Scabs (7 page)

My lungs were burning and felt as if they would explode under the tremendous exertion. Still I maintained my fanatic pace. For the ninth day in a row I put in miles that would have awed the most dedicated ultra-marathoner. There were still at least another three hours left before daylight and already I’d run twice the distance of the average marathon. But now my body was starting to rebel.

I was perhaps a day or two away from organ failure. I was losing fluids far too rapidly. And there was so little fat left on my body that my muscles were starting to consume themselves for fuel. Spots began to dance in front of my eyes as the oxygen in my blood continued to decrease, my lungs unable to keep up with the demand. But once again I could feel them expand a little farther to accommodate the strain and allow a few more breaths inside. The cramps in my legs and calves were getting worse. The blisters on my feet burst two days ago and the raw skin now rubbed against the synthetic leather of my broken down Tuned Air Max running shoes, aggravating the tender flesh. Soon the sores would be infected and I wouldn’t be able to run. I’d have to fight. But that was days away. Hopefully by then I’d be deep in the desert. Safe from the night things.

I jogged up the freeway entrance ramp dodging in between cars. As soon as I hit the freeway I knew that this had been a bad idea. The smell of death choked me and scalded my throat, churning a tidal wave of bile in my stomach. Even worse, the cars were too close together. If there were something inside waiting to lunge out at me, I had only inches to avoid it. But then again, if I managed to reach open highway where the traffic gridlock thinned out enough to allow a vehicle to pass through fast enough to avoid being attacked, I might be able to borrow one of the cars and give my legs a rest for awhile. I decided it was worth the risk. I kept running down the freeway, between the cars.

There were more lights on the freeway. There were hardly any gaps between the road lights. But where there were gaps, they were great expanses where the darkness seemed to stretch on for almost a mile before the light resumed. The pain in my calves, thighs, and feet was starting to slow me down, affecting my stride, and my lungs were starting to cramp again. I couldn’t keep that pace up for long. I knew I had to make it to the end of the freeway.

I hadn’t been awake during the day in nearly a week. I was too exhausted from running all night. If I could get a car and drive some during the night, then maybe I could wake up a little earlier and find out if anyone was still alive. Besides, I’d almost overslept two nights ago. By the time I woke up, the sun had already begun to set and the things had started crawling out of whatever dark pits they slept in. They were slithering into the apartment I’d slept in that morning, surrounding me. Luckily, I’d had the foresight to pick a ground-level apartment. I leapt out through the window with a herd of the things scratching at my heels and ran screaming down the street. I ran four city blocks before I could get my panic back under control and regain control over my breathing.

I was nearing the end of a long row of streetlights and there was about a quarter of a mile of solid darkness, pregnant with those voracious creatures, before I would reach the next light. I could see what looked like hundreds of the phantoms seething in the night that stretched out endlessly in between.

“The way out is not around but through.” I could hear my counselor telling me after my first failed attempt at detoxification.

“There are no shortcuts.”

“No shortcuts.” I repeated to myself as I picked up speed and hurtled into the night.

Claws raked my flesh as the things tried to latch onto me. The sharpness of their fangs and talons worked against them now because it sliced right through my skin like a hot knife through butter and didn’t allow them to grab hold and pull me down. I felt my skin shred as they slashed at me but I kept running harder and faster, Olympian strides, until I could barely see them anymore. They were just blurs of dark flesh and fangs. I reached the next series of lights covered in blood and sweat, exhausted.

I had taken up running during rehab. The more health and body-conscious I became, the easier it got to stay away from the rock. I was only two months sober when I did my first 5k race, a month later I did my first 10k. I had been off the rock for six months when I finished my first marathon. Then the screams had started coming in the night. The blood and dismembered bodies piling up in the morning. It had gotten harder and harder not to use.

My body was shutting down, failing. I could feel it. I was losing too much blood, exerting myself too hard. I had to stop. I stood beneath the light staring into the darkness, at the terrible things slithering and crawling around just beyond the light. This was the first time I had ever taken the time to look at them.

At first all I saw were the claws and the teeth, the flaming yellow eyes, then faces slowly swam into focus, familiar faces.

A shiver raced up my back as I recognized the face of the first kid I’d ever sold crack to. The thing’s flaming yellow orbs began to soften and resolve themselves into those same big trusting eyes that I had taken advantage of all those years ago. Its fangs melted into a big dopey grin. Coiled beside him was a snakelike phantom that had once been a teenaged girl that I’d gotten hooked on crack so that I could have sex with her. She had only been sixteen years old. A church girl who thought she was too good for us street thugs. I had turned her into a crack whore in less than a month. I didn’t even attend her funeral when she eventually died of AIDS. I had already moved on to the next innocent life.

One tiny creature was hurling itself at the cone of light as if it was an invisible force field that it could break through. The light would immediately scald its oily midnight flesh and it would shrink back squealing in agony only to attack again. I knew what and who it was even before I saw its face. I hadn’t seen his face the night he died, not until I picked up the newspaper the next day. I had been driving too fast when I leaned out the driver’s side window with the Tech-nine and let the Black Talons fly into the crowd of gangbangers. There was no way to see who I had hit, if anyone. The next day when I read that only one person had been killed, a six-year-old kid named Devon who’d been playing hide-and-go-seek with some friends when he’d been struck by one of my errant bullets, I didn’t even cry. I smoked the largest rock I could find and went out again to find those fools I had missed.

There were larger creatures that began to push their way in closer to the light. They were more brazen and they got so close that their inky black skin began to blister and burn as they huddled in close. They knew that they couldn’t get me as long as I stayed under the light, but they seemed determined that I should see them. They wanted to be recognized.

I looked past the gnarled and twisted horns and fangs and immediately began to put names to the faces. Donny, Tank, Warlock, Bean, Eddie, Malik. All rival drug dealers that I had murdered. There were other faces huddling in close to the light but I didn’t recognize most of them. How could I? I’d never met half of the people whose lives had been ruined by what I sold.

Blood was starting to pool in my sneakers. I could feel myself getting light-headed from the blood loss. I had to get moving again before I went into shock. I had to find some open highway and a car.

There were six streetlights in a row and then beyond it another quarter mile of darkness. More of the things had amassed around the perimeter of the light. I would have to go through them again. I began to run.

As I sprinted beneath the last streetlight, preparing to charge into the darkness, I saw what looked like a wall of the fearsome night things raging amid the shadowy twilight between the street lamps. Now I could make out all of them. The biggest mob of creatures, swarming directly in my path, were led by faces that I’d known most of my life. The Christians had been right after all. These things were not some genetic experiments gone wrong or the aftermath of some industrial accident. But they hadn’t come from hell either. They were the most fearsome of all the demons, my own personal ones.

“The way out is not around but through.” I whispered as I tucked my chin and hurtled right into them swinging the axe as I prepared to make my last stand. I saw demons with the faces of my mother and father lunge toward me and I prepared to cleave their heads from their shoulders. But I couldn’t. I dropped the axe and ran, trying to dodge between them, but I was slow from injuries, exhaustion, and loss of blood, and there were too many of them. Their fangs and claws cut into my flesh and this time they hooked in deep. I couldn’t break free, but I didn’t slow my stride either. I dragged them along as I sprinted toward the light. My mother and father latched to my thighs and buttocks, slashing at my back. My sister, and brothers, my aunts, and uncles, and cousins, former friends, and ex-girlfriends, everyone who’d ever had the poor judgement to invest their emotions in me, were gnawing at my chest and stomach, working my muscle and fat free from my bones, and burrowing into my organs.

One of the night things, an ex-girlfriend whom I’d gotten pregnant and then coerced into having an abortion, scampered up my back and began biting and clawing at my throat, lacerating both my jugular and carotid arteries with its hooked talons and shark-like teeth. The spray of blood seemed to excite the demons already clinging to me and attract even more. I stumbled, nearly went down into the herd of rapacious shadows, then righted myself and continued to run. Staring at the cone of light just yards away, like an oasis in a desert of pain and death. I began to scream just before the thing on my back tore out my larynx, silencing me. Still, I kept running. It was what I had always done. The only way I knew how to deal with life. But now, my demons were catching up to me.

Best Friends

I was almost asleep, staring across the darkened room in a drowsy twilight haze at the moonlight beaming through my window, when a shadow crossed slowly in front of it, blocking the silver light from view. My heart drumrolled in my chest as the dark shape, a piece of the night, detached itself from the larger body of darkness and began moving towards me. My breath came in rapid bursts filling the silence with the sounds of a quiet steadily increasing panic as fear sent a surge of adrenaline through my nervous system and shot up my pulse rate somewhere around one hundred and fifty beats per minute. Nothing should have been moving in my room. Nothing except me.

I wanted to reach for the nurse’s call button sitting on my nightstand but I was afraid to move from the relative safety of my blankets. The room darkened even more. The inky black silhouette appeared to be absorbing the moonlight and breeding more shadows into the already stygian gloom. A tenebrous curtain of night obscured everything from view as the shadow approached my bedside.

My heartbeat doubled. The blood surged through my veins as if propelled by a steam engine.  I watched the dark ethereal shape glide to the edge of my bed and I dug my fingernails into the sheets, ripping them. I imagined the sound of footsteps even though I heard none. A cold draft preceded the apparition as it floated toward me, whispering like wind beneath a doorsweep. Slowly a distinctly human silhouette emerged before me, taking on more anthropomorphic features as it drew closer.  The outline of a human skull with ragged tufts of hair clinging to its otherwise bald head, emaciated arms, bony hips, skeletal legs. I could hear it breathing as it hovered above my bed. The dark shape expanding and contracting as it inhaled warm climate controlled air and breathed out that chill gasp.  I began to pant terrified little breaths that turned to steam in the frigid air radiating from the nebulous penumbra above me.

Then the shadow reached out one lithe wisp of a limb, lifted my sheets and blanket, and slipped into bed beside me, snuggling its icy flesh against mine. The scream stuck in my throat and came out as a whimper as it drew itself still closer. It was trying to spoon with me. A riot of goosebumps exploded across my skin and icy tendrils clawed my spine raising the hair on my neck and forearms. I could feel it against me, cold, clammy, dead, but breathing. I was more shocked that the apparition had any substance at all than by its lack of body heat.

Too weak to move, I lay there with those cold skeletal arms wrapped around me, that frail damp torso pressed against my back, and its frigid breath creeping down my neck.

When it turned its face toward mine its eyes were gaping holes that yawned wide, more shadows slithering deep within them. It was a portrait of sorrow. Sorrow so deep that it had literally become her, bending each feature into the shape of that one emotion. Still, I recognized her.

“God damnit! Why the hell does she keep following me!” My fear and guilt had merged into one paralyzing emotion. Whatever she had come here to do to me I knew I deserved it.

Her name was Sarah Michelle and she’d had a crush on me, but I’d been too afraid of what others would say about me dating the emaciated little nerd to show her even the simplest human kindness. I had killed her. Or, at the very least, I’d given her no reason to want to keep living.

I never knew that she had cancer. She’d kept it to herself. Never using it as an excuse when people laughed at her sunken corpse-like face or her bald and mottled scalp, giving no explanation for these abnormalities at all. Enduring all the taunts and torments with stoic indifference even when they said she had AIDS and accused her of being a heroine junkie or a crack whore. The other kids were so cruel that I had felt sorry for her. So I tried to be nice.

I spoke to Sarah whenever I passed her in the hallways between classes. “Hi” and “Bye” mostly. I offered her a smile whenever I could. I was just trying to make her feel...I don’t know...not so alone. When I’d first started speaking to her she would eye me suspiciously and quickly walk away. It wasn’t long before she was returning my greetings and my smiles. It was like winning the trust of a wild animal. Soon I could see her lingering in the halls, waiting for me to notice and acknowledge her with a smile before shuffling off to class. I thought it was cute at first. Until she started following me.