I dragged what was left of my shattered self over to where she lay.
She was out cold on the linoleum. Assorted fruits and cereal boxes surrounded her. Blood bubbled from her mangled nose, her eyes had already swollen a sickly black-blue.
I searched under and around the table for the knife she’d cut me with and, finally, my eyes fell upon it.
It was strangely stood upright. The tip of its blade impaled in the blood-soaked linoleum.
Damn that thing is sharp, I shuddered. She could have opened me up like a tin of ravioli.
My rage leveled up.
I reached for the blade, pulled it free, and then crawled over to where she lay, bruised and beaten. I knelt before her with my knees pressed down on her shoulders to hold her in place, and with my good right hand I took the knife and pressed the cold steel against the soft flesh of her throat.
“I'm setting you free, honey. I hope you find the answers you’re looking for out there, but I'm pretty sure murder - even if only attempted on a self-confessed asshole - is a mortal sin.”
I pressed the knife deeper into her flesh. I could feel the skin begin to tear. All it would take now was one quick slash and she would finally be gone from my life.
Hell, I’d earned the right. She’d tried to off me first, I told myself.
Yet as I looked down upon her, with her swollen and blackened eyes shut and her nose in ruins, I saw the girl I had fallen in love with. Right then, in this moment, in her sweet oblivion, she wasn’t caught in the web of her beliefs. She wasn’t intolerant, or hateful, or judgmental, or pious.
In this moment, spread out on the kitchen floor and covered in Coco-Puffs and rapidly cooling coffee, she was simply ‘Kate’.
I couldn’t do it.
Instead, I dropped the knife to the floor beside us, and ran my hand through her cereal and blood-matted hair. I never even realized at the time that I was stroking her with my slashed and mangled left hand.
In those precious seconds, time had turned back, and all the chaos and disorder brought not just by this morning but by every morning for so many years, was gone. I was simply a guy who had once loved a girl, and somehow it had all gone irrevocably, horribly wrong.
She was still unimaginably beautiful to me, even all fucked up.
Love, no matter how damaged or corrupted, has a way of fucking with us romantics, and as usual, my traitorous mind conjured up excuses for her. She was ill, she was scared, she had PTSD, she was a good person, somewhere deep down inside. This was a new world we were waking up into. Perhaps we could find a way to turn the clock back, reclaim what was taken from us. Maybe it wasn’t too late. If I could make her see sense, maybe this whole horrible event could be the catalyst for her return to mental wellness.
Hope springs eternal in the souls of fools.
I leaned forward and swept back her sodden hair. Then leaning closer I whispered into her ear. “I'm so, so sorry baby. We’ll find a way through this. We can be—”
I didn’t get to finish my romantic spiel, as I felt Kate’s knee smash into my balls, crushing them like two grapes.
They say that rage and adrenalin can imbue us with enhanced strength and dexterity.
I'm here to tell you this shit is true.
At least on a female’s part.
I don’t know when she’d come to, or how in her present condition she’d found the strength to punish my testicles with such ferocity, but it felt like both my nuts had been knocked into my stomach.
Grunting, I rolled off my wife and collapsed into the fetal position amidst the morning’s debris. I was barely aware through the pain that I’d thrown up all over the floor and was squirming in a puddle of half-digested eggs and toast from the previous evening.
“The last supper,” growled Kate.
In no time she was on her feet, had a towel pressed to her crumpled nose with one hand, and that goddam knife in the other.
She stood over me and smiled. Even in what must have been a great deal of pain, she smiled.
Honestly...I couldn’t see the humor in the situation.
“You think you can take the Lord’s name in vain, Don?” she asked. “You think that now, at the very end, you get to drag me down with you?”
She was breathing heavily, perhaps from exhaustion or perhaps from excitement. “All this time you’ve lied to me. Had me believing that you wanted to be saved, too…that you wanted a new life...a blessed life. All you really ever wanted was to revel in your sin, have the Devil’s apple-cake and eat it!”
Something like that, yeah, I thought, through waves of undulating testicular agony.
“No more time, Don. No more time to wallow in Satan’s playground. The scraps the Lord left on the table for your measly soul’s nourishment were gifts sent in vain. Today is not for you, or your kind. It’s for the truly enlightened. The blessed few. You’ll burn just like all the others, and then, Don, then your soul will burn. It’ll burn until time ends. And you’ll scream, and you’ll scream, and no one will hear your call!”
I was having a very hard time grasping the finer details of what she was getting at (it was getting to be a habit), but I think I got the gist of it.
On she ranted. “You really are an idiot, aren’t you? This is no global anomaly! This is no terrorist attack! There's no help coming and there's no help needed. The Lords wrath has been loosed upon mankind, and the burning will continue until every last one of the sinners, fornicators, liars and blasphemers is little more than ashes blowing on the winds of Hell. And you, my husband, are all of the above.”
While she sermonized, I managed to gather just enough strength to pull myself upright. My head was spinning and my guts rolling, yet I made a spastic reach for the leg of the table to try and hoist myself up.
She reached into my underwear and grabbed herself a handful of balls. I knew what she aimed to do, right off the bat.
Kate squeezed.
In that moment, I would rather have been dead.
Waves of nausea flooded through my whole body. The center of my being became that small sack of skin between my legs and the two crushed balls therein. My bladder loosed, and I pissed feebly down my own leg and still she clenched her fist tighter. She squeezed them so tight I thought they would explode in her vice-like grip, and just as I was beginning to pass out, she stopped.
“You’ll listen when I'm talking, honey.” She said, quite calmly.
I was as helpless as a new born babe. She had defeated me utterly.
She went on. “Did you think the Lord’s gaze wouldn’t fall on you, Don, as you scuttled around like a rat through your horrid little life, pretending to seek grace? How many days did you think you'd have to enjoy before the Dark One came to claim you, huh? I bet you thought it would go on forever. Living under a falsehood…betraying the sanctity of marriage.”
Through blood and puke, I grunted, “Uck oo!” It was the best I could manage, and the only rebellion I was capable of at the time.
Kate was laughing. “Yeah, fuck me, Don. Fuck me! That’s all you ever wanted from me anyway. You took me before marriage, tainted me, tainted my soul. And now, after all these years of deceit and lies and betrayal, you turn around and offer up your soul to the Devil by insulting the good Lord on his day of return!?”
It’s not like she was a virgin before we met, but I guess in the throes of full-tilt madness, these little details become irrelevant.
I tried to state something to this extent but managed only a high-pitched whine.
“Save it, Don. Today is the day of reckoning for all mankind, and your time is up.”
And with that, she got down on her hands and knees, put the blade to my left eye, and said, “Beg for forgiveness or I’ll take your sight before you die. I take your fucking eyes before Satan takes your soul!”
I struggled once more to find my voice, and managed a whisper, “I-I'm sorry, Kate. Please.”
I hated myself for saying it.
She smiled.
I
t was more of a grimace, really. For someone so adamant she’d achieved inner peace, she sure as shit didn’t project it.
She smiled like you would imagine a great white shark would smile, right before it bit your fucking head off.
“Don’t apologize to me, dummy…apologize to God. It is He who is ever watching. It is He who condemns you. It is He who has brought this whole rotten, sinful world to its knees and it is He who will take all the children into his sacred embrace and carry us into Heaven.”
Crazy bitch.
“Sorry Jesus”, I mumbled, far more concerned with my crushed nuts than her fevered preaching.
“That’s better. Now you can burn in Hell knowing you done one good thing in your short, miserable life.”
I fought to get up, but the pain shooting from my testicles and into my brain had all but crippled me. The cramps that clenched at my stomach had me doubled over, and my mind and body were not as one.
I was at the mercy of her.
I was at the mercy of her knife.
I was gonna die there on my kitchen floor, stewing in a puddle of puke and blood and warm piss.
She raised the knife above my heart, positioning herself to plunge it in deep.
“Any last words?” she asked.
I didn’t have much pep left in me, but what I did have, I pushed to the surface
“Your mom’s a fucking atheist, bitch,” I wheezed.
“Nice try, Don. Time’s up. Give my regards to your family.”
I tried to close my eyes. I didn’t want to watch that gleaming six-inches of stainless-steel plunging into my heart. I tried to close them, but I couldn’t.
All I could do was stare, like a deer staring down an oncoming four-by-four as it bore upon me with death behind the wheel.
She gave me one last shit-eating smile. “Bye, Donald.”
And then it began to happen...
***
The knife dropped from Kate’s hand.
It fell to the floor, blade first, almost slicing my ear off in the process, yet my mind wasn’t on the would-be murder-weapon at that particular moment.
It was all on Kate.
My wife had frozen, mid-plunge, as though every muscle in her body had turned to rock.
Veins throbbed in her neck like struggling worms, bulged from her rigid arms as she tensed so violently and so completely that I thought her bones may snap.
The feral rage that had been etched into her features only moments ago had been replaced with a terrible expression that traversed some harrowing canyon between twin peaks of absolute terror and blind anguish.
In the beginning assault of her agony, her eyes met mine, and in that moment I swear I saw a desperate pleading there. A need to be saved, from God only knew what.
“D-Don? What’s happening to me?”
I was speechless, too busy drowning in the swamp of my own mortal terror.
Her skin was blackening from the inside out. A sickly bruising was engulfing her flesh like a black cloud over a clear field. Every inch of her once-porcelain flesh was blackening at an alarming rate, and as I watched in horror, her ashen, corrupted skin began to rapidly blister, bubbling like lava. Her body thrashed wildly as more and more of the rippling bubbles stretched her skins.
Her skin was boiling, and the boils were beginning to split.
Lesions were forming all over her body as her skin continued to crack and tear open. Thick reddish white pus oozed from her, a stinking, fleshy soup that reeked of death. The larger blisters erupted slower but with more ferocity, spewing warm, cooking muck that patterned the kitchen milieu like a nightmarish Jackson Pollock canvas.
I lay there, beaten half to death, and I watched my Kate slowly transform into a mess of melting, viscous, dripping flesh.
In her horror, she somehow found the strength to reach out to me, whether to strangle me or plead for help, I’ll never know.
The nails slid from her fingers and dropped to the kitchen floor, sinking into the fetid pool of melting flesh already forming there, the skin sloughed off her once beautiful and delicate hands in bloodied sheets. By the time her arms were fully outstretched in front of my face, the bone beneath was showing, as her muscles liquefied and dripped to the floor.
I crawled back from the hellish vision that had once been my sweetheart.
It got worse.
Kate was looking directly into my eyes. I met her desperate, pleading stare, taking one last look at those tender orbs that I’d gazed upon for years, in both love and hate. They bulged, pushed forward by some terrible pressure in her head while she bled tears of darkest red. I think I screamed when they burst, but I can’t be sure. The deflated orbs slid like two half-cooked eggs from her skull and ran down her cheeks like tears. There they hung on red fleshy stalks, dangling momentarily before the stalks too began to succumb to the inner inferno. Her char-black lips peeled back for a second then split at the corners. Within moments they, too, slid down her dissolving chin, leaving behind a hideous grin as her face drooped into an unspeakable mask of despair.
She tried to scream, but managed only to gargle as she drowned in her sloshing, bubbling flesh. Chunks of meat hit my face as she coughed in great hacking sputters. Her teeth clenched together so hard I could hear them grinding on each other and, in her agony, she bit down so hard her molars cracked against each other and spewed from her bloody mess of a mouth. Some rattled to the floor, others slid down to her now pendulous, distended breasts.
And then, after a merciless eternity, the fire that had been burning my wife alive from inside her, burst forth from her skin and she went up like a fucking firework on the fourth of July.
In those last moments, the cooking, unrecognizable horror of exposed bone and stinking meat that had been my wife somehow managed to scream.
Really, really scream.
***
What came immediately after my wife’s demise is something of a blur.
I recall a time passing before the immediate danger of our house burning down took hold on my mind. I vaguely recall stumbling around on drunken legs searching for a blanket or a hose, anything to put the flames out.
I needn’t have bothered, though. By the time I arrived back at the scene of this unexplainable carnage, Kate was little more than a steaming puddle spreading across the linoleum. She was gone, bones and all.
Amazingly, the fires that burned within her had died out as quickly as they had engulfed her, and the puke, coffee and piss had done the rest. No need for the firefighters here.
I upturned one of the fallen breakfast chairs that had valiantly remained intact during our battle, and I sat down wearily amidst the wreckage of our home, surveying the desolation before me. Exhaustion had taken hold, so absolute that even the smell of poor Kate couldn’t force my ass up from that chair.
And there I sat, dazed and more than a little confused, staring into the vastness of space like the half-crazy fuck I was surely becoming, until the phone rang.
Mumbling to myself, I picked up the receiver.
“Hello?” I stuttered.
“Jesus fuck, Don! You’re alive, man! And the phones are back up! Can’t believe your still with us, bro. I've been trying to get through to you for hours!”
I couldn’t help but smile at the ever-jovial, ever-reliable sound of my best friend’s voice.
“Derwood.”
“In the flesh, brother! Although it’s been touch and go for a while. I almost got blindsided by a huge fucking explosion. We won’t be shopping and Penny’s All-Night Gas Station anymore, buddy, that's for sure.”
I couldn’t help but laugh, “You’re a madman, Der”.
“That's as may be, hombre, but I’m a live one. How’s things at your end? I take it you’re aware the fucking world has ended and all?”
It was a rhetorical question. I hope it was a rhetorical question.
“I’m alive, Der. That's good enough for now. You any idea what the hell is going on out there?” I asked, knowing full-w
ell what his answer would be.
“Not a clue, my man. Everyone’s got their own bead on what’s causing this thing. The holy rollers are calling it Judgment Day, the tree huggers are calling it an extreme side-effect of global warming. Fox news are claiming it’s the Muslims.”
“Figures,” I answered, tiredly.
“All I know is that we’re all on our own for the time being. From what info I was able to gather before the cable went down, it’s the same shit the world over….people and animals are bursting into flame. No rhyme or reason for it. No pattern at all, supposedly. Fuck, man. I watched that little fucker Bentley burn up like the wicker man not twenty minutes ago. How’d you like that shit!?”
Der seemed in good spirits. I had to admit, he was really cheering me up.
“You never did like that guy,” I said.
“Hated the fucker, goddam little thug ran around like he owned the place. Well, no more, brother! No fucking more!” he laughed.
“Glass half full, huh?”
“Always, Don.” There was a pause, and then he went on, sounding markedly more cautious, “How’s the old ball-and-chain?”
I sighed, “She’s dead. She burned up this morning. It was pretty fucking horrible, Der.”
“Shit…”
“Yeah. Things got pretty heated before she died, too…no pun intended. It’s all water under the bridge now, Der. Over and done with.”
“I'm sorry, Don. I know things were tough for you for a while there, but that's harsh. How you holding up?”
“Good. I'm good. A bit battered and bruised, but I’ll survive. As long as I don’t go up like a stick of dynamite anytime soon.”
“You and me both, buddy. I was worried for a while but it seems like its dying down out there. Seems to me like all this spontaneous combustion shit is done, at least for now. I've been thinking about all this, what it all means, you know? And I’m thinking maybe it’s a purge of some sort.”
“Fuck sake, Der. Not you as well.”
“Yeah, man. Think about it…the world’s been going to shit for a long time…bankers robbing the people blind, illegal wars across the globe, those Monsanto assholes monopolizing the food supply, police states springing up all over the fucking place…”
Consumed- The Complete Works Page 10