Chapter Eleven: Bat Out of Hell

2017:

It feels like I'm stumbling home drunk again.  It's raining, but the raindrops are syringe needles.  They don't fall with the force of a thrown dart; they hit the skin and bounce right off.  They don't hurt, but where they touch the skin they itch.  They litter the ground and it's a struggle to coordinate each drunken step.  Wouldn't want one sliding through my boots, heaven's no. 

Why do I feel so intoxicated?

The man on the corner has a laced-on face.  The edges of it are lined with metal eyelets and the eyelets are pulled back taut with black shoestring.  The back of his head glistens red wet muscle beneath the network of string.  He is smiling at me, but the smile is the result of his streched face and not at all genuine.  Below the face lies menace.

I see my reflection in his sunken masked eyes: I am huddled fetally in a too-white room drooling into a puddle that gathers around my cheek, unmoving, unblinking eyes staring at nothing.

The man with the laced-on face tilts his head and the reflection is gone.  I frantically scratch myself everywhere it itches.  It itches everywhere.

"This is the only the edge," the man says.  I see the shadow of his real mouth moving behind the too-widely-grinning mask mouth.  "Just the tip.  Just to see if you like it."

I've never heard a chuckle that sounded predatory before.

He steps back and I can see the road rise up to meet the horizon.  I walk toward it and he blocks my path.

"Not today," he says.

My first tangible thought is "moisture".  My face is coated in it.  My mouth is absent of it.  I'm still itchy, but less now than I was.

Dr. Sutton is sitting on a folding chair beside me, writing on his clipboard.  "Can you describe your experience for me?" he says over his glasses.  I roar wordlessly and reach for him.  My hands are zip-tied together.  As are my feet.  I don't get very far.

"You haven't converted," he says.  "That's a good start.  Very promising."  He rises.  "Are you sure you don't want to add your perspective?  For posterity?"

I tell him to fuck himself.  He writes on his clipboard, then leaves.

I'm left with my thoughts.  What the fuck was that place?  How could a little bit of blood leave me in such a pathetic, delusional state?  A side-effect of a disease?  Hell?

All I know is that tonight when I close my eyes I'm going to see the man with the laced-on face and it terrifies me. 

The lights go out.  I sit up, awake, staring into the darkness.  My head nods here and there, but I jerk myself awake every time. 

Eventually the lights come back on.  Time drags by.  The doctor comes back in with his little clipboard.  The soldiers hold me down while he takes a blood sample.  I don't bother fighting.  I'm too tired.  I'm too beaten.  The doctor takes my blood sample and leaves.  The soldiers leave behind him.

I haven't seen Bacchus or Starin in days.  Maybe I did dream them.

The food tray/waste bucket combo make their appearance.  I eat.  I shit.  This is me, reduced to my most basic functions.  At some point I drift off to a dreamless sleep.

The opening of the door wakes me.  The doctor is in.

"Your body is completely free of contaminants.  Not overly surprising given how small the dose was."  He is holding a larger needle.  "Shall we try twice the dosage?"

I fight back.  Hard.  I don't want that in me.  I surge against the soldiers.  I buck and I thrash.  The needle jabs in painfully and the burning comes back.  The itching spreads like fire.  And I scream.

The man with the laced-on face is still standing on his corner.  He is waiting for me.  The needle rainstorm is gone.  Instead, everything is crawling with insects.  Thick black beetles with men's faces and long jagged tusk-like mandibles.  Their hairy legs scuttle across my skin.

The man with the laced-on face smiles behind his fleshy mask.  "A double dose of Communion today," he says.  "Take this and drink.  This is my blood."

I feel drunk.  Like everything is happening to me too quickly for me to process. 

"What is this place?" I ask.

"How would you ever trust my answer?" he says.  "If your psyche, than I don't know any more than you.  If hell, then I'm a demon and can't be trusted.  If heaven...well, you wouldn't believe me if I told you this was heaven."

"Is it heaven?" I ask.

"Hell if I know."  He roars laughter at his joke.

I scratch and slap at the scuttling insects.  They take cumbersome flight with armor wings and settle back exactly as they were.  The insects scuttle on him, too.  They crawl on him, they crawl in and out of the space between his mask and face.  They bulge beneath the tautly stretched skin.  They don't seem to bother him.  Of course they don't bother him.

He steps aside and that road rises up again, to taste of the horizon. "We can walk a ways today," he says.  "Not far, but a little."

I step onto the street and we walk together side-by-side.

"I know this place," I say.  It's the street I grew up on.  This could still be either my psyche or hell.  "I've ruled out heaven, though" I say.

The shitty apartment buildings stare down at me with their craggy-bricked facades, grinning broken-stooped grins.  A kid comes running from a building.  It's Christian Diangelo.  He's got on that stupid denim jacket he always wore and his ears are still sticking out the side of his head like Mickey Mouse ears. 

"Hey Smallfry," Christian yells to me.  It seems ridiculous; I've got twenty years on this kid.  But twenty years ago, I looked up to Christian Diangelo.  Usually from street level, through my arms as I cowered in the fetal position and tried to block his fists and feet.  "My dad says your old man owes him rent."  Papa Diangelo was our lazy slumlord landlord.  He trained his kids to be muscle.  That's how pathetic that worthless fuckstick was.

"Yeah?" I say.  "Your old man owes us a working furnace.  Your mom's tits get rock hard whenever she spends the night."  This is me now responding in a way that me then could only have dreamed of.  Christian seems stunned into silence.  For a second.  Before he lets loose a youthful battlecry and launches himself at me with a savage fury.  He gets in three wide swings before I plant my boot in his chest and send him sprawling.

He lands facefirst.

All of the impotent rage that defined my youth comes crashing back with the force of a swinging I-beam.  I bring my booted foot thundering down on his twelve-year-old head and watch the ketchup-packet reaction it induces.  I do this again and again and again while the man with the laced-on face watches and laughs.

I wake up screaming shrill, maniacal laughter that quickly breaks down into body-wrenching sobs.  What is happening to me?

Doctor Sutton is there, monitoring me.  I call him a cunt and he makes note of it on his clipboard.  I call him a soulless beauracrat and his eyebrow raises a bit.  He writes that down, too.

"His blood takes you to hell," I say.  "I saw your mother there, sucking cocks.  Your mother sucks cocks in hell, Mengele."

"Quoting Exorcist," he says.  "Shall I attribute that as a side effect?"

I want to projectile-vomit all over his stupid fucking clipboard.

"Rest up," he says.  "Tomorrow there will be more tests."

Thirty cc's takes me to the corner gas-station and the owner that caught me stealing candy bars.  The young me had cried.  The dream me threw the old man through the plate-glass window and beat him to death with the bat he kept behind the counter.  I pulped him for three days until Dante's blood worked its way out of my system.

Forty cc's brought me to the park where some older kids had constantly chased my brother and I off of the basketball courts.  I tore through them now like a force of nature, and picked bits of them from my nails and teeth for a week while the intoxicating blood surged through my veins.

I am wheeled back to the operating theater for fifty cc's.  The audience wants a show.  The straps dig into my skin, but I ignore them.  I'm a junky.  I strain toward the needles when they're brought into view.  My mouth is open, mumbing nonsense in broken tongues, eyes wildly rolling like a spooked horse.  The first needle sinks in and I sink into it.

The man with the laced-on face is standing beside the gurney.  I am where I had been: in the operating theater with the suits standing on high, looking down on me.

"This one will be fun," the man with the laced-on face says to me as he undoes my straps.  I grin broadly as a shark.  I take the needles from Doctor Mengele and I stab, stab, stab him.  I puncture his eyes so that a thick gelatal goo runs down his cheeks like tears.  I drag the points of the needles down his face like claws.  And I stab.  And I stab.  And I stab.

And I'm on the upper level.  I hold the needles like knives.  I leap onto victims like a tiger.  I throw them like an enraged ape.  I clamp teeth upon their neck-tied jugulars and I shake my head like a wolf.  I taste blood.  It fills me.

And when I've torn through them, I scratch at the itch that fills me.  I scratch until skin gives way beneath my fingertips.  I scratch until the skin peels back.  But the itch is in the blood, in the veins, and I scratch my way to it.  I tear away my flesh in chunks.  I rip out my hair in chunks.  I pick at my eyes like they were scabs.  So much of that burning blood inside of me.  Too much.  I'll be trapped in here forever.

A sharp pain on my cheek.  Someone has slapped me awake.  I am still strapped to the gurney, but I'm being pushed down a hallway at full gallop.  Bacchus' smiling face looking down.

"You were right," he says.  "They insisted that we bring you."  I can  barely hear him over the gunshots.  Gunshots?  I look right and left and see Guillermo and Lucas, flanking me, armed to the teeth.  Occasionally they turn and fire backward.  We round a corner.

The man with the laced-on face looks upon me with pity.  "Not enough time," he says.  He reaches behind his head and begins untying.  The laced-on face slackens.

Another slap.  "Stay here," Bacchus says.  Gunshots everywhere.  Someone cries out and I hear a thud.  "Grab that gurney," Bacchus says, and I realize that Dante and I are dragracing.  Whoever was pushing him dropped out of the race, apparently.

As the laced-on face slackens, it relaxes into a familiar shape.  Minus the long white hair, this is Dante.  "Maybe I'm done wearing his face," the man behind Dante's face says.  He lowers the eyelet-ringed Dante-mask.  His head is glistening red muscle, a horror right out of an anatomy textbook.  "Maybe," he says with fleshless lips "I want to wear yours for awhile."

We crash into daylight.

Chapter Ten: In the Land of the Pig, the Butcher is King

2017:

The room I'm in is about thirteen feet square and white.  Overwhelmingly white.  It's all masonry brick except for one wall that is floor-to-ceiling, end-to-end mirror.  I have no doubt that on the other side it's a window.  I am self-conscious about anything I do that could be embarrassing.  I watch myself for nervous tics, unconscious nose-picking, something like that.  I don't know why I care what these assholes think, but for some reason I do.

I met Dr. Sutton this morning.  He came in to give me a physical.  Pulse, knee-hammer, turn your head and cough.  The whole nine yards.  He didn't say one word to me.  He inspected me like I was a car he was interested in.  Cupping my testicles was his version of kicking the tires.  Nothing more.

I called him Dr. Mengele.  That got a reaction.  His face turned bright red.  He looked at me like I was broken.  This one's got a faulty transmission.  It will need a tune up.

The two soldiers that had accompanied him waited until he left to work me over.  Afraid to hurt his delicate sensibilities, I'm sure.  I imagine him crying softly to himself as he writes sad poetry about how I hurt his feelings.  The image helps a little.  Not much.  Too far-fetched I suppose.

I worry about Lucas.  We Shaughnessy boys are a sassy bunch and he doesn't have my self-control.

The door opens and two new soldiers enter.  I recognize one as Bacchus.  They're with a small, squirrely man wearing rubber gloves and a surgical mask, carrying a bucket.  He's here to clean my dirty Irish blood from these clean white walls.

Bacchus looks impressed.  "I guess he really didn't like what you said," he says.  "Your brother got off light."

"Oh yeah?" I say.  "What did he say?"

"He called Sutton 'Dr. Frankenstein'."

"Psh," I say.  "No originality, that kid."

Bacchus studies me.  "This Zombie Fist thing...what are you?  Escaped mental patients?  You're all nuts."

I laugh.  "What did Gigi do?"

"Nothing," Bacchus says.  "He just sits there and stares.  Sutton won't go in there at all.  Your boy has a way of looking right at you even though he can't see you."

"Gigi is  magic," I say.  "He's our Mexican leprechaun."

"I believe that's called a chupacabra," Bacchus says.

If our situation were different, I may like this Bacchus bloke.

The squirrely fellow finishes cleaning the walls and leaves.  Bacchus gives me a small nod before he goes.  I think I made a friend.  Yay me.

I'm so bored.  I'm the kind of guy that needs constant stimulation.  What you might call short attention span.  I need something shiny to distract me at all times or the boredom overtakes me.  Like now.  I pace back and forth.  I walk up to the mirror and inspect my lumpy face.  I still have all of my teeth, so I count myself better than Lucas.

I want someone to come in so that I can provoke them, just for something to do.

It's hours before someone does.  Bacchus again.  He stands guard while the squirrely guy slides a tray of food across the floor.  The squirrely guy leaves and come back with a bucket.  I know what the bucket is for.

"What," I say.  "You're too good to scrub my shit up now?"  Bacchus cracks a smile.

"How are my boys?" I ask.

"Your brother made a smart-ass comment about shit," Bacchus says.  "Not quite as good as yours.  And the big Mexican keeps staring.  Sometimes he sleeps."

"It's one of his most endearing qualities," I say.  "Sometimes he eats, too."

"I guess we'll see," he says.

"And Dante?" I ask.

"That area is restricted," he says.  "I don't have access."

I humph, then nudge the food tray with my foot.  "Is it poison?" I ask.

"What would be the point?" he says.  "Anything we want to do to you, we can do to you.  We don't need subterfuge."

"I love transparency in government," I say.

Bacchus' smile fades.  "Yeah," he says.  He gives me that little nod again and he leaves.  Poor guy.  He looked a little sad.

I don't eat.  Despite my wisenheimery, I don't trust food prepared by captors.  That's long been a policy of mine.  Instead, I alleviate my boredom by crumbling the bread into my mashed potatoes and mixing the concoction with the unidentified hunk of meat.  I paint the word "POOP" on the floor with the food paste I've made, using the edge of the tray to make sure the straight lines are perfectly straight, and using the bottom of my bucket to make sure the curves are perfectly curvy.  I'm looking forward to telling the squirrely fellow to clean my poop off the floor.  Chuckle chuckle guffaw.

God, I'm so bored.

I close my eyes.

When I wake up, my room is clean.  No bucket, no tray, no "POOP".  I don't normally sleep that heavily.  I look around the room and see the air vents again with fresh eyes.  Anything they want to do to me, they can do.  Including pumping in a gas that knocks me out.  Message received: the potatoes are safe.

Bacchus comes back with Starin.  They study me. 

"I pooped on the floor," I say.

"I saw that," Bacchus says.  "Very clever."

"Him?" Starin asks Bacchus. 

"I think so," Bacchus says.  "All three of them, actually."

Starin looks at me.  "When we found you, you were unarmed."

I interrupt him.  "I had a crowbar," I correct.

"Regardless," he says.  "Can you handle a gun?"

"Emotionally?  I mean, if you would have asked me a week ago, I would have said 'no', but now I'm a little on the fence, to be honest."

Starin looks at Bacchus.  "Not him," he says.  "The Mexican for sure, and the other one maybe, but not him."

"Hey," I say.  "Whatever you've got planned, I'll tell you right now: the Mexican and the little one don't do anything without me."

"What makes you think you want to be picked?" Starin says.  “What makes you think this is for something good?”

"Regardless," I say.  "Good or bad, we ride together."

Starin seems to assess this.  Then they leave.

I wake up feeling groggy and mentally off.  I'm learning to associate that feeling with the gas.  They want me to think that I dreamt them.  Or at least doubt myself.

The day passes in boredom.  The lights go out and I know that it's nighttime.  I sleep.  The lights come on.  It's daytime.  My food tray and waste bucket are back.  Someone brought it in the night.  I don't even have that meager human contact to break the monotony.  I eat the food.  It tastes like cafeteria food.  I contribute to the bucket.  I hope they're watching. 

I worry about the girls.  I hope they don't get it in their heads to do something stupid like attempt a rescue.  But I sure do wish they would rescue me.

They day rolls on.  I spend most of it pacing and making faces at the mirror, just for something to do. 

The door opens.  Two soldiers I don't know come in, accompanied by Dr. Sutton.

"Mengele!" I call out enthusiastically.  He ignores me.  He nods to someone on the other side of the glass, and then someone wheels a gurney in.  The gurney has straps dangling from the sides.

"I'm not going to like this," I say.  For the first time, Sutton acknowledges me with a creepy smile.  He writes something on a clipboard he's carrying with him, then nods to the military orderlies.  They grab me, lift me, and lay me down on the gurney.  I long for my rape whistle.

"It always comes back to the anal probe," I say.  "Listen, I'm a lady.  At least buy me flowers."

"You joke the most when you're scared," the doctor says.  He must be a master psychologist to have figured it out.

I'm thrashing to no avail.  The straps are tightened around me and it reminds me all too much about that female zombie we liberated at the farmhouse.

"I need to run some tests," he says.  "I would have gassed you but I don't want that in your system.  Hence the theatrics."

They start to wheel the gurney out and I panic.  "Come on, guys, I'll be good.  I don't want to play anymore.  Come on."

I'm wheeled into an operating theater.  The top level is all stadium seating.  About a quarter of the seats are filled with men in suits and ties.  I recognize the president of the United States (former president?  former United States?) among them.  "Hey," I shout to him.  "I voted for you!"  I didn't.  He ignores me.

"As you may remember," Sutton says to the crowd, "there were some anomalies in the old man's blood.  Seeming variations of the strain we've isolated from the zombies, but drastically malformed.  The question is: is it dangerous?  And can we use it?"  He motions someone forward and they hand him a syringe filled with blood.  "Today we'll attempt to inject 10 cc's into an uninfected subject to gauge the likelihood of infection."

Oh, I don't like this at all.  The needle stabs.  I scream at them.  The plunger sinks, and I feel rushing heat enter my veins at the point of insertion.  My blood itches, and the itching spreads as the infected blood dissolves and disperses amongst my good blood.

My screaming turns shrill.  I am crying.

I feel the needle slide out.  

Chapter Nine: Out of the Frying Pan (And Into the Fire)

2017:

Dante is standing at the edge of the cliff, watching the sun bleed its descent.  His bandages are off; he's bled through the last of our supply.  His arms are outstretched (crucifixion style) as though he's embracing the last of the light, basking in the remainder of the day.  I watch him, sillhouetted black against the reds and blues and purples of the coming night.  There's a tiny little bastard living in my head that whispers "one push and we can find out if he's really god or not."  A tiny little evil bastard.

"You don't think he is what he says he is," Meghan says beside me.  It’s not a question.

"He hasn't said anything," I say.

"I watch him," she says.  "I watch to see if he's doing something to himself.  Something to keep those wounds from closing."

"What's the verdict?"

"I can't tell," she says.  "When we make camp, he wanders off a lot.  Have you ever noticed that?"

"No," I say.  "But what would he gain?"

"I don't know," she says.  "Attention?  An old man in a world like this is easily left behind.  But an old man who may be Jesus?  People keep him around."

"Provided they believe," I say. 

"Here he is," she says.

I mull this over for awhile.  "He doesn't seem that bright," I say, but I'm not convinced.

Naomi comes walking back to where we're sitting.  "I miss toilet paper," she says.  "Having to choose between leaves and drip-drying is barbaric."

The sun gasps its last and the darkness drops quick.  There's a brief pause and then...

"What in the hell?" Lucas says.  He's sitting behind us by the fire, but he can see exactly what I see.  "Lights?"

Indeed.  Peeking over the ridge of the cliff is the artificial twinkle of city lights.  One by one we creep over to the edge, as cautious as a cave-man inspecting a city bus.  The lights that catch our eyes, they're the bright chaser lights of an airport.  As we watch, one by one, stadium floodlights pop on all across the city.  They are not accidental.

We agree to investigate in the morning.

We go to bed.

When we wake up the next morning, Dante is gone.  We see the twin thick mud spots where he stood and bled while watching the sunset, and we see the sporadic blood-drip trail where he wandered off, down a steep embankment on the cliff face, through rough foliage.  Toward where we saw the lights last night.

The evil bastard in my head is glad to be rid of him.

"We have to be smart about this," Guillermo says.  "We know where he's going.  But we know nothing about this city.  I don't want to risk any...unfriendliness."

We defer to him.  Pack mentality.  He's the alpha.

"I say that Sean and I follow on foot.  Direct path.  Hopefully overtake him.  Everyone else leave the supplies here and take the bikes with the sidecars back down to where the freeway on-ramp is.  That's where we'll meet up."

"I go where Sean goes," Lucas chimes in.

"O.G. M.C.," I say.  "Founding members field trip."  

"I'm going, too," Mercedes says.  "He's my patient."  But while she says that, it's Lucas she's eyeballing.

"No women," Guillermo says.

The women begin to protest.

He waits them out.

"There is no such thing as civilization anymore," he says.  "Wish there was, but there's not."  He is thinking, as I am, of the barn we encountered.  All those ladies tied up and...

"No women," I say.  I wish that I was looking at Naomi when I said this, but I wasn't.  I was looking at Mercedes.

"Alright," Ellen says.  "Let's hide the supplies and shake a leg.  We're wasting too much time."

We scramble down the embankment, damn near falling face-first to tumble our way to the bottom several times.  The idea of us going on foot was that we'd be stealthier than the motorcycles.  I'm beginning to wonder.

We crash our way right into an ambush.  A gun at my back.  Our weapons are taken away.  I still don't trust myself with a gun so I'm stripped of a crowbar. 

We're led in the direction we were going, so the guns seem pretty needless.  I tell them so.  They answer roughly but wordlessly.

We're taken to a small camp.  I see Dante.  They have him tied to a tree.  He's crying.  When he sees us, he begins to whimper and cry out to us unintelligibly.  I'm caught off guard; I didn't realize he had a voice.

A soldier walks up to us.  He has a somber expression on his face and the shadow of a beard just starting to pop out.  The name patch on his jacket says "Bacchus".

"You're with this man?" he says.  Dante whimpers pathetically in the background.

"Yes, sir," Guillermo says.

"He's infected," the soldier says.

"No, sir," Guillermo says.  "He's been like that for weeks and he hasn't turned."

"It's Stigmata," Lucas chirps.

The soldier stares him down hard.

"It's something," I say.  "Probably not Stigmata, but it's something.  Maybe he's got a mild case of...whatever.  Maybe he's got the cure."

The soldier turns and calls for someone named Ev.

The man who responds is huge and boxy, and looks to be in his fifties or sixties.  Square shoulders, square jaw.  His grey military crew cut dropping down to a full but carefully sculpted beard gives his head a square shape.  He looks down on Guillermo.  The name patch on his jacket says "Starin".

"What do you think?" Bacchus asks Starin.  "Should we take him to Sutton or should we kill him?"

"You kill him," Guillermo says, "and I'll kill you."  He's so matter-of-fact.  What a badass.

They ignore him.

Starin looks back at Dante and shrugs.  "If we keep him bound, there's no harm in taking him.  Who knows?  Maybe he does have the cure."

Bacchus nods.  "Fair enough," he said.  "That's what I was thinking.  And them?"  He indicates us.

"Bring them with," Starin says.  "If nothing else, Sutton could use more test subjects."

I don't like the sound of that at all.  I find myself missing Loki.

Our wrists are bound with zip ties in front of us.  I ask why the front and not the back and someone tells me they're not holding my pud when I piss.  Fair enough.  We're marched single file, and I'm right behind Dante, so I get to watch the slow drip, drip, drip of the blood from his hands.  With all of that lubrication, he should be able to wriggle free at any time.  But he won't because he's Dante.  Too old, too stupid, too frail.  I blame him for all of this.

We approach a tall barbed-wire-topped chain-link fence punctuated with sniper towers.  The whole city looks like a maximum-security prison.  I try to look back at Guillermo to see if there's some sort of dramatic gulping or terrified recognition, but apparently the soldiers on either side of me would prefer that I not look around.  I try to rub the spot on my jaw that just recently became quite sore, but apparently the soldiers on either side of me would prefer that I not do that, either.  Now there are two spots I am not permitted to rub.

Stupid Dante.

We get through the gates and Dante is ushered right.  I start to follow, but I am ushered left.  Dante turns and sees this.  He begins to howl with fear.  He looks right into my eyes and he screams and drools and reaches clutching hands toward me, blood flinging from his fingers like spit.  I watch a soldier hoist him up and pull him away before I am turned again and he is out of sight behind me.  I can still hear him screaming, though.  Until, abruptly, I cannot.