Read Skullcrack City for Free Online

is very graphic.”
    A street kid was on my screen. Did he have strap marks along his jaw from gassing, like the gutterpunk version of pillow face? The kid had shock in his eyes, but he was excited to be on TV, maybe hoping for some compensation.
    “I found his body and I thought, you know, corner [bleep], typical. Maybe he tried to step somewhere he shouldn’t. But then I noticed the top of his head was just missing , like dude who got him used a shotgun. But the weird part was, no brains. They should have been all over the place. You know. BLADOW! PSSSHHH! Brains everywhere. But there was nothing coming from his head. [Bleep] was empty.”
    I couldn’t have grabbed the remote fast enough. I turned off the screen and immediately set to forgetting what I’d just watched.
    You’ve seen that kid before, when he was even younger. With Hungarian.
    No. Fuck that. Nope.
    I had my Hex score. I had bankers to bust, secrets to sell. It was time to get focused.
    It was time to bring down an empire.

 
    The first pill tasted distinctly of human blood, but I chose to write off the flavor as a mix of ocean water and barbecue sauce.
    Not that a pharmaceutical, even one as black market as Hex, should taste like any of those things, but that was the mojo in these pills. So the first wave was alien, a mouth filled with blood, and I flinched thinking I’d been busted in the chops. Then the second wave rolled in, throwing shivers across every inch of my body like an all-skin orgasm, followed by the sound rush, a beautiful child screaming from the depths of a corrugated metal well, and my eyes were painted silver and my fingers trailed melted aluminum tendrils and EVERYTHING IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW.
    The feeling was like this: Imagine your legs are spring loaded. Imagine every breath you pull is processed at maximum efficiency, pumping pure light to your extremities. Everything is vital. Everything is important. None of it can hurt you. A thought translates to action before you have time to remember the thought. If you were at a baseball game and engaged in deep philosophical conversation with a beautiful girl and you heard the crowd roar, you’d be able to tell by the shifting streams of audience noise that the ball was headed your way. And you might catch that home run ball without ever turning away from the truth you were imparting. Everything is possible.
    The reality was like this: You clean your kitchen. You drink a gallon of water because you can feel it moving through you all the way down to your stomach. You jerk off, a sacrifice to the newly unearthed Goddesses of Big Booty (Vol. 3) . You light candles to unknot the spunk and turtle smells that suddenly rope in your senses. You clean your bathroom. You jerk off again and it shouldn’t but your scar tissue feels so good. You realize you didn’t pack your Top Secret bank investigation notebook in your briefcase, but urgency and movement erase panic. You admire your turtle, quietly. You clean your bedroom. You clean your garbage disposal interior without flipping the switch at the fuse box. You wish you had robotic prosthetic hands, an end to the weakness of the flesh. You jerk off until the morning sun peeks in through your drapes, murders your mechanical hypnosis. You try to ignore the heavy weight on your left shoulder, the warm breath of a snorting animal on your ear, soft black earth crumbling from its paw to your skin.
     
     
    The weekend disappeared. I didn’t even make it to work the next Monday. Called in sick with plans for an epic blackout sleep session. The cowboy on the phone played it cool. Told me, “Take ’er easy, bud, and we’ll see ya when we see ya.”
    I was certain, though, that the empire was trembling.

 
     
    The terrible loop began on a Tuesday and didn’t end until the day I saw a skullcracker swallow the brain of a bank-hired assassin.
    I’ll try to explain how I got from here to there, but even now the memories are a series of frenzied