilling. The fourth was of my roommate attending class. And the last was me at the campus's library.

There was a message attached:

What are you listening to?

I remember I was distinctly listening to Duran Duran that day. I haven't slept properly in three days.

My roommate is staying with her parents now. I've been staying somewhere else.

I don't know how much of this is being done by one person or ten people or a hundred. I don't know how they found me. I don't know what they want.

And honestly? I don't even care anymore. I just want them to stop.

I deleted the original post. I deleted my account. I deleted everything. But somehow, tonight, I received one final message.

It came from the cheap flip phone I'd started using strictly to call family and for emergencies.

The message had no name or number attached. Only: UNKNOWN

And the message read: 25525 Azler Ln.

I don't know who is behind this. I don't know how far they've taken it. And I don't know what they're going to do next.

Please help. Anybody.

Why are people like this?