now and I am too.
She starts screaming and her voice hurts my ears so bad that I just want her to shut up, to stop yelling and be quiet, and it makes me even more mad that she won’t.
She kinda dives toward this really long knife like the one jungle explorers use to cut through vines and stuff and she just touches its handle with her fingertips when all of the sudden we’re all piling on top of her.
I can hear her clothes being ripped as we claw at her and she’s still screaming and for a second I see her boob only I don’t feel all embarrassed like that time when I walked in on my babysitter changin’ clothes.
She’s still screaming and kickin’ and tryin’ to push us away but there’s too many of us and I start seeing blood squirtin’ everywhere. It smells rusty and salty at the same time and its warm on my face and chin, so warm that I didn’t realize exactly how cold I was before.
And I’ve got something rubbery in my mouth, something that tastes like I bit down on an old penny or stuck the tip of my tongue against a battery. But at the same time, I like the way it makes my mouth feel nice and toasty and as soon as it’s not warm any more all I want is another piece, a little bit more make my tongue feel like it’s a cat sleepin’ in sunlight.
The lady isn’t fighting as hard now. Maybe she realizes we just don’t wanna be cold no more and that she can help. Or maybe it’s ’cause she’s startin’ to get a little fuzzy now herself. It’s almost like her face is melting in front of my eyes, her nose and lips and ears kinda smoothing out into one big blur that starts to go down her body, covering everything in its path.
By the time the lady is just as blurry as everyone else, she’s stopped moving altogether and I don’t feel that excitement any more. None of the others seem to either ’cause we’re all standing up now and starting to walk away. When we were with the lady, it didn’t hurt no more but now I can feel it starting again, like little needles bein’ shoved into the bottoms of my feet. And my eyes are starting to sting and my skin feels like its shrinking and crackin’.
Maybe she didn’t want to be alone anymore or maybe she was starting to feel cold too, but the lady in the checkerboard jacket stands up and for a minute it almost seems as if she’s about to fall down again. But she doesn’t and she just kinda falls in with the rest of the group, just like kids used to do when we had to go back inside at the end of recess.
And I can feel that tugging again only its stronger than what it was before. It’s almost like I’ve got an invisible rope tied around my waist and am being pulled through the woods by something a lot stronger than me. My new friends follow along behind me and I don’t know if they feel it too or if they’re just kinda playin’ Follow The Leader.
Either way, I don’t really care. All I know is that I want to be warm again, that I want to find someone else who’ll share their heat, that I want the hurting to go away. Even if only for just a little bit.
And I somehow know that out there in the woods, hidden by the trees and rocks and shrubs, there are others like the lady in the checkerboard jacket. All I need to do is find them….
CHAPTER NINETEEN: CARL
For some reason, I find myself thinking about the day I shot Jason’s mother. God, that seems so long ago… almost like it’d happened to an entirely different person or perhaps in another life.
Josie always talked about reincarnation, you know? About how she’d die and come back again as a little baby… how this cycle had been repeating over and over throughout the course of time and would just continue on until she had learned whatever it was she was supposed to. And I think she had the basic concept right; she just had it all muddled up with religion, superstition, and what-not.
The way I see it, a person can reincarnate a hundred times within the span of a single life. But there ain’t nothing mystical about it. There ain’t no divine plan guiding the way. It’s all about having an experience so damn intense that it seeps into every pore and every cell of your being. And it changes you. Sometimes slowly, sometimes so quickly that you’re left feeling as dazed as if you’d just been struck by lightning. But the change happens and you come out on the other side as someone other than the person you were before.
Hell, you don’t even look the same in the mirror any more. Your eyes seem a bit older, hopefully wiser, and the emotions left over from this here experience bring out new expressions that re-sculpt your features. You see lines and shadows that weren’t there just a day earlier, slight variations in your complexion and the contrast between your skin tone and the stubble growing across your chin. Even your voice sounds different… and, at some point, you realize that the reason for all of this is that the old you is dead now. You’ve been reincarnated and it didn’t take your whole dang body kicking the bucket to bring it about.
Jason and Monica, the little girl in the forest… that was one of those experiences for me. Hell, unless you’re some kinda nutjob a man can’t take two lives in a single day and just expect to go on like nothing ever happened. And those books and movies I used to like so much? They lead you to believe that it gets easier with time: that eventually you can just pop one of those things in the head without giving a second thought to who they used to be. But, for me at least, it was always right there in the back of my mind. I’d try to push it away, to remind myself that whatever it was that made these people human had long since left their rotting bodies. But, truthfully, there was always this part of me that wanted to cry.
And that day, I did. After I shot Monica in that bedroom, I felt as if every sorrow I’d ever felt, every heartbreak or pain, just came rising to the surface like bubbles in a pond. I didn’t want this anymore. I wanted to return to the way things had always been. Just give me my boring, old life back. Give me the Pit Stop, the customers bitching me out ’cause I’d shorted them a nickel, the never ending routine that marked my day to day life. Let that little boy have his mother back, let everything return to normal, and I would never wish again that my life was more exciting or unpredictable than what it was.
Of course, I knew that couldn’t happen. Might have as well wished for a bumper harvest in the middle of winter. So I knelt in that there room and felt like those tears were pulling everything that had ever been worth a damn plum out of my soul. Left me feeling hollow and empty inside, how I expect a Jack-o-lantern would if it were able to think and feel.
I thought things had hit rock bottom. I thought there was no way in tarnation it could possibly get worse.
I thought wrong….
After I realized the boy had run off, I tried to find him. I ran through those woods, calling out his name until my voice felt like glass scratching against my vocal chords. I knew that I’d attract every damn rotter within earshot; but I didn’t care. I’d fight my way through each and every one of them if I had to. Whatever it took to make sure that I didn’t fail that little boy again.
I kept thinking about how alone he was out there, how dark would be coming soon, and how he wouldn’t stand a chance against those things. I had these pictures of him in my mind, pictures that I tried to shake off like a dog flinging water: rotters tackling him to the ground, freshies leaning so close to his face that he would smell their decaying organs waft from their opened mouths. Him screaming, begging for help.
By the time the sun had sunk below the horizon, I was no closer than I’d been before. I’d seen signs that I thought might have been him passing through: broken twigs and crushed undergrowth, a scrap of cloth that could have been from his shirt. But they could have just as easily have been from someone else trying to hide within the forest. Or even from one of them.
But I had to keep looking. If I didn’t at least try, I knew I’d be signing that little boy’s death warrant. So even after the full moon had risen well within the sky and tinted the woods in a bluish light, I kept searching. Kept calling his name and dealing with corpses as they staggered through the trees.
The sun rose, the birds chirped their little Good Morning songs, and by then the soles of my feet stung with burst blisters. I’d walked through the woods the whole night through, stopping for a spell only when I couldn’t force myself to take another step. I might’ve nodded off here and there, but if I did it weren’t nothing more than a cat nap and offered no real rest. At least not the kind my body demanded.
The morning sun, however, has an effect on someone whose been up the better part of the night. It’s almost like the golden light filtering down through the trees and leaves gives a boost of energy. A body feels more hopeful and the cobwebs start to clear from the head a bit. And, of course, the thoughts in that head turn to
