Eat'em

by Chase Webster

  “Let’s go,” Mike says, pushing my back with one hand as he waves off the reporters with the other. I’m led, unchained, toward the same comfy front row seat to the play that will decide my future. Mike sits beside me.

  “Who says I’m the devil?” I ask. It’s a stupid question, but the accusation brings an icy chill to my veins. Sure, for months I’ve known the world thinks of me as a criminal, but now the frenzy of vindictive citizens set on sacrificing me to alleviate their disdainful hearts – it casts a shadow on my life I don’t know how to handle. Even if word spread that I told nothing but the truth, I would still be considered the cause. And with my only true witness being an aloof demon, how am I to react to being the devil? Had my sidekick been a seraph would my circumstances be any different?

  Mike scratches his nose as he leans in and whispers in my ear. “Things have gotten a little weird since more folks are starting to watch this thing. People are seeing little glitches in the footage when the camera’s on you. Say it looks like film blur, something stupid, it’s asinine. Some think it moves around… conspiracy theory shit. It’s nothing. But people want to see it like it’s a big deal or something.”

  “I told you…”

  “Shh, shhh, sh,” Mike says. “Enough of that nonsense. All you have to worry about is that it isn’t part of this case. The district attorney can’t use it and even if he could, he wouldn’t. He’d look like a damned fool, like he was trying to convince us of aliens.”

  “But what if…”

  “We’re not bringing your imaginary friend into this case, Jacob,” Mike’s forehead creases with a raised brow. And I wonder, what if Eat’em had been an angel? Mike says, “Let them conspire. Drop the demon. The case will win or lose with this virus of yours. If we can make it real to them, we can get you out of this mess. The demon will land you in a straight jacket and a padded cell.”

  Gomes looks far more presentable than he has over the past few weeks. The steady decline in his level of give-a-damn shot up overnight. He’s dry-cleaned, clean-shaved, and clean-cut. A file that’s downright encyclopedic has replaced the thin folder he brought to the last session. He sets up for a presentation as Judge Brentt stifles the spectators in a method that’s more “Shut up” than “order in the court.”

  “Gomes is going to go over crime scenes,” Mike says. “He hopes to start this fiasco off with some grizzly imagery to get the mob in a lynching mood. I don’t want you making a face. Not one emotion better come out of you. For you, these aren’t crime scenes; they’re the fields of battle. And warriors are disciplined. Keep that in mind, huh?”

  I nod. The commotion fades to a few stray whispers.

  Mike pats my shoulder, almost smacking Eat’em’s hind end, resulting in a shrill “Watch it, yes!” from the demon as he scrambles to higher ground.

  “Don’t worry about what he does,” Mike says as he rubs the tension from my trapezoid. “Tonight, we’re going to show them exactly what your eyes can do.”

  Chapter 31

  Val danced around like a court jester, his deceivingly muscular arms swaying back and forth as he stared at me with a grimace not even a coward would fear. He wore a blue and white wrestling singlet, which he barely fit all his body parts into, and a set of ear guards that could hardly be seen beneath the wild fire mop of hair growing off the top of his head. He looked like an overconfident cartoon, but beneath the goofy outfit and the so-freckled-he’s-kinda-tan skin was a scrappy little fighter who had put embarrassed me in a fight on more than one occasion.

  “Come on, Orphan,” Val said, “It’s time to show me exactly what you can do.”

  I didn’t know what was more embarrassing, Val’s wardrobe or mine. Not having the middle school wrestling outfit Val held onto for this precise moment, I wore thigh-high bright yellow running shorts and a black and white ball tee that had gone out of fashion only moments after it was ever in fashion. Then I wore tube socks since I didn’t have the right shoes for match.

  This would be embarrassing enough if we were somewhere secluded, but no… Val found it necessary to drag me out in public for this humiliating display.

  We were in the school’s basketball gym, which doubled for an assembly center. In the corner of the room were a few mats, so old the edges rolled up and peeled. They were stiff and not much better suited for floor exercises than the wood gym floor. A few weight machines and a punching bag on a rope took up even more of the space we needed. And at this very time of night, a time Val promised me we’d have the gym to ourselves; there wasn’t an area not in use.

  Some guy punched the bag, some others rotated on a squat machine, a game of five on five took up half the gym and the other was being used up by a couple kids playing horse. To top it off a second floor running track circled the entire court, and there were a number of very pretty girls staring down at us with the completion of each and every lap.

  “I’m serious, Jake,” Val said. “If you’re going to break into peoples’ houses in the middle of the night with your mind set on some vigilante justice… bare-handed, I might add… then you at least need to know how to fight.”

  He grabbed my wrist and I shrugged away. I was a bit more concerned about appearances than a guy with an invisible demon should be, but even someone regularly accused of talking to himself still has his pride.

  “Because, if you think I’m going to dawn a cape and follow you on a spree of violence,” Val continued, “you’ve lost your mind.”

  “Oooo,” Eat’em turned from a mirror used for aerobics exercises. “We should get capes, yes?”

  “Could you not speak so loud,” I said to Val.

  “You afraid someone’s going to hear me?” He asked.

  “Yes. Kinda.”

  Val grabbed at my wrist again and I pulled away again. “I could show these guys a video of you killing someone with your bare hands and they wouldn’t care enough to watch it.”

  I tugged at the crotch of my shorts. Every step I took was another inch they crawled up my thighs. If I didn’t change back to my pants soon, I’d be leaving the gym in dental floss.

  “I’d watch it!” Eat’em said. “But I wouldn’t believe it.”

  “This is stupid,” I said for the fiftieth time since Val told me he wanted me to show him how to fight. “I don’t need you teaching me how to wrestle.”

  He grabbed my wrist again.

  This time when I pulled back, he dropped to one knee and swept his other leg around me in an arc. Using my momentum and slippery socks against me, Val pushed me headlong over my feet. I landed hard on my back and my scrappy uncle climbed toward my head and grappled me into what felt like some sort of self-inflicted chokehold. He wrapped my arm around my head so tight that I felt like I was about to break my nose with my own bicep. Before I had a chance to react, Val squeezed the air out of me, forcing me to breathe through the sweaty fabric over my armpit.

  I had my head turned one way, my arm pulled the other. My legs twisted uselessly searching for some sort of leverage to shake my redheaded uncle off.

  Worse yet, the musky uncirculated gym air felt cool as it rode up my shorts where I undoubtedly gave the giggling trio of girls running on the upper floor a show nobody paid to see.

  “Is this how you’re going to fight, Jacob?” Val asked.

  “He wishes he fought like that, yes,” Eat’em laughed. He pounded on the mat three times and shouted, “Ding! Ding! Ding!”

  Though, I was the only one who heard Eat’em announce my defeat, I was certain by the awkward silence and muffled laughter that the rest of our audience agreed. Val had my head cranked so far into his chest that all I could see was the white and blue spandex as it faded into blackness.

  “Alright!” I tried to scream. “I get it.”

  Val loosened his grip. “What was that?”

  “I get it,” I coughed, “okay. I need to learn to fight.”

  He tightened his vice-like grip until my right arm wrapped so snuggly around the front of my head
that I could bend my elbow at the back of my head and just about hook my finger into my lip. He had me bent up like a practiced contortionist. Except, I wasn’t a practiced contortionist, and it felt like my arm was a pound of pressure away from snapping in three different places.

  I tapped the mat rapidly with my other hand, hoping for Val to relieve some pressure so that my last breath on earth wouldn’t be a whiff of my own underarm.

  “Weak,” Eat’em said.

  “You’re an idiot, Baby Jake,” Val said. “This isn’t about learning to fight.”

  He let me go and all the air rushed back into my lungs - repugnant, but beautiful.

  “This is to show you, you can’t fight.”

  I rolled to my back and cautiously looked over my shoulder, expecting an audience. Nobody seemed to care.

  “You’re not a fighter, man,” Val said. “If I can get you in a hold like this…”

  “I wasn’t ready,” I said.

  “And what if you aren’t.”

  “What if I have to be?” I sat up and plucked my shorts from my thighs.

  “At least be prepared,” he helped me to my feet. “Use a weapon or something. A gun. A taser. Pepper spray? Anything.”

  “Maybe pepper spray,” I said before Val put me on my back again. Again, because I wasn’t ready.

  “You need to wake up, Jacob,” Val said.

  Chapter 32

  The sound of gunfire startled me awake. I thought it was gunfire. The loud “BLAM!” blended so perfectly with my dream. The retired lineman held his hands up in a plea for mercy, “Whoa!” He said, “Jacob you don’t want to…” I aimed the pistol at Parsons’ nose and pulled the trigger. I awoke in a classroom to the hush of suppressed laughter.

  “Jacob, yes?” Dr. Reeder loomed over my desk. His arm ended in a balled fist, squeezed so tight that the freckles on the back of his hand made his flesh look like a crinkled page of connect the dots. “Usually I don’t mind my students take a nap in my class. It’s your grade, after all. But even I won’t be interrupted by snoring.”

  “Yes sir,” I said. “Won’t happen again.”

  I lifted my head from the notebook I’d been sketching in to keep awake. So much for that.

  Eat’em chimed in, something about my ruining Karl Marx, and when I turned to Dixie, she quickly looked away. I felt her stare return to me as I rejoined the classroom.

  “We’re discussing the needs of the many versus the needs of the few, yes, Jacob?” Reeder said.

  “Sure.”

  So badly I wanted to speak to Dixie, but what words would I have to offer? Lies were impossible to come up with and the truth would be impossible to believe. I kept my distance from her between classes and resented Val for making me come.

  My mouth opened as she silently followed the herd out of biology, but voice refused to part from my chest. She walked away without a word, as I expected. As I deserved.

  “Jacob,” Professor Kempter startled me. My heart chased Dixie out the class, but I weakly lingered behind unable to do anything but watch the door shut on me and the teacher.

  I slumped onto a maraschino cherry colored stool by Kempter’s desk, dropping my book bag with a thump on the cracked linoleum tiles. My day-to-day life quickly became tolling on my emotional wellbeing. I’ve shot a man and I stabbed two more. I witnessed the death of a beautiful blonde, who’d come back from the dead only to tear some poor homeless man’s throat out and be shot down by police. The only reason I wasn’t in prison was because a couple other folks broke into Parsons home to eat the man for whatever reason. Lucky that. Dixie wouldn’t talk to me. I couldn’t talk to her. And Eat’em… for all that is good and holy in the universe… recently discovered masturbation.

  Which he did.

  Frequently.

  In spite of my reasonable requests and offers of reward.

  Kempter either didn’t notice my heavy mood or didn’t have time to express empathy. She hobbled to the door, peaked outside, and locked it before returning to her desk. Usually, she moved rather gracefully despite her large shape, but as she sat on the large leather chair, she seemed exasperated and out of breath. She opened the bottom drawer of her desk and pulled out the familiar bloody Deftones shirt.

  “Where’d this come from?” The question might have come off as accusatory, but it didn’t. Perhaps it was because she was a woman of science, or perhaps I naively trusted her, but her demeanor was that of someone genuinely curious, maybe even concerned. Definitely not threatening. “It’s not from a dog, Jacob. Is it?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Whose is it, Jacob?”

  I looked into Kempter’s deep brown eyes. They weren’t the same color as my mother’s, but they reminded me of them. The shape and softness behind her look. I felt compassion like that from only one other person. And I missed her.

  “I wish I could tell you,” I said. “But the truth is, I don’t really know. That’s why I brought it to you. I was hoping for answers, myself.”

  “Jacob,” Kempter’s voice lowered to almost a whisper. “I want you to know something. Whatever is in this blood is dangerous. I don’t know if it’s a plague or a curse, but you need to avoid it.

  “Its more than just an infection,” she chewed on her thumbnail before continuing. “I don’t fully understand how it works yet, but I can tell you this – I discovered – you discovered a new type of parasite. I can see it in the blood. Some kind of micro-organism. It latches onto the cells and seems to organize them. It acts almost like a stem cell would. It gets the body to start creating cells it needs. Muscles become stronger. Fast twitch fibers are improved. Fat tissue is broken down. Weaker cells are eliminated. The parasite actually attacks cancer cells. This is why you observed the rapid healing properties. Its amazing. Unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”

  “I thought you said it was dangerous?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she shifted uncomfortably. “Those are just the side effects. It is doing something else. Something bigger. I’m still trying to understand it. The parasite seems connected. Like some kind of neural network. Even spread across multiple hosts, the parasite stays connected.”

  “How do you know they stay connected?” I became increasingly curious. Despite sounding like the medical find of the century, Dr. Kempter’s observations had the potential to explain not only why the infected were so hard to defeat, but also how they seemingly knew who I was before we’d even met.

  She continued, “I’m getting to that. This is why I believe the infection is potentially very dangerous. You already know that I used the shirt to give the infection to mice. Well actually I only used it to infect a single mouse. A male. That mouse bit a female and infected her. The parasites are blood born and can be passed by ingesting infected blood or from the bite of something already infected. After several days, the male escaped. I put a trap out and found him the next day, back broken, still alive. The female was also acting strange. She wouldn’t move, wouldn’t eat. I released the male from the trap and within thirty minutes it was as if it never happened. He was fine, fully recovered. The female too.”

  “She was sympathetic?” I asked.

  “No,” Kempter sighed as if about to lift a large weight. “She was dying. The pain seemed shared. So, I decided to make the experiment a little more morose. I killed the male.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “She became feral,” Kempter said. “Attacking anything. But she also forgot the things she’d learned, including the maze – she no longer cared about the maze or the rewards. It was like hitting an off switch in her brain.”

  I couldn’t help but picture the blonde. The newscaster went over the grizzly attack again and again. And the curly haired roommate of Trevor. Is that what I’d seen?

  “The female,” Kempter continued, “what happened to her was a result of losing the consciousness of the one that infected her. It’s like traumatic brain-rot. Once infected, either you share the same mind as all the others,
or you have no mind at all. Those are the only two options. Breaking the chain… only seems to create aggression on both sides of it.”

  As she spoke my heart began to race and her room opened up to me. Once again I found myself with no peripheral vision. One hundred-eighty degrees of clarity in all directions. Every stain, crevice, and texture became focused. I could read every word on the chalkboard over Kempter’s shoulder at once and simultaneously see every pore on her face. My vision grew perfectly crisp. Then I blinked it away.

  “Jacob,” Kempter snapped her fingers. “This parasite, if it’s able to infect people, it could be worse than the plague. It could be worse than any natural disaster humanity has ever known. If the same goes for the mice and the chain is broken, everyone downstream would do the same thing she did.”

  I stood and grabbed my backpack. My stomach churned as if I couldn’t digest this new bit of information. Like the knowledge had gone sour and my body fought to reject it. I asked, “Is it possible for memories to be transferred through a bite?”

  “Memories, ideas, consciousness, I don’t know,” Kempter said. “I don’t know if it could be passed to humans, but if so the effect could be disastrous. Were you ever able to find the girl that was attacked by the dog?”

  “YES!” Eat’em shouted. “Jacob, let’s go!”

  “Jacob, this is not something to mess around with. If you know something we have to report it.”

  Easy for her to say without blood on her hands.

  Chapter 33

  Clouds rolled across the open sky like a heavenly mountain range. Twenty minutes earlier the campus was under lockdown for a tornado watch and a malevolent shield of scorched atmosphere blocked the midday sun. Hail pelted the earth with unfaltering hatred. Electricity rippled from one cloud to another as a premonition to a storm that never came.

  Now I sat under a sky so friendly it was almost impossible to imagine the darkness that came and went. Students flooded from the buildings behind me as if in anticipation of more chaos. Though, this time of year, chaos was typical.