Alarms.

Ensuing violence resounded between a low frightening BOOOOM, fading back into siren and carnal voice. The bass hit like a wall of sound, reverberated through warm concrete, and then back up and out through my core.

A brash of naked heels darted through the chaos inches from my ear. They coulda’ been a herd of cattle for all I could make out, and by the time I opened my eyes they’d already gone.

Anarchy and chaos gave birth to the human condition; but what unfolded in that moment was akin to its aborted malformity after several generations of inbreeding.

This was pure, unadulterated — not like before. Before was a flux breeze before the storm; kinderanarchists showing off their fringe pallets.

No restraints now; no more reason to rape in shadows.

            The blast force had swung me around away from the direction of the pool, dropped in a dead-man’s crawl at the base of a rusted column, gasping for a single good breath through a sharp pain in my side and chest.

“Smit — eh, Smitty!” a familiar drawl struggled. I’d never heard a call like it before — never such urgency.

Its direction quickly rolled under the rhythm pounding in my skull when it cried out again, singing through a shrill, gurgling effort before choking out on its own horror when a mob behind me erupted with violent cheer.

I turned in time to witness a blood-swathed arm rise above the crowd of raging faces. Resting on its palm like a prized relic stared the severed head of my friend before his eyes rolled back into their sockets. It disappeared again, down into the mob and then back up a moment later, bathed in lubricant and blazing; picketed on a broom handle between jubilant bearers.

The air was thick with rage, and at that moment I felt a renewed strength driven by primal determination.

Up from the ground after a few good takes sent a shock over my back with a hot, sick sensation — like taut-canvas skin, charred after a midday nap in the sun — until I collapsed in fever.

Again.

My voice shredding when the upper remnant of my jumper slid down my arms like a smock with frayed ends singed.

No time for pain, hunched, shielding my downcast eyes, collapsing every ten feet where emergency lights strobed off metric between siren, and low irregular boom until I stumbled upon ground zero’s outer fringe.

Was I headed in the right direction? What direction? In truth, there was no direction for me to follow, I just had to keep moving until I found some black, dismissible corner to wait it out.

            Blood mopped the concrete where fires scattered in large and small pockets. Fed by lubricant, waste, and human fat — their light a welcomed constant amid rapid firing diodes.

A skinny black man danced barefoot with a manic glint in his dark eyes. His feet smeared long rhythmic trails into the surface of a dark crimson pool; and then I realized.

He was painting! Fucking painting.

A riot shield and uniform lay before him in an intestinal pool spilling from a severed torso. Its hairy lower half thrown ass-up in the exact opposite end, giving the body a cracked egg effect. The head, at least, I guessed it was his head, lied a few yards to the right with an upturned jaw a few yards opposite that.

It wasn’t a clean death, between its torn nose and the bruises on its flesh suggested a hard match of soccer more than an execution.

To the artist’s left raged a locust of blood washed bodies licking and sucking curdled blood from gaping holes, and hard, throbbing shafts. A heavyset woman with shit-stained breasts burst through the scene. Her vitiligo lips and face swelled through a glistening brown-red wash over breaking sweat.

This is the end.

Suddenly a hand from within clamped onto a nipple, ripping it away with an angry jerk and releasing a short spurt of dark blood. Her round brown eyes shot wide with pain, locked in panic for the true realization of our nature.

There is no escape.

This warm flush renewed their rage, pulling her large thrashing body back, down into the fold.

Panic jellied my legs when suddenly two large feet crashed into my back from above. The force ripped my skin and cracked my ribs. Just when my brain processed that pain, a pair of long jointed fingers went to work fish-hooking my cheek and then slammed my face onto the concrete.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The next thing I remember were peanut shells.

A large pile, rotten beneath my face. Traces of string, bits of mirror, and tufts of coarse black hair matted between with little dark pellets. The air was stale, like the cell — sour with mildew washed into wet concrete.

Suddenly everything blurred — shut; and then squinted. Then there was pain.

Deep, osteo-pain, and a cool, burning sensation wrapped tight over my back and arms; but it was healing pain; bones had been set, my flesh scrubbed, taut and stitched.

My legs down were bare. Clean, no stitching around the anus allowing me to breathe a heavy sigh for relief, but as I relaxed, I discovered the tube’s weight; deep in my bowels, hanging out and over my left buttock toward the floor.

Restrained, face down in a gurney with arms and legs strapped, outstretched and ivied. Something else, some anti-psychotic; heavy, like a Thorazine dose marked for a bull.

I opened my mouth to speak, and in my mind, I formed the words alright, but what came out was more akin to a drooling gorilla. A woman’s sardonic voice declared; “He lives!” adding “I’ll get Skittlez.”

A heavy thud: slow shuffle — and then another peanut shell bounced off my head and settled atop the pile.

For what seemed like another week I waivered in and out of consciousness until a hand gripped, and lightly joy-sticked the anal tube. “Sorry,” a sharp New English offered. “You were shittin all ovah ya’self.”

Before I could reply I felt a wave wash up from my gut, up my spine and over and through my being like a warm rush of god.

“Wha—? Who……?” was all I could muster between flushes of vomit, while fighting back dreamless rest. The voice trailed, muffled through a cotton filter: “Foooock—again? Well, whenever ya’ ready. We’re all dyin t’know what th’ fock makes you sa’ goddamn special.” he returned his attention to the others as I struggled to catch the broken exchange; “Denis, I told you…”

“Dammit Clandestine! Skit… …cooks, man!” a heavy thud, and then the intermittent fragments “Tommy don’t… …didn’t I? And… …desert!”

“Half… …nell, goddammit!”

Black.