When she thought of the bottom line, the only thing she cared about was not getting caught. Beneath her hungry mouth, blood spurted in ecstatic torrents that she hoovered up in orgiastic frenzy. Dim in a subterranean corner of her animal brain there was an infinitely-looping replay of the look of absolute horror that had darkened his face like an opening night curtain when he realized he couldn’t feel his legs anymore. Couldn’t feel that he had pissed himself, but never mind the smell because as far as she was concerned he was already dead. It did not matter that she knew his name, Sean, because lunch didn’t need a goddamn name. Nobody missed a pimp anyway. She had snapped his lower back like a matchstick and enjoyed the dry twig sound of vertebrae crushing, but not anywhere as much as she liked his face once he realized what she had done. Not that what she had done solved the great puzzling tower of anger lodged pyramidal within her undead heart. It didn’t. But it did give her a smug, black-humored satisfaction that at the moment, Sean knew he had accidentally found himself a genuine moral-free psycho. Bona fide.

She hadn’t expected to be picked up like she had been, just walking by the gas station and minding her own business. She had been homeless for seven months in Philly. She stank in a way that only an immortal could stink, a dry, choking musty smell that subtly crept into your nose and made you want to vomit after about ten seconds of exposure. She had stopped smelling herself except for inopportune moments when she lifted the shabby microfleece jacket to scratch an itch or to fix one of the shopping bags she was carrying. Sean had driven up in his low riding 1978 Cadillac, his speakers blaring godawful T-Pain jabbering she had already heard seventeen billion times, his hair neatly corralled into perfect cornrows festively tipped with colored beads.

“Whatchoo doin walkin’ out here?”

She had ignored him. He cut the music.

“Hey! You! Whatchoo doin’ here?”

“Who, me?”

“Yeah, you.” He had reclined in his car just enough so he could still see her with one eye.

“Come over here.”

“I don’t think so.” She stood frozen in place.

“I said come over.”

“Fine.” She said petulantly, brushing aside the hair that had flown into one eye. She bustled herself and all her bags to the warm car, which was emanating radiant heat.

“What.” She got a better look at him. He wore a uniform of denim. A denim jacket and underneath it a shirt, most likely an expensive shirt with its logo obvious once the jacket was taken off. Stiff, blackish-blue jeans about three sizes too large. They crumpled like paper bags around his young man thighs. There was an almost indiscernable bulge near the right side pocket of the jacket, a gun.

She got into the back seat. It stank of cigarettes.

He shifted gears and pulled out of the gas station.

“How olda you?”

“Fifteen.”

“Bullshit. You twelve.”

“No I’m not.”

“Thirteen. You run away?”

“Maybe.”

She knew he was waiting for her to ask him questions like where are we going? or what’s your name? She didn’t. She hadn’t asked to be picked up.

“You a creepy little bitch.” He smirked into the rear view mirror. His skin was even and a little shiny.

You have no idea, she thought.

His apartment was at the top of a three-story government subsidized walk up in the projects. There were human feces lying in an ironically neat pile on the carpeting in the stairwell, the flies buzzing around it in a holding pattern. The smell of the place was unbelievable. His apartment was equally aromatic, mostly due to a white paint bucket on the lower floor that was serving as a toilet. As she suspected and later confirmed, there was a usable toilet on the second floor. A chunky girl spilled out of a dark room, wiping her mouth with one fist.

“What the fuck is this baby puta? Sean, you crazy?”

“Get her clean, she fuckin’ stinks.” He shoved Ann towards his chunky roommate. “She gonna get broken in tonite.”

Ann observed a flash of passionate but momentary jealousy moving over the chunky girl’s face like a storm cloud.

“What a joke.” The girl muttered as she ushered Ann upstairs.

Ann fought the urge to kill the girl in the bathroom as her layers of clothes, little more than stinking rags, were stripped off one by one. The girl grimaced afresh at each redolent new layer but Ann’s thoughts were far from sympathetic. After all, she hadn’t asked to be picked up.

Into the shower Ann went, with instructions to use plenty of soap, which she did. Even coming out of homelessness, Ann still found herself disgusted that the shower was creating a puddle around her feet because the drain was clotted with hair. She turned the water to a scalding hot temperature no normal human could withstand.

After toweling her off as if she was a little kid, the chunky girl wrapped the towel around Ann’s head.

“Hope you don’t got lice.”

“I don’t.”

“Good.”

“He can’t make you do this. You barely got boobs. You got your period yet?”

Ann looked at her cockeyed. “Uh, what’s your name?” She asked, trying to mask her congenital sarcasm.

“Diamond.”

“Seriously? That’s your name?”

“Not the one I was born with, but whadda you care?”

“When did Sean get you, Diamond?”

Diamond sighed as she pulled a pathetically small cupped, padded push-up bra and a miniskirt from the heap of clothes next to the bed. Diamond’s sides were bulging out of the thin tank top, her underarm fat exposed. She tossed them toward Ann, who rapidly clothed herself.

“I was fourteen. Homeless, like you.” Diamond’s head was downturned, her face rendered suddenly beautiful, like a Sphinx.

“Why?”

“You don’t ask why, don’t you know that?”

“Sorry.”

“You don’t belong here.” Diamond’s movements suddenly became frantic. “You need to get out!”

“Don’t worry about me. Just watch out for yourself.” Ann plucked a pair of cheap shoes from the pile and donned a shirt after ripping the tags off.

“I gotta go work. Fuckin’ Andre, he tired me out and I did him for free.” Diamond looked at Ann ruefully. “This is your last chance to run off.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Put some makeup on then. You still look like a kid.” Diamond grabbed an oversized purse emblazoned loudly with fake gold and slammed the door.

Andre, bull-shouldered and borderline obese, was playing Halo when she walked downstairs. His thick forehead was creased in consternation as he thumbed the controller. He lay sprawled on the couch between the poop bucket and the patio window with the broken vertical blinds. They angled like spiky teeth as they fanned depressingly towards the floor.

“Can I play?” Ann asked. She loved Halo.

“Hell no.” He didn’t bother looking at her.

“That’s cause you know I’ll kick your ass.”

“Shut up, cunt and get yo ass upstairs!”

“Fine.” Ann skulked upstairs, resentment in every step. There was nothing to do except wait. She spent three hours mulling about two of the upstairs bedrooms, snooping around, rifling through drawers and piles of clothes left like mountain ranges across the dirty carpeted floor. One drawer in Diamond’s dresser was locked. It was probably her drug drawer. Sean’s room was more obvious: there was a lighter on the bed, some tubing, and a spoon caked with the remnants of viscous syrup. The bed was sodden with an unknown brown liquid had seeped into the bare mattress. There were fresh white stains across a quilt emblazoned with the cartoon head of Darth Vader. In another lifetime, it had probably adorned some pampered little boy’s bedroom. How it had ended up here was anyone’s guess.

Sean returned at eleven o’clock the next morning. Ann had fallen asleep in Diamond’s room on a pile of clothes near to a radio, which she had tuned to NPR.

“Hey, wake up.”

“No.” She grunted and turned over, her face in a pair of jeans.

He slapped her on her behind. “C’mon, get up.”

“Go away.”

He grabbed her by the hair. “It’s time, bitch.” He dragged her down the stairs. She yelped in a pantomime of pain, salivating, the nails on her fingers extending in points. Her legs thumped against the banister.

“Andre, get over here. We gots breakin’ in to do.”

“I dunno, Sean.”

“I said, get over here, Andre!”

Andre’s eyes were glazed over, the smoke still curling from his nostrils. He grimaced as Sean threw her on the bed, prone, her butt sticking out of the miniskirt.

“Nice lil’ pussy.” She could hear the greed in his voice. “Tight.”

It took one leg, still clad in its high heel, thrust upward at the exact moment she heard pants unzip. She brought the leg up and Andre went down with the meaty thud, his hands clasped to his broken balls.

“Owwww, bitch! Fuck!”

Within a split second, she turned and drove her elbow into Andre’s forehead, the bone crunching with a deafening crack. His cerebrum poked rudely towards the surface over the side of one bulging eye, his mouth agape. Blood rushed around the ring of his skull, pausing before its inevitable slide down his neck. She wriggled the other shoe off of her foot as Sean gaped in disbelief of his friend’s newly cloven skull. Sean looked as if he meant to say something. She grinned.

Sean jumped on her, slamming her on the bed. The mattress springs screeched in loud protest as he forced her legs apart. He fumbled with his belt, hurrying to pull out his cock and get the rape over with. She embraced his abdomen with her naked thighs. He had no time to register her seeming acceptance. Her legs tightened around his waist, and tightened, and tightened. She was glad he had left the lights on. Sean tried to grab her head, his palms closing upon her face. She blocked his oncoming hands with a butterfly stroke that was almost graceful. His body jerked in a spasm as the sockets of his femurs popped out of his hips. There was a crunching sound like popping corn as Sean’s hip bones gave way, then the vertebrae. The Rage was upon her, loose and roaming free.

The Rage was in control. It was the Rage so badly in need of his terror; the Rage that savored that last horrified look in his eyes as he realized he could no longer feel his legs. The piss slipped down his leg, darkening the baggy denim to black.

“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!” He spat at her. She briefly considered cutting out his tongue with a butcher blade and stuffing back down his throat just for fun, but her more rational instinct won out. There was no time for play. She wiped Sean’s spittle off her face serenely and lowered her face to his neck as he tried desperately to strangle her, to bring to her neck what she had done to his hips. The blood sprung from his neck. It was as sweet as a late summer peach. She lowered her mouth and began to drink.

The Rage died down as she fed, the house eerily silent as if to bear witness to its passing. Her brain quickly went into survival-mode. She reached into Sean’s designer jean-jacket pocket, its edge damp with piss. There were a few hundreds and a couple of twenties in a diamond-studded bill fold. She pocketed the money, but she searched the other pocket. She found his keys.

She went upstairs and frantically showered, scrubbing her face of the blood and gore that was the grisly hallmark of her meals. Glancing at the clock, she changed herself into a found pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and a puffy silver jacket. A police siren sounded somewhere in the distance and she nearly jumped out of her skin. She had to get out, and soon. A pair of shoplifted Nike shoes was gleaned by digging in the pile nearest the bathroom door. She unlocked Diamond’s drawer. Predictably, there was some pot and some hash. It wasn’t what she was looking for. She went back downstairs and ripped apart Sean’s closets, tore down a poster of a naked woman proffering her vulva for the cameraman, hoping for a safe in the wall. Nothing. She lifted the mattress.

Flicking bedbugs aside, she hoisted the metal box onto her lap. The key was small, its head shaped like an octagon that matched the closure of the metal box. She opened it. There were four dime bags of pot, useless. There was 5,620 in bills in envelopes laying neatly stacked around the pot. The real drugs were obviously stashed elsewhere, but she didn’t have time to root around anymore. There was no time to sell them anyway. She took the bills, stuffing them into the inner jacket pocket.

She winced as she held the butane torch to the ends of her fingers, the edges turning red before they dripped into the sink as blood and plasma. The smell of roast pork filled the bathroom. It was easier than disposing of the bodies. Her fingerprints never grew back the same way twice.

The Harvest Moon, blood-tinged, rode the cold October sky. As the wind whipped around the train car, she thought of Diamond. Diamond would probably die because of what Ann had done, either at the hand of some indignant gangbanging thug-friend of Sean’s or if not, by the next pimp. Poor Diamond, with her occasional-goddess face. Diamond had truly been concerned for her welfare; a total stranger. Diamond was a good soul. Well, it was just too fucking bad. Philly was behind her and good riddance. The train sped west. She looked through the oversized lozenge of a window with an embittered sense of relief. She would find the old forest path down to the river where she had been born. She would finally have the courage to commit one final, heinous act. It had to be at the river. It was the only place where she belonged.