“Please just tell me. Act like…like we just met.”
She talks into the night, pausing occasionally to ask me why I’m crying, as I struggle desperately to keep my agonized eyes wide. She designs our future home, room by room. It is an old colonial mansion complete with angels, and gargoyles, and swirling designs in hand-carved wood. The interior is black and white art deco with gray marble floors and large sculptures (seemingly in place of furniture.) She manages to engage me in a discussion on what we should name our child. After going through a few less-than-flattering suggestions (including Rusty and Dusty) we decide to name our child Pharaoh if it’s a boy. We come to the mutual conclusion that I shouldn’t have a girl. Not with my Karma.
As we talk, I find myself slowly slipping into the fantasy, actually starting to believe that she is more than just an illusion resulting from all five senses hallucinating at once, actually starting to believe that she will not disappear like the rest of them. I find myself believing in the forever and ever, voicing concerns over a house, a child, a family, an entire life, that will never exist.
“I know you don’t believe me, really believe me. You probably never will. But I do love you and I’ll never leave you. Never. I’m not like the others. I love you.”
I don’t want to tell her how many times I’ve heard that same statement, spoken from countless faces with eyes just as honest and sincere as hers… because this time I believe it. I believe her.
Even though my eyes are twitching and itching in their sockets. I believe her even though they are burning as if someone massaged them with rock-salt and left a little tucked under each eyelid. Even though my tear ducts are empty and my eyes are so dry and tacky that I can’t even see her. Even though one of my eyes has now plastered itself shut, causing her image to fade, shiver, and shift in and out, transposed with the image of the next woman. Even though I know I’m about to blink.
“Shana…”
I pull her tightly to me and we begin to make love, passionately, furiously, our bodies crashing against each other as if in battle, as if somehow she too senses that time is short.
“No. No. No! No! Noooooo!!! Don’t leave me! Not you too! Don’t leave me!!!!”
My eye feels as if it is about to explode from my head. I see the worried look on Shana’s face. Then I blink. And it is over. She is gone.
I scream and blink a dozen times, hoping I can bring her back.
“Why? Oh God why? Why do they always have to go!?! Why? Why? Why?!!!!”
Beneath my body, for split seconds between blinks, I see a staggering menagerie of different women appear. Fat ones, skinny ones, Black ones, White ones. One or two that look old enough to be my mother, or young enough to be my daughter. A Samoan woman with hard warrior eyes, a wide nose, and full lips like my own, who I met at a grocery store. A Nigerian woman with a shaved head who I met doing the butterfly at a Reggae club at five o’clock in the morning. A Filipino woman with massive breasts and eyes like an abused child that I met at a shopping mall. Some of them look like Lynn. Some of them look like Shana. But they all disappear, and I feel each loss and neither Shana nor Lynn return. They are gone forever. Back into nonexistence or someone else’s bed.
Finally, I stop crying; stop blinking. Beneath me now, is a woman with long black hair. Her eyes are black as pools of liquid obsidian. Her pale white skin is the unearthly pallor of a vampire’s. Her lips are so red they appear to have been soaked in blood. She is inhumanly lovely. Her name is Renee’
“How long have we been together?” I ask her.
“Three wonderful years.” She replies while stretching a body not half the equal of her face. She has a faint German accent. Where the fuck did I meet her?
“That’s the longest I’ve ever been with anyone.”
“I know.” She purrs, “That’s why you married me.”
For a moment I am too shocked to speak. I guess my traitorous face betrayed my bewilderment, because she stared at me, looking simultaneously worried and annoyed. I allow the memories to seep from my subconscious to the forefront of my mind.
It seems we met at Lynn’s funeral. She’d gotten her cap peeled by a jealous boyfriend after he caught her dirtying the sheets with some other stud. Renee’ had been her roommate after Lynn and I had parted company. Following the funeral, we’d kept in touch under the pretense of comforting each other through that terrible time. It wasn’t long before we became lovers.
She was there for me when my mother died. She let me move in with her when I lost my apartment. She was with me to celebrate the publication of my first novel. So when she wanted to get married and raise a family, I felt duty bound to be there for her. Today is our wedding night. I look down at the little gold band on my finger, and a weak, unenthusiastic hope swells in my chest before flickering out forever.
“I wonder if this is the answer? Just getting married? I wonder if this will stop the carrousel? The rotation of the earth? End the infinite loop? No. No. It wouldn’t…it couldn’t be that easy. Ain’t shit ever that easy. The merry-go-round ain’t ever going to stop. It just keeps going and no little ring is going to stop it. No vow of fidelity, no fucking ‘til death do us part is going to freeze its gears. It just keeps going ‘round grinding my sorry black ass into the dust!”
I begin to laugh.
Again the worried look from Renee.
“Forever and ever.” She says then catches me staring at the ring and adds: “’Til death do us part.”
This makes me laugh harder. Then I blink, and she is gone, and for the first time it is a relief.
“I won’t open my eyes again. Not this time. Not ever again.”
I imagine digging my fingers into my eye sockets and tearing my eyes out of my head. I imagine lacerating the tendons and optical nerves with my jagged fingernails. It would be just like ripping oysters from their shells.
“I love you. I’ll love you forever.” I hear someone saying.
My eyes are still squeezed shut. I don’t know who’s lying next to me now. I don’t care who it is any longer. Just as long as they stay…
…forever and ever…
“I’ll never leave you.” The woman says.
…’til death do us part.
No, you’ll never leave me. Because I’m going to rip my eyes right out of my fucking skull and I’ll never blink again.
“Just you and me sweetness.” I laugh and lick my teeth nervously.
“Yet still this fond bosom regrets while adoring…”
I begin to reach beneath my eyelids. When I touch my eyes it reminds me of that Halloween game we used to play with peeled grapes when we were kids. “This is an eyeball.” Someone would say while they placed the peeled grape into your hand, and it felt…just like this. But what if I rip out my eyes and this woman disappears and no one returns in her place? What then Einstein?
“…That love like the leaf must fall into the sear…”
“That’s just a chance I’ll have to take.”
My fingers hook into claws.
“…That time will come on when remembrance deploring…”
“I’ll always love you,” she says.
My last thought before I destroy my eyesight, is about that old movie “The Man with the X-ray Eyes!” At the end of the picture the guy goes crazy and tears out his eyes, then the screen goes blank. But rumor has it that in the original director’s cut, after he rips out his eyes, he turns and screams to a horrified audience: “I can still see!”
“That’s just a chance I’ll have to take.” I say to myself.
And then the screaming starts.
“…Contemplates the scenes of our past with a tear.”
“I’ll love you forever.”
Run Away
The night absorbed the landscape around me, swallowing the terrain whole in a thick tapestry of shadows. Ahead of me I could see nothing but the street lamps lining the freeway and the ominous silhouettes of stalled cars laid out like grave markers, their occupants
long fled or murdered. The only sounds were my own rapid footfalls, my own panting breaths, the disturbing sound of tearing flesh, and the snarls and growls of the things pursuing me in the dark. The screams had stopped a few days ago. I feared I was the only thing left alive. It was all the incentive I needed to keep running.
I tried to stay beneath the streetlights. Slipping from one protective cone of electric sun to the next. Shadowy creatures lunged at me baring saber-like fangs and long gnarled claws, yellow luminescent eyes glazed with hunger. Gruesome things lived in the darkness now. I spun away from them, weaving and faking like an NFL runningback. I knew they couldn’t catch me. Not as long as I kept running. They were slow, stupid, and every-fucking-where. There was just enough illumination between lights to allow me to see their silhouettes lurking there in the blackness, waiting to spring.
A car parked at the curb rocked and jerked with violent activity as I passed it. A few weeks ago I would have thought there was a couple in there, fucking their brains out. Now I knew that whatever was in there wasn’t copulating. It was eating. The wet smacking and sucking sounds, the grunts and growls and moans of ecstasy were not those of a happy couple consummating their relationship but of a feeding frenzy. I shivered and kept moving past. I still carried the axe I’d borrowed from a sporting goods store a few days ago when the cramps first began; the first indication that I wouldn’t be able to outrun them forever. But whoever had owned that vehicle was past any heroics I could provide.
I hit a wet slick of dark liquid trailing out from under the car and nearly tripped; saving myself from a lethal fall by grabbing onto the next lamp post. I looked down at my running shoes already knowing that it wasn’t motor oil that I’d stepped in. There was no time to wipe the tacky red substance from my sneakers. I had to get moving again. The car door was opening. Several long serpentine phantoms came slithering out, tracking my scent, drawn to my heat. Had to run.
Human remains littered the street ahead. I would have to dodge the creatures while running the obstacle course of rotting carrion. Some of the bodies were still being fed on by the night things. I tried not to disturb their meal. I pumped my legs harder, nearly sprinting as a herd of the dark creatures rose from the gruesome maze of death and decay.
There had been all kinds of speculation as to where the things had come from. It had started with a few random attacks but soon swarms of the things began to pour out, covering the earth in a thick cloud of voracious evil. The best theory seemed to be that they had come from beneath the earth; roused from the bowels of hell by petroleum drilling equipment in search of hidden pockets of fossil fuel. The most popular one was that hell had unleashed its minions upon the earth. The end of times. Armageddon. Churches filled with parishioners begging the lord for forgiveness. Many of them were eaten right on the church steps as they left, having made the mistake of worshipping past sunset.
Soon the wild theories and speculations began to peter off as thoughts turned towards survival and the theorists themselves were murdered in their beds. It seemed the entire human race was now under threat of extinction. Of course it could have just been happening in isolated cities and I’d just been unlucky enough to have run through every one of them. Or maybe it was just the West Coast? I couldn’t be certain. My only concern now was with my own survival. I had to keep moving. I had to stay one step ahead of them.
I hurtled a couple of the night things as they burrowed in and out of a man who appeared to be about six-hundred pounds. Most of his girth was due to his body filling with gases as his organs decayed. He had obviously been dead for some time. The stench of the dead was overpowering. Nothing seemed to be alive anywhere except for the rapacious shadow creatures and me. I tried to block out the thought that I might be the only living thing in the whole city to keep the panic from crushing the remaining air from my chest. I calmed myself as much as possible, concentrated on the road, maintained my heart rate at a steady even pace, still only slightly below panic level.
My lungs were burning and felt as if they would explode under the tremendous exertion. Still I maintained my fanatic pace. For the ninth day in a row I put in miles that would have awed the most dedicated ultra-marathoner. There were still at least another three hours left before daylight and already I’d run twice the distance of the average marathon. But now my body was starting to rebel.
I was perhaps a day or two away from organ failure. I was losing fluids far too rapidly. And there was so little fat left on my body that my muscles were starting to consume themselves for fuel. Spots began to dance in front of my eyes as the oxygen in my blood continued to decrease, my lungs unable to keep up with the demand. But once again I could feel them expand a little farther to accommodate the strain and allow a few more breaths inside. The cramps in my legs and calves were getting worse. The blisters on my feet burst two days ago and the raw skin now rubbed against the synthetic leather of my broken down Tuned Air Max running shoes, aggravating the tender flesh. Soon the sores would be infected and I wouldn’t be able to run. I’d have to fight. But that was days away. Hopefully by then I’d be deep in the desert. Safe from the night things.
I jogged up the freeway entrance ramp dodging in between cars. As soon as I hit the freeway I knew that this had been a bad idea. The smell of death choked me and scalded my throat, churning a tidal wave of bile in my stomach. Even worse, the cars were too close together. If there were something inside waiting to lunge out at me, I had only inches to avoid it. But then again, if I managed to reach open highway where the traffic gridlock thinned out enough to allow a vehicle to pass through fast enough to avoid being attacked, I might be able to borrow one of the cars and give my legs a rest for awhile. I decided it was worth the risk. I kept running down the freeway, between the cars.
There were more lights on the freeway. There were hardly any gaps between the road lights. But where there were gaps, they were great expanses where the darkness seemed to stretch on for almost a mile before the light resumed. The pain in my calves, thighs, and feet was starting to slow me down, affecting my stride, and my lungs were starting to cramp again. I couldn’t keep that pace up for long. I knew I had to make it to the end of the freeway.
I hadn’t been awake during the day in nearly a week. I was too exhausted from running all night. If I could get a car and drive some during the night, then maybe I could wake up a little earlier and find out if anyone was still alive. Besides, I’d almost overslept two nights ago. By the time I woke up, the sun had already begun to set and the things had started crawling out of whatever dark pits they slept in. They were slithering into the apartment I’d slept in that morning, surrounding me. Luckily, I’d had the foresight to pick a ground-level apartment. I leapt out through the window with a herd of the things scratching at my heels and ran screaming down the street. I ran four city blocks before I could get my panic back under control and regain control over my breathing.
I was nearing the end of a long row of streetlights and there was about a quarter of a mile of solid darkness, pregnant with those voracious creatures, before I would reach the next light. I could see what looked like hundreds of the phantoms seething in the night that stretched out endlessly in between.
“The way out is not around but through.” I could hear my counselor telling me after my first failed attempt at detoxification.
“There are no shortcuts.”
“No shortcuts.” I repeated to myself as I picked up speed and hurtled into the night.
Claws raked my flesh as the things tried to latch onto me. The sharpness of their fangs and talons worked against them now because it sliced right through my skin like a hot knife through butter and didn’t allow them to grab hold and pull me down. I felt my skin shred as they slashed at me but I kept running harder and faster, Olympian strides, until I could barely see them anymore. They were just blurs of dark flesh and fangs. I reached the next series of lights covered in blood and sweat, exhausted.
I had taken up running during rehab. The mor
e health and body-conscious I became, the easier it got to stay away from the rock. I was only two months sober when I did my first 5k race, a month later I did my first 10k. I had been off the rock for six months when I finished my first marathon. Then the screams had started coming in the night. The blood and dismembered bodies piling up in the morning. It had gotten harder and harder not to use.
My body was shutting down, failing. I could feel it. I was losing too much blood, exerting myself too hard. I had to stop. I stood beneath the light staring into the darkness, at the terrible things slithering and crawling around just beyond the light. This was the first time I had ever taken the time to look at them.
At first all I saw were the claws and the teeth, the flaming yellow eyes, then faces slowly swam into focus, familiar faces.
A shiver raced up my back as I recognized the face of the first kid I’d ever sold crack to. The thing’s flaming yellow orbs began to soften and resolve themselves into those same big trusting eyes that I had taken advantage of all those years ago. Its fangs melted into a big dopey grin. Coiled beside him was a snakelike phantom that had once been a teenaged girl that I’d gotten hooked on crack so that I could have sex with her. She had only been sixteen years old. A church girl who thought she was too good for us street thugs. I had turned her into a crack whore in less than a month. I didn’t even attend her funeral when she eventually died of AIDS. I had already moved on to the next innocent life.
One tiny creature was hurling itself at the cone of light as if it was an invisible force field that it could break through. The light would immediately scald its oily midnight flesh and it would shrink back squealing in agony only to attack again. I knew what and who it was even before I saw its face. I hadn’t seen his face the night he died, not until I picked up the newspaper the next day. I had been driving too fast when I leaned out the driver’s side window with the Tech-nine and let the Black Talons fly into the crowd of gangbangers. There was no way to see who I had hit, if anyone. The next day when I read that only one person had been killed, a six-year-old kid named Devon who’d been playing hide-and-go-seek with some friends when he’d been struck by one of my errant bullets, I didn’t even cry. I smoked the largest rock I could find and went out again to find those fools I had missed.
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