the satanic six chapter one
The Hunters Point projects sat at the far edge of San Francisco, pressed against the bay like a scar the
city tried to forget. From a distance, the skyline glowed with wealth—glass towers, tech campuses,
Michelin stars—but down here, under the orange haze of broken streetlamps, it was another world
entirely.
Gunshots didn’t echo here; they blended, like background noise. Sirens wailed and faded into silence
without anyone stepping outside to look. The paint on the buildings peeled like skin. Weeds pushed
through cracked concrete. And yet, inside those crumbling walls, dreams thrived. Not gentle ones. Not
the kind whispered about in classrooms or job fairs. These were desperate dreams—dreams forged out
of hunger, out of the hard-knuckled need to escape.
Dante sat on the hood of a beat-up Buick, the kind that coughed smoke every time it started. His hoodie
was zipped to the chin, a blunt glowing between his fingers, his eyes scanning the block. He was the
quiet one, the thinker, though people mistook his silence for menace. Malik, broad-shouldered and loud,
leaned against the Buick beside him, arguing with Rico about who had the harder verse on their latest
track.
“Man, you ain’t hearing me,” Rico said, his gold tooth catching the dim light when he grinned. “That line
about climbing out of the sewer? That’s real. That’s pain.”
“Pain?” Malik laughed, clapping Rico on the back so hard it made him stumble. “You don’t know pain, lil’
man. My verse was hunger. That’s what gets people. Hunger sells.”
Across the street, Shawn and Dre were messing with a busted speaker they’d dragged out of
somebody’s garage, trying to get it to connect to a secondhand laptop. Tino, the youngest, balanced a
notebook on his knees, scribbling bars with the ferocity of someone who thought words could set him
free.
Together, they were six brothers not by blood, but by block. The world didn’t give them much, but it
had given them each other.
“Yo,” Dre called, his hands deep in the guts of the speaker. Sparks hissed, and he yanked his fingers back
with a curse. “Somebody tell me why we tryna make history with junkyard shit?”
“Because that’s all we got,” Dante said quietly, exhaling smoke into the cold air. “And we're gonna flip it.
Watch.”
The name Santanic Six had started as a joke. Malik had said it one night, drunk off cheap liquor, when
they were freestyling under the flicker of a busted streetlight. “We too cursed for heaven,” he’d said.
“Might as well embrace hell.” The name stuck, half because it scared people, half because it made them
feel untouchable.
But deep down, they knew the truth. They weren’t untouchable. They were trapped.
A black-and-white patrol car rolled slowly past the corner, its headlights cutting across their faces. The
friends grew silent until it turned off down another street. They all knew someone who hadn’t made it
home after one of those drive-bys—someone swallowed by the system, or worse.
“Man, we need out,” Tino muttered, looking up from his notebook. His eyes burned with that restless
fire only seventeen-year-olds carried. “I ain’t tryna die here. We got talent. We just need somebody to
hear us.”
Rico leaned in, his voice dropping to a whisper, as if speaking too loud would make the dream vanish.
“Then we gotta make ‘em listen.”
Above them, the lights of downtown twinkled, distant and cold. Six young men, bound by rhyme and
survival, sat in the shadow of the city, not knowing that the path out was already waiting for them—dark,
glittering, and paved with blood
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