Ionic Relapse

by Howard Hachey

  Once again, both pie-eyed, slightly hungry sixteen-year-old boys pushed on, ignorantly drifting on the whistling breeze deeper into the unsuspecting night.

  The burning need to see the progress of so many months of seedling transplants and preventative care was the only thing keeping Nieko from turning back. His nerves were thoroughly jangled, but his will was still solid cast iron. He wasn't going back until he knew how all his sticky children were doing. Truth was, Nieko had a bit of a green thumb, or hand in this case. What started a short time ago as a stoned agricultural science experiment one day while out on this very back trail soon turned into a fifty-plant operation. He sat at the top as its only owner and curator. Occasionally doing these midnight hikes to transport water or other materials, his hobby had accelerated so fast that he was soon able to flip the extra grass he didn’t smoke for a profit.

  Knowing the dangers that came with dealing, Nieko was initially hesitant to start selling. He knew lots of guys who started small like him, and the story always ended the same way. Guy finds he has a knack for growing; he soon learns that he can make a decent profit from said knack. Guy then starts growing for a profit instead of leisure. Greed and money soon become his vice, and he eventually gets caught and goes to jail.

  Every low-level dealer Nieko had ever known eventually got too big for his own boots. Each one flying too close to the sun on their papier-mâché Zigzag wings. They all knew the story of the man who tried it before them, but that never mattered. They go right on and make the same exact set of wings anyway. Completely identical, even down to the flaky green arches of brittle brown stalks and stems. Each stargazed idiot following in polite suite to the newly fallen soldier of fortune before him.

  Nieko knew that once you got busted in a town like this your job appeal was officially over. As soon as word travels from one hungry ear to the other, you were forever labeled as a pusher. A criminal. Accusing stares and secondhand whispers forever keep you out of getting any job better than dishwasher or custodian. He decided, after a lot of thought, to only sell to those he knew personally. His friends and family were the only clientele he would take on. The rest of the spoils would be for his personal consumption. That was always the true game plan, just to grow enough to sustain him and his friends until next harvest rolled around. Rinse and repeat cycle. He fancied himself to be a Rastafarian Robin Hood: helping those less fortunate, as long as they weren't snitches.

  Besides, why risk his only real hobby just to make a few extra bucks?

  Loudly coughing and gagging away at his left, Eric reiterated, “I ain't never smelled no skunk like that. You think it died from eating its own shit?”

  Nieko had smelled the stench in question. The smell reminded him of a cat he and a friend found once while fishing down by the trestle. Both boys were just sitting on the riverbank below the tracks when a red and white cooler lazily floated right past their casted lines. Spotting it almost immediately, they both weighed down their fishing poles with a couple good-sized rocks and ran down the muddy riverbed to catch it. Nieko caught it first at one of the shallower banks, pulling it out of the water like a lifeguard rescuing a drowning toddler.

  Once ashore, they hurriedly opened it, thinking it was a fisherman's lost six-pack or maybe abandoned porn. Nieko anxiously ripped off the soggy duct tape that sealed the lid and excitedly popped open the top. A cloud of rotten gas sprang up into their wide-open faces. Green sulfurous vapors misted their lips and eyes. Both boys gagged and recoiled back to let the gas clear and then cautiously examined the greasy black bottom of the container.

  Inside were the skeletal remains of a small cat laying in a hairy purplish slime of its own deteriorated flesh and organs. The sealed lining of the closed cooler acted as a pressure cooker for every single byproduct of the cat's death. Thousands of tiny, wriggling maggots squirmed and dragged their way across the slime and dripping bones, discordantly dancing in chaotic ecstasy to the process of organic decay. Nieko could see the faint impressions of a collar under the layers of kitty congealment, the tag unreadable through the film of the hairy jelly that coated it. He will be missed, Nieko barely thought. Disappointed, the boys closed the lid and set the water-resistant tomb back on its journey downstream. Neither one of them ever questioned why someone would lock a cat into a cooler and send it on a pointless journey down a long and winding river.

  Neither of them had cared to know.

  This new death smell clearly wasn’t the sweet, earthy smell of his plants, so Nieko paid no mind. Though the memory of the sarcophagus cat poked at his growing anxiety, he was quick to swat it away. He needed to focus on where he was if they were ever going to find his girls.

  “Just shut up and keep an eye out for a break in the trail. It should be somewhere around here.” Walking slightly ahead of Eric, Nieko intensely surveyed the upcoming ridge just along the right shoulder of thinning tree line. “I think this is it,” Nieko said, spotting the first sign of a trampled path off along the small nestle of butt shaped trees just up ahead. The sighting of those assy elms was his first visual indicator that he was very close. He didn’t remember leaving such deep impressions in the thick weeds the last time he was out here, but quickly dismissed it to optical illusions cast down by the thinning recycled light. He stopped Eric from blindly trotting past the entrance before quietly guiding the way.

  “Bout fuckin' time,” Eric added sourly, the water containers banging noisily around his neck and chest as he quickened his pace to meet Nieko’s. They squinted against the shifting dimness as they cautiously walked off the trail and onto the dark path.

  “When we get in there, make sure you watch where you're walking. Don’t step on any of my plants or I’ll—”

  The words end in a heavy, throated choke as both boys suddenly stopped dead in their tracks. At the end of the short trail, the thin silhouette of a man stood against the loose moonlit circle of tall grey plants with large flat leaves and billowing stalks. A dull red fire glowed hazily from the figure’s right hand as he turned to face the approaching sounds emerging from the mouth of the path. With only twenty feet between the boys and the dark figure, both parties were reluctant to say or do anything for what felt like minutes.

  “Hey, boys. Little late to be out in these parts, wouldn’t ya’ say?” the figure said, his voice low and outwardly amused under the constant droning of the dry, sifting current of moving treetops and heavy branches. The warm breeze blew that strange, putrid stench up their nostrils with each sudden gust. Standing downwind of the tall smoking man, Nieko quietly choked back the chunky slime sluggishly edging its way up his gullet. He and Eric stood transfixed, both hoping that the joint they smoked had been laced and was playing games with their heads. This was exactly what Nieko had been so careful to avoid. He didn’t know how they found out so fast, but he knew he was being busted.

  Strange, though, Nieko thought to himself as the shadowy figure causally closed the distance between them. Where are his pig friends? He doesn’t look like a Border Patrol or a Ranger. What kind of cop is he?

  Suddenly, the dark figure took human shape just a couple feet in front of them and stopped. The man’s large dark-framed glasses shone brightly in the night; two shiny yellow disks with giant, dust filled craters where eyes should have been. Those double moonbeam eyes gazed at them over an insidiously white smile. The man’s face reminded Nieko of the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland. A feline cosmonaut who could suddenly materialize at will.

  “Alright guys. Put down the jugs and get on your knees.”

  Eric and Nieko heard the command, but failed to understand its levity. Both of them were so thoroughly baked and were trying desperately to make sense of what was going on. The amount of effort it took to truly analyze and find any possible way out of the situation had, unfortunately, robbed them of their motor skills. They could think and they could run, but they couldn’t do both at the same time. The cannabis had invaded the active switchboards in their heads and mixed up all the pl
ugs.

  The man stood patiently watching their slack-jawed expressions with an emotionless smile. Suddenly, the dark figure raised his right hand, exposing the hard outline of a handgun. The boys watched helplessly as the man raised the gun and fired a single shot. The bullet hit one of the canteens before ripping through Eric’s sternum, lungs, and spinal cord. All four hits exploded simultaneously, soaking Nieko’s right side as he dropped to the ground and groveled face down in the grass. The realization that this wasn’t a bust had led him to another even scarier scenario.

  He was being robbed.

  Face pressed to the ground, Nieko felt dirt sifting into his lungs with every panicked breath. He coughed and choked out his plea as the tall figure walked over to inspect Eric’s lifeless body. “Take it all! Just please, PLEASE, don’t kill me! I swear I won’t tell anyone!” His steady flow of tears spilled soundlessly onto the crumbling mound of dirt beneath him, each drop of salt evaporating back into the earth from which it came.

  The man bent down and grabbed Eric’s limp legs. “Get up and help me move him over by that tree. If you try to run, I’ll shoot you in the back.” His matter of fact tone picked Nieko up from his knees, and soon Eric’s already cold skin was in Nieko’s numb, shaking hands.

  Convulsing with each step, Nieko struggled with the lopsided weight as he helped move the remains of Toni Pepperoni down the path. His arms and legs surged with adrenaline as he stepped blindly into the night. The dark man solemnly pulled Eric’s legs ahead of Nieko, his gun ever ready in one long Nosferatu hand. They carried the body past the rough circle of tall, bushy plants and stopped in front of a large oak tree with a rusty hatchet spiked into it. The man gestured for Nieko to get back to his knees and then turned to unwedge the hatchet. Nieko watched numbly as the man turned back and tossed the hatchet to the ground a foot from Eric’s corpse.

  “Pick it up and start choppin.” The man flicked his cigarette butt to the ground, stubbing it out with one heavy boot while simultaneously lighting another.

  Seeing now what was coming, Nieko finally broke down. “Why would you kill a kid over some plants?!” he screamed defiantly at the man leering down at him. His usually deep voice reverted to prepubertal squeaks and crackles. “Why can’t you just see how fuckin' wrong this is?!”

  The man flashed another glowing white smile. “Plants?” He glanced over at the cluster of long, budded stems swaying back and forth in slow unison just half a yard from where they now stood. “Ooh, so those are yours, huh? You shouldn't be smokin’ grass, kid. It’s bad for your boys, ya’ know?” Again, his demeanor drastically shifted. “No, little buddy, what’s wrong is that you aren't listening to a fuckin' word I’m saying. You can either nut-up and cut off your buddy’s head, or you can end up like her.” He gestured with the pistol over to a dark patch of ground about ten feet to the right of where he stood.

  There, in an organized pile, were the gangrenous remains of a dismembered girl. Her body had been cut and stacked like cordwood, her head placed at the top like some kind of sick, biologically constructed human pyramid. It was clear now that this was the smell that Eric had been complaining about only moments earlier. Nieko stared in overloaded horror at the sunken eyes of the once youthful face that now dripped and watched over them. Several flat stones forming a rough star formation, with the girl’s parts acting as the central piece, encompassed this teepee of limbs. He noticed the killer had put her long strawberry blonde hair in neat pigtails sometime after dismantling her body.

  “Oh God...Please, sir. If you let me go—”

  The man suddenly leaped onto Eric’s limp body and began stomping its stomach and chest while screaming, “NO! NO! NO! LISTEN TO MEEEEEE!” his voice progressing to the pitch of a hot teakettle. It was an up-close performance of the screeching he had heard just down the hill. Originally, Nieko had assumed the screams he had heard earlier belonged to the dead girl before him. But, judging by the smell, the girl had been dead for a long time now.

  “There are things that exist over us,” the man suddenly said while standing on Eric’s flattened chest. “Not literally over us, like in the sky or space, but superimposed over our reality like laminated paper. Clear and almost untraceable, it acts as a border, and window, for things on the outside. Sometimes, the laminate wears in one corner and begins to peel back, exposing different layers and planes. You dig?”

  Nieko was struck silent by the sudden shift in attitude. It was like the man had mentally switched circuits, channeling another personality from somewhere behind those thick lenses and piercing eyes. He watched as the man stepped down from Eric’s now dented chest cavity and approached the pile of limbs that used to be someone's daughter.

  “I don’t want it to be this way!” he exclaimed, his tone now that of mourning for the little girl whose death he was responsible for. “I tried religion. I tried books. I tried drugs. Nothing keeps them from bleeding through. THEY are all around us right now, and only a fraction of people can really see what’s happening. Our minds and our reality are being raided by these... THINGS. That’s what THEY do, you know. It took me a long time to be able to figure out where they're coming from and why only some of us can see them. But now that I know how to keep them away, things are on the up and up.” That sly, toothy smile then slowly peeled back across his ghoulish face.

  Holy fuck, Nieko thought stonily to himself, he’s worse than the Cheshire Cat; he’s The Doll Man...

  “THEY are the reason for the world's hurt and sorrow. Why do you think most major catastrophic events coincide with the lunar phases of Saturn's moons? It’s no coincidence. This organized chaos on an almost manufactured level occurs too consistently to be chalked up to human rage and disease. THEY only want one thing. Plasmid energy. It’s what they use to travel between dimensions and time. Do you know what plasmid energy is?” He paused, letting the question go unanswered. “We all have it. It’s basically the literal energy inside of you that births consciousness and individual thought. So… a soul.” The man's stance wavered as his breathing grew quick and harsh.

  “If I give them plasmid, they leave my thoughts alone. That’s all I want. Just for my brain to stop whispering and badgering me into DOING THINGS I DON'T WANT TO DOOOO!”

  It was teatime again. Nieko winced against the onslaught of childish screeching. Once again, Eric’s lifeless body became the man's personal punching bag. Kicks and jabs berated the expressionless carbon copy of a living thing who only lay on its back and stared blankly up at the twinkling stars.

  The abuse stopped as the man's attention turned back to Nieko. His voice was streaked with deep loathing. “I'm tired of being a slave to THEM! I’d kill myself, but I don’t know if they’ll let me.” Nieko could hear the layer of despair creeping back into the man's voice. His moods were changing so quickly that he could barely keep up.

  “What if I pull the trigger, and I wake up in THEIR world? Becoming one of THEM, invisibly crawling and biting all over mankind for eons. Sucking out their loose plasmid with those straw-like beaks for another billion lifetimes. Is that what death is? Do we all ascend past the laminate? Do we somehow lose what are thought to be preexisting human qualities along the way, only to stubbornly journey back to this realm to recapture what was once ours? What if there is no Heaven or Hell, but only eternal longing for the essence of genuine human creation? Can you even conceive of an existence void of soul and emotion? Do you understand how awful it would be to have the lingering taste of God on your tongue only to spend eternity failing to recreate the flavor?” He paused nervously as thoughts of the impossible drove him back inside his head.

  Nieko was blindsided by the onslaught of semi-coherent theological ranting and could only slouch numbly and stare at Eric’s corpse. At that moment, he regretted every lie he ever told and didn’t know exactly why. Something inside of him knew that he was going to die.

  Still pacing, the man suddenly stopped and faced the shaking boy. His voice now filled with annoyance. “No. I didn't
think you would. Now pick up that fuckin' hatchet, or else.” The man then raised his gun and pointed it at Nieko’s junk to remind him of the dire consequences of not obeying.

  After getting to his feet, Nieko bent down in what felt like slow motion and picked up the rusty hatchet. His cold fingers soon felt tacky as they loosely gripped the short handle. What he initially confused for rust was the dead girl's blood dried on in thick, gooey layers. He heard his grip stick and peel with each muscle spasm as if his hands were lined with Velcro. The stale smell of pennies soon joined the already pungent stench of death floating around them as Nieko’s head ached with fear.

  He was standing looking at the hatchet in his hand when the man's strong voice scared him back out of his head.

  “Okay. I need you to listen to me. I can either shoot you in the dick and make you watch me pick apart your friend, or you can save me a lot of trouble and cut off his head.” He waited for the options to soak in before adding, “And if you're really good at swinging that thing, I will let you help build the offering.”

  Nieko knew he couldn’t go through with decapitating Eric. Even though he had imagined it many times before, this was for real. Seeing no way out, he acted on pure instinct and blindly heaved the hatchet at the man. The heavy arched swing fully played out in extended frames; fuzzy reels spun back excruciatingly slow. The tightknit veins in his temples furiously pumping blood at irregular speeds muddled all exterior sounds. Each thump thump shook the hazy background of dancing shadows and trees into blurred lines of shaded, grey squiggles. As he felt the weight shift through the short wooden handle and the momentum starting to gain, Nieko put all his might into the downswing. Closing his eyes against the impact, he ground his teeth as the sticky blade touched down. Eyes still clenched, he felt the head pierce through something tender before halting. Bone. It seemed Nieko had lucked out. Thinking he hit the man dead on, he quickly opened his eyes.