Continuing our tireless efforts

To entertain you bastards. Here's some light Saturday Noir for your eyeball-pleasure
(hmmm...another good band name, methinks.)

Good god, I remember looking at the first corporate computer screen I’d ever seen, and thinking, how cool it was. Then I started figuring out what the hell all these programs did, and I realized, how much I wished I didn’t know what these little icons meant. They meant despair, they meant subjugation, they meant, the hell of the nine to five summed up in eight or ten graphical icons.

Tom looked at the same icons, but he never felt the trap like I did. See, he had an outlet. Usually he’d find a pick-up game of basketball, and play hard, and like an asshole. He wasn’t afraid to throw his words around like weapons, slamming insults into people until it got under their skin, and they got pissed enough to start hammering elbows back, and ripping up their own worst trash talk. But, that’s just an aside, like I said, Tom had an outlet. He had a nice stiletto, something he picked up in Mexico, before the 9-11 made it harder to get stuff across the border. Although, now that I think about it, you could probably still buy the crazy stuff, and just ship it Fed-Ex.

Anyways, it had a solid black handle, and a nice thin blade, and he liked to find people to knife with it. The cops and the crime beat guys had noticed his particular style, which was pretty nasty. He got a thrill out of, well, getting to stab people a lot of times. But he kinda’ had a way of keeping them alive while he did it. The first few he practiced on, it was either a quick affair, where only one or two thrusts were enough to damage some internal organ, or they were loud, where the victim screamed so many times, that he either ran, or got really lucky, and was never caught.

By now – damn near three years, the cops and crime beat guys were calling him “The Scorpion Killer” cause he stung his victims so many times while they were still alive. Anyways, like I said, his technique was to surprise the victim from behind, and make a small cut across the windpipe of the throat. Done properly, the cut was only about ½ way through the windpipe – it didn’t come close to killing. It just drowned the vocal chords in blood, and that way, Tom could just start knifing, with satisfying stabs to the legs, arms, and wherever there wasn’t a really vital organ.

I’m not saying I liked him, but the guy didn’t really look at the computer the way I did. Like I said, he had an outlet.

Now...go find a cure for cancer or something...