over them, attempting to pull away some of the tastier morsels. She stood toe-to-toe with me, not six inches from my face. Sweat coursed down my body. I shook from impotence and then that stilled. I wouldn’t die fighting, but at least I’d be standing, small consolation. It’s like ‘winning’ a participation trophy in Little League baseball. Who gives a shit.
What would it feel like to have your face ripped open? Would she still my pain centers? Doubtful. I couldn’t tell much from her near frozen features, but still I sensed that she was taking some form of perverse satisfaction from these events. She moved in closer; I would have offered her a mint if I had one. My eyes still were not allowed to close. My vision of her blurred as she moved in even closer. A fly landed on my eyeball. It was singularly up to this point in my life, the most disgusting thing that had ever happened to me. Then my zombie girl topped it, she kissed me. My innards roiled in protest, my guts churned like a washing machine on spin cycle. If I wasn’t allowed output through my intake or outlet valves this was going to blow a hole through my midsection a la Ripley’s Alien. The kiss was not so surprisingly, very cold, but very surprisingly tender. It was literally the kiss of death from the dead. It doesn’t get much more ironic than that, does it? A Brillo pad wrapped around coarse grit sandpaper applied at 190 revolutions per minute under skin scalding hot water would never allow me to feel clean again. I was tainted, for fucks sake a zombie is kissing me. Didn’t she get my bio? I’m a card-carrying germaphobe! As she slowly pulled away, a dark viscous fluid kept us tenuously connected. The fly finally descended from my eye to land on this small bridge. Her tongue shot out, incredibly long, and pulled the fly into her canines. I swear I could hear the small crunching of its delicate exoskeleton. The spin cycle was in full throttle. A whoosh of haunted air escaped her lips. She was laughing, she had known exactly what she had done and she found humor in her dark actions. She pulled back another foot and let loose her controls. I fell to the ground, afflicted with crippling cramps. I rolled into a protective fetal position hugging my midsection. Mount Vesuvius erupted. Hot refuse steamed on the cold ground; the whoosh of air which accompanied her amusement persisted. Glad I could be her entertainment. For long minutes I alternated between evacuating my stomach and pulling in long cold drags of air. How long this happened I’m not sure. The pain lessened minutely, small fractions of degrees is the best way I can explain it. Each breath was better than the previous but only in infinitesimally small measures. It might have been minutes or days, all reference to time was lost, although my cheek touching the ground was rapidly becoming cold and my refused refuse was not steaming anymore.
“Mike?” I heard a tenuously thin voice try to break through the paralyzing grip of insanity that was beginning to blanket my mind.
“Mike?” There it was again, a disassociated voice speaking an incoherent word. “Grab his legs, I’ll get his head.”
I felt myself being lifted and then mercifully blackness sheathed my capacity for thought. I was floating in a white void, but I was not afraid, I was free, free from burden, free from sin, free from responsibility and then I think I puked again. Not because I could ‘feel’ the sensation but because I heard the disgust from one of the people carrying me. I found it funny the same way an insane person finds humor in slinging shit at walls. How different was this from that? I was close to the edge, maybe I had even taken that first perilous step over and gravity had finally worked its magic. I was being pulled down into the abyss. There wasn’t a drug invented that would raise this sinking ship. I spiraled down. Whiteness faded to black, cognitive thought became an illusion.
Mike’s return 12/17 – CHAPTER 19
Tracy’s Journal Entry - 1
‘Hi reader, this is Tracy. Mike’s journal has not been touched in three days, since he has finally come back to me, to us. I now have the strength and will to fill in the events as they have been unfolding since that thing did whatever it was she had done to Mike.
That fateful morning, Justin had finally arisen and seemed to be getting better. After the initial bliss had passed, the stress of everything came back two fold. I went out to the garage to try and calm my shattered nerves. Mike had caught me smoking once or twice, but I don’t think it made a connection with him. He looked like he was trying to assimilate his own set of nightmares. At this point I went to the clubhouse to get some rum. It was that or suck down another pack of smokes to make my quaking hand stop its palsied movements. I ended up running into a bunch of other wives sitting near the fire drinking some Chablis. The talk was animated and at first I was reluctant to join in, but I found the conversing and the wine to be calming influences. Hours passed as we talked of all sorts of things, and thankfully none of them involved team sports. My head was swimming in a sea of bliss when I heard a huge commotion from outside the clubhouse. There were three men in the back of a pick-up truck applying ministrations to some poor soul laid down in the truck bed. I stood up as my glass shattered to the floor.
“Mike!” I screamed. How I knew I don’t know. That I knew it was him was unquestionable. I darted for the front doors.
The women stared at my retreating back. “Talk about drama queen,” I heard one of them say. I think it was Cindy. She was a heavyset dirty blond. I hoped she was a smoker, I was going to make sure she paid double the going price. ‘Bitch,’ I thought viciously.
They kept talking but I was already through the doors and into the howling wind. All that mattered now was what had happened to Mike. As I expected, the truck pulled up to our front door. The three men jumped down. One of them undid the tailgate and the other two pulled the prone form of my husband from the bed. I nearly collapsed right there and then as I saw the pallor of his skin. I honestly thought he was dead. The cold air burned in my lungs as I struggled to keep black dots from growing in my vision. As I got closer though, my initial fear was relieved as I saw his mouth moving. It was, however, replaced with a different sense of dread. Mike was uttering the Lord’s Prayer, which in itself would be scary considering he hadn’t been to church in over thirty years. No, the real problem was that he was saying it BACKWARDS! IN LATIN! My soul was scared!
“What’s he saying?” one of his bearers asked.
“I don’t know, he must have hit his head hard when he collapsed. It’s just gibberish,” answered the second man. But I could tell he knew this wasn’t gibberish. There was a cadence and a tone to the words that made them sound unholy and just because he didn’t ‘know’ that didn’t mean he couldn’t ‘feel’ it. They wanted to unload this package as fast as they could; Mike had the greasy feel of evil all over him.
“What happened to him!” I screamed as I opened the front door. The men rushed past me, quickly depositing their load onto the couch. Both absently wiped their hands on their jackets as if they were wiping off some foul contaminant. They were both backing out of the house as they answered. I got the gist of the story before their eagerness to be done with this foul deed was completed.
I asked if he had been bitten, but his mere presence within the compound answered that question outright. I could find nothing physically wrong with him except for some tar like substance adhered to his lips. Vaseline, warm water, soap and a face towel finally removed the sticky substance but I couldn’t help but feel that he had been poisoned. By whom or for what reason I didn’t know. What kind of poison can make you speak in a language you’ve never spoken before? The only reason I recognized it was because of the six years I had spent in Catholic school. I had never told Mike about my time there and I had never let him know I could speak and read Latin. What was the point? It’s a dead language, or the language of the dead? My thoughts reared up in one of those ‘aha!’ moments.
Some color had returned to his features, but that was more the flush of the fever setting in than anything healthy. For three days Mike ran to the edge of death and then slowly retreated. Each brush to the proximity of the other side seemed to drain more and more energy from him. The kids and I held constant vigil, each of us at one point or another saying our goodbyes.
Tommy remained silent throughout the entire ordeal. Apparently even Ryan Seacrest didn’t know the outcome. Thankfully, Mike never broke out into prayer again, I honestly don’t think I could have taken it. As close as Mike was to death, was as close as I was to insanity. Our kids were inches away from being orphans, where Mike would be leaving physically I would be leaving mentally. Three times during those three days Mike’s fever spiked to 105 degrees and each time it broke he shouted a word. It wasn’t until later that I thought to put it altogether, and even then I could make no sense of it, at least not until much later. ‘She.’‘Is.’‘Death.’
Mike shouted the word “Death!” and sat up just as the first shot was fired in the fight for Little Turtle. His gaze crossed over the room as he tried to orient himself to his surroundings. How different a normal living room must look like compared with the gates of oblivion. Recognition didn’t dawn on his features until his eyes rested on mine. It was long moments before the glaze peeled away from his visage. “Tracy?” he asked tentatively.
