Mac stepped forward and grabbed the first guard by his chin. He jerked it back and to the left, burying his blade in the tender flesh of the guard’s throat.

Mac was infiltrating a drug operation in the warehouse district. He was here for info, but since he wasn’t officially on the books anywhere, he didn’t have a limit on collateral damage. He was clear to waste as many punks as he needed to find out who was behind all this.

They’d started posting their guards pretty far out, so Mac had to be careful. These first two were easy to spot, though. There were several blocks away from the target building, posted near an oil drum fire on a deserted corner.

These two guys were bush-league punks. Mac enjoyed his work–wasting dudes always got him hard–but these two were not a challenge; they were just a warm-up. Both were working the skinhead look with shaved heads. One was in a denim jacket and jeans, wearing combat boots. The other wore a simple leather jacket and jeans, with lace-up work boots.

Both were in their late teens. They were likely small-time thugs called in to beef up security. They were good at playing tough but had no clue when it came to the business of swift and silent death. They were about to learn, though. The hard way.

Mac worked his way around the block. He’d noticed an alleyway that exited near the corner where the kids were standing–looked like a good way to approach unseen.

In the end, it almost tripped Mac up. The kid in the denim was in the alley as Mac came up; he’d stepped back from his friend to take a leak and Mac was on top of him almost before he knew the punk was there.

The hardman gasped and choked as the steel blade sliced into his esophagus. His dick was still out from where he’d been pissing and a new stream of urine was flowing. But this was involuntary; the fucker had lost control of his bladder when his throat was cut.

The punk staggered out of the alley and dropped to his knees, gagging and coughing up blood, his hands wrapped around the hole in his airway, eyes wide and tears streaming down his face. The horrible choking sound alerted the other guard, who turned just in time to see his buddy collapse and a grim, muscled figured in black emerge from the shadows. It was death coming for him, and he knew it.

“Oh shit! Oh fuck!” the leather-clad punk screamed. He turned to flee in panic, but Mac’s silenced 9mm cut him off. There was a soft “thwack” sound, repeated once, and the thug was twitching in the gutter with two slugs lodged in his brain. His lace-up work boots kicked a couple of times before he went still.

The next guard was half a block away, but on the other side of an empty warehouse. He hadn’t heard the screams of the others. This one was slightly older, early twenties, long dark hair, unkempt goatee. He wore tight black jeans with black hightops, a white t-shirt and a gray hoodie pullover.

He was smoking a joint. It had gone out and he re-lit it. Mac stepped into the tiny circle of light cast by the punk’s lighter. The kid’s red, sleepy eyes focused on Mac’s face first, then his gun.

“Oh, fuck, don’t, please don’t—“ he gasped. Mac fired once. The cough of the gun was quieter than the guard’s mortal grunt as the bullet punched through his chest and punctured his lung. He staggered back against the wall, staring dazedly at the menacing figure before him. Mac gave the kid a 9mm facial and faded back into the shadows as the young hardman slid to the ground, leaving some of his hair and most of his brain on the wall behind him.

The corpse jerked a few times, then grew quiet. It wasn’t found till sometime the next day. By then, the few men who had any use for this thug were dead as well.

The next situation was more serious. There were two grunts again, but one was carrying a Kalashnikov. He didn’t look like he knew how to use it, but it didn’t take a lot of skill for the damn thing to be deadly.

Mac decided to see if he could take the guards down separately. It’d make things easier if he could get the unarmed fucker taken out first, so he could approach the guy with the AK-47 without having to worry about his back.

The building Mac was ultimately targeting was up against the waterfront. These bad boys were by the next building landward. It had been part of an industrial park at one time but seemed empty now. The hardman with the gun stayed at the entrance of the building, but the other one wandered restlessly inside and back out, continually. High, or badly wanting to be, Mac guessed. Again, it would be helpful if he was high—it’d be easier to drop him quietly. They don’t struggle long when they’re fucked up.

The best way to drop the kid would be an ambush from inside the building, Mac decided. Getting inside wasn’t a problem; none of the windows retained any glass. On the inside, Mac needed more than caution. He slipped on his night vision goggles.

It was pitch-black inside the building. This part of it was clearly a warehouse; it was a large empty cavern, floor littered with detritus. The front entrance, where the guards were, was a kind of lobby that led into the warehouse by a short hallway. With the goggles, Mac could see that the kid would just barely step beyond the hall onto the warehouse floor before turning back in his constant pacing. The punk didn’t venture any further into the darkness.

He was young, this one. Knit cap tight over his head, obscuring his hair. Black t-shirt and extremely tight jeans over red canvas sneakers. He looked like he was about eighteen, trying to be hardcore. Gauges in his ears and a neck tattoo of barbed wire probably helped his street cred. They damn sure weren’t gonna help him survive the next couple of minutes. And the knife hanging from his belt wasn’t going to help, either, but the kid wouldn’t live to regret it.

Mac picked his way carefully through the debris, his soft-soled combat boots making no sound on the concrete floor. He timed himself to be within reach the next time the thug made his rounds. He became completely still as the punk entered the vast blackness and stopped six inches away. When the boy turned away, Mac sprang forward.

It had to be quick, and it had to be quiet. The guy with the machine gun was twenty feet away, just outside. Mac clamped one hand over the motherfucker’s face, digging his thumb into the boy’s eye as he tightened his grip. He pulled the kid’s knife free and as he held the guard’s writhing body tightly, Mac quickly jammed the thug’s own six-inch blade up under his jaw. Mac’s biceps bulged as he tightened up his grip on the boy’s head and thrust the blade though the tongue and soft palate into the punk’s brain.

Mac found himself having to hold the dying kid with both hands to keep the noise down. His convulsions were so severe that Mac had to manhandle him to the ground and climb on top to hold him down, straddling the dying fucker, whose back shuddered on the debris-laden concrete floor.  Even so, the punk’s shoes scuffled in the dust for a while and Mac was finally forced to ream the knife into the thug’s skull a few times. The little fuck went rigid instantly and trembled all over. Mac felt something warm leak through the groin of his black tactical jumpsuit. When he stood up, he could see a large glazed stain on his crotch. The massive trauma to the nervous system had sparked an involuntary orgasm so strong the boy’s cum had soaked through both his jeans and Mac’s suit.

As Mac left the room to handle the guard with the machine gun, the huddled pile of meat he’d laid out on the floor continued to spasm and ooze semen from its flaccid cock. It might have stopped the twitching and the oozing sooner, but Mac had left the knife lodged it its brain. An electrochemical reaction that occurred where shredded cerebral tissue came into contact with carbon steel caused random neurons to fire for longer than they would have in simple brain death.

The punk’s legs flexed in the tight jeans, his red sneakers carving furrows in the dust. His limp dick leaked for hours, the balls draining dry.

Mac moved quickly now. The hit had taken too long; soon the thug with the gun would wonder what had happened to his buddy. Mac intended for him to find out in person.

The night vision goggles were no longer necessary once Mac reached the lobby; the ambient light from outside allowed him to see clearly while remaining in the shadows himself. The single streetlight on this block was directly outside and the kid with the machine gun was standing in the light, looking back at the dark lobby.

He was in his early twenties, with short blond hair. Slightly taller and better built than his dead friend, he wore a red t-shirt under a plain leather jacket. The punk’s hightops were also shiny black leather. His jeans were so tight Mac could see his junk outlined in every detail—he wondered how fast the boy could move; it looked uncomfortable. The thug took a tentative step towards the doorway.

“Randy?” he called out. “Ya there, dude? I swear to god, if you’re tweaking in there again, I’m gonna beat yer ass! Get the fuck out here now!”

Mac made a low noise to lure the guard in. As his target stood in the doorway, Mac chucked a pebble down the hallway to the warehouse. The kid heard it.

“Randy? That you? Quit fuckin’ around and get out here, bitch!”

Mac was on him the moment he stepped into the lobby. The boy never saw it coming. A gloved hand clamped over his face and pulled him backwards, off balance. As the punk stumbled back against him, Mac reached around and rammed his own seven-inch blade into the right side of the kid’s chest.

The guard forgot about the weapon in his hand; it clattered uselessly on the floor. He gave a loud grunt as the knife slid smoothly between his ribs and penetrated his lung. He gave another, louder and longer, as Mac twisted the knife in the wound and jerked it back out.

Mac yanked the thug’s head up. He forced the tip of his blade into the back of the boy’s neck, just above C1, the top cervical vertebra. He gripped the kid’s head tightly as he thrust the knife upward. The punk moaned as the blade sheared into his spinal cord. There was a slight resistance at the base of the skull, but it gave way with a crunching sound as Mac tightened up and rammed the knife into the fucker’s brain.

The trauma had instant impact. The punk rose up on his toes as his body arced backwards. His breathing immediately became swift and irregular, forcing a stream of drool out of his mouth. His eyes rolled back, only the whites showing.

Mac dragged the boy back down the hall into the warehouse, using the knife embedded in his skull as a handle. The kid kicked and flailed the entire way. Even in the dim light, Mac could see the thug’s dick spasming in his jeans. The dying hardman’s jizz spread in a dark circle out from his groin.

When he reached the warehouse, Mac dumped the guard’s body on top of the corpse already there. When he yanked his knife back out of the dead man’s skull, the thrashing slowed. The smell of piss became noticeable. With the blade no longer run through his brain, the dying punk stopped unloading in his shorts. His bladder had failed and his piss was soaking both him and his dead buddy beneath him.

When Mac left, the kid might still have technically been alive. There was a pulse and respiration, both extremely irregular and fading. There was brain activity; the random action of dying neurons that kept the pile of meat twitching and quivering in the dark for nearly an hour.

By the time he got to the door, Mac had dropped the two punks from his mind; there were more targets ahead and some might be more dangerous than these useless fuckers had been.