Page 47 of Antihero

“Hang on, hang on.” Finn-Finn said everything twice. Thus his name.

The fucking MMA fight wasn’t loading on the onion site Taz had found on the /r/mma subreddit, the linked site buffering forever, and he figured it’d come up Content Removed, Copyright Infringed, or Blocked Due to Community Standards. An alert pinged in—his Adderall dealer sharing a link to the red room of a surgeon in Estonia with unusual proclivities but Taz was pretty sure it was a scam since you had to pay to watch it.

They were crossing a street.

Finally Finn-Finn’s shit had loaded, a radical prank site, some hammered college kid in Dublin squatting over his sleeping roommate’s head, and Taz shoved him away, said, “Seen it.”

“What? What is it?” Big Dumb Mikey, always one step behind, tugged at Finn-Finn’s elbow. Mikey had the backpack filled with research supplies, an ironic seafoam-green JanSport, not one of the trendy Herschels the private-school turds flaunted.

B-Roll glided next to them like a shark. B-Roll had been through some fucked-up shit with his single mom’s boyfriends growing up, so you never messed with him. He didn’t remember anything before the age of eight. Paranoid, too, used burner cell phones and shit, stayed off the radar.

B-Roll’s face was severe, skin stretched tight over bone, intense eyes, and he was wiry as fuck, all muscle. His schlong curved to the right like a banana, thus Banana-Man to B-Man to B-Roll ’cuz B-Roll was more derogatory, like what you’d leave on the cutting-room floor. He worked food-service gigs here and there, had told Taz once that all you need to have as many pretty girls as you want is a server apron and access to roofies and once you got good, you didn’t even need roofies no more. He could go forever, B-Roll, especially when he was snorting star-spangled powder.

Taz was at the pickup counter now and some porker in a Hermione tie was staring at him and he thought about her in a position from a video he’d seen last week and it was sorta gross and sorta not and he said, “Huhn?”

“I said”—she checked the receipt stapled to the bag again, all bitchy—”‘Taz Kinley.’”

“Yeup.”

She handed him his order, a weighty fucking bag. That was Chipotle, didn’t jew you on the burrito size. Swinging away, face to phone, he checked RedLite. RedLite had his algo down from his viewing history, the best, best shit, and they were sending him alerts of girls with Big Naturals and Big Butts and corsets pinching their waists in between the bulges down to nothing.

He had guac on his cheek—weird—and no napkins. His burrito was mostly done and he was way full and it looked like he’d eaten a ton of chips, too. Finn-Finn and Mikey were laughing at something on TikTok and B-Roll was glaring all psycho at the tools waiting in line, his jaw clenched like a steroidal pit bull.

The juicy corset parade was interrupted by a commercial for some new first-person-shooter game from Solventry, Karnage something, a total CoD rip-off they’d been shoving at him through the pre-rolls 24/7. Skip Ads in 3 … 2 … 1. He cleared it and then on the other screen the MMA fight loaded—finally!—not the whole thing but the clip where his boy leaned over the pinned Bulgarian and ripped his fucking nose off, not just the cap, the whole fucking thing, like a Viking savage, and spit it at the crowd.

Taz felt the sidewalk beneath his sneaks now, Finn-Finn at his side, and he vaguely sensed Mikey and B-Roll behind him but if not they had location services on and they’d figure it out if they got separated. He’d forgotten where they were going and he stopped, people streaming around him at the crosswalk.

Finn-Finn said, “Mikey’s place, Mikey’s place,” and pointed.

Taz said, “’N’kay.”

A woman walked past them and she had a flowy skirt under her coat and long blond hair that caught in the wind and she was dressed all classy, a hostess at a nice restaurant or a sales chick at one of the fancy boutiques on Madison maybe, and he thought about what it might be like to be with a real woman like her with smart eyeglasses and a career. Taz was only nineteen, the youngest of the posse by a full six months, but the possibility of a woman like her had been exhausted before he even had a chance. It had been bled out of the world he’d been raised in. Everything was fake, wasn’t it? Makeup and filters and outrage and spin-spin-spin. Aside from when they went hunting, circling up prey, he barely knew where he was in space anymore—what city block, what his body was doing, where he was on the sliding scale between the inside of his mind and the world outside it. The singularity was already here, man. He was disembodied. And more powerful for it.

People pretended to get all judgy about how things were. It was so funny. For as long as Taz could remember he’d never felt like a kid. The world didn’t treat them like kids, never had. There weren’t children, not in this era. They were a future voting bloc, a key consumer base, drivers of content and culture. It was so funny, how the gray suits ceded all the power to them, politicians citing favorite rappers, corps scrambling to pump out shows and commercials using last week’s slang, teachers fighting to stay relevant and “connect.” And none of it worked. They were already dinosaur bones, never even saw the comet coming.

When the walls came tumbling down, they’d be the ones who’d rule the rubble, him and Finn-Finn, Mikey and B-Roll. No rules and no laws suited them just fine. They knew how to play the game the way everyone else in the world was playing it, the way it had always been played with lesser tools and shorter reach. Taz was happy to let the i-bankers and social justice warriors fight and fret over the bullshit while his posse picked over the battlefield, stripping Rolexes and NFT drop mints from the dead bodies.

“Didja see this? Didja?” Mikey now showing him some argument on Twitter or X or whatever it was now, drone footage of a tank getting blown up somewhere and a heat signature stumbling out and giving the drone the finger an instant before white phosphorous ammo lit his ass up. And what was so funny was that they blurred out the guy’s hand flipping the bird but still showed his body getting demolished.

“Kewl,” Taz said. “’S like that new Solventry game, whatzitcalled?”

B-Roll said, “Kings of Karnage.”

Finn-Finn said, “KoK. WoW. CoD. Nothing’s new. Nothing’s ever new.”

An email alert sailed in from Taz’s stupid HVAC tech vocational-training class. He’d enrolled to get reduced sentencing for another public-intoxication charge, but they didn’t always check if you finished. All of a sudden they were at Mikey’s place.

Mikey’s mom was gone—she was always working or servicing some booty call—and there was shit for food but Mikey found a half sleeve of stale mini-doughnuts and they scarfed them down except for B-Roll who was following some low-sugar podcaster diet this month.

Taz waved at Mikey’s backpack. “’S do it.”

Mikey dumped out the contents. A bunch of big blocky high-school yearbooks, old-fashioned ones they could thumb through and mark up like catalogs. Mikey worked as a school janitor now and then, shit work that moved him around from high school to high school. But it gave him access and he could lift new yearbooks from the school libraries. They passed them around, leafed through the pages.

They were shopping. Shopping for the hunt. They needed new product to pound and they couldn’t count on stumbling upon some half-conscious chick on the 2 line again.

There were so many hot girls. It was endless, just like online. The posse could slide into their DMs, sweet-talk them into a meetup. Most of them were willing if B-Roll threw a little bad-boy charm. They were starved for attention. A shocking number would do whatever for money. Taz paid them with dummy Amazon or Solventry gift cards they stole from the Starbucks rack and wrote $500 on in Magic Marker.

Mikey was scritching at his scraggly beard over that gross dried-out port-wine stain and marking pages like a maniac. He had a low bar, so they had to veto him all the time. They had to maintain standards.