What it would be like to meet the girl behind the words? What it would be like to pick her brain….then eat it? Oh a feast it would be in deed.
***
He walked towards the sun every morning, waiting for its bountiful heat to warm his frozen skin. The coldness of the night had seeped into his bones yet again. He could not keep warm for the life of him. Life? Is that what this is called? He would have giggled but stifled it to keep himself from coughing.
Life.
Warmth.
Blood.
Hot.
He shook his head as the thought of what he did a few days ago crept back into his idle mind. If only the idea of it didn't disgust him, he would do it again, and he wouldn't think twice. Well, maybe twice. The memory of this hunger exploded tenfold. His throat now parched beyond the driest desert. The burning in his veins becoming more and more unbearable with every shallow beat of his heart. His lungs ached to be full again; no matter how deep of a breath he took, it was never good enough. He was hungry, starved beyond the point of death. He could hardly understand whatever power that was keeping him ‘alive’. He could feel every nerve, every vein, their capillaries, the tendons in his legs as they screamed out in agony like that of a dying man. It had to be done again, he needed it to survive. He needed to take another's life, or if he was truly honest with himself, their afterlife. ‘Beggars can’t be’ . . . well, you know.
He was reminded of something that bubbled up in his mind from the past. His previous life. It could not be said that much of his past remained in that rotten and scarred brain of his. Obviously, it had not been a charmed one. A series of events that led him to where he stood today. He remembered purchases. Ahh, yes. Many, many purchases.
Money had exchanged hands quite a few times. He had buried himself from the pains of his past. Scratched out all of his yesterdays by drowning himself with whatever the popular drug was in at that moment. Marijuana? Pshaw He did not want to relax. He wanted to erase memories and in attempting to do so, broke his already demagnetized moral compass. More like shattered and scattered it to the four winds! He had not been the most amiable fellow to begin with for sure. The layers of addicted years had piled on quickly, had all but deleted his initial reasoning for poisoning his body in the first place. A failed marriage? Most probably, but he could no longer remember her name let alone conjure up an image of her. The death of a child? Who knew?
Shit, I can’t even remember my own name! He had long since cut all of the ties that bind with the sharp shears of his addictions. The dealers he had purchased from were as close to any kind of family he would ever know, his memories traded away for glorious powders and pills that only returned his mind to normalcy for short periods.
Then, there was Havoc.
Although its effects faded after a time, it stayed with you. The brain soaked it up like the knowledge it replaced. Anyone who tried it once was an addict for life, but worse yet, his or her personality cracked a little more with each dose.
He continued his trek coming upon an old bus stop. The three-walled chamber that housed the waiting bench laid on the ground, slammed over backwards, much of it shattered in large fragments across the grass and bald and threadbare patches of soil. To his surprise, he was not alone. This was no walker, crawler or even a laze-about moaner. A young girl, pale faced, lips thinned out into black lines were so dark she looked like she had been kissing charcoal. She greeted him, shivering beneath a heavy quilt that was impossibly too heavy for her to lift off.
It was no small matter to him meeting her like this. She was the first ‘living’ being he had come across in months, not that he could remember much from before his awakening. The poor little girl looked starved, emaciated. One would think someone who was this hunger-struck would be scrounging around the stores or even the nearby houses for food and water. Not this one. There was only one essential, one incessant need she felt she required.
“So, Mister,” she spat. “You have any Havoc?” It was her trademark line. He knew the sound of that proficient line all too well. Every addict had it. It was common for addicts to speak in such a plea, such a fashion as to make whomever they focused it on want to offer whatever they asked for. Much like the Good Samaritan, the mark needed to proffer the shirt from his own back. He instantly hated her for it.
She shook uncontrollably under her blanket. Her tiny waif of a body contorted on her side all scrunched up. She was huddled into a ball on the bus bench. A metal trash can inside a cute little picket fence stood next to the bus stop as its only adornment. The chain around the can was an afterthought. Apparently, someone was in the business of stealing trashcans. Is nothing sacred, hmm? He realized that she had scarcely looked up at him. Without fully understanding why, he felt his ire rising to that blood vessel in the front of his skull. It was as royalty besmirched. A slap to the face. Slighted, he walked up upon her and squared his body up at her feet.
“Havoc?” he repeated. His face twisted up into a grotesque caricature of his usual sedentary look. “Havoc?” He screamed.
She dared bring up the demon culprit, his vice. His pill-formed lover. The anger rose and steamed through the many cracks in his shattered mind. He rushed over, seized the trashcan and ripped it up out of the fence, straight off the chain. The girl instantly leaned over to her side, throwing her hands up to her face. It was of no use. He swung the trashcan, using both hands in arc, smacking her upside the head knocking her clear off the bench. She screamed through her teeth in agony, unable to move the now shattered hinge of her jaw to open her mouth. Blood came forth in only small rivulets, despite the damage to her face. She fell flat on her stomach. The girl’s face contorted into wide-eyed panic and started throwing one arm in front of the other, dragging her body forward against the sidewalk. Blood trickled out in pulses from the back and side of her head and trickled in rivers down her cheek.
You want some havoc, eh? The man-with-no-name stood over the scurrying figure below him, his stance wide open as he raised the trash can high above his head. She turned to look only for a second; the fear in her eyes widened and then shrank into survival mode, sharp enough to cut straight through the sidewalk. She doubled her exertions, but even as she went, she felt the energy dissipating within her, scarcely realizing she was bleeding out with each effort.
“I’LL SHOW YOU HAVOC!”
He gritted his teeth in a psychopathic smile, and brought the can down hard onto her skull. Her face smashed into the concrete, separating teeth from jaw, sending the shattered bits skittering this way and that. She laid halted along the asphalt, her only movement was her last twitches and convulsions in her extremities. The last of her pistons firing their final sparks before the end. This bus stop, a place of departures, a place ironically became her terminus. The end of her road. Last stop; everybody off.
The one-time zombie huffed at his effort, yet it was not enough. His hunger had not been sated. He realized then the wonderful morsel he had just prepared for himself. He sighed and once again brought the trashcan up to bear. Crashing it down, he split the girl’s head open-faced like a walnut.
He dropped down to knees exhausted. Reaching down, he let his fingers glide through the bits of skull, swiping away the big pieces and almost instinctively started shoving the bigger chunks of brain matter into his mouth.
He closed his eyes and savored each morsel. It was not the taste that stirred his palate so much as the immediate after-effect. He was euphoric. Calm. Self-confident. Extremely self-aware. Like looking down on himself with God’s eyes. In all his lost memories, one thing that always stood out was how each of the drugs he ever partook in made him feel. There were highs that you just sat in and enjoyed, like a warm room on a cold winter’s day. Then stood others which you surrendered your soul. You hastily signed that devil’s contract with your soul’s blood.
His eyes rushed open in recognition.
He stood there dumbfounded. Havoc, she said. She had been a Havoc user.
He looke
d around and found his hearing was pinpointing things he should not have been hearing. The movement of paper on the wind, or better, the fact that the wind itself was whipping around the telephone poles and through the trees, whistling deep resonant tones over the ditch lines. Colors were much more vibrant than before, in fact he felt his sight had been clearing up, no longer blurry and considerably less handicapped as they were before. His depth perception was, well, for lack of a better word, deepening. His eyes no longer ran around independent of each other. That cinched it.
Havoc. Much like Acid. He had heard that Acid users never truly got rid of the drug out of their system. Some of the chemical did not pass out of the body, but kept residence in the bones and the marrow of the spine. He had once known a fellow who never had to use again. He had used so much of it, he only needed to crack his back and it would release the Acid back into his bloodstream once more with the same results. The man never stopped hallucinating.
So, it seemed, Havoc resided yet still in the brain matter of its users. He also remembered the potency of the drug. One dose of the “remedy” could last its user for days, sometimes up to two weeks before he tumbled down.
He reveled in this new information. He looked around at the roads surrounding him, picturing the walkers trudging toward their next meal in his mind.
I don’t have to be one of them. I don’t have to go back to that. I am back at the top of the food chain! But how long would this last?
He shook it off. He did not want to think about it. The one thing he did remember was how hard he would come down. He recollected that he desperately needed to keep the amount of time between pure heaven and rock-bottom hell to an infinitesimal minimal. He remembered it dictated how far he would tip the scales of fate to reclaim normalcy, clawing his way out of the pits of perdition. Bitch slapping Death’s scythe out of his skeletal hand repeatedly was nearly a reflex. He remained somber in the knowing that it would not be very long before the Reaping Angel would scoop it back up and resume his chase.
He tried to enjoy his high, relaxed in it. It wrapped around like a warm knit afghan, sewn by his grandmother. Anybody’s grandmother, for even now he could scarcely remember his own. He closed his eyes and he exhaled a sigh of the worry-less and the free. His memories clear and clean, he sat inside his own little world and marinated in its bliss. Ignorance of his previous life was indeed blissful.
The creases of his mouth recoiled back as his smile shrank into a frown, and his eyes struck open. He remembered. Like lightning, it was birthed into being, unprovoked. Unexpected.
He had recalled that he had killed. He killed at least once before.
Therefore, this was not his first rodeo, nor even his second. He could have very well blamed his need, his addiction for the taking of the little girl life just now. Indeed, he blamed everything else in his life on the dependence, never taking any of the weighted culpability on to himself. He remembered the face of the man from who he used to buy. He remembered the only two expressions that man ever gave to anybody. One when he was getting his money, and one when was not getting his money. The self-same dealer that was his go-to fell before his own hands. Choked him down while searing the dealer’s eyes with his own, smoldering in red-eyed anger. No, not anger. Anguish. He recalled the feeling in his thumbs as his victim’s larynx gave way and popped, crushed in on itself. He remembered holding him so tightly, even long after the betrayer’s arms had fallen away, lying limp in their failure to rake the choking hands away. The dealer’s eyes had nearly popped clear away from their swollen sockets. He stood there, living in that moment and he felt no shame. No regret.
So. I’m a killer. So what. I am sure there was a good reason.
The reason escaped him, only the tapestry of that one tormenting moment in time fell before him, draped over him. He paused, attempting to drudge up some bit of guilt, using it as a whisk to stir up some remnant of memory. Failure. It may have well been that he owed his dealer some scratch and it escalated. It was just another of a thousand purged memories, and he did not care to spend another moment on it. It just did not matter. The virus probably would have taken him anyway. No skin off his teeth.
He stewed for a bit and then looked down at the broken remains of the addict at his feet. Her hair floated in tightly woven mats in a pool of her own blood. She was his line of cocaine, his razor blade and mirror. Nothing more, and now she was all used up. He looked at what remained of her, her flesh still warm to the touch, the air still steaming around the body in the cold air. All that meat and marrow lay just ripe for the picking. He stood up and walked away. He had gotten what he wanted, non-reciprocating lover that he was. Let those second rate walkers have his sloppy seconds.
His palate for flesh human had abated by quite a considerable amount, since his imbibition of brains. In point of fact, he had not felt the usual intensity of his hunger pangs. It was much like B.Z. (Before Zombies), when he was using. Not much of a diet at all. He had lost so much weight, his intake of fats and protein was next to nil. To his doctors that looked him over during his final collapse, he most likely looked the part of a Zombie. Dark bruised veined eyelids from his lack of sleep coupled with dark red road mapped inked on the whites of the eyes. Havoc had many side effects, insomnia being of the top-tier properties of deep usage.
He felt now as if he did not even require food anymore. He was leveled out and that was what mattered. As long as he stayed that way. This got his brain churning. Dangerous thoughts started to connect themselves in wicked ways inside his skull.
Wicked? How can they be wicked when there is no one to judge me?
He let his eyes survey the empty apocalypse that laid in all directions before him. The world beckoned, no, ached, for him to take it for his own.
And who is to say what I can and can’t do now.
He reached down past the sidewalk, grabbed a handful of dirt and grass and ripped it out of the Earth. He watched it, transfixed as the bits of root and dirt sifted and fell through his fingers. His hands felt some of their old strength once more. He balled his hand into a fist. It still pained him, but even those pains pale in comparison to the hell he had awoken from. He slammed his fist hard into the dirt, grinding down recalcitrant.
I won’t go back. I might still be teetering at Hell’s Gate, but I won’t fall again.
Still, there were things to consider. Even now, he felt his eagerness beginning to slip away ever so slowly, as the pain tentacles threatened to drag him back down into the inferno. The licking flames were still chasing, and if he remembered anything at all, it was the pain of the turn. His memory of the pain struck his face into hard marble, drawing his lips back flat against his façade. Back when his humanity was burned up again from the virus, replacing his soul with a million fire-demons, one for every pore of his being. He swore in that moment, he would do anything to keep those devils at bay, just as he did when he first became an addict.
His mind was smoking now, gears turning. This was something he was going to have to play around with. An experiment of sorts. How to keep the flames away. Ideas were brewing. He would need more brains. That much was certain, made easier by the fact that his need for flesh was gone with the demons. Then there were those damn zombies. Walkers, runners and crawlers. Oh my.
Patient Zero looked down at his clothes. Disheveled and bloody, some scraps of clothing had been ripped almost free from his pants. Not the look of a man bent on ruling the Earth. Ruling the Earth? And why not? He looked about and outstretched his arms in mock grabbing of the very horizon surrounding him. A man could be king in this world. Come and go as I please. He dropped his arms and frowned.
A king needs subjects. People to bend to his will. His needs. His desires.
The voice in his head was his own. At the same time, it was not. It was dark, and basal in its timbre. He recognized it as his own, but he felt it did not come from his usual conscious self. He dropped his rear end to the ground, curling into a ball. He buried his face in his own arms,
trying to drown out the voice that too much sounded like his own. He had not exorcised all of his demons.
Not a demon. No, sir. I am you. I am the part of you that you know full well. I am want. I am need. I am the yearning of all of your hearts desires.
Patient Zero had started to rock himself, still squeezing himself, shutting the whole world out. The voice, however, remained, locked up with him deep down within the confines of the prison of his mind. It echoed off the powdered concrete walls and bars that made up the confines his brain, vibrating through his burnt up synapses. It would not be silenced.
Patient Zero laughed to push down his panic. He knew he was crazy. He just had not known his was this cracked.
Call us eccentric, sir.
Then, a thought rose in the one-time walker.
“Do you know my name?” He immediately regretted saying it aloud. He was sure that talking to oneself was a sign of impending mental collapse. However, the voice continued to answer him back.
Our old name is lost to us. It’s time now to claim another. We don’t what to keep going on being referred to as THAT GUY do we?
Patient Zero nodded his affirmative, despite the fact that there was no one around referring to him as anything anyway. He found himself unable to stop rocking; he began to shake uncontrollably. Not from his addiction, but from fear.
You are a king. Your name should reflect that.
Again the nod. “But what about the other walkers. They do not listen to anyone. They only eat.”
Everything except their own. And you . . .
The would-be king slowly uncurled himself and stared out across the roads. Several moaning men had indeed already walked up to him while he was sitting. He had not noticed, but was realizing now that they had already skirted by and were wandering on to other random places.
And before?
Yes. He remembered the group from before that just walked up to him, like pigeons waiting for the hand-out. He had killed them then, not realizing the significance of that moment.
Zombies Don't Ride Motorcycles Page 6