It once had a formal name, an acronym with a number, but effectiveness and popularity had caused it to become known as the Deathmobile, shortened by field operatives to the D-Mo.

There is a secrecy scale in Illuminati manufacturing, one that ranges from 'perfectly normal' to 'can be passed off as secret normal-government stuff' to 'never, ever, let a normal inspect this'. Like most of the truly astounding innovations, the Deathmobile's latest iteration was at the far end of the scale, well past the point of no return. It appeared as a normal car, of various models; the framework had a remarkable ability to shift, and the outer skin was flexible and could change color in seconds, with even the license plate being mutable via an array of tiny rods under a thin, stretchy shell. The engine was pure fusion, with a carefully orchestrated rumble and sound system for secrecy; most of the associated equipment was in the belly of the car, leaving space in both the front and back. The back trunk was intended as a weapons cache and storage space. The front trunk was simply a miniature cremator, hot enough to melt iron. The windows had the standardized false-image routines developed a decade ago; the tires were made of a special polyurethane that would never, ever leave marks (the tire would come apart before that happened), and the transmission worked with a magnetic system that could take the car from 0 to 150 to 0 in a single second, without the car feeling any ill effects. (The occupants would be another matter.)

The interior was pure Illuminati; anyone who's ridden in an Illuminated craft before would immediately recognize the inside of the D-Mo. Illuminated servants don't just kill people, they kill people in comfort and style.

Naturally, using such a thing carries a certain amount of secrecy risk. There were no safety features for preventing murderous acceleration, so drivers had to be specially trained. Under no circumstances could one get into a crash; any sort of real impact would reveal the car's true nature immediately, one way or another. Ordinary police stops were survivable, but unwanted and extremely rare; Enforcers drive at a steady fluctuation between two and four miles over the limit and obey traffic laws with machine precision.

Riding inside this particular D-Mo at 2:30 in the morning, going east on I-40, were one Enforcer and one grinning, electrical 14-year-old.

Getting to this point was far easier than he'd expected; he'd forgotten that servants generally don't ask questions like why. Instead, the professional assassins he talked to portrayed a helpful, friendly attitude. Ah, you're running an assassination? You have it all planned out? What will you need? Okay, we'll have that ready for you immediately. Come on down. We'll pick you up at the private airport, a few miles east of Boone.

Even getting the jet-helicopter was easy. That sort of transportation was the property of an Illuminatus, and he was tempted to use the Duumvirate's jet (because hot damn that thing rules), but decided to borrow one instead. Luke had a completely bullshit explanation prepared, but didn't need it- the man immediately bent over backwards and asked few questions himself. Luke had wondered why the man had been so accommodating to a mere servant, but then realized that he was trying to endear himself to someone who lived in the mansion of the Duumvirate, as he wanted to show loyalty to get the retrovirus. Luke figured he could have told the 45-year-old manipulator of souls to pull his own toenails out, and he would likely have done it, just for the tiniest increase of his chance to be godlike.

Which made a lot of sense to Luke, because he understood the relationship between himself and his master as a simple trade: power in exchange for his humanity. Fine by him; since he never had much humanity to begin with, the Faustian bargain was just that, a bargain. He just had something he needed to clear up.

That and some Wendy's. Naturally, pulling into a drive-in of any kind was a pointless secrecy risk, but Luke knew he'd get chewed out for this no matter what the details were, so he didn't really care and stopped at the first one he saw. It's not like anyone was going to recognize him anyway; he wasn't even sure if his parents would. The Enforcer was a relatively new model and didn't really need to be told how to deal with a drive-through. Twenty chicken nuggets and a large lemonade, paid with a crisp twenty. As irony would have it, the kid working the headset was too immersed in his own highly disturbing fantasies to so much as notice the muscles on the driver, let alone the passenger; suffice it to say that had he really known who he'd just served, he would have run away screaming.

And had Luke known who had served him, he probably would have had to resist the impulse to chuck the food out the window and brutally kill the fucker by dunking his head in the fry oil, but instead he blithely gobbled away. Not for the first time in his life, he felt invincible, as if his desires would not be stopped by anyone. This was, though, the first time that assertion was backed up by powerful technology and tactics. For the next few hours, he really would be basically invincible. Even if Paul realized where Luke was, he wouldn't stop him until the operation was finished. Luke used the car's CD tray as a cupholder, fully aware of the irony. The car's hard drive was usually used to store complicated voice instructions and target data, but Luke had loaded up heavy metal instead. Although he prefered silence for the moment, choosing to close his eyes and let his imagination run wild the rest of the trip, he smiled at the concept of the next assassin to use the headphones getting a double earful of Primal Fear.

As they pulled into the residential neighborhood, the lights became gradually, slightly dimmer, and angled more towards the ground. Few people would have noticed this, and no one would have questioned why. One quick sweep of the streets with an infrared scanner: No one at the windows. The "engine" became quieter. Not too quiet- a silent car attracts attention- but just another car on the road, maybe someone coming home late from a party, maybe someone who works at night. No big deal, and no one was really watching anyway. The car pulled up into the Stephens' driveway, and Luke stepped out.

Seeing his old house, he simply scoffed. He had cared about coming back to this? He pulled out a keylike object from his pocket. The Illuminated lockpick would instantly scan the inside of any lock through subsonics and immediately extend parts of itself to fit the tumblers, opening locks faster than the key they were designed for. The front door opened with a small creak. There was no dog to smell Luke's changed scent, no siblings to worry about. (Being an only child made his decision easy. If he had a brother or two he really didn't know what the hell he would have done.)

All along the trip and even before it, he had imagined how he would confront his parents, imagine all the pithy things he could say to them and all the sardonic comments he could make. All of that was obliterated in a wave of rage when he saw their peacefully sleeping forms. Was that a smile on his mother's face, or was that just his imagination?

Did they even tell his parents he was dead? Did his parents still think he was in the place he never actually went to? Or maybe a dead kid was what they wanted all along. His enhanced intelligence gave him the idea to look for pictures, mementos, memorials. There weren't any. With a queasy, disturbed feeling in his stomach, he went into his old room.

His vague suspicion was confirmed: His entire room was transformed as they expected him to be. Posters gone, stereo gone, desk in place of his assorted collections, wardrobe completely turned into preppie clothes right down to the shoes.

Incredulity hit him a full second before anger. His parents had really thought this way? They honestly believed that they'd send him somewhere to be changed, and he would be? That you could inflict horrors upon a person, and somehow turn him into a happy, content someone else? For a moment he almost laughed- in many ways he had become a happy, content someone else- and got the wild idea that maybe he should just go home and forget it, because his parents were simply too stupid to be worth killing. But then he realized that his parents would accept a brainwashed puppet in lieu of an actual thinking son and a tsunami of hatred overrode everything else.

If he was still a normal he would have gone into a red haze and started attacking blindly, uncaring. Retroviral, he was strangely detached, fury somehow combining with logic to form the details of an overall plan. Even so, it took as much self control as he had ever used in his life not to murder them right there, but he was able to fight down the urge.

After all, he had already decided to torture them first.

Luke jumped on the bed and seized his parents by the throat, their initial screams cut off by Luke's crushing hands. He leaped off the bed, carrying both of them by the windpipe ('they're so goddamn light!'), and walked down the stairs, dragging his father against the railing and his mother against the wall, knocking down a picture as he went. His dad started to fight back, his useless blows strongly reminding Luke of how he had fought the Enforcers in that place, and how he had once struggled against his dad when the old bastard had spanked him. "How does it feel, asswipe?" Luke growled. He pushed out the door with his foot (he wanted to just kick it, but for the noise), and literally tossed his parents into the already-open back door of the D-Mo, slamming it silently shut. That last second was crucial- if someone had come out and seen during that time, there'd be hell to pay- but there was no one. The Enforcer would have reacted if there was. Luke quietly closed the door behind him, opened the passenger side door to a loud series of choking coughs, and got in with a grin, closing the car door with the finality of a coffin.

"Go," he commanded the Enforcer, and the Enforcer went.

"Who.. who is that with you?" his father sputtered out. People act retarded in these situations, don't they?

"That's my driver, shit-for-brains. Go on. See if you can get him to even acknowledge your existence. I dare you." The man was still unable to think clearly and did nothing.

His mother opened her mouth, took a deep breath, and started talking. "Co-"

Was Luke fast enough to stop her from even starting the second syllable? Of course he was. Instantly his hand whipped back in what, to him, was a casual backhanded pimp-slap; she spat out three teeth with a mouthful of blood, half-screaming, half-moaning, as Luke pondered how nice it was that he wouldn't have to clean the seats. That was apparently his father's cue to frantically try to open the back door, scream against the soundproof walls, and generally act like an idiot. Luke waited until he inevitably tried to make a dash between the two seats, and casually pushed him back with one hand, barely even looking, intentionally being nonchalant. He kept this up for a while before his father got the idea to grab the arm; Luke simply smiled as the man attempted to twist his arm and wrist, and then grabbed his father's left arm with that hand, reached around, and touched a single finger to his father's bicep. His father's arm instantly seized up, the muscle contraction almost breaking Luke's iron grip. Luke withdrew his hands and started slowly chuckling.

"Luke.. how can you..," he started.

"How can I? How can I, you fucking retard? How can you be so goddamn stupid as to think you can pay some cocksucker to wave his fucking dick like a wand, and you'll get a new kid back because this is obviously fucking Best Buy and you've got a warranty? Well guess what, bitch, you better call fucking Consumer Reports because you've just been had, like the miserable piece of shit bitch nigger you are." His father was white, and getting paler by the minute, realizing that this was indeed his son, not understanding how any of this was possible or what he had gotten himself into. Why, oh why, did he listen to that ed-con? "Guess what, Dad? I'm going to kill you. Not because you need to die for some greater good, not because someone's ordered me to kill you, but because I want to. You're going to die just because I feel like it. I guess you're just going to have to be sad, aren't you." That last phrase was originally his father's. "It's going to start just as soon as we get there. Oh look! Here we are." Luke had discovered this empty field when he was much younger, and was pleased to know that nothing had changed. He wasn't sure who the owner was; he wasn't sure if it even had an owner. It was simply emptiness in noplace, hidden from view by trees, and with no fresh tracks save the very ordinary-looking ones of the D-Mo.

Luke got out of the car and smiled; it was dark, but the moon was mostly full on a clear night, the cool wind of early April blowing into his face. He inhaled deeply, enjoying the night air and the glitter of the stars, before opening the door behind him. "Get out of the car, asswipes." They didn't move. "I said, get the fuck out of the car. Or am I going to have to ground you?" That word took on a whole new meaning with Luke, and he grinned at his own wordplay.

His father began slowly crawling over the seats to get out; his mother screamed for him not to, crying, trying to hold her husband back. Luke got sick of the charade and simply reached in and yanked them out the door to land in the dirt. His mother crawled against the side of the car, whimpering; his father started to slowly stand up and say something, but Luke started talking.

"I bet you want respect, don't you? You've always told me that because you're my father, you deserve respect. Well, guess what?" he asked rhetorically, tossing his dad face-first into the dirt yet again.

"THIS! IS! ALL! THE! RESPECT! YOU! DESERVE!" he screamed, punching his father in the back on every word with alternating hands and charging up before every punch. An interesting bit of electrical oscillation happened; although there wasn't much current flow because there was no direct connection, the man's sweat and skin received a voltage change, and that made Luke's hammer blows hurt even more. Luke noticed that the lemonade reached his bladder; he smiled, unzipped, and drenched his father with warm urine. His mother started making s-s-s noises like she was going to say something; he glared at her and she immediately shut up.

"Get up. Get up, you stupid fuckhead, I didn't kill you yet." Luke grabbed his father by the back of his sweaty, piss-covered wife-beater, lifted him up into a standing position, then kicked his legs out from under him and slammed him on his ass. "You're going to watch some reality TV. It's kind of like Survivor, only you don't." He walked up to his mother, who was still in a state of panic, unmoving, her lips quivering in something like prayer. "Hi, Mom," he said, and smiled at her for a second before he started punching her in the face.

The oscillation was even greater this time around; the copious blood was highly conductive, the surface area was less, and Luke was charging and punching faster. "Huh, bitch, you like this? You want some more, you stupid cunt? Where's 'You can't go out now, it's too late!' Or 'You need to look your best for church, sweetie'? Or how about 'I'm only doing what's best'?" Luke's imitation of his mother's voice was a sardonic mockery indeed. "Where's that now? I'm not hearing that anymore. Why don't you? Go on, dumb cunt. Tell me I need better penmanship. Tell me I'm hanging out with the wrong crowd. Tell me I'll be dead or in jail. Go on. I want to hear it." He waited until his mother started saying something, unintelligible to be sure through the missing teeth and blood, before he slammed her with a right cross to her lower jaw full force. This was the first time he had used his full rage-inspired strength against anyone before, and he simply wanted to see what would happen.

The results were splendid. His mother's jawbone flew off her skull like a wiffle ball being hit off a stand, with a heartening THWOK! She put her hands tentatively up to her face, tears streaming down her eyes, which were wide open with sheer disbelief. The electrical beating had deadened her nerves, pain no longer able to tell her she was dying. "'Aww, look at me!'", Luke mocked, putting his blood-soaked hands to his face in a McCauley Caulkin impression. "'I don't have a face anymore! Poor, poor me!' Hey, let's have a pity party for the stupid cunt! She just lost her ability to suck dicks! One, two, three, AWWWW!" He could dimly recall her having said similar, albeit less vulgar, things to him when he got hurt.

"Hey, you still watching reality TV over there, dickhead?" he turned and said. His father was not. The man was forty feet away, staggering and holding his left side, adrenalin and terror allowing him to move at all. "Trying to save your own ass? I guess you didn't love her that much anyway. Surprise, surprise." Luke reached him in seconds, grabbed him from behind with one of his hands doing a red flag touch, and simply tossed him behind his head, not even caring where he landed.

As luck would have it, he landed on his face, breaking his nose and rolling to a stop facing his wife, who was choking on herself, trying to reach into her mouth when she didn't have a mouth anymore. Luke wished he had chucked his father all the way, and with another mighty heave, threw him face-first into the car. Then he looked at his mother and pondered how he wanted to finish her; what he really wanted to do was shove something conductive up her cunt and something else up her ass, and fry her guts. He then realized how nice a pair of heavy, super-tough, conductive baseball bats would be to have, and made a mental note to have some made. Shrugging, he simply put one hand to each of her bloody temples and gave her some electroshock therapy not even Nurse Ratchet would approve of. In normal ECT, the voltage is about 450 and the amps are a bit less than 1, alternating current. Luke gave her a thousand volts and the amps were 3, direct current. Her brain seized up like an engine full of sand and she slumped over dead.

He grabbed his father by the testicles again, liberally touching his junk Miller Newton-style, and slammed his other hand atop his father's skull, his full power ready to go again. "Any last words, Dad?"

The man croaked through a blood-soaked mouth, "You're not my son."

"Not anymore." And with those words came his father's realization that he had been right all along, that this really was him, that the angry boy he had sent away less than two weeks ago had returned to him a monster-

And that thought was obliterated by the amperes flooding his brain to travel down his spine, releasing its chemicals in one fatal flash of insight.

The Enforcer understood that both targets had been killed, and got out of the car to unseal and sprinkle a small canister of bacteria where there was blood; the germs would eat away the hemoglobin and assorted small pieces of flesh inside of two hours, and disintegrate into untraceable nothing afterwards, the only clue that they had ever been there a slightly richer topsoil. Luke tossed the bodies into the front trunk and slammed the lid closed right after the Enforcer tossed the missing jawbone in, the powerful incinerator swiftly reducing them to fine ash within moments, to be gradually flushed out the exhaust pipe. He had been expecting to feel some twinge of remorse, but instead he felt a warm, content glow inside himself, an emotion he hadn't experienced in quite some time:

Satisfaction!

The first thing Luke did upon getting back in the D-Mo was plug in his headphones and turn on his selection of metal (Lightning Strikes Twice by Iron Maiden was first on his playlist); the second was to drink a mixture of half-melted ice, half-lemonade until the straw sssshhhppp'd against the paper cup which he tossed in the back; the third was to lean the seat back all the way; and the fourth was to fall into a peaceful, gentle sleep, the smile never leaving his face the whole way home.

He wasn't the only one going on a raid that night.