At the Gates of Madness

by Shaun Meeks

  “What the fuck was that?” Mark said in near hysterics and James couldn’t find the words to respond to him. He had no idea what he had just seen, but he was sure that it meant one thing.

  “We’re fucked.”

  The newscasters at CP24 went on to say how there were more cracks appearing all over the globe, and with them, more of these monsters were coming out. They went to feeds in different countries and showed more of the same images. James felt coldness in his stomach that he didn’t like at all. They had continued to watch until the reporters introduced to guests that began debating with each other on what all of it could mean. One was a scientist who claimed that something older than the dinosaurs had been breeding near the earth’s core for millennia, and was now just surfacing, while the second guest, a Roman Catholic scholar claimed that the creatures were the God’s wrath in their physical form. James thought that both were idiots and had no idea what the hell was going on any more than he did and decided not to waste his time, possible the last hours of his life, watching some talking heads ramble about useless points. No matter what the things were, the whole situation meant one thing, the end was at hand.

  James shut off the television, went to his room and pulled out his stash which included four ounces of weed, eight grams of mushrooms, five Oxycontin and one vial of hash oil. Not enough for him or both of them to overdose on, but it was enough for them to at least enjoy the last few hours of their lives.

  An hour later, as James stood looking down at the chaos building below him, people now knowing that those dark creatures had spread worldwide and would no doubt fall on the city before long, the mushrooms were kicking in and James began to smile to himself. He wished he was sitting on the couch playing Zelda or watching his tapes of Pee Wee’s Playhouse or The Adventures of Mark Twain as he usually did when using hallucinogenic, but how was he going to enjoy any of that with the world ending outside? He doubted there were enough drugs in the world that would make what was going on outside more acceptable.

  “You sure you don’t want to see what’s going on? Maybe the army dudes are kicking their asses and shit.” Mark said holding the converter. “Not our military of course, the U.S. army. They at least have nukes and tanks and helicopters. Some real Call of Duty shit. All our shit is that hand-me-down stuff that sinks and crashes.” Mark laughed the way only really high people can, sounding more like a dullard than he normal would and James walked over to him.

  “Nah, screw the news. Let’s listen to some tunes.”

  James turned on his stereo and put on some Black Flag, then sat back down beside Mark. While Henry Rollins screamed about how he wanted to be given some more, James began to ponder things.

  “So this is it, man, the end of it all. Kind of feels like I wasted my whole life. I did all this shit, went to school, refrained from stealing, beating the hell of people, killing anyone, and why? To die in this shitty apartment, high as fuck without anything to do? We don’t even have broads here so at least we can end this on a good note. That’s the way I always wanted to go you know, elbow deep in some hot girl so I wouldn’t even know what was going on. Die cumming.”

  “Well…”

  “Don’t even suggest it, Mark. I ain’t into no butthole pleasures or circle jerks. I meant more like having a girl here, better yet someone I have been dating for a while and actually care about. If I just wanted the sex, I could just go out and rape someone. We’re all dead anyway, so jail wouldn’t matter at this point.”

  “You want to?”

  “What? Go rape some girl? Hell no, idiot. I’m just saying that we could at this point because it really wouldn’t matter.”

  “So why don’t we? I mean, I could go for some trim too, and if this is really the end, I’d rather die hip deep in some hot skank than sitting here with you listening to your shitty music that you think is good.”

  “Bite me, fan boy! Black Flag is great. Would you rather I put on some fucking Nickelback or one of the fifty thousand other crappy bands that sound like them? To hell with that, and just forget going out and raping some girl, you fucking ‘tard. The fact that you even suggest it as a good idea shows me how messed up you really are, Mark. Try putting yourself in her shoes. She knows she is going to die, that some fucked up shadowy thing is coming to kill her and while she is trying to get away and survive, here comes Mark Trent with his curved banana dick to make her last moments on this planet a living hell. Way to go.”

  James watched as Mark sank back into the couch, visibly defeated.

  “You have a point. I doubt I could do it anyway. I have a hard enough time with girls that want it a bit rough, never mind me having to be all aggressive and shit. But dude, is this what we are really going to do? Just sit here, listen to music and trip balls while we wait to die?”

  “What do you suggest? Want to go for a stroll along the beach, and then go see a movie, have dinner and end up in bed together?” Laughing, James punched Mark’s arm lightly, not wanting to admit to himself or his friend how terrified he was by the whole situation. He had done all the drugs he had to avoid thinking about how he was going to die, sooner than later, that the whole world was about to end. He wished he was so high that he could just spend his last hours or even minutes laughing his ass off, not giving a shit to what was going to happen to him or anyone else.

  It wasn’t working though.

  “I’m not suggesting that, but I ain’t even close to high enough to not think about all of this crap, man. I’m kind of freaking out and just want to stop worrying about what those things are or what is going to happen to me. I mean, when those people disappeared, do you think they dies instantly, or do you think they’re like food and just being slowly absorbed inside those things. What if you stay alive for years, man? What if it takes like ten years to finally die in them, that they just melt you away and shit? I don’t want to go out like that.”

  James hadn’t really thought of it that way, hadn’t even made an attempt to wrap his head around the possibility that death wasn’t instantaneous. He began imagining what it would be like to die that way, like being burned away slowly, something close to what it would feel like to have battery acid being poured over your skin day after day, skin blistering, erupting and corroding away from your bones, the entire time you feel every painful second of it. He had once had two AA batteries exploded unnoticed in his jeans pocket one day in school, the corrosive liquid seeping out of the battery and made his leg only itch a bit at first. As the itching increased and became a painful stinging burn, he had asked permission and went to the bathroom to see what was wrong. What he had found was a burn the size of a ping pong ball on his upper thigh, near his groin. The wound had been oozing puss already and he had been sent to the hospital for fear that the poisonous liquid had found its way into his blood stream. It had turned out to be fine, but the feeling of the acid slowly burning his leg never left him and he was sure that if he ended up in the darkness, it could very well be a similar feeling. Melted away slowly, like some bacon in a human stomach.

  Or maybe their insides were not human like at all. Instead of stomach acid, they could have little parasites inside that slowly ate and broke down the flesh of what they ate, chewing off only small chunks of flesh and muscle at a time. Maybe the parasites need to turn what they ate into a liquid form that they then regurgitated back into their host, giving the shadow creature the nutrition that it needed to live. James could visualize it in his head and the thought terrified him, but he kept his mouth shut so that he didn’t cause Mark to panic any more than he already was.

  “Will you kill me?”

  James turned to Mark, surprised by the sudden question and saw that his friend was crying. He had known Mark since they went to grade school together, meeting in grade four or five, the exact time he couldn’t remember, but it had been at least nine or ten years since they had first met. In that time, the two had been almost inseparable; people had nicknamed them the Boppsey Twins because they were always together. They
would go to parties together, lost their virginity at the same party, backed each other up in fights, took all the same classes throughout high school and were looking to get into the same career. In all the years he had known Mark, he had never seen the guy cry, not even when Mark had severed part of his finger when he had put his hand through a window that had metal mesh inside it. He had simply gritted his teeth and told James to call 911.

  Seeing him crying, asking to be killed as a steady stream of tears poured from his eyes hurt him more than he would have ever expected.

  “Please. I don’t want to die inside one of those things, or even see them coming at me at all. I’m scared and the ‘shroom and shit aren’t helping me at all, dude. I can see it even more clearly and I’m freaking out, man.”

  “What the fuck? Why are you asking me? I don’t know if I can. Why can’t you just jump off the balcony?”

  “I couldn’t, I don’t have the balls for that.”

  “So you think I have the balls to kill you? Jesus, Mark!”

  Mark jumped up from the couch and stormed to the kitchen like a kid being sent to his room and when he came back, he had a butcher knife in his hand. He slammed it down on the coffee table, scaring the roach that had returned unnoticed to the fallen Cheetos.

  “Just do this for me, James. Please.”

  “Look, dude, you’re high and not thinking right. You have no idea how things are going to go, if we are going to live or die. Maybe we’ll be like those guys in The Stand or The Walking Dead and we’ll be the survivors that live on to do amazing shit. I’m not going to kill you.”

  “Do you really want to be like those guys? They go through hell, man. And when you think about it, they only prolong the inevitable anyway. How long can you run? How long do you think food would actually last? Even canned food goes bad eventually and then you are left with nothing. My cardio is shit, dude, and I’m not sure I could go too long without smokes, dope or some booze. This is just the way I want it. Please help me here.”

  James looked away from his crying friend to the knife lying on the table like the elephant in the room. He had never killed anything in his life bigger than a bug. He had lived in a house once in the High Park area that had a mouse problem, but refused to use traps or poisons to deal with them, instead he bought a cat, knowing that the scent would scare the little rodents off, and he hated cats.

  He had wanted to kill people before, sometimes in school fantasized about harming some bully that had picked on him, teasing him because his mom had sent him to school on picture day wearing a three piece suit or because she made him wear bell bottom corded pants ten years after they had gone out of style. Fantasies were one thing; killing his best friend of almost ten years was something else entirely.

  At the same time, how could he deny his friend what he seemed to want so badly? He was obviously terrified as to what might happen if the things they saw on television did in fact come this way, and there was little doubt that they would. James was afraid himself the possibility, but not so much that he would ask Mark to kill him. He would rather jump to his death, having a heart attack long before he crashed to the ground, than ask to be stabbed to death.

  “Do this for me, James.” Mark picked the knife up from the table and held the handle towards his friend. “You’re my best friend; you’re the only person that means anything to me. Don’t make me do it myself.”

  James looked at the knife; it seemed to look back at him, accusing him of being selfish, a fake friend. He wondered if he could do it as he took the blade into his hand, it’s weight seeming greater than it had the day before when using it to cut a frozen pizza he had made for dinner. The extra weight was brought on by the gravity of the situation.

  “I would have done the same for you, but I asked first,” Mark laughed and wiped tears from his cheeks with the back of his hand. “Which way do you think would be faster? Slit my throat or right through the heart? You watch all the horror movies, so I’ll leave it up to you.”

  Mark closed his eyes, leaning back while James looked from him to the knife and back. He had watched plenty of horror movies in his life, but that really didn’t mean much to him. Before having sex for the first time he had watched plenty of porn, but that didn’t make him much of an expert in those matters any more than watching movies by Lloyd Kaufman and Frank Henenlotter made him an expert in killing his best friend. He tried to picture the best way he could go about it, if there really was a good way to murder someone, then stood up, deciding it would be better to slit Mark’s neck that to stab him in the chest, hoping to hit his heart. James knew where the heart was, pretty much, but he also knew that it was covered by a breast bone that he would have to go through as well and wasn’t all that confident that he had the strength to go through it. The thought of cut his best friend’s throat, of watching him choke and bleed out required a whole different kind of strength, the mental seeming so much harder than the physical. He sat the knife down on the table and turned back towards the window.

  “I don’t know if I can do it. Either way seems too much, man.”

  “Are you serious? After everything I’ve done for you, you won’t do this for me? Remember how I covered your ass for you when Sheryl thought you were cheating on her? You were, but I lied time and time again so that she never found out. I also had your back when those dicks at school came after you with baseball bats. I have the scar to prove it. If you want, I can go on, but you know you fucking owe me.”

  James turned back to Mark who had picked up the butcher knife again and was holding it out to his friend; smiling though he seemed to still be tearing up. He knew that Mark was right, that he did owe his friend in so many ways, owed the guy that had stood beside him, back him up and covered for him every day that they had known each other. The thought though of paying back his friend by killing him was not an easy thing for him to grasp and agree to. He took the knife from Mark’s hand and stared at his reflection in the blade.

  He didn’t like what he saw, the eyes of a man accusing him of being a false friend and a potential murder, the conflicting thoughts pounding through him and he lowered the blade to his side, not wanting to look any more.

  Then the building felt as though it was alive, swaying, the floor raising and lowering, feeling as though it were pulsating and from the window came the sounds of screams and things crashing and the room filling with echoes of explosions from outside. James knew right away what it was, without having to look, that the earth had opened up and whatever was attacking the rest of the world, what they had seen on the television was now on them. He had never felt an earthquake before, but knew that was what he had just felt and that those things would be rising up soon enough.

  He looked at Mark who was leaning back on the couch, his eyes still closed; waiting for James to do what he needed him to do, what he had begged him to do. Without wanting to think about it anymore, trying to weigh the morality of what he had finally decided as he was afraid that all he was going to do was to continue to talk himself out of what needed to be done, James walked over to Mark and swiped the blade as fast as he could across his friend’s throat. He looked at Mark who’s eyes popped open suddenly, a strange look on his face as though he had just heard a strange sound and was trying to figure out the source. There was no blood coming from his throat and James wondered if maybe he didn’t end up cutting the skin at all. He thought he had felt some resistance when the knife had gone near Mark’s throat, but that could have been his own hesitation.

  “You okay?” He asked and Mark didn’t say anything, just began to open his mouth, looking like a beached fish, his eyes wide. “Dude, say something. You’re freaking me out right now.”

  Instead of words coming out, blood began to pour out of the slit in his throat. The skin separated and crimson liquid poured like a waterfall from it. Mark grabbed at the wound, as though he wanted it to stop, like he had changed his mind when it was too late. He jumped up from the couch, slamming into James and knocking him to
the floor. James hit hard, dropping the knife, but didn’t care because he was too busy watching Mark run around wildly, groaning and covering the apartment in gore. Blood oozed out from between his fingers that were clenching his throat and was painting the floor, making it slick so that when Mark began to retrace his steps his slipped and slid in the red mess. James stood up and ran to his friend in hopes of making him sit and calm down, but how do you tell someone that knows they are about to die to chill out and let it happen? He knew that Mark had made the choice to die, had begged for it, but Mark was obviously terrified and James had to do something to help him.

  He grabbed hold of Mark’s arms, his eyes going straight to the blood even though he had told himself not to, felt an almost magnetic pull towards the mess. He could smell the coppery blood that poured out as his friend made strange, gurgling cries and wished he could do something to help him, wished he could take back what he had done. Even though it was what Mark had wanted, it didn’t make things any easier to deal with. He thought that maybe if he had done all the drugs; eating the mushrooms, taking the Oxy and smoking all the weed, maybe he wouldn’t have done helped kill his friend. If he wasn’t high and the world wasn’t going to hell in a hand basket, maybe James would have been killing Mark in Mortal Kombat instead of killing him for real.

  James let go of his friend then, and went back down to the fallen knife and scooped it up. He had started this for Mark, had done what his friend had asked of him and he knew that he had to finish it. He turned back to Mark who was again running around as though he was going to find some way to stop bleeding, a look of pure panic in his eyes.