I Will Rise

by Michael Louis Calvillo

  2. “Do it,” I hear someone shout. A series of acknowledging cries follow. The room, which looks like an employee locker room with signs that read things like: Customer Satisfaction = Success, is overflowing with people, at least twenty men and women. The floor is littered with about as many dead bodies. The crowd fans around me in a sort of horseshoe shape.

  3. I feel tension around my neck and notice that it too is bound with packing twine. Two men stand to either side of me each holding a thick end of the twine in their eager little hands. I look at one and his eyes widen and I feel pressure around my neck. I do the same with the other and again a little pull tightens things up. I ignore the twine pullers and crane my neck to look behind me at the door. A few heavies stand guard with their arms folded across their barrel chests.

  4. “Charles?” Jim repeats, and I turn my head to find him standing over me. He is holding a nasty-looking meat cleaver in his right hand.

  Full orientation blasts my brain awake, alert, aware, and the world goes seamless, stepping into solid moments. Panic floods. Keep it together. Panic.

  “What’s going on here?” I scream. The bindings, the scary crowd, the big cleaver all set my system on fire with nervousness. I feel tingly (not in a good way). The horseshoe of people (I can’t help feeling like I am five years old, seizing at the mall, waiting for my mommy) chatter and yell and cast dispersions. Jim raises his hands and quiets them down.

  “He claims he doesn’t know.” Jim’s statement is met with more outbursts, but again he settles the crowd. “Seriously.” And before anyone can speak up he continues, “It could be he doesn’t even realize what’s going on. You all saw how he just went into a trance. He was passed out.”

  An ugly man yells, “We still have to kill him!”

  “Of course, we still have to kill him”—Jim taps his head in frustration—“but perhaps we owe him an explanation.”

  I scan the crowd and all of the familiar types are present and although this isn’t a pathetic display of inadequacy like my seizures for instance, it still feels the same. People are still looking at me and they are still thinking basically the same things: I am sorry, poor thing, it’s unfortunate, but no matter because I am so glad I am not you. However, there is a little something different in the mix this time. There’s fear. There’s power. I rather like the additions. I feel like less of a retard. I feel stronger.

  “Charles?” Jim looks at me very solemnly.

  I look up at him and ask why with my eyes. Why Jim? Laying it on. Why? Meanwhile my body slowly, carefully, inconspicuously searches for a way out of these blasted restraints. My mind begins to bubble over with a zillion different thoughts. Is this the end? Is Annabelle pissed at me for being late? The eye wall tries to rise, the newly dead eager to bring me down, but I am way too tense and on edge to let it bother me now. Maybe later (if there is a later).

  Later.

  Work it.

  Let it out.

  I am so scared.

  “Don’t kill me,” I plead.

  “I don’t want to kill you. We don’t want to kill you. Unfortunately, we have no choice.” Jim tightens his grip on the meat clever and looks inadvertently menacing for a moment. “I told you that you wouldn’t regret this and after I tell you what I’ve promised maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll understand why this has to be done.”

  The restraints don’t budge and I get frustrated with my slow, calculated attempts at loosening them. These fools are going to kill me. It doesn’t matter what I say, or what I do at this point, they are really going to kill me. Fear finally pervades, upsetting and overriding every other emotion. I am dead, but they are going to kill me. They are going to kill me and I am so fucking scared. I start to cry and struggle openly with the restraints. The twine pullers assert their control and apply pressure to my neck.

  “I didn’t do anything,” I scream through fist-sized tears.

  “Perhaps not intentionally, Charles, but you are destroying the world. You may or may not understand this, depending on whether you know more than you are willing to tell us, but there is no great dreamer. We are not being dreamed, nor are we threatening some perfect order. Something, somewhere along the line has filled your girlfriend’s head with these lies. She really believes what she tells you but she knows no better. We do. You follow me so far?”

  I think it’s time to change strategies. “I won’t kill anymore,” I say earnestly. “Let me go, let her go and we will disappear.” And we will. If they let me go, to hell with all this shit, I’m getting Annabelle and we are dropping out of civilization.

  “I thought you didn’t know what was going on?” Jim’s face darkens and his eyes narrow. “You had me going there. Not most of them”—he gestures at his associates—“but you had me.”

  I think I just made a mistake. Jim seems kind of upset that I have been lying to him.

  “I’ve been nothing but straight with you, Charles. I was hoping you would have showed me the same courtesy and respect. Obviously you and I are on different moral planes. This is why you are here”—he points at me—“and that’s why I am here”—he points at himself. “Okay, I will be brief, I promised you an explanation and I am a man of my word.”

  I nod, defeated, liar, loser, fuckup. Let’s get this over with.

  “As I was saying, there is no dreamer. There is no human threat. What there is, is death. You are death’s agent, a carrier, and your touch kills.” He gestures to the dead on the ground and then to himself and the others in the room. “We have all been touched and will perish soon, but if we take you with us, we may not rise again. That’s what this is all about. Charles. Life and death. If you succeed, death wins. The dead will rise and the world will lumber on in a perpetual state of dread and horror, no feeling or emotion, just dead people doing dead things. If we succeed, life goes on, providing we can fight off and contain the trouble you’ve already made for us. In exactly thirty-six hours from the moment you killed the canine, roughly a day and half or so away, the dead will rise and walk the earth and try to destroy the living.”

  The crowd looks at me accusingly. Their patience is wearing thin. Jim nods at them.

  “How do you know you’re right? Maybe Annabelle knows the truth,” I contest.

  “Doubtful. We all believe the same thing, Charles. Not because we want to or have an opinion about it, but because it is, and we were chosen to stop it.”

  “Let’s get on with it,” a woman calls out. “Come on. Jim, it’s enough.”

  Jim nods again and draws closer to me. The twine pullers yank hard and my neck constricts.

  “You can’t kill me,” I sputter, “I’m already dead.”

  “True. Hence the cleaver.” He holds up the offending weapon. “We have to dismember you and burn the pieces.” Jim leans in and whispers, “I know you only did what you did because you had to. We all watched your life for some time before this started up and we’ve all grown to love you. Most of us still do. I really don’t want to do this, but please understand I have no choice. I have to. And don’t worry about your girlfriend, she won’t be harmed.”

  He stands up tall, positions the blade close to my left wrist and takes aim. I try with all my might to move my arm, but it remains securely fastened to the table. Jim brings the cleaver up over his head.

  My sweat is flowing like a river. It stings my eyes and runs salty in between my lips. Everything slows down and I can hear the stillness inside myself. I can hear the anti-beat of my frozen heart, the unflow of my thickened blood, the negative whoosh of my death breath. They can’t kill me, I think, they can’t hurt me, I’m already dead.

  Jim starts the downswing and I watch in horror as the cleaver slices through the air. The crowd watches, mouths agape, eyes wide, glistening with anticipation. The blade draws nearer and nearer and I look up at Jim. His eyes are closed and his mouth is a tight grimace. He looks like a dead man, embalmed, stuffed, displayed, funerary suit and all. If this doesn’t work, if fate intervenes in the n
ext millisecond and sets me free, I’ll make sure he does more than just look like a dead man, touched or not—I’ll speed him to his grave. I’ll work my hands into his abdomen and rip his self-righteous heart from his chest.

  The blade splits a hair on my wrist and I bite my lip. I don’t care if I die. I don’t care if they cut me to itty-bitty pieces and melt me down so much as I care about fucking up. Again. Always, eternally fucking up. Why couldn’t I just go to Annabelle’s? Why did I run myself into this mess? Because I am a loser—always have been, always will be. This was my chance to rise, to do something important, to prove that I am more than the sum of my dysfunctional parts. This was my chance.

  The blade bites into my skin and now it’s my turn to close my eyes and grimace. I feel the cleaver driving in, cool and hot and forceful, severing tendons and veins and then cracking through bone, sluicing through gooey marrow, cracking through more bone, shredding more tendons and veins and then ripping out through the other side of my wrist, thunking an inch deep into the table.

  My left hand hops with the impact and rolls free of my arm. It comes to a rest palm up. From the severed mess at its base there is no blood, just a small runoff of thick black fluid. The same dark, viscous fluid pools from my new stump, dead-ending upon and spreading out around the table-embedded cleaver.

  Strangely, none of this hurts. My head feels a little swimmy and my nervousness has been washed out, swabbed and dulled in gauzy numbness.

  Jim pulls at the cleaver, but it’s stuck. He looks at me and I loll my head from side to side lazily. I feel increasingly strange, loose, like a sack of jelly. With a little more effort the cleaver comes free and great gobs of the black slimy shit slowly propels from my arm like a timid, sludgy river.

  “You struck oil,” I slur and giggle.

  What is going on with me? I am no longer scared or worried, I just feel drunk. I feel a great shift take place inside. Not metaphorically or emotionally but physically, a physical reallocation—and my chest rumbles. The cavity shakes and shudders and it feels as though my soul, my inner lining, has swum past my heart.

  “Hurry up,” I hear a sour-faced female onlooker yell.

  Jim moves around to the other side of the table and is preparing to do my other hand when I feel the oddness shiver and shake and travel from my chest to my left shoulder blade. Something is inside of me. It continues, like a wave under my skin, and creeps down the length of my left arm.

  A man in the crowd notices something amiss and takes a step forward. “Jim,” he says quietly and then, “Jim,” again, louder and a little frantic.

  Another crowd member shouts, “His arm!” But it’s too late for anyone to react.

  You know how it feels during those head-spinning moments before you vomit? You know, the world is going round and round and all that’s tainted in your body crowns and bubbles at the top of your throat. Well that is exactly how I feel, except, as weird as this sounds, I feel it in my arm and my wrist as opposed to my throat.

  At the very moment the puke feeling reaches its apex a black cloud settles around my brain. An image, grainy and deep and dark, fills the back of my head: an ocean of people, heads down, an army, a legion.

  The dead are legion.

  Just then, hundreds upon thousands upon millions of tendrils—tubing, capillaries, an explosion of decaying stalklike flagella—shoot from my savaged wrist. They wave and lunge at the terrified crowd, flailing like demon antennae—autonomous, ugly as sin and lethal.

  I stare wide-eyed, unfeeling, unmoving, unbelieving.

  What the hell am I?

  What the hell have I become?

  Instantly, simultaneously: the tendrils eviscerate, amputate and decapitate the entire crowd in about thirty ferociously bloody seconds. It is like the room has been transformed into the chamber of a Cuisinart and I am the blade.

  A few tendrils manage to wrap themselves nice and tight around Jim’s head. His hands splay tense and the meat cleaver drops to the ground, embedding itself in a random, steamy, wet piece of eviscerated flesh. After a few seconds of struggling and thrashing, his body falls atop a growing pile of parts. The tendrils unfurl, releasing Jim’s head, and then rejoining their brethren in the chaotic tumult. The head free-falls and bounces off Jim’s body and rolls away.

  After another few seconds of mess evisceration, the tendrils slow and then fan themselves out and form an organic-fleshy-knobby umbrella over my head. They begin to glow white. The carnage, the mess of broken bodies littering the room, begins to glow as well. The light, from both sources, intensifies and intermingles until the room is washed away.

  I feel the souls of the dead filling my heart.

  The explosion of light dims and my eyes readjust themselves to the standard overhead lighting. The tendrils are gone and my wrist is nothing more than a black-slime-encrusted stump. I think I must be going out of my mind, but the bodies—the pieces, the blood and bones and gushy organelles of what used to be my captors—still paint the room.

  Without my left hand I am able to squeeze my wrist through the leather restraint. I stare into the stump. Nothing. Just rotten flesh and marred bone. My head spins, but I feel normal, not loopy and drunk like a moment ago. I keep trying to process what just happened, but my brain is being stubborn. It is more concerned with getting free and getting to Annabelle where we belong.

  I work at my restraints, utilizing my stump as best I can. It takes me a good twenty minutes, but at last I am free. First instinct is to run and I am halfway out the door when I see a sign that reads Proper Grooming is Essential – Appearance is the Cornerstone of a Successful Operation followed by two columns listing recommended grooming standards for men and women.

  No kidding. I look myself over in an accompanying mirror, one of those cheap jobs made from thick paper and some sort of reflective coating. As usual I am a fucking mess. Eddie’s mom’s green T-shirt is covered with all kinds of crap, as are her sweatpants. I’m not a clean freak, but enough is enough. Besides, maybe the sign speaks the truth. Appearance is the Cornerstone of a Successful Operation. Indeed. I like that. I wrinkle my nose and squint my eyes and sort through the human wreckage until I locate Jim’s headless body. The suit, save for a soiled collar and a stain here and there, still looks pretty good.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Murder, Torture, Control: Something Like Love

  Outside of the store, I can’t stop looking over my shoulder.

  Paranoia spikes, the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up straight, and nervous heat blossoms in my head. Adding to the distress, the great eye wall pushes and struggles and fights for control of my brain.

  “Fuck off!” I scream, head down, and fast-walk to a row of pay phones adjacent to the store.

  Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off, but the slimy little orbs blink and climb and glisten with accusatory menace. I shake my head from side to side vigorously.

  There’s no need for paranoia now, nervous justification, because like always everybody really is watching me, like always everybody is staring at the freak. A parking lot full of lookie-lookies crane their necks and raise their eyebrows and tweak their ears. Quick everybody, look at the fidgety freak in the suit.

  “Fuck off!” I yell again, more for the gawking onlookers than the headful of eyes. I swing my arms wildly and put off the crazy vibe: stay away, stay away, stay away, stop staring. I gotta get out of here. To hell with the bus or asking the opposing public for directions, I’m calling a cab and getting curbside service to Annabelle’s house.

  Reaching for the pay phone receiver my new stump is zero help. I pick up the phone with my right, cradle it in my neck and dial 0. The operator, indiscriminate and friendly, connects me with a local cab company. Another operator, also indiscriminate and friendly, answers, “Speedy Cab, how may I help you?” I tell her I am the nicely dressed man in a huge hurry. The cab receptionist says she’ll have somebody right out.

  Standing on the curb, I let out a long sigh. I am long overdue for
a little pensive time. I’ve been running, running, running, since Eddie’s abduction and there hasn’t been much time for thinking beyond the hectic immediacy of these never-ending hectic moments. Once I get to Annabelle’s I am going to request a day off. I hope she will understand. Just one day locked away in a hotel room, allowing my thoughts to catch up.

  The paranoid feeling creeps on yet again. I fight it for five solid minutes—leave me the fuck alone, leave me the fuck alone, leave me the fuck alone. In the end it gets the best of me and I turn to investigate, the heat and worry picking at my cognition. Sure enough a small grouping of store employees and customers are pointedly watching me. They stand in a loose circle whispering and gesturing. When I widen my eyes and look at them with exaggerated dramatics, they avert and pretend to be doing anything but congregating and discussing someone’s demise, probably mine, maybe theirs, what with the way they cautiously keep their distance. Someone has seen the mess in the employee break room by now. Their anxiousness to capture me and cut me into tiny benign pieces has been curbed, and rightly so; if anyone moves on me, I won’t hesitate to fuck them up.

  I hold up my stump (it still hasn’t sunk in. My gimp hand—ruiner, fuckup, death bringer—is gone. It’s really gone. I suppose it will hit me soon enough) in an attempt to flip them off. By the time I realize the hand is no longer there, there is no time to bring up my right and finish the job. A taxicab with the words Speedy Cab emblazoned on its side, pulls up to the curb. Damn, that was speedy. The cab honks.

  The horn is a blaring, obnoxious, unnecessary thing that startles me hyperalert. I forget the staring grocery store group and whip around. The cabdriver stares straight ahead and honks his horn again. Not a polite little honk either, oh no, this guy lays into it, holding his horn for a good ten seconds. I’m right here, I see him, and even though he keeps staring straight ahead, another bit of rudeness, I know he sees me. I know he knows I am his customer.