KTA (Patreon)

You have to do it in the middle of the day. The itinerary is always changing. The city is so flat and vast and full of same-faced men and women pulsing in and out of buildings you can’t tell apart. You won’t get them all. You know you won’t. But this is your best shot. In your dingy motel room you sit cross-legged in front of the TV, dry-swallowing your last few pills as you watch a balding man in a charcoal suit lead a group of schoolchildren down a vaulted hall, his voice distant and scratchy on the VHS. 

A blue capsule dissolves in your stomach. Acid roils. Bile scorches the back of your throat. There is power. So much power. You reach out and gather two long golden strings of it into your hands, tugging them until they thrum with tension, until the song of their restrained and trembling force throbs through your burning veins.

You let go.

Foreign molecules slice through you as you reintegrate just an inch too far to the left in that same hall, losing part of your pinky to an antique table laden with a stodgy, commercial floral arrangement. No one around. No children. No man. No charcoal suit. You yank your injured hand back and the meat-and-cherrywood synthesis pops with a wet crack at the first joint. The vase explodes on the polished tile. Dirty water and fat, aromatic petals squish underfoot as the beginning of a migraine blooms hot in your brainstem. Blood swirls through the rushing slick.

You start ripping down the walls. Clapboards snap, catch fire, dissolve into ash and sawdust. Copper piping vomits gouts of steam. Wiring flares and crackles like nests of pale serpents as you drag it out in tangled skeins. Rooms beyond. People screaming. You reach into their throats and tie off their carotids. Bloody noses. Eyes rolling up like slot wheels. Their thoughts wash over you in waves of boredom and resentment and a thousand petty infidelities. You rip lances of bent rebar from the walls and hurl them through the bodies of clerks and speechwriters and two-star generals dripping with minimalist medals. Ribbed metal impaling skulls and pulverizing vertebrae. Others are coming for you now. Blatts of earpiece static cutting through your thoughts.

“—wing.”  

“—repeat, repeat—”  

You start to walk. Your senses fragment. Echo. Snatches of garbled sight and sound, touch and taste. Cigarette smoke. A painting of hunting dogs. Precum on your tongue. Wood grain under callused fingertips. You see the men in their black suits converging from a dozen places spread out through the compound’s superstructure, and you fix your will on them. Skulls split by cleavers of compressed hot air. Kidneys crushed in a mental grip until wet flesh squelches between your mind’s fingers. Staples swiped from desks and flattened into killing needles. Hearts pricked like balloons. One of them penetrates your net by blind luck alone. He puts two bullets in your shoulder before you unzip him from groin to nostrils and his organs slide out in a glutinous waterfall of gore.

Shredding carpets and staving floorboards in, you stagger onward with your own blood drying on your back, shirt stuck to skin, a line of red agony running from your ruined fingertip up to the right side of your jaw. Your flailing consciousness can just reach the gray-carpeted tedium of the capitol building. You pull them apart as fast as you can. No creativity. No malice. Just a cat shredding the side of a couch. Running. Slipping. Fusing locks and tearing gas lines. Abortive explosions, undernourished, rippling through the lower levels.

The dullard, down in a dark place behind iron doors. Aging Ken doll sanded smooth under his molded cap of stiff white hair. Grab his optic nerves and drag them slow out of his screaming head. Eyes popping out of sockets. The man beside him loses his mustache as his upper lip sloughs off, exposing bloody teeth. You pluck the bristles from his skin, stiffen them with a faint electric charge, and flick them one by one like tiny spears into his eyes, his nostrils, his bare mucous membranes. He finishes the job for you, nails digging at his ruined face as you pop the dullard’s vertebrae like firecrackers. 

Collapsing columns in the grand arcade. Pulling up turf in psychic fistfuls and flinging it against cracked and buckling bulletproof windows. More gunfire. Distant. They’re confused and firing at each other. You spit up a little as your concentrated stomach acid eats its way up your esophagus, puckering its membrane with raw wounds. Other faces split and rip apart under the awful pressure of your thoughts. Rags of skin unfurl from your hands and wrists as you channel current through them. A scythe of blue-white light cuts through the roaring ruin ahead of you, slashing a momentary gap through falling dust, woodwork, and masonry. Lives wink out like unplugged faerie lights.

Staggering on through showers of debris. Sections of your marrow are starting to overheat. There is a ringing in your ears and the taste of copper as blood floods your mouth. The wife. Grab the back of her head and bang it once against the edge of a nearby table. Two of the older children. Sneering. Sleek. Wet-lipped and rat-eyed. You wrap your will around his jaw and pull until it separates. You fold it back over his skull, taut and raw and bloody. Her you break, folding her body in half and forcing her still-living into a nearby freezer. Pentagon officials hammering against the door until you yank their spines out through their backs.

Your hair is falling out in greasy clumps. You can’t see out of your left eye. Inside your body, strange and awful changes take place at fantastic speeds. Not long now. At last, you find him, blustering and ranting as his black-suited roaches push him toward the dark tumor of a secure bunker. You seize hold of the strings again, yank them back taut, and release, launching yourself through molecular chaos into the hall directly in his path. Your body coalesces around dust and other foreign particles. Organs skip and shudder. Bones grind unevenly against each other. The men around him you kill quickly. Boil blood. Sever spinal cord. Hook mental fingers up flared nostrils and yank out bloody clots of brain.

Him you sandblast like unfinished furniture, scouring his skin away inch by torturous inch, ripping his hair out in careless tufts and unzipping the seams of old scalp-pulls and plugs. You set him on fire as the bottom of your stomach dissolves. You crush his kneecaps as your teeth begin to fall out of your bloody mouth. Gibbering flesh writhes on the floor in a flailing mess of smoke and flame. You feed him oxygen. Don’t let him asphyxiate. Stroke and tease his nervous system to keep it alive as fire climbs it like a ladder into his cooking flesh. Your left arm hangs limp and useless at your side. You’re drooling. Someone else has shot you, though you don’t remember when, and blood spreads over your shirt front. You pinch his bones into wet gravel starting at the toes. Transform him into a red bag of meat and crunching osseous material. Pull out his tongue and sink your few remaining teeth into its twitching flesh. Make him watch. Keep his eyes open even after yours have filmed over and gone dark.

Make him feel it, right until the end.