Skullcrack City Read Online Free

rodeo had thrown off most of my old friends, and after I got clean I had to shake my new acquaintances to ensure I stayed alive.
    I mean, I had my turtle Deckard, but his lifestyle consisted of sunbathing, eating goldfish, and—somehow I just knew this—silently judging me while I masturbated. I’d taken to covering his tank with a thin blanket, but still…he knew.
    Home: a one bedroom apartment three blocks short of the really rotten side of the city. When I’d moved in I felt a certain naïve thrill, being so close to the reddest part of my city’s crime maps. Stabbings just a few streets away! I was fearless, a man of the people. A saint, maybe, moving among the fallen.
    Plus: super easy access to drugs.
    My brain woke from auto-hypnosis as I neared my apartment’s parking garage. A cop car whipped by as I pressed enter on the security key pad. The sound of sirens had been rendered dead stimulus after years of constancy. It was like living next to a waterfall of alarm.
    Driving in, I noticed the increasing number of bum barrel bonfires in my neighborhood. Probably time to find some fresh real estate. The number of homeless still rocking dress shirts under brightly incongruous mission-granted hoodies told me that some of the newest barrel buddies were likely fallen comrades.
    My sedan made an ugly rumble as I pulled into my parking space. The thing was dying. Every morning I closed my eyes and shot a silent prayer out of my forehead before turning the ignition. Every evening commute I turned up the car radio to avoid the new noises the sedan made as it fell apart.
    Time for a new place to live. Time for a new car. New debts. Time to grow up and sign paperwork saying, “Sure, I’m comfortable with this grind for the next thirty years or so. And what a great rate!” Time to let the bank own each and every facet of my life.
    I considered going off grid, but where was “off grid” anymore that didn’t require me to know how to kill an elephant seal and live off its blubber? And where could I even set up a nature camp, now that the ProTax Drones had become so wide-ranging and effective? Public assistance programs needed your Social—thus placing you firmly back on the grid—and ran weekly drug tests. The government’s health care system was still a shambles since the ShellPharm testing scandal broke and all of the parents of short-lived jellyskin babies got their class-action going. Alternative economies in New Hampshire and Boston flopped under old school COINTELPRO disruption. And after the bitcoin Digipression almost negated the global value of the US dollar and the Yen, no other agreeable survival systems had been forthcoming.
    I’d still have a nice stash left from dad’s life insurance—we lost him to a donorcycle accident before I was even old enough to remember—but mom’s fight with a rare case of Pelton-Reyes Syndrome drained the war chest. I couldn’t sing, dance, play sports, or produce any kind of art you’d want, and my student loans didn’t seem to go away no matter how many petitions I signed.
    I considered sex work, but then I bent over and looked at my asshole in a mirror. Nobody was going to pay me for access to that thing.
    So the bank owned me. But not for long.
    I’d call Hungarian. Hook things up. Get focused. Find something. Something BIG.
    And then what? Tell the Feds? Then they take the bank down, I’m out a job, and nobody hires a whistle-blower.
    Or worse. Maybe the bank decides I’m an Externality. Maybe I have a mysterious heart attack. Strange for someone in the prime of their life. So sad.
    No. I knew that taking it to the government was a dead end. Instead I’d play the bank’s game.
    Everything is commerce. We weren’t the only multi-national mega-bank in town. Whatever I found, I’d sell at a premium to the biggest buyer I could. They’d respect me as a rogue, a high-finance info-pirate. I’d push for my price, the shark-feeder’s fee.
    And then I’d do it all