*
Everything is an explosive. Every thought is a sort of explosion inside the head. When you give me your hand I feel as if something is exploding inside you.
â Karel Äapek, “Krakatit”
*
Donât move.
The LED screens and billboards around the Fuchsia World Mall all say the same thing.
People run, of course.
The parking lot explodes. The mall shakes. Smoke rises from the courtyard at the center, or traps itself dark behind cracked windows.
Eventually, people stop moving. Some have the presence of mind to understand whatâs happening, the rest get lucky with shock and concussion, or the inability to move with their new bodies. The border is delineated by horrified bystanders, clean and unharmed, except for the powderized city drifting into the creases of their clothes and lungs.
Lazur drives into the storm of carcinogens, windshield growing grayer.
The smell of almonds, even half a mile away. A tribute to classical plastic explosives, Nobel 808s, and so much more than heartbreak.
*
Lazur parks his car. Rental, because things could always get worse. His second-best jacket, and the shirt he fell asleep in last night. Dark hair slashed with early white, and blue undertones when the sun hits it.
Car alarms are still going off like crickets of death. The almond cloy is overwhelming this close. At least it deodorizes the bodies.
He shows his badge, dropping it twice. His fingers shouldnât be this sweaty already.
âHe asked for you.â
âHeâs alive?â
But even as Lazur says it, he knows. Or they would have asked for a bomb technician closer than a six-hour drive. This is a very personal terrorist incident.
He finishes his milk tea and crushes the cup in his hand. Heâs about to drop it then remembers the cameras. It might look tough, rolling up the sleeves kind of deal, or it could come off as disrespectful. And littering is littering. Thereâs already been enough of that today. Sneakers, sole detached like a skin flap. A handheld console, translucent purple plastic shattered into rare earth blood minerals. A wedding ring, perfectly lodged in a crack of the parking lot, like it was lost for years and years and years.
His phone buzzes and he almost pisses himself. Through the cracked screen, over the wallpaper of him and his mother at Olive Garden, a notification hovers.
Youâre safe for one minute.
He walks past frozen people sitting on the ground, or standing with aching legs, afraid to even kneel. Their eyes follow him. Waxwork museum of 21st century parking lot life. Authentic explosions included.
How does it work? Motion sensors, toggled off? In which case, he could try to save some of these people. Tell them to run.
But if itâs manual, human eyes reflecting security monitors, then that is a very bad idea.
Facial recognition would be cute. The one face that wonât blow up the mall. How special.
He walks past a crater, heat radiating through his sneakers. The blasted asphalt is like volcanic rock.
*
The mall is a cathedral of ice, reverberating with industrial aircon. The screens are playing commercials again, and the actorsâ wide smiles have a desperate, hostage taint to them.
In the mallâs courtyard, black sloughing waterfalls of structural gore. People stare down silently, more waxworks. A mother grips her toddler like sheâs going to crush him, trying to keep this panicking nascent mind from reacting normally to terror and setting off the nearest bomb, wherever it is.
Someone is still breathing in the fragments of that heavy mall pot, covered in plastic leaves and fake soil like he dug out of his own grave. Survived the initial blast, but fortunately for his neighbors, heâs lost too much blood to thrash. He just writhes slowly like a worm, under the threshold of the bomb sensor.
There it is. Like a dead pixel.
A black box.
This is the bomb. The one that matters. The others were just setting the stage.
Video screens drain of their commercials, happy families and pristine cars fading to black. An unfamiliar voice echoes through the speakers. But a familiar way of saying it.
âThereâs enough to send you to the moon.â
The screens turn back on. Grainy feed, but it doesnât matter at that scale.
Lazur doesnât recognize him at first. Broken in a wheelchair. Drooling out the side of a ruptured jaw.
*
Rubicon could make a very mean, very reasonable bomb from household parts by age ten. They flocked to his fingers like doves.
Money in the blood. Took his final exams at the atrocity. Flying colors, red mist to the troposphere. Arms dealt like hands. You know idiot savants? Imagine that, but really smart, with no downsides. His car bombs purr like a luxury sedan. Magazine spread, the blond bombshell. Hottest heirs under 30. He burnt up.
*
Lazur looks up at the twisted body replicated on every screen. âCan you hear me?â
The shredded mouth moves after only a slight delay. âYes.â Lazur wonders if they can trace the transmission. Probably. But not in time.
âYou look great.â
Rubicon laughs, and Lazur can see how it hurts for air to pass through that surviving lung, up through a patch of miraculously preserved soft throat tissue, wheezing through the broken jaw. Each vibration dispersing through shattered ribs, and finally, amplified through mall-wide sound systems, showing him every bit of grit, an auditory microscope into fried tissue and bone shrapnel.
âItâs my twenty-first birthday.â Rubicon tips back a mini-bottle, brown liquor pouring through the holes in his face. His face contorts with the sting.
Lazur looks at the bomb, that unadorned black box like an alien interpretation of gift giving. âI didnât get you anything.â
“I disagree.” The screens turn off, leaving error messages tall as trees. Then something clicks and Lazur tries not to flinch. Rubiconâs voice grates from nearby, a hidden speaker, close and personal, no longer audible to the hostages. âWhy donât you take a look. Iâm kind of proud of it.â
Natural light falls on the bomb from the open ceiling of the courtyard, cold bright afternoon tempered by clouds. He wonders if itâs going to rain. Probably. But not the way you like to see.
âCan I bring in a bomb suit?â
Silence, susurrus with the dead air of Rubiconâs feed.
âSure. Letâs embrace the ritual.â
*
He walks back to the parking lot. As they bring out the bomb suit, a weakness passes through his legs, and he puts his hand on a car hood for support. He thought he was solid. But coming back out was the wrong move. It triggers too much a sense of visceral relief, fakes his body into thinking he survived it, when he hasnât even begun. When that black box is still there, unopened, fissile with secrets.
Everyone is watching him. He can feel the instability out here, the lack of coordination. So he goes back inside.
The bomb suit weighs 85 pounds. It was comforting the first time he put it on. Everyone wants armor. But now it feels heavy as his soul.
People keep talking at him. Texts, emails, calls. But he knows they canât give him anything he needs. No amount of research, protocol, international expertise, tech specs, or cutting-edge tools can change the outcome. So he silences his phone.
He waddles toward the bomb. Out of reach of the hidden speaker. All alone now.
He swivels, taking in the mall like a deep sea diver. Those distant drawn faces. All bombs render their surroundings alien. Not just after, but before. Alone with this secret pressure. Inside the veil of its inverted explosion. Before a great noise, great silence.
The suit doesnât help with the alienation. Xeno-bulbous and oblong, something like those projections of what humans will look like evolved for cars after millions of years. Bomb world neanderthal.
Someone clears their throat. A woman laying against a wall, dark matter drying on her capris. She holds a tablet in her hands.
Lazur stares at her through the spacesuit.
Itâs for you, she says in a dehydrated voice, but with some dignity, some subdued spirit of offense. She holds out the tablet.
âThanks,â he says, not sure if she heard him. He wishes he could comfort her. Or comfort himself. Talk to anyone like a normal person. No. Emotion has a specific atmospheric cost inside this sweltering suit. And if he allows a single moment of softness, heâs fucked. Because humans were not meant to commune with bombs. Hexamine demons, beasts of nitrogen, plastic deities that slowly and instantly invade reality. He has to be a device.
Lazur takes the tablet. Rubicon looks up at him through the faint smears of the womanâs fingers. Tracks of her daily use: scrolling automatically through social feeds, tapping at gacha game rewards, gripping the edges to position herself in the best light for friends, family, a lover.
âHow much time do I have?â
âLook at the bomb. Then maybe Iâll tell you.â
Lazur trudges to the black case. Heâd hoped that a closer look would reveal new details, but it remains surprisingly minimalist compared to Rubiconâs past work. He canât see a way inside the monolithic form, it resists his touch, his interpretation. Maybe itâs a joke. A combustible koan.
âIs there a timer?â
âOf course. You need to stay motivated. But itâs not the point.â
“Then what is?”
âFunny youâd say that.â
Lazur sweats, trapped in his own body heat. Itâs only going to get hotter. If the suit had holes, it wouldnât be protective.
âTake the suit off,” Rubicon says.
âI think it looks good. Kind of suave and sexy.â
âIt wonât help you. Not with the ordinance Iâm using.â
He leans against the bomb for support, cooking in the wearable sauna, dizzy, dizzying, dizzier.
âIâve established that you have nothing to gain with the suit. And youâll be more dexterous.â
The crip fuck is right. It wonât do shit. He needs his most important organ to breathe. Has to think his way out of this. He takes off the suit, getting a blast of that cool mall air.
He gets out his kit. Lays down his spudger. Wire cutters. Hex key. Hemostat. Cold chisel, made of beryllium copper to avoid sparking.
âThat wonât help either. Itâs solid state all over. A hundred failsafes.â
Lazur believes him. Rubicon tired long ago of the usual games. His last bomb was a gauntlet, testing every principle of bomb defusal, taking him through a history of explosives. Black powder, nitroglycerin, gelignite, dynamite, vintage plastic. A gift basket, a sample platter, a greatest hits anthology. It was almost interesting, after a career of defusing the same entry-level pipe bombs and garden-variety plastic explosives.
The point is, Rubicon doesnât repeat himself. A pivot to minimalism makes sense.
Lazur runs his hand across the case. Smooth all over. Well-machined but betraying nothing. Then he walks around the bomb, and finally sees it. A hole. Like a large headphone jack.
Maybe it emits something. A gas? That would reach a wide area.
He shines a penlight inside. The inside looks coated with some kind of rubber. Thereâs a fissure at the end made of a similar polymer, a smaller hole within the hole.
*
âLean the tablet.â
âWhat?â Snapping. Irritated.
âSo I can see you.â
Lazur picks up the tablet. He thinks about tossing it over the edge. But it would be a pointless defiance. And with how much Rubicon is talking, maybe thereâs a negotiation angle after all. Or maybe the shattered anatomy just makes him look vulnerable. Unless the blast scrambled his brain, this is the same person, the same choice of weapons. Except both are scarred and obfuscated, skin as inscrutable as this bomb.
Lazur places the tablet against the glass railing. âDo I get anything for that?â
âIâm not the Nintendo Power hotline. Thatâs what people your age used, right?â
âI donât play games.â
Crackling laughter that turns to coughing. âI thought Iâd get to use this body more. Or I never thought of it at all. Same thing.â
Rubicon sounds wet and clogged. He spits on the floor, his saliva disappearing off-screen. The background is painted black. No hints to location. But probably in the same state, judging by latency.
âI had a dream I was kissing someone. On a roller coaster. The roller coaster wasnât moving. It was inside a mall. Maybe thatâs why I chose the location.â
âItâs a nice public place. Lots of people.â
âSee. You get me.â
Shrug.
âI woke up and my face hurt. Itâs shocking, forgetting what shape it is now. I realized Iâd never kiss anyone again. After a certain point of ablation, itâs just meat pressing against meat.â
âI didnât do that to you.â
âWhen you raided me, I was on a three day coke bender, up all night in my workshop. I panicked. Touched the wrong thing.â
âHow do you know I was there?”
âBecause my bombs didnât go off. The ones that were supposed to protect me.â
âIâm not the only defusal expert in the world.”
âI think you knew my personality. Knew what to look for. Understood my sense of humor.â
âI was just one person, doing my job.â
âIf it was just that. I could forgive you. But I think you werenât just a hapless little technician bumbling along. I think you showed them where I was.â
Lazur doesnât answer.
âYou could feel it, couldnât you? In the guts of my last bomb. I was too forensically generous. Not enough details sanded off, too many exotic, hard to source ingredients. I overshared. I was just so excited to finally have an audience that could understand me.â
âLooking at it made me sick.â
Excitement breaks through Rubiconâs fractured face, facets of flushed skin. âI made you feel something.â
âJust another night at the opera.â
âI wish I could have shown you what I was working on. But the only pieces remaining are inside me. Embedded around my skeleton.â
âTell me about this one.â
âYou know how it goes. Debris will rain for miles around. Cancerous materials will jet through the city. Radiationââ
âItâs a dirty bomb?â
âThe dirtiest.â
âSeems overkill.â
âLike a witchâs cauldron. I put everything in it.â
Lazur looks at his tools. Blank. Nothing. Useless. Maybe if he had colonoscopy equipment.
âItâs beautiful how such a tiny quantity of materials can blight so much land, for so long. Dominating the chromosomes of our fellow man.â
Lazur doesnât respond.
âHeyââ
âIâm going to find the room youâre hiding in, and Iâm going to shoot you.â And all the bombs will unvomit themselves, and all the people will come back together.
âMaybe.â The lazy word hangs there. Rubicon doesnât need to say anything else. The bomb is right there, total and commanding.
âYou could have done something with your life.â
âShut up, dad. This is what Iâm good at.â
âBlowing people up isnât a careerââ
âIt created your career.â
âBombs killââ
âBombs equalize.â
âAnother victory for democracy.â
âTired macho quips wonât get you out of this.â
âI feel tired.â He thought Rubiconâs death, supposed death, would end it. But every suspicious bag on the subway was full of fear, his pores rewired to pump rookie sweat, virginal trembling in his wire cutters.
âYou look tired.â
4th of July, on a date, baseball at night, the sky full of burning worms, popping and crackling with their consumption of the air, their gnashing of bismuth trioxide. How could fireworks be that loud, were they always that loud? Surrounded by thousands of mannequins, cheering coming from loudspeakers. He excused himself to the stadium bathroom and hid inside a stall, finishing his beer in quick, automatic swallows. It tasted like aftermath. He walked home, lost, unable to find the way back to his seat. She never texted him back.
âYou eating okay?â
Potato chips. Moldy takeout. An insidious lack of appetite. As if waiting for something massive and inorganic, pica for rubble.
âI could order you a pizzaââ
âAre you fucking me here?â
âHuh?â
Lazur grabs the tablet. âIs there a point to trying, or not?â
Rubicon leans back in his wheelchair, a defensive posture, or simply too weak to keep his spine erect. âThere is a point. If you can find it.â
Lazur kneels down, trying to feel under the bomb. Flush with the floor on every side.
âHow are you since the whole explosion thing? I feel like we have so much to catch up on.â
âFine. Just beautiful.â
âI saw on social youâre not with that one lady anymore.â
âThatâs not your business.â
âYou probably brought home too much baggage. Pent up. Waiting to explode.”
âI never hit anyone.â
âWow. Defensive.â
âYou have no idea what my private life is like.â
âYou can tell me if something is wrong. You know how compromised I am morally. Itâs like having a therapist.â
âIâm not the fucked up one. Iâm cleaning up your mess.â
Wetness shines on Rubiconâs lip-chasm, pink where the tissue is still alive. âItâs not a mess. I worked very hard on it, very carefully, on every detailââ Spit catches in his throat and he coughs.
âChoking on me?â
Rubicon wipes his face. âI could ask the same thing.â
âYou didnât give me anything to work with. This is just a nihilistic fuck me.â
âItâs not.â Rubicon leans forward in the wheelchair, and Lazur sees it. The lopsided cant in the boy’s spine, the wrists too weak to stabilize without pain. It must have taken many painstaking hours to make whatever this bomb is. He looks like heâs going to say something else, but he just hangs there, in a helpless vibrance of neuralgia. He sounds like he was accused of faking his homework.
âI know,â Lazur says quietly.
âI think a lot. About what I make.â
âYouâre good at it.â
As in all things, the instinct. Donât let it blow up. Things or people. The slightest vibration of molecules can build to an irreversible and shocking outcome.
Rubicon hangs his head, letting the saliva drip until he can talk. When he does, a strand of clear drool hangs from his tattered lip. âThanks?â
âBut itâs not enough. Not after what happened to you.â
Silence from the tablet.
âYou canât catch up anymore.â
Wet rasp. âCan you?â
âI have a real job. Helping people. Not blow up. I believe in somethingââ
âSure. Casimir Pulaski with wire cutters.â
âFuck you.â
Rubicon assumes a posture that might once have been insouciance, but now comes off as muscle memory for a body that no longer exists. He reaches offscreen and Lazur hears the click of a keyboard.
The mall screens turn on. A red countdown.
Fifteen minutes.
It doesnât matter what he does here. The elements of cheap, scalable annihilation have entered this reality. Bombs blowing through the world like storm clouds.
He thinks of the soul that enters each bomb, to act as its detonator, its tripper, some vital link in the mechanism. Surrendering to this bright new form as it explodes from the hyper-flagellating vest around your chest. Trading a dim, anonymous, interminable life for a single brilliant inversion of your hell.
We are in a labyrinth and the string that leads us out is a wire.
Rubicon leans forward. A scrap of blond hair falls over his eyes and he forks it to the side with his fingers.
âDid you mean it?â
âMean what?â
âThat Iâm good.â
Lazur thinks of the delicate mechanisms he balanced his very sweat against, trying not to contaminate them with his perspiration, rapt with surgical flow, discovering these new bodies of blast. âSure.â
Rubicon looks away, then his head jerks back, the scar tissue on his neck restraining him like a collar. âIâm a little embarrassed now. Itâs a different kind of bomb.â
âDifferent?â
âItâs not as sophisticated as the others I made for you. Itâs just. Different.â
“Okay.”
“Iâm still good at music. Iâm just trying a new instrument.â
âGot it. No judgment. Iâll leave that for the war crime tribunal.â
âThanks.â
*
…your body is a sleeping explosive, and even the faded, trembling hand of Mr. Paul contains more explosive force than a capsule of melinite. You lie motionless in an ocean of immeasurable, unanalyzable, unutilized forces; you are surrounded not by the walls of the room, quiet people and the rustling branches of trees, but by an ammunition store, a cosmic magazine prepared for the most frightful deed. You tap matter with your finger as if you were testing casks of ekrasite to see if they are full.
â Karel Äapek, “Krakatit”
*
Lazur stares at the bomb. It yields nothing. He feels like heâs going crazy.
âWhat did you mean, different?â
âUh. Most of it is incredibly powerful explosive. No surprise. Packed very tight. Very dense. The rest is diagnostic machinery.â
âDiagnostic?â
âYou wonât need your tools for this. Well. Maybe your tool. In the vernacular sense.â
âWhat the fuck.â
âThe bomb disarms when it receives your DNA in seminal form.â
âFuck off.â
âCome on, Lazur. Your biological clock is ticking. Haha.â
âI have to stick my dick in some kidâs edgy freshman art projectââ
Rubicon reaches for the webcam, and for the first time Lazur notices his pinkie and ring finger are missing. The camera swoops over the keloid canyons and emaciated valleys of his flesh. âYou think anyone is ever going to look at this body and think of me as a kid ever again?â
Fourteen minutes.
âI know. A real boner killer.â
Hostages whisper like jealous statues. Lazur leans over the bomb, eyes shut. It smells like chemicals. Workshop taint. A whiff of almond.
Rubicon rests his hand on the arm of the wheelchair. His thumb is missing too. âWhatâs the play, Laz?â
Lazur runs his finger around the bombâs hole. Maybe he can jerk off instead. Push his cum insideâ
âI thought of everything. You have to physically nut in the bomb.â
Hostages sit in front of a Build-a-Bear. One of them has a dark stain down the front of his pants. He stares at Lazur, or maybe heâs just dissociating.
âRemember. The first part of fucking a bomb is acceptance.â
âYou didnât give me enough time.â
âA red-blooded patriot like you should have no problem fucking a bomb.â
âYou donât know what color my blood is.â
âA watery translucent effluvia. Microplastics and ennui.â
âDamn.â Lazur watches the red numbers change, huge and important like some event he couldnât possibly have anything to do with. He wants to be one of the people waiting for him to fix this.
âI know youâll do it,â the ruined mouth says.
Lazur covers his face, breathing through sweaty palms.
âBecause youâre the best.â
Lazur goes into a shop and drags out cardboard cutouts. Anime girl with insectile sword, exoskeletoned star marine, some kind of edgy furry mascot. He never played any of those games. Theyâre just some dumb shit he never learned about and probably never will.
He positions them around the bomb. A startling sound comes from the tablet. He flinches, then realizes it was Rubicon laughing. Like someone trying to play a smashed violin.
âYouâre really going to do it?â
Lazur seethes. His lower half is hidden from the Build-A-Bear refugees. And the hostage panopticon, are they really going to assume heâs fucking the bomb? Fucking perverts. Dick hawks circling overhead. No. Itâs probably not the first thing that comes to mind. He just has to, there, unzip, snake it through, keep his pants on. He leans on the bomb all casual, like heâs about to eat his lunch. Just a working stiff. Hopefully.
*
Thirteen minutes. Rubiconâs wet mouth noise through the tablet like out of sync hentai foley. Still soft. He tucks himself back in and zips his fly.
âGiving up?â
In a Hot Topic next to the cash register, he finds a small half-used bottle of warm lotion.
âGood idea. I didnât make it self-lubricating.â
âFrigid bitch.â
Another laugh. That busted xylophone of teeth, a single lungâs worth of air, and the tongue, bright and pink and intact, struggling not to fall out of the mouth.
All bravado aside, he doesnât feel good. He just needed to feel like he wasnât helpless, so he did those things, without emotion, to shut that kid up. But now heâs here. The pop culture cutouts surround him like a praetorian guard. The lotion sits on the bomb, a strand of hair smeared on the side. How long was it laying lukewarm and stale, soothing the eczema of a teen cashier?
He unzips again. The tip of his cock brushes the rubber rim of the hole. He wonders what it feels like inside. Chop off his dick. Spew acid. Roast him like a sausage.
Is that really Rubiconâs style? He likes big explosions. Or he did. His artistic direction has clearly changed. After all, he lived through a blast. Felt it intimately in his muscles, bones, nerves. How deeply was his mental process transformed?
âBetter pop before my bomb does.â
âDonât talk.â
âThey call it total body disruption. The thing a bomb does. Chunks. Gibs. Meat cloud. I was in awe when I read the term. Twelve years old.â
Lazur closes his eyes, trying to regulate his breathing.
âWhat are you thinking about? Whatâs your go-to?â
He scans for mental images, desperately flipping through obscene fantasies tracing all the way back to puberty.
âYou probably need olâ reliable for this one. The stuff that gets you off when you need to fall asleep.â
Get out of my head, you fuck.
Rubicon says, âYou know the first thing I jerked off to?â
âThey didnât mention it in the briefing.â
âThe first thing I ever jerked off to was Kajaki.â
âI didnât think anyone else saw it.â
âYeah. You never meet anyone who saw it.â
âThey canât handle the circus.â
âHalfway through I started laughing and couldnât stop. I felt like I was going crazy.â
This stupid conversation is the only thing keeping him from freezing up. So he allows himself to speak naturally, aimlessly, knowing he needs to relax on the deepest level. âI always wanted to see it again. I donât know why. It made me so sad.â
âWe should watch it together sometime.â
Lazur fingers the mouth of the bomb. Feels soft enough. âDirty bomb,â he whispers.
“What?”
Dirty little bomb…
âKrakatit, Krakatoa, Kajaki, kraken, KrakusâŚdeath is in the KâsâŚthe STOPâŚthe voiceless velar plosive…are you voiceless, Lazur? Or plosive?”
“Please be quiet. I’m trying to concentrate.”
âMaybe I lied. Maybe I went small and cozy. Packed it so youâll survive. So you can be like me.â
Lazur shudders, a gruesome, slimy dread coating every inch of his skin. Eleven minutes. He jerks off in small, weak, scared motions, part of him still trying to preserve his dignity even as he grinds against his death.
âI made the interior extra nice for you. I didnât want you to have a hard time in front of all these people.â
âRight. Then the razors come out, and the scorpions.â
“It’s not a fucking Saw trap. This is medical-grade silicone.â
âFucking ridiculous.â
âDid you go inside? Was that you going inside?â
âSo fucking stupid.â
“Look around. Then tell me how stupid this is.â
The dead bodies do lend an air of gravitas. Lazur presses flush against the bomb, trying to conceal his penetration. He gasps at the tight, sticky sensation of his cock embedded in a high-yield, block-leveling explosive.
âWhy are you doing this?â
âI’d already tested your technical strength, took you through the intellectual gamesââ
“It wasn’t a game to me.”
âIf you wanted to help people, you could have become a plumber. A nursing home aid. A shit scrubber.â
Lazur pushes a little deeper, trying to relax. The bomb hasnât cut his dick off yet.
âBut you became a bomb technician. You headed straight for the alien apparatus, the archonic convergence of it all. The screaming edge of the future.â
With his cock soft in the interior of a doomsday device, Lazur feels the sudden urge to beg. Hey, turn off the bomb. Please? For the sake of whatever delusion youâve invested in me.
âYou were the only one who understood. All that effort that dissipates into nothingââ
Ten minutes. His head pounds with blood, the wrong one. âTell me about the bomb. Help me understand.â As long as Rubicon is still on the line, the fantasy of negotiation is alive. Someone who can end the nightmare, even if he wonât.
âI wanted to make something high-concept. A blockbuster hit for the masses.â
âAn accessible bomb for your average guy.â
âI think everyone watching will get it.â
Lazur thrusts faster, fighting to keep his half-erection alive. âIâm just a low-concept guy in a high-concept world.â
âYouâre a component in my bomb now.â
Lazur freezes. Wondering if heâs fucking his way to some kind of ironic twist.
âDonât worry. You can be an off switch. If you believe in yourself. And uh, fuck the bomb real good.â
Grind grind grind. His foreskin pinches. He adjusts it. Squirts more lotion on. Still not hard enough. He always jerked off with TV in the background. He needs a distraction. âSo youâve just been convalescing this whole time?â
âMy dad left me a lot of money.â
âI hate guys like that. Letting their kids grow up to be narcissists.â
âWhat kind of dad are you?â
âIâm not in the right profession to have kids.â
âWell. I canât think of a more public demonstration of your virility.â
“Sure. Fuck off.”
âYou should thank me for all the pussy coming your way. You could repopulate that whole parking lot.â
âI donât even remember to water the flowers.â Dead and brown in his motherâs garden. Sheâs not mobile enough to go out anymore, so itâs okay. Just another private desolation.
âIt eats away at the nerves. The work we do. Are you taking something for it? Modafinil?â
âIâm fine.â
âYou should have put Viagra in that kit of yours. Haha. I think I wanted something you couldnât solve with your obnoxious little tools.â
Slap slap slap.
âWhat usually works for you? Whatâs the trusty fallback?â
The countdown slices red all around him, LCD blades of death.
âTry boobs. Thatâs pretty classic.â
The trophy wife of a high-ranking politician came home one night with new tits. Implants done in water gel explosive. Her breasts exploded in his face while he was motorboating her. Charon drove the rest of the way.
Lazur shakes his head, trying to clear the memory of that room. A drop of sweat hits the bomb, trickling down the side.
Six minutes.
One night at a bar, he went to the restroom and saw an honest-to-God glory hole. He stared at it, stupefied, as it started swallowing the universe. His pants were down when he noticed it, his bladder just emptied. Someone was definitely on the other side. All he had to do was turn and insert his Molotov cocktail dripping with vodka piss.
Instead, he took out the red marker in his pocket, and around the hole he wrote:
FRONT TOWARD ENEMY
Four minutes.
He grinds his hips into the bomb. A tight, clinical fuck. It feels so bad, to fuck like this. So bad in his brain. Just to save a tiny part of this sick, doomed world. These people werenât having a good time before. Theyâll have a worse time after. If they survive.
This is forced. The thought clarifies for the first time. Everything is unpleasant, everywhere, so it took time to get it. But it fucking hurts, being forced. Not just pushed toward something, dragging his feet, but slammed, slotted, expended like a piece of machinery.
Three minutes.
âAre you crying?â
âI am perspiring from my forehead.â
âWhatâs on your mind? Whatâs the hardcore sexual fantasy thatâll save all these upstanding citizens?â
âGood old tits and ass.â
Rubicon leans toward the webcam, coming into mutilated focus. âI donât believe you.â
âIâm thinking of a landscape where everything moves at normal speed.â He slams into the bomb, hard enough to bruise. The only hope now is adrenaline.
One minute.
Canât do it. This dick-killing world. Everything is so weak and insufficient. Heâs been weak for a long time. Losing sleep. Jumping at loud sounds. Coming back from each mission with a piece of him sealed away. He was always a guy being inserted into things, and now he has to admit it. The blast will cast his soul in the shape of his weakness.
Forty seconds.
âYouâre thinking about running.â
Itâs only natural.
âYouâre cutting it really close. Even if you escaped the immediate explosion, youâd have to outrun the blast radius.â
Dick soft. Thirty seconds.
âMaybe you could make it. Depends how the explosion propagates. Itâs all so chaotic and unpredictable, isnât it?â
His legs tense, to run or fuck, he doesnât know.
âOn the other hand, youâve been exerting yourself. And youâre not young anymore.â
The countdown blurs into red bokeh. He fumbles for his zipper.
âGoing to leave all these people to die?â
A cool breeze falls from the sky, passing through the colonnades of each floor like a sigh so vast he canât hear the edges of it.
Twenty seconds.
He looks at Rubiconâs face, really seeing for the first time. He always hated shock images, but itâs like how you can look at your own shit in the bowl because it came from you, this is personal, I did this to you, fuck you, I broke your face, I broke your skeleton, nothing could dominate you more completely than that explosion, shockwaves fucking your bone marrow, punished on the molecular level, rattled and shook and crushed in the hand of God, youâre a warning, a message, I did this, you submitted to me down to the last atom in your body.
Lazur is so hard his cock can barely fit in the hole, the suction blurring his vision. âI did this to you.â
âHuh?â Confusion flits through Rubiconâs face, exposed through the scarring.
âI broke you. Like a toy.â
âDonât say that.â
âI took your fingers. I twisted your spine.â
How long did you lay like that, before your people saved you? Like a shattered horse. The shape of you changed forever. Your skeleton threaded with the asteroid belt of your workshop. The one I ran my hand along, finding my way through a dark hallway, cool hard concrete, smooth as the devilâs skin. They couldnât take everything out. Not without removing parts of you.
You canât shut your mouth all the way because of me. The wind will always fuck you, cold and cruel, or hot with mosquito-shit. I fucked you. I broke your body. Youâre crying now. You canât even see me anymore. I see you. Every atom of your subtotal body disruption. I can look as long as I want, youâre just a picture on the image roll, hand clawed, chest caved in, bleeding tears that canât even make it down your face without falling into the holes, I did that to you, youâre the only thing Iâm allowed to ruinâ
White-hot phosphorous explodes in his eyes, phosphenes blazing. He shoots inside the tight rubber hole, hot seed draining into the guts of the bomb, diagnostic machinery vibrating at the reception of his load, setting him off again, and in that climax he opens, deeper than skin, one with the bomb, mall spiraling around him, this entire building and all its souls held intact by his surging load, by the mere drip of his foreskin into the bombâs cuntâ
When he opens his eyes, the tablet is dark. The screens are dark. The sky is cloudy.
His cock slips out of the hole and he falls against the bomb, legs shaking. The dribble of semen on the mall floor feels more obscene than anything that came before. But they’ll probably waive the sex offender laws for this one. Yes, I exposed myself to multiple children, your honor, but their molecular integrity was at stake…
His phone is blowing up.
Someone walks past him, covering their daughterâs eyes. Others join the silent migration. Soon, heâs the only one remaining.
He walks through the abandoned food court. Plucks a sugar-glittering churro, chugs a warm, stagnant orange slushy, plunges a fistful of fries into his mouth, grips a buttery pretzel like brass knuckles, picks orange chicken from the heated trays, stirring the queso dip with cummy fingers, too many wet sounds, he collapses behind a cash register, listening to the muzak, which never, ever stopped.
*
I can feel you sobbing out there, tears zig-zagging down the ruined landscape of your cheeks. Total boy disruption.
Youâre already thinking about your next bomb. I canât stop thinking about it either. You tease my tight urban densities, drip hazardous chemicals through my logistic centers. My brain has become a list of parts and projections, the way I used to think about my favorite sports teams. You can barely move from your wheelchair but theyâll put the mandatory handcuffs on you, and youâll look up at me with that crushed butterfly of a face, chained by those broken wrists, stuck in the exact second before ignition, knowing I ruined your beautiful explosion.
The countdown continues, in this red world.
*
He racked his brains in trying to decide whether the potential explosive energy of the organism depended upon the presence of certain enzymotic or other substances or on the chemical composition of the cells themselves, which constituted charges par excellence. Be that as it may, he would have liked to know how that dark proud girl would explode.
â Karel Äapek, “Krakatit”
amazing, mindblowing. an incredible treatise on dadson
thank you đ here at INNOCENT labs we innovate at the cutting edge of dadson technology
god. i love this so much. this one really crawled inside me and started building a nest right away.
nest full of bomb eggs heheheh! thank you!
Great story, very hot, especially the climaxx! A good entry in the bomb fandom!
thanks for being part of the BL (Bomb’s Love) fandom!! đ
oh this is going to fuck up my brain meat so good
fuck that meat up!!!!
rubicon absolutely BTFO
actually I think I finally understand BDSM after reading this
Bomb Detonate Sado-Masochism!!
Something snapped in my mind reading this, thank you (I think?)
you’re welcome!! đĽ
WHEW the money shot of this story!!!!!!!!! WHEW captivating build-up and release
money explosion kaboom!!! thank you!! đ
holy shit i love this. im going to think about this for the next 30 years.
yaoi halflife is very dangerous…thanks for loving it!
my new brain rot material <33333 thank uuu <3
luxury brain damage!! đ!!!
such a great story, love how both of these characters have a tense, fucked up history together. and the climax is sooooo satisfying…
you’ve done a fantastic job on this tale, looking forward to more! đ
this is so nice and encouraging, thank you, it makes me excited to work on more. the next parts are coming along really well!!
I’ve enjoyed your writing for a long time. Never disappoints. Could not stop reading this one.
I’m glad it continues to be nice to read, through all the morphs and evolutions. thank you very much!
wr
My boyfriend convinced me to let him read me this first chapter, and my first response was âehhh, I donât really WANT to have sex with bombs, but okay, if you really wannaâŚâ So first this comment is an apology for my foolishness, because oh my god.
The writing is breathtaking, somehow both sensual and clinical at the same time, unornamented but also lush; Iâm not sure Iâve seen anything like it before but it was instantly captivating. You donât need me to tell you any of this but Iâm having emotions so Iâm gonna ramble: obviously Rubicon and Lazurâs dynamic is absolutely killer, and this manages to be funny, sad, sexy, extremely *not* sexy, and tense in turns, or even at the same time. I spent the entire first chapter horrified and squirming (and an aside: if you need an audiobook of this someday I might have the guy for you: admittedly I have a bias, but he nailed Rubiconâs slightly wet, mocking lilt and dry needling, Lazurâs gruff exhausted growl, and narration that purred low and rumbling like distant thunder), and then wasted more of my work day than Iâm comfortable admitting devouring the rest of the series, and everything else you have on this blog.
Iâm getting overly wordy and embarrassing myself with enthusiasm that definitely comes off as cringe and pretentious as fuck (mixing some metaphors here I think too, oh well), but I want to express how this captured me like a live wire around my chest and wonât let me go. Iâm riveted by your writing and the complicated naked emotions that disturb me and ring true even when describing experiences I donât think Iâve ever metaphorically experienced, I donât know how to put it into words, but I hope some of these words were at least flattering enough that you feel good about what a remarkable weird and horny and not-horny masterpiece this is, because it is so fucking good. I love it. Thank you for sharing it.
this comment makes me so happy <3 love the description of the writing and the emotions it ignited. fireworks in my brain!
i'm flattered your boyfriend found it worthy to audiobook. thank you boyfriend...
i'm working on a remastered version of the first chapter for my new anthology, and i'm excited to post the other chapters in season 2 after i get my deadlines out of the way. especially after such encouragement!
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