Deep breath. He wonders about the rain. It’s loaded with chemicals, saturated with death and decay. Yet it tastes so sweet, it falls into our pores. He thinks that the rain, with its chemicals and liquid rot, has become a part of us. We are the residue of this world, the waste along the rim.

His creation is potent, it will free them, it will reduce them to their vile cores. He puts both hands into the pockets of his coveralls. In his left pocket, his hand coils around a quartet of long, sealed vials. In his right, his fingers thread around the trigger of a newly cleaned pistol. One pocket provides comfort. The other doesn’t.

He looks around at the rushing crowds: Workers heading to soggy happy hours. Tourists in strips of North Face hogging the sidewalk. Suits rushing underground to make their escape for the weekend. No one suspects anything…

Why should they? It is their very lack of suspicion that caused all of this. Their lack of real curiosity lulled the seething mass into blindness, weakness, and complacency. Not anymore. He smiles with the thought of things to come.

The first vial goes soundlessly into the open pocket of a distracted city worker. This one will be a slow release; its effects won’t be seen immediately. The second vial drops down a subway grate, rattling before it breaks onto the city’s steel blood cells. No turning back now.

The third vial is blatant. He tosses it like a live grenade. It traces an arc through the night sky, refracting the bright lights from a vodka advertisement, catching a spare rain drop as it skips off the nylon shoulder of a tourist’s rain poncho.

The confusion starts immediately. As the tourist turns angrily to find out who threw what, the vial finds the ground and smashes open, spilling its contents over the city sidewalk. A new tragedy begins.

The conversion is almost instant, and he can see it. He is far enough away not to be involved, but he can see it. One block ahead of him, the massive crowd starts to boil. An uncontrolled feeling of excitement rises within him. It clamps his heart and strikes his breathing with an evil heat.

Out comes the gas mask. He’s practiced, so it goes on easily. He tightens the strap as the first infected starts it’s journey. He fingers his gun, and starts to walk backward, watching the chaos ripple through the massive crowd. Soon these lights will shine on something meaningful, soon our blood will touch the sky.

A tourist father grabs his child and picks him up and tries to shield him from the bleeding Suit who grabs on with relentless strength and infinite determination. The Suit bites The Child, his teeth gripping easily through soft flesh. In a moment of panic, The Father pulls his child away and blood flosses through The Suit’s perfect, screaming teeth. In the pull, most of the child’s neck tears away. The Father’s horror and pain streaks his face as he tries to stop the bleeding, but its too late. The Child clamps onto his Father’s neck, biting and tearing into his flesh through the nylon strap of the camera. Memories now meaningless. The Father’s blood drains over his wedding ring and he drops to his knees.

The Suit is knuckle deep in the face of a Dominican peanut vendor. The Dominican screams and bucks, unable to shake free the claws through his eyes, cheeks, throat. He’s still very much alive, unbitten, and the pain screams out of him in terrible animal noises, betraying his humanity. The Suit bites. The screaming stops.

The Suit loses interest in The Dominican and frees him from his grip. The Dominican’s blood-hole eyes see nothing. He rushes the crowd and grabs onto the back of an escaping Hasid and takes him down, his head hitting the sidewalk with a brutal thwack. The Dominican uses his fists, and screaming with rage, pummels The Hasid through the face. Once breaking his teeth, twice cracking has jaw like a wishbone, three times shattering his nose and eye sockets, pushing his bristled beard deep into an expanding crater of blood and meat. The Hasid doesn’t even scream. The fourth fist lands like a sledge, caving his head in completely. It’s over for him, he won’t turn. The Gas Mask notes this silently…they don’t always bite. Sometimes they just kill.

The Child is tearing at the legs of a terrified 22 year old Intern. He snatches her by the right leg, dropping her face down on the ground. Her jaw hits first, disintegrating her teeth in a seismic wave. She looks up at the rushing mob and begs for help through broken teeth. The Child claws his way up her back, pulling and stretching at her new, proud clothes. She can’t make a sound. She hyperventilates. She reaches back for The Child, gets a grip on his hair and pulls hard, slamming him on the concrete next to her. The Child is momentarily dazed with one cheek against the sidewalk. She pulls him up closer to her, dragging his face along the grit of the concrete, shredding it to the molars, until she has enough leverage to pick his head up and slam it down once more.

The Child barks terribly and throws his arms out as his head hits the pavement. She gets enough strength and lifts his head once more, jamming his face down into the wet cigarette butts and grime. The Child stops moving briefly, twitching and snapping his limbs crazily beneath him. The Crowd continues to rush, stepping on her other hand, tripping over her rubbery calves. She relaxes her grip and The Child whips around, leaving his scalp in her hand. His teeth find her neck just below her jaw and she wails. Her eyes fill with blood.

The Gas Mask watches The Intern as she drags herself across the ground, spitting blood and retching from her belly. As she eagerly hauls herself into the wailing mouth of an abandoned stroller, he turns and walks away. The gun comes out of his pocket cocked. He trots east on 42nd street towards Bryant Park. He jumps backward as a cab screeches past him into the front of a theme restaurant, scattering its patrons in a storm of blood and glass.

He’s calm, but his breathing escalates. He didn’t expect it to be so quick. The converted patrons start to stumble out the shattered window, so he picks up the pace. He rounds a corner underneath a scaffolding to find a young Worker, scared and huddled under a “Post No Bills” stencil. “What is going on?” The Worker says, terrified. The Gas Mask grabs his last vial, and cracks it over The Worker’s forehead. “You’ll be fine”.

A little girl stands on the sidewalk wearing thick glasses. She is watching what is going on. She is having trouble understanding. She blinks like she does after a scary dream, but everything stays the same in front of her.

A man screams by her, spattering blood through the air. The mist settles a red carpet at her feet. She follows the crimson petals. A big man like her Dad tackles the screaming blood man after a few feet and she keeps walking. The big man like her Dad makes eating noises. Her hand still aches from the way her mommy squeezed it.

Where did she go? The little girl wonders as she comes to the curb. She looks both ways. A burning person screams past. The flames glint in her glasses. She looks again, its clear. She crosses the street.

Open doors.

…A priest mounting a thrashing, made-up corpse from behind…her makeup smeared.  Her giant hoop earrings spinning in wild circles from her ear lobes.

…A legless, armless trunk of a woman is chained in midair by an “X” of chains.  She sits pelvis high.  A half-crazed traffic cop leers from the corner, not moving yet.

…short whacks of consciousness capitalized by the taste of bile, punctuated by the slam of gunshots into windowless rooms.

…A decomposed nurse’s outfit…no bottom jaw.  No way to say “no”.

Rooms full of money.  A hand covered in gold.  The stink of chugging generators.

Wet bodies hit the floor.

Slick with blood.

Open door, open door.

“Cuuuuuunnnnnnttttttssssssssssssssss”, he chokes through a graveyard of bleeding teeth.

“What’s your name?”

He spits, groans.

“Fuck”

“Last name?”

“You.”

“Alright Mr. Fuck You, do you know where you are?”

“Cunnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn…………………tah.”

A crazed, ragged laugh.  Half closed eyed roiling about their sockets.

“Fine, well here’s the situation.  You’re in my shop motherfucker.  Your leg is fucked up, and if I don’t help you, you are going to die.”

“Cunt-ah cunt-ah cunt-ah cunt cunt cunt ah-roo”

Another, more saturated laugh.

“He’s gone man, fix him up.”

“I’m not gone…anywheres…”

He groans and pushes himself up against the wall, making a clean trail through the blood and oil.  He blinks and clears his vision.

“Not gone…not gone…I’m… RIGHT FUCKING HERE!”

He screams so loud that the gunshots get quiet.  His eyes go red.

“Alright then.  You here.  Good.  But you don’t have long so I’ma make this quick. You got a rep.  I know all about you and what you do.  I might could use you, so I am going to fix you up and turn you into one of my hitters.  Just don’t fuck with me.  I ain’t no Driver motherfucker, and I don’t take shit like your boy Prick.  If I did, I would be cadaverous right now.  Just like him.  You respect me, keep your shit together, and I’ll take care of you.  If you don’t, I will eat you my motherfuckin’ self.  Got me?

He blinks again, licks his lips.  They stare dead into each other’s eyes.

A gun goes off.

The priest comes, moaning.

Through the blood, he coughs, “What kind of shoes are those?”

No answer.

“Alligator?”

“No.”

“Rattlesnake?”

“No.”

“Ostrich?”

“Fuck no.”

“What then?”

“Zack.”

Another long, ragged laugh.  Longer than before.  The look on his face is pure, maniacal joy.  His mouth sweats blood.

“Alright man, you got my vote, now fucking fix me the fuck up.”

“You got it, Mr. Fuck.”

So I sent my doctors to go to work on him.  The way he did his knee, he’s not going to end up a hundred percent.  Pimp limp for sure.

What had happened was I got a call from one of my A&R guys.  He was scouting some talent out by the old stadium, near this fucked up bar.  The talent, she must have been a gymnast, cuz she was still fit, still wearing her sports bra.  Prime real estate for drilling, but she was tough.  My scout watched her rip Fuck’s boy in two.  By the time I got there, she was about to go to work on him so I put a stop to it.

I got guys who work for me.  Guys who get their hands dirty for a few pills or a few rounds with a Zombitch.  It’s nice to have those people, but every once in awhile, I handle my own business, get my own hands dirty.  I don’t want to lose my mode for this kind of work.  The second you need others to do a job you can’t do yourself, that’s the second you are in the wrong line of work.

Plus, I needed this guy, so I wanted him to owe me. So, without scuffing my shoes, I gave her the lead root canal myself, yoked her, and stuffed her in the limo.  He saw me, he knew who saved him.  Plus, I picked up an asset.  A stacked bitch like that will put up a fight.  She’ll probably net me some supplies, some ammo.  Maybe even a real bitch for those long cold nights.

I don’t believe in the “no-win” scenario.

———————–

I smack him with the side of the blade and his head hinges open.  The crack of that skull gets me every time.  Depending on how long they’ve been up and rotting on their feet, it always sounds different.  The real dead ones, it just caves like rotten fruit.  The fresh ones have more snap to them.  Crack.  Crack.  Crack.  I duck slightly and throw one over my shoulder; his head hits the cement and opens up.  More slick spills on the ground.  I’ll need to watch my footing.  I’m still getting used to the brace on my leg and there’s three more at the end of the hall about 25 feet away…giving me about 10 seconds to take a coffee break.

I dump a little cocktail out onto my fist, right over my thumb.  I don’t spill any.  I look up and there is a hand out, almost touching me.  He’s groaning like he wants me to share.  I jam it up my nose and aspirate.  I drown in fire.  I choke on anger and violence.  My eyes fill with blood and I’m back.  I look up shaking and he’s 10 inches from me, his hand already on my coat.  I can smell his breath.  Everything vibrates – the world moves too slow, struggling to catch up with me.  The two behind him claw at his back, ripping off long strips of his clothes, skin.  I can’t fucking wait.

One swipe with the lawnmower blade and his hand is still on my coat, only he’s falling forward now.  He hits the ground face first.  The two behind him scramble over him.  I hear his skull break under their boots with a fresh crack. That’s what I love about these things; they kill each other and don’t even know it.  I once saw one stomp its own “kid” to death on its way to chew the legs off a trapped teenager.

In a second they’re both at me, crammed too tight in the narrow corridor, ripping their flesh to shreds against the concrete walls.  I consider giving them a bit of my own, just so I can feel alive again but I feel the tap on my shoulder and it all kicks in.  I get to swinging.  The first swipe takes her arm off at the shoulder.  The change in weight throws off her balance, and she falls into the wall.  The follow through splits his ribcage and nicks his spine.  His posture changes and I can see his right arm go limp.

I take another swing.  Higher this time, and the blade sticks.  Like a log that won’t split.  This happens all the time, so I leave the blade and let her drop.  Two steps back and I get the burner out.  I check the clip, check the barrel, reload it, and get ready for the noise.  I run a bead right between his brows, blink once, and the world catches up to me, panting, “Sorry I’m late, what are you….aw jeez.”  I coil around the trigger and change my mind.  It’s just me and him…blowing him away would be the coward’s way out.  Plus my ears already hurt bad enough.

I take a few steps back, get some speed, run toward, and sweep his kneecap.  It buckles like a wet sapling, throwing it out to one side, dropping him under his own weight.  He gets a hand out and uses it to drag himself along the floor, kneeling on his one good knee, twisting and dragging the other one.  There’s a scraping noise that’s thicker than fingernails…just bones, no finger tips.  I watch his bones leave streaks against the concrete floor…like living chalk.

He looks up and once our eyes lock, everything leaves me.  I can’t hear or see.  All I can feel is the grit of the pistol grip in my hands.  I filed it all down into jagged peaks when I first got it…so I would know when it was in my hand.  I squeeze hard.  A little blood runs down the barrel.  A little more pools into the crease of my trigger finger.  It’s beautiful.

One swipe and his head hits the wall.  Another swipe and he’s got “Desert Eagle 5.0” stenciled backwards into his temple.  A third and everything’s wet.  A fourth and the job is done.  He smacks the floor and everything spills out.  My hand is sticky and I’ll need to clean my gun…

“Fuckin’ A.”

The intercom crackles to life.

“Why didn’t you use the burner?”

“I did use the burner, I’m just tired of blowing out my eardrums so I skipped the loud part.”

“What?”

“What.”

“Huh?  Speak into my good ear”

“Oh I get it.  Fucking hilarious.  Fuck You.”

“Alright, start the clean up and we’ll send in some more.”

“Yeah, yeah.  Hey, this woman you sent in here, how come you don’t pimp her?”

“Pssshh.  Cos’ she’s ugly as fuck.”

“She’s not so bad…I’d fuck her.”

“I know.”

The reel spins off and slaps the back of the projector.  The lights stay out.  It’s black again, so familiar to me.  But its not still, it seethes against its own black borders.  Pulsing with the weight of the edges.  Something is trying to get in, but it’s just me in here.  The floor is wet and I’m dragging something.  Its heft is familiar.  The view is the same.  Nothing ahead, nothing behind.  I’m holding a huge slick bag bound with tape, chains, rotting bungee cords.  Its heavy and I’ve been towing it for a long time.  Sometimes it wakes up, whatever it is, and snakes around, trapped in the bag, fighting me.  Screaming, snarling, dripping black fluids through the seams.  It wants out, and I can’t hold on to it much longer.

He did look a bit like a homeless person, but he was not.  He was so “not homeless” that it pissed me off when he was regarded as such.  He was old, weathered, educated, alive.  “Helooooo, Ryaaaaaan, how are you?, are you getting good maaarks in your school?”, he dragged every word out, each syllable passing through its own accent, French, Jamaican, English, erudite, academic, compelling.  This man could read the phone book to me and I would sit, glassy eyed and cross legged in front of him until the birds stopped singing.

He said the most amazing things whenever we spoke.  Things that I had wished I could write down and remember.  I never had a pen, but his words found a way into me, forgotten until they would be released at the most perfect moment.  The guy was liquid inspiration.

A hitman wandered by, mumbling to himself, dragging one foot, the other kicking up dry leaves on his way in to murder the guy who lives above me.

Pete thought I was a student.  I never had the heart to tell him I had just graduated and moved here to start working.  I told him I was doing well, and asked him how he was, taking great care to enunciate my words and hold my shoulders straight.

“Well you seeee, I’ve just come from the doctor, and my eyes, they have been fixed”, he dropped the word ‘fixed’ about three octaves, ten years of emphasis in one word. “My cataracts, seeee.  This doctor has helped me. This street, I haven’t seen it in ten years, all of you look so much younger nowwwww, the trees, they are bloooooming, and I can see so much in the light.”

He smiled.  He had the most fantastic smile.  12 minutes had passed since I came in.  Pete hadn’t seen anything clearly in 10 years.  Ten years and everything was milky to him, and today, he started seeing everything that we take for granted.

I suddenly hated everyone in my building.  I hated them for being so caught up in their own minor dramas; getting their mail from the doorman, staying glued to the TV’s latest crisis, signing in their visiting boyfriends, getting stabbed in the neck, quibbling over details.  Here we had something actually magical, and they all still treated him like he was a beggar.

I shook hands with Pete and wished him well.  I’d see him again.

Night came and I was on the roof with a bottle of cheap wine.  The city looked hazy from my perch in Brooklyn, the lights looked like everything I’d pictured from home.  I still had the eyes of someone from David’s “Big Country”.  I still saw it all as a teeming pile of smelly opportunity.  I knew I could barge my way into that beast and write my name all over its insides.

I chose music for the moment, but who knows where I would end up.  I wanted greatness, and my eyes were wide enough to look for it.    For now though, I was sitting on top of the stairwell to the roof.  I was sitting on the door-high cement structure called a “Steve”, as my friend Cliff and I had once named it in a fit of hallucinogenic giggles.

The Steve swayed a little as the door opened.  Someone else was on the roof.  I didn’t want company, so I crossed my digits, hoping that they didn’t climb up here too.  This was my Steve, damnit.  I looked over the edge and recognized him.  It was the walk.  He had a limp, an old injury that never healed right.  I recognized him from the lobby earlier, I wonder if Pete saw him too.

He didn’t know I was there as he shuffled to the edge of the roof.  He was facing the side of the building that looked over nothing really…no street, no other roof, just a small gap between the buildings that was full of junk and stagnant water.  He threw something into the gap.  It glinted in the spare light as it went down.  He then pulled out a rag, wiped his hands, and threw the rag into the gap.

I was frozen and worried.  I couldn’t move or he would see me, and something told me that I did not want this guy to see me.  I looked up and there were so many planes in the sky, bringing people like me here to join the chase.  Someone had their window open and I recognized the song…

“Up on cripple creek, she sent me….”

I looked back and he was vomiting.  Retching and coughing and dumping so much dark fluid onto the ground, over the side.  He held his head as he did it, as if he was trying to resist the force coming out of his mouth.  Then he was screaming, making terrible pained noises through the liquid, through his teeth.  He threw up for a long time, the noises got worse and worse until he stopped.

Now he was crying, holding his head, now he was punching himself in the head, teeth, eyes.  Crying and screaming, he came apart right there in front of me.  I’ve never seen a person betray their composure so completely, not when my father died, not when the bridge in my hometown collapsed and the wife of the man who was trapped, fused into his burning car, was caught on film.  It was a destruction so complete that I knew this man would never be made whole again.   He knew this, and instead of coming apart figuratively, he chose to physically dismantle himself.

I was horrified.  I didn’t move for what seemed like hours.  He eventually took himself up, wiped his mouth, barely removing the mess he had made of his face, and shuffled towards me.  Towards the Steve, towards the door.  I pulled back from the edge.  I laid as flat as I could.  I didn’t move.

The air stayed cool.  The city shuddered.  It was built on so much granite, and just to remind everyone of its charge, the granite shrugged, just as confused as everyone it was carrying.  Support girders cracked, but not enough for anyone to notice yet.  The veins running through the island spit their blood all over the streets.  The streets spit blood back into the veins.  Nowhere was a heart.  Every liquid cranked into alcohol and grease, every molecule saw itself in a mirror and was scared.

A star came down, didn’t crash, but came closer, just to make sure it was real.  The divine left in disbelief, muttering nothing under its breath.   Rock became soil, human became soil, soil became nothing but a novelty.  Something for people to take pictures of and send home.

The wind blew and the air above me smelled sweet and human.  It smelled like the inside of something.  I felt dirt and gravel grinding beneath my shoulder, hurting, almost tickling.  I turned my head and realized. I had fallen asleep.  The wind blew a little more and it was another song I recognized…

“Doctor my eyes have seen the years…”

I was glad, and it was still night.  I must have been out for an hour or so.  The wine must have gotten me, oddly, but I was thankful for the bottle that was rolling around near my feet.  What a terrible dream.  The wind blew again, and there was that smell again, human, pungent, sickly and sweet.  Again, and it wasn’t sweet anymore, it smelled like bile and bad breath.

“YOU WERE DREAMING. TELL ME ABOUT YOUR DREAM”, belched a huge, wet, ragged voice, just inches away from my face.  Something dripped onto my nose.

It was him, fuck me, it was him.  Adrenaline shot through me and my heart flipped and jumped up to meet my face.  I ratcheted around and scooted on my butt as far away as I could.  I hit the back ledge of the Steve hard, bruising my tailbone, almost falling off.  There he was, just far enough up the ladder that he could see over the edge.  I looked him dead in the face.  His dead, mess covered face twisting, “well, what happened in your dream?”, he choked and wiped bile and snot from his lips.

“I, I….”

“Ack.  Eye?”, he grinned as he pointed to his wide right eye.  It was crisscrossed with thousands of burst blood vessels from all of his retching.  He kept pointing though, until he was touching it.  He touched his eye harder than anyone should touch their eye, pushing stomach acid and dead skin cells right up under his eyelid.

“I didn’t see anything, I didn’t see you.”

“Neither did I” he said, staring.  “Come with me you little shit.”

He grabbed my leg and dragged me off the Steve, my head hitting the rail ladder on the way down, knocking me into a daze as I landed flat on my back on the roof.  “Get up”, he spat, as he hauled me to my feet.  Into the stairwell.

He walked me down to the room right above mine, room 523.

He showed me the man he had murdered.  He showed me where the blade went in, right underneath the Adam’s apple.  He showed me where he extracted his pound of flesh.  He showed me the money he received to murder him.  It was a lot of money.  He showed me the pictures of the man’s family and friends, now with no precedent or reason to be in the room.  He showed me what his blood would look like when they found him.

He took me outside and walked me through the streets, he took me past happy restaurants and bars, full of happy people and friends.  He smashed my face against their windows and made it clear that none of them could help me.  He pulled me by my arm until my collarbone broke.  He dragged me underground.  He showed me where the rats lived.  He showed me how to lie down with them and listen.  He showed me how to wait there for him to come back.  They crawled over me and left their waste in my mouth.  Stopping in back alleys he made me watch as he used a broken beer bottle to remove living things beneath the skin of his arms, legs, hand, calves, eye.  He vomited and spewed, he pulled chunks of his hair out and showed them to me.

He took me to the freeway and showed me what the car looked like after 52 bullets went through it, before the cops put their guns away, before the driver stopped twitching, before they called it in.  He showed me my idols, rock stars, in the privacy of their lush homes as they beat their wives and snarled at their children.  He showed me the foam under the pier, the foam in the mouth of an army of rabid dogs, neglected and staring me right in the eyes.

He showed me the girl I would fall in love with.  He let me feel the love.  She was so beautiful.  He showed me everything as he murdered her right in front of me.  He slowed down time so the loss crept through me molecule by molecule, so I could feel every millimeter of pain and sadness as the light left her eyes.

He never obscured anything.  He wasn’t capable of metaphor or any other mechanism.  He wasn’t capable of anything that wasn’t literal.  He laughed at me when I broke, when he laughed he lost teeth.  When I cried he lost more teeth and they dropped all around me.  He disintegrated and pulled himself apart.  His clothes became only an idea as his bones showed, splintering when he needed to pick me up, to make me see whatever it was he had to show me.

He showed me a man.  This man had a name sort of like mine, and a face that was another sort of like mine.  He showed me how dark this man was, how consumed by his own greed and sapped of creativity.  He was so sad as he wept into his last dose of some drug whose name he could not pronounce.  As this man kicked his legs and foamed at the mouth he kicked up regret, only pieces of his own horrid history.  Pictures of mistakes.  Signed documents that proved his lies.  One by one.  This man was weeping and dying and he wouldn’t let me look away.  I felt his horrid fingers break against my chin, breathed his skin flaking off as he struggled to keep my head up and seeing.

I crouched and hoped for darkness, hoped for nothing.  He was on my back screaming into my ear.  All awful breath and dried out gums.

He showed me nothing.  He told me everything.  His hate came out of him in the most vile voice imaginable, each syllable more putrid and hateful than the one before it.  His was the language of metal on metal, of bones breaking in echo chambers, of frequencies beyond hearing, wavelengths that made me deaf to everything except his voice.

He told me of civilizations devouring each other alive for no reason.  He told me, in detail, about the deaths of everyone I had ever known.  He told me every secret I have ever failed to keep.  Called me every name anyone ever called me behind my back.  He took all the pity and mercy I have ever given and turned it into a vicious rant, condemnation, spraying the opposite of love deep into my ear.  His hate went deep and infected me.  It turned my whole being as black and deep as the center of his eye.

“YOU WERE DREAMING.  TELL ME ABOUT YOUR DREAM!”, he screamed.  I didn’t think he could get louder, I prayed he wouldn’t.  But he did.

My eardrums buckled under the bulk of his words.  There was a wind now.  It howled out of him, screaming and ripping his now frail body into twisted jerky poses.  His hands still held me, and as they broke and snapped they only got stronger.  His grip grew tough, like a closing vice with no ‘off’ switch.  There was no mercy in his grip.  I felt my jaw collapse.  My screams now mixed in with the roar around me.  He vomited dust and bad ideas, his last two fingers crushing together until there were only teeth between them, then dust.  I choked on my own teeth and swallowed my tongue just as his final finger broke.

He was unable to hold me anymore so he just lay on my back, his mouth still licking horribly at my ear, beating his handless bones against my ribs, cracking them, frustrating his scream to an even higher pitch.  I beat my hands, started pounding them on whatever I could, screaming as the blackness screamed back, loud as a train falling down a set of stairs.

The more I pounded the more my hands hurt; I beat them until they were raw.  I beat them on the ground until I could finally see them in the storm raging around me.  I beat them one more time and….light….

My eyes started to clear a little in the sunlight.  They felt dry, wasted.  The light hurt.  All around me the world was tearing itself apart.  There was noise, sirens, and chaos.  I could hear fire burning, smell smoke.  People were screaming everywhere.  The wind blew and I felt wet. My clothes were sticking to me.  I was covered in blood and my mouth was full of something vile, something…substantial.  The smell was awful.

What had I done?  I took a step forward as the contents of my mouth fell out and slapped my chest and I almost slipped…the ground at my feet was slick with something…hands, teeth, hair, insides, all wiggling about.  My eyes were so dry, I blinked, but they did not focus the dark figure in front of me.  One step closer and I saw.   It was Pete!  I was so thankful, “Pete, what happened?  What have I done?”  I was so terrified, but I knew Pete could help me.  As I tried to speak though…I couldn’t…nothing came out but a dry croak from the back of my throat.  No words, no communication.

“Please help me, Please”, but he could not hear me.  I only dragged my vocal chords into a horrible moan.  This made me angry, and the hate He had spattered so carelessly all over my insides started to make itself known.  “Destroy him.  Negate him”, His words echoed from a dream that did not end.  As the wind kissed the blood on my arms I saw Pete’s face, and he raised one arm.

“Help me”, I said one last time.

“I can seeeee you now, my friend”, he said.

A click, and the hammer came down….

I’m looking up, miles and miles away from anything.  Miles from the asphalt beneath me, miles from her teeth.  I’m looking down an extremely long soundproof tunnel.  The only thing I can hear is a heartbeat, some muffled noises…the sounds brain cells make when they die screaming.

I can see her, but damn she is far way.  Her teeth, broken and dripping.  Her eyes… nothing…more nothing than a shark’s.  I know she’s dripping other people’s blood on me.  I know what she is about to do, but I’m not going to do anything about it.  I could,  believe me, I could tear the walls of this tunnel down and eat this bitch alive if I was so inclined…but I’m done.  This is it; I’ll stay here until I come back with a reason to rip out every throat I see.  Finally.  I can kill at will.

Yes, her mouth moves toward my throat, yes.  Do it.  Bite, tear and end this forever.  I’m looking up through my K Hole watching her teeth get closer.  It’s beautiful…

I used to sleepwalk, I used to have a family…I used to think the sun was a good idea.  I’d wake up in my garage, digging through an old box of letters, notebooks.  Letters from before my love turned sour.  Notebooks from when I still cared.

I would wake up with my hand in the knife drawer, blood pooling around the handles of the blades.

I would wake up to find my child without a mother.  Rooting for a breast, a nipple that wasn’t there.  To feed.  Starving to death in a dry world.  I would wake up feeding myself…I gorged on every drug I could find and burned up alone in my bed for two.

The person who came out of that bed was different.  I had blood on my hands, literally.  I had screaming in my head that I could only beat down with vicodin, Percocet, PCP, Ketamine, coke, ether, ups, downs, expired anticonvulsants, mutant pills.  My wings had been clipped and I was stranded, yet somehow this felt right, that my newfound recklessness and utter lack of control was priming me for something…

I was being built for this fight.

When the shit hit the fan I opened my mouth to catch it.  I looked out my window to see the dead rise, walk around.  I saw my neighbors running, guns blazing, blood screaming down every surface.  The camera shook and the reels came off.  The lights came up and nothing got brighter.  The sky was black, and we were devouring each other alive, dead.  This is what I saw when I looked out my window.  Now it was real, no longer just a vision.

I fit into this world like a key does a lock.  Bullets into a gun.

Pain had left me.  It was the one thing I could not overdose on, pain.  Psychic, mental torture was my real drug of choice.  No worldly chemical could knock me down.  Only I could do that.

I dragged blades deep into my skin and felt nothing, saw the blood.  The red blood, the black blood.  Not the brown, dead oil of these who suddenly had it so easy.  I would exact my pain on them.  This was my fight.

I clutched my piece as I walked outside for the first time in weeks.  I was out of food and I wasn’t going to try and get more.  I was going to walk out into my street and become a part of this world, inserting myself into this stream of violence was the only option.

That’s when I met the drivers…before Prick…

…what a beautiful watch.

Watch?  What the fuck?  Wait a second, no…a huge black hand covered in rings, gold, light, hope.  I should have seen salvation, all I saw was an invasion of unnecessary optimism.  This can’t be happening.  Everything beyond a tailored cuff goes right underneath her neck, lifts her chin up.  The barrel of a gun now…pearl handle…is pressed against the right sight of my savior goddess’ mouth.

The slam of the hammer and the wreck it makes out of her mouth yanks me up and out of the darkness.  Everything in her ragged mouth gets blasted into oblivion by a fashionable, party-spoiling pair of black hands.  Now she is just gumming, moving her jaw up and down uselessly like a drowning fish.

He wraps a modified chain around her neck and yanks it tight, like a choke collar.  I see her fragile flesh tear through the knots in the chain, right before he drags her, kicking and thrashing and gumming away from me.

I look up to get a glimpse and I see a man, a huge, black man in a purple suit that shines like chrome.  He looks too perfect for this blasted world.  His shoes, perfectly shined and made of some kind of odd skin, accented with gold.

As the G bitch thrashes and spits, he stays clean and immaculate.  Nothing touches him.  He throws the bitch into the back of an unmarked van, closes the door and lights a massive cigar, inhaling slowly with a look of success and satisfaction so pure it freaks me out.  This man clearly loves his job.

I make some kind of noise and he looks over at me, stares for a second as if debating whether or not to address me.  He walks over to me slowly and his shoes echo in the blank street.  He kneels down over me and says, “Look here pimpin’… if you’re one of them, say so now.  I don’t want to get blood on my damn shoes.”

I tell him to fuck off, give me my shit.  Just then the pain rockets up through my every molecule like a freshly cracked oil mane and I black out.  Fuck.

To Be Continued.

It really got fucked when the only place I could find was a foot locker, about 3 feet square to hide in. I closed it on myself and it somehow stayed that way…

Think about it, the very idea of pizza delivery sprang up once folks decided to barricade themselves in suburban homes to keep dangerous minorities away from their lives and their expensive shit. This is kind of the same situation, except the trend of barricading your entire family extended itself into an actual life and death matter.

How The Drivers took hold I will never know…but they did. At first they spent their time fortifying their own shops, stealing generators, living off of stored ingredients. They had enough to support themselves while they got their shit together.

They swarmed, they always do, at first it was only a few, but eventually I could hear them piling up…

They were on some road warrior shit. Half of them were packing anyway, not the pimply college kids working a summer job. Most of them got chewed up as soon as the shit hit the fan. I’m talking about the lifers, the guys with DUIs on their record, no education, NRA memberships, bad backs and drug problems. Those guys took over.

Think about it, all these people barricaded in their homes, churches, whatever, they needed food. And The Drivers could get it to them.

I’m sure they only delivered a few actual pizzas initially, after their stores ran out, eventually they became more like paid scouts, heading out into the white zones to pick up spare food and deliver it to whoever paid.

They were piled so high on top of the box that parts of it started to dent in. I could hear them, inches away from me, snarling and biting each other. Trying to get to me.

And I will say it again; they were fucking bad-ass. Their uniforms changed from dorky shorts and embroidered polo shirts to heavily reinforced leather and work fabrics. Some of them even worked up some chain mail to cover the weak parts. It helped protect them but made them a little slow, which affected tips. The crazy part is they maintained their corporate identities. They hacked the patches and insignias off of their old uniforms and stitched them onto their new ones.

They also did insane things to their cars. Delivery drivers already know how to change their oil, and do general repairs, but who knew they knew how to weld steel plating, wire insanely bright halogen light sets, throw in new suspension and beefed up engines to handle the extra weight. These things were fucking tanks, with gun ports, spikes everywhere, and yes, even those damn light up pizza siren things.

So there they were, gangs of roving maniacs, out saving the world (for a price). The Drivers. They stayed loyal to their colors too. Dominos was the first to get a foothold in the market, on account of a local general manager, Louie Bruno, being an ex green-beret/martial arts expert/general Brooklyn bad ass. I heard that before the storm once, he was ambushed on his way to make a night drop at the bank. Instead of giving up the money like those corporate training videos told him to do, he beat the shit out of the guy, grabbed his gun and chased him to his car, calling him a pussy the entire time.

I couldn’t move, they were right on top of me. Their spit and blood and fluid was leaking into the box, and I kept puking on myself from their smell… after a few hours I was dry heaving, an hour after that it was blood, and I kept passing out…

Louie trained his Dominos guys. They were the original bad asses. They didn’t fuck with guns very much. They would roll up, three or four of them would jump out of the back of a van/tank with Lobos and machetes and other randomly thrown together melee weapons. 2 would go to work clearing Zack out of the delivery area while the other two would unload the goods onto the customer.

Little Caesar’s was next up, and they were pretty hardcore too. Remember their mascot, the little cartoon dictator or whatever? He had those pizzas on the end of that fucked up pitchfork? Well The Caesars had those things too. Cast iron, two prongs, long as hell, strapped to their back. I received a delivery once, the driver was getting ready to give me the food when a quick one surprised him. Before I could even start bitching that he forgot my Cinna Sticks, he had his fork out and buried straight into the G’s chest.

Fucking thing was stuck there, thrashing around like crazy on the end of that stick. The Driver just held him there, pinned to the pavement like it was nothing. I then realized why they made their weapons so long. Same concept as a dog catchers leash/lasso/pole thing, keep the rabid shits as far away as possible. He didn’t seem to mind. It was damn hard calculating 20 percent with a thrashing zombie 5 feet away from me.

After about 4 hours I came to… gunshots…someone else was in the room…

Loyalty and turf became a huge fucking deal. Delivery zones became sacred, if 2 opposing crews ended up on the same road there wasn’t any kind of discussion. These massive steel hulking bulldozer fucking cars would just slam right into each other until one crew was dead. They really did stick to their own zones though, so collisions were rare, but the roads were so fucked that detours were inevitable.

I heard about a Papa John’s squad coming across a lone Domino’s Driver in their zone. The Domino had gotten separated from his crew on a botched delivery and wandered into the wrong zone.

The Papas were particularly gnarly. A lot folks said it was on account of all the sugar in their sauce and dough. Some said it was their mob-bred roots. Anyway, they took this poor fucker, stripped off his armor, strapped him to the front of their transport, and went about their business making deliveries. The whole time he was there he acted as a kind of lightning rod for Zack. They would all swarm on him and rip him apart, leaving room for The Papas to get paid. Eventually he turned, of course, so they wasted him and left him strapped there. Hood ornament.

The more shots I heard the louder everything around me get, as layers of them fell off of my putrid stronghold.

Eventually, resources ran so low that The Drivers became pretty hardcore about their money, or whatever it was you were giving them in exchange for food. When it got really desperate, the luckiest houses were the ones that had women. Those pornos where the pizza guy stops by to deliver the “extra sausage” pizza and ends up railing two already-naked (she just came over to use the shower) stay-at-home moms… well that shit happened all the time…except in this version the pizza guy is covered in gore and the moms are all malnourished and half-crazy. Nice.

Payment of any kind was serious business too. I heard about a customer who owed them money for like 3 months. After three months The Drivers, a crew from Pizza Hut (pussies by driver standards) came to collect. They knocked down every door in the house, and raided the place. They grabbed everything of any kind of value. Not money but booze, pornos, prescription drugs, medical supplies, clothes, books, magazines, anything they wanted. They took all of this as payment and left. And they didn’t stop to put the doors back up.

Eventually they ran out of bullets…I could tell they had switched to melee weapons now as I could hear the sounds of stabbing, slicing, bones breaking, rotted skulls caving in…

They got close to me, I could hear them killing the last layer, and…”FUCK!” I screamed as 3 feet of rusty pipe came punching through the roof of the box, right through my calf…

“FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! YOU FUCKERS ARE NOT GETTING ANY KIND OF TIP FROM ME!! FUCK!!”

To be continued

I heard a rib crack and decided I needed to get back on the job, the ether left me in a drunken useless state so I dug for my cocktail of uppers and blow. I dipped into my bag and stuck a lump into my face, inhaling deeply as I grabbed for my gun. More would be coming, and I need to be on my shit if I was going to make it.

As my hood slammed and my windshield went red I realized something was wrong. The shit that went into my nose hurt waaaaay too much. I knew this burn, this was not any kind of upper, it was K, Ketamine, horse traquilizer, and I was fucked.

My senses ran screaming from me and I clenched my gun, falling over into my front seat, I heard Prick scream his last scream, and the sound of dead fists tearing a wet rib cage in two. Surprisingly, a sound like that is nowhere near enough to rocket someone out of a K-hole.

I laid there, with the back of my head against the passenger door grinning at my drivers side window that I had punched out hours ago, drooling, anxiously awaiting the moment when that fucker tore me apart, so the disassembly of my body that I was feeling would be both literal and metaphysical. I couldn’t wait. I couldn’t move. Then again, I thought, as the tiniest mutation of survival instinct swam through the blackness and tapped me on the shoulder. My subconscious being way smarter than I ever could be. I decided I was going to try and kill this thing from a coma tunnel 4 thousand miles away from Now.

I propped my gun up as well as I could and waited for the bitch to come to the window. I would do my best to blast her, or I would do my best to die, either way. I kept my mind almost awake by thinking of the huge nut I was going to blow all over the dead G bitch if I made it out of this. Any second now, as the time dragged elastic across my eyes, nothing happened. I heard her coming, drooling, making all kinds of dumbfuck retard noises.

It happened, but not like I had planned. She came to the door, but not the side I had my gun pointed at, the door I had my head leaning on. She ripped the fucker straight off the hinges, and still ready to react, my trigger finger coiled despite my attempts to stop it and I went right ahead and put three in my kneecap without breaking a sweat.

Then she had me, by the collarbones, that fucking grip. I was fucking useless. I was fucked, so fucked. My knee was obliterated, three slugs from my desert eagle from no more than 9 inches away, and I couldn’t even feel it…

To be continued.

I have to look at my assets, play the hand I’m dealt. So when my two main bitches caught a bite, I didn’t think it meant they had to stop working. There’s some fucked up people out there bro. You name it, it’s out there. I knew of one dude who would show up with his own novocaine and busted ass dental equipment. For real, shit was rusty and crusted with old blood. He’d have the girls hit him up with novocaine and fucking rip his teeth out while he jerked off. Once he ran out of teeth I never saw him again. Shit was wild, but you see my point, there’s a market for all kinds of shit…including people who want to fuck zombies.

Who knows why they wanted it, doesn’t matter, even when things were bad, I’d have these twitchy motherfuckers trading me food and old cell phones and shit to get at one of my Zombitches…that’s what I called them. I know the name sucks, but I’m not advertising pro. I’m more like a “Fuck you, pay me” type of pro.

I had them there, chained up like whoa. Sometimes I would have them gagged, but some of the johns liked the gag off, so they could have that zombitch gnashing and snapping and howling at them while they got fucked. Sometimes I wondered if the girls could feel it, if they liked it, through those dirty eyes, did they know what was happening? Sometimes they moaned louder, but I think that was because they had a meal right there, literally inside of them, and they couldn’t have it.

If they did get at them though, I was ready. The catch was that I would have to be there, right there in the room when they did it. If they got bit, I would wax them right then and there, no questions asked.

It actually worked better for me after they turned, because before, the girls were all, “I need to eat, I need to get my nails done, my kids need a babysitter” all that shit. Now, they just lay around, chained up, making that money, all profit.

No blowjobs though, that became a law after I saw this one dude go for it like it was a good idea. I think the danger is part of the turn on for these guys, but putting your unit in the mouth of a G bitch? You might as well be sticking your dick in a blender. You can guess how that one ended….my girl getting a snack and my gun getting some work.

Condoms too, those were a rule. Unless you were fuckin’ stupid. Who knew what type of fucked up ass STDs a zombie bitch would have.

What can I say? This war was good for business. Pimpin zombies definitely ain’t easy, but it’s definitely easier than pimping regular bitches.

See, for us it was so dark on the floor that no one ever really noticed the 8 year old with the glass of brown liquor, the trail of dark blood leading from the booth, to the bar, to the pinball machine, to the change machine, back to the pinball machine. There were other more malicious things to worry about, like the fucking black handprints all over the highball glasses. Black and murky like asphalt, smell like a science classroom on dissection day.

In fact, blood was normal, fists shredded to the bone and beyond were not. Manual tooth extractions were not. Instrument free dentistry was not. Not for me at least. Our policy was usually, “just let them scrap it out and pick up the loose change once they’re done”. But these weren’t typical brawls, blacks would lose an arm and keep fighting, reds would rip off someone’s lower jaw, throw up thick syrupy shit and get right back to their shitty rail and water.

Like I never said, apathy and routine took hold.

We never changed many lightbulbs, and it always smelled like that. Like so many old ladies, we had gotten used to our musk. We didn’t give a fuck and the regulars didn’t either.

The first inclination I had that anything was off the tracks was under the bar, changing a half expired keg for another less expired one. We never could sell much beer, real alcoholics didn’t have time for it, they only bought it when they were too broke to afford anything else. Herpes, a “busboy” was down there. I hadn’t seen Herpes in about 3 months. That was typical too, they would get their money for the night and run off to blow it all on bad junk, buying it with a needle in their arm in some other shitty bar’s bathroom. Saved me the clean up. I figured the same happened to Herpes, apparently it didn’t. When he stood up, groaning, I thought it was the junk and told him to fuck off, find a hotel room and never come back.

He was pissed, and I was armed. It didn’t take much time or thinking or bullets. His blood didn’t look right though. It was too brown, too thick, and his eyes, they weren’t the watery desperate eyes of a smackhead. That’s probably why i wasted him, that look in his eyes suggested that nothing good was going to come from my little intervention. The back of his head ended up all over a bunch of spare tin, and I went back up and closed the door.

When I came back, I was asked repeatedly about “that shot”, but no one gave an inch of piss about the other one, the one for Herpes.
–”This place is completely fucked”, he told me over the phone. Fucking Prick. Big fucking surprise I thought, the only reason I ever speak to this guy is when something, someplace or someone is completely fucked. Fuck. Shit. Fuck.

I got there and did a line off the dashboard, and then put my fist through the driver’s side window. I opened the door from the outside and wandered over to what was left of what had to be the shittiest bar in the shittiest town in the world. He stood there all dramatic lighting a cigarette, inhaling slowly and exhaling as he turned to look at me. All I wanted to do was break his fucking neck, but instead i just focused on the blood that was running off of my hand, I felt it cling to my knuckles until the last second when it dropped and patted the asphalt. It was bliss.

He gestured with his faggoty American Spirit and said, “some of them are still moving”. I looked. They were. Some of them looked like the falling action in a shitty horror movie about construction site disasters. All twisted limbs with steel and glass stuck through them. Some of them just looked sad, crying. “WHO FUCKING CARES!” I screamed at him, feeling the blood vessels pop in my eyes. He just shrugged.

I went to the car, grabbed my gun, a mutant Pakistani Desert Eagle, drilled, rebuilt and fucked with by God-knows-who-for-crack. I’ve shot planes out the sky. I cocked it and walked up to the different faces, ignored the watery ones who asked me to “please stop” and put one in each. I heard Prick say something similar, but he knew why I was there and he knew he wasn’t going to stop me. Only I can do that.

I came back, wiped off their “blood”, licked some of it off my hands and ran the rest through my hair to keep it back. Their blood isn’t contagious, the shit is motor oil, brown, useless, stagnant, delicious. Its their saliva that gets you. Of course there could be traces of it in their oil, I could have swallowed some of it, I could have been turning right then and there, but I didn’t quite give a fuck.

“Nice job”, he said, flicking his cigarette. Fucking Prick.

I huffed ether in my car and waited for the next shit storm to come.