The notion of blood for blood
Only unleashes a flood
Of endless recrimination
Guilt without discrimination
Life too costly, death on sale
Kill the head without detail
Bodies burned, bleeding, broken
The unspeakable unspoken
Even where it bleeds it leads
Empire’s where excess exceeds
Using media to stroke us
Unsleeping lens directs our focus
“Over there!” our eyes thus turn
While behind us cities burn
The human toll they always hide
None dare call it genocide
Blood runners
Our crimson ebb and flow
Don’t get caught up in the truth
It’s on a need to know
The rule, as we’ve learned, is to take it
And quietly’s always preferred
The law is of rule and to break it
Is to have our dead bodies interred
Injustice, rulers partake it
Our outraged voices aren’t heard
Justice in law’s how they fake it
And criminal law is absurd
Blood runners
Our systems sinking low
There are places so disgraceful
Even heroes dare not go
Their game can be played by all
Regardless their protests
Anyone can field their ball
We’re players, not just guests
We scare them to stand up tall
And show we’re not mere pests
No longer held in killer’s thrall
In pieces empire rests
Blood runners
Our crimson ebb and flow
Don’t get caught up in the truth
It’s on a need to know
Blood runners
Our systems sinking low
There are places so disgusting
Even saviors dare not go
Blood runners
As our numbers grow
Sic semper tyrannis
Undermine, then overthrow
© 2024 ArtAHammer
3/27/24 Arturo Hammer
BLOOD RUNNERS:
Love and Murder in the 21st Century
By A. A. Harmer
Chapter One: Manifesto Destinado
It was my Manifesto where I got them. Most “Why I dud it” manifestos are tedious, disjointed, rambling screeds detailing every slight the “authors” have endured and every injustice levied upon them by an uncaring reality, their justifications for the horrid things they did or intended to do all painstakingly articulated to assure that most people will never read them, but instead rely upon law enforcement and the media to feed them the juicy bits pertinent to their individual proclivities.
Not mine. I made it direct, to the point, offered no specific grievance or justification, and for maximum accessibility, I released it on TikTok. I even applied my many years of cop show-viewing to make sure I said nothing in the first twenty seconds that would indicate criminal intent or threat in my presentation, which we’re told is the limitation of Law’s legal/illegal intrusion into our electronic communiqués. This presumably would keep the piggies focused on more overt madness, my covert madness sliding under the radar until it was too late to shut it down.
I figured I might have ten minutes before getting it jerked from circulation, even five would have sufficed, just long enough for a few intrepid weblingers to copy it and send it flying around the globe with wild abandon. As it turned out, I had read my audience deftly, surprisingly even for me, and my dynamic presentation and mesmerizing copy kept it up for over two and a half hours. Go TikTok!
The top had been ripped from Pandora’s Box and cast into the Abyss where hope sank infernal: glubbity-glub-glub.
Of course this didn’t particularly benefit TikTok, a Chinese social media concern that concerned the American government, which professed that TikTok was engaged in espionage against American citizens and also influenced USNA elections. The CIA accused China of meddling in other nation’s governments, activities it felt were its purview exclusively. Monopoly with armored assault vehicles and water boarding. Go straight to Gitmo, do not collect your two hundred dollars, Scoopy.
I had crafted nearly ten versions of it before settling on the official variation now so popular among assassination aficionados. TikTok held significant appeal because it allowed me to address my targets and targeted demographic directly without the selective presentations of Mainstream Media.
TikTok also compelled me to keep it short while incorporating theatrical techniques, brevity the soul of clicks. Or something. I modified my voice and created the iconic look presently clogging interweb arteries, assuredly among the media idiogencia, who happily glom onto the suffering of strangers to perk up their mundane existences. For those who missed it:
SK
After years of painstaking
research and significant
personal expense, I have
composed a detailed List
of one hundred people I
feel are demonstrably the
worst people in the United
States of North America.
These people are responsible
for the ruination of countless
human lives. Those on top of
the List are directly responsible
for the murder of literally
millions of people. And,
instructively, there isn’t a poor
person on it. Not a one. This
is a List of the very worst of
humanity. I am going to kill
as many of them as I can.
You’ll learn who is on the
List when I have killed them.
I’ll post their names, dates
of execution, and ranking.
If someone on the List dies
before I can get to them it
will be adjusted accordingly
and a lower ranked scoundrel
will be advanced. Because
I target people of clout and
authority, not the poor and
desperate like so many
popular serial killers, there will
necessarily be some spillover.
Can’t be avoided. Meaning: If
you don’t want to be collateral
damage, don’t hang around
horrible fucking people. People
like Joseph Bronowski, a dirty,
dirty man whose vile brain I
crushed last night in St. Louis.
Joseph was number 87 on the
List. Ninety-nine to go. As this
will certainly be taken down
immediately, X marks the spot
for my List updates and
occasional pith. Thanks for playing.
I ended it with a Title Over: Robert B. Zell.
To be fair, I’m not particularly fascinated by serial killers. Most of them are pathetic, disturbed little malcontents without a modicum of consideration for those they defile. They attack the weak and defenseless, driven by poor impulse control and fueled by malicious cowardice. No, what fascinates me, inspires me upon this course, is other people’s fascination with serial killers. Particularly Americans; they eat this shit up. Doubtless why they produce by far the most of them.
My first kill, Joseph Bronowski, was as if the Universe was goading me, offering me a sacrifice of such ease that no other course of action seemed logical or even rational. Joe was a heinous fixture in St. Louis and was reported as frequenting the tony Chez Poutine near Columbus Square. The burgeoning blogosphere, combined with people’s endless fascination with celebrity (especially undeserved celebrity), provided an instructive window into the movements of all sorts of persons of interest.
I remembered the film Bandit, about a bank robber who escaped prison and snuck into Canada where he robbed something like fifty banks while wearing disguises, making identification problematic, to the point he got away with robbing so many banks.
At least until the inevitable Bank Too Far.
If I was going to pull this monumental feat off, I couldn’t be recognized. So I hit several local theatrical makeup shops, even got the gentle people who worked in them to help me, based on the premise I was doing a live performance in some regional venue or something. With their guidance I created a makeup kit with noses, mustaches, beards, eyebrows, glasses, wigs, and physical deformities.
The deformities were my personal touch. A prominent scar, wart, mole with a hair popping out, draw any witness’s attention to it. They can’t help it. US media has taught them to focus on the ghastly and they drink it up with a glorping slurp. And that invariably is the thing they focus on in describing the suspect: the hideous, toad-like wart on the end of his nose.
In the Chez Poutine bar I was more subtle, well-suited, without facial hair but with black horn-rimmed glasses and a nose of significance, my George C. Scott. When I wore it my voice tended to gravel up and my cadence took on Scotts’ frenzied urgency and conspiratorial calm. I sat alone at an out-of-the-way table where I could see the restaurant and the restroom, drinking tonic water and appearing uninteresting. I popped in on Thursday and Friday nights, usually after nine when I became another face in the crowd. I fielded the occasional flirt, so as to not stand out by pushing pussy away, and found myself surprisingly approachable after years of perhaps self-imposed isolation.
Lisa, a forty-year-old S&M aficionado who worked at Chili’s, threatened to derail my entire plan by being so attentive and downright alluring that I considered resettling down, again, until she was killed in a freak riverboat collision, paddling her to an ironic demise while redoubling my resolve. Bronowski owned the riverboat what killed my Belle, which only moved him up on the List.
In the process of compiling the List, I Googled “evil people in Missouri,” after “bad,” “shitty,” and “corrupt people” came up relatively dry holes. While having no shortage of heinous people (compared to the US coastal states), most Missourians just weren’t worth murdering. At the bottom of the extended page I came upon a chat room, and in it one of the chatty types offered up a link. That link led me to the interviews by St. Louis police department detectives of a couple of Honduran girls, fifteen and seventeen, who had been picked up in a prostitution sting, purportedly part of a half-vast child-trafficking ring. They represented the part that was trafficked.
The girls both alleged, independently, that Bronowski operated in a managerial capacity akin to jefe, or the US sex-work version, pimp. Both girls stated he had raped them. The older girl said that she had seen him kill two people, including another girl like herself, who’d been abducted from near her home and turned out to keep profit margins as black as the hearts of those who destroy for them. Having the suck that comes from being richer than fuck, Joe had been discreetly alerted to his impending arrest, which was predicated on the girls’ legal depositions.
Which were sadly never taken when the oldest abductee was found sunk in a car in the muddy Mississippi, the day prior to her deposition, and the youngest never was found. As a result, no charges were filed, and Joe trafficked in places less inclined to impede his cash flow with the crocodile tears of surly allegators.
Thursday night, at nine-fifteen, on my sixth visit to Chez Poutine, Joe walked in with some well-used dame, who pushed as much cleavage as she could legally muster to maximize her effect on the local hickish denizens, who responded appropriately droolingly. Joe couldn’t have cared less; he bought and sold women like her, and she was but one more in an endless chain of empty sex – disgustingly hot, empty sex.
I had considered placing a towel over my arm, all waiter-like, and approaching his table with menus, making nice, then stabbing him repeatedly with my emergency stiletto. But Joe was a big guy, way bigger than he looked on TV or in print, and it seemed I might not get a sufficient number of punctures to induce fatality before cooler heads stopped me before I even got started.
But Joe got a call and decided to take it to the bathroom, not twenty feet from where I perched channeling my inner Buck Turgidson. He walked past, oblivious to me, as I looked away nonchalantly, as if neither of the forces soon to crash headlong into each other existed within the same universe. After a minute, I got up to take a leak.
“What the fuck do I care? Listen, I’m gonna eat and I’ll be over there around eleven.” From within the stall his words were punctuated by a horrific defecatory explosion, causing the fellow at the urinal near me to tremble with revulsion, then shake his head smilingly. He glanced at me, standing there trembling and fighting the vomitous urge, and I smirkingly glanced back. Though we expressed much in this exchange, our eyes never met, enforcing the unspoken rule that when you’re holding your dick in public you never make direct eye contact with other guys. Just don’t do it.
“Yeah, I’m taking a shit. What about it? I’m about to eat. Gotta make room.” The other pisser had completed his urinary ministrations and ineffectively washed his hands, then fled the chamber before the olfactory poo-nami assuredly released by Bronowski could drift thither. That left us alone.
“Listen, run dem through a car wash or something before I get dere. I mean it Pedro, I’m getting tired of dese dry cleaning bills.” Joe would be a class act to the bitter end.
I continued fake-peeing, having moved closer toward the door and farther from Joe’s brownout, as he exited the stall and walked to the sinks on the opposite wall behind me. “Yeah, right.” He hung up his phone and pocketed it, gazing at his imperiousness in the mirror while adjusting his jacket. I began to wonder if he’d bother to wash his hands and considered the public health bonanza his demise would represent.
“Really?” I looked at him at the sink, clearly reflected in the polished marble wall before me, where he still refused to wash his hands and was now fixing his hair. He scowled at me in the mirror contemptuously: Who dared impose on his self-adoration?
“What the fuck do you want?” He had returned to admiring himself. I was nobody. Just another mouthy pisser.
“So close to the baptismal, so far from grace,” I muttered in disgust. “I’m in collections.” Joe glowered at me. I was talking gibberish and even my best George C. Scott couldn’t compensate for being such an annoyance.
“Well den, collect your ass da fuck outta here.” Convinced that his brilliant yet menacing riposte was sufficient to resolve any further outstanding issues, Joe returned to the pressing business of Joe, I but a gnat he had crushed with his mighty woids. So I turned and clubbed him down with the empty champagne bottle I had brought in with me. In his amour-propre, he never saw it coming.
My silent smack-Dom caught him behind his right ear and cracked his skull, the bottom edge of the thick bottle ripping through his flesh and causing a gush of blood (which kindly avoided me), knocked him face first into the sink, the ornate spout and handles breaking his nose and teeth as more blood squirted from his violated face. Collapsing with a flatulent grunt, he toppled back onto the unforgiving tile floor, his head snapping back and hitting it hard, blood leaching everywhere. It was a mess, really quite grisly.
Disgusted by the utter disregard for hygiene on display there, I deposited my bottle in the trash receptacle and left. Chez Poutine had become an unacquired taste.
Copyright 2024