Shock Value

I was clicking around on the internet, reminiscing about the good old days of MySpace and Quizilla. Before the internet got fucking boring and turned into nothing but ads that market the shit I think about one time. I rolled my eyes and closed out a search window when a new browser window popped up on its own. It went full screen on my monitor, blocking everything else out.

It was a grainy video of a messy living room. There were random things scattered on the floor. Dirty work boots, jeans caked with mud or cement, yellow vests draped over the backs of old, mismatched furniture.

Three men sat around a cheap black table. It was covered with empty Ghost cans and beer bottles. One of the men leaned back in his chair and pulled open the door of the mini fridge behind him. He pulled out another beer and tossed the cap into the tiny black trash can beside the table.

All three men were wearing gray construction uniforms with the logo of their contractor, their boots and tool belts laid in a heap next to the door. The audio was tinny, picked up by a built-in microphone that amplified every swallow of beer, every laugh, and every greasy belch the men were dishing out. They were all leaning over a tablet screen, scrolling through photos of women.

"Pass," the biggest one grunted, his fat neck folding over the collar of his faded shirt as he scratched his dirty forearm. "Too much jaw. Looks like she'd give you lip before you even get her pants off."

The second man had blonde hair that was shaved down nearly to stubble on the sides. He leaned forward with a cigarette dangling loosely from his bottom lip and smiled. "Smash. Though you know she'd be boring in bed. Probably cry afterward. I like 'em when they fight back a little. Makes it feel more like sport."

The third man laughed, a hacking sound that started deep in his chest and probably brought on by years of chain smoking. "You say that about every waitress in town, Brandon. Give me someone quiet. Someone who actually fuckin' listens and doesn't talk back when you tell her to shut her fuckin' mouth."

The first man laughed. "Fuckin' right, bro. Only time a bitches mouth should be open if she's putting my cock in it." All three of them laughed.

I shuddered. Imagining this fat slob of a man and his pathetic excuse of 'a cock' that probably hid under moist flaps of fat like a fucking turtle head made me sick to my stomach.

I shook my head in disgust and moved the cursor to close the window. Some nasty, shock-value ad for an indie horror movie, no doubt. The kind of trash marketing campaign where some wanna-be edgy studio tried to go viral by simulating a creepy webcam stream. Pathetic. Lazy garbage pushed by people who routinely tried to pass smut off as art piss me off. I clicked the red "X." The window vanished.

Within seconds, it popped open again. I sighed and dragged it to the trash bin, emptied my cache, and ran the CC cleaner. The stream returned before the cleaner could even finish running.

The perverts were passing around photos snagged directly from Facebook and Instagram. They were nearly drooling while dissecting women like butchers grading sides of beef.

By the afternoon, the pop up was no longer confined to my laptop. My phone, which was sitting face down on my desk, was vibrating. I picked it up. A push notification from a calendar app I hadn't opened in months read: Watch now. Below it was a clickable link.

I deleted the app. The phone instantly locked up, the screen flashing white before settling on the same grainy interior view of the construction trailer. Brandon was leaning back, picking his teeth with a tooth pick, while the other two argued over a picture of a woman standing next to a car at a drive-thru window.

"Look at this bitch," the fat one uttered, pointing his dirty, sausage sized finger at the screen. "Little Miss high and mighty because she got employee of the month at fuckin Whataburger." He chuckled. I watched her wiggling her ass while she wiped down the counters. She knows what she's doing. She wants it bad."

"She'll stop lookin' so smug when the sun goes down." Brandon said, blowing out a stream of cigarette smoke.

I stared at my phone screen in horror. Maybe this wasn't just a bad promo for trashy horror. Ai? Maybe. But what if it wasn't? The internet was huge and full of slop generated by miserable people with warped imagination. It felt easier for me to write this off as just that. I locked my phone and slid it into my pocket where it vibrated again a few minutes later.

Before long, this feed had made its way across every connected device in my house. The smart thermostat on the wall in the hallway flickered from its blue standby mode to a bright glowing white, displaying a pixelated thumbnail of the trailer's interior. My TV, which I'd already turned off and unplugged from the wall, was emitting a low whine while the screen was bleeding a faint pale light around the edges. The picture was slowly coming into view.

The men were louder now, becoming more bold from various bottles of cheap liquor piling up around them. They began shuffling around in drunken stupor kicking around the empty beer cans which clattered loudly as they ricocheted off the table legs.

"Let's go," the fat one said, grabbing a flashlight from a drawer.

"You ain't going first, Jay. You're too fuckin' fat, fuckface. Your big ass will break her before we even get started," Brandon laughed. He stood up and stretched his arms until his shoulder joints popped. "Let's try n keep her in mostly one piece for at least the weekend."

I watched the screen for a few moments, and as the fat man leaned in close to slide his boots over his cankles, the light caught the side of his face just right. That's when I saw the scar running from his left earlobe down into the collar of his uniform.

I knew that scar. I knew the way the shit ass system had looked right past him, letting monsters like him slide through the cracks. The way he just kept getting a slap on the wrist. Probation. Every single closed file was a victim's silenced voice, buried under technicalities and 'circumstantial evidence'. This world was full of corrupt scum that let garbage walk free while imprisoning people for having weed. These fuckwads in positions of power loved protecting major predators because that was easier than looking at them.

The memory of that night flickered inside of my skull like TV static. I remember walking home from my late shift at the diner and the sound of my shoes hitting the damp pavement, each step so loud in the quiet night. I remember when his fat hands clamped over my mouth from behind and dragged me into the dark alley.

He rushed to pull me to where no wandering eyes could see and I screamed as loud as I could through his giant hands. He beat my head against the ground and screamed in my face to shut the fuck up. His breath smelled like whiskey and decay. He pinned my wrists behind me with one hand. The weight of his enormous body crushed the air from my lungs.

His fat fingers tore through my clothes. He pawed at my panties, tearing them so hard they left burns across my skin. He shoved them inside my mouth and reduced me to nothing more than a piece of ass. The seconds stretched into an eternity of pain, humiliation, and shame. His bad breath and body odor made me gag.

When he took what he wanted, he rolled off of me with a grunt. I opened my eyes and watched as he lifted up his fat roll to button his jeans. I could see festering wounds on the underside of his blubber which made me want to throw up.

I looked at my hands, scraped raw and bleeding against the gravel. They'd brushed up against the remains of a broken glass bottle. With whatever strength I had left, I grabbed it and dragged that beautiful piece of glass straight down the side of his face, slicing a deep signature of my own into his skin. He screamed and backhanded me across the face so hard, my vision went black.

I woke up hours later dumped in a crumpled heap onto the cold sidewalk in front of my house like trash on the curb. How long had he been watching me? How had I never noticed him? I felt so stupid. My body ached. But the physical pain was nothing compared to the shame and disgust lingering underneath my skin. I felt dirty.

I walked inside and went into the bathroom. I stripped off the remains of my clothes as the bathtub filled with cold water and lowered myself inside, pulling my blow dryer in underneath the water with me.

Death was supposed to be the end. But it wasn't. My heart didn't beat anymore. It hadn't done that in years. What pumped through my arteries now was electricity and rage. I wasn't human anymore and I had long since abandoned any pretense of mercy towards things that viewed human life as a disposable toy. Now, I could move through the electric grid like a ghost in the machine.

I stared at these animals on my screen. These weren't actors or AI. They were real and they were poison. The girl whose face was still lit up on the tablet that was laying on the table, the one with the small silver stud in her left nostril and the bright smile was Naomi.

Naomi, who handed me a black coffee and a hashbrown every Tuesday morning at the drive-thru window of the local Whataburger off I-20. She always asked me how my week was going with genuine, unforced kindness that felt increasingly rare in a world populated by things like the three bastards on my screen.

I could feel the sparks beginning in my veins. That familiar surge of current racing from the wall outlet through the floor and up through the soles of my bare feet.

I watched in horror as this slob stumbled back into the room with Naomi. Her wrists were bound with zip ties and her uniform was torn. A dark smudge of something was on her cheek. Fatty reached down to brush her hair away from her eyes. She spat into his face.

"Touch me again and you won't have hands left to use!" Naomi screamed out.

Fatty slapped her across the face and the other two beasts laughed as she fell to the floor.

"Little bitch," he laughed. "I like 'em a little feisty... let's see how tough you are when..."

I did not allow him to finish that sentence. I let go of the tether holding me to my physical form and my body dissolved into a flash of current. I traveled at the speed of light through the electric grid. I surged through the wires in milliseconds. The world blurred into a scream of pure energy. I passed within every household appliance, every street lamp and stop light. I hit the job site transformer behind the construction trailer with the force of a lightning strike.

The heavy metal casing blew outward into a shower of sparks and molten copper. Inside the trailer, every lightbulb blew at once with a loud pop, showering the floor with a rain of hot glass. The trailer went dark.

"The hell?" Brandon shouted, stumbling backward into the wall. "Did the fuckin' breaker blow?"

"Check the breaker box by the door!" Fatty yelled, releasing his grip on Naomi's hair and fumbling in his pockets for his lighter.

These fuckers were blind in the dark. But I wasn't.

I stepped out of the wall socket behind the kitchenette, reforming my physical self with ease. The air in the trailer dropped twenty degrees and the smell of my approaching thunder storm enveloped the room.

Fatty flicked the lighter and a tiny, yellow flame sputtered to life, casting a glow across his terrified face. He looked straight into my eyes. My hand shot towards him too quick for him to stop it and my fingers locked around his fat throat and the scar I'd left years ago. I lifted him easily off his feet, his huge feet kicking around wildly against the air as the lighter slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor.

"Who... what the fuck are you?" he choked out, his hands clawed at my wrists and his fingernails scraped against my skin helplessly as if he could hurt me anymore.

"An unwanted notification," I smiled. My voice crackled like static.

I didn't snap his neck. Not yet. That was too merciful. I opened up the floodgates. The live current that now lived within my very skin surged outward. Electricity shot through my palms into his windpipe. His body went rigid. Every muscle was seizing in a violent, involuntary lock. A pulsing blue light flared from beneath his skin, tracing the web of his veins like glowing roots.

He couldn't utter a single sound. His lungs were paralyzed, choked by the electricity cooking him from the inside out. I watched, smiling, as the pressure built beneath his skull. The skin around his eye sockets turned purple, stretching thin until the boiling fluids behind his retinas reached their breaking point.

With two wet, satisfying pops, his eyes exploded from their sockets, spraying the trailer with blood and scorched tissue.

I tossed his smoking body to the floor like the bag of dog shit it was. I stepped over his mutilated corpse and made my way toward the two remaining wastes of life. I couldn't see the name tag on this one. It was buried beneath grease. But he screamed and tried to run towards the door, blindly sweeping his arms across the table to grab something that might save his life.

"Brandon!" he screamed. "Help me!"

Brandon had already drawn a hunting knife from his belt. His eyes were wide and blood shot as he lunged at me through the darkness, slashing uselessly at my midsection. The blade struck my skin, but instead of killing me, it acted like a lightning rod. The moment the metal met my frame, the electrical current under my skin snapped toward it with a crack of thunder. A bolt of electricity surged down the blade, slamming into Brandon's hand like a storm.

His arm went rigid as the current travelled through his muscles, locking his joints, and flash cooking the flesh on his fingers around the handle before he could drop it. I pushed my voltage through the knife until his body caught fire. Then I turned to face the last douche bag.

He was still searching for something to hurt me with. Empty Ghost cans and bottles were flying in my direction, but his aim was so bad, not a single one even came close to hitting me. He backed himself into the corner. He was shaking so violently, he could barely stand. Tears were streaming down his face. I looked at him, my power coursing gently over my skin. Static danced around me and made his hair stand on end.

"Please," he sobbed.

He pressed his hands over his face and slid down the wall to come to rest in a fetal position on the floor. I reached down and plucked him up as easily as a daisy and tossed him toward the center of the room. He tried to scurry away but I was already behind him blocking the exit. I wanted to make sure he understood every single second of what was happening, ensuring that the terror he had so casually planned to inflict upon someone else was returned to him tenfold.

I pressed my finger against his forehead. A little shock hit him. He whimpered. Then I sent a big volt of power right into his skull. The sound was like a welder's torch tearing through sheet metal. The room filled with the scent of burning hair. His brain turned into liquid steam inside his skull, building up pressure until blood began to ooze in thick streams from his tear ducts, his nostrils, and the corners of his mouth. His skin blistered and blackened instantly from the inside out. He popped and crackled like cooking bacon.

I watched his body convulse in one last spasm as his bones began to glow orange through the melting layers of skin. I lifted my hand and let his lifeless, charred husk slide down the wall. It left a black smear of soot in its wake.

I turned to look at Naomi. She was sitting against the back wall of the trailer, her wrists still bound. She was watching me with wide eyes, her chest rising and falling quickly.

For a moment, neither of us moved. The static in the air calmed down and faded away, replaced by the silence of the East Texas night outside.

I walked up to her and knelt down. I sent a little zap to release the zip ties binding her wrists. She rubbed her skin, wincing slightly, but kept her gaze locked onto my face.

I stood up, offering her a hand from the floor. She took it, stood up, and looked at the massacre in front of us without a single ounce of fear in her eyes.

"I'll see you on Tuesday," I smiled. "Black coffee and a hashbrown."

She smiled back at me. "Make it two hashbrowns." she said. "On the house."