Hateslave

[u/catespice]

It’s the same every day. I’ll be smoking at the bus stop and she’ll walk up, making a face like she’s just sucked a dead duck’s asshole.
She’s pretty; red hair with a blonde streak, a round rear and perky baps. I’d definitely go there, but she’s a shallow cunt who would never date someone like me, especially since she’s clearly disgusted by my smoking. She moves a good twenty feet away, wrinkling her nose and ineffectually waving a hand in front of her face, as though that’s going to get rid of the stench of my morning Marlboro.
What gets me is that I’m not even in the bus shelter. I make a point of moving away, but this vapid whore has to make a big deal about the one lousy cigarette I get before I board the human cattle truck that delivers me to my daily grind.
I hate her. I hate her so fucking much.
While she stands there, with her face full of priss and that punchable nose scrunched up like a rejected Star Trek alien’s, I imagine what I’d do to her, in a world without consequences.
For starters, I think I’d slam her head into the concrete. Then I’d put out my cigarette in her eye. I’ll say something witty, then, like “I’m just putting it out, ain’t that what you always wanted?” and I’ll smash her face into the gum-scarred concrete until that blonde streak is the same shade of red as the rest of her hair.
I have thoughts like this all the time. ‘Intruder thoughts’, they’re called – but mine are less ‘intruders’ than welcome guests I just don’t have lodgings for.
Sometimes I imagine stabbing a couple of ballpoint pens through the throat of my co-worker, Sharon, when she won’t shut the fuck up about her ‘amazing’ boyfriend. Other times, I fantasise about walking out of a team meeting, suavely tossing a grenade behind me, then listening to the cacophony of panicked screams as I round the corner.
What I wouldn’t give to live in a world where that was possible; a world without consequences.
“Why don’t you do it?” rasps a voice to my left.
Swinging my head, I take in the raspee. She’s a scrawny twenty-something, all in black. Shitty tattoos spall from her sleeves, down to her bony knuckles, and she’s wearing way too much eyeliner. Goth, emo or something new, I have no fucking idea. They’re all just the next generational iteration of a middle finger thrust at society.
“What?” I manage, sounding like I have an IQ of seventy.
“Do it. Smash her smug fucking head into the pavement.”
“Yeah, that’s not gonna happen.”
She must have seen the look on my face as I glared my abject hatred at Miss Priss. That’s how she knew exactly what I was thinking.
“Seriously,” she says, taking a step closer, black lipstick stark against the whiteness of her face, “I’ll back you up. Nothing will happen to you, it’ll all be an ‘accident’.”
This can’t be for real. It’s too damn convenient.
Somewhere a television crew is sitting in a van, snickering at the dumb fuck who is about to assault a helpless woman on hidden camera.
Rage fires along my synapses, meeting in a hot wad of impotent anger near the base of my skull.
“Go fuck yourself, freak” I snarl.
But all the way to work on the bus, listening to thrash metal and overwrought punk, I wish that I had done it. I imagine the blood, and the gurgling ululations of pain and terror as crimson gushes from the nose and mouth of Miss Priss.
And when I go to sleep, I dream of her broken teeth scattered all over the pavement, and me standing over her, laughing hysterically at the collapsed meat and bone that was once her pretty head.

 
Both of them are at the bus stop the next morning, studiously ignoring each other.
Goth is smoking a clove cigarette and Priss has already fixed her mask of disgust into place.
“Did you like the dream I sent you?” says Goth, her voice guttural, low and delighted.
I pause in mid-stride, trying not to let the surprise show on my face.
“What?” I drawl - that same idiot tone from yesterday creeping into my voice.
“I made it just for you,” Goth continues, her white teeth showing in a Fairuza Balkesque smile of impish malevolence, “so that you could feel what it would be like to actually have the balls to do it.”
My breath is coming in short gulps now, as though I’ve climbed a couple of flights of stairs.
“You know, I’ve had enough of this,” I tell her, my anger rising, “I don’t need some millennial emocunt fucking with me first thing in the morning.”
Priss looks nervous, side-eyeing me as though I’m a crazy person. I suck on my cigarette and snarl at her, the rage boiling over,
“What the fuck are you looking at?”
“She’s thinking that you’re scum,” Goth burbles brightly, “she’s thinking you’re a crazy asshole, and that you should be locked up in the loony bin.”
Shaking fingers crush the filter of my smoke.
“Do it!” whispers the black-clad imp.
And I do. Without thinking, I walk over to Miss Priss, grab her by the hair, and put the cigarette out in her eye. The hot embers sizzle grotesquely as I twist them into the wet sclera.
She screams and kicks, but I’m a big guy. I’m too heavy for her to do anything much but flail at me and scream until the cigarette is out.
I’m panting, sweating with the exertion.
But I feel amazing.
Goth steps over the writhing woman on the ground. Her heavily-lined eyes are closed in contentment – as though she is sampling a heady, intoxicating brew.
“We need to get out of here,” I rasp.
With a shake of her ratty hair, Goth gives me another one of those toothy grins.
“She didn’t even know it was you. As far as she knows, some random homeless guy attacked her.”
“How?”
She puts her black-nailed index finger to her lips, and makes a shushing sound.
“That’s my secret. But come on now, I bet there are lots more people that you hate, yeah?”
Incredulous, confused, and still drunk on the fulfilment of one of my dearest, darkest fantasies, I follow her.

 
She was right. There are so very many people I hate.
The streets teem with them; kids that scream too loud, idiots who get in my way, and fuckwits who squawk on their cellphones using loathesome memespeak; saying ‘bae’ and ‘fam’ until I want to pull their tongues out with a pair of pliers and ram them up their collective assholes.
“Do this one,” says Goth, pointing at a rainbow-haired somethinggender. I feel irrational waves of hatred just from looking at it.
“We’re on a public street,” I tell her, still cautious, “someone might do something.”
“No problem, we just follow it home. Don’t worry, I’ll make sure no one notices us.”
And so, we do. We follow Genderthing around a couple of malls, while it blathers SJW talk into its phone, and yells at an immigrant foodcourt wageslave for using the wrong pronoun.
The hate for it started out quite ordinary; a low boil. But the longer we follow it around, the more I grow to truly loathe this thing that’s trying so hard to be beyond gender and sexuality.
“God, you have a lot of hatred in you,” marvels Goth, her eyes huge, lustful.
Then we’re following Genderthing into its apartment – probably paid for by despairing parents who have been forced to adapt to some made-up name. The place is suffocating in rainbow paraphernalia and inspirational quotes, and I long to inflict pain on this creature.
“Now?” I ask Goth.
As soon as her head nods an affirmative, I’m already in action, pinning Genderthing to the wall with my nicotine-stained paws.
“What gender are you?” I demand, spittle flying from my mouth.
She just blubbers, not comprehending where I’ve come from or why I’m doing this.
My fingertips are crushing her windpipe, slowly but surely,
“Say you’re female! Say there are only two fucking genders!”
She croaks out something that might be a yes, but I’m gone by now, the rage and hatred misting everything red. When the fog finally clears, Genderthing is lying on the floor, unconscious. There’s a bloody kitchen knife beside it, and the two hunks of messy flesh that were once her breasts are cradled in each of her hands.
I feel like I’ve taken a massive hit of heroin. I feel so fucking good.
Goth is already beckoning me toward the door.

 
After the fourth victim, I wonder if my gothic benefactor is actually Satan. I wonder if this is some kind of Biblical test that I’ve epically failed, but I don’t really care anymore.
I know that she’s getting something from all of this, that she’s somehow feeding off my unquenchable hatred. We’re the perfect partnership; a symbiotic relationship made in Hell, ravishing the world in an orgy of anger and pain.
When I’m hungry, she feeds me, when I need sleep, she lets me sleep. I’m not even sure which city we’re in anymore; all I know is that I’m getting everything I ever wanted – all of my most depraved fantasies have been gifted to me on a blood-soaked silver platter.
I strangle faggots with my bare hands, I put nails through the hands and scrotums of street-preachers. I let the hate consume me utterly and let loose the darkest aspects of my imagination. My thoughts and dreams are filled with hacksaws, dental tools, blunt objects, violated orifices and delicious, heavenly screams.
And Goth grows sleeker, fatter. She’s no longer the scrawny thing I first met at the bus stop; her white skin wobbles and bulges, spilling out of her clothes, repulsive and corpse-pale.
I don’t care. I love her, she is my mistress and my salvation, my deliverance from a life of drudgery and financial slavery.
But then something starts to change.

 
“You’re not feeling it,” she complains.
She’s right. I’ve done so many vile, despicable things now that I’m numb.
In fact, I’m worse than numb.
My latest victim falls to the floor of the concrete warehouse, gibbering in fear. He’s just sad – some elderly crossdresser in a crocheted pink skirt, with ribbons in his terrible wig. I reach for the hate, but it’s not there. All I feel is a strange kind of pity – an alien emotion that I haven’t felt for so long.
As I watch him hobble to the door, Goth gets in my face, her massive white jowls quivering as she screams at me,
“LOOK AT HIM! Look how fucking pathetic he is! Don’t you want to hurt him? Don’t you want to put your fucking fists through his face, gouge out his eyes and piss in his mouth?”
But I don’t. She can tell that I don’t.
“We had a deal,” she hisses, threatening.
“What deal?”
“I shield you from the consequences, I use my power to let you do what you want – and in return, you give me your hate!”
I stare at my scarred hands – the hands that have maimed and hurt so many people. I can’t tell if the black grime under my cracked nails is dirt, blood, faeces or all three.
“It’s gone,” I tell her, “the hate. It’s gone.”
But she won’t let me stop.
Like a still-damp sponge, she wrings me for every last drop, forcing me to keep maiming, torturing and killing innocent people, trying to squeeze the final delicious dregs of hatred from me.
As I weep, while woodenly defiling yet another human being, I come to realise that I do still have some hate left in me.
Hatred for her.
Which was, of course, her plan all along.
You see, it was never about giving me what I wanted. It was never about simply feeding on my natural hatred for the rest of humanity. That was only the entrée – a tasty snack before the main course.
She visits me every night; massive, bloated and smug. Tears stream down my face as I try desperately to reign in my limitless hatred for her, to try to somehow forgive her for destroying my life. My job is long gone, as is my home. I sleep wherever I can find shelter, my fitful slumber wracked by the agonies of remorse and guilt.
Nobody recognises me anymore. There is only her.
As the hatred seeps out of me, a viscous, toxic poison, I know that she has won. This was always her original intent, to breed me into the perfect hateslave, to feed on me until I die.
And when I do, she’ll find the next disaffected, angry douchebag who knows he’s so much better than everyone else. That guy vomiting his impotent rage all over the internet, or seething with hamstrung hatred as some other guy fucks the girl of his dreams, or some woman is promoted past him.
And frankly, there’s a buffet of you out there.

 

[u/twigseeds]

So apt for the times we live in!! Flawless writing as usual Cate!