testing....
Fuck. This is not a way to live. She ripped at the warm blankets as her alarm screamed commercials at her. It was 7o’clock; time for two cups of coffee and a good cry before she went to the office. The apartment was frigid. Not even her tattered sweater and bathrobe could stand against the cutting chill pouring from the cracked windowsills. She hadn’t been able to pay for heat in months, which became more and more painful as February approached.
When does this end? She couldn’t bear this much longer. There didn’t seem to be a clear escape from this miniature cycle of suffering and want. She still had that fucking ring on a bit of string-there was no doubt that it gave her some small hope, but it was a one.
Her one suit, an article of clothing that met the managerial board’s requirements, was beginning to stink. She hadn’t been able to afford to wash it in months. At least everyone else in the office smelled as bad or worse. Some of them had the nerve to try and cover this up with bulk-purchased, imitation aerosol scents. This was a far more terrible olfactory offense, but one gets used to it after a few weeks. Soon she’d be transferred to a new job anyway.
She carefully walked out of her apartment, carefully picking her way around the broken glass and human waste that covered the hallway floor- a mosaic of desperation and misplaced anger. Her neighbors didn’t know her, she didn’t know them. The city itself, all three hundred miles of sprawling concrete, steel, and shit didn’t know her, and she didn’t know it.
That’s a funny thing to realize, really- she’d been living in New Jerseyork for her entire life, never seen anything else, and yet it was still a confounding and furious place.
*****
Fuck. These things move fast. He’d been running from a pack of gutter roaches for a solid hour now, and no matter how many backtracks through sewage, daring leaps over concrete waterfalls, or disgusting high dives into cesspools he made, every time he stopped for a breath of sewer air, he would hear them tearing through the muck towards him.
A gutter roach is a terrible thing to be chased by. If mankind had decided to domesticate and breed cockroaches instead of wolves, and let the product run feral, they would’ve had the gutter roach thousands of years ago. Instead, the fucking things decided to pop up amongst the worst possible mixture of poisons, mutagens, carcinogens, heavy and ultraheavy metals, and raw organic matter that could be found on this god-forsaken planet: three feet below the streets of New Jerseyork. Let’s try again to explain this animal. Imagine a pig- right, meat, internal skeleton, four legs, all that. Now, replace it’s head with what a roach head would look like if it was vertebrate. Three to six eyes, horizontal mandibles complete with serrated teeth, et cetera. Last, toss the pig hooves for some wickedly barbed lizard feet, and then perhaps a more appropriate appreciation for the aesthetic of a typical tertiary predator of the sewers can be found.
Of course, there were worse things down here, but most of the really frightening sewer biomass is either extremely rare or simply not as persistent as the gutter roach. Point being, Randall Davis, official Pariah of the Church of New Jerseyork, needs to kill or permanently lose these hideous fucks before he gets eaten. Davis is a clever little shit, and he fully intends on making his way out of this one alive too.
When does this end? She couldn’t bear this much longer. There didn’t seem to be a clear escape from this miniature cycle of suffering and want. She still had that fucking ring on a bit of string-there was no doubt that it gave her some small hope, but it was a one.
Her one suit, an article of clothing that met the managerial board’s requirements, was beginning to stink. She hadn’t been able to afford to wash it in months. At least everyone else in the office smelled as bad or worse. Some of them had the nerve to try and cover this up with bulk-purchased, imitation aerosol scents. This was a far more terrible olfactory offense, but one gets used to it after a few weeks. Soon she’d be transferred to a new job anyway.
She carefully walked out of her apartment, carefully picking her way around the broken glass and human waste that covered the hallway floor- a mosaic of desperation and misplaced anger. Her neighbors didn’t know her, she didn’t know them. The city itself, all three hundred miles of sprawling concrete, steel, and shit didn’t know her, and she didn’t know it.
That’s a funny thing to realize, really- she’d been living in New Jerseyork for her entire life, never seen anything else, and yet it was still a confounding and furious place.
*****
Fuck. These things move fast. He’d been running from a pack of gutter roaches for a solid hour now, and no matter how many backtracks through sewage, daring leaps over concrete waterfalls, or disgusting high dives into cesspools he made, every time he stopped for a breath of sewer air, he would hear them tearing through the muck towards him.
A gutter roach is a terrible thing to be chased by. If mankind had decided to domesticate and breed cockroaches instead of wolves, and let the product run feral, they would’ve had the gutter roach thousands of years ago. Instead, the fucking things decided to pop up amongst the worst possible mixture of poisons, mutagens, carcinogens, heavy and ultraheavy metals, and raw organic matter that could be found on this god-forsaken planet: three feet below the streets of New Jerseyork. Let’s try again to explain this animal. Imagine a pig- right, meat, internal skeleton, four legs, all that. Now, replace it’s head with what a roach head would look like if it was vertebrate. Three to six eyes, horizontal mandibles complete with serrated teeth, et cetera. Last, toss the pig hooves for some wickedly barbed lizard feet, and then perhaps a more appropriate appreciation for the aesthetic of a typical tertiary predator of the sewers can be found.
Of course, there were worse things down here, but most of the really frightening sewer biomass is either extremely rare or simply not as persistent as the gutter roach. Point being, Randall Davis, official Pariah of the Church of New Jerseyork, needs to kill or permanently lose these hideous fucks before he gets eaten. Davis is a clever little shit, and he fully intends on making his way out of this one alive too.