GOD HATES HEAVY METAL: THE KINDRED GLITCH
Shrouded in the facade of greenwashed innovation, the factory exhaled its toxic breath into the night, a ritual suffocation it had performed for seven years, staining the sky with its poison. Upstate New York was always exceptional at keeping its secrets buried, especially in the murky shadows of the Mohawk River, where those who never escaped its undertow clung to the few lifelines of economic survival it offered. The inhabitants of this ancient land rarely considered the remnants of native wisdom and old folklore, lost beneath their calloused footsteps as they roamed the trails, hunted the wilderness, and harvested its pastures. So the people who lived along the banks of the Mohawk River just looked away as industry plundered the region’s true treasure—the vast, majestic woodlands that once defined the area.
The forest was already sick when they dumped her body there—wrapped in plastic, bones shattered, tossed among discarded motherboards and broken screens. The wires coiled around her like roots seeking a home. Something archaic stirred beneath the rot, beckoned by her final scream. The plastic that entombed her was no match for a spirit born of the forest.
To the ancient guardians of this land—woven from bark and breath—human constructs held no meaning. What mattered was the earth itself, now pulsing with shared anguish. As the woman’s vengeful soul surged through the spirit, the soil trembled, awakening something far more powerful than grief. They entered each other. Kindred spirits now one, fusing with circuits, vines, and brittle plastic. Her body took shape—a grotesque amalgamation of nature and machine.
She moved like static, flickering in and out of existence, her form a glitch of twisted branches, shattered LCD screens and decomposing dreams. Consciousness pulsed from everywhere with the restless hum of circuitry and the slow, hoary breath of roots—an eerie fusion of whispered data streams and the quiet sigh of leaves drinking in the hush of dawn’s dew.
Memories. Faces. They drove her forward on pure instinct, as sorrow and rage wove together into binary vengeance, pulsing in the green glow of chlorophyll and code.
The first man she found never saw her coming. His scream choked on a garrote of fiber-optic cables as his body was dragged into the earth. The second tried to run, but the roots beneath the concrete cracked open, swallowing him whole. Torn and discarded, the rest of them never even had a chance.
By dawn, the path to the factory gleamed with the blood of those who stole her life and ravaged this land. The air thrummed with a charged energy, crackling with the snap of breaking branches as she loomed above the pile of lifeless bodies below.
Now, outside the gates, her hollow eyes glowed with the erratic flicker of glitching memories. The man inside—once untouchable, a god of circuits and wealth—would soon know fear.
With a stuttering pulse, she vanished, drifting through the wind like a corrupted file, fragmented and fading.
She was coming.
Art and story by Hal Hefner.
Produced by Catmonkey Studio