Prose.

It's apparent. Completely, totally obvious. It's consistent with her body language. I've been trying to convince myself for about a month or two now...and so has she. I couldn't seem to shake it; the way she carries herself; those eyes caressed my mind with pure lust and her hips spoke a language of bodacious wrath. Never thought i would be able to be with someone so beautiful. And when it was over i wasn't surprised...just at the rebound.

The guy's name is John something...yeah John Beetle...He's a sketchy fuck. He looks to be about 30 in age. His philosophy seems to be that he gets older and they get younger...This kind of thing doesn't sit all that well with me. I'm a man of conviction. I don't go by the black book but i do have my morals, and this guy...he falls dead center into my cross hairs. It's been a while since my 'crime fighting' days; no more leaping off of fire escapes with crossbows...Now i just want to get the cases nailed shut. I feel like I'm inheriting my father's visceral sense of reality along with his brutal sense of force; it's part of being a MacDonald. Now my mother would never approve of this, but then again she met her end at the hands of this wretched city. Corona brûlera dans l'enfer.

I've found a secret about Mr. Beetle out on the streets that doesn't make him the most suitible rebound for Lita. I think that if i politely address this situation that he'll agree with delight and all three of us could go out for tea. Or i could squeeze his brains out through his eyes.

The car stops. I pass a few dollars to the cabbie. Then I'm off into the city night. Don't worry about how i got the man's address. What i'm more worried about is the bad feeling i get along with an iron taste the wind pushes into my mouth as i stand in front of the door of John Beetle. Apartment 7.06. With this...i push the bell and wait.

After less than a minute of wait, I jam one into each of the locks in the door. I'm being generous; there are more than enough rounds to share. After finding out Lita is missing, subtlety fell low on the list of traits a while ago. I can definitely thank my father for that one... I wedge the door open to a dank hallway, a blast of heat comes my way when it opens and feels dirty on my face. On the ground is something black as asphalt sticks to my feet like glue; makes it hard to walk. Down the dark hallway i see a black cat in the light, licking at a brown spot on the floor. "Who's jinxin' who?" i say to her. Sweat builds up on my forehead, the apartment is a living organism, right down to the clanking heartbeat of the furnace. I open a door and I'm in the kitchen.

Everything is yellow; except for the dimming light surrounded by huge horseflies. I can't help but gag on the stench coming from the trashcan; the inside painted with the same shades of brown and black as the hallway. Clanking continues and my eyes follow the trail of black/brown from the trash onto the floor and up to the 50s style freezer. A hand-print is on the door and handle, it's a bit more red than the others. I hesitantly reach for the door handle; but i hear footsteps...heavy, deep-into-the-floor footsteps. I leap into hiding. Peering in from the pantry i can't see anything yet, but i can hear a grotesque gurgling wheeze. A boot kicks the door open and in comes a brooding, hump-backed giant; the light is eclipsed by his head. He pulls in what looks to be a burlap sack full of bodies. He pulls them out one by one, by the head. The first is a kid i saw on the streets, one that likes to get in the way; I could definitely see why he's there... he has a gash in his torso that bleeds still as he is put into the deep freezer in the corner, the giant has to throw out the frost-bitten salisbury steaks and pop-sicles. The next is a child who also looks familiar...oh god...wait...He pulls out the next child...it's the first's younger sister...a friend of my little sister Cindy...oh god...The giant is turned away from the pantry and as i aim the copper-plated revolver at the back of his dome, i feel a hand reach toward my shoulder...

The hand on my shoulder adds pressure, then i look back to see the dead eyes of a former roller rink girl i knew from...past instances. Her throat was slit; slaughtered like a pig. I try to stop her from falling onto me but the small space can't hold us both and wouldn't you fucking know it, I'm face up on the kitchen floor, with a dead whore down there with me, the revolver's on the other side of the room and a large mongoloid is staring me in the face. Don't take this out of context. He's staring me in the face with eyes so deep into his head that all i can see is shadow. His mouth has rips and tears all over and his lips just look like tattered skin.

The behemoth picks me up high, some of my hair is caught in the light i can feel it. I fall through the walls into a dark room without friction. His figure casts a shadow of a demon through the red light and smoke in the hole in the wall. Playing dead won't help me here; he won't believe it 'til he sees my insides and my inner most thoughts splattered all over, or at least that's how it seems with him pounding into the ground and all i can do is wait for him to find me under the steel and plaster and asbestos. Now that i have some time to think, i realize this guy definitely isn't John Beetle. Not the scrawny little rich pale freak i remember. And as I cough up that metallic taste, the big guy finds me, pounding into my ankle. The pain shoots up my spine so fast that it overpowers the shock of hearing it crunch then snap. Vision's getting...damp. I feel like dead weight now. I'm in mid air again...now the gentle rain taps on my face, while a pole on the fire escape protrudes from my shoulder...I cry in agony at the sight of it, but thank god that i can't feel any of this yet...more like thank the painkillers. But he isn't done yet. He pulls me off of the pole and brings me back inside. I guess I won't put much of a fight like before...I fall in and out of consciousness while he gives me a tour of the building. The caverns of blood and dirt. Attics lined with animal carcasses. Some kind of make shift testing lab, a marijuana farm, then i totally blank out...

I come to, my face scraping against the floor catching every fragment and splinter as we inch closer to the sound of Jim Morrison crooning 'The Crystal Ship' on an old, dirty radio. A familiar voice interrupts the song,

"Paul, is that you? Oh good. You got the fucker." I look up through one eye; the distorted vision is just enough for me to get a good look at the bastard. John Beetle. Now that I look at him, there isn't much to hate if you'd never met the man. Clear, pale skin, perfect eyebrows, I think he might be wearing rogue too. His eyes have a sustained, unchanging stare like a mannequin you'd see in some uppity store in an even more uppity mall.

"Hey, you piece of shit. You think you can just run up in the place and make the news the easy way? Blast us all to hell? Bad strategy choices, Mr. MacDonald. Lita Virgo isn't going anywhere. I think she's doing just fine where she is." He says this walking backwards to the left, out of my view. He returns rolling in a chair into the light. It's her. Lita..it almost took me a second to tell if it were really her...but the eyes are the same...The same beautiful blue, only surrounded by a bloodied corpse. The wounds in her head look deep and are still bleeding; hair is scarce and burnt off. She drools in a dead daze, vomit sludges from her mouth and onto a high class blouse and skirt that i did not buy for her. I try getting up but my leg breaks; that fifteen or so minutes of healing send another one of those shocks up my body.

I lay writhing in pain and Beetle comes over to my face.

"You're not slipping into unconsciousness. This is death. You are looking at the beautiful face of Death. And he's ready to harvest. That's why I'm keeping this bitch alive. Everything she has is going to serve another dire need. I'm sucking the life out of her. That is of course...after she sucked the..." I spit a brown mess of blood and mucus in his face and watch him fly backward, clutching his prominent countenance. He quickly runs back and bitch slaps me.

"You stupid fuck.." we both say to each other in unison.

"Well," He says wiping off the bloody spit, "I'm the stupid fuck with a muscle-bound retarded brother. What do you have? Paulie, kill his ass. I'm done with this game..."

Big Paul comes over in a slump. He sees the hate in my face and hesitates for a second. Without a thought, i grab the closest thing to me: a pair of badly sharpened scissors and dig into his monstrous left tendon. After a few tries of twirling and gouging, I make a clean rip. Paulie's leg falls forward following gravity's rule. I try to hobble on one leg, but before i could even get from the prone position, Paul's got his paws on my face and head. I don't know if he's trying to break my neck or crush my skull, but it's clear he's trying to END ME. The screams of agony coming from him are a gift to me.

He goes for a twist, but can't get past the pain.
The second twist almost does me in and i gag a little.
The third is set to do me in, he's making sure of that. But mid twist...he loses grip and falls to the ground, a bullet above his eyebrow. Me and Beetle are frozen, eyes darting toward all the exits. I leap for Johnny with the bloody scissors and he falls to the ground under me.

"I have to say, I wasn't expecting it to go this far...But i won't let it go any further. Whatever little after-school program you got running in here ends today. This ain't the face of death. I'm the fucking Devil." He gurgles on something as i raise the scissors to his neck. Footsteps emerge in the distance and another familiar voice screams in "Harry NO!!"

I look over and it's detective Steven Dextro. The man who told me about Beetle. That Johnny boy is his 'White Whale' and always gets away. I guess i got to him first...

I rip into his throat with the scissors. The blood sprays into my eyes and nose and mouth and I don't care to move out of the way. I lay back under Lita and look at her one last time.
"Steve...yes."

I feel myself falling out of it with the worst image in my head. The twisted visage of a lost lover caught up in the flashing lights and stuck in the web of Beetle. The last sounds i hear are the end of a song by the cure i can't seem to remember and Dextro's ultra-conservative, Latin-accented, frantic calls for backup and EMTs.

Yeah...Lita Virgo doesn't want me anymore...