Quarter-Pounder. Extra cheese. Hold the pickles. It all snaps into focus, like waking up from a long sleep. T’s phone clatters to his feet as dream and reality abruptly intertwine, weaving a messy memory tapestry. The scene around him is both familiar and foreign, a picture he distantly recalls painted backwards, details shifted, periphery misleading. Dad—no, he’s not his real father, who is—comes into the kitchen, his brow furrowed with concern. They exchange looks, then paper-thin, status-quo affirmations. He speaks with a therapist’s tone, You alright, pal? Selected for his agreeable demeanor, counselor background. Selected by who? He’s gentle, though somewhat unsteady. Uh-huh. I’m fine. He steers his recliner back into the black hole, deeping into the TV-void. They’re issuing their commands to T through the static, between the lines, in the fuzz chasming their chitchats, they’re screaming, Kill Them or kill yourself. The second he turns around to go back into the living room, T can’t remember his own faux-father’s face. The details blur out and dissociate, like the man’s only a stranger. But he’s not—he is—he is not his father. T never knew his father, and that man is not him. He was made to be his father. This is not his home, only a box made to appear like his home. This is not even his body—it’s a carefully concocted façade to hide the cruelties roiling just under his skin’s leathery precipice, until his approaching molt finally unbinds him. Everything is an abstraction outside his mind’s lightspeed expanding field of perspective, brain racing mad to slot itself into a reality that makes sense. He catches himself blurry in the stainless steel reflection of the refrigerator door as he tips skim milk into his face. Small and lanky, full-body atrophy. His familiar features have devolved into the most pathetic versions of themselves. It takes effort to stay standing on his weak, skinny legs. His breathing is strained, eyesight foggy. T looks down at his feet where his phone lays face-up on the linoleum floor. The screen reads paused Halo 3 no-scopes and doom-gloom commentaries. Unknown Caller—issuing their commands. WW3’s coming, bro, we’re so fuuucked. With the growing number of terminal adult virgins in the US, the military has started chemically castrating their new recruits so that they can’t commit assaults while deployed among a volatile civilian populace overseas—the eunuched stormtroopers’ limbics, lizard-child neuroplastics, have developed so that their dopamine delivery systems now only respond to extreme violence. im so fucked up and im so fucking lonely and im so fucking horny. pussy would fix me. pussy would fix everything. Picking up the phone, the speaker is suddenly quiet. H—h—hello? Quarter-Pounder. Extra cheese. Hold the pickles. It sparks through his cortexes again—The Mission The Mission The Mission The M—wha—wha—whaaaaaaaat? Again, a cacophony clearing and he hears it in his blood. Quarter-Pounder. Extra cheese. Hold the pickles. The Mission. The Target: Big Tee. Is T activated? killpISoTtACTIVATEDus??? It’s like Seeing the fuTure’s omen through A bout of heavy déjà vu. It starts to make more sense as the details emerge from his gray matter. He Can only remember The MIssion when he stops thinking, when he dials his brainwavVves down to A dull, singular monoTone—he knows who hE is, anD??? he knows what he needs to do without recalling exactly how he got here. It’s only The Mission now. All diverging thoughts obsolesce, shave away. He hones into a killPrecise efficiency, diamOnd incisor sharp. His senses shifT into aUtopilot, unSure of where they’re steering. A weapon doesn’t require assurances—there is no future for him beyond The Mission, beyond his Target: Big Tee. Some spIrit-satellite Shoots TV signAls straight into his pineal, Calcified disrupTion scramblIng Visions of bodies on bodies on bodies slAked in blood and disemboweled innards, shiT-stained intestinEs ruptureD??? and leaking foul into the dirt. Become Death Machine, reap lIfe. He hateS, but he doesn’T know where. He is An omni-direCtional full-auTo EnmIty Cannon launching Vvarheads mAde of puresT light and sEething. He’s killing himself on the insiD???e, raping himself backwards with machine gun fire. He’s a spree-killer butterfly emerging from its Happy Meal chrysalis, new knives glinting off every contour of his new body into deadly crystalline wings. If I get on TV, I bet a buncha weird chicks’ll rub their clits to my photo, thousands of orgasms spanked out in my name. They’ll see my skull cracked and broken apart fountaining chunky brain-paste on LiveLeak. And they’ll cry and cry, cry their salty tears and jerk off and lament how they never wanted to fix me until after I was already turbo-dead every single night on the 6 o’clock news for almost three months straight. He’s a weapon in his own hand, an infiniTely unwInding bullet fractal fisting itS gun-cock rAw, evaCuating clouds of pearly napalm down on a gaThering of Innocent Villagers in A hyperreal rendering of easT Afghanistan. He's a bullet the sizE of the sun hitting critical mass, hellfire cusping at a scream. Kkiillll or be killeD. Kill Them or kill yourself. There is no alternative.

These bullets was dipped in a vat of AIDS gunk, the collected jizz droppings from a thousand infected homo dicks n balls—handle with extremo care, lil bro. They jingle-jangle in T’s gloved palms, glimmer in the light. The dealer’s wrap-around shades sparkle with the bullets’ brassy reflection. His Backwoods sparks red and plumbs bluish feathers of dopesmoke over the stash of lethal weaponry stacked in the trunk of his 85 Cutlass Supreme. T remembered Skkkott from his first year in high school, a burnout who dropped in the middle of junior year. He burns bright now, makes his stacks of cash pushing homebaked goods and god dust and military-grade heavy weaponry. The goal ain’t to spank a killshot, kid. Alls ya gotta do is get that nut-sludge into the target’s bloodstream, all up in their guts, and they’re done-zo—worm food in under a year from that immuno-fuckery. Ey, this ain’t Call a Duty, boa. Headshots is all video gayme bullshit. Do you play? Huhwuht? COD—you play? Nah, mane, I kill real motherfuckers in real life. You ever think about what it’d be like if the whole world was like a game like that? Would everything suddenly make more sense? How long would it take for everyone to end up KIA? I dunno, lil bro, but I do know that I’d be Last Man Standing. I’d kill and kill and kill until the only one left to kill is myself. That’s so fuckin sick. He flashes the akimbo muzzles of a pair of Mac-10s at a passing couple walking their golden retriever puppy, making explosion noises with his tongue. They flee. I wanna make people run away from me in fear. I’d kill Seal Team Sex, I’d kill ISIS, I’d kill the Talibam, I’d kill al-Qaeda, I’d kill fuckin Canada, bro. I’d fuck the dead bodies of all my enemies and leave em to rot and stench in the streets. Every living thing would meet its end by my bullets. After I kill every human, I’m gonna kill the sharks and the squirrels and the mosquitos. Total planetary annihilation, absolute bonercide. You wouldn’t leave anyone alive? Nah, no one, nothing. I’m a necromancer, homie. Fuck yeah. So, hey, looksee, this HIV strain is, like, turbo-virulent—brewed up by the DOD in their underwater virology labs under Superior—it’s only been used by those top-secret DEVGRU shinobi assassins out there in the real world. How the fuck you think they got Ghaddafi, dawg? They tactically nuked his white blood cells so gyaddamn hard he couldn’t do nothin but get a knife rammed up his HIV-infested manhole on TV. I hear someone slipped the toxo-jizz in his morning Wheaties—guy didn’t even noticed the taste of spunk splatter, the cumguzzlin freak. The AIDS is why he got all weird n saggy when he got old. You ever see how he looked in, like, the 60s or whatever? I woulda fucked him, thas all I’m sayin. Skkkott’s wrists are bedazzled with gold and diamond. The gaudy jewelry chimes as he pulls a wadded plastic baggy from his hoodie pocket and slaps it onto the hood of his car. Whatever you need these HIV bullets for, this gnarly shit’ll help a whole shit-ton. Mescaline-infused meteorite dust, mane. They pulled the dust from a crater in Mongolia back in 92. It’s said to grant supernatural abilities. If you sniff up just a lil bit right before you’re bouta do what you’re bouta do, you’ll be totally undetectable by the human eye, as well as thermal imaging. For about a hour, you’ll occupy the spirit realm, bro. T has never been to the spirit realm. Will that really work? Spies n assassins been using it since the 90s, lil homie, of course it’ll work. It only got on the black market recently, so you’ll be one of the first dudes to use it for—I dunno—whatever yer gonna use it for. Hey, what are you gonna use it for? I’m gonna shoot the president. Damn boa, shit, good luck with that homie. But why HIV bullets instead of, I dunno, regular bullets? Because that’s The Mission. Just cause it’d be funny? Oh, naw, it’s ironic since he was selling that Oburgerfeller overturn shit last year, huh? You gay, dawg? Ey, my cousin likes dudes—no hate. Hey, actually, you might actually kinda be his ty— No. I don’t give a fuck about any of that. It isn’t political, but— I just have to do it. It’s something I need to do. Skkkott withdraws a smaller bag from the bag and presses it into T’s palm. In that case, this one’s on The House. You try it and lemme know how it goes, huh? Yeah, sure. One more thing—and I’m only tellin you bout this cause I like yer moxie, bro—do you know how easy it’d be to make a crude gun-type uranium bomb? I dunno. Not very hard at all, besides gettin, y’know, fissile material. It’s jus shooting one hunka U-235 at another an boom dawg! Nagashima. Little Boy, lil boa. It’s really that easy? It’s that easy—I think—I dunno I never made a nuke in my garage, dawg. Just look up how to do it and I’m sure you’ll figure somethin out. Anyway, hardest part bout makin them gun bombs was just enrichin a whole shittona uranium—the rest was fuckin easy shit. Thas why they never tested the gun-type in that Oppenheimer flick, they knew it’d work no prob. Plutonium Implosion’s where it gets all confusin. Anyway, these days, now we got U-235 all over the gyaddamn place. So much fissile material goes missing from all over, it’s honestly a bit scary how much. But ey I can’t get rid of the stuff! You have uranium. Enriched and eager to fuck, bro—jus, like I dunno, tayke a shower after you handle the stuff I guess.

The range doesn’t allow human-shaped targets. Such pussy shit. T stretches his imagination, manifesting his bullies and fleeing children and the Big Tee in his crosshairs. The AR-15 spasms in his hands like his cock seizing mid-orgasm. Bullets shoot out every pore of his body, into everyone and everything, but the only bullets that matter are the real ones cumming out the end of the rifle. In 2069 AD, I’ll be considered a folk hero and they’ll make me into a Fortnite skin bundled with Zombie Che and Mecha-MLK and remastered tracks from the Abu Amriki vault. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, huh? T is seeing every way his face can explode at the deadly end of a 5.56 hunk of death. His head opens like a gaped asshole spewing shattered teeth and globs of brain. Cracking his skull open reveals a hidden missile silo that launches a nuclear-armed ICBM into Baltimore. His gun makes him a one-man GI Joe omnicide automaton, a two-way ballistic annihilator that kills forward and backward. The fired gunpowder fouling reeks up and holocausts his brain cells till he’s a dopey bullet-whore swaying with the recoil like a stripper swooning around a gun barrel. Cops are gonna puke when they get to the scene, deep deep therapy for years after. News people are gonna make their speculations with the bloodbath blurred up behind them, a fuzzy red mosaic collage stenching through the TV and into America’s glazed-over retinas. Freaks’ll scour Google for the uncensored shit and jerk off to it—to me—obsessively. T wishes the targets would bleed and scream when he shoots them. He wants the wounded paper to crawl at his feet and beg him to spare its life, suck off the end of his gun in penance. He’s thinking about who’ll play him in his biopic as he pumps brain bullets into the ghosts of cowering civilians. Someone with a sharp jaw, toned biceps, huge cock, clean skin, no acne, no chronic body odor. My ghost’ll come back and possess the actor’s body and I’ll get so much fuckin pussy. Pornostar Lich Deathlord: Spirit of Virgin Vengeance. Scorch the oceans dry until the planet’s nothing more than a nuclear-wasted necropolis dusting cold through space, enslave humanity’s last pathetic vestiges and force them into my undead eterno-prison-harem. He doesn’t know the numbers that keep calling his phone, or the people screaming at him killkillkill over the radio as he drives out to the other end of Penn. They get louder the closer he gets. His muscles twitch, trigger finger worming wild around the steering wheel. The mescaline-meteorite cocktail guides him up his ladder, moving see-through like a gaseous deathform, his spirit ascending toward its rapture. The frequencies churning out invisible through the 5G towers above suppress his empathy neurons, his targets warping into things less than human before his eyes. Piss trickles and pools under where he lays prone on the roof with his weaponry starting to graft into his hands, becoming one with his body. He overlooks some foul squirming orgasm yawning wet and brutalization desirous. A puddle leaks out his jeans, but he hardly notices with every sense projected laser-precise through the barrel of his rifle. The bob of his red dot slows with his heartbeat as his eyes dilate into serpentine slits tuned for predation. They’re begging him, Big Tee is begging, Fuck us with your bullets, save us all, we love you.

Lee Pearson has been ineptly running God’s Cruel Joke Literary Magazine since late 2022. '“X” - @leeisscum