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.

The first two guards were Mexican; they’d been hired as cheap and unskilled labor. They were there to raise the alarm if anyone showed up and they were extremely expendable. They were posted in the woods, not far from where the gravel road had branched off the state highway.

Mac knew they’d have handguns and knives, but little else. They were on the bottom tier, guarding the first stretch of road. Further on, there’d be others, local boys—hunters, most likely, who knew the land and knew how to kill. But these two were small-time dealers at most, utterly unable to defend themselves against the sudden, brutal attack about to be unleashed.

One was standing at the bend where the gravel road swung to the west. He was in his early twenties. It seemed to be too cool an evening for shorts, but he was wearing denim ones, his hairy, muscular calves rising from blue hightops. His t-shirt was the same shade of grayish blue as his shoes. His coal-black hair was fine and straight, worn long, pulled back into a ponytail. A faint mustache darkened his upper lip.

The other guard was about a quarter-mile away, where the road bent back to the north again. He was older, in his late twenties, shorter, but more muscular. He wore tight black jeans, a white wifebeater that displayed his tattoos, and work boots. His hair was shorter and slightly wavy, but just as dark.

Each of the guards was patrolling the bends in the road, pacing back and forth around the curves. Clearly no professionals—as Mac watched from the woods, they went far enough around the bends to get out of sight of each other.

That was an amateur mistake that was going to cost them their lives.

Mac crept down to the side of the road, waiting for the younger guard. His gear was all black, gloves, boots, everything. Blackout paint on his face. In the shadows, he was invisible. The kid certainly didn’t see him when he came round the bend.

The boy walked towards Mac’s position, stopped, and made his turn. He was close enough for Mac to see his glazed eyes and smell the weed saturated in his clothes. They’d both smoked out recently and were even more useless as sentries than mere inexperience would have made them.

The Mexican punk never knew what hit him; Mac didn’t give him a chance. The moment the kid’s back was turned, Mac popped up and snatched him back by the ponytail. Simultaneously, his other hand came up, plunging his seven inch serrated Ka-bar utility knife into the guard’s right kidney.

The boy gave a sharp gasp. The overwhelming agony of a steel blade slashing through a major organ induced instant shock. He trembled and moaned, unable to move as Mac ripped the knife back out, twisting the blade to inflict maximum trauma.

Pulling the kid closer to him, Mac reached around and buried the blade into his heaving chest. The Mexican went rigid as the knife punctured his heart like a balloon. The force of the blade penetrating his lung forced his breath out in a deep, vital grunt.

The boy arced back, his eyes staring uncomprehendingly into Mac’s. The pupils dilated as his skewered heart thrashed itself to shreds on the cold steel that Mac ground remorselessly into the wound. The smell of weed was overpowered by that of piss and shit as the guard lost control of his bowels. He kicked twice, violently, his hightops carving furrows in the gravel road.

Mac yanked the blade back out of the boy and dropped him face-first on the road; the kid spent the last few agonizing seconds of his wasted life with gravel digging into his face. He didn’t know he was dying; he didn’t know much at all at this point beyond the agony of massive organ trauma. The cold blackness, when it came, was a welcome relief…

The older guard suffered more.

Since he was just as stoned as his counterpart had been, it took him a few turns to realize he hadn’t seen the other guy in a few minutes. He stopped to ponder for a moment when a gloved hand clamped over his mouth and jerked his head back. In a swift one-two stroke, seven inches of serrated carbon steel punched through his throat and was torn back out.

Then he was free.

The guard staggered forward, scuffling his boots on the gravel, his hands around his neck. The guy’s eyes were wide in shock and pain. He coughed and spit up a gout of blood.

The guard fell to his knees in the middle of the road and held his hands up in front of his eyes, staring at the blood in horror and confusion. He was having trouble breathing—both the carotid and the jugular had been severed but most of the bleeding was internal, down the trachea and into the lungs. The guard was drowning in his own blood.

The realization that he was dying stole over the Mexican along with the creeping gray that froze into eternal black. Someone was there, though. A man had stepped from behind him. Still on his knees, in an instinctual appeal to plead for his life, the guard held his bloodied hands out to the man in front of him, the man all in black, the man with a bloody knife in his hand…

The dying man fell face down onto the gravel road, quivering as he bled out on its dusty surface. His last conscious act was to turn his head to the side—his last view was that of the combat boots of his killer. They turned contemptuously and moved away before he was completely dead. There was no need to watch him die; it was inevitable and he was helpless.

And there were more guards who needed killing.

The kid had dark, straight hair down in bangs over his forehead. He was wearing a light leather jacket over a white t-shirt with a logo—a pair of combat boots—printed on it. He wore tight, torn jeans with a thick brown leather belt, well worn. A large hunting knife dangled in a sheath from the belt. He was wearing combat boots in desert camo, tightly laced, with zippers up the sides. He was about twenty-one years old and had paused, one boot up on a stump, to light a Marlboro. An old hunting rifle was slung on a strap over his shoulder.

He was thinking about getting high and getting laid. There was no hint that he’d be dead within three minutes.

The boy took another drag and stepped forward. Mac was on him instantly.

This one was one of three he’d found farther up the gravel road. Local boys, as he’d guessed, and boys was the operative word. This youth was the oldest; he’d bought the beer. The other two hadn’t been able to, so they were younger. They’d bought their own cigarettes, though, so it was likely they were over eighteen.

They’d passed the beer around, laughing and talking loudly, for over an hour, giving Mac all the info he needed. He watched silently from the shadows as they finished the case, surprised again at the amateur nature of the defense. He’d drop these boys quickly. They ended up getting drunk enough that he could incapacitate them easily without killing them.

But that wouldn’t be any fun.

This one had stood up and staggered in Mac’s general direction. He’d slurred out something about taking a leak as the other two climbed unsteadily to their feet and went in the other direction. They, too, separated after a few yards, each stumbling off into the darkness alone.

Definitely hunters, Mac realized, and despite their youth and their drunkenness, they were confident in their knowledge of the land. Good; that put them at their ease. They wouldn’t know what the fuck hit them.

The boy in the leather jacket propped himself against a tree about fifty yards away. Mac could hear the patter of the kid’s piss on the dry leaves of the forest floor. He approached, swiftly and silently.

The young hunter had zipped his cock back inside his tight jeans by the time Mac got there. The kid turned away from the tree to find a man standing in front of him—the phrase “fuckin’ ninja commando” bubbled through his soused brain.

Then all existence exploded into pain.

Mac punched the kid in the face, the steel knuckles inside his fingerless leather combat gloves breaking the punk’s jaw. The boy spun around and found himself in an iron grip from behind. A hand clapped over his mouth and jerked, hard.

The force applied to his fractured jaw was agony, but it was nothing compared to the electric shock that erupted in his neck and enveloped his body as his head was twisted around backward. There was a sound like an entire bag of popcorn popping at once, the sound of vertebrae shattering and shredding the spinal cord.

The boy stared into the eyes of the killer standing behind him; his neck twisted nearly two hundred degrees. He struggled to breathe but the only things he could feel were the pain in his neck and that in his jaw. The rest of his body was gone. Bloody foam oozed from his nose and the corner of his mouth. His mouth gaped open, desperate for air, but his chest was paralyzed.

As the kid’s body sank to the ground, his eyes remained fixed on those of his killer. He didn’t know exactly what had happened, but he knew that he was dying and that the man with the hard face and the cold eyes had clamped down on him and broken him like a twig. He could smell death in the air but couldn’t feel that he’d shit his pants as organ failure cascaded through his body.

Consciousness ebbed from the outside in, everything fading to bright white. The last things the punk saw were those cold, cold eyes, glowing like the angel of death.

Mac stood up, a pile of human meat twitching under his boots.

There’s another two just ahead.

The second hunter died quickly. Young, dumb, and drunk, he was utterly defenseless and was taken down without a fight.

He and his companion had separated after the older boy had gone off. Mac had decided to follow the kid on the left first.

The punk was playing with his cell phone. They were much too far out of town to have a signal; he was listening to music. Mac could see the kid’s face lit from underneath by the screen; in the pale blue light, he could see the wires running up to the boy’s ears.

This one was wearing a white ball cap over strawberry blond hair. The freckles on his broad face glowed palely in the odd lighting, his half-lidded eyes not really focused on anything in particular. He was a small-town punk and looked the part—white t-shirt showing his developed chest under a worn denim jacket. Tight, stained jeans over a pair of square-toed shitkickers.

Mac wasn’t sure where the boy was headed; he’d moved off from his friend at a forty-five degree angle and seemed to be just wandering at random. Mac decided that was probably the case. The kid was very drunk and probably didn’t have a specific goal in mind.

Mac did, though. He knew exactly where the boy was going—down.

Mac stepped out and confronted the guard. The kid stared at him in amazement, mouth working like he was trying to say something, but nothing came out.

Mac kicked the kid in the groin with his steel-toed boot, dropping him to his knees instantly. As the punk tried to catch his breath, eyes wide in pain, Mac stepped forward, grabbed the boy’s right arm and twisted it behind his back, forcing his head down to the ground at the same time. He slammed his boot down onto the back of the kid’s head to keep it in place while he forced the steel tip of his blade into the kid’s skull through the hole where the spinal column enters.

This was a speed shock kill. The process involved some discomfort to the victim, but was curiously merciful in its way. The victim spent his last few seconds on earth in a universe of hellish pain, but was spared the terror of impending death, since each new trauma assaulted the nervous system before it had a chance to recover from the previous shock.

Mac placed the tip of the knife at the back of the guard’s neck, where it met the head, and shoved, hard. The cracking sound of the blade splitting the skull as it was forced through the opening that was too narrow for it was very audible. The kid was certainly still alive when it happened; he not only heard it, he felt it happen inside his head.

There was no obvious reaction; the brain trauma was immediate and overriding. The punk spasmed violently, kicking his legs back from his kneeling position, the toes of his boots digging up the dirt and leaves.

Keeping his boot planted firmly on the back of the boy’s head, Mac made sure he was neutralized as a threat. He ground the blade of his knife inside the young guard’s skull, slashing and shredding the brain to hamburger.

In the mindless static of neurons firing at random, the punk jerked and pumped piss and semen from his dick almost simultaneously. His eyes were open grotesquely wide, rolled back so only the bloodshot whites showed. His arms and legs flailed violently each time Mac twisted the knife inside his skull, with a final convulsion when he yanked the blade free.

Mac’s mind was already on the third boy as he angled off in the direction he’d seen the guard headed.

Behind him he left another quivering pile of human meat. This one still had a soundtrack, though. As quick and as brutal as the attack had been, Mac had been so smooth, the earphones were still in the kid’s ears. The only signs of violence were the cap lying in the dirt, the small trickle of blood at the back of the neck (and from the left nostril)—and, of course, the slowly-diminishing convulsions caused by fatal brain damage.

Mac was improvising as he went along, deciding each takedown move as circumstances seemed to warrant. He wanted to see what the last kid at this level was doing. Surely there were others ahead who were more professional; the ease with which he was moving was worrisome in itself.

The third guard clearly thought of himself as a serious hunter. Mac had never seen so much camo pattern—cap, jacket, boots—and not one inch of it doing the stupid punk any good. Mac could still see him clearly. He was facing away from Mac, leaning with one hand up against a tree, taking a leak, most likely.

Since he was sure this was the last guard along this part of the road, Mac decided he could take a little longer here for the sake of silence. There was a spool of wire on a strap around his right wrist. He wrapped some around his left hand, pulled out enough to make a loop, and crept forward.

He was still five feet from the kid when he realized his target wasn’t pissing. He was beating off. Horny little fucker got drunk and decided to let out a little excess cum. By the sound of his breathing, deep irregular gasps, he was pretty close to shooting, too.

Perfect timing, thought Mac as he dropped the wire over the punk’s head and pulled tight.

And it was tight. Mac jerked back on the wire so hard, the muscles bulged in his arms and the tendons stood out. The boy forgot all about his dick as his hands scrambled madly at the crushing pain in his throat. The wire had sunk so deeply in the kid’s neck that his desperate fingers were unable to grasp it. It had broken the skin in places, too, and the blood made the skin slippery. The kid suddenly realized that he had no way to stop what was happening.

Panic set in. The young guard’s cock was as hard as ever, but a stream of piss shot out, splattering the tree trunk. The boy was voiding his bladder in terror. He struggled forward, arms reaching behind him to seek out some soft spot in his assailant.

There was no soft spot in Mac. He tensed up and tightened the wire. There was a faint crunch as the punk’s hyoid bone broke. He leaned backwards, pressing himself against Mac’s chest as his legs flexed out in front, the heels of his camo combat boots scraping furrows in the dirt.

He turned his head back and to the side in an attempt to get a look at his attacker. Mac obliged; it wasn’t like the fucker was gonna be able to tell anyone. He stared icily down into the pleading, confused face of his victim and watched as life drained out of him. The kid could only see the dark silhouette of a male figure, but his questing hands could feel the rock-hard muscles that were wringing his life out of him.

The boy’s face was already red and as Mac watched, it darkened to black. His eyes, already bulging in horror, became monstrous as oxygen deprivation caused them to swell. His lips, too, swelling and darkening until they were separated by his tongue, forcing itself up in a fount of foamy drool that dangled from the dying kid’s chin.

As the guard sank into darkness—a loud, excruciating darkness—he reached one hand up to the face of his killer. Much of his brain was already dead at the time, so it was an instinctual gesture, at most—the submissive male ape brain submitting to the alpha male—as he gently stoked Mac’s cheek and shot his last seed out of his rigid tool. A solid jet of semen splattered on the trunk of the tree, in the same spot his piss had soaked.

The wire was so embedded in the meat’s neck that Mac had to use some force to pull it out. Like the others, this one was dead but not quite still; it jerked and twitched from time to time. Even the dick on the meat spasmed and leaked another wad of cum occasionally.

Mac left the meat to rot where it was. There must be others ahead, and surely they would be better than these useless assholes. He needed to stay on his toes.

Mac nearly walked into a trap himself. If it hadn’t been for his hunch that he’d find more professional guards ahead, he’d have been the next victim of sudden, brutal death.

He almost didn’t see the next guard. It had been a brilliant ploy; placing untrained expendables on the outer boundaries to lure any attackers into a false confidence. This guy wasn’t a local kid. He was a grown man, and one whose original locale was likely glad he wasn’t there at the moment.

He was down on one knee, listening quietly. Late twenties, early thirties maybe, slim and wiry but very fit. He was quiet, disciplined—very obviously professional. He had on camo cap, worn backwards over his black curly hair. A bulge on his nose showed where it had been broken once. He had hard, narrow eyes, glinting as they scanned the darkness in front of him. This was a man who had been paid to kill.

And he hadn’t been killing animals.

The guard was wearing a dark t-shirt tucked into a tight pair of jeans; since he had approached his target from behind, Mac could see a pistol tucked into the waistband in the rear. It was a small revolver, a .38 maybe. Length of the barrel made Mac think there was a silencer on it. Perfect.

The guard shifted, moving one rubber-soled boot up to take pressure off the other. He was about to stand up—Mac poised himself to spring.

It was quick and efficient. The moment the merc got vertical, Mac was on him. Clamping his left hand over the man’s mouth Mac pulled him back and rammed his blade into his back.

The guard stiffened in agony. He knew, as physical shock held him in its iron grip, that he was about to die. He’d done this to others; now it was his turn.

He was right. Mac left the knife in the merc’s back as he reached down and pulled the guard’s own weapon out. He placed the barrel of the silencer against the back of the man’s head, angling it upward to avoid his hand that was still covering his target’s mouth.

A quick jerk backwards and a quiet coughing sound and it was over. The merc grunted as the slug tore through his brain pan. It exited with a remarkably small hole from the front of the man’s head, above the hairline. A fine mist of blood and brain hung in the air for a moment.

He fell back into Mac’s arms, shuddering as his brain began to die. Mac continued to hold him tightly by his head, supporting the twitching meat as he dropped the gun and jerked his knife back out of the dying man’s back. Mac then dropped the body; it hit the ground like a sack. He knelt down and wiped his knife off on the guard’s clothes. He glanced casually into the man’s face.

The merc’s eyes were half-open, staring without focus. Blood leaked from both nostrils and from the one visible ear. He was still breathing, but just barely. It was difficult and irregular, causing deep involuntary gasps and gurgles. Massive brain hemorrhages were shutting the body down and the arms and legs flailed uselessly as random signals fired down the length of the hardman’s destroyed nervous system.

The professional gave one long last gasp and pissed himself.

The meat still jerked and twitched when Mac left it behind. He had other things to worry about; this was becoming more dangerous with each step he took. He was leaving a pile of meat behind, not something that needed attention.

Besides, it would keep twitching and jerking for a few minutes anyway, no matter what he did. He just needed to make sure he didn’t end up the same way himself.

Mac moved silently through the forest, leaving twitching piles of human meat to mark his progress. He was on his next kill before he knew it. This forced an improvised attack; it was lucky he had trained himself to a razor sharpness—to the point where he could kill automatically, without thinking about it.

There were two of them, both professional hardmen. They were dressed similarly. The one closest to Mac had on jeans, laced-up hiking boots, a white t-shirt with a black leather jacket and a knitted cap. The other man had on jeans and combat boots. He wore a black turtleneck but he also had a black knitted cap. They were both in their early thirties and well built.

Mac had just cleared a thicket when he stepping into an open space too small to be called a clearing. The hardman in the jacket was there, staring at him in surprise. The other guy was facing away and unaware of Mac’s presence—for the moment.

Mac’s superior reflexes allowed him to neutralize the first hardman quickly. He stepped forward, straight-arming the seven-inch serrated blade of his Ka-bar knife into the guard’s throat. It came in at an angle, deflected off a vertebra in the neck and punched out the other side of man’s neck. Mac jerked the knife back towards himself with a slashing motion, cutting the blade free of the guard’s throat in a single tear, ripping the larynx into useless strips. Knowing that this guy would have no further interest in his activities, Mac turned his back on the man so he could take out the other guard.

But it took a while for the first hardman to die. He knew exactly what had happened; he had done this to men himself and knew how fucked he was. The pain was more incapacitating than he had known it could be. He grabbed his throat in an attempt to slow the bleeding, but his fingers felt the mangled edges of torn flesh as the sensation of warm blood flooded down his hard chest and taut belly, mingling in his crotch with the warm flow of urine.

Pissing himself in terror, the merc fell to his knees. This all occurred in the space of about a second and a half. The guard could see the dark figure of death close in on his companion.

It can take up to a minute and a half to bleed out from a slashed throat. There was plenty of time to watch his partner die.

Not that he could think of it in those terms. He had been rigidly trained in how to kill, not how to die, and the physical shock had rendered him helpless. As he knelt and choked on his own blood, he watched his buddy die in agony.

Mac rammed his forearm against the back of the second guard’s head, slamming him face-first into a tree. He only needed to pin the stunned hardman there for a moment, giving him time to thrust his knife into the merc’s back, puncturing his lung and forcing out his breath in a deep, startled grunt. Mac whipped the blade back and flipped the blade around in a blur as he spun his target around. Leaning forward, Mac slammed the hardman back into the tree with his forearm across his chest. The knife darted up and speared the guard’s head under the jaw. A momentary resistance followed by a faint crunching sound and the blade was lodged firmly in the man’s skull.

The first guard had fallen on his side; the continuing drop in blood pressure had made it impossible for him to remain upright. But despite the icy haze that was creeping in from the edges of things, the merc was still conscious. He saw his buddy’s death blow. He heard the sound of the blade penetrating the cerebrum, he knew what kind of damage was being done when Mac ground the knife in the wound, clamping down on his victim’s head and reaming the knife around like he was stirring a mixing bowl, churning the brain into hamburger.

As he bled out, the first guard sobbed silently, wondering why death would not come and release him from this agony and this horror. His severed windpipe squealed impotently with each breath after his esophagus collapsed in on itself. The hardman thrashed in the dirt, trying to claw open his blocked airway, but the loss of blood prevented anything more coordinated than a general convulsion.

But he was still there. He could smell the scent of death when his partner, deep in the throes of brain trauma, lost control of his bowels. He could see the rhythmic kicking of his boots, the random flailing that accompanied brain death. He last hope, useless as it had been, that his buddy would somehow be able to save him…

Everything was going gray. But the dark man, the killer was gone. His partner was slumped in a sitting position with his back to the tree and his legs straight out in from of him. His head was tilted back, showing blood tricking from the hole torn under the jaw. His eyes were rolled back, showing nothing but white.

The first guard was almost gone. Everything was cold and dark. Down a long tunnel, he could still see his buddy, kicking and jerking, a large dark circle spreading in the groin of his jeans.

It still hurts, he thought. Why does it still hurt? Oh god why can’t I die…

And then there was just more meat, rotting in the woods. Mac moved on.

The kid’s hand fumbled in his crotch as he rang the doorbell. He was hard as a rock and his tight faded jeans had bent the rigid pole tenting in his crotch. He was seventeen—the age when boys have a constant boner.

Holding the pizza box in one hand, he pulled off his cap and scratched in his dirty blond hair. His tight sneakers shuffled on the porch as he waited for the door to open. He didn’t wait long.

The man who opened the door loomed over him. Tall and very well muscled, he was in his mid-thirties, with a cold, emotionless face and buzz-cut black hair. He was dressed much like the delivery boy, in tight faded jeans, sneakers and a t-shirt.

“Got your pizza, dude. Where do ya want it?” the kid drawled. He stepped inside the house and noticed right away that it was empty. Except for a couple of boxes stacked in the room to the left of the door, all he could see of the ground floor looked vacant. The ceiling lights were on and the blinds were shut.

“Just put it on top of those boxes,” the man said gruffly. “Just moving in.”

“Sure, dude,” the kid said, moving toward the boxes. “It’s $13.95, and I can take—“

In a split second, the man had closed in on the kid, wrapped a nylon cord around his neck and cut off his air.

The delivery boy shouted in shock, his cries reduced to random syllables by the cord. “Gah! Ig! Uck!”

Then the only sounds were the labored breathing of the killer and the frantic flailing of the victim’s limbs.

The kid fought. He didn’t want to die. But he was young and soft and had no idea what was happening to him. He was helpless in the arms of a professional hardman and had no choice but to submit, even to the point of death.

His arms clawed desperately in front of him, seeking help that wasn’t there. The pain, the horrible pain in his chest and his throat was overwhelming and he was almost mindless in his panic. As his muscles clenched in a last fight-or-flight reflex, his dick strained rigidly, his balls red and swollen. More agonized grunts erupted past the teen’s purple lips and protruding tongue. “Ng! Ng! Guh!”

“Shut up, you little fuck,” the hardman snarled in the boy’s ear. He dragged the kid roughly into the rear part of the house. The kid’s leather sneakers beat uselessly on the floor; he was getting weak and his struggles were fading.

The boy reached up to grasp the arms that were holding the cord. His hands fluttered across the hard, tensed muscles relentlessly choking his life out. The dying teen’s bloodshot eyes were losing focus and glazing over.

Suddenly the kid started jerking, violently and convulsively. His dying brain was losing control and sending scrambled signals. Along the way, a dark circle appeared in the boy’s crotch, growing larger with each second. The punk was shooting his wad as he died. He couldn’t feel it; his brain was too damaged. He shot his load uncontrollably as a physical reflex..

The killer dropped the corpse on the floor; it was useless meat. He picked up the kid’s cap and pizza box and dug through the boy’s pockets for his key. He turned out the light as he left.

Silence settled in afterwards. There was an occasional gurgle and twitch from the corpse but they faded over time. Rigor set in and the teen’s dull blue eyes grew cloudy.

Mac responded quickly to Bill‘s knock. “How’d it go?” he asked.

“Fucker kicked a little,” Bill growled. “But it worked fine. Car’s a fifteen-year-old POS, but it’s got the sign. His cap has the company logo, so I took it too. It’s in the car with the pizza. Ready to roll?”

Mac chuckled. “Yeah, we need to get a move on or they’ll be expecting it for free,” he said. “Just be grateful these fucking morons are so predictable. Ordering pizza from the same place every Wednesday. Whoever they are, they’re amateurs.”

The target location was not far away. The house was set back off the road. They’d done some recon and knew that there’d be one guard outside and one just inside the front door.

As usual, they didn’t know who the main target was or why. They were there to do a job, a job they were good at. A job they enjoyed.

Bill had enjoyed killing the teen delivery boy just for his car and pizza box, but it had been Mac’s idea to order a pizza at an abandoned address to kill the driver and use his car to infiltrate the target location. Worked like a charm.

Mac was in a commando blackout suit, all black, with rubber soled combat boots; he even had black greasepaint to ensure his face wasn’t visible beneath his black ski cap. In the shadows, he was practically invisible. He hid in the back seat of the dead kid’s car on the way.

Bill pulled up at the curb and got out. The guard stepped off the porch and approached him. Bill’s silenced .38 was hidden under the pizza box. The guard never saw it.

The guard was the typical free-lance merc. Late twenties, very fit, long, slightly curly hair. Dressed casually in tight black jeans and a t-shirt. There was a pair of tightly-laced black and white leather sneaker on his feet. He was hungry; he never saw death coming at him.

Bill’s gun made a slight coughing sound. The merc punk grunted as the slug punched through his abdomen. He sank to his knees with a gasp, looking up at Bill with a helpless, pleading look on his face. He didn’t know what had happened; he only knew that something was very wrong and he was in terrible pain.

He didn’t seem to catch on even when Bill tossed the pizza box aside and fired again. The second bullet punctured the guard’s left lung. A deep, primal grunt was forced past the man’s vocal cords as his chest was compacted by the impact. He collapsed in a heap with that taste of his own blood in his mouth, still not realizing that he was dying.

Bill thought it was a shame he couldn’t send this one off right. He and Mac usually arranged things so that their victims blew their loads before—or even better, at—death. But there was another hardman waiting just inside the door, so this needed to be quick. This fucking punk was small-time, a boy pretending to be a man. Bill ended the game by popping a cap into the boy’s brain. His leather shoes kicked violently, then the corpse quivered in its death throes. Man or boy, thought Bill, they die same. They all go out kicking at the end.

Mac had crept silently from the back seat of the car and managed to reach the front door before Bill had fired his second shot. As he’d suspected, they never actually closed the door; it was kept open slightly for the inside guard to see what was going on outside. Sounded like the guy was just realizing that something wasn’t right. Mac flew into action—time for a shock kill.

The idea of the shock kill it to inflict such trauma on the opponent’s body that he is incapable of reaction; he goes into instant shock and is helpless to defend himself or alert others. Mac and Bill had refined this technique to the point that they could usually induce an involuntary orgasm by extremely accurate placement of their weapons.

In this case, Mac found the guard standing right at the door. He elbowed the door open, grabbed the hardman’s shirt and brought his knife up to his neck.

A quick jab thrust the cold jagged steel into the mercenary’s throat. The guard grabbed hold of Mac as his larynx was shredded by the vicious blade. His body stiffened; his legs tensing in his jeans and his boots scuffling on the floor.

Mac twisted the knife in the guard’s throat, slicing the tissues into hamburger. He ripped the shank brutally out of the guy’s windpipe, doing even more damage. The next thrust would be the master stroke.

Mac quickly raised the knife and rammed it up through the base of the guard’s skull. As the blade penetrated deep into the helpless man’s cerebellum, it slashed through the pleasure center of the brain. Mac could feel the guy’s dick as a stiff, warm ridge as the dying man’s body arced forward and pressed tightly against him. The convulsions induced by the massive brain trauma caused the merc’s body to twitch and jerk against Mac, humping the punk’s hard rod until it began to ooze sperm uncontrollably. Mac let the corpse slid slowly down that wall. Its jeans were so tight that the spasms of the dying cock could clearly be seen.

They were inside.

Bill dragged the dead merc into the bushes and left the lifeless meat hidden away. Mac waited for him to finish and get inside before closing the door behind him.

Now it was time to clean house.

The entryway was small. It was a hall leading to the back of the house, terminating in a door. On the right side was the staircase to the second floor. Further down the hall were openings into rooms, one on each side. There was noise and commotion coming from the opening on the left.

Mac crept down the hall and peered into the room. He looked back at Bill with an expression of amused contempt on his face. Bill took a look himself. He saw what Mac had seen and turned to him with a grin.

Professional hardmen at the door, teen punks in the living room. Three of them, playing a video game. Bill took another look. “Dude, I just owned your ass!” one of the kids shouted at another. He had long dark hair with blond highlights. He had on a tight black t-shirt that emphasized the muscles of his chest. His black jeans did the same thing for his thighs. He was wearing gray suede hightops His belt was formed of links of metal and there was a chain running from a belt loop to his wallet. The kid he was yelling at was younger, no more than seventeen, if that. His dirty blond hair was shorter and the body enclosed in the white t-shirt and blue jeans was slimmer. He wore a simple but very tight pair of white leather sneakers.

The third punk had been loading and hitting a bong while this ownage had occurred. He was slightly more developed than the other two, with a broad muscled chest displayed in a black Metallica t-shirt. He had a red bandanna tied around his head but his black hair hung down behind. He wore old, faded jeans and a pair of black harness boots. He took a lung-busting hit off the bong and handed it to the owned kid.

Mac and Bill huddled. The youngest, they decided, would be the easiest to crack. Once they tenderized him, he’d talk. Time for a little shock and awe.

It was quick and brutal. Bill stepped into the room. The kid who had been speaking saw him first. Reaction times were slow since they were all stoned. The kid just stared at Bill, mouth agape. His brain couldn’t process the signal fast enough—and then it couldn’t process anything at all. Bill’s silenced .38 spat twice, giving the kid a hot lead facial. The boy gave a deep mortal grunt as a small neat hole formed under his left eye and another appeared on his forehead at the same time.

The punk fell backwards, kicking and convulsing violently as bullet fragments carved channels in his brain. Shards of metal ricocheted of the inside of his skull to further increase the trauma. The boy writhed and twisted, a mindless chunk of meat agonizingly kicking away its last few seconds on earth.

The younger kid was frozen in terror. Bandanna boy stood up, uncertain of what to do. Mac solved that dilemma for him. Grabbing the punk’s hair right through his bandanna. Mac locked the kid into place and rammed his K-Bar military knife straight through the boy’s ear canal into his brain.

Seven inches of cold sharp steel penetrated the kid’s gray matter. There was a physical reaction to the massive brain trauma. And Mac, using pinpoint precision, was able to control that reaction.

The punk shuddered in Mac’s arms as Mac slowly skullfucked the knife in his head. “Watch this,” Mac said, turning the helpless kid towards both Bill and the younger boy, “Little fucker’s just a brain-dead meat puppet. Watch me make him shoot a wad.”

He twisted the knife in the boy’s skull slightly, nicking the pleasure center of the brain. Then he reamed the blade in hard. The kid gave a reflexive cry, muffled by Mac’s gloved hand tightly clamped over his mouth. The body arced backwards, thrusting the groin towards Bill and the other youth. A thick ridge was obvious in the groin and before their eyes; a dark stain was spreading from the end of the ridge, glistening on the surface of the denim.

“Fuck yeah!” cried Bill. “What about you, you little fucker, ya ready to get a cold hard tool fucked into your brain too?”

The remaining teen was gasping and staring at the quivering remains of bandanna boy, eyes wide with shock. “Oh fuck,” he moaned repeatedly, “Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck. Please, don’t. Please don’t kill me…” He broke off and started weeping openly.

“Then talk. How many others? Where are they? Tell us and maybe we won’t kill you. But if you don’t tell us, we will kill you. How’s that for a deal?”

“There’s-there’s Paul outside and Ricky at the…at the door,” the kid sobs, “and-and I know there’s th-th-three guys upstairs, including Carl. He’s who-who you want, please, oh god, please, he’s the big guy, I’m nobody, dear god please don’t fucking kill me—“

He started sobbing again. The video game was still running and covered some of the sound.

Bill turned to Mac. “Sounds like what we needed. We wanna keep this piece of shit around for any reason?”

“Nothing I can think of,” responded Mac, “Might as whack the fucker.”

The kid began bawling and begging, “Oh please, please, please…” As the knowledge that his life was about to end in terrible pain and futility overcame him, the teen began to babble in terror. “Ohpleaseohpleaseitoldyouwhatyouwanteddontkillme—“

He fell to his knees, his right hand held up to shield him from the death blow. It was useless. Bill fired once. The bullet punctured the boy’s hand before it pierced his abdomen and tore a gaping hole in the youth’s smooth hairless back. The punk exhaled forcefully as the air in his lungs was expelled by the impact.

At the same moment, Mac stepped forward, placing himself directly in front of the stunned boy. The kid looked up at him in a daze. Mac reached down, knife in his hand, and slashed the boy’s throat.

“Fucking traitor bitch,” snarled Mac in the dying youth’s face, “You talked. Your partners are gonna die because of you. You don’t deserve a final load of cum. You’re a fucking bitch and you’re dying like one. Here’s a final blessing, you fucking worthless loser.”

Mac unzipped his fly, and eased out his thick, uncut, semi-hard cock. Bill is right beside him, cut, not as long, but thicker.

They both pissed on the bitch who talked. The kid stared up at the pair of cocks hanging over him, urine diluting the color of the blood flowing from the gash in his throat. The blood bubbled and foamed as the dying teen tried to exhale. The boy gasped in agonal respirations, bleeding out his worthless life as his killers expressed their contempt for his attempt to act like a man. The punk ended his bitch life gargling and drowning in his own blood in a shower of piss.

Mac crept slowly up the staircase, testing each step to make sure there would be no sound. Behind him was Bill, putting his leather hightops directly into Mac’s boot prints so that he only stepped on a spot that had already been cleared.

After wasting the kids downstairs, Mac and Bill had a better idea of what was going on. They never asked questions, but this was a scenario they’d run across before. Amateur mercs and juvenile delinquents in a suburban house added up to one thing: a relatively low-level drug dealer was being taken out.

Who wanted him taken out and why were unknown and didn’t really matter anyway. What mattered was that Mac and Bill now knew what to expect. Three guys upstairs, including the primary target, Carl. None of them would be professionals. In fact, it was likely that two of them would be teen punks—runners and street dealers recruited to guard their employer.

Mac paused at the top of the stairs. Bill was right behind him. They both were relying on their hunting skills, listening carefully for the sounds of their prey. The landing was small and square. It was also empty. There was a door on each side. The one on the left was closed. The one on the right was not and the sounds of a conversation came from the doorway.

“Hey, Ryan, got any more of that weed or did you give it all to Andy?”

“Nah, brah, I got more. But I only got one paper left. Here, you roll a jay and I’ll go get more. If Andy don’t have any, Josh will.”

Ryan staggered out of the room and stumbled toward the staircase. From his point of view, Mac was in plain sight—but Ryan was far too high to notice him.

Ryan was about nineteen and was stoned to the point of being completely goofy. He wore tight gray jeans with skate shoes laced tightly on his feet. He was putting a green t-shirt on over his well-developed chest. There was a huge grin on his face. His eyes were completely bloodshot and he had a large nose that somehow made him look vulnerable. He was settling a white ball cap on his head after he’d pulled his shirt down.

The kid made it all the way to the staircase without noticing death crouching in the shadows. It wasn’t till he actually started down the steps that he realized something was wrong.

And be then it was too late. Mac was already on him, reaming his knife into the teen’s hard body.

He’d popped up and grabbed Ryan by the back of the head, pulling the boy tightly towards him. At the same time, he brought his 9” commando knife up and rammed it hard into Ryan’s chest. The kid gasped loudly as the serrated blade pierced his left lung—more of grunt than a gasp, since the force of the steel shaft in his chest forced the air out of his lungs.

Bill moved past the spot where Mac was holding the teen punk in the hard grasp of death. The sounds could have been heard by the boy who was still in the room and Bill needed to take him out quickly, before the target—who was presumably on the other side of the closed door—was alerted.

Mac was still embracing Ryan, holding him close, staring into his eyes. He twisted his knife into the boy’s chest, watching the agony he was eagerly inflicting. The kid struggled violently, trying to break free of the muscled arms that held him relentlessly in the world of pain he had suddenly wandered into.

Ryan looked into Mac’s face, dazed and confused. He didn’t know what was happening. There was some dude in front of him, snarling in contempt, holding him helplessly. And there was pain, my god, there was pain that seared him with each breath.

Mac ground the knife into Ryan’s chest, shredding lung and muscle tissue, before yanking the knife brutally out of the wound. The sheer viciousness of the knife being ripped from his body forced another agonized grunt from the dying pothead.

Bill, in the meantime, was crouched beside the open doorway. He was still in his tight jeans and t-shirt, in the guise of pizza delivery. He even still had the dead delivery boy’s cap on.

As he suspected, the commotion on the landing—quiet as it was—had attracted the attention of the boy in the room, and he came to investigate.

He was slightly older than Ryan, in his early twenties. Like Ryan, he had on a white ball cap, but his was on backwards. There was a light goatee on his broad face and his eyes were as bloodshot as his friend’s. The hightop shoes that showed at the end of his long muscled legs were of a dark brown suede. He too had on skinny jeans and a t-shirt and he was clearly just as stoned as Ryan.

The sight of his buddy getting punk-fucked with a sharp blade stunned the kid. He froze in place and opened his mouth to shout. Bill didn’t give him a chance. He popped up from his stance beside the door and grabbed the boy with both hands, reaching around the kid to place his left hand on the boy’s right shoulder. Bill then reached behind the kid’s head with his right hand to grab the punk’s chin from the left. All he had to do then was pull his arms violently back into place.

Instantly, the kid’s head was twisted backwards through more than 180 degrees. Even though the punk’s body was facing away from Bill, his eyes were staring with horror directly into Bill’s. The sound was that of a dry branch breaking—but it went on for much longer, with a shattering effect.

The kid went completely rigid in Bill’s arms. His red eyes were wide with pain and panic, the panic of someone who knows that something is terribly wrong but doesn’t know what. The kid was too high to know that his neck was broken; he only knew that he couldn’t breathe and that some muscled dude was holding him so he couldn’t get away.

Then everything started to get bright and fuzzy. There was a ringing in his ears, but he couldn’t feel anything below his neck. The dying punk had a hard-on that was leaking semen into his shorts, but he couldn’t feel it.

As everything faded into a blaze of white as the useless kid gave up his life, he reflexively blew a massive wad. He never felt it, though. The last thing he was aware of was Bill’s cold , hard face looking into his own.

Ryan put up more of a fight. In the end, of course, it was just as futile. Mac put him down.

Mac forced the kid up against the wall, holding him in place by clamping one leather-gloved hand over the boy’s mouth and pressing his head back against the wall. He rammed his blade into the kid repeatedly, plunging the hard cold steel into Ryan’s firm chest and stomach.

The boy fought Mac as best he could. His arms were fairly strong too and he was trying to break free from the merciless grip of pain and death. His face contorted in agony with each thrust of the knife as he twisted and writhed in his futile attempt to escape.

Mac realized that Ryan was on his way out and decided to send him off right. He spun the youth around and slammed him face-first into the wall, momentarily stunning the teen punk. Then he bent the kid’s head forward and forced the razor-sharp tip of his knife into the back of Ryan’s neck at an upward angle.

The blade punctured the base of the kid’s skull with a crunching sound and slid into his brain like a hot knife through butter. Ryan went rigid with instant brain trauma, involuntarily inhaling with a loud gasp. Mac leaned against the boy, pressing him against the wall and feeling the quivering of his damaged nervous system.

Once again, Mac had managed to take a tough punk and turn him into a spunking meat puppet. Ryan’s cock spewed a solid stream of cum for nearly a minute and a half as Mac worked the serrated blade of his knife into the boy’s brain stem. As the corpse—brain dead but still upright and ejaculating—jerked and twitched against his groin, Mac moaned quietly and shot his own wad. When he was done, he jerked his knife out of Ryan’s head and left the dead meat to sink to the ground.

Bill grinned at Mac; he knew exactly what had happened and had enjoyed watching. But there was still some unfinished business.

They turned to the closed door. Time to take of Carl.

The kid stood at the mouth of the alley, nervously smoking a cigarette. His back was to the alley, his attention directed outward, scanning the street in front of him. It was a short side street near the waterfront, with the wall of a derelict factory taking one side of the pavement. The alley, on the other side, allowed access to the backs of a couple of storage buildings. It was three in the morning and there wasn’t much for the kid to see.

He didn’t see death hovering above him.

He was a city kid, about eighteen. He wasn’t dressed for guard duty—had probably been called away from a club to be the lookout for this drug deal. He had a white baseball cap, worn backwards, covering his mop of black hair. His plain leather jacket was open, with the sleeves jammed up to his elbows. His wrists were covered with bands and bandannas.

Mac grinned. He wondered if the kid would’ve gone with that look if he’d known he was gonna be caught dead in it.

The kid was wearing a black concert t-shirt—it was too dark to make out which band—and tight bleached jeans. His hightop kicks scraped the concrete as he shifted position. The shoes looked like they were brown velour; he’d almost certainly not planned on being here tonight. His bloodshot, heavy-lidded eyes proved the point. The dude was baked.

There was a movement in the shadows behind him. He had a friend. This one stepped into the light and spoke a few words to the first guard.

The second kid was about the same age as the first and dressed similarly. His hair was dirty blond and his cap was red and faced front. He wore an olive-green jacket and his t-shirt and jeans were just as tight as his friend’s. His build was slightly larger and more developed than the first guard, who was slim. He looked even more fucked up, with a big goofy grin on his face.

Mac nodded silently to Bill. First two targets acquired, in optimal circumstances. They were together and drugged, so the chances of them alerting anyone was minimal.

The job was to terminate anyone taking part in this deal, no questions asked. Mac and Bill had come prepared to kill. And to enjoy themselves. After all, what’s the point of being a professional killer if you can’t make the punk you’re wasting suffer?

The mercenaries had crept down the fire escape without the boys below hearing them. They crouched on the lowest level, not three feet above the guards’ heads, while Mac tied a loop with a slipknot in a length of nylon cord and Bill pulled his huge combat knife from his boot sheath.

Mac wrapped the cord around the railing and dropped the loop of cord over the first guard’s head. Just as the kid became aware of it, Mac wrapped the other end of the cord round his hand and leaped off the fire escape simultaneously with Bill.

Bill’s boots hit the ground first. He lunged at the second kid, who was too stoned to react. Bill clamped his hand over the kid’s mouth and rammed the knife into the side of the kid’s throat, punching through the larynx and esophagus in one blow. His eyes wide with agony, the only sound that escaped the brutal pressure on the boy’s mouth was a groan of pain.

Mac had used the body of the first kid as a counterweight to slow his descent. He quickly tied the end of the cord he still held to the bottom rung of the fire escape ladder, leaving the teen kicking and jerking in midair. He stepped back to admire his work.

The first jerk of the cord had popped the kid’s cap off, revealing his stunned expression. His eyes stared into Mac’s with stupefied horror as the boy flailed his legs in an attempt to find purchase. There was none to find; he was too far out from the wall to make contact.

His hands grasped frantically at to cord above and behind him. As his face reddened and his eyes bulged, he managed to get a grip on the cord and raise himself an inch or two. He couldn’t hold himself up for more than a few seconds. Each time he fell back, the slipknot tightened around his neck and intensified his panic-filled grunts.

Bill enjoyed his work with a more hands-on approach. He was using his full body to pin his target against the wall, feeling the punk die slowly beneath him. He twisted the knife in the kid’s throat, shredding his adam’s apple and windpipe, but just barely nicking the jugular or carotid. The dying teen shuddered in agony, slowly bleeding out. Bill felt every twitch and jerk between his legs as the kid weakly kicked his legs, an instinctive and futile attempt to escape the iron grip of pain and death that had suddenly come out of the night.

The first kid was still struggling. In a last attempt to survive, he grabbed the cord and yanked till muscles stood out on his forearms and tendons on his neck. His face distorted with the strain. He was able to lift himself about four inches—for about seven seconds. He took a shallow gasp of air, then lost his grip again. He fell back with more force this time. The cord tightened around his neck violently. The cracking sound of his hyoid bone seemed loud in what was nearly a silent hit. The boy couldn’t make any other sound; his esophagus was completely crushed.

Mac could feel his cock getting hard as he watch a bulge appear in the kid’s crotch. The guard was reaching out to him, his hands, bloody with rope burn, clawing ineffectually in the air. He drew his legs up and kicked out again, still desperately seeking something to stand on.

Stupid little fuck probably still doesn’t realize he’s dying, thought Mac. It made him harder.

The kid fought for a while, but his struggles diminished quickly. His tongue slowly emerged from his mouth, accompanied by a streamer of drool that trickled down his chin and caught on his shirt. His eyes rolled back, showing nothing but bloodshot white under drooping lids. The punk’s body began convulsing, swinging like a pendulum. His brown kicks twitched violently in the final death throes as the bulge in the teen’s crotch squirmed visibly and a dark stain spread over the corpse’s groin.

Mac creamed his jeans without having to touch himself.

Bill got plenty of touching, without having to take his cock out. As the kid coughed and choked on his own blood, Bill yanked the knife out roughly. Tightening the muscles in his arm, he thrust it up under the boy’s chin. A bit of force enabled him to penetrate the base of the little fuck’s skull and slam the cold sharp steel blade deep into the brain.

The teen punk opened his eyes wide in shock, looking directly into Bill’s. Bill’s dick swelled as he watched the boy’s eyes dilate before massive brain damage made him jerk back spasmodically. As he ground his pelvis convulsively into Bill’s crotch, Bill could feel the kid’s thick rod, erect from a reflexive tightening of the muscles, press warmly against him.

The dying bitch was dry-humping him. Just before the boy stopped jerking and collapsed at his feet in a pile of quivering meat, Bill felt the moisture of the punk’s dying orgasm trigger his own. Bill pressed him against the wall to let the kid’s final seconds on earth milk the cum out of his dick.

Once the body hit the ground, there was nothing but silence. The mercenaries had vanished back into the shadows; their night was far from over. It was over for the first two guards. They’d started the evening going out to party and get fucked up. One of them was now huddled in the shadows, a quivering mass of flesh in the alley gutter. The other was swaying two feet off the ground, the toes of his kicks pointing down and occasionally twitching. Just two worthless punks, wasted and left to rot.