The Death-Drum and the Worm[1]

 

 

I

 

“One has, I think, to reckon with the fact that there are present in all men destructive, and therefore anti-social and anti-cultural, trends and that in a great number of people these are strong enough to determine their behavior in human society.” Freud The Future of an Illusion.

 

“I tell you, he is alive and killing the Dead” Agamemnon The Libation Bearers l. 886

 

“Never even noticed We’re suddenly Crumbling
Tell me how you’ve never felt delicate or innocent
[…]
Tell me nothing ever comes lashing out or breaking down” t.A.T.u “Show Me Love”

 

“The History of Life has been punctuated by brief episodes of mass extinction.” Stephen Jay Gould Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of Dinosaurs.

 

 

Shae stood on the edge of the overpass. Beneath her red and gray Globes, a line of cars headed to the Igloo sped happily by. The Pens were in the race for the Cup, and the city was in a sport’s fury. Last year, they’d won Lombardi’s prestigious monolith. Soon, they’d have the Cup to drink from. Rain saturated tears streaked her heavy mascara; the looming Nimbi thundered about themselves, pouring down their rains to stifle mortal joys. Shae leaned forward. The winds tore at her shirtless arms. She shivered, tucking her fingers into her armpits, and leaned further forward. She let herself gently fall. Someone shouted, but she refused to hear them. In the winds rush, all things blended to a sententious nothingness…

Forgive the paint by which I smear the canvas. Let us pause for a brief second as certain parties collect the actualities of this narrative. It should be noted that, given our present cultural dispositions, this story is not meant to reflect any greater commentary. It is, after all, merely a story meant to tell a story, or the story, of Shae, a typical well-off child stereotypically portrayed. It is no more historically objective than our own historical narratives, and more subjective than your average reader may tolerate. That the author takes certain personal liberties with such a factual occurrence must be forgiven; there are only so many sides to our loaded dice.

 

It was a fight for her to be released both in the legal/social sphere as well as her own familiar one. Shae saw her mother standing there. She wept muffled sobs into the Shae’s worn DC sweatshirt. Her father stoically reminded an officer of legal codes neither he nor the policemen had forgotten. They bickered in a professional tone. Shae held her feverish eyes tightly closed. Eventually, a large officer shoved a black man against the outside of her cell door, startling her eyes open. She watched them in a fright she could not conceal. The tall policemen whispered some inaudible threat. The man he pinned against the bars looked in at her. Shae thought perhaps he held sympathy in his eyes. The policemen hauled the man violently backwards, and pushed him further into the bowels of the station. Shae shut her eyes and laid back down. She shook slightly from an inner cold.

Footsteps approached. “They say you were drunk.” Shae didn’t answer, but she recognized the authoritative voice. “They also said you were stoned.” Again, she didn’t answer. “Listen, James Dean, You want cut in half that’s your fucking business.” His voice sounded lower, like he knelt down. There was a moment, though her eyes were closed, when she could physically feel him sizing her. She shivered from the warmth of his actualizing eyes. “You like seeing Mom cry?” She could hear the rage building in his voice. “Well, you’ve fucked them both now.” There was a hesitation, “They’re gonna commit you.” His voice picked back up, a slight razor latent in his articulation, “Happy? You’d better be, you dumb selfish cunt, because they’re taking this bullshit serious now. No more little iconoclast, Shae. You’ve found the real world. The bottom of the fucking barrel, just the way you like it.  No more hardass break bottles on your little friends heads. This is real.” He got quiet, a hushed tone breezing into her warm ears, “You’re gonna be in the bin with the rest of the psychopaths. I’m not certain it isn’t where you belong.” There was the sound of physical exertion; she heard his feet squeak as he stood up.

“Hey Jason,” she said, opening her eyes. She looked back over her brow. He stood there, his shirt and tie widened to allow him breathing room. “Do me a favor. When you’re done suckin’ yourself off, can you get the fuck off my back?”

He stood there, his Macy’s-purchased suit coat tossed idly over one arm. Shae saw how far he had come to cover the Fayette County roots. “Part of me wishes those kids hadn’t saved you. Part of me understands that you can’t even kill yourself. You had to fuck that up.” He walked a few steps away. “Then again, part of me just wishes you’d drive far away and be the demon name at family parties. I think I could live ignoring you.” He walked over by her mother, who cast a sympathetic eye towards him, and raised a polished finger-tipped hand to caress his back. Shae closed her eyes. Great comeback, she thought to herself, now if only he hadn’t been right…about the failed suicide.

“Baby?” It was her mother. She closed here eyes, hoping her mother hadn’t seen them open. “Baby? Baby, please, what’s the matter with you? Tell me. Your father and I are scared. Why did you do it? Why this?”

There was a long pause. She obviously isn’t going to leave, she thought. “Nothing, Mom.” There was a sob. Inside, she felt horrible. The dry knot pulsed in her throat. She wanted to vomit.

“Shae?” It was her father. He had his professional “I’m leavin’ you out to dry for your own good” voice on. “Shae, this is serious. Open your eyes. Dammit Shae, open your eyes. I want you to look at me.”

“No, Dad, I don’t think that’s gonna happen. I told them I didn’t want to see you. I’m old enough to kill myself without your lectures.” She felt her voice was brave. Her bottom lip quivered slightly. She started to say something but he interrupted.

“Yes. Yes you are.” There was another long pause. When she opened her eyes, they were both gone and her hoodie lay partially folded on the floor. She rolled her face into the pillow and wept where no one could see.

 

She awoke on the couch with a terrible pain in her neck. The smell of corporate coffee smothered the apartment. She stirred, awakening the black sleeping cat above her head. Shae smiled at the chirpy noise the animal made when prodded. She extended her lithe hand, pursing the black hair about its face. Staggering upright, Shae stretched her pale arms above her head and cracked her back. She yawned, unintentionally happy for once.

            “You’re finally awake.”

            “Time?” She asked, looking casually over.

            “10:30.”

            “I miss breakfast?” She asked him. He swiveled in his tattered computer chair. She noticed a small plate. A half-eaten piece of egg sandwich sat upon it. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

            “You’re welcome to this,” he gestured to the plate.

            “No, I’ll pass. I’ll get something later.” He turned away from her. “Any calls?” She knew the answer before he gave it. At this rate, she’d have to go to a temp agency or something.

            He didn’t turn around, though he paused in his typing. “No.”

            She stood up and adjusted the Bioshock shirt he had loaned her some weeks ago. Her bare legs slid gracefully under her. She watched as her feet wiggle as they stretched.

            “You want to come with me to class today?”

            “Which one?”

            “Well, I have two on Tuesdays-Thursdays: Contemporary Feminism and History of Madness. If you ask me, they’re one in the same,” he laughed at his own joke. When she didn’t immediately join in, his laughter trailed into a body chuckle.

            “I’ll pass for today. Maybe tomorrow.” She stood, the shirt dropped down to cover her upper thighs. He wasn’t looking, but she was curious if he would have had he been turned around. “Cam?” He stopped typing. “Any calls for you yet?”  This time he did turn, his smile draining quietly away. Feeling as if her question was taken insultingly, she quickly added “I’m sorry. He’ll call.” Cam silently turned to his computer screen. As she walked towards the shower, she heard FPS sounds—rockets, gunshots, profanations, vulgar threats, occasional lamentations, etc—blaring over his speakers.

            This marked the second week since she’d moved in. Since her release, she had neither made an attempt to call her family nor be reached by them. It seemed—at least for now—they were both happy.

She shut the small bathroom door. Reaching her hand into the shower, she turned both knobs; She turned the left all the way and the right just barely on. She stepped back in front of the mirror. The purple and red highlights were still blatant. They’d be for at least another month. But the rest of her face looked, well, looked natural. If that was possible, she thought. She looked like her eighth grade yearbook picture: narrow chin, freckles, and pale gray eyes. Worst of all, she could see the mousy brown roots There they were, maybe an eighth-of-an-inch at best, but visible nevertheless. Her mother’s brown hair, her dad’s gray eyes. The worst of both, she thought. If her parents were…normal, she thought, normal is a crock of shit.

            She pulled the gaming t-shirt above her head. Naked, she thought, and nothing abnormal about me. Two eyes, two breasts, etc. She flexed the muscles in her chest and watched her breasts move ever so slightly. Taking her right forearm, she covered her nipples and turned her head. Seductively, she smiled a partial smile, coyly rolling her eyes. In the shutter like contact of her eyelashes, the palest hint of gray stood out amonst the unkempt eyelashes. Still, she felt…she felt attractive. “I’d fuck me,” she said to her reflection. She opened her eyes and removed tension from her chest, “but I wouldn’t pay a fucking dollar for it.” The steam of the shower casually billowed over the curtain top. She reached her arms above her head, gently stirring the faux clouds. The scars lining her inner arm appeared in the mirror. Ashley Jealson broke a bottle of Vlad across her ribs. Somehow, the leather coat—complete with the uniform bullets and studs—had only allowed a few pieces through. She thought back on the scene. She thought back on the night. Then, in a moment of nostalgic nausea, she quickly fell to the toilet, her bare ass flattening on the seat with a soft thump.

            Shae felt the color drain from her face. In a matter of seconds, she had thrown up the toilet seats. She began dry heaving into the toilet. The gasping air rippled the surface of a toilet that had not been clean since Cam moved in. The black sludge which lined the underrim watched apathetically as her hair mixed with the toilet bowl water. Shae felt her eyes pushing violently against their sunken abode. They poured unintentional tears down her face. “In a matter of minutes,” her headed pounded, “I’ll have an aneurism.” But she didn’t. Instead, she fell against the shower tub, ignoring the wet hair draped against her clavicles. With the remaining energy in her swarming mind, she willed herself to crawl into the tub.

            She let the water run over her. She began to melodramatically cry, sobbing muffled sobs into the cascading water. She didn’t cry because of the “Pyscho-bin” or because of her families dismissal of her. No, she’d just as soon never think of that again. She wept because there she sat, wasting water, and still felt the same self-pity which pushed her gray and red Globes over the overpass. The dismal dread of existence was stitched to her very core. Thank god, she thought, Cam let me in. She wasn’t certain why she was thankful, but she was…but the feeling would not leave her.

            They’d met in Ancient Greek history class: he, a lonely nerd with a Battlestar wallet; she, a suicidal ‘punk’ with a Hello Kitty purse. They were both hiding secrets at the time, secrets that have since been exposed. It began when she went to him dripping wet with a bookbag of books and a purse of money and makeup. She’d knocked on the door, shivering against the single-pane window in the hall. He opened the door. “Before I let you in,” he held the door sternly open, “Are you done?” She shrugged her shoulders. “Are you done trying to kill yourself? I’m not gonna let you in if you’re gonna bleed all over my shit. And I won’t stand for you sobbing everywhere. So, you’d better be done.” He was mustering his masculine voice. She remembered his face, though, a mixture of self-righteous rejection and benevolent empathy. They were two of a kind, in that instance, and only the intentional, melodramatic stupidity of suicide stood between them.

            She replied yes, but the finality would not leave her. At the time, she was past the dramatic bullshit; however, she did want to kill herself. When she fell forward, she’d felt the contrasting warmth of someone’s hand grab her under the arm and that alone made her feel like continuing. There she hung, dangling above seventy-mile-per-hour death. The two boys pulled her over the railing. They watched her as she fell safely to the overpass ground, vomit spewing from her mouth on impact. They didn’t say anything, but she wasn’t there to hear. When she awoke, the night nurses told her the campus had thrown the kids a party, called them heroes, and so on and so forth. A hero is social nomenclature for someone that saves someone else’s life. Shae knew this. She also knew she was somehow thankful. Between the need to uphold their efforts and the inner desire to put a bullet in her brain, Shae was, to say the least, conflicted…then, and now.

            She wiped the tears from her eyes. But it wasn’t some abstract something they had saved, she thought, it was my life, my worthless existence. She shook her hair slightly—very demanding in the falling water—and used both hands to wipe her eyes again. She stood. She felt the water press against her back then down her breasts. Her sad form stood, hesitantly at first, but soon with more strength. There, in the midst of the shower, she felt her body slowly begin to warm. The water was too hot, her skin too cold, but she stood and soaked in the steam. She let the hot water soak into her hair. Even the sunburn-like pain didn’t bother her. Instead, she let herself lean against the wall and drift lazily into her head.

            She found herself thinking about her current place in the world, thinking that the day seemed longer than normal. Then again, it was much lonelier than she thought possible. Four months ago, she was a little punk girl, walking amongst so many other girls, headed to her first day of class. She’d met people and done things, but she couldn’t remember any of them now. In fact, the only people she could recall was her family, and even they were fuzzy. No, today is far removed from then. Over the course of eighteen years, the path before her seemed so much longer than possible, the path traveled so much shorter and insignificant. That punk girl eventually threw herself off an overpass. This girl, this girl was someone a little more surreal. “Surreal,” she said aloud. “Not sublime and not defiant, just covered in scars, disoriented, and alive.”

She shut the shower down and stepped onto the red bathroom floor mat. She barely dried off, instead wrapping a towel around her wet hair and another about her thin body. She pulled the towel tightly about her breast, and tucked it down next to her chest muscle. Somewhere in the action, she realized she was starving. The cool air of winter rushed through the single-pane bathroom window. Shae ignored the temperature and stepped into the hallway adjoining the bathroom to the remaining apartment.

Cameron was gone. She snooped through the fridge, eventually settling for a bowl of left over Mexican rice. She ate it slowly while watching Sanford and Son on some retro TV station. She started to feel exhausted. The last thing she remembered was the cat jumping onto her stomach and curling up. She fell into a Lethian sleep; the cat purred compassionately on her stomach.

 

            The apartment phone rang. Shae opened her eyes. Bernard, Cam’s cat, leapt terrified off her stomach, scratching her slightly; the towel fell casual open, exposing her bare, moist flesh to the frigid apartment wind. “Fucker,” she muttered in agitated pain. She picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

            “Hello?”

            “Yeah, hello?”

            “Hi,” the voice was hesitant. It coughed.

            “Well, man, what do you want?” She croaked hoarsely into the phone.

            “Is Cameron there?” She rubbed her head and looked about the room. His bag sat on the countertop next to a warming gallon of milk, its perspiration dripping nonchalantly down the sides.

            “Hang on,” she said to the voice. “Cameron,” she screamed. There was a coughing sound in the bathroom and then a toilet flushing. “Cameron, the phone’s for you!” She hollered again.

            “Does that mean he’s there?” The voice asked quietly.

            She pulled the receiver away from her ear, starring at it stupidly. She eventually mumbled, “Uh, yeah. Hence the reason I was screaming.” She sat the receiver down and tucked her skin back inside her towel. Bernard hid under a chair, her bright green eyes flaring in fright. “You’re a fucker,” she muttered.

            “Shae?” Cam peeked out of his closet of a room. “It’s him, what do I say?”

            “Say ‘Hi’” She went into the storage room, a makeshift spot where shit was dumped and forgotten. It served as her dressing room the majority of the time. In the midst of gliding her foot into her panties, an abrupt thought fell upon her. “Make sure you ask him out this time!” It was met with a violent shhhhh from the hallway. She closed the door and finished dressing.

            It was not long before Cam’s bass began to thump through the door. The sound of some industrial remix of Zimmer’s Pirates of the Caribbean wailed loudly. “Fuck,” she said aloud, “that son of a bitch…” she continued the profanities until she had tied her shirt tight and finished strapping her boots. It never failed, she thought to herself, Cam was destined for solitude. She couldn’t help wondering why. He seemed chill enough, she thought, though the thought of her dating him was noticeably absent from her mind. In fact, she felt no general amorous feelings for anyone other than Cameron, but even that feeling was tempered with both the general knowledge of his sexual nature and her ill-suited romantic being. Put short, they were two fissured personalities vastly separated.

 Fate, society, personal fuckups, she thought to herself, all intertwine to ruin us. Fate hates us both, she thought. The archaic thoughts, though outside her own cognition, weighted heavy on the back of her mind. A fluttering moth, pinioned by socially saturated wings, lay dormant in her subconscious. Still, part of her knew she was better off, that oppressed heterosexual love was possible in a stagnant society and far out-weighed the plausibility of homosexual joy in a tyrannical, mind-manacled social sphere. There, iconoclastically personal, was the last romantic social tragedy available for the American man; its overweight manifestation sat stagnantly appeasing itself with games and serenading its mind with mechanically reproduced music. These abstract thoughts were ignorantly absent from Shae’s mind. No, she was far to concerned with the blinding reality about her: a job application/interview, her suicide attempt, the miserable fucking family which spurned and spawned her. The list continued exponentially away from true empathy for Cameron. Sympathy was all she could spare. Somewhere within the turmoil, was a defiant sexuality separating the two of them.

 Cameron wept absently in his room; Shae dressed and, with a noticeable apathy uncharacteristic of her new character, left quietly. Afterall, she had an interview in the Warlords of Station Square tonight.

 

Shae shuffled sleepily off the T. A cold wind whipped over the tracks, pulling the moisture of the roadway over her. Her destination, Station Square, lay just over the river outside the city. It was a series of buildings surrounded by parking lots. A former Railroad station, it had become a haven for hedonistically blinded yuppies and bar hoppers. From where she stood on the opposite side of the city, several menial big-city clubs thump loudly to her right. A long line of freezing soon-to-be patrons waited for their chance to enter. Shae ignored them as she slid two crinkled dollars into the machine. The heavyset woman inside the box patiently waited for her to drop a quarter into the machine. Shae reached a shaking hand into her tight pants pocket. “I don’t got it,” she mumbled.

            “Try your purse,” the lady responded in an equally as muffled voice.

            “Yeah,” she searched around in her purse, where she found a dime. “How about a dime?”

            “How are you gonna get home?” the lady asked. Shae wasn’t certain if she was expressing concern or antipathy.

            “I don’t know, walk I guess. I think I have an interview tonight. I’m looking for a job.” The woman pushed a button on the machine, making it beep loudly and causing Shae to jump.

            “Take this transfer ticket,” she reached a pink ticket out of the glass. “When you get that job, you owe seventy-five cents: twenty-five for the fare, fifty for the transfer.” She waved Shae on.

            “Thanks.” She made her way across the street. In the distance, the moon sat heavy on a layer of weighted nimbi. To the newly-determined mortal below, the ominous sky was nothing more than an atmospheric, pastoral backdrop. The pathetic pastoral’s symbolism was lost on the young individual as she sought some means to stave her material needs, already indebted to a corporate machine by the kind action of a kind employee.

 

II

 

“Some day nature will reveal to you all her secrets”- Seneca Everlasting Light (ep, 102)

 

“While I watched the tempest, so beautiful yet terrific, I wandered on with a hasty step.” – Shelley Frankenstein.

 

The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath

Blew for a little life, and made a flame

Which was a mockery; then they lifted up

Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld

Each other’s aspects—saw, and shrieked, and died—
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,

Unknowing who he was upon whose brow

Famine had written Fiend. The World was void…

Byron “Darkness” ll. 62-9

 

 

A brief aside, if it is allowed. Now, it is assumed—forgive the logical taboo therein—that the reader is familiar with certain events and facts fundamental to this narrative. One) that certain universities names have been altered to protect said universities. Afterall, to debase the Ivory Tower is a job for peons and hacks. Two) that the vehicle for social commentary has been borrowed from a long line of pseudo social critics who write predominantly for their own amassing of character. Three) that the previous narrative to this point was written/established for the sole purpose of establishing a beginning to the narrative, and has no baring up on the upcoming tragedy which follows. Four) that the relation of this story to another compiled in this volume of work is arbitrary, and plays/ holds no bearing to the overall metaphoric message. Five) that the characters fatalistic disposition is innate, and not socially enforced. And finally, Six) that the author admits to shifting the weight of the events unto a heroin imputable to the significance of the events;  she appears more as a variable “X” to a formula for “Y”.

 

On leaving Stubb’s Fine Coffee, Shae stumbled on a discarded copy of The New Yorker. In a fit of childish anger, Shae kicked the magazine off into the darkness of a yawning alleyway. “No,” she said aloud, “Today’s a good day!” She’d done it. Given the coffee shop would not pay her immediately, her position was worth a solid ten dollars an hour in two weeks. Of course, she would have to give five dollars a day to the wretched trolley lords. She’d still be taking home more than she had ever made before. At least Cameron would enjoy some of the new financial income. Her rumbling stomach reminded her that, after a few months of scoping the place, she might even be able to skim some left over food to appease her demanding, though small, appetite. She smiled to herself. Today was a good fucking day, she thought.

 With a lighten step, she navigated the grime of Station Square’s denizens, carefully avoiding the weekenders throwing their money away on booze in cramped, inhospitable clubs. It was about this time when she heard the first of a series of unrecognizable groans. Shae stopped. Given the sounds of the hedonist about her, she strained to make out the noise. Vomiting? She thought to herself. Some sick kid out of the bar? She worried and, remembering rather tangentially, the trolley lady’s kindness, she decided to investigate. She peered into a dark alleyway leading to the river. Curiosity drove her into the flickering shadows of the alley’s solitude.

The winter winds had driven any revelers away from the riverbanks; the pooling water had frozen the concrete sidewalk. Shae tried to ignore both winter obstacles as she tred carefully towards the uncanny noise. The frightful sound, though alien, called to her through its awkward familiarity. Like a blurred face in a frozen crowed, each step brought her closer to both a vague recognition and an increasing alienation. Not vomiting, she thought, but some other sort of gagging. “Like a dog on a chicken bone,” she said aloud in a puzzled voice. Somewhere, perhaps in the haunting, oppressed subconscious, she knew the noise to be reified dread.

The riverbanks were brighten by a elevated florescent light. Shae’s eyes had no trouble seeing the sight before her, but the actualization of the sight was lost to her recognition. A man dressed in a tattered lab coat stretched over the broken remains of a Pittsburgh policemen. The broken transmission of the Pittsburgh dispatcher punctuated the suckling noise of the scientist’s feeding. Shae watched as the former wreck of a man was slowly consumed by something resembling a human being, resembling, but most defiantly inhumane. She watched in forced stasis, the very mobility that drug her intentionally to the river, held her unintentionally to witness the slow cannibalism.

It was in the sliver of a moment before her mind’s absolute fragmentation that a frigid hand clasped her mouth and pulled her into the darkness of the alleyway. “Please, Please,” a male voice creaked in a hushed whisper, “Don’t make a noise.” She could feel her moist breath pulling on his fingers. “Come back into the darkness where we can watch him, and I’ll tell you. Please, you must be quiet. I’m going to move my hand now.” He removed his hand and wiped it unceremoniously on his labcoat. She turned in the dim light and immediately was drawn to his contorted face. Soot and sweat and streaked his visage leaving what was clearly once a polished disposition seem ruined. She glanced down at his lab coat. In blue script, the coat read: Jason M.  Ambers, PH.D.: UCH Lab Tech., Senior Researcher.

Shae stammered out a standard question. “Who are you?” Somehow, despite her fright, she managed to keep her voice arbitrarily quiet. He bristled. Her voice grew agitated “What’s going on?” she demanded.

“Where do I start? I don’t know.”

“How about, what the fuck is that thing doing over there! Who is that?” She pointed to the stoic man feasting on the flesh of the dead.

“That is my colleague, Michael Stevenson. We did our graduate work together…” Shae saw the nostalgic clouds had taken him, even in the frightful seconds of theatrical death. His eyes pooled in what would soon be uncountable tears. She punched him in the arm. “I’m sorry.” He managed, rubbing his arm. “We work…”

“No backstory. What do we do?” She didn’t know how she became involved, but she felt she was.

“I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on!” his voice rose frightfully high. “It must be the naegleria fowleri.” Ambers shrugged his shoulders. “Stevenson and I have been doing tests…and…well, and something happen.”

“Listen, Doctor, I’m not concerned about what happen, but what we have to do.”

“I know.” He paused, “I know goddamn it. But someone has to hear it…”. There was a glitter to Amber’s eyes that frightened her, a basilisk’s sly, petrifying gaze. In the darkness of the alley, Amber’s refracted eyes took on a carbuncle color, an awful shade that forced Shae into a seeming catatonic state.

In an uncanny stasis, Shae watched him for a second. Then, in a cynical moment, she knew why his confession was important, giving a social reality to the surreal precocities of that night. “You’re fucking worried about them blaming this on you, aren’t you? That fucking thing is eating that guy and you’re worried about them pinning this on you?”

The illusionary magic was broken, and Ambers burst out “But it wasn’t my fault! I didn’t do anything! Stevenson must have got it on him. The modified batch or something like that. It had to have been during the animal incubation...”

Shae shook her head. “Listen guy, isn’t there someone you’re suppose to call when a diseased monkies gets out or something? Wait…What does that mean? Incubation? You were putting this shit on chickens?”

“The CDC? No, no… no. It’s not a disease. They’re amoeba. They don’t transfer like that. They attack the brain; so, there would need to be some direct connection between the amoeba…and…they’d need to travel into some cranial orifice, like a direct stream of water or something. They’re not tapeworms. They don’t burrow. These are water bound.”

Shae failed to notice the unintentional sidestep of her question. With their logical scientific discussion, the heat of the emergency began to fade from Ambers, but Shae continued more verbally violent than ever, “Whatever the science of it, we need to get someone down here to take care of this. Who do we call?” Shae reached into her pocket for a phone, though she hadn’t had one since the overpass. “Do you have a cellphone?”

“The school has a deal with the phone company. We all get one.”

“Well, where is it?” She asked impatiently.

“On my desk in the office.” Shae let her head drop back against the wall. “It’s not my fault. I had to shove him in the car! Oh Christ, there was blood from everywhere all over the place. My car…I didn’t know where I was going, I just drove and he was screaming in the backseat and spitting puss and God knows what else all over it, all over the leather, everywhere. My wife’s books were in the back. Oh God, her original Evelina, everything…covered in blood. Jesus…” he seemed to struggle for Shae’s name, instead stammering, “Girl, you should have seen the mess, the pooling, stagnant waste. I tried to get him,” he turned to point to the policemen and paused, the flush of his excitement visibly draining from his face.

Shae fell away from the doctor, her red Globe shoes slipping from under her. The raising silhouette of darkness fell upon Ambers before any logical motion, any calculate response, could be made. As Stevenson sunk his teeth into the shoulder-meat of Amber’s upper body, Shae fell to the concrete. In the fear, she never noticed she was screaming, but the shrill noise met her with her impact. A crescendo of audible fear and terror escaped from both Shae’s and Amber’s mouths. Shae’s, a high unflattering and broken note, fell short of Amber’s actualizing acknowledgement that, yes, he was being consumed mouthful by bloody mouthful. A mixture of profanations and invocations of the godhead fell from both their blabbering mouths. Rhythmically, the bestial, finite sound of Stevenson’s moist inhalations punctuated the screaming. It was slow, a sound of the impending machination of death, a percussion line to their operetta.

Her mind fell into itself, swam away from the subliminal ripples swarming over her consciousness. Whatever fortitude she may have original felt, the bravado awarded her by a detached, voyeuristic digestion of the murder, had finally fissured with Amber’s shoulder blade. Who knew, she thought in only one of many grotesque realizations, that one’s teeth could part human meat. The realization followed closely on the heels of an awareness that Ambers was slowly climbing towards her, Stevenson still latched onto his back like an inverted lamprey. Together they crawled towards her looking very similar to a puerile Clive Barker image, a childish merging of human flesh and shadows. “No,” she said in a quiet reserve.

Amber’s mandible pumped silently. The small drippings of saliva fell from the corners of his frothing mouth. He looked ravenous, she thought to herself, but she did not act. The only thing she knew of ravenous creatures was a misunderstanding of the word. In her head, peculiarly near her need to crawl away, was the image of a small version of herself sitting on the table avoiding a wandering skunk. Logically enough came the knowledge that not all skunks were rabid.

They were all silent now, except for an occasional moan from Ambers as his nails cracked as they scratched the concrete. Stevenson contented himself with the further destruction of Amber’s upper back, though it seemed that he had been slowed by the material of Amber’s lab coat. Shae watched Amber’s dismal eyes; they twitched in the general acceptance of their fate. It was that pathetic empathy between the two of them which would eventually spur Shae into action.

In Amber’s eyes, Shae felt no sympathy, but, in an odd quirk of mental abstraction, she saw the poor, accepting Cameron. She imagined him behind the door of his room, blindly allowing himself to accept yet another excuse. In that individual manifestation, Shae saw Cameron at a distant age, shuffling himself into a college office. Of course, in the stereotypical portrayal, his office would be on the bottom floor, his books all wet from the moisture of the underground structure. There he would remain an adjunct professor, slaving away on the menial sludge the Academy would call freshmen students. With no breathing room, they’d drown him in the masses of barely appreciative minds. “No,” she said to Amber’s beckoning eyes.

In one last-ditch effort, his larynx croaked out the quintessential beckoning of the oppressed individual as it is consumed by another of is so-called friends: “Help me,” he cried, the moisture of his mouth immediately drying into a cracked whisper. Shae rose from the ground, carefully collecting her shoes beneath her. Even the sludge they had collected was intentionally disregarded. Amber’s eyes followed her as she stood, a seeming titan to the prostate scientist and his ravenous enemy. With a renewed vigor coursing through her body, she dashed to the policemen’s ruined corpse, and drew the gore-covered pistol from his belt. With a casualness disturbingly callous, she flick off the giblets askewed over the slide action. She checked the chamber for the brass casing, and allowed it carefully slide back into place.

However, the motivation which drove her forward towards the ferocious form was far from logical and calculating; it was a motivation similar to a vengeful entropic form freed of any social restrictions. Driven by a destructive need, she moved like a staggering wraith. Had Amber’s turned, he might have shrieked again, for it was no human wafting towards the two scientists locked in their polemic struggle. No, it was a thing of primitive violence, the primordial manifestation of an inhumane fascination with free destruction and chaos. As if to cement her abstract manifestation, Shae’s mind was quashed as it calculated the trajectory of an untrained shot from the pistol. Instead, the clouded conscious rose and fell with every pump of the innate cudgel; the light which reflected off the stainless-steel pistol shimmered on the wall, illuminating the splattering gore as the thing crushed the former brain of one of UCH’s finest. Beneath the raining annihilation, Ambers screamed in the sheer delusion that he was being slain. Within the dialectical relationship, nothing human remained of any of them.

The first actual memory of the event came to Ambers as he stumbled into the light of Station Square, a fanatically breathing Shae staggering behind him. As they approached the first people they saw—a young couple promenading before a group of cat calling girls and two bashful young men—Ambers fell to his knees. “Jesus-fucking-Christ!” was a unanimous chorus rising up to great the gathering Nimbi, who, taking it as a sign, immediately began to rain.

 

Sometime during the night, the rain slowly turned into a mixture of sleet and snow. Thankfully, by that time, the majority of cars had safely navigated themselves out of the parking lots towards their warm abodes. Sometime between the first car’s exit and the first drafty snow’s fall, a former policemen drug itself toward an overpass, where a frigidly sleeping man tried to cover himself in an old hunting blanket.