Then…
The grimy floors of the convenience store never looked so white to Peary as when his blood seeped over them in liters. Peary was fighting for his life: blood pulsed out of two .45 caliber wounds in his chest. A hard gurgling sound from his throat reminded Peary he was still there, but a hollow wheezing sound from his chest told him not for long.
He wrenched his phone out of his urine- and blood-soaked jeans, thinking:
This is bullshit. Goddamned city ordinances. I could’ve had the drop on those hoodrats if I’d had my carry piece on me.
Fingers numb with shock and slick with gore stopped the thumb print unlock. Each press of the thumb growing weaker.
Goddamn fucking iPhone, goddamn fucking job. I am dying for $10.25 an hour. Fucking shits shot me.
The image of those dark, soulless eyes turning to flint a split second after Peary handed over the money, a split second before the concussive roar of the .45, played over and over again in Peary’s oxygen=starved brain.
Who the fuck will find me? Who will tell my mom? Can’t even get that Shelley’s number. Fuck those gangsta wannabes, fuck their mothers, fuck their entire hood.
A bleak greyness washes over Peary.
Now…
The bass beat hits heavy in the club, a real throwback, people packed asshole to elbow. Missy watches from the bar as 50 Cent’s “In Da Club” hammers away like a punch in the chest. Twenty years out of date, but it still gets asses out on the dance floor. Missy watches a guy, Trey, on the floor in between fidgeting with Snapchat.
Trey had introduced himself earlier; he knew Missy’s friend Chloe from the neighborhood. He gave a quick nod and wink to Missy. She was glad she had come with Chloe; being one of the few “wypipo” in the club would have been awkward.
She watched Trey grind his crotch hard against some hoody goody’s ass while popping a massive boner. Ms. Hoody Goody looks good: crop top, tight skirt, looking to get her fuck on. Trey grabbed the chick’s hips and grinds with more passion. Drawing Missy’s attention was their waists moving in a sinuous serpentine motion.
Something caught Missy’s attention; a pale gaunt visage across the dance floor watching Trey with an indecipherable look. Missy turned away and ordered another coke and rum; when she looked back, it was gone.
Then…
Peary was in luck, sort of; a customer came in twenty minutes later. A regular, Old Abel gets bouts of insomnia. Old Abel noticed when Peary wasn’t behind the counter reading his usual paperback novel. With a look behind the cashier’s counter, Old Abel saw the blood. He called emergency services.
Holding Peary’s hand as he waited for the ambulance, he said, “Hey kid, hold on, they’re coming. You can’t die; who the fuck am I going to talk to in the middle of the night?”
Old Abel thought he could feel the faintest squeeze of the hand, so he kept on talking, “You’re gonna make it, you’re gonna make it.”
Flashing lights strobed outside. Peary’s eyes snapped open.
“That’s it, kid, you’re gonna make it. Hang tight, I’m going to get them.”
Peary’s eyes see but don’t see as the paramedics lift him onto the stretcher. They see and don’t see when they begin resuscitation on the way to the Presbyterian hospital.
But Peary’s ears heard when the paramedics said, “He’s gone.”
Now…
“Hey baby girl, you dance?” Trey asked.
“Maybe,” Missy answered. “I’ll have to finish my drink; not really my kind of music.”
“Yeah, I could use one myself. But you don’t have to be gangsta to enjoy the life, maybe just vacation that way.”
“Yeah, like getting ‘crunked,’” she said.
“Shit, my mom was listening to this stuff when I was a baby hood.”
Missy cracked a smile. “Funny, mine too.”
They both laughed at that.
Then…
Bright fluorescents flashed over Peary as he was wheeled down the hall to the morgue.
I’m not fucking dead, you idiots!
“Real shame. 29 years old.”
“Yeah, I remember him. Sometimes I’d get coffee at that 7-Eleven. Nice guy. He’d always have a joke.”
“They have any idea who did it?”
“Patrol definitely thinks it may have been a gang initiation. You know: some punk has to rob and kill some civie.”
“Shit, probably those Oak Grove fucks. They’ve been making moves lately.”
“Real fucking tough guys.”
I’M NOT FUCKING DEAD!
Out of the corner of his eye, Peary saw the night desk for the morgue and heard the shuffle of papers.
“ME’s going be a couple of hours, put him in cabinet E5.
Peary summoned a mass of energy to raise his hand. There was only a faint twitch in his right pinky and ring finger. The lights dimmed a shade.
“Hmmm, weird. Well, E5, don’t forget to sign out.”
Doors thumped open, a clatter of metal on metal as they open the cabinet and place him in the cold and dark.
Peary hears and sees, all the while his mind screaming, Oh God! God! Why? Someone! I’m not dead, you motherfuckers! God help me! Please…
Now…
They were outside vaping, Missy and Trey, talking about this and that.
“Well, sometimes I listen to N.W.A., but mostly stuff like Mitski or Bob Dylan,” Missy says.
“Like some old school folk shit. Listen to any Jimi Hendrix?” Trey asks.
“Sometimes. My grandparents were at Woodstock.” She giggles, a little bit tipsy.
“Cool. Try some of this shit. Cannabis oil. ‘Crunk,’ aight?” Trey laughs.
She inhaled a deep lung hit and a minute later, the world started pulsing in time with music seeping through the club’s walls.
“Bet you feeling it. Wanna go back inside and hit the floor?”
“You bet.”
Missy cast a glance over her shoulder as they went back in.
Then…
Peary was locked in pure darkness as time ceased. If anger could surge over his cold, clammy form, he would shake with rage. Instead, all it does is bore deep into his mind, his flesh so much wet clay, his thoughts so many screams into the ether.
Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Let me out! Don’t tell my mom I’m dead. For the love of God, I need help. By all the saints! Someone, please!
Peary’s right fist clenched as animation suffused his limbs and he kicked. The cabinet door exploded off its hinges and he shoved the rear wall sliding out on the tray. He bolted upright, waiting to see if anyone heard the racket.
The front desk is empty. How do I know this?
He took a deep inhale of the air.
The smell: I can only smell rot and disinfectant. Not the warmth of anything living nearby.
He peered into the gloom around him and felt his chest; his hand came away with thick, heavy clots of blood, black in the dim light. Swinging his legs off the tray, he hopped to the floor light as a feather.
I feel good, like electric, so hungry. Shit! Mom! Someone is probably telling her I was killed. Phone, I need a phone.
He scanned the morgue and saw the phone on the far wall. In an instant, he was there, dialing in the dark and listening to the ringing, hoping she would pick up.
Now…
Trey gyrated against Missy’s firm ass, sporting a turgid chub to the atonal bass heavy music. Missy reciprocated, moving her rear in time with the beat. Trey made gang signs with his hands held high in a display of machismo.
The music grew frenetic: something about being young, being tough, being sexed as fuck. Missy lost herself in the flashing lights, crushed among other sweating bodies on the floor, pushing harder into Trey’s penis. It grew harder.
Then…
Peary’s mother picked up on the fourth ring. She sounded like she had been crying.
“H-h-hello? Who is this?”
“It’s me, Mom: Peary. Did the cops talk to you?”
“Peary? Is that you? The cops were here. They said you had been shot.”
“Mom, they’re wrong. I was shot. I, uh, don’t know what happened, but I’m not dead.”
“If you were shot, why are you calling me? Why did those policemen tell me you were dead?” she asked.
“Where are you? Do you need me to come and get you?”
“No, I’ll get a bus home from the hospital.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know. I’m sorry, Mom, but I am fine. The doctors want to keep me for a day or two. I love you.”
“Son, love you too. I am just glad you are okay; I didn’t know what I was going to do.”
“I know, I have to sort some things out. Listen, I’ll see you when I get home.”
Peary hung up, unsure of what to do next. Things were not all right. His hunger was ravenous.
Now…
Trey slipped his hands around Missy’s waist, nuzzling her neck. Missy turned around, dancing cunt to cock. “You want to get more drinks?”
“Sure, hotness,” she says, tingling in her nethers.
Then…
Peary stared at his reflection in the morgue’s bathroom mirror. His face was bloodless. Pulling off his work shirt, he saw the two bullet holes: unbleeding, dark, cavernous. Everything he was wearing was soaked in blood. Peary ditched his clothes and sponged off naked at the sink. He could only look at his ice-pale body before he found some scrubs.
Still, that hunger bothered him; a sweet succulent scent came to him, as maddening as the smell of grilling streaks to a starving man. He paused at the morgue door waiting for the night desk man to leave again.
Clear.
Peary stalked out of the morgue and into the hospital’s labyrinth following the smell. A few times he caught the scent near the emergency room, but kept following it past the ICU, past the cafeteria, into the restricted areas limited to staff.
No one looked at him, no one noticed him. As if he willed himself invisible.
Finally, he reached the sub-basement waste disposal and stood before a row of red locked dumpsters emblazoned with the biohazard rosette. He sniffed each one in turn with long, drawn-out inhalations, until he found the right one.
He seized the lock and ripped it off in one motion. Giving no thought to his actions, Peary rummaged through the contents: sealed bags of human detritus and offal, all bloody and fresh.
The smell! The wonderful delicious smell!
One after another, Peary tore open the bags, wolfing down the contents. A tumor swimming in a red soup, a bumpy, yellowish, cirrhotic liver, discarded blood transfusion bags sucked dry like Capri Sun juices, and on and on as the plastic refuse gathered at his ankles.
He was gnawing on an amputated foot when someone burst in behind him.
“Security! Stop ri…what the fuck?” The guard, shocked, stopped. Peary tore ass over the dumpster, up a wall, and into the ventilation system.
Now…
Missy’s hungry mouth locked on to Trey’s, a furious probing of tongues transpiring through Bacardi-tainted breath at the bar. His hand reached between her legs probing even more as she pulled him in closer.
“Let’s go outside for something more fun,” she says.
Then…
A hot summer wind blows over Peary, the bullet holes in his chest gone. Fifteen stories up, on the hospital roof, he took in the city spread out before him shining like diamonds. With senses beyond sense, he received a myriad of inputs. The dull autumn crescent moon seemed to be lit with the fire of a noon sun. Sirens approaching in the distance blared with clarity. The city sung its symphonic cacophony and Peary had a front row seat, the smells wafting up; a buffet of exhaust, smog, sweaty sex, violence, fear, searing food, everything.
Peary paced the ledge, a thought playing back in his burning brain now the hunger was gone.
Later…
In an adjacent alley to the club, Missy’s panties were pulled hard to the side as Trey tongue-lashed her pussy. Back arched against the wall, she moaned, “Oh fuck!”
“You want more, dirty girl?”
“Yes. Put that hard black disco stick in me.”
Trey undid his belt and something clattered to the pavement. Missy looked at the gun for a few seconds. Trey paused, not sure if he has killed the mood. Then her eyes brighten.
“Gangsta with a gat: fucking hot. You ever shoot someone?”
“Believe it, baby girl. Blasted some white dude a week ago, made my bones for the Southside Pride. I’m a real motherfucking gangster.”
She spread her legs wider. Trey’s cock was at full attention: he flipped her around and pressed her against the wall before entering her. Missy uttered strident squeaks of pleasure mixed with “fucks.” Trey pounded away in a furious rhythm more savage than anything playing in the club.
Arms braced against the wall, Missy leaned forward as Trey squirted ribbons of cum inside her.
His hands seized her hips with a death grip and something wet and warm splattered all over her back. Trey’s penis suddenly went flaccid inside her and he thrashed against her back.
Missy collapsed to the ground into a puddle of slick gore. She rolls over, legs splaying, gasping at Trey’s headless form looming over her, a corpse-white face tearing into the bloody stump, sucking down blood in long, heavy draws.
The thing dropped the body before reaching down and picking up Trey’s head with knotted, sinewy hands. Trey’s face is locked in a grimace. Slavering jaws tear out chunks of muscle and bolt them down its gullet.
“A little too much gristle,” it said. It leaned over her, exhaling a metallic graveyard odor. Long ropes of blood and saliva drip on her tits.
“Here.” It dropped the head between Missy’s legs. “I think you’ll like it more than me.”
Missy gapes at the head.
“LOOK AT ME, SLUT!”
She looked and its gaze drew her in with cold intensity.
“You like getting banged by killers?”
“Uuuuuuhh…” The word stumbled out of her mouth. Before she could answer, it snatched her ankle and swung her through the air, slamming her headfirst into the wall with a loud “BANG!”
And Missy knew no more.
Later…
“…a fucking slaughter, dude…”
“…must have been a real looker…”
“Take a left here…”
“…no face left, eyes liquefied…”
“…helluva strong motherfucker…”
“Sign this.”
Silence. Impenetrable darkness.
Missy awoke in a cold, dark, confined place and screamed over and over.
Proteus Juvenalis, of the Lost Generation, is a cynic and misanthrope orbiting Neptune and contemplating his former home. His stream of consciousness broadcasts can be found on Telegram.
