Sloughing Off the Rot (4 page)

“Santiago! Wake up!” John rolled toward Santiago and shook him awake. “What is this? What the fuck? What are these people doing?”

Santiago sat up slowly. He rubbed his eyes. He rejected the urgency in John’s voice. He scanned the slow-moving throng around him. He stretched. “What the fuck, Johnny? That’s a hell of a way to wake me. I told you about lunkheads last night. Remember?”

“I don’t remember anything. We stopped. I was beat. I slept. We didn’t talk.”

“We did, man,” said Santiago. He squatted low to the ground and tugged at his beard. “We did. And I’ll hep you to it all again. But first, you gotta tell me something. Do you want more worms? Are you jonesing for one more lunk?” He tittered his nervous laugh and watched John’s face closely.

“I don’t ever want to see those stupid worms again,” John snapped. “My body aches all over. I feel empty inside. My skin is torn and scabbed and burned. My head is throbbing and the ground feels like it’s moving. I want nothing to do with lunkworms.”

Santiago jumped up again and slapped John on the back. “That’s the answer I was looking for. You ain’t gonna be no lunkhead. If you don’t want more, then you ain’t a lunkie.”

The gape-jawed men stood just outside the circle, watching and waiting. Santiago approached the edge of the perimeter and stood in front of a short, crumpled man. The man’s eyes were devoid of any emotion or recognition, but they locked on Santiago. The man’s jaw repeatedly shifted and chewed at his ragged tongue, his lips pursed and slackened, pursed and slackened. His arms twitched and thoughtlessly slammed balled fists against his own sides. The right side of his face hung, palsied and dull. Infected claw marks crisscrossed his bare chest.

“These,” said Santiago, waving his hand to indicate the men who surrounded them, “these are your sins and your shame and your guilt, guy. These are the things that will dog you until you deal with yourself. These are the manifestation of your fucked up past. This is your shit looping back around and smacking you in the back. These are lunkheads. Some people take the lunk once and never have a need for it again. Some get helplessly addicted. Some suffer almost immediate mental incapacitation and only certain parts of their brains seem to work.”

Santiago swaggered around the circle and waved his hand in front of an emaciated lunkhead’s face. Angry red patches of flesh marked spots on the man’s head where he had torn out his own hair. A red sore throbbed and oozed on one of the bald patches. “Look at this sorry sack of shit. Lets just call him Gary,” Santiago said. He balled up his fist and threw it within inches of Gary’s blank eyes, stopping his hand just short of the protective perimeter. Gary did not flinch. His only reaction was a cruffulous cough, and then he stared straight ahead, his brain turned off.

“Hey, motherfucker, Trix are for kids!” Santiago shouted, blasting a fine mist of spittle in Gary’s face, trying to get a response. But the man did not answer. The man did not wipe the spit from his face. The man took no umbrage at Santiago’s abuse. He did not blink. The man stood and stared at Santiago. “Look at him,” said Santiago. “He’s cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, baby.”

Santiago paced at the edge of the circle, stopping to taunt the creatures. Scooping up a handful of sand, he threw it in the face of a drooling lunkhead. The recipient of the sand stood slack-jawed and unaware of the mistreatment, not even blinking to clear the grains of sand from his eyes. “Look at these. These are lunkies. And what do they want? They want my Lucky Charms, don’t they? They want my worms. But I don’t have any more.”

“Well, why are they here then?” said John. “Just show them that you don’t have any more worms.” John stood toward the center of the circle, repulsed at the shuffling swarm of bloodied and bruised meat surrounding him.

“They don’t just want my worms,” tittered Santiago. “They want you. They want to tear you down. They want me. They want to fuck us and kill us and eat us. And not necessarily in that order, baby.”

“So, what? They’re like, zombies or something?”

“They ain’t zombies, dig?” said Santiago, stopping to pick up an apple-sized red rock from the ground. Winding up like a major league pitcher, he flung the rock with all his might at a tall, gangling lunkhead who stood shifting his weight from one foot to the other. The rock smashed the lunkhead’s nose and provoked a flow of blood. The victim of Santiago’s attack shook his head and then resumed his back and forth shifting. “They’re not dead. You won’t turn into one if they bite you. Their affliction ain’t contagious, or infectious, dig? It’s more pathetic and outrageous. They’re just missing a part of their brains, brother. For some reason, lunkworms affect some people differently. I don’t know if they change the chemical balance in the lunkies’ brains or if the worms just eat an essential part of the brain, or what. I just know that when some people ingest a worm, it turns out that the worm is actually ingesting them. It’s like the basic needs are all that drive the lunkies. And all thought and reason go out the window. These bad boys just want to eat, shit, fuck and kill. Dig? Let me show you.”

As the crowd swayed back and forth outside of the invisible barrier, Santiago ran around near the border of the circle, picking up speed and tittering his nervous laugh all the while. With a sufficient head of steam built up, Santiago launched himself into the air, throwing his feet in front of himself. His feet broke the protective border of the circle and smacked into an elderly lunkhead’s bare chest. Upon making contact, Santiago allowed his legs to bend slightly and then pushed off with all of his might, springing himself back into the protective perimeter and, in the process, knocking the brain-dead old man to the ground amongst the groaning crowd of lunkheads.

And a violent and lustful blood orgy erupted. The lunkheads converged on the fallen man and tore at him. And there was much screaming and gnashing of the teeth. The savages ignored the man’s screams and devoured his flesh, quickly tearing him down to bones and a puddle of gore. Some, as if in a drunken barroom free-for-all, turned their frenzy on each other, reeling about, randomly striking, scratching and biting at any bodies close to them. John’s eyes reflected the horror as he watched one lunkhead smash a rock down on the head of another lunkie who was bent over and chewing on an unconscious victim. The rock caved in the back of the man’s head and he dropped face-first into the dust. Other lunkheads fell on him and ripped at his flesh. His side was gashed open and the viscera tumbled out, slopping onto the dusty ground. One of the creatures, his hunger for flesh sated, tugged the pants off of the fallen man and mounted the prone form, dry-fucking the already-dead lunkie’s ass. And his lust incited the base needs of the others, who gathered and penetrated the newly formed openings in the dead man’s body. The ass-fucking lunkhead put his hand in the dead man’s crotch and performed a vicious reach-around, ripping off his victim’s genitals and tossing them into the air, bouncing the rent organ off of the forehead of another lunkie. One of the combatants, upon being struck in the face with a log, tripped backward across the piss-barrier and fell into John and Santiago’s circle. The lunkhead immediately dropped to the ground, clutched at his face and yowled a high-decibel scream, rolling out of the circle and back toward the fray. Once out of the circle, he rolled up, fetal, and continued to clutch at his face and scream. Others fell upon him and shucked him like an ear of corn, painfully and permanently relieving him of his suffering.

“What the fuck?” gasped John, shocked at the horrid display of violence and lust. “What did you do?”

Santiago tugged at John’s arm, pulling him away from the bloody melee. “I just bought us some time, dig? They’re all focused on each other and have forgotten about us. Let’s split this scene A.S.A.P.”

Allowing himself to be led away from the horrors, John realized that he and Santiago were walking away from their protective circle. They were again walking the red brick road.

John stopped, ignoring Santiago’s insistent tugging at his arm. “Shouldn’t we stay in the circle? Can’t they get us now?”

Santiago answered, “They’re all focused on each other. They’ll probably tear themselves down, every last one. And even if they do break from that shuck and jive to hassle us, they don’t move very fast. Dig? So as long as we keep moving down the line, we won’t have no troubles from those boys back there. They’ll trail us like the stink of your shame. But, they won’t catch us as long as we’re careful. We just need to keep an eye out for other lunkies up ahead of us. Let’s go, the night is far spent and the day is at hand.”

And they were on the road again. Behind them, the lunkies fought and they fit, and they scratched and they bit. And because the mindless violent hunks of meat ripped each other down to scraps and snips on that location, the spot is called Elmira Gulch.

The path now welcomed them. It twisted and wound its way over the red rocks and hills in the distance. The river of clouds rushed by overhead, clearing the way of bad mojo. Bloodcurdling shrieks and howls of combat filled the air behind Santiago and John, the screams fading out as the men distanced themselves from the self-destructing band of lunkheads. The fresh air and the disappearance of the rabid meat-puppets helped John to clear his head. The unthinking exercise of briskly walking away and the clear skies above him lessened the lunk-hangover. His steps fell in rhythm with Santiago’s and they beat a steady retreat from the danger behind them. John allowed himself to concentrate only on the rhythm of his march and cleared his mind of everything else. The men headed west, not talking, just walking.

And John and Santiago walked the road for forty days and forty nights. In the desert there were plants and birds and rocks and things. There was sand and hills and rings. Every so often they saw a small village or gathering of people in the distance, off of the path. In the villages the houses were built of unsplit logs and the sod roofs grew thick and green. The aroma of good meat cooking drifted to them on the wind, making their mouths water and their stomachs rumble in hungry protest. But John and Santiago kept walking, eschewing the temptations of a good meal and a comfortable slumber. Instead, they stayed true to the path. When hunger controlled, they dined on desert flora and the oversized dirt-rats whose colonies popped up randomly along the red brick road. Santiago fetched their food by sitting stock-still in the middle of a colony with a handful of pinyon nuts and waiting for the plump, lazy rodents to approach and sniff him. He would wait for the critters to crawl into his lap and eat from his hand. When they did, he swiftly scruffed them with his empty hand and slammed them to the ground. Catching the rodents by hand and dispatching them gave Santiago a sense of satisfaction. At the end of the slaughter, Santiago, uncharacteristically calm with a beatific gaze, sat with the dead animals piled off to his side and still drawing others in to check him out. Once the killing was done, the remaining dirt-rats settled on his lap and safely ate from his hand. The nights found the large stripped rats turning slowly on a spit above a fire, dripping grease that flared up on the embers. The meat, gamey and tough, killed the hunger but left the men unsatisfied.

Along the road, the twisted juniper skeletons stretched their dead limbs, welcoming turkey vultures to roost in them. John marveled at the birds’ hideous beauty as they sat, necks hunched over and feathers ruffled, and stared at him with hollow, piercing eyes. The red wrinkled heads tipped with curved ivory beaks seemed ill-fitted to the oversized brown bodies. The birds’ glare always seemed to mimic the hunger in Santiago’s eyes. The omnivorous creatures waited for Santiago to do his work with the dirt-rats. He always killed more than he and John needed for sustenance and threw the extra carcasses out for the buzzards to dine on.