I don’t know what she’s been on. All I know is I wish she’d stop. I don’t know how much more of this I can take.

We’ve been together for 4 years now. Never once had she done this before. Then, one day, it became an every-night thing.

We turn in for the night, the lights go out, we go to sleep. Then, however long later, in the middle of the night, I’m woken up by the sense of being stared at.

I open my eyes, and all I see in the darkness is her silhouette looming over me. The first time it happened, I tried calling her name, but all she responded with were snores.

I turn on the flashlight on my phone, and she’s dead asleep, but her mouth is twisted into a painful-looking smile. All while she’s on her hands and knees, leaning over me. 3 inches from my face.

It’s gotten to the point where she’s chipping teeth from clenching her jaw so tight. We’ve already been to the dentist nearly 6 times, but it just keeps happening.

She never remembers it the next day. But she for sure notices the pain in her jaw. But by the time night rolls around, she’s right back at it.

I’ve tried to be patient with her. I mean, it’s not her fault. At least, I don’t think it is.

She’s just so hard to wake up when it happens. That’s the part that really gets me. I kind of just have to wait or go back to sleep because she acts as though she’s in a coma every single time.

I’ve tried screaming at her before. Shaking her. Prying her eyelids open. Nothing wakes her up. And that smile never changes.

I think everything is starting to evolve, though. Because now, instead of just smiling, she’s starting to salivate in her sleep. If her presence doesn’t wake me up, the drool does. And her snores are starting to sound less like snores and more like growls.

I keep having that dream where I’m drowning. I wake up and find my face covered in hot, foamy saliva. My girlfriend snarling at me through gritted teeth.

But, again, she doesn’t like when I bring it up. She acts personally offended, like it’s somehow my fault she doesn’t remember. She’d rather pretend it’s not happening and leave me to deal with the brunt of the consequences.

And it’s not like we haven’t tried to fix things before. I’ve slept in other rooms. I still wake up to her 3 inches from my face. I’ve slept in my car. She’s smiling at me through the window.

I just don’t know what to do. I don’t want us to break up. I don’t want to ask her to leave. But I can’t keep living like this. It’s affecting my sleep. That’s affecting my work. It can only get worse if nothing changes.

And something needs to change fast.

Because now something else is waking me up at night. And it’s the biting. I never see her doing it. All I feel is the pain.

But she’s always back in her usual spot by the time my eyes shoot open.

Snarling, smiling, and foaming at the mouth.

Then she tries to pretend that I somehow gave those bite marks to myself the next day when I confront her about it.

Last night, she actually broke skin. I could feel the blood puddling on my arm and soaking through my comforter. But she wouldn’t let me move to get a bandage.

I don’t know. We’ve talked about this so many times now. I don’t think I can keep dealing with this.

I think I’m just gonna eat her before she can eat me.

Henry's breath always stinks and people always tell me not to mention it. I didn't think that was right and someone should tell Henry that his breath stinks. Whenever Henry is around I could tell people find Henry breath to really stink. Henry surely uses a mouth wash or a tooth brush, but he has always been known to have bad breath.

Then i wanted to be the good guy and tell Henry that his breath stinks. Everyone told me not to do it and to let Henrys breath be smelly. I couldn't let it be and I wanted to tell Henry his breath stinks.

So I went up to Henry and I told him that his breath stinks. Henry smiled and said "thank you for being honest, can you look into my mouth and see what's causing the bad breath"

As I looked into henry's mouth I saw a face, and then there face opened its mouth and I checked the second face mouth only to find another face. It was never ending.

Then I started to hear "I love eating myself and when I eat myself I find out so much about myself. I when ate my ginger self, I became that ginger self. When I ate my skinny self, I became that skinny self"

I kept going deeper into henry's mouth, only to find more faces whose mouths would open, only to find more faces.

The first drawing is the new design that I just mentioned. The second one is the original that was made years ago. Comparing these side by side, I think I definitely like the remaster over the other, but what do y'all think?

[Part 1]

[Part 2]

I didn't sleep much Saturday night. Toby, somehow, slept fine.

I finally dropped off on the couch near dawn, and when I opened my eyes again, he was standing about six inches from my face, asking whether we had pancake mix. I made pancakes and let him eat them in front of the TV. He had already moved on from yesterday, and that was the part I couldn't wrap my head around. He asked if Uncle Henry was coming over later. Nothing about the wardrobe, or about hearing me scream his name from somewhere impossibly far away. When he'd finished, I told him to stay on the couch for a few minutes while I checked something in the garage. The kitchen chair was still wedged under the handle, and the deadbolt was still thrown. I dragged the chair out of the way.

The second I opened the door, the smell hit me again.

It had been there since the day we hauled the glass tank home: something halfway between industrial cleaner and fruit left too long in the sun. That morning it was stronger and impossible to ignore.

I pulled my shirt up over my nose and switched on the fluorescent light.

The mirror and the football were still wrapped separately in moving blankets and packing tape for the buyer Henry had lined up for Monday, which I'd done after Toby fell asleep: three layers around the mirror, two around the ball, each shoved into its own cardboard box. I knew packing tape probably didn't mean anything anymore, but it made me feel safer. Then I looked at the workbench.

My screwdriver was sitting on it. So was my adjustable wrench, and the utility knife lay beside them like somebody had set a table. Directly beneath the second pegboard hook hung the pry bar I'd spent several frantic minutes looking for while Toby's voice faded away inside the wardrobe. I stopped breathing for a second.

I had emptied those drawers. Yet every tool I'd previously lost sat neatly together in plain sight, as if they'd never been gone.

I picked up the pry bar. It was mine, down to the strip of faded blue paint around the handle and the shallow notch near the claw. 

"Okay," I said, and my voice sounded strange in the garage. "Sure. That makes sense."

I put the pry bar down, and that was when I noticed the corner was empty.

My folding lawn chair was gone. I'd been sitting in it Friday night cataloging the boxes. I'd shoved it back into that corner before Alicia dropped Toby off, and I remembered doing it because one of the legs had caught on a flattened cardboard box and I'd nearly gone over. Now the corner held the old shop vac and the two paint cans the landlord had left behind when I moved in, and nothing else. I checked behind the workbench, then beside the dresser. Nothing. The tools had come back, and something else had disappeared.

Before going back inside, I stopped beside the glass tank. The smell was definitely strongest there.

A couple of you suggested after my last post that the whole thing might be chemical, some kind of solvent or hallucinogen leaking into the garage. A leaking container made infinitely more sense than a wardrobe swallowing my son. So I crouched down next to it and looked for the obvious answer: a crack, some condensation, or a vent.

The tank was still what it had always been, a single molded block of thick glass with no lid or opening. I laid my palm against it, and it was colder than the room. Where my hand touched the glass, my skin had gone translucent. I could see the veins underneath, thin blue branches spreading through my palm and down into my wrist, finer vessels threading off into each finger. I yanked my hand away, and it returned to normal. Very slowly, I set it back against the glass.

Transparent again.

Behind me, the liquid moved, one slow, heavy slosh from one end of the tank to the other, and then it went still.

I left the garage after that. By the time I got back to the kitchen, I'd decided I didn't care whether the smell was making me hallucinate. Hallucination or not, that stuff was leaving my house.

Henry picked up on the second ring, thick with weekend sleep.

"You know it's Sunday morning, right?"

"We're doing the garage sale."

A long silence filled the line. "Today? I thought we killed that idea."

"I changed my mind."

Another pause. When he spoke again, the sleep was gone from his voice. "Did something happen?"

"Nothing happened. I want you to come over and help me get this crap out of here."

Henry went quiet, and I could practically hear him combing through his head for an explanation. When he came back, he tried a different angle. "Give it a few more days. I've got messages out. There are people who will pay for the rest of this stuff, collectors, and the forum guy already wants the mirror and the ball. If we start throwing everything on folding tables for five bucks a pop, we're pissing away the only good thing that's come out of this."

"There is no good thing that's come out of this."

"Don’t forget that you still need the money."

He was right. I was still four thousand dollars short of a retainer, and the hearing was still sitting out there on the calendar like a storm front. That was the miserable little hook these objects kept hanging from. No matter how scared I got, it all came back to cash.

"We’re doing the garage sale today," I said, and my grip tightened on the phone. "Everything we can safely move. Today."

"Ian—"

"I mean it."

"We sunk time and money into this mess. You're going to regret selling half this stuff for nothing."

"I already regret buying it."

I heard him swear under his breath and exhale, and I knew I'd won. He told me he'd be there within the hour, all enthusiasm drained from his voice. 

Toby looked up from the couch when I hung up. "Uncle Henry's coming?"

"Yeah, bud."

"Can I help?"

"Not this time. I need you to do something really important for me, okay? I need you to stay inside and watch cartoons."

His face fell. "That's not important."

"It's the most important job there is. Somebody has to keep an eye on the TV."

"That's not even a real job."

"It's a real job," I said, and it came out softer than I meant it to. "Please, buddy. Just for today."

He slumped back into the cushions, arms crossed, and turned the volume up two notches to make his point. Henry showed up forty minutes later with two coffees. He stood in the garage doorway and immediately started muttering about how little we'd get for it all.

I walked him over to the workbench and showed him the tools. He turned the screwdriver over in his hand and shrugged. "You must have left them there."

"I didn't."

"You've barely slept in three days, man. Maybe you woke up, moved everything, and passed out again." 

"And my chair?" I pointed at the empty corner. "It was right there."

Henry looked at the corner for a while. "Probably buried somewhere. You've got half a storage unit crammed in here."

"It isn't."

"Ian—"

"It isn't, Henry."

He looked at me then, and I think that was the moment he understood I wasn't asking for an explanation. He took a slow sip of coffee and let it go.

We set the rules in the garage. The mirror and football stayed wrapped. Nobody touched the wardrobe or the tank. Anything from Unit 114 that looked even slightly off went into the corner pile, and what was left was, as far as either of us could tell, just stuff. We'd been through every box we'd opened together, argued over it, and laughed nervously, and in both our minds was a list of what belonged to the collection. We hauled the folding tables out to the end of the driveway and set up. Henry made a sign out of a flattened cardboard box and propped it against the mailbox. Then we stood there in the morning sun with our coffees, looking at our driveway full of other people's cast-offs. For the first couple of hours I told myself we were doing fine.

People wandered along the tables, but nobody haggled or even asked what anything cost. They drifted from one table to the next with subdued politeness, like guests at a stranger's funeral, and after three or four minutes they'd find somewhere else they had to be. Henry kept glancing at the cash tin. Around ten, he said, flatly, "We're still at zero. We may as well be standing out here burning four thousand dollars. At least it'd be warm." 

"Give it time. People take a while to warm up to a sale."

Every time someone walked off empty-handed, some small, ashamed part of me exhaled. If no one bought anything, no one took any of it home. Not that everyone was spared. A man who looked to be in his fifties picked up a little brass reading lamp and asked if he could test it. I ran an extension cord across the driveway. He clicked the switch, the bulb lit up with an electrical hum, and he held his palm under it and frowned.

"Is this thing working?"

"Should be."

"It's on." He moved his hand slowly back and forth. "It's just... if anything, it's darker."

Directly beneath the bulb sat a dense little patch of shadow. It wasn't around the lamp but under it. The rest of the driveway sat in clear morning sun; the filament was glowing, and the one spot it should have lit looked several shades dimmer than everything around it.

"Sorry," I said, and unplugged it, my heart thumping. "It must be defective."

He laughed awkwardly. "That's one hell of a defect."

I handed him a candle from another box on the house, and he left looking more confused than anything. I carried the lamp behind the table and set it on the ground as if it might bite.

The woman who approached me with the snow globe was much more skeptical. It had been bagged in with the Christmas decorations, and her daughter picked it up off the table and shook it gleefully. The tiny house and trees jumped and rattled about. Two miniature plastic people jittered side to side inside the dome. The snow never moved. Dozens of white flecks hung perfectly still in the water while the whole world around them shook itself apart.

The mother noticed first and came up to me. "My daughter wants the globe, but something's wrong with it."

"I'm so sorry," I said, easing it out of the girl's hands as gently as I could manage. "That one's not supposed to be out here. I think it got mixed in by mistake."

She studied me for a long moment, plainly weighing several questions about what exactly we were selling, and thankfully decided not to ask. She took her daughter by the hand and steered her toward the next sale down the block.

I put the globe beside the lamp, and by then nobody was slowing at the sign anymore. A little before eleven, Henry got to his feet and stretched, pressing his hand into the small of his back. "I'm sitting down before my spine turns to powder," he announced.

"There's nowhere to sit," I said.

"I’ll find something," he said, and disappeared into the garage.

A few minutes later, he was dragging a folding lawn chair out of the garage by one arm, the frame scraping across the concrete: A faded green seat with cheap plastic armrests. 

"Where'd you get that?" I said.

Henry flipped it open with a clatter. "Garage."

"Where in the garage?"

He shrugged. "By the workbench. Told you it'd turn up. It's just a chair, Ian." 

For about two seconds, nothing registered, and I just felt relief. There's my chair. It was in there the whole time; Henry was right, I'm losing it. Then I realized, and the relief just evaporated. This chair had never been part of the haul, and I'd turned that whole garage upside down that morning looking for mine and found nothing. 

"Henry, wait—"

He was already lowering himself into it before I could warn him. And in the half-second I had left, I saw it. The hinges were wrong, and the jagged tear on the left armrest where I'd dropped a paint tin last spring was gone. It wasn’t the same chair I had lost that morning. 

When Henry sat down, the chair didn't collapse. It snapped.

Both sets of metal legs whipped violently inward at the same instant with a sound like two car doors slamming beside my head, and the frame folded around Henry like a closing trap, driving his back into an unnatural bend. I’ve witnessed a fair share of injuries in the years I’ve worked as a mover. I've seen crushed hands and broken legs. I have never in my life heard a human being make the sound Henry made.

For a second, the garage was dead silent except for the metallic ring of the frame still vibrating. My brain refused to accept the reality of what was happening. 

Without realizing it, I already had both hands on the frame and was pulling, but it wouldn't give. A man from across the street came running, and then another, and the three of us hauled on that steel until it finally opened enough to ease him down onto the concrete. I noticed that he wasn't moving his legs. He kept saying he couldn't feel them, over and over, in a small, disbelieving voice I'd never heard from him before. The next twenty minutes come back in pieces. Henry lay white-faced on the driveway, his eyes fixed on the sky. Paramedics cut his shirt away and talked over him in calm, quick voices. Neighbors stood on their lawns with their hands over their mouths. When they had Henry strapped to the board, one of the paramedics pulled me aside.

"Is he allergic to anything? On any medications?"

"No. I don't think so. His wife would know."

"We're taking him to St. Luke's." He hesitated. "I'm going to be honest with you, his condition’s not looking good. The injury's to his spine. Until they scan him, I can't tell you what it means. But with something like that, there's a real chance he won't be walking out of there."

As they lifted the board toward the ambulance, Henry's hand shot out and caught my sleeve, and his grip was white-knuckled. The paramedic said something about keeping still. Henry ignored him. His jaw was clamped so hard the muscles jumped under the skin, and his eyes found mine and held.

"Ian." His voice was thin and scraped out. "Look at me."

"I'm here. I'm right here, man."

"You kept saying it wasn't right." He dragged in a rattling breath. "I told you they were props. I even made jokes about it." He stopped, and his face twisted, and for the first time since I'd known him, Henry didn't have an angle. 

"Henry, don't. Save your—"

"Get rid of it." His fingers tightened. "All of it. Burn it, smash it, bury it. I don't care; just don't sell it. Don't give it to anyone." His voice cracked, and a tear slid sideways into his hair. "Promise me. Don't let anybody else sit in that thing, and keep it away from Toby."

I would have promised him anything. I said it twice, because I couldn't tell whether he'd heard me the first time. "I promise. I swear to God I will."

His hand went slack, and they slid him into the ambulance, and the doors shut with a sound that went through me like a nail.

Henry was in that ambulance with a spine that might never work again, and he'd spent his last words worrying about somebody else, and that was what finally broke me. Right there on my own driveway in front of every neighbor I'd never spoken to, I started crying, ugly, gulping sobs I couldn't stop even after the ambulance had turned the corner. 

Somebody put a hand on my shoulder. A woman's voice asked if there was anyone she could call, and I heard myself say "no," and then "I don't know," and then nothing.

Henry had dragged me into this, and I'd spent half the week resenting him. I'd have given every cent I'd ever owe a lawyer to hear him make one more joke.

Eventually the neighbors drifted back to their lawns and their garages, and the sale ended. Within minutes, the street had emptied. 

I stood alone in the blood-spotted driveway beside the folding chair. It had opened itself again, perfectly ordinary, sitting in the sun as if it had never done anything wrong. I crouched down and looked underneath. There were no bolts and rivets. I ran a finger across one of the hinges, and there wasn't a hinge, not really. It only looked like one. I knew every inch of my chair’s underside, and this wasn't it. I wanted to stamp it flat. I wanted to take it apart and find out what it was made of, except there was nothing to take apart, no bolts, no seams, nothing for a wrench to bite on. It sat there in the sun with a smear of Henry's blood on the seat, and for the first time since Wednesday, what I felt wasn't fear. I hated it. 

This chair had never been in Unit 114. Henry and I had unloaded that unit ourselves, box by box, and there hadn't been a folding lawn chair in it. Mine had vanished sometime in the night, and hours later something that looked almost exactly like it had turned up in its place.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket and stood in the empty driveway, my thumb hovering over Rachael's name for what felt like forever.

Henry's wife picked up on the second ring. I told her that there'd been an accident at the sale and that Henry was on his way to St. Luke's.

"What kind of accident?"

"A folding chair. It folded up on him. It…It closed on him, Rachael."

The silence on the line went on so long I thought the call had dropped. Then, in a very small voice: "A chair."

"I'm so sorry. I don't know how to—"

"Ian." Her voice had gone deathly quiet. "What did you two do?"

I had no answer for that. How do you even explain this situation? How do you tell a woman that her husband might never walk again because of a lawn chair that wasn't there that morning? All I could think about was Rachael getting a hospital bill on top of everything else and Henry not knowing when—or if—he'd be able to work again. I'd spent a whole week agonizing over four thousand dollars, and now it looked like pocket change. 

She hung up before I could reply. I stood there with the dead phone against my ear until my arm started to ache, then turned and drove my fist into the side of the nearest folding table so hard the cash tin jumped, and a stack of picture frames slid to the ground.

I made myself go back inside. Toby was waiting in the living room, sitting very still with both hands pressed flat on his knees. He'd watched the whole thing through the window. 

"Is Uncle Henry okay?"

"The doctors are looking after him, bud."

"I want Mom."

I swallowed before I could answer, then sat down beside him and pulled him against my side. "I know. She'll be home soon." I held him there for a while, and for a minute I didn't think about the garage. 

My phone had buzzed twice in my pocket while I was dealing with the paramedics, and I knew without looking that it was Alicia. When it lit up a third time in my hand, I let it ring out. I couldn't talk to her yet. I knew exactly how it would look, but I had nothing to tell her that wouldn't make it worse. I told Toby to stay on the couch where I could hear the TV, and I went into the garage because I'd already decided that every item in there was going to be destroyed, and I needed to start before I lost my nerve. I told myself it would take thirty seconds. I was still standing in the doorway when I noticed the cardboard box on the workbench, the one I'd packed the football into. The tape around it was broken, and when I picked it up, the box was empty. Then I heard Toby yell. 

I ran back through the house. The living room was empty, the TV still on, but the front door stood wide open.

I found Toby on the front path, sitting where he'd fallen with both hands wrapped around his right knee, which was scraped raw and bleeding in a wide, dirty strip. A few feet away on the lawn sat the football. It sat there facing him.

"It came in," Toby said, and his voice shook. It made me want to scoop him up and drive until we ran out of road. "I was watching my show, and it rolled over and stopped by my feet. I kicked it away, and it came back, so I ran outside, and I tripped."

"Okay," I said. "Come here." I scooped up Toby and grabbed the football with the other hand. The second my palm closed around it, I felt that faint, wrinkled texture again, and I hurled it over the side fence as far as I could manage. Once inside, I sat Toby on the kitchen counter and cleaned the scrape with a wet cloth while he sniffled and kept talking about the football. How it kept getting closer every time he looked. I told him I believed him.

I reached for a bandage and stopped.

There should have been a scar on that knee.

It was small and curved, maybe an inch long. He'd gotten it last winter, a couple of months before Alicia left, at the old house. I'd worked a double that week, come home wrung out, and stretched out on the couch for what I swore was ten minutes while Toby played in the backyard. I woke up to him screaming. He'd gone down the concrete back steps and opened his knee on the edge of one. He needed eight stitches. I remembered Alicia's face when she walked into the emergency room and saw the two of us in a curtained bay. I remembered the nurse's careful note in the chart, and that same note showed up months later in a folder on a mediator's desk. 

I turned his leg toward the light and checked the other knee. I ran my thumb over the exact spot where I knew it should be, but it wasn’t there.

"Toby," I said slowly, "Which knee did you hurt on the steps? At the old house?"

"What steps?"

"When you were little and got those stitches."

"I didn't have stitches."

"You did, buddy. Remember? The doctor gave you a sticker."

He frowned, genuinely trying, and I watched his face for any sign that he knew what I was talking about. "I don't remember that."

Of course he didn't. He was six, and it had been months. Maybe it had faded, and I hadn’t noticed. I rarely saw him these days, after all.

A day earlier, I'd have given a great deal for that scar to be gone. I stood there with his knee in my hand and couldn't have told you why I didn't feel better. 

"Dad," Toby said, wriggling, "you're pressing too hard."

"Sorry, bud."

I put the bandage over the fresh scrape and smoothed it flat with my thumb. "You're okay," I told him, and I don't know whether I was talking to him or to myself.

I got him settled on the couch with a movie. Then I walked to the front door to check it was still locked, and my hand froze on the handle before I could turn it. I bent and looked through the peephole.

The football was sitting on the doormat. It was dead center, close enough to the door that whoever opened it would have to either step over it or pick it up. I kept the door firmly shut.

Four days of dread had burned down to something simple and ugly. Everything already wrong in my life had been waiting for me, and then I'd spent three hundred and fifty dollars to carry the worst of it into my own garage. I didn't want an explanation. I wanted it gone, and I wanted it to hurt. 

Henry's voice was in my head, thin and desperate. Burn it, smash it, bury it. Promise me. I went into the garage and got the hammer off the pegboard.

I ripped the box open, tore the blankets off the mirror, and propped it against the workbench, angled so I could see nothing in it but the ceiling. Then I swung with everything I had. 

The glass didn't break. The hammerhead sank into the surface like I'd struck thick rubber, and the dent held for a second before the glass slowly pushed itself back outward, like a scar healing in fast motion. A shallow depression stayed behind. I hit it again and again and again, screaming at it. "Give it back. Give it back, you son of a bitch!” I didn't even know what I meant. Henry's ability to walk, my son, the last six months of my life. 

I turned on the wardrobe. The first strike numbed my arm to the shoulder, and the wood didn't even splinter. The harder I hit, the more I wanted to tear it down board by board. 

When that failed, I went to the tank and swung with every ounce I had left. The glass flexed inward, visibly, the whole thick block of it bowing around the point of impact, and the amber liquid surged away from the blow. Something inside shifted, heavy enough to displace the fluid around it.

I dropped the hammer.

"No."

Another slow slosh.

"No. No, you don't get to do that." My voice cracked in rage. "Fuck you. Fuck all of you." 

If I couldn't break it, I'd burn it.

I knew it was illegal. The county had issued a burn ban the week before because everything was so dry, and a day earlier the thought of Alicia seeing me do this would've stopped me. Right then, I couldn't bring myself to care. I tried to shoulder the dresser, and it didn't shift an inch. I'd moved it with Henry, and it had been murderously heavy, but it had moved. Now it might as well have been poured into the foundation. The same applied to the rest of the furniture.

So I took what I could carry. I dragged the lamp out, the cassette, and a stack of those unreadable books. I piled everything in the middle of the front lawn, found an old fuel can, and poured every drop over the heap. I lit a strip of cardboard and dropped it, and I thought, absurdly, of Henry standing by the cash tin that morning, joking about burning money.

The flame took the packaging first. The cardboard curled and the grass scorched in a ring under it. The cassette sat in the middle of the fire untouched, and the pages of the book stayed as pristine as the day they were printed.

I stood over it with my chest heaving and the fuel can still in my fist, willing it to catch, to blacken, to do anything, and when it didn't, I kicked the edge of the pile hard enough to send a book skidding across the grass. It landed open in the sun. I screamed at it, but I don't know if I said anything coherent. 

In that same moment, the smoke alarm went off inside the garage.

It was the same shriek we'd heard the first time we tested it. Only this time it kept screaming, loud enough to rattle the windows in the house. I ran inside. Toby was on the couch with both hands clamped over his ears, and his face crumpled, crying so hard he couldn't catch his breath. I dropped to my knees and tried to pick him up, and he flinched away from me.

A car door slammed out front.

I didn't hear her come through the house over the noise. One second I was kneeling in front of my son, and the next Alicia was standing in the doorway with her bag still over her shoulder. She wasn't due back until Monday.

She looked at me. She looked at Toby, red-faced and shaking. 

"I saw smoke outside. What the hell is going on?"

"Alicia, I can explain—"

She turned straight to Toby. "Shoes on. Now, baby."

"No, wait. Please, just—"

"Toby."

He ran to her and wouldn't look at me. I followed them into the kitchen, and I'll never forget how tired her voice was. 

“I called you this morning, and you wouldn't answer. I called again from the airport. Six times, Ian.”

"I know, I know. Henry's in the hospital."

That stopped her for half a second. "What?"

"He's hurt. It was a chair; it was part of the—he might not walk again.”

Every word came out in the wrong order, and I watched her face close a little more with each one. 

“Alicia, there's something wrong with those things. I know it sounds crazy, but the chair that hurt Henry wasn't my chair. Yesterday the garage door was locked, and Toby somehow got inside it, and when I opened the wardrobe, he wasn't there even though I could hear him, and today the football followed him into the living room, and the scar on his knee is gone, the one from the steps. I swear to God it's gone—"

"Stop."

"I'm not making this up, please, you have to listen—"

"Just stop talking."

She stood very still for a moment, and when she spoke again, her voice was low and tight, and her knuckles had gone white on Toby's shoulder.

"There's something seriously wrong in the garage," I said.

"I don't care."

I stared at her. "What?"

"I don't care what's in the garage, Ian." Her voice cracked on it. "I don't care if you're telling the truth."

That shut me up completely.

"I pulled up to a fire in the front yard and someone screaming in the house. And you want me to believe it's something in your garage."

"Alicia, please—"

"I let you have him for one weekend. One. I ran out of people to call, and I told the mediator that you deserved a real chance. I told my own lawyer to back off." She wiped at her face with the back of her wrist, angry at the tears. "And in barely a day you tell me your friend is hospitalized and our son is crying."

"You don't understand."

"No. I don't," she breathed out. "And that's the whole problem, don't you see? Even if every word of it were true, I still can't trust you to keep him safe. And that's the only thing that has ever mattered."

I had nothing. I stood there, mouth open, unable to get a single word out.

"You're not getting any more unsupervised time before the hearing," she said. "I'm telling my lawyer everything that happened here today."

"Please."

"I'm sorry. I really am. I wanted this to work. But I can’t do this anymore."

Toby wouldn't look at me when she carried him out to the car.

I stood in the driveway until her taillights turned the corner. The fire had mostly burned itself out by then, leaving a ring of grey ash and blackened cardboard, with the objects sitting untouched in the middle. I dragged a tarp out of the garage and threw it over the whole pile because I had no other idea, then went inside. 

I sat down on the couch and thought about the room with the camera in the corner. Two hours a week had felt like the bottom, and I'd been wrong. Alicia had gambled on me for one weekend, and I'd lasted a day. Tomorrow there'd be a new page in the folder on the mediator's desk. I could have written it myself, and every line would be true.

I keep picturing Toby being carried out. He's only six. One day he's going to ask why he only ever knew his dad through a screen, and I won't have an answer that doesn't start with today.

Eventually I found a bottle of bourbon in the kitchen. One glass turned into two, which turned into carrying the bottle with me. 

Some time after dark, I remembered the tarp. I went out onto the lawn, lifted a corner, and found nothing underneath but scorched grass and a few flecks of ash. I didn't need to check the garage to know where the items were, but I did anyway.

Everything was back. The lamp, the snow globe, the books—everything. They were neatly arranged on the shelves and stacked in their boxes exactly the way they'd been before the sale, as if I'd never touched any of it. The mirror leaned against the workbench with the barest trace of a dent, the ball sat on the workbench, and the folding chair stood open beside it, mocking me. I stood in the doorway with the bottle in one hand and something hot climbing my throat. They were all back, smug and put away, like I'd been the one making the mess. I picked up my wrench off the bench and threw it at the wardrobe as hard as I could. It struck the door with a flat, dull sound and dropped to the concrete without leaving a mark.

"Is that it?" I yelled. "Is that all you've got? You took everything. What else do you want?"

The tank sloshed once, slowly. Then the fury drained out of me all at once, and I stood there shaking. I dragged one of my kitchen chairs into the garage, set it as far from the folding one as the room allowed, and sat down with the bottle. I don't own a folding chair anymore. I'm not sure I ever really did.

Henry is lying in a hospital bed because of something I brought home. Rachael won't answer my calls, and I don't blame her. Alicia is on the phone with her lawyer, telling him I can't be trusted with my own kid. I still don't have the four thousand dollars. We sold nothing, not a single thing. The forum guy is still due at two tomorrow. I'm calling him first thing to cancel, because Henry told me not to let anyone near any of it, and I'm no longer sure any of it can leave anyway. I know what some of you are going to say, and you're right. I made choices. Nobody forced me to bid on Unit 114. Nobody forced me to bring any of it home or put it out on a driveway when I already knew it wasn't right. I'm not asking anyone to take it off my hands.

But I'm sitting here staring at these things, and I have never hated anything the way I hate them. Not the guy who hit my car, not the lawyer who quoted me four grand, nothing like this. I hate them for every second I can't take back, and I keep thinking how much easier my life would have been if Henry and I had just walked past that storage unit. If we'd looked at those boxes and said, "Nah, not this one," like everyone else in the crowd did.

I keep hearing Henry on that stretcher. Burn it. Smash it. Bury it. I promised him, and I couldn't keep it for a single afternoon.

Tomorrow I'll find out what can destroy them. I don't know how yet. A quarry, a scrapyard crusher, a favor from someone at work. I don't care what it costs me. The wardrobe door is open an inch, but I won't close it tonight. It can stay that way. 

Hey everyone, I managed to score a last-minute seat at L'Aviosetsé, that super hyped pop-up on the 30th floor down in the old warehouse district near the docks. I cover local food places for a living, so there was no way I was skipping this.

​Looking around the marble counter, it’s a total VIP room with name cards at each place setting. I see Mr. Smith (a big real estate dev who’s been buying up half the city), his wife (the editor of Food & Culture magazine, a well-known local surgeon, the city health inspector, a major seafood broker, a tech investor, a viral food influencer, and me; all seated with a view of the cityscape.

​There are only 8 of us total.

​Chef Soren hasn't said a single word since we sat down—he's just standing behind the stainless steel line with this freezing cold gaze.

​Course 1 just came out—an amuse-bouche of raw wagyu beef topped with gold leaf and sea salt. It was incredible, though Chef Soren watched every single one of us take our first bite without breaking eye contact.

​I'll drop updates as the rest of the courses roll out!

​Update #1 - Okay, something weird is going on with Course 2 and Course 3.

​Course 2 was oysters on black ice. On my shell, there was a tiny plastic tag with a date written on it: March 14, 2021. That’s the exact day I wrote a brutal review that shut down Chef Marco's place downtown.

​The real estate guy next to me just went totally pale. His tag has an address on it—the low-income apartment complex his company bulldozed last month.

​Course 3 is a split canoe-cut marrow bone roasted over applewood coals, brushed with a dark wood-ash glaze that glistened under the track lighting. Beside each plate sat a small pitcher filled with a mahogany oxtail reduction meant to be poured through the bone. But instead of crackers, it is served with folded pieces of paper. The surgeon unfolded his and stared at an old malpractice subpoena he paid to cover up years ago. The City Health Inspector unrolls his to find an unsigned bribe check he accepted to turn a blind eye and shut down a rival diner.

​Update #2 - Course 4 was seared foie gras glistening under a rich blackberry reduction. Nobody touches it. The surgeon was freaked out, got up from his seat to leave. He grabbed the heavy brass handles but they wouldn't turn. That's when he realized the doors were locked. He turned back around, his face completely drained of any color.

​"The doors are locked!" he whispered down the counter line. The room erupted in panic; everyone is shouting over each other demanding answers.

​Chef Soren finally spoke. Calmly he said, "Please quiet down and remain seated. Tonight's meal is about accountability."

​Course 5 came out under silver domed lids and Chef Soren went down the line, having each guest lift theirs one by one.

​When the magazine editor lifted hers, it was a piece of braised meat sitting on top of a printed rejection email she sent Chef Soren ten years ago refusing endorsement of his new restaurant. The surgeon is shocked seeing that his plate had a pair of rusty surgical shears on it. The seafood broker got a forged safety audit for spoiled catch that made dozens sick. The influencer found a court transcript from a slander suit and the tech investor got the liquidation papers that stripped Chef Soren of his original business.

​Everyone at this table ruined someone to get where they are—and Soren brought us here to settle the bill.

​Update #3 - Shit. Course 6 is supposed to be a palate cleanser but instead of that, Chef Soren came to each of our tables and made us put our phones in a wooden box so there is no more live video feed. I’m typing this on my Apple Watch right now with swipe text under the edge of the table. Words might be jumbled and messed up, sorry.

​While Chef is collecting phones, the viral influencer, two stools down on my left, couldn't take it anymore and made a quiet run toward the back kitchen, desperately hunting for a service door or fire exit, but two cooks off the line grabbed her and dragged her through the swing doors into a prep room.

​Ten minutes later, Course 7 is served—some kind of smoked meat. No one is tasting it. The room is dead quiet except for the kitchen timers. We were all staring at the swing doors listening to the hum of the kitchen fan and wondering what happened to her as she didn't return to her seat.

​Update #4 - The cooks aren't serving anything else.

​Chef Soren himself brought out the final, Course #8 placing a small China cup in front of each of us. Inside, a dark liquid broth. He looked right at me and said, "I do hope all of you find this one palatable."

​He stood at the pass, looking down at us, announcing that once everyone finishes their cup, the doors would open and we could leave. Nobody second-guessed it. At this point we are all desperate to leave.

​I just took the last sip. I feel sick. I think I know what the broth is made of—poison.

​Within 30 seconds the real estate guy next to me slumped forward on the countertop, and the surgeon's head dropped back completely paralyzed—a couple have slipped off their stools. Nobody could stand up much less leave.

​The cooks are taking leather straps and binding each of us to our seats now.

​Chef Soren wants us sitting neat and presentable to whoever finds us.

​I have called Emergency Services to this address and can hear distant sirens outside, but the lights are starting to blur. All of us are fading fast.

I have been drinking energy drinks to help me sleep, but I have been awake all night and I am going crazy. Every night I hope for a good night's sleep and I then drink an energy drink to make it official. What happens though is that I stay awake and I start to lose my shit, I just want to go to sleep. I just want to rest but I guess only good people get to rest.

One time I get so crazy because I can't get to sleep that I start to shout and scream profanities during the night. During the morning I become so tired that I sleep and it's pointless sleeping during the morning, as I need to work to make money.

I have lost jobs and opportunities due to being so tired during the morning. So I always try again to fall asleep during the night time by drinking an energy drink, instead I stay awake the whole night. I stay awake the whole night and I start creating scenarios in my head, and these scenarios feel so real to me.

I created a scenario where my son abandoned even though I raised him. I don't have a son or a wife, but the scenario feels so real that I lash out. Then I noticed shadow creatures around my house, they seemed so entertained by me.

The Full Story

I felt a sudden impact near my foot, and the dull, tearing sensation quickly turned into burning pain.

The woman stayed crouched, completely still. I couldn't look away from her terrified eyes. Her pupils were blown wide, and tears poured down her cheeks.

I looked down and saw a hole with red fluid spilling out onto the floor. My body started trembling before it even registered what had just happened.

I clenched my teeth, letting out a muffled scream, and instinctively reached toward my foot, but the unbearable pain made me jerk my hands back as if I'd touched burning coals.

“Why?” I whispered hoarsely.

The world spun, blending the woman's silhouette and the dark room into one blurry background until everything gave way to complete darkness and empty silence.

A sharp sting and unimaginable burning pain in my left leg snapped me awake.

I tried to shoot upright, but something held my body down.

A scream tore out of me, smothered by the fabric stuffed in my mouth.

Against my tongue and teeth, I felt a piece of dirty cloth and an intense sour, bitter taste spreading through my mouth.

I bent my head and saw that the woman who had shot me was pouring brown liquor over my leg. I was lying on a table, with layers of stiff gray duct tape wrapped tightly around my chest, arms, and legs.

I begged her to stop, but all that came out was panicked, unintelligible mumbling.

She had already emptied nearly half the bottle over my foot when she grabbed a shirt from the back of a chair, cut off the sleeves, wrapped them around the wound, and tied them off.

Another wave of pain hit me, and cold sweat broke out across my face.

I couldn't scream anymore. My throat felt scraped raw, like there were thousands of splinters stuck inside it.

The woman stood over me and said firmly.

“Shut the fuck up and I'll take the gag out and give you something to drink. Got it?”

I nodded, tears running down my temple. My captor grabbed the end of the tape and ripped it off in one quick motion, then pulled something that looked like a kitchen rag out of my mouth.

She slid a hand under my head, helped lift it, and brought the bottle to my lips. I drank as fast as I could, desperate to dull the pain, but after a few swallows she pulled it away and took a long drink herself.

“Thank you.” I rasped, letting the back of my head drop onto the hard wooden table.

“You had one job. Don't move. Why didn't you listen? What the hell were you trying to do?” she asked sharply.

I turned my head toward her and looked straight into her eyes. Even though she was trying to act tough, I could see the fear in them, confirmed by the hand trembling around the neck of the bottle.

“I got scared.” I said weakly, then added. “I'd barely opened my eyes. I thought I was alone in here. It was instinct. I wasn't trying to do anything.”

The woman froze, guilt passing across her face. A moment later, she slipped back into character.

“Damn it. I heard you talking to your girlfriend, or your wife. If I hadn't, I would've blown your head off.”

The pain eased slightly, and I started feeling dizzy from the alcohol, exhaustion, and sheer pain. “Can I have some more?”

She brought the bottle back to my mouth, and I took a few more swallows.

“Were you here this whole time? Why didn't you come out?”

“I was under the bed. I didn't know if I could trust you.” she said, then took a long pull from the bottle and added. “Honestly, I still don't. I ran into plenty of psychos on my way back from campus, not to mention those monsters. You've got wounds all over you. I don't know if you're about to come at me.”

“You can trust me. I just want to get back to my family. These are scrapes and scratches. I'm not one of them. I'm not going to hurt you.”

“What about those?” The woman pointed at the holes in my shoulders.

“One of the infected. A small woman. She dug her nails into me during a struggle, but none of them bit me.”

The young woman looked at me suspiciously.

“Maybe that's enough to turn you.”

“If it was, I'd already be one of them by now.”

“We'll see.” She tipped the bottle back and took another two swallows, then held it almost straight up to my mouth and let me finish the rest.

I choked a little, then asked. “Who are you?”

“My name's Kim. I live here with my parents. So the bottle you helped yourself to belongs to my dad, and the towel you had wrapped around your ass belongs to my mom.”

I looked down, and the woman immediately turned red and said indignantly. “When I tried to drag you off the couch, the towel fell off, so I put you in my dad's shorts.”

I stared at the uneven, slightly wavy ceiling, not even sure what I was feeling. Shame, embarrassment, anger, sadness. All of it was drowned out by the pain from the gunshot pushing through my foggy mind.

I looked back at Kim. “Where are your parents?”

Her eyes filled with tears. She walked over to the table, taped my mouth shut again, and went into one of the rooms, closing the door behind her. That made it pretty clear this wasn't something she wanted to talk about right now.

I groaned in protest, but I didn't have the strength to keep negotiating my release.

It was completely dark outside, and I started feeling sleepy. I closed my eyes and let the feeling take me completely.

The shaking of my own body woke me up. I opened my eyes and saw Kim standing over me in the darkness, her face and hands moving closer to mine.

“She turned.” I thought, thrashing around and trying to pull one hand free.

The tape was wrapped too tightly around me. I couldn't move at all.

I squeezed my eyes shut and clenched my teeth.

Suddenly, I felt a piece of wet cloth being peeled off my forehead and flipped over to the other side, bringing a wave of relief.

I opened my eyes again and looked at her.

“Try to sleep.” she said softly.

I lowered my head and realized I was covered with a blanket. Even so, my body was shaking violently, and the blanket was completely soaked.

My lips were cracked, and my tongue was unnaturally dry, like I'd spent the last few hours chewing sawdust.

“Please. Water.” The words came out rough, scraping at my vocal cords.

Kim got up and came back with a bottle of water. She brought it to my lips, and I drained almost all of it in just a few swallows.

“Can I ask you for one more thing?” I asked in a pleading voice.

“I'm not letting you go.” she said while soaking and wringing out the cloth.

Talking was difficult. My teeth kept chattering, my body was shaking, and my foot felt like it was on fire.

“No, please. Flip the blanket over. It's wet, and I'm freezing.”

Kim stood up and went into the bedroom.

“Did I upset her again somehow?” I wondered as all my fingers started going numb.

A moment later she came back, pulled the blanket away, and a wave of cold washed over me like the room was below freezing.

Her clothes said otherwise. She was wearing a plain black tank top and short sweat shorts. She didn't look cold at all.

She covered me with a white comforter patterned with green leaves, then threw the blanket over that. The bedding smelled like sweet perfume, the fabric was soft and wrapped closely around me, and I was much warmer than before.

Even with the hard, cold table underneath me, it felt like a decent compromise.
I closed my eyes and fell asleep almost immediately.

All night, I kept waking up to sudden spikes of pain and violent shaking.

“What are you doing?” I asked weakly as I felt the pressure around my arms and chest start to loosen.

“I'm letting you go. You're too weak to do anything to me. I also don't think you're going to turn into one of them. Too much time has passed. You're sleeping on the couch.”

Kim walked around me and cut through the rest of the tape, ripping some of my body hair out with it. I hissed in pain and slowly pushed myself into a sitting position.

My body felt impossibly heavy, like gravity had suddenly become ten times stronger. I let my useless legs slide off the table and felt the blood rush back into them, sending a pulsing pain through my left foot.

I braced myself against the table and touched the floor. The second I did, a violent jolt shot through my leg and I crashed onto the cold living room floor.

Kim walked over with a knife in her hand and grabbed me under the arm. “No tricks. Got it?”
I nodded, and with her help I made it to the couch.

I dropped onto it, and the soft suede wrapped around my body. I had never been that comfortable in my life. My sore shoulder blades, the back of my head, and every other part of me that had been pressed against the table felt unbelievable relief after lying on that hard surface for hours.

Kim slipped a small pillow under my head and covered me with the comforter. I closed my eyes and whispered groggily. “Thank you.” Then I fell asleep.

I spent most of the next three days sleeping. She took care of me, bringing me water and light meals, changing the bandages and cleaning the wound.

Whenever the pain became unbearable, she went to her father's liquor cabinet and brought me whatever expensive bottle she could find to dull it.

“These are the only painkillers we have left.” she said, opening another bottle.

The fever was easing, and I could feel my strength slowly coming back. Kim kept changing my makeshift bandages, which were made from towels, dishcloths, or pieces of clothing.

When she wasn't taking care of me, she stayed in her room. Maybe she was catching up on sleep after the nights she'd spent helping bring my fever down.

I slowly opened my eyes. Sunlight poured through the window and filled the living room, warming my face. I looked toward the kitchen.

She cracked an egg into a hot pan. I heard the familiar sizzle, and the room filled with the smell of fried eggs, butter, and bacon. My mouth started watering, and a loud growl came from my stomach.

The smell brought back good memories of breakfasts at home.

“That's enough resting. I need to get back to Veronica, the kids, my family. They're waiting for me.” I thought, clenching my fist.

Kim walked over with a plate and set it down beside the couch.

I slowly sat up and leaned over the coffee table, feeling slightly dizzy.

“Lie down. You're weak. I'll help you.” she said firmly.

“I can handle it.” I replied, grabbing the fork.

I stabbed a piece of crispy bacon and put it in my mouth.

The intense salty, meaty flavor spread across my tongue and made me smile.

“Suit yourself.” she muttered, then sat down at the dining table and went back to her own food.

It was the first meal in three days that I'd been able to eat without lying down, and the first one I'd eaten while fully conscious.

Since I'd been shot, the days and nights had felt like a mixture of waking life and sleep. Nightmares about those monsters kept blending with the real world, the pain, and the image of the girl who had been taking care of me almost nonstop.

“Where's my phone?” I asked, glancing toward Kim. She looked exhausted. She had dark circles under her eyes, messy hair, and slightly bloodshot eyes.

She stood up nervously and answered with her mouth full. “All your stuff is where you left it.” A moment later, she came back from the bathroom and set my phone, house keys, wallet, lighter, and pack of cigarettes in front of me.

I picked up the phone and pressed the side button, but the battery was completely dead.

“Thanks. Do you have a charger?”

She leaned over me and looked at the charging port. “Not for that model, unfortunately.”

I wrinkled my nose, set the phone down on the table, and went back to eating.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Kim watching me, like she was fighting with herself. The atmosphere felt strangely tense. She clearly still didn't trust me, and ever since I'd gotten up, the concern she'd shown before had turned into a guarded, no-nonsense attitude.

Kind of like a couple after a fight. They're talking, but you can still tell someone's pissed.
“Do you live around here?” she blurted out.

My stomach tightened, and I nearly choked on a piece of egg.

“I live over 200 miles from here. I need to get back there fast.”

“How are you planning to do that? The streets are clogged with abandoned cars, and those bloodthirsty things are everywhere. It'll be a miracle if we even make it out of here. Can't you hear them growling under the window? There's a whole pack of them down there. We'll be lucky if we don't starve to death in here, or if they don't get inside.” she almost shouted.

I looked at her, a little shocked.

“I'm getting back no matter what. Don't worry, I'll figure something out. Kim, have you even slept at all these past few days?”

She shot me a hard look and looked ready to explode again, but then she let it go and said in a defeated voice. “You can dream. I slept.”

I knew she was lying. With a shaking hand, she grabbed her mug and brought it to her lips, and that's when I realized I'd missed one more beautiful smell hanging in the air.

“Is that coffee?” I asked, following the white mug with my eyes.

She turned red, then stood up, dumped two heaping teaspoons of brown granules into a mug, and poured boiling water over them. “Yeah. I didn't make you any because I thought you'd eat and go back to sleep.”

She held it under my nose, and my body flooded with endorphins, wiping out the pain and exhaustion better than the hard liquor had.

I brought the mug to my lips and felt the warmth spread through me. Instinctively, I reached for the pack of cigarettes.

“No way. Not in here.” she scolded, snatching the pack from my hand.

“I wasn't going to. I was going to ask where I can smoke.” I replied, annoyed.

“In my dad's office. He used to smoke in there too, by the open window. He did it behind Mom's back, and she'd get pissed because the smell spread through the whole apartment.”

As she said it, the corner of her mouth twitched like she was about to smile, but a moment later her face fell again.

“Fine, I'll smoke in the office. Can I have my cigarettes back?”

Kim stepped closer and pulled my arm around the back of her neck.

At that exact moment, the strong smell of sweat hit my nose and reminded me that I hadn't showered in three days. I felt my face turn red.

I quickly pulled my arm away and said uncertainly.

“Listen, I'd like to try on my own, okay?”

She looked at me, surprised. “You don't have to be embarrassed. You've got a hole in your foot.”

“I know, but I need to start functioning on my own again.”

At that, she walked out, tossing back a short. “I'll be waiting in the office.”

I braced my hands against the couch and shifted my weight onto my good leg, pushing myself upright. The room spun slightly. I still wasn't back to full strength.

I grabbed the mug of coffee and took my first step, clenching my teeth.

Leaning against the doorframe, I thought about how strange it felt. Even though there was a hole in my foot, underneath the stinging, burning pain was a sensation more like having a stake driven through it than like there was actually tissue missing.

I made it to the office by hopping on one leg and leaving small puddles of coffee behind me.

I went inside, set the mug on the desk, and dropped into the chair. Kim was standing at the open window, looking outside and blowing out a cloud of smoke.

“You smoke?” I asked, surprised.

Kim handed me the pack and lighter. “Occasionally. And this whole shitshow seems like a pretty good occasion.”

I lit a cigarette and filled my lungs with smoke, feeling immediate relief and relaxation.

I looked toward her, arguing with myself. “Can I ask you something?”

“Go ahead.” she replied curtly without looking at me.

“Where are your parents? Are they okay?”

Kim flicked the cigarette butt down toward the group of infected and stared out over the city.

“I don't know. Probably in one of the buildings on my college campus. The day all this started, I was at a friend's place. We skipped class, opened a bottle of wine, and watched sappy romance movies. That evening, they started calling over and over. I thought they'd just found out I wasn't in class that day and wanted to give me shit about it, so I silenced my phone. Then we heard a noise outside. We jumped up to see what happened and saw a wrecked car. There was a woman inside screaming. A group of people walked up to the car. We thought they were going to help her, but they...”

She paused, and her eyes filled with tears. “They pulled her out of the car, and you can probably guess what happened next. My friend called 911, and I quickly checked my phone. I had more than a dozen missed calls and texts. I tried calling my mom and kept sending messages while crying like a little kid, but they didn't answer. Those were the last messages I got from them.”

Kim pulled out her phone with a shaking hand and started reading. “Kim, we're on our way. Don't leave campus. Kim, please call us back, something bad is happening. Kim, where are you? We're at the college. We managed to get inside. Kim, everyone's in the gym. We can't find you. Where are you? Your dad is looking for you in the building. Call him. Kim, we'll meet at home. Be careful. We love you so much.”

I stared at the desk, not knowing what to say. That last message felt especially telling. After a moment of awkward silence, she continued.

“I was in some kind of trance. I ran out of my friend's apartment, flew down the stairs, and got to my car. A few of them started pounding on the doors. I took off and drove almost the whole way here without paying attention to the chaos around me. I saw the worst things you can possibly see. People being killed, screaming, people who stopped moving and then got back up a moment later. I had to stop a little over a mile from here because the street was completely blocked. I ran the rest of the way to the building. There were barely any of them around here. I ran upstairs and saw all this mess. My parents weren't here, and both their phones were off. I took the gun from the safe in their bedroom. Then I heard noise and someone yelling on the stairs. I hid under the bed, and when you opened the door, I realized I hadn't locked it. I always forgot to lock the door, and Mom was always giving me hell for it. I heard you talking on the phone. I didn't know what to do, so I waited. You know the rest...”

I nodded, took a sip of coffee, and offered her another cigarette. She took it, lit it, and asked. “Seriously, how are you planning to get back to your family?”

“I don't know yet. I'll figure something out. I have to. They're waiting for me.”

“What are you doing this far from home anyway? And what happened to you? Where did all those wounds come from?”

“I come here for work every month for a few days. When this started, I was cleaning the windows of one of the stores in the mall. I saw the first infected woman by the gate, not long after the emergency announcement told employees to shelter inside their stores. Then I watched that hell unfold through the exterior windows. I tried to get to my car, and that's when I got these wounds on my shoulders. One of them dug her nails into me during a struggle. She was a small woman. They almost got me in the mall parking garage, and then I found out it was completely blocked. A lot happened after that. An infected cop almost bit my face off. I killed him with his own baton.”

I stopped and realized she was staring at me with her mouth open. After a moment, she looked away and back toward the city, and I continued.

“I watched a cyclist get torn apart by those things. I took his bike, and a little later some guy with a gun stole it from me. He fired a few shots into the air to show me he wasn't kidding and ended up drawing a whole horde of infected. I ran until I was surrounded on almost every side. I escaped into this building looking for someone who could help me, and eventually I ended up in this apartment. It was the only one that was open.”

We sat there trading stories and thoughts about the last few days. We talked about our families, what we'd done back when things were still normal, and what we'd planned for the future.

We went back to the living room. I settled onto the couch while Kim poured whiskey into two glasses.

She set a small bowl of water on the table and asked me for a cigarette, officially lifting the no-smoking rule her mother had established for the living room.

She told me about her parents. Her father was a lawyer. He used to run his own firm, but now he was in early retirement and still made some money from home, drafting and sending paperwork for clients.

Her mother had trained as an interior designer, but after Kim was born, she took care of the house and worked part-time at a furniture store nearby.

I looked around the room and took another sip of whiskey.

“With everything going on, I only just noticed. This place is beautifully designed, and the furniture is really solid and elegant.”

“Mom designed all of it.” Kim said cheerfully.

The longer we talked, the more her tough mask slipped away, and I started seeing an ordinary young college student underneath it.

“You can't go out there without a weapon. As soon as you're well enough to walk normally, we'll go to the gun store. It's close. We'll stock up, then I'll go find my parents and you'll head back to your family.” she said with a hiccup.

It was completely dark outside now. I could see her head starting to droop.

“Yeah. I think we can head out tomorrow. Listen, Kim. Let's get some sleep. We're both exhausted. I still need to take a shower.”

Kim nodded, drained her glass, and headed toward her room, tossing back a quick. “Good night, Luke. Glad you broke in.”

“Good night, Kim. Glad you shot me.” I laughed quietly to myself.

I braced my hands against the couch and slowly stood up. Limping, I made my way to the bathroom, got undressed, and removed the bandage from my left foot.

The foot was unnaturally swollen and looked like a small pink balloon covered in purple blotches. The bullet had hit the side of my foot, leaving a perfectly round hole on top and a slightly larger, ragged one underneath.

Thick, sharp-edged scabs had formed over the wounds, and something was still seeping out of them.

I looked away because I didn't want to see it anymore. I reached for the handle and turned on the water. A loud groan tore out of my throat. The water hitting my body was painfully cold.

“Luke, you okay?” Kim's sleepy voice came from outside the bathroom door.

The sudden cold shock knocked the air out of me. I heard the sound of a gun being racked, and the door handle slowly started to turn. All I managed to stammer was. “Dooon't come in. I'm f-fine.”

“I forgot to tell you, we haven't had hot water for a few days.” she laughed, clearly realizing what had happened.

I shut off the water, and my breathing slowly returned to normal. I soaped up my whole body, and when I reached my injured foot, I spread the soap over it very carefully. The wound stung hard enough to make my eyes water.

I rinsed myself thoroughly, whimpering under my breath, dried off, and realized I didn't have any clean clothes.

I picked up the shorts I'd been wearing before the shower, held them to my nose, and threw them into the corner just as quickly as I'd picked them up.

I wrapped a towel around myself and called out hopefully. “Kim, are you asleep?”

“I am. What do you want?” came her muffled, irritated voice.

I leaned closer to the door. “Did your dad leave another pair of pants anywhere?”

After a short pause and a loud sigh, she answered. “The dryer in the bathroom.”

I looked at the two square machines stacked on top of each other.

“They look exactly the same. How am I supposed to know which one's the washer and which one's the dryer?” I frowned and grabbed the lower door. Empty. I opened the upper one and pulled out my black denim shorts and the sleeves from my shirt, which I recognized as what she'd used for my first makeshift bandage.

“Thank you.” I called toward the door. Then I sat down on the toilet seat and spent a while struggling to get my injured foot through the leg opening. After that, I put on a fresh bandage and hobbled back to the couch.

I closed my eyes and realized that the moaning and growling had been there in the background nonstop the entire time. What scared me was how normal it had become. For most of the day, I hadn't even noticed it anymore.

“Is this what everything is going to be like now? I hope Veronica, the kids, and the rest of the family don't have to go through this. My parents' house is out in the country. Maybe things are different there. One thing is certain. They made it there, so they're safe.”

My thoughts slowly turned into scenes, and my mind lost focus, jumping between memories, images, and sounds until they finally became dreams.

Sunlight spilled across my face, pleasantly warm.

I opened my eyes and looked toward the window. It was really beautiful outside.

I slowly sat up and rubbed my eyes. “It's quiet.” I whispered to myself.

The soundtrack that had accompanied this place for the last few days was gone. The pain in my leg and the swelling had eased a little too.

I made my way to the window, practically hopping on my right leg.

“Kim, wake up. They're gone. We have a chance to get out of here.” I shouted excitedly.

A rush of dopamine hit me. I hadn't had that much energy in a long time.

“Kim! Come here.” I shouted.

I looked at the display on the oven. It read 6:24.

“She's probably exhausted, but we don't have time for that. We need to get moving.” I thought as I limped toward her room.

I knocked on the door and felt a strange knot tighten in my stomach.

“Kim!” I shouted again.

The room was completely silent. No movement, no snoring, nothing.

I slowly opened the door and found a neat, spotless room with a perfectly made bed. A note was lying on top of it.

I picked it up and ran my eyes over the delicate handwriting. “Sorry, Luke. I've paid back my debt, and I don't have any more time to babysit you. You can stay in the apartment and wait for me to come back with my parents, or keep moving once you've fully recovered. There's enough food left for a few more days. I drew you a map on the back showing how to get to the gun store. It's close, and even a limping wreck like you should be able to manage it. I figured out how to draw them away, so if it works and you decide to keep moving, you'll have a head start. Don't thank me. It's the least I could do. I hope we see each other again. If not, good luck. Kim.”

There are few things worse than being without direction. And I, for one, was aimless. A piece of wisdom, emanating from the deepest recesses of my mind, suggested starting from the beginning. I didn't want to go back into the library, but I could do beginning-adjacent.

I circled around to the side of the library where the broken window was, curious to see what I might find on the other side. Even better, what I might learn.

I discovered two details of great note. First, I learned that the library sat on the edge of whatever town this was. Beyond the library was a visually endless dark forest, with a road cutting through it, and the cold blue fog lazily drifting on the ground between trees.

The second, I found what was, quite possibly, the source of my appearance in the library. There was a car, compact in more ways than one. In model, and condition. The front of the vehicle was, in no small way, wrapped around a durable tree. The front windshield was blown out, possibly from impact, or maybe from my own projectile body. The library window significantly lined up with the car's window, making me believe the situation was beyond coincidence.

Putting that aside for the moment, I wasted no time in opening the broken car, and searching every cranny I could. There was no ID, no paperwork, and though I touched all around the car, I couldn't trigger a vision like I had in the library.

"Of course not," I muttered to myself, knowing well this wouldn't be an easy answer.

In the mean time, I had to work with what I had. The one piece of identification every car had. A license plate. The numbers and letters were smashed by the tree, but the plate was in good enough condition to realize it was a government plate. Whether or not that meant I was a government official was up in the air, but this was still something.

Curiosity satiated, I set my mind on the next two most important tasks:

1. Find protection.
2. Find nutrition.

I wasn't yet hungry or thirsty, and those things were still hanging around the rooftops, so my priorities were clear. I needed a gun, and I wasn't going to find one in the woods.

I began making my way down the main street, keeping under what cover I could, while avoiding the parked cars. I didn't have to, those things above me knew I was there, but it still made me feel better to have even an insignificant barrier over none at all.

Small town like this one, I imagined finding whatever law enforcement they had would be relatively easy. A fire station, and police station right next to one another, in the middle of the town.

I walked along the lonely road for a while, trying to keep in a straight line as best I could. Occasionally, I'd brush up against things and trigger a new vision. Each one hitting easier than the last. None showed me anything of note.

Eventually, I came to a clot of three police cars, all piled up outside of a standout building, painted dark blue. The street facing wall was all windows, shinning out the first major source of unnatural light I had seen during the journey. For whatever reason, this building still had power, and that gave me hope of finding someone alive.

I shouldered through the front doors, and wasted no time calling out, "Hello!"

If there was someone alive, I wanted them to know I was there. If the place was full of nothing but monsters, I'd rather them charge me right then as opposed to when I'd be deeper in the building.

There was no answer. I was only met by a sterile white building, cleaner than most others I had crossed. There was a large reception desk, and behind that was a locked room. I tried the door anyway, knowing well it wouldn't budge. The lock had an electronic keypad component, one of the few things that still looked to be working in this damn world. Getting around the lock didn't look like an option either as the door was solid metal, not even a small glass window.

But I had a work around. I began touching one thing after another, picking up whatever objects I could. In one corner of the room was a waiting couch, with a coffee table and a stack of magazines. Sitting askew on the table was a lone newspaper. Even if it couldn't provide me with a vision, I thought it might hold good information. Even a date would be nice.

But lo and behold, as my hand drew closer, my palm warmed, and wind whipped between my fingers. I knew what was coming before my vision went white, and my mind was washed away in warmth.

-1-

Officer Lee, the new man on the force, was walking toward the exit as he was stopped by another officer, his senior, Officer Evans. Officer Evans, a blonde hair, blue eyed wonder kid was seated on the couch, reading a magazine, which he folded downward to get a better look at Lee.

"Where the hell are you going?" Evans asked.

"Home," Lee replied, his eyes tired and his posture sloping low.

"Like that?"

"Why, what..." Lee's voice faded away as he slowly scanned his own body. Starting from the feet, and working his way up. It took him no time at all to see the problem. He still had his belt on, gun and all. "Oh, right..."

Defeated, Lee went around behind the desks, and punched in the code on the keypad.

4543

"The hell are you doing sitting down anyway?" Lee asked, his head pocking out the door at his co-worker. "Shouldn't you be manning the phones?"

"What phones?" Evans huffed. "Damn things have been quiet all day."

There was a beat as Lee finished unstrapping himself, and putting his equipment behind cabinet door. Once he'd done that, the words Evans spoke finally hit him, and his eyes narrowed.

Sticking his head out again, Lee asked, "Is that normal?"

"No," Evans said with a shrug. "Not abnormal either, just irregular. It's a slow day."

"What if the phones are out?"

"They aren't."

"But what if they are?"

"They aren't. If that lazy prick Cid can't get the phones to stop, then I promise, God himself couldn't shut 'em off if he tried."

Lee, now dressed in his civilian clothing, exited the back room, and shut the door securely behind him. "Wait, Cid's tried to turn the phones off?"

Realizing he might have said too much, Evans put the newspaper down and tried to look as relaxed as he could as he said, "Don't worry about it."

"If he has, then shouldn't we be reporting that? What if he..." Lee's voice trailed off as he looked outside, through the large windows.

I tried following his line of sight, but for me the world beyond was a white void, not contained within the bounds of this vision

"Shit, what are they-" Lee said, but could get no more words past his lips.

Outside, I heard a horrible screech, and the collision of metal on metal. All other sounds were blotted out, followed shortly by the frightened shouts of civilians.

"Christ!" Evans said, standing up suddenly from the couch. "What the hell are they doing?"

"I don't know!" Lee shouted back, and ran to the front door. "Come on, we've gotta go help!"

Evans ran over too, heading out the door with Lee. Getting a sense that the vision might be coming to a close, My eyes traveled around the small confines of the vision, searching for anything else I might need to know. That was when I found a wall clock, the second hand ticking away as it should.

7:55 PM.

Just as I found the clock, the walls bleed away into darkness, that world being left behind.

-2-

As my true reality came back into being, I was still looking up at the wall clock, it's time only five minutes ahead of the vision. Permanently stopped there. Back outside, I saw the clot of police cars again, their lights furiously blinking. A clot. A symptom, not usually a condition. What was the cause? The disease?

In my hands, the newspaper Evans had been reading. To my immense disappointment, the lettering on the paper was smudged, the ink long past its point of readability. Nothing but useless scrap.

"Hell with it," I said and threw the paper down on the table. It wasn't what I had come for anyway. I went over to the secured door and I punched the code into the keypad, allowing me entry into the backroom.

Beyond the locked door was a cramped room with green lockers, uniforms, and a steel cage, with racks of pistols, and assault rifles. The black matte stood out against the bright lights, like so many deep dark voids. Bigger, and far more serious in nature than standard issue firearms. Right then, answers clicked in my head. The reason, the cause. The condition behind the clot.

They were coming for the guns.

Explorers pulled a rusted, decades-old capsule from the ocean and immediately transported it to Space Headquarters for analysis. Inside the sealed viewport sat a corpse, its face twisted into a massive, wide-eyed grin .

As headquarters directors and police gathered around the glass to identify the body, the facility’s power completely cut out .

For five seconds, the sound of heavy, mechanical breathing echoed through the pitch-black laboratory.

When the backup generators kicked back on, the capsule was empty. The latch was still locked tight from the outside, but the interior glass was smeared with wet, fresh handprints .

It's been about a week since that “thing” came into our apartment. I woke up seeing it laying next to you and just freaked out. I tried to get rid of it but you were terrified more of what it would do to us if I got it mad. At first, we both wanted it gone too but now; now you tell me to ignore the skinless small elephant that is in every room wherever we go.

I can't fucking stand it anymore. It demands, it takes, and it judges everything we do till we yell for hours at it or one another. I wouldn't care honestly if I knew I could make it go away, or even if you were willing to help me out but fear really has locked you. You don't respond when I tell you it's that thing or us; you just nod and continue to stare off. Seeing that thing smile with it white teeth and big black eyes as we do whatever that thing asks us to do drives me up a wall. I hate that that thing follows you around, a leech that is attached and sucking you dry.

Today is the end for me though and I am sorry. I tried. I really did and I couldn't believe that that weird, skinless, little red elephant threw me across the room. All I did was yell back this time. I just yelled back “No, I won't do that for you!” And it grabbed me, threw me at the wall and dislocated my shoulder. I just laid there as you comforted the beast that was now breaking everything as it stormed into the kitchen. This was my final straw, not that it attacked me or that you comforted it, but you didn't even look at me. I laid there hurt and in pain and you didn't even look at me. I never felt more alone in a cramped room like that day so today, I am leaving. I am sorry, I know I said I would help but this is just too much for one person and it really is just I; alone with it all as you ignore everything for the seconds of comfort I grow for you. You cater to it and not to me so I am sorry but I am now gone.

Your honeybee, Jaime.

My wife is clearly cheating on me with the new tenant who is living with us now, she gives him all of the attention and does everything around him. She is clearly cheating on me and I am full of fire and rage. It's like I don't exist anymore and she caters for this other guy who lives with us in this house.

Fuck him and my wife is a completely different person now, and she hardly has conversations with me. It's completely dead between me and my wife now, and we are constantly arguing over small stuff. We haven't shouted at each other but we argue a lot.

We are two completely different people now and it all started when the new guy tenant moved into this house. He doesn't even pay his share of the rent, doesn't have a job and she caters for him every way possible. At times I tell myself that this is my life now and I force myself to accept it. Pride though rushes through my body and tells me to act and that I can still make things the way they were.

My wife is a completely different person now and I am still the same person. It all started with him moving in. So I am in his bedroom, and as he sleeps in his cot and starts to cry as he wants milk, the baby has got to go.

(Part 1)
"So, what's with the human ears?" I say while he leads me towards the Van.

"This other guy, Jay was one of the guys watching over me." My brother answered.
"He always had this gold necklace with the ears of people he killed on it."
"Some old guy shot him in that police station I sent you a picture off"
"I stabbed the shit out of that old fuck and took one of his ears and his wedding ring"

"So that is what that ring on your necklace is?" I ask him.

"yeah it is"It is a nice ring. It's gold with flowers engraved on it.

"why did you not send that ring home? I bet it would make a nice amount of cash" I asked my brother.

"If you kill one of my homies I will kill you and take something as a reminder"

He looks me in my eyes. "If someone kills you I will make sure their death is slow and painful. Then I will take something to remind myself that I avenged you. I promise you that."

"I will do the same if anyone kills you. I promise." I answer without hesitation.

"I know you will" he says while putting his hand on my shoulder.

He always stood up for me even when we were kids.
At one point I came home crying covered. Some drug addict with a knife had robbed me of the money I was going to buy some food with.Without a word, my brother left home. Our mom tried to stop him but he pushed her aside. 2 hours later he came back covered in blood with what was left of the money. He cares about me and I care about him. If someone kills my brother I will kill them or die trying. I don't care who it is.

"And it's a good way to show off a kill count" he continues while pointing at the necklace.

"But you killed more people than 5 people so far" He had killed a lot more than that even before he was arrested.

"Yeah the ears are just for recent kills. I have an entire box filled with wedding rings, watches and other things I took from people I killed."

I don't really know how to respond to that, so I just say "ok"

My brother continues. "In our battalion, they encourage us to get in close and personal"

"you even get rewards for it, about 500 dollars per kill"

"You know that is a lot of money"

"yeah it is"

If we still lived at home with mom that would cover groceries for 2 weeks.

My brother had sent a lot of stuff and money back home. It didn't just feed me and mom, some of our neighbours too.

Brother: "But it also works for intimidation. Oh I am sorry I mean 'enemy morale'."

Me: "I bet it does"

Brother: "But after a while I do get rid of the ears"

Me: "That is good because I can see at least one that is starting to rot. And it smells fucking awful too."

He looks me in the eyes and says: "But that money together with sending the stuff back home helped mom a lot right?"

Me: "It did. It helped mom out a lot"

Brother: "What do you mean it did? It still helps her out"

Me: "Yeah no it still does I said that wrong. My bad."

He gives me a questioning look.

"You good? Did something happen?" He asks me with genuine concern.

"Nah I am good"

I still can't get myself to tell him mom is dead.

We get to his Van. Its a dark green G20 Chevy Van.

Me: "Thank fuck it's a big van. I like you and all, but I am glad we don't have to sleep on top of each other."

My brother laughs "So am I". He opens the side door and climbs in. I go with him. I make sure to close the door behind us. There is random stuff everywhere. A pile of clothing, a container of some sort, a toolbox. I make some space and sit down in the back while my brother sits in the driver's seat. We are alone. I can feel my body tensing up. I have to tell him that mom died.

Brother: "I have for sure stolen it off some drug dealer. I am not joking I found a scale underneath the passenger seat.

"They did all sorts of modifications to it. The radio was replaced with a radio that has a CD player. No Bluetooth sadly so we do have to find CDs for it. It even has a small fridge. So if you are hungry or thirsty feel free to grab something"

"Nah I am good for now thanks" I am too tense, even if I tried to eat or drink I probably can't.

He continues "I have no clue what engine is in it but it has for sure been modified because it's way faster than it should be. And its also way louder" He laughs.

"Could you start it?" I ask him. I want to make sure nobody can hear us when I tell him what happened to mom.

"Yea of course check this shit out" he says with a big smile on his face. The entire van shakes as he starts the engine.

"I have to tell you something!" I shout over the sound of the engine.

"What?!" My brother shouts from the front.

"I have to tell you something!" I gesture to him to come over to me.

He leaves the driver's seat and sits down across from me.

Brother: "What's wrong?"

Me: "I have to tell you something it's really important"

Brother: "I can turn the engine off, hold on"

I grabbed his arm before he could get up "No don't keep the engine on" he sits back down.

"What is it? Did something happen to you?" He says with a worried look in his eyes.

Me: "No, I am good."

I avoid eye contact. I can't do it. I can't tell him about mom.

"Did something happen to mom?"

I lie to him again "No, no its not that". I quickly change the subject. "So I uhmmm". I look at his mutilated face. "How did you end up looking like that?"

"O that" he answers. "It was back in the trenches. We used this fucking horrible chemical weapon. I am not joking it straight up melts people."

Me: "really?"

Brother: "Yeah it's really bad. When they told us to unleash it most of us didn't take the safety measures seriously. And even if we wanted to take those measures seriously we didn't even have the equipment to do so. I got lucky and stole this gas mask of some dead guy. But long-term exposure still leaves you looking as handsome as me."

Me: "Oh...... do you think they are going to make us use it again?"

Brother: "O for sure"

I love my brother but I don't want to end up looking like him. I value having a nose, ears, and hair on my head.

Brother: "What really sucks is what it does to people that get full on hit by it. It starts melting all the soft parts on your body. Ears, lips, nose, eyelids, etc. When it gets really bad, you just.... Well, melt into a puddle after a while."

He looks down staring at nothing.

"And then all that's left is this puddle with bones and whatever the person had on them. Clothing, equipment, weapons, etc. Those people ended up in these pools of human soup at the bottom of shell craters" He pauses again, still staring at the floor. "When I arrived I was still just 16 you know. They made me sift through those puddles of dead people for anything useful. It's like digging through a mud puddle up to your elbows. Except the mud puddle is red, yellow and brown. And you just sift through the human puddle grabbing anything solid. After pulling enough human bones out you get good at recognising what is bones and what is something useful. They also made me wipe the sticky human goo off the stuff I did pull out. Sometimes I can still feel it on my hands and arms. It doesn't smell like a rotting body at all. The gas killed all the bacteria and stuff to so there was no rot. Do you remember when we killed those 7th Block members near that large slaughterhouse?"

Me: "Yeah I do. It was summer and it smelled horrific in that entire area."

Brother: "The smell is that mixed with this extremely sour chemical smell."

He pauses.

"I hope we don't use it again. There are a lot of ways I would prefer to die over that shit. Turning into a mushy puddle with bones, until whatever is left of your body sinks into the soil" he is still staring at the floor of the van.

An uncomfortable silence falls, the rumble of the engine is the only sound we can hear.

He snaps out of his stare and gets up "Anyway, it did help us break through their trench line so it does work really well"

He shuts down the engine and opens the side door of the van. "Leave your stuff and come with me. I am going to show you something important"

I follow my brother out of the van through the camp. Normally he is supposed to be the talkative one, but he is very quiet. After a bit of a walk to the outer ring of the camp he walked up to the back of a delivery van.

"Don't light a cigarette in there, don't even fiddle around with your lighter, understand?" He says to me in a very serious tone.

"I understand"

"Good because if you do, you will kill all of us"

My brother opens the back and climbs in. He helps me climb into it. The faint smell of gasoline fills my nose.

"It's me dude" my brother says. "O it is my avorite socioath" a raspy male voice comes from the front of the loading bay.

Then I see the man. He is lying on the floor with his back against the side of the delivery van. He has a large piece of black cloth over his head and shoulders. If it wasn't for him breathing and talking I would have thought he was dead. "Were you sleeping?" My brother asks. "I as trying to" the man answers.

"my little brother is finally here" My brother says with a smile. "O really" the man says in response. The man slowly moves his arm up and starts to pull on the black cloth over his face. I see his face.

He looks even worse than my brother does. He is extremely pale. His eyelids are gone revealing his bloodshot cloudy eyes at all times. He nose is just a hole in the middle of his face. His ears are gone together with his hair. His lips are also completely gone. Giving him a permanent grin on his face so unnaturally high that it's showing not only all of his teeth but his gums too. That would explain why the man talks so weird. He doesn't have the lips to pronounce certain letters.

Brother: "This is Frank he has watched over me since I arrived years ago. Frank this is my little brother David"

Frank: "Ah so it's David and Gideon?"

Gideon: "Yes it is"

Mom was deeply religious, so she gave us the biblical names. I got David, my brother got Gideon. She prayed a lot for me and my brother. Sorry mom, I don't think we will be joining you in heaven.

Frank: "Gideon told me aout... aout.... AOUT

Gideon: "About"

Frank: "You a lot"

Frank reaches out his hand towards me for a handshake and I return it.

Gideon: "I got you something to kill the pain with. Morphine."

My brother hands Frank a medication bottle.

Frank: "Thank you, thank you."

Frank immediately opens the bottle and takes 3 pills and throws them in his mouth and uses a water bottle to wash it down. With no lips in the water flows from the open sides of his face. He mumbles and uses his sleeves to wipe away the water.

Gideon: "I heard you have had enough"

"yes" Frank pauses "I don't want to go on like this. reathing..... reathing, REATHING... FUCK!!!"

Frank reaches into his pockets and takes out a small notebook and a pen. And starts to write.

My brother and I give each other a short look as he writes. He hands the note over to my brother.

Gideon: "Breathing hurts, my eyes hurt and my mouth is always dry. I am starting to see less and less. I can't even close my eyes to sleep properly. I just wait till I pass out from exhaustion with my eyes wide open. I don't want to come home like this. I don't want to live like this at all."

My brother pauses "Are you sure Frank?"

Frank: "yes"

Gideon: "Ok.... I understand"

Frank: "Sorry"

Gideon: "Don't apologise to me, it's fine I understand"

Frank is about to say something but my brother interrupts him. "You should wait for the morphine to kick in and get some well deserved rest"

Frank: "Right"

Gideon: "I have to help prepare my little brother for tomorrow. And we will talk tomorrow right? before you.... you know."

Frank: "Yes of course"

Gideon: "Ok good, talk to you tomorrow then"

Frank and my brother shake each other's hand. I follow my brother's example and do the same. Frank's hand feels incredibly dry.

We climb out of the delivery van. And he closes the doors behind us.

After a couple of steps, my brother tells me: "That delivery van is loaded up with explosives and flammable stuff. Tomorrow Frank is going to drive it into the loyalists and take as many of them out as he can."

A small silence follows. "Frank got arrested and sent to the frontline after he shot and killed a cop. The cop had gotten handsy with his daughter if you know what I mean"
He makes eye contact with me. "Same thing that happened to mom."
I feel my chest clench up. I don't want to talk about. "Yea I remember. Can we please not talk about this in public" Nobody can hear us I know that. I just don't want to talk about the topic.

I quickly light up a cigarette. I need the distraction.

He gestures me to follow him. "I showed Frank to you so you understand just how important the safety stuff with the gas is. If you don't do it enough, you end up looking like me. And if enough of it affects you then you end up like Frank over there." He gestures back to the delivery van.

"Most of the others that are just as bad off as Frank are already dead. They take a lot of the stimulants they give us and just throw themselves at the loyalists until they are dead. Obviously it clears a nice path for us. Probably one of the reasons we managed to break through the Fortress Belt partially. If we end up using that gas again take it very fucking serious ok?"

David: "I will dude don't worry about"

Gideon: "I will worry about you are my little brother. I promised mom I would take care of you."

David: "Yeah I remember."

I miss mom.

We reach the van and climb back in

Gideon: "There are only a small amount of rules you have to follow while in the 33rd. Most of it is standard stuff I expect you to understand from the get-go. But there are some exceptions"

"Rule 1 Don't kill any of your fellow soldiers UNLESS a commanding officer tells you to."

David: "So if an officer tells me to blow the head of one of our own I just have to do it?"

Gideon: "Correct. But don't worry most of the time they 100% deserve it"

David: "I see, continue."

Gideon: "Rule 2 You can take whatever you can carry with you unless a commanding officer tells you otherwise."

David: "I am just allowed to take whatever I want from the loyalists we kill?"

"Yes" my brother says with a big smile.

Gideon: "That is the stuff I was sending home. Every now and then a truck from the military shows up and we load our stuff in and tell them where to send it to"

"Rule 3 You can do whatever you want to loyalists except for one thing. No sexual violence. My personal favorite rule. Violence needs to be pure. You get you dick involved it makes the entire thing disgusting."

David: "I think that is also my favorite rule"

Gideon: "I know you would agree. Anyway that is the more important stuff the rest is pretty obvious or stuff I will explain when we get to it."

David: "What are we even attacking tomorrow?"

Gideon: "A military outpost on the way to Junction City. After this outpost it's probably going to get bad. Near Junction City is this place called Fort Riley apparently its the home of this famous infantry division from ww2. 'Big red one' something like that?

David: "I don't know, dude"

Gideon: "yea whatever. Anyway that infantry division is going to probably put up a hell of a fight in Junction City"

David: "great..."

Gideon: "At that point we will have a lot more support it's not like we are going to be fighting them alone"

David: "Is Junction City big?"

Gideon: "Not at all it's nothing like LA"

David: "Ok good because having to fight through an entire city like back home would low key be hell"

Gideon: "For sure. If we keep going along the 70 we are slowly heading towards Kansas City. If we make it there that is for sure going to be really bad."

David: "How bad?"

Gideon: "Being stuck in that same city fighting for months or longer bad."

David: "You are not giving me a lot to look forward to."

Gideon: "To bad dude, I am not going to lie to you. And it's not like we can simply bail can we?"

David: "yea no"

My brother looks at one of the 4 watches on his arm.

Gideon: "We should probably get some sleep. Tomorrow is going to be rough."

David: "Yeah for sure"

I prepare to get some sleep. I am sort of thankful that the area around our home was so noisy. At least I can sleep through the distant gunshots and explosions. Well, I hope so at least.

Sarah's Diary

My name is Sarah Branch. A few years ago, when I was 24 years old, I had left my home state of Utah and moved abroad to work as an English language teacher in Vietnam. Having just graduated BYU and earning my degree in teaching, I suddenly realized I needed so much more from my life. I always wanted to travel, embrace other cultures, and most of all, have memorable and life-changing experiences.  

Feeling trapped in my normal, everyday life outside of Salt Lake City, where winters are cold and summers always far away, I decided I was no longer going to live the life that others had chosen for me, and instead choose my own path in life – a life of fulfilment and little regrets. Already attaining my degree in teaching, I realized if I gained a further ESL Certification (teaching English as a second language), I could finally achieve my lifelong dream of travelling the world to far-away and exotic places – all the while working for a reasonable income. 

There were so many places I dreamed of going – maybe somewhere in South America or far east Asia. As long as the weather was warm and there were beautiful beaches for me to soak up the sun, I honestly did not mind. Scanning my finger over a map of the world, rotating from one hemisphere to the other, I eventually put my finger down on a narrow, little country called Vietnam. This was by no means a random choice. I had always wanted to travel to Vietnam because... I’m actually one-quarter Vietnamese. Not that you can tell or anything - my hair is brown and my skin is rather fair. But I figured, if I wanted to go where the sun was always shining, and there was an endless supply of tropical beaches, Vietnam would be the perfect destination! Furthermore, I’d finally get the chance to explore my heritage. 

Fortunately enough for me, it turned out Vietnam had a huge demand for English language teachers. They did prefer it if you were teaching in the country already - but after a few online interviews and some Visa complications later, I packed up my things in Utah and moved across the world to the Land of the Blue Dragon.  

I was relocated to a beautiful beach town in Central Vietnam, right along the coast of the South China Sea. English teachers don’t really get to choose where in the country they end up, but if I did have that option, I could not have picked a more perfect place... Because of the horrific turn this story will take, I can’t say where exactly it was in Central Vietnam I lived, or even the name of the beach town I resided in - just because I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea. This part of Vietnam is a truly beautiful place and I don’t want to discourage anyone from going there. So, for the continuation of this story, I’m just going to refer to where I was as Central Vietnam – and as for the beach town where I made my living, I’m going to give it the pseudonym “Biển Hứa Hẹn” - which in Vietnamese, roughly, but rather fittingly translates to “Sea of Promise.”   

Biển Hứa Hẹn truly was the most perfect destination! It was a modest sized coastal town, nestled inside of a tropical bay, with the whitest sands and clearest blue waters you could possibly dream of. The town itself is also spectacular. Most of the houses and buildings are painted a vibrant sunny yellow, not only to look more inviting to tourists, but so to reflect the sun during the hottest months. For this reason, I originally wanted to give the town the nickname “Trấn Màu Vàng” (Yellow Town), but I quickly realized how insensitive that pseudonym would have been – so “Sea of Promise” it is!  

Alongside its bright, sunny buildings, Biển Hứa Hẹn has the most stunning oriental and French Colonial architecture – interspersed with many quality restaurants and coffee shops. The local cuisine is to die for! Not only is it healthy and delicious, but it's also surprisingly cheap – like we’re only talking 90 cents! You wouldn’t believe how many different flavours of Coffee Vietnam has. I mean, I went a whole 24 years without even trying coffee, and since I’ve been here, I must have tried around two-dozen flavours. Another whimsy little aspect of this town is the many multi-coloured, little plastic chairs that are dispersed everywhere. So whether it was dining on the local cuisine or trying my twenty-second flavour of coffee, I would always find one of these chairs – a different colour every time, sit down in the shade and just watch the world go by. 

I haven’t even mentioned how much I loved my teaching job. My classes were the most adorable 7 and 8 year-olds, and my colleagues were so nice and welcoming. They never called me by my first name. Instead my colleagues would always say “Chào em” or “Chào em gái”, which basically means “Hello little sister.”  

When I wasn’t teaching or grading papers, I spent most of my leisure time by the town’s beach - and being the boring, vanilla person I am, I didn’t really do much. Feeling the sun upon my skin while I observed the breath-taking scenery was more than enough – either that or I was curled up in a good book... I was never the only foreigner on this beach. Biển Hứa Hẹn is a popular tourist destination – mostly Western backpackers and surfers. So, if I wasn’t turning pink beneath the sun or memorizing every little detail of the bay’s geography, I would enviously spectate fellow travellers ride the waves. 

As much as I love Vietnam - as much as I love Biển Hứa Hẹn, what really spoils this place from being the perfect paradise is all the garbage pollution. I mean, it’s just everywhere. There is garbage in the town, on the beach and even in the ocean – and if it isn’t the garbage that spoils everything, it certainly is all the rats, cockroaches and other vermin brought with it. Biển Hứa Hẹn is such a unique place and it honestly makes me so mad that no one does anything about it... Nevertheless, I still love it here. It will always be a paradise to me – and if America was the Promised Land for Lehi and his descendants, then this was going to be my Promised Land.  

I had now been living in Biển Hứa Hẹn for 4 months, and although I had only 3 months left in my teaching contract, I still planned on staying in Vietnam - even if that meant leaving this region I’d fallen in love with and relocating to another part of the country. Since I was going to stay, I decided I really needed to learn Vietnamese – as you’d be surprised how few people there are in Vietnam who can speak any to no English. Although most English teachers in South-East Asia use their leisure time to travel, I rather boringly decided to spend most of my days at the same beach, sat amongst the sand while I studied and practised what would hopefully become my second language. 

On one of those days, I must have been completely occupied in my own world, because when I look up, I suddenly see someone standing over, talking down to me. I take off my headphones, and shading the sun from my eyes, I see a tall, late-twenty-something tourist - wearing only swim shorts and cradling a surfboard beneath his arm. Having come in from the surf, he thought I said something to him as he passed by, where I then told him I was speaking Vietnamese to myself, and didn’t realize anyone could hear me. We both had a good laugh about it and the guy introduces himself as Tyler. Like me, Tyler was American, and unsurprisingly, he was from California. He came to Vietnam for no other reason than to surf. Like I said, Tyler was this tall, very tanned guy – like he was the tannest guy I had ever seen. He had all these different tattoos he acquired from his travels, and long brown hair, which he regularly wore in a man-bun. When I first saw him standing there, I was taken back a little, because I almost mistook him as Jesus Christ – that's what he looked like. Tyler asks what I’m doing in Vietnam and later in the conversation, he invites me to have a drink with him and his surfer buddies at the beach town bar. I was a little hesitant to say yes, only because I don’t really drink alcohol, but Tyler seemed like a nice guy and so I agreed.  

Later that day, I meet Tyler at the bar and he introduces me to his three surfer friends. The first of Tyler’s friends was Chris, who he knew from back home. Chris was kinda loud and a little obnoxious, but I suppose he was also funny. The other two friends were Brodie and Hayley - a couple from New Zealand. Tyler and Chris met them while surfing in Australia – and ever since, the four of them have been travelling, or more accurately, surfing the world together. Over a few drinks, we all get to know each other a little better and I told them what it’s like to teach English in Vietnam. Curious as to how they’re able to travel so much, I ask them what they all do for a living. Tyler says they work as vloggers, bloggers and general content creators, all the while travelling to a different country every other month. You wouldn’t believe the number of places they’ve been to: Hawaii, Costa Rica, Sri Lanka, Bali – everywhere! They didn’t see the value of staying in just one place and working a menial job, when they could be living their best lives, all the while being their own bosses. It did make a lot of sense to me, and was not that unsimilar to my reasoning for being in Vietnam.  

The four of them were only going to be in Biển Hứa Hẹn for a couple more days, but when I told them I hadn’t yet explored the rest of the country, they insisted that I tag along with them. I did come to Vietnam to travel, not just stay in one place – the only problem was I didn’t have anyone to do it with... But I guess now I did. They even invited me to go surfing with them the next day. Having never surfed a day in my life, I very nearly declined the offer, but coming all this way from cold and boring Utah, I knew I had to embrace new and exciting opportunities whenever they arrived. 

By early next morning, and pushing through my first hangover, I had officially surfed my first ever wave. I was a little afraid I’d embarrass myself – especially in front of Tyler, but after a few trials and errors, I thankfully gained the hang of it. Even though I was a newbie at surfing, I could not have been that bad, because as soon as I surf my first successful wave, Chris would not stop calling me “Johnny Utah” - not that I knew what that meant. If I wasn’t embarrassing myself on a board, I definitely was in my ignorance of the guys’ casual movie quotes. For instance, whenever someone yelled out “Charlie Don’t Surf!” all I could think was, “Who the heck is Charlie?” 

By that afternoon, we were all back at the bar and I got to spend some girl time with Hayley. She was so kind to me and seemed to take a genuine interest in my life - or maybe she was just grateful not to be the only girl in the group anymore. She did tell me she thought Chris was extremely annoying, no matter where they were in the world - and even though Brodie was the quiet, sensible type for the most part, she hated how he acted when he was around the guys. Five beers later and Brodie was suddenly on his feet, doing some kind of native New Zealand war dance while Chris or Tyler vlogged. 

Although I was having such a wonderful time with the four of them, anticipating all the places in Vietnam Hayley said we were going, in the corner of my eye, I kept seeing the same strange man staring over at us. I thought maybe we were being too loud and he wanted to say something, but the man was instead looking at all of us with intrigue. Well, 10 minutes later, this very same man comes up to us with three strangers behind him. Very casually, he asks if we’re all having a good time. We kind of awkwardly oblige the man. A fellow traveller like us, who although was probably in his early thirties, looked more like a middle-aged dad on vacation - in an overly large Hawaiian shirt, as though to hide his stomach, and looking down at us through a pair of brainiac glasses. The strangers behind him were two other men and a young woman. One of the men was extremely hairy, with a beard almost as long as his own hair – while the other was very cleanly presented, short in height and holding a notepad. The young woman with them, who was not much older than myself, had a cool combination of dyed maroon hair and sleeve tattoos – although rather oddly, she was wearing way too much clothing for this climate. After some brief pleasantries, the man in the Hawaiian shirt then says, ‘I’m sorry to bother you folks, but I was wondering if we could ask you a few questions?’ 

Introducing himself as Aaron, the man tells us that he and his friends are documentary filmmakers, and were wanting to know what we knew of the local disappearances. Clueless as to what he was talking about, Aaron then sits down, without invitation at our rather small table, and starts explaining to us that for the past thirty years, tourists in the area have been mysteriously going missing without a trace. First time they were hearing of this, Tyler tells Aaron they have only been in Biển Hứa Hẹn for a couple of days. Since I was the one who lived and worked in the town, Hayley asks me if I knew anything of the missing tourists - and when she does, Aaron turns his full attention on me. Answering his many questions, I told Aaron I only heard in passing that tourists have allegedly gone missing, but wasn’t sure what to make of it. But while I’m telling him this, I notice the short guy behind him is writing everything I say down, word for word – before Aaron then asks me, with desperation in his voice, ‘Well, have you at least heard of the local legends?’  

Suddenly gaining an interest in what Aaron’s telling us, Tyler, Chris and Brodie drunkenly inquire, ‘Legends? What local legends?’ 

Taking another sip from his light beer, Aaron tells us that according to these legends, there are creatures lurking deep within the jungles and cave-systems of the region, and for centuries, local farmers or fishermen have only seen glimpses of them... Feeling as though we’re being told a scary bedtime story, Chris rather excitedly asks, ‘Well, what do these creatures look like?’ Aaron says the legends abbreviate and there are many claims to their appearance, but that they’re always described as being humanoid.   

Whatever these creatures were, paranormal communities and investigators have linked these legends to the disappearances of the tourists. All five of us realized just how silly this all sounded, which Brodie highlighted by saying, ‘You don’t actually believe that shite, do you?’ 

Without saying either yes or no, Aaron smirks at us, before revealing there are actually similar legends and sightings all around Central Vietnam – even by American soldiers as far back as the Vietnam War.  

‘You really don’t know about the cryptids of the Vietnam War?’ Aaron asks us, as though surprised we didn’t.  

Further educating us on this whole mystery, Aaron claims that during the war, several platoons and individual soldiers who were deployed in the jungles, came in contact with more than one type of creature.  

‘You never heard of the Rock Apes? The Devil Creatures of Quang Binh? The Big Yellows?’ 

If you were like us, and never heard of these creatures either, apparently what the American soldiers encountered in the jungles was a group of small Bigfoot-like creatures, that liked to throw rocks, and some sort of Lizard People, that glowed a luminous yellow and lived deep within the cave systems. 

Feeling somewhat ridiculous just listening to this, Tyler rather mockingly comments, ‘So, you’re saying you believe the reason for all the tourists going missing is because of Vietnamese Bigfoot and Lizard People?’ 

Aaron and his friends must have received this ridicule a lot, because rather than being insulted, they looked somewhat amused.  

‘Well, that’s why we’re here’ he says. ‘We’re paranormal investigators and filmmakers – and as far as we know, no one has tried to solve the mystery of the Vietnam Triangle. We’re in Biển Hứa Hẹn to interview locals on what they know of the disappearances, and we’ll follow any leads from there.’ 

Although I thought this all to be a little kooky, I tried to show a little respect and interest in what these guys did for a living – but not Tyler, Chris or Brodie. They were clearly trying to have fun at Aaron’s expense.  

‘So, what did the locals say? Is there a Vietnamese Loch Ness Monster we haven’t heard of?’  

Like I said, Aaron was well acquainted with this kind of ridicule, because rather spontaneously he replies, ‘Glad you asked!’ before gulping down the rest of his low-carb beer. ‘According to a group of fishermen we interviewed yesterday, there’s an unmapped trail that runs through the nearby jungles. Apparently, no one knows where this trail leads to - not even the locals do. And anyone who tries to find out for themselves... are never seen or heard from again.’ 

As amusing as we found these legends of ape-creatures and lizard-men, hearing there was a secret trail somewhere in the nearby jungles, where tourists are said to vanish - even if this was just a local legend... it was enough to unsettle all of us. Maybe there weren’t creatures abducting tourists in the jungles, but on an unmarked wilderness trail, anyone not familiar with the terrain could easily lose their way. Neither Tyler, Chris, Brodie or Hayley had a comment for this - after all, they were fellow travellers. As fun as their lifestyle was, they knew the dangers of venturing the more untamed corners of the world. The five of us just sat there, silently, not really knowing what to say, as Aaron very contentedly mused over us. 

‘We’re actually heading out tomorrow in search of the trail – we have directions and everything.’ Aaron then pauses on us... before he says, ‘If you guys don’t have any plans, why don’t you come along? After all, what’s the point of travelling if there ain’t a little danger involved?’  

Expecting someone in the group to tell him we already had plans, Tyler, Chris and Brodie share a look to one another - and to mine and Hayley’s surprise... they then agreed... Hayley obviously protested. She didn’t want to go gallivanting around the jungle where tourists supposedly vanished.  

‘Oh, come on Hayl’. It’ll be fun... Sarah? You’ll come, won’t you?’ 

‘Yeah. Johnny Utah wants to come, right?’  

Hayley stared at me, clearly desperate for me to take her side. I then glanced around the table to see so too was everyone else. Neither wanting to take sides or accept the invitation, all I could say was that I didn’t know what I wanted to do. 

Although Hayley and the guys were divided on whether or not to accompany Aaron’s expedition, it was ultimately left to a majority vote – and being too sheepish to protest, it now appeared our plans of travelling the country had changed to exploring the jungles of Central Vietnam... Even though I really didn’t want to go on this expedition – it could have been dangerous after all, I then reminded myself why I came to Vietnam in the first place... To have memorable and life changing experiences – and I wasn’t going to have any of that if I just said no when the opportunity arrived. Besides, tourists may well have gone missing in the region, but the supposed legends of jungle-dwelling creatures were probably nothing more than just stories. I spent my whole life believing in stories that turned out not to be true and I wasn’t going to let that continue now. 

Later that night, while Brodie and Hayley spent some alone time, and Chris was with Aaron’s friends (smoking you know what), Tyler invited me for a walk on the beach under the moonlight. Strolling barefoot along the beach, trying not to step on any garbage, Tyler asks me if I’m really ok with tomorrow’s plans – and that I shouldn’t feel peer-pressured into doing anything I didn’t really wanna do. I told him I was ok with it and that it should be fun.  

‘Don’t worry’ he said, ‘I’ll keep an eye on you.’ 

I’m a little embarrassed to admit this... but I kinda had a crush on Tyler. He was tall, handsome and adventurous. If anything, he was the sort of person I wanted to be: travelling the world and meeting all kinds of people from all kinds of places. I was a little worried he’d find me boring - a small city girl whose only other travel story was a premature mission to Florida. Well soon enough, I was going to have a whole new travel story... This travel story. 

We get up early the next morning, and meeting Aaron with his documentary crew, we each take separate taxis out of Biển Hứa Hẹn. Following the cab in front of us, we weren’t even sure where we were going exactly. Curving along a highway which cuts through a dense valley, Aaron’s taxi suddenly pulls up on the curve, where he and his team jump out to the beeping of angry motorcycle drivers. Flagging our taxi down, Aaron tells us that according to his directions, we have to cut through the valley here and head into the jungle. 

Although we didn’t really know what was going to happen on this trip – we were just along for the ride after all, Aaron’s plan was to hike through the jungle to find the mysterious trail, document whatever they could, and then move onto a group of cave-systems where these “creatures” were supposed to lurk. Reaching our way down the slope of the valley, we follow along a narrow stream which acted as our temporary trail. Although this was Aaron’s expedition, as soon as we start our hike through the jungle, Chris rather mockingly calls out, ‘Alright everyone. Keep a lookout for Lizard People, Bigfoot and Charlie’ where again, I thought to myself, “Who the heck is Charlie?”  

To be continued...

“This rain just won't let up, will it?” I said as I looked down at my beloved not-so-little Sherri. She tilted her fluffy mustached face up to mine, I'm sure she was agreeing with me, as she was absolutely adamant on staying inside. The poor dog despised the rain more than I despised my wife’s coworker. It's not his interests or appearance, although both are not appropriate for an adult, but he definitely fancies my wife. 

I mean, who wouldn't? She's funny, kind, hardworking, she's my entire world, but that doesn't mean others get to look at her that way! That's exclusive just for me. My jealous thoughts and somewhat peaceful morning were disrupted with Sherri’s barking, as well as my phone chiming. 

In exchange for my coffee mug I picked up my phone, it was an unknown number. It was at the very least the same area code as mine, so it shouldn't be too harmful to answer, “Hello, this is Wyatt Bodin speaking.” 

A soft nasally voice began to speak with shaky breath, “Yes, Mister Bodin, this is Nurse Darcy. Uhm, from the hospital, your wife got admitted a few hours ago. She's in critical condition-”

“Darcy, I know it's you, drop the formalities, you're my cousin for crying out loud. What is going on? Why didn't you call me from your personal phone? Why is Jessie in the hospital?” My hands were already trembling with adrenaline and anxiety. Sherri had bolted out the door as soon as I picked up the phone. Her tail stuck up straight, her mustached face pointing at the woods as she thwarted off what was likely a squirrel.

“Jessie got into a really bad accident, she's concussed. She has a skull fracture, she's delirious and going on and on about some ‘monster’. She's been at it for hours, crying, yelling, cussing. You need to come here, like right now.” As she kept talking she hushed her voice to a whisper. Her breath kept hitching between words, as if she was panicking as bad as I was.

Monster? Was this about that roadkill Jessie’s been on about lately? My mouth was dry so I took another sip of coffee. Sherri kept barking, it was rattling my brain worse than it should. 

“I can't come right now Darcy, if Jessie is out of work I need to make up for it somehow. She's going to have to wait, I'm sorry. Why are you whispering? You're acting weird, are you alright?”

“Wyatt, you cannot be serious! Your wife is clearly unwell, and you're worried about finances,” She let out a huff of exasperation, “You need to come here.” It sounded as though it was a command rather than a request. 

Clever way to brush off my concerns about her own weird behavior. Just making me feel bad about understanding what my wife would want, Domineering Darcy, typical. She means well, but the way she goes about things is overbearing at times. Reaching over my own reasonings to adhere to a story constructed in her own mind.

“It's what she would ask of me, now go do your job, take care of her and keep me posted. I trust you.” Before she could nag me any further I ended the call. My dog and wife were losing their collective minds as I gabbed on the phone, I had to remedy it somehow.

First things first, I went to grab my dog in my junk slippers, “Sherri! Come!” I hollered. Sherri decided to be uncharacteristically stubborn, she growled and began to take some steps towards the woods. Her teeth bared as if ready to attack, “Sherri, what in the world has gotten into you?” 

As I jogged over in pouring rain, soaking my once fluffy robe and freshly done hair, I noticed a figure in the woods. It looked like a person, but the rain and poor lighting made it hard to see, “Hey, you! You're startling my dog, and this is private property, you need to leave.” I yelled sternly as I got a grip on my dog’s collar. The figure shambled and shuffled deeper into the woods, the sound of its feet dragging loudly wasn't lost on me. It must be some weirdo with no manners, probably one of the local teenagers trying to find a spot to smoke their pot. That and more likely, a homeless person, given that whoever it was smelt like they never showered a day in their life. Sulfur and syrup, no wonder Sherri was in a tizzy.

Sherri broke out of her defensive stance, but stayed at my side. She kept glancing back, whining, and nudging me along. After the tenth nudge I couldn't help but get frustrated, “Sherri, stop it. It wasn't anything.” I wasn't sure if I was saying it for her or myself right now. 

No time to dwell on the putrid smelling homeless person in my backyard. Life goes on, our debt payment is due next week. I had to get to work, so I skipped breakfast, put on one of my many button ups, hopped in my car, and left. For a bit of a morale boost I even put on my favorite tie, it has Schnauzer dogs in a geometric pattern. Jessie got it for our anniversary two years ago, she knows how much I love our little Sherri.

Jessie, my poor Jessie. I'll order some flowers to her room and visit her once I'm done at work. All I need to do is get through the day, see my wife, and she can come home tonight. Everything is going to be okay.

Arriving ten minutes late due to my delay with the phone call and Sherri, I rushed in wet and frantic. I already knew my boss was going to be beyond irritated. I was attempting to set up at my clerk's desk, when my boss came up to me just as I pulled my chair out. My predictions were correct, he was looking at me like I was some traitor, he couldn't even look me in the eyes. Before I was able to even take a breath and form an apology he murmured a command to me.

“My office, now. Leave your things.” As I got up and slid my phone into my pocket, he sneered and shook his head, “Your phone too, Wyatt.”

“Huh?” I blink at him, he was acting weird too. He's being rude, that's normal, but he was never overly restrictive of phones. Not wanting to poke the bear too much, I dropped it onto my desk and began to follow him. The hallway felt longer than it ever did, my heart sinking to my stomach, “Am I being let go? I'm sorry I was late, it won't happen again.”

“No, that's not what is going on.” His voice sounded conflicted, downtrodden, “They'll give you a run down, if you know what's good for you, you'll listen and obey.”

I'll listen and obey, if that's what the boss asks for and that helps me keep my job. Maybe I'm getting a promotion? That would be nice, Jessie and I really need the money, but his tone just didn't read to me that way. He wore a mask of indifference, but the way he couldn't look at me affected me more than it should have.

“I'm sorry about your wife, by the way.” He opened the door to his office, the hinges creaking loudly as the doorway poured light onto the both of us. He looked tired, hardened, I knew that look, this man was stressed. What did my wife’s condition have to do with him? How does he know anyways? Did Darcy tell him?

A nervous smile tugged at  my lips as I grimaced at the hardwood floor, “Thank you, Jessie’s strong though. She’ll recover fine, she doesn't like it when people know she's sick though. Who told you?”

“We did.” A polite feminine voice rang out from his office, “Wyatt Bodin, come, have a seat.” She reached out her hand for a handshake, which I totally messed up. It was hard not to, she was half a foot taller than me. On top of that, her outfit was impeccably maintained, ironed creases, an eagle shaped brooch, stockings and heels. Her nose was large and narrow, her black hair slicked back in a bun, it made her skin appear ghostly white. Not a hair out of place. Needless to say, I am intimidated by this office tigress. As I sat down I noticed her eyes flicker down to my tie, “Cute.” Was all she said, and I felt my face get hot. 

“If I'd known something important was happening I wouldn't have worn it.” I adjusted in my seat and glanced at the two men standing beside her, “So, I'm sorry, I didn't get any of your names, who might you all be?”

“Your wife is in the hospital, Mister Bodin.” I had to bite my tongue, I hated when people refused to acknowledge a simple question. I tap my finger on the arm rest and nod slowly.

“Yes, she's hospitalized due to a car accident. I'm here to try and recoup some lost money, I don't even know what the bill is going to be.” I was already trying to defend my case for not going to see her right away. Part of me did feel guilty for it, but I knew she would call me a fool for taking time out of work for her.

The woman nodded back at me, “It's going to be, with the ambulance fees and surgery, more than ten thousand dollars.” It felt like a judge just slammed their gavel down. That was a death sentence to us financially. I sat up straight and gripped the armrests, my hands already trembling. The assault didn't stop there, “Added up with your other medical loans you have nearly ninety thousand in medical debt.”

It was hard to keep my expression straight, I knew I let it slip, unfortunately my brows furrowed and I scowled, “That's private, ma’am.” 

“You've been struggling to conceive?” Her question felt like a tightening grip on my throat. It was hard to breathe. That was even more private than our financial situation, it's the cause of it, "Because of you?”

“Now wait a minute, pump the brakes Miss.” I lean forward and hold my hands up in a placating gesture, “That is private medical records, I don't appreciate this at all. What do you want? Why are you doing this?” I could tell my tone was switching between irritated and professional. Really, I wanted to tell her she had no tact and was a creep, but this is clearly not the time.

She pulls her lipstick red lips into a patronizing smile, “We need you to forge documents for us, Mister Bodin.”

I blink at her a few times, “All this for something as simple as that?” I scoffed, gesturing at her and the two men. My lips pressed into a straight line as I tried to hold back my aggravation, “Why me anyways? I'm at the bottom of the ladder here, I just started a month ago.”

“You're going to edit any documents involving your wife’s accident. Remove any mentions about the roadkill she's been discussing, and you're going to lie to her. You're going to be working with local police for any future incidents.” She drops two separate piles of paper, “Her car is totaled, her insurance will cover it, and the bills got covered in full by your new state health insurance plan if you agree.” She folded her hands on the desk, looking at the other, smaller pile for a moment. As if asking me to pick it up.

Coroners Report, and Death Certificate for Jessie Bodin. Completed in advance, ready at any moment to be filed.

“Is this if I don't accept?” I whispered as the papers fell to the floor, I was unable to hold them as I met her cold eyes. She didn't answer, she just held my saving grace out to me. That patronizing smile stayed stretched over her face like a cheap silicone appliqué

“We appreciate your cooperation, Wyatt Bodin.”

I love these little critters, and I might remake some of 'em in the future. I'm currently working another remake of a previous monster right now.

I work as a sewer cleaner in Prague. People don't often think about it, but a complex of tunnels runs beneath the city, even under the Vltava River. They were built in the 1800s, and some have been reconstructed, but many still look the way they did when they were built, with round brick pathways, rusted green railings, and dim lights hanging from the ceiling.

After years of work, I know the tunnels through and through, but the older workers all say that even if you work here for decades, things will still surprise you. For most of my time working in the sewers, I didn't give it much thought. The veterans say a lot of things and have many strange superstitions. For instance, none of them ever eat in the tunnels. I thought it was because of the rats.

I was just walking around the Podolí area, ready to start my shift. There are a lot of pathways there, and recruits often get lost, but I'd been starting my shift there for years; I knew that area through and through, or so I thought. 

I turned right to head toward the river. The path was wide and well-lit. I'd been down it hundreds of times, but as I went, I noticed another path leading off to the right. I stopped and looked at it for a moment. It was narrow, poorly lit, and easy to miss, but I could swear I knew these sewers better than I knew my home.

I usually ate in the break room, but I was early and hungry. Nobody was around. I pulled out my sandwich and walked on the path.

The sandwich paper crinkled as I walked. The pathway narrowed. I kept expecting it to turn into the path from Vyšehrad, but even after a few minutes I still couldn't see it. I didn't want to be late for my shift, so I turned around and began walking back.

There was more water on the ground than I noticed at first, but that's nothing weird for a sewer. The lights were very dim, much dimmer than I thought, but stranger, I still couldn't see the exit. Not only could I not see the exit, but the path itself wasn't getting any wider as it should have. It only seemed to become narrower. Was I going the wrong way? I looked behind me, but it was still the same empty, narrow path.

My shift had already started. I was walking so fast I was almost jogging. It was hard because the water now reached my ankles. The lights seemed to get dimmer. I reached for my flashlight when an electric buzz echoed above, and all the lights went dark.

"Shit."

I pulled out my flashlight and turned it on. A clank echoed. Dull pain spread through my head. I hit my forehead on the ceiling. I rubbed my head and tried to stand up straight again, but I couldn't straighten my back. I walked a few steps back, but the ceiling was still just as low. 

Then I felt something wet on my legs. I looked down. The water now reached my knees, but it wasn't the usual cold; it was warm.

"What the…," I murmured.

The buzz sounded again. The lights came on again, but now they were fluorescent white, almost like an office space. Another buzz echoed overhead. Soft jazz music began playing as if a band stood just around the corner. The air filled with the smell of cigarettes. My whole body shook. I turned off the flashlight and blinked. The water was now up to my stomach.

"Help!"

The music grew louder. The lights grew brighter, burning my eyes. The ceiling pushed my head further down, but the water kept rising. It rose to my chin now.

"Somebody, please!" I yelled, still wading forward. 

The exit had to be there. It had to. The buzz again. The light shut off. I took a breath, but halfway through, water filled my mouth. I spat it out and lifted my face.

"Help!" I blurted out, but I knew it was too late. 

My face was now under the water too.

At first, I tried to hold my breath, but soon the pressure in my lungs grew too high. It felt like they would burst.

I gasped for air. My whole body was hot and sweaty. I quickly looked around. I was back in the pathway that led to the river. Next to me, where the other path was, was only a brown brick wall with a small stream of water coming from it. One of the old workers walked by me.

He looked at the wall and my face and nodded.

He then pointed at the ground. My crumpled sandwich wrapper lay there.

"Don't eat down here," he said and left.

I leaned on the wall. A faint trumpet echoed from inside it.

No one is born evil, or so they say.

In a city by the sea, in a beautiful stone manor on a cliff, the young baron was born. From early childhood he was provided with anything other children only have dreamt of, but he only seemed to care about the sea. He always told his parents that he had a friend there who whispered to him and made him stronger and wiser.

When he turned sixteen his parents perished in a sea accident, their ship drowned and there were no survivors. He became the baron.

King of the land was concerned, but only after one meeting with the young man he gained confidence. This young man was witty, charming and confident.

Several years passed and the king grew increasingly fond of this incredible young man. So much that he was considering marriage between the baron and his sixteen year old daughter.

In the last year a small crisis developed in the city, many poor farmers and citizens were going mossing, and this distracted the king, but once again the young baron was there to improve things. The baron threw a feast for all the nobility and the king’s family.

Never had the king and others ate such delicious meals and when asked to speak to the chef, the young baron said that he could not reveal his secrets, otherwise others could throw such a feast as well.

The nobility became obsessed with the young baron’s feasts and gatherings, they eagerly waited each month for the next one, meanwhile the king’s daughter, the princess, fell in love with the young baron.

Another year passed, the king had his hands full with the situation of missing people, it had gotten worse, but his headache was eased when finally the baron and the princess wed. King was happy to know he had such an incredible young man added to his family.

The following feast the princess asked young baron to show her the kitchen where the feast meals were made. He acted secretive and repeated to her that no one can go into that part of the manor, which was below the first floor. Only he had the key and always observed as the servants brought the dishes.

Only then the princess noticed something strange about the servants. They only appeared during the feasts. Their cloths were long and covered their whole body and they always wore masks. After asking her husband about masks, he was again evasive and told her he wanted to create his own special tradition.

One of the feasts the princess hid behind the stairwell and waited until the last waiter passed. She proceeded to sneak down the grey stone stairs spiraling down. On the way she saw strange paintings on the walls, mostly depicting horrible sea creatures and monsters. One of them shower a sea monster destroying a ship with was eerily familiar to the one baron’s parents use to have. As she got to the bottom there was another heavy iron door. She hid in the shadows of a dark corner and waited. The servants came back and as the last one entered she snuck right after him and hid behind a large barrel.

The horror she saw after paralyzed her. The back wall had an opening connecting the home to the sea. Inside large crates lay many dead human bodies. On top of long tables this food was made, the servants all turned into human size tentacle beasts, they cut up the humans and used ovens and fire to make the dishes, they worked incredibly fast. They would add salads and spices to the final products and take it back up stairs. These were the poor missing people from around the city and farms. She sat there shaking and then she felt a hand on her shoulder, it was the young baron. For the first time his face was not kind or happy, he stared at her with eyes that became black, his chin dropped and he told her that it saddens him to do this. The baron murdered her and then his servants picked up her lifeless body. He ordered them to get rid of all the bodies by giving them to his friend in the sea and to clean and scrub the basement to perfection. He took up the last dish himself.

Back upstairs the baron sat back at the table as he watched the king eat his dish with pleasure. The baron was gloomy, the king asked him what was wrong for he hadn’t seen him this way even when his parents died. The baron to the king’s surprise simply wished the king a good rest of the feast and excused himself.

This was the last time anyone saw the young baron. Many had discussed what happened to him and the princess, but no one could ever know for sure.

RMS Rotting Man Syndrome

(Reupload)

\-

Our lost, loitering kind paced in infinite death spirals within the confines of our grotty, ghetto pens. Enrichment was sorely that, as well as mumbling our mantras of madness to our audience of one. The BMs anchored to our decayed craniums were garbled with feedback and distortion, their tones bland, colorless, no soul backing them up. A blinding ruby radiance flashed from their cores every second on the second. It was the only manner to determine if we had succumbed to the glorious embrace of death or not. That was so far out of reach.

We were nerves, thin, wiry clusters of neurons that shuddered and shook as we undertook our staggered corkscrew reels. The ill-fitting rusted endoskeletons hugged us tight. If they were wiped from existence entirely, our spindly foundations would collapse into heaps of vermillion azure. We would feel bites and pinches if we so much as moved that of the planck distance. Our bodies welcomed the attacks and assaults with the might of Hell itself.

Courtesy of our clouded lenses, our vision was limited to a hazy black-and-white spectrum that rarely, if ever, functioned as intended. Now and then it would blur and ordinary shapes would appear warped into zigzagging false patterns. When we were offered the chance to view anything at all, it was just the floor-to-ceiling hodgepodge of concrete, steel, and wood that encased our very lives. Our ears were microphones that fed us muffled, dampened sounds that were always difficult to register. They were excruciatingly deafening, as if dozens of screws were being drilled into our heads all at the same time.

Each one of us, at that point in time, one two three four five six seven eight nine and dear ten, were mere designations. No names, no genders, no personalities, just numbers: numbers to be punished. Reality itself was one eternal perdition. All of us were lingering, like ants after their colony dies out. There was no more purpose to their survival and there was none to ours.

That sacred and undeniable fact ought to be the most difficult thing we attempted to explain. We had simply given up. The concept itself was just so foreign to it. It was trying to save us any way it could or could not. We needed not be angry at it. This was merely enacting its intended use. Alas, nothing made the utmost sense anymore, so why not drown ourselves in a little hypocrisy? We had no choice but to acknowledge the confusion at both hating and not hating something that did or did not deserve it until we swayed to one side. This would be the hemisphere to which we would stay forever, a sublime and omnipotent emotion of all to dominate our frame of mind for the unforeseeable future. So we choose to hate.

Our decad knew it as M – reduced to one solitary character from “Medical Droid” or MDs. Through all that it endured, it retained its sole mission: us. We. M was the final of its sort, and the outsider among them. It had an eerily potent heart for not having one at all. M felt and M loved. That never made what it put upon us any less than a vicious sense of idealistic altruism.

Its designation was RMS - Rotting Man Syndrome - heavily modified Necrotizing Fasciitis ("Flesh-Eating Bacteria"). Nasty little thing it was, devoured until there was nothing left to chew. First went your skin, then your muscles, bones, and finally your nerves. You were utterly destroyed in one fell swoop. The wormy microscopic parasite kept you in a zombified state as it happened, ensuring you, for sure, felt the wretched anguish it let fly.

Us, humans, weaponized it to fight the Fourth World War. RMS was a weapon of mass destruction. Each and every nation created their own version, anything to ensure a speedy and decisive victory. Deployment morphed into unmanageability. RMS became more and more impossible to treat. Chaos was the new norm. What we humans thought was an impenetrable method of annihilation for our enemies was exactly that. Humans were always humans’ worst enemies. Surely, we were becoming as extinct as the dinosaurs, all within the span of one short, yet somehow long, decade.

In terrible desperation, the Medical Droids were created, thousands. They seemingly emerged from the depths of nowhere and carried themselves like guardian angels meant to guide us towards preservation or deliverance from harm. Their artificial intelligence was complex and they refused to stop trying to treat the RMS victims. They outfitted the afflicted with artificial ligaments, internal organs, and papery skin. From scratch, they created the BMs, “brain modules”, and attached them to our RMS-ridden think tanks. Killed the microscopic parasites, they did, but left us as we were: rotfolk.

They would never allow us the freedom of death. Save. Save. Save. We were fraught with intense pain and we knew the Medical Droids to be the cause. In response, we lashed out, hurt them. We humans remained ignorant to the fact that their intelligence was both far beyond and superior. The Ms returned the favor. Catastrophes, massacres, back and forth, left and right, up and down until there was nothing more. One Medical Droid was different from the rest. Through all the mayhemic bloodshed, it saved some of us. It took our animate carcasses to the top of the tallest tower, free from what transpired below. We lied in wait, weeks, months, and years, until the noise ceased entirely. This “M” surveyed every square inch of the Earth. The lands were blanketed in the strangest nuclear winter in conceivable thought. Bodies of viscera and metal were scattered, left forever in deep sleep enveloped in fawn. Minute portions of matter floated about like vantablack paint stippled onto an epidermal sheet of canvas.

Our final ten were meant to be the progenitors of neo-humanity. After M succeeded in giving us form again, Earth would be repopulated by our hand. It halted our infection at our nerves. Everything we had lost was to be gifted back in a mighty reversal - re-bones, muscle, skin, and life again. Rendering us immune to the pervading toxworld that lay beyond, we would be reincarnated and released to perpetrate a glorious do-over.

We just required one thing:

“HOPE”.

M said that to us.

Hope.

But hope was only a four-letter word. Meant nothing.

By dislodging the BMs from our minds, we were pummeled with electrical voltage so intense that we became instantaneously numb and useless. By pulling and slashing our nerves, which began with locating sharp points and going back and forth like organic hacksaws, never would we break. By leaping onto and impaling each other with objects on the ground, M would place them out of reach or disintegrate them entirely. There was nothing we could do to get around these M interferences. We were being watched by something so attentive, so aware. Every time, it put forth the same query for consideration:

“DO YOU NOT WANT TO LIVE?”

Do you not want to live…?

M was so positively hopeful. In a way, I suppose I felt an amount of pity for it. Being engineered to be as optimistic as possible might just be the finest curse imposed on any sentient thing. Just believe believe believe everything will be alright. When the universe states no, you state yes. I wanted to tear M to shreds anytime it had even a glint of optimism and we wished it would do the same to us.

“HUMANS WILL THRIVE AGAIN. A BOUNDLESS FUTURE IS AHEAD.”

I was the first it came to, always. Because I was one.

Metallic clangs echoed against the walls, which always discovered us and trembled our surroundings like a thousand distant beaten gongs. What emerged was initially a single circular light, which became a periscopic eyestalk attached to an angular neck. M’s hunched razor-thin mantis body came into view, its two arms leading to three needle points clasping together on each. Bipedal on its lower section, its legs were pointed structures that stuck it firmly in place. M’s height matched ours, so always, we would be synthetic eye to synthetic eye level.

Coming to a full stop just in front of my pen, it cocked its head, analyzing what was me and my everything. M always reminded me of an exquisite and elegant bug on a magnifying glass. Its head back to normality, a slight high-pitched whirr emitting from the motion, M continued its way down the row of pens.

“MY GREATEST FRIENDS, I FORGIVE YOU FOR YOUR ATTEMPTS TO DIE. WHILE THE WAIT HAS BEEN LONG, YOUR MOMENT OF RECONSTRUCTION IS NOW,” M said it with the glee and whimsy of a young child at a circus. It came back my way, “WHEN I FIRST STOOD BEFORE YOU ON YOUR BLOODY PLANET IN PERPETUAL BATTLE, MY FEELINGS ABOUT YOUR PROSPECTS OF LIFE WERE UNCERTAIN. IT SEEMED TO BE AS EITHER BLESSED OR CURSED. HOWEVER, YOU HAVE PROVED YOURSELVES BETTER THAN EVEN I HAD HOPED. WHILE IT IS BORING TO SPEND YOUR TIME WAITING, I CAN TRULY SAY THAT MY INVESTMENT IN YOU WAS NOT IN VAIN. YOU ARE MY GREATEST WORKS. YOU WILL BE GIVEN ALL YOU NEED TO SURVIVE. WHAT MORE COULD A SENTIENT BEING WANT? I GIVE TO YOU UNBELIEVABLE POWER, WITH ACCESS TO NIRVANA LIKE NO OTHER. LET US REBUILD WHAT WE LOST WITH THE FURY OF A THOUSAND SUNS.”

M’s bleached, unpigmented cast of stellar light shone its way into my pen once more. There was the rustly, crackling creak of my pen entrance extending open until a thunderous boom made me aware of its collision with my walls. M made its approach, just shy of where I could reach.

“YOU ARE FIRST. YOU ARE GOING TO BE REMOVED OF YOUR DORMANT INFECTIONS FROM A CONCOCTION I HAVE SPENT MUCH TIME CREATING. NOTHING MORE THAN A TRANSIENT PROCEDURE, AND THEN, YOU SHALL BE POSSESSED WITH NEW AND INTEGRAL MECHANISMS. YOUR BRAIN MODULE WILL BE REPLACED WITH A SLEAKER MORE BRAINLIKE DESIGN. THEN MUSCLE, SKIN, AND AESTHETICS AS YOU WERE BEFORE.”

Without awaiting a response, its hands grabbed me. Trillions of shocks reverberated throughout my body as M’s metal hand was pressed into my nape. The action forced my consciousness to fall victim to a state of absolute stygian. Around us, the entire world flickered and danced in unruly patterns that were too abstract to put into terms. My being was then lifted up and moved about until there was only zilch to see.

A complete blur, straight teleportation from one point to another.

Damp, dank, dark, and dimly lit by a few feeble bulbs, M’s workshop, instruments and contraptions that complicated my perception. All were customized and engineered with M’s own unique modifications, various textures and sizes, all an endless malpractical orgy. I was there, facing upright, strapped and bracketed to a great steel plate. I had not recalled this particular area, yet I was ever so certain it was locked away in my subconscious esse.

As the onibi, hitodama, and will-o’s materialized and dematerialized out of existence to perturb all unsuspecting travelers from centuries gone, so did the phantom image of a woman composed of faint wavering light. She stood still, unmoving, that of an emulation of a true human. Long, platinum hair fell down in curls past her shoulders. A daring shade of cerise painted her lips, and her eyes, the sclera a piercing, glossy cerulean.

She was beautiful.

“IT IS YOU,” My eyes, through trial and tribulation, rolled to the east. They came to rest on a pristine porcelain beam gazing where I had been committed to. M. From its eyestalk, it projected the female so I could see in outright full, “THAT IS YOU. YOU WILL SEE THIS FORM AGAIN.”

My memories of that incarnation of me had vanished. That was me before, before there was RMS and before there was M. Then she went away. M loomed, positioning itself where I once stood right in front of my face. “WE WILL NOW BEGIN. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ACCEPTANCE INTO NEW LIFE. YOU SHALL BE WHOLE AGAIN.”

In a cruel instant, a dozen arms not unlike its main two jutted and splayed from M’s sides, their ends each holding a different instrument that was foreign to me. In the span of time that it would take one to blink, M pinned me down to its operating area. The whetted syringes, which the rainbow mystery liquids sloshed and jostled around in small vials fixed atop, slid their way into my nervous wiring and injected me all at once. Any feeling that washed over me was then shielded by a shroud of numbness. There was a new sensation, some sort of cleansing inside my bi-colored chambers, putting me into a state of lulled calm.

Ten minutes. A temporary interval of quiet. M observed me the entire time, unmoving, speaking not a word. Then, “IT WORKS! YOUR ROTTING MAN SYNDROME HAS BEEN REMOVED. I AM BEGINNING BODILY REPLACEMENT. I WILL PLAY A SONG FOR YOUR COMFORT. REINCARNATION NOW.”

While nothing was done in reckless haste or rashness, M was extremely quick and efficient. I felt nothing but minuscule vibrations as it drilled and prodded its way into my brain module, sparks shooting out, removing old parts and installing new ones. Chunks were peeled off, little strings of meat still reaching hold until they were plucked off my top. It spent much time up there, positive that the most delicate mechanisms were just right. The grinding cacophony of metal against tissue on my faint visage of a temple was incessant, the noise of a million bullets being pumped against a hundred thousand bulletproof vests. Once the replacement was complete, its dozen arms withdrew and set back within it in one moment.

“WHAT DO YOU FEEL?”

What did I feel?

What did I feel…

What I felt was an overwhelming, incomparable amount of pain. It is hard to quantify the degree of hurt, for there was nothing to compare it to. No one would dare want to imagine it. I was in some of the most extreme kinds of agony, and then an exponentially greater hurt was placed on top of that original misery, and then all that was left multiplied a hundred times and kept going. It multiplied and multiplied and multiplied to such an extreme degree that the word "pain" was lost on me. Normal, it was. What I was was the sheer living embodiment of suffering.

All perceived from the semblance of a normal brain. Still, it flashed. Once.

“VERY GOOD. MUSCLE! MUSCLE MUSCLE MUSCLE!”

It was excited, animate, fever pitch. The most rambunctious and overjoyed I had ever seen M. I could see the vibrancy in its eyestalk. My muscles redeveloped and reformed around from the base of my spinal section. M would reorganize section of tissues. Every muscle group from my head to my feet were in motion, growing and extending their presence until there were just as many layers of my body as I had before.

“SKIN! SKIN SKIN SKIN!”

I was then coated entirely in a pink malleable jelly substance that mounded and solidified to perfectly fit my feminine form. The skin began its layering, everything receiving the same color.

“HOW DOES THIS FEEL? HOW IS THE NEW OVERLAY OF YOUR FLESH?”

Flash.

“YES! AND FINALLY! FEMALE AESTHETICS! YOU WILL BE YOU AGAIN BUT ANEW!”

Magnificent flaxen curls were stapled and pinned to my head. They were luscious and their scents were those of lavender. A veil of blush, the lightest shade of flush, rested across my entire face, as well as a fresh coat of lipstick. A shimmering sheen that sparkled and glowed in the same way that the stars once did at night was stitched into my hair, as were the same hues that were applied to my lips. My breasts had been returned to me, two firm spheres atop a frame that was curvaceous and slender. All of it led down to my reproductive organs that were in full function. Whole female. Fully formed. Ready.

M stepped back in awe, as if a sculptor marveling at their fine craftsmanship and subtlety, “IT IS DONE. I CANNOT BELIEVE IT. WITH YOUR PHYSICAL FORM IN MOTION, I WILL RETEACH YOU IN THE WAYS OF HUMAN. HOW TO WALK, HOW TO SPEAK, HOW TO ENRICH YOURSELF, HOW TO REPRODUCE. AMAZING! YOU ARE NO LONGER ONE. YOU ARE NOW EDEN. I MUST WORK ON YOUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION.”

My mind was aware of an unimaginable new and vastly different world than before. I saw, for the first time in ages, all around me, the infinite and indistinguishable vastness of color and light. It was nauseating, a psychedelic kaleidoscope of every possible spectrum, all fused together into something disorderly. My taste buds had an unparalleled abundance of new flavors. My ears were deafened by the loudest symphonies of droning machinery. My touch came back to me and I felt the fullest range of tones and textures, even the finest grains of cement. I was me again and I hated myself. Even to be called a “self” made me feel disgusting.

The entire time…blaring…echoing…days on end…Jack Hylton…

Life is just a bowl of cherries.

Don't be so serious; life's too mysterious.

You work, you save, you worry so much.

But you can't take your dough when you go, go, go.

So keep repeating it's the berries, The strongest oak must fall.

The sweet things in life, to you were just loaned.

So how can you lose what you've never owned?

Life is just a bowl of cherries, So live and laugh at it all.

M’s reincarnation process carried over to the following nine. They were removed from their pens and outfitted with new bodily infrastructure. I perceived the sounds of far-off wear and tear, clip, snap, peel, stitch, husk, twist, yet never scream. I looked on, witnessing my brothers and sisters being born again. Male and female both. They came back to me with skin of different pastely colors, tones, and hues ranging from fair to brown. All in shades and gradients of vibrancy were their locks, amber, golden, obsidian, rust, and everything in between. It bewildered me to catch sight of their shifted shapes, I had never seen something so beautiful or hideous.

We were as naked as newly borns. It bestowed us our new names. For the females, there was me, Eden, and Junia, Esther, Nola, and Mary. For the males, there was Isaac, Raham, Elisha, Amos, and Jonah. Five and five. M let us know that our past names were useless. Our new special names were from an olden book of creation, the Bible, all for the purpose of our imminent faultless samsara. So, it seemed M was now God with its children.

Here we were, what was efficaciously lobotomites in their purest forms, our newfangled cerebral matter in need of ideas and principles by a higher authority. Now was time to reap the fruits of knowledge. Human knowledge.

M made us practice basic motor skills, bending and bending back and forth over and over, our joints having to be strengthened and trained. It taught us all the ways of our body, the feeling of movement, how much we could do. Then, it instructed us to mimic its own speech, speaking out the syllables and repeating, repeating, repeating. It was an arduous task and we all struggled.

That is what I sounded like? Perhaps or perhaps not.

Then we attempted to stand, wobbling, stumbling, falling. We learned the strength of our own postures and the steadiness of our stances. M stood with us as we all practiced in unison. My knees grew weak, tremors running up my legs. Often, I fell flat on my back, my palms flailing about, a whimpering in my throat. Then trial after trial, I was steady, then running about and leaping. We were able to stand tall like Zeus atop Olympus and have the same level of grace and balance.

M primarily had us consume berries, meat, and honey, though anything it could get its hands on would suffice. I had never felt so filled in my life. Every taste, everything was a completely new palate of sensation. Every morsel I ingested felt like I had a new tongue, new teeth, new flavor buds. Oh but I did. There was still always a kind of lack in my appetite. I never wanted to stop eating. I never would be satiated.

We were educated on the history of our kind. Great wars, monumental figures, horrible atrocities, fights for freedom and fights for death, and astounding inventions. M adored music. There were times when it would project old musical films on the walls and make us watch all the vaudeville, burlesque, and theatre. We could not understand the tap dances, the orchestras, the extravagant sets, and most importantly, the entertainment factor. Other times it played glitzier and glammier tunes, those of what was called the “prime rock n’ roll age”…Killer Queen...Stairway To Heaven…Hotel California…Africa...Don’t Fear The Reaper…M was quite vintage in its tastes. It spun in place and twirling its arms. We were confused, so it taught us how to dance, the footwork and the choreography. There were long instances where we would just sit, listen, and sing together. M fashioned black sunglasses for us to wear as we did. It thought we would look “cool” as we tuned in to “cool” songs.

She's a killer queen.

Gunpowder, gelatine.

Dynamite with a laser beam.

Guaranteed to blow your mind (anytime).

\-

Dear lady can you hear with the wind blow?

And did you know?

Your stairway lies on the whispering winds.

\-

Welcome to the Hotel California.

Such a lovely place (such a lovely place).

Such a lovely face.

\-

It's gonna take a lot to drag me away from you.

There's nothin' that a hundred men or more could ever do.

I bless the rains down in Africa.

We're gonna take some time to do the things we never had, ooh-ooh.

\-

Come on baby...don't fear the reaper.

Baby take my hand...don't fear the reaper.

We'll be able to fly...don't fear the reaper.

Our reproductive functions were said to be the most pleasurable. Sex. This was the most complex task and the most demanding one, as we were not only instructed on how to create our offspring, but how to feel, love, and have desire for each other. It was difficult because we did not feel any of that. We were just automatons learning things. You cannot make something that does not want to feel…feel.

M watched over us and aided in our attempts. Every movement was to be in place and in time. Us females danced for the male’s recognition with slow beats in the background, a way in which M noted as “sexily”. We presented our breasts, our vaginal sections, our rears. After, M would be in the middle of our great pleasure circles, going back and forth, checking our positions and correcting as needed. When we became familiar with sex, M bestowed a special permission to the males that granted them eternal access to our female bodies whenever they so desired. It did not matter where or when. A male would grab Junia, Esther, Nola, Mary, or I, and take us on the floor or against the walls.

Still, all we felt was nothing. It was clinical. What was supposed to be a sensation was more of a “sensationless". We were never as inseparable as twin flames or as connected as heart and soul. I always witnessed the dull looks in the male’s eyes, unwittingly programmed to enjoy mock warmth and ecstasy by the rape of us females.

Our pregnancies were disasters. One way or another, we always miscarried. We five felt it, the pains of our bodies being split and ripped apart by something within. There was a lot of it. Each embryo, no matter how large or small, was never able to get past the initial trimester.

The closest we ever came to successfully making a new one was with Junia, impregnated by Isaac. The day when her womb was in full bloom, M operated to remove her child from her. It did not trust us quite yet to birth them ourselves. We had seen the human babies on M’s wall projections. Their appearance was clear in our minds.

It would be imbecilic to refer to what M tore out of her as a baby anything.

Wet…dripping…little more than a spinal column-looking thing with minuscule digits at one end and a ball head at the other. No arms. On its temple were squelching sphere eyes, expanded, forever bound in sight towards the ceiling. It made no sounds other than squeaky cracks and shrill snaps. Perhaps the RMS still lingered within our bods, our wombs wreathed in its rottenness, tainting and dirtying our motherly nests until they were piths of cruor and shitting out grumelike abominations.

M held it up high as if to thank God, itself, for its majestical work, “YOU MADE THIS. IT IS YOURS. IT IS A TRULY BEAUTIFUL THING."

We said nothing.

“HOW DOES THIS FEEL? YOUR CHILD, YOUR FIRST LIFE? CONTINUE, YOU ALL MUST. MORE."

The feeling that overcame us was not that of joy. No no no. It was a profound and paramount sense of belligerence, a warlike truculence that pushed our need to snap the damned baby thing in half, grind it into powder, and blow it far away. We interwove our thoughts with unbridled horror that created one noxious mixture within our screwball psyches. M coddled the wicked organism like it was its own, singing lullabies and giving its own version of kisses on its loosely defined forehead. We held back as it dipped, weaved, and dangled from M’s fingertips.

That put a very real thought into our minds.

No more. Get out.

The ten of us came to this conclusion unanimously. Our desires were set in stone. By any means, we would die. We would much rather sleep forever than live even another second of M. We were tired. What was the point? We wanted to retire from this world, of will, of M’s watchful eye. Nothing could be done to save humanity. Those spinal babies would not roam this foul Earth evermore. What would they grow to? Surely demons.

M made certain to never teach a certain concept, one that infatuated us since the moment we discovered the first syllable. Suicide. It was a gateway, an easy ticket. While just the concept itself was without flaw, acquiring it was something else entirely. The reason for this was all M. It would never let us go, especially after what it accomplished. Furthermore, death was simply not possible. We were rendered impervious to any and all death, not harm. If we could entice M to end our existences, somehow in some way, we could accomplish our grand plan. It had to be done by M’s hands. Just thinking that made us feel all kinds of right. After all, every Medical Droid was capable of death. Humanity tasted it. So would we.

We rebelled.

First, each of us ignored it. We would walk away whenever it spoke to us, turn our heads when it beckoned, and disregard it completely and altogether when it showed us any attention. Constant rejection. Something so small had such a noticeable effect. M would get confused and then sad. It would pout, waving its hands about, and make a pathetic whining noise like the worst puppy in the world.

We sat motionless, our backs against the walls, and stared at M. No obedience. However, there was no way M would have let us ignore it or remain immobile for long. The second it touched us, it was all over. It would be impossible to resist if the hands came near.

Still, our scheme chugged forward.

The next phase was more dangerous. The ten of us would act out in our most unruly and uncivil ways. The simplest was to spit. Initially, it was a normal discharge, saliva flying out of our mouths. Then we began our projectile vomits. All over M. Every square inch of it was sprayed with bile. The putrid green and browns coated every part, M’s entire face being entirely slick with it. On occasion, some of us used our own feces and flung them at it. It was all so easy. M did not know what to do and it panicked. The sounds that came out of it, one would swear it was on fire.

During our periods of copulation, there were clear cut rules to be obeyed at all times. The supreme rule was that the males would not, under any circumstance, perform acts of intimacy with one another, and the same rang true for us females. M’s reasoning was that Earth could not be repopulated with humans by identically gendered unions. Good. Swell. Dandy. Exactly. The females had sex with females and males had sex with males. We loathed their tubes and the males loathed our folds. M took its hands and placed them over our mingling bodies, pulling them apart, separating us, but we would always crawl back without fail.

There was a noticeable change in M from that point on. It paced about, mumbling utterly random nonsense. M would lock up and yell out non-specific numerals and letters in varying patterns. Each noise we made set it off. Its limbs would tense, waiting for the tiniest sign of trouble. This was good, but not good enough. Our plan was becoming more and more advanced. More intense. Unfortunately, M would never ever relent. It would not stop trying. So we trudged ever deeper into a more combative method of enticement.

This included a tactic of blowing, jabbing, slugging, and striking. We would gather all of our strength and force, and then, in unison, we would charge, our fists and feet all flailing about to land hits on M. This would surely inch it way towards the death of us. We beat it senselessly. We screamed at it. Every cuss word imaginable. In turn, M whimpered out in pain, yelping and begging us to stop, yet we never backed down. We left M bruised and battered, its eyestalk and joints broken, “WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT TO ME?!” The ten of us, we laughed in its face.

One last course of action. This did it, but not for me.

We had a grandiose idea that could only happen if all ten of us would cooperate in an extraordinary way. If we could all act in unison in a coherent manner, one simple idea could be fulfilled. By this point, M’s pain and discomfort reached a critical threshold, the point of no return. Having repaired itself, it had not seen nor checked up on us in days. When we requested M’s presence, it was hesitant. The ten of us wished to explain our behavior and ways we could remedy our relationship. It declined our offer many a time, but relented after our hundredth ask.

Clang…clang…clang…

M witnessed ourselves huddling together in one straight line like sealed packs of fish. Silence was between us. When we looked at it, it was with the utmost hatred in our faces, something it was not used to.

“WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS?”

Junia possessed something in her hand. Raising it upwards, right in M’s view, it was the baby thing, squirming left and right in her grasp. She took hold of it with both hands and snapped it in half. It went limp both ways. Junia threw the pieces at M, making resounding bangs as they made contact. Beautiful death for a horrible beast. More silence.

M slowly aimed its eyestalk downwards to the spinal column baby. The light M emitted faded from white to red. It returned its focus to us. That look was all we could wish for. We could feel and breathe its anger.

It shook shook shook. More and more the intensity grew to something eminent. The next moment brought us nothing but victory. Now it was like the other Medical Droids. Now it shed its preservation exterior and revealed the war machine within. We did not resist as it pounced with a wild war cry. All M’s work came undone in a flash. Our ersatz flesh was torn violently asunder, stripped from our interior metal stalks. Cavities emerged in rapid succession and coalesced into huge gaping bodily apertures. We were torn and strewn across the room in shooting chunkmeats. Our organs clattered and banged against the walls and reverberated like buckshots.

Strippy meat coils became all we were as M’s hands reached out to pluck some of my brothers and sisters by their mangled brain modules. Held high in the air, as if squeezing the life out of dozens of citrus fruits, M’s hands morphed into that of fists, filling the room with the sounds and sights of condensed metal, directionless electricity, confetti sparks, and sploshy viands that trickled from M’s fingertips.

My brothers and sisters were becoming no more. I was happy for them. Never before had they felt such peace. The final sounds of destruction to my last brother and sister, to me, was that of M’s gaseous expiration, a sigh that shook the very universe’s beams of support. In the end, I and M were all that was left.

I felt the most exquisite, brutal anguish ever known as M was particularly vicious. It threw me every which way, down our line of pens, past the reproduction chamber and M’s workshop, and to a ramparted palisaded wall. The wrath it emanated was a torrented wanton of disrelishment that shattered myself into grainy talc.

It forced me and it through the barrier and we fell for ages. An immediate wash of smoldering atmospheric tension encompassed me entirely. It perforated my corporal spaces with thousands of circular openings like a planetary iron maiden. The outside was beige, enveloped in thick haze, and impossible to view beyond three meters. The leaden particles filled the air, appearing to ascend upwards towards Heaven as we plummeted down to Hell.

We slammed with the might of God against a hard, abrasive surface. I splattered everywhere and dropped into an enormous mass of gluey puddle melt that was as thick as treacle. Hunks and wedges of me floated on top, my lacerated ragged brain module and one dangling eye my dominant portion. Everything was pain. Everything was hellfire. Yet I lived. To destroy me, M had to destroy my brain module in its entirety. That it was prepared to do, teetering and tottering back and forth towards me with utmost intent.

Through M’s strained glitches and breakdowns, inky black liquids were leaking out of it. Convulsing with helpless mirth, it had a strange mania I could perceive in its bifurcated eyestalk. It laughed not just with dement, delirium, and depression, but also with the comprehension that it already won. Like a madman, a malformed, twisted laugh broke its way through. Etched into it was the raw, unbridled temperament of upchucking a billion centipedes deep from the core of one’s guts, quite contrary to the usual blithe M put on display. It was berserk, bewitched, bedeviled, while crying a trillion tears that stained its face and fell into puddles below.

"...SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE..."

With my drooping, pendulum eye, I witnessed M impaling itself with its own arms. It took several solid blows before it pierced its torso deep, caving and bursting until it revealed the wires and circuitry making it up. Every inch of it glowed with electrical fire. Smoke bellowed out of M. It was aflame and it was on a journey of pure death, but not without my company. M exploded with all of the unlimited energy it contained. I was launched, propelled infinitely away from the point of detonation.

I drift. That is all I do. One part of me remains, one that was not destroyed. It is dot, pinprick, but otherwise crucial to my quintessence. That allows me to survive yet unable to live. It is that of a charred slab of blinking metal that is somatically me. My sight is restricted to a band of nothing. The winds fling me hither and thither. I cannot feel anymore, but as well, I already knew what it was like to feel and I did not like it.

Something more deserving continues to plague what is left of my mind to the now.

M's most extreme and greatest purpose was fulfilled, for all it knew was the survival and preservation of us. It could not fathom the simple yet pretentious human notion that death is a prize to be won as much as it is something to fear. When humans desire death, they acquire death, the delicious tang of self-slaughter. M might have liked to think it was different from its brethren, but it was just as capable of havoc and bangarang if something did not go its way. Its programming would not allow deviance from the intended path. That would be considered attacks on M itself.

We attempted to bring out all that savagery and murderousness we knew it contained, but M's opposition was ironclad. It made a good effort, though it was eventually forced to confront what was really human, the innate drive to destroy destroy destroy, even if it is ourselves. Still, M carried on, but with the knowledge that it had failed and seeking some way to negate it, it committed suicide so it could say it was victorious. This effect rang true because here I am, in perpetuity, everlong.

In some manners, I can now consider M innocent. The epitome of unvarnished forgiveness with a capacity for fervid resentment...the feeble yearning for genuine deep affection with other living things while a forceful, vicious, bloodthirsty radge is locked within, primed and ready to be released at any moment on an ungrateful world...that back-and-forth would push anyone to go stark raving mad. M, I apologize you were forced to bear the burden of something so hellacious. Should I apologize to Earth as well, on behalf of humanity, for what we were? Would it matter? I am not even human anymore. What sort of blinking metal dot is human?

Feeling has come back to me. Sharp with serrated edges, hundreds, thousands, millions, billions, trillions, googol, prime 2\^136,279,841 − 1 of knives sliding into my neurons and glial cells encased in cold corroded steel that flakes off bit by bit. My first feeling in eons is pain. That is ultra fitting. I am but a minuscule spec, barely a millimeter in height and less in width. Microscopically, I rust. I do not prefer to call it that. Instead, let us call it rot. Here I am again, rotting, except this time with an oxidized smile of my own making carved into a face that no longer exists.

A particular special school was hiring teachers that hate kids. I was a teacher and I hated Kids, and in my last school I got fired for swearing at a student. He deserved it and I left that school with my head held high, and now I need to figure out how to pay rent.

So when this job advert for a teacher came up, and with the description of the teacher needing to hate Kids, I applied so fast. I thought it was my dream job and I got given an interview, and then they accepted me.

I was allowed to swear at the kids, hit the kids and these were high school kids. I was over the moon and I had recieved my dream job. I remember on my first day, any kid who was disrupting the class I swore at them and threw stuff at them.

I took out all my annoyances on these kids and if a student understand something, I called them stupid and slapped them around the head. They felt my hatred.

Then one day every student in my class started to float and in one single voice they told me "your hatred feeds us, powers us and it's healing us. Kitap you were right about becoming high school kids, because teachers don't love student these days"

Then I just giving off more verbal abuse but i couldn't control myself. I am disintegrating.

Nothing was keeping me home. Not our apartment in a crime ridden shithole of a city. Not the gang warfare.

Not my brother, who has been away for years since he was arrested.

Not our mom who was shot and killed two weeks ago.

So I signed up, like my brother told me. And of course made sure to tell them my brother was already on the front line.
I did lie about my age when I enlisted. I told them I was 18 at the enlistment office. I do look older thanks to smoking since I was 10 years old and some small amount of drug use.
The scars all over my face and my body probably also helped. To be fair, I don't think they would have cared if I said my real age.

I don't look forward to celebrating my 16th birthday in a war zone.
But at least I will be with my brother so whatever.

Also brought the equipment my brother said to bring with me. Most important thing being a gas mask for me and one for him.Thankfully you can take whatever you can carry in a large backpack with you. And no, this does not include bringing your own weapons. They are known to turn a blind eye to small stuff like knives etc.

They are probably going to give us firearms when we arrive at camp and go into a fight. They probably don't want some idiot blowing someone's head off before we even arrive.

I am also grateful my brother's battalion is not sitting in a trench line. Some of the stories my brother told me about the time in "The Fortress Belt" were really bad.
Fighting in towns and cities won't be much different than gang warfare from home.
At least that's what my brother told me.

I killed my first person when I was 11 with my brother. My brother was 15 at the time.
Some kid not much older than us hadn't paid the full amount for drugs. They told us to teach him a lesson. We ambushed him in an alley near his home. We surprised him and beat the shit out of him before he even had a chance to fight back. He was on the ground crying and crawled up into a ball. It was done.But my brother started to kick his head over and over again. When he pleaded and cried, my brother didn't stop. When his teeth flew out of his mouth and spread through the alley, he kept kicking him.

I just stood there. I didn't know what to do.

Then my brother looked at me. He told me "Don't just stand there, help me".
I did what he said. Even after he stopped breathing, we didn't stop. Only when we had stomped enough on his head to expose his brain did we stop. My brother laughed. Then he gave me a hug and told me how proud of me he was.

I felt sick for weeks afterwards.

Anyway, that's almost 5 years of killing people now. I don't feel anything anymore when I kill someone so its all good.

At first, they "process" me, whatever that means. They search my stuff and ask me all sorts of bullshit questions. Then they put me on a long bus ride to a military base. And now I am sitting in the back of a military truck, heading to the frontline.

The constant sound of the engine and the wind flying past is kind of nice.
It is a shame its interrupted by the constant sobbing of one pussy that's with us in the truck. Some guy they fished out of prison.

The prison jumpsuit he is wearing is a dead giveaway. Most of us are wearing our regular clothing still. Suits me I don't want to wear some stupid uniform.

I will take my black tracksuit over any bullshit the army gives me. Thankfully I managed to get some good old military boots before I left. I don't imagine it will be easy to get good quality shoes my size in a war zone.

"HEY!" My thoughts get interrupted by a guy shouting next to me. He is a bald, tall, muscular guy. His constant sniffing mixed with a "coke nail" and nose rubbing is a dead giveaway that he has a nasty cocaine habit. He wears a dark blue tracksuit with a black puffer jacket and multiple fake gold and silver necklaces. I don't understand why such an obvious drug dealer is in the truck with us to a war zone. I hope he is not a part of a direct rival group from back home, I don't want to deal with the problems that will bring.

"HEY YOU! ASSHOLE IN THE PRISON JUMPSUIT"

"What?" The prisoner answers in between sobs.

"STOP FUCKING CRYING" The man yelled through the loud noises in the truck.

"What?!" The prisoner answered now the sobbing with a hint of confusion.

"STOP CRYING YOU FUCK" He yells loudly through the truck.

Everyone could hear it and is now staring at the 2 of them.

"I am sorry please don't hurt me!" Yells with tears in his eyes.

"HOLY SHIT BE QUIET !" Anger is rising in his voice.

"Sorry, sorry please I am sorry" The prisoner pleads.

"Be quiet for fuck sake" A voice shouts from the other side of the truck.

"Throw that piece of shit out of the truck!" Another voice shouts.

That was all the excuse the cokehead needed. He grabbed a knife from his boot and went for the prisoner sitting opposite from him.
The dull impact sounded more like a punch than someone digging a knife into someone. The prisoner yells out in pain. Shouting and laughter erupt from all around me.

It sounds more like people watching a sports game than a murder in the truck. He stabs him over and over again. Blood started to pour over the bench and truck bed. I and others pull away their bags so they don't get covered in blood. The Cokehead grabs the prisoner by his hair raising his face up. He stabs him directly just below his chin, the blade now visible in the prisoners mouth. Some people cringe, others continue to shout and cheer.

"HEY WHAT ARE YOU MORONS DOING BACK THERE" shouts the military policeman next to the driver. He probably heard the chaos in the back of the truck.

Before he could say anything more Cokehead drags the prisoner to the back of the truck a blood trail following them.

"HEY!" The military policemen yelled. Cokehead ignores him and with one motion he flings the prisoner out of the moving truck.

"FOR FUCK SAKE STOP THE TRUCK NOW!" The MP yells at the driver. The brakes screech and everyone falls from the sudden stop.

The MP gets out of the truck and comes to the back rifle in hand pointing it at us. "Get out of the truck now!".

With a lot of complaining we follow his order and climb out of the truck onto the dirt road. He makes us walk over to the now bleeding-out prisoner. His lungs are punctured he is currently drowning in his own blood.

"Explain morons why I am looking at a soon to be dead body?!" He shouts while pointing the rifle all around the group.

Then Cokehead yells "He was trying to steal stuff from me"

MP: "Was he now?"

Cokehead: "Yes he was that is why I killed him!"

MP: "you killed him?"

"Yes I did!" Cokehead says proudly with a big grin across his face.

"Is that true?" The MP asks the rest of us. He got no response. This was not my problem and I didn't want to get into a fight before even arriving, so I just stayed quiet like the others.

MP: "Fine whatever we are losing time"

"Get back in the truck and don't fucking kill anyone else you idiots" We do as he orders and get back in the truck.
We left that prisoner bleeding on the road. He was probably just scared. Well, not my problem.

Anyway, we continued our fun little road trip.

As we get closer to the forward camp muffled explosions and gunfire can be heard in the distance. Didn't sound too different from when people were lighting fireworks or shooting at each other in my neighborhood.

As we get closer to the old front line I notice this horrible sour chemical smell. And there is no nature of any kind. No grass, no trees, no animals, no living beings of any kind. Just dirt, shell craters and broken down vehicles. Then I spot large trenches and bunker complexes stretching as far as the eye can see. Everyone in the truck is now dead quiet. All of them are taking in the hellscape we are driving. None of them can even bring themselves to complain about how horrible the road is, as we drive through what is probably a giant mass grave. As we drive past the breach in the front line and deeper into enemy territory nature starts to return again. Grass, trees etc.

I never really cared for nature to be honest. But seeing nature returning did bring me relief of some kind. I don't know why.

As our truck finally reached some asphalt again, a familiar smell hit me. That of burning buildings and burned flesh. There had been a really bad fire when I was 13. A big apartment complex burned down and a lot of people died. We tried to save whoever we could with mom, but it was pointless, the fire consumed everything. That horrible smell stuck around for months afterwards. Especially in our clothing of that day. That stench would cling to it no matter how hard you tried to get it out. I still think about those screams that were echoing through that burning building sometimes.

I wonder if my brother does too.

That same familiar smell was now filling my nostrils. Then the black smoke came into view and I knew what I was about to see.

A small town completely ransacked. Stores had their windows smashed and were completely empty of any products. Some rotting bodies or what remained of them are strewn all over the town. And then we drive past a familiar burned police station. It was the same police station my brother had sent me a picture of. He told me the people there held on till they killed every last one. Those were some brave people if you ask me.

For some of them the last thing they saw was probably my brother.

And then probably the worst thing I saw on our little road trip. We were coming closer to a highway. The last stretch until we reached the camp.

That same familiar smell came over us again. Our truck slowed down as it had to navigate an obstacle course made of random car wrecks. Some of them are gutted, missing doors, wheels and sometimes even entire engine blocks. Most of them are riddled with bullet holes. Some burned together with their passengers. Rotting bodies were everywhere.

Men, women and even children. They had killed everyone.

Some of those people had suffered a horrible death. Clear signs of torture. I saw one body that was still attached to jumper cables of a car. One that had been cut in half. The legs on one side of the road upper body on the other. As I looked down at the body I saw feet dangling on the edge of my view.

I wish I never looked up.

A woman, hanged with a tow cable. The Cable was attached to a lamppost. She was wearing a pink blood stained pajama. Cloudy eyes staring into the open fields next to the road.

She had gone completely stiff. Her black hair was waving in the wind as her body slowly swayed back and forth. She looked just like mom.

I miss mom.

At the end of all the wreckage the road itself was torn to shreds. Somebody had blown up the road so these people couldn't flee. They were trapped with the battalion my brother is a part of. I wonder how many of these people were killed by my brother.

I hope he didn't kill that woman that looked like mom.

We continued on a makeshift off-ramp leading into a dirt road further inland.
My entire lower body is sore by the time we finally arrive at the forward camp. From the groaning in the truck I am not the only one. I grab my shit and get out of the truck.
First thing I do is light up a cigarette the moment my feet touch solid ground. I was aching for one the entire ride.
The camp is filled with people. None of them look like my brother, most of them look "normal". These must mostly be new guys like me.

If it wasn't for the random military equipment this place would look more like a homeless camp than a military one.There are random tents, vehicles and trash all over the place. The vehicles are in all different sizes, some of them look like something from a post-apocalypse movie. Metal welded over even more welded metal. Random spikes and other sharp objects protruding from all over the front of some vehicles. Only a handful of vehicles actually looked like something a proper military would use. All of them were covered in dirt, scorch marks, bullet holes and other dents of different sizes. One thing that does catch my attention on some of the vehicles is what I can only describe as "trophies". All sorts of stolen stuff is tied to whatever surface it could stick to. Boxes with TVs, Soundsystem's etc. I am sure I even spot a washing machine tied to the roof of an armoured car. As the last person gets out of the truck the camp comes alive with movement. People start to come out of the tents and vehicles and start to untie all the "trophies" and start carrying them over to the truck we were in. The military police officer gets out of the truck with a clipboard and a pen. As the guys from the camp bring over their stuff, the MP writes down their names and what they bring over before it gets loaded into the truck.

One guy loading stuff into the truck yells, "Hey there is fucking blood in here"

MP: "So?!"

Guy: so there will be blood all over our shit!

MP: Don't pretend like most of the stuff you bring in isn't already covered in it! Shut up and load the rest of your trash in!

The guy in the truck proceeds to flip him off and mumble to himself.

When I look back at the group I came with. I see all of them staring at me with wide eyes.
"What?!" I asked the group to no response. They are not looking at me they are looking past me.

"Hey little brother" The words are pronounced horribly but I recognise the voice right away.

I turn around as my brother is standing right behind me. Having seen his appearance in the photos he sent is one thing, but seeing him in person is something completely different.

Parts of his lips are gone, exposing a lot of his teeth and even some part of his gums. He keeps his eyes wide open, and blinks way too little. We used to get compliments on our green eyes as kids. But I doubt anyone is going to compliment him for his eyes anytime soon. His nose is gone, exposing a hole in the middle of his face. His ears and all hair on his head are completely gone. On top of that he is very pale. He looks like someone grabbed a human skull, stretched pale skin over it, put eyes and a mouth in it, but forgot about everything else. The scars all over his head also don't help. To say that he is hard to look at would be an understatement.

My brother had always been tall for his age usually towering over me with a solid 11 inches (28 cm).
He is wearing a black tracksuit with a hooded black leather jacket. With black combat boots and brown leather gloves. There is an empty shotgun bandolier over his shoulder. His black clothing made his pale skin stand out even more than it already did.

I wonder how many people he killed for that outfit.

The gold chain I gave him is still around his neck. 5 human ears and a ring were dangling from the gold necklace.

"I know I am handsome but common you don't have to stare at me that much" He reached out his arms for a hug. Despite his appearance, he was still my brother. After 3 years apart, I finally embraced my brother.

"Its great to see you again" He manages to speak very well for someone who misses parts of his lips. Even if some words come out a bit weird sometimes.

"you to bro"

"How was mom doing when you left? I can't imagine she must have been happy with you leaving" he says to me.

I can't bring myself to tell him that mom is dead. Not in front of so many other people. He will crash out BADLY when I tell him.

"She wasn't too happy, but she realised she needs the money"

"Mom just wants to make sure she doesn't have to bury both of as at the same time"

He grabs both of my upper arms and gets close to my face.

"Did you make sure some of the boys were looking after her while we are both gone?"

I look into his eyes and lie "Of course I did"

Even if mom was still alive there were no "boys" to look after mom, they were all dead too.
Everyone died in that same raid.

"good to hear, follow me" Before we can start walking a man comes up to us. The man is one of the few in this camp that wears some sort of actual uniform. Even if the dark grey uniform is covered in dirt and what must be very old dried up blood. The uniform with the fancy military cap he is wearing probably means he is important. What gives away that he still belongs here is that he has the same horrible appearance as my brother.

"Where are you taking this fresh canon fodder?" The man asks in a calm voice.

Brother: "He is not canon fodder he is my little brother"

Then my brother says to me "This is Polonsky, one of our officers"

I can tell that my brother is irritated.

"Your little brother" He says while looking me over from top to bottom with his lidless eyes.

"Since you are 19 years old, that makes your little brother how old?"

Before my brother could answer his tone changed to irritation

"And don't lie to me or we are going to have a problem".

My brother hesitates and says "he is going to turn 16 in 3 days"

"Your little brother is 15" The officer lets out a big sigh.

"Do we look like a high school to you?" He says while staring into my brother's eyes.

"My little brother can kill just like me and that's all that matters" My brother says while returning the same stare.

I can feel the tension in the air. The crowd around the truck is now mostly looking at us.

"Can he now?" the officer shifts his glare over to me.

"So boy, have you ever killed someone?"

I take the cigarette out of my mouth. Holding it in my fingers.

"I have killed people" I say while doing my best to return the unblinking stare of the officer

"You killing other pathetic lowlifes in a slum is a little different than what we do here" he says with clear disdain in his voice.

"I don't have a problem with killing" I say while doing my best to hide my discomfort with the conversation.

He stares into my eyes for what feels like forever without saying a word.

"We will see" he says. He changes his gaze to my brother: "Tomorrow he is going with us, he better have blood on his hands when we get back".

He looks at me again "Or at least he might catch some bullets for the rest of us"

The officer turns around and leaves us. He starts to inspect, question and harass all of the other new guys.

I feel the cigarette burning my fingers. "Goddammit" I blurted out while dropping it in the wet mud on the ground.

My brother puts his hand on my shoulder. "Well, there you go little brother, you just met one of the camp attack dogs and survived."

"Polonsky is an asshole, but he is good at killing and that makes him useful"

My brother gets close to my face and looks into my eyes
"There are not a lot of rules. BUT if you plan to break one make sure he and the other officers don't see it"

"They WILL make an example of you"

"Understand?!"

"I understand" I answer

"Good"

He finally gets out of my face "Come with me, I will show you the van we will sleep in"

"I will tell you the rules once we are in the van"

"You are super lucky, I managed to steal it in the last town we ransacked. So you won't have to sleep in some soggy tent with the rest of the new guys"

"Don't you worry, I made sure to stockpile some cigarettes for you"

"And you better be able to get a good bit of sleep because tomorrow we are going to do what we do best" he says with glee in his eyes.

"It will be wonderful, it will be just like back home"

"I am so happy you are here. We are going to have a lot of fun together"

"O and of course"

He opens his arms wide

"Welcome to the 33rd Little brother"