"Who knows what motivates these pricks. Ratings. Animosity. Shits-n-giggles. Hell, I could have pissed the wrong someone off up at Corporate. I have the tendency to do that if you haven’t noticed. Who the fuck knows and, quite honestly, who the fuck cares?"
He watched her as she took a minute more to digest everything he’d told her. A cavalcade of emotions fluttered across her face. It had taken him a while to put it all together. He was patient enough of a man to give her the time to do the same. He wasn’t surprised when she arrived at the same conclusion a lot quicker than he had.
She was a smart woman.
"So, what are you going to do about it?"
"Honestly?" he said as he pulled her body even closer. "I plan to bounce."
"What, really?" Her eyes again went wide.
He nodded and continued, "I figure I’ll gather up as much as I can on the financial end and hit the bricks as soon as possible, some time when no one will notice me gone… until it’s too late. I mean, it’s not like we’re prisoners here, right? They may think they own my soul, but they don’t. And as for my body… Hell, that’s always been up for grabs."
He gently pinched her bare butt cheek and laughed.
"Not anymore, Baby," she said punching at him, but missing. "You have
my
scent on you. No other woman is gonna dare come near you," she said as she laughed along with him.
She lay there for a long time then as if in great thought. Finally, she pulled back from him slightly and her face took on a look of bound determination.
"I’m going with you."
"What?" Now it was his turn to go wide-eyed. "Are you sure? You don’t want to take a minute and think it over? You know, once the post-coital euphoria wears off?"
"I am," she replied as if it were an admission of guilt. "Before this…" she motioned her head toward the bed, "I didn’t much care whether I lived or I died here. It was the thing that gave me freedom; gave me my edge. But this… this is somehow different. Now… Now, I want to have a life. Now, I want to find some kind of solace… some kind of happiness and live the rest of my life someplace safe. Someplace…" and she burrowed deeper into his arms, "like here. After everything that’s happened, we of all people, deserve at least that, don’t we?"
She drifted off and seemed to become lost in her thoughts. He stared at her and, even before he had a chance to think it over, he knew he’d agree to take her along. How could he not? She was beautiful and his equal both intellectually and on the sand.
If anyone deserved to get away from this Hellhole, it was she.
In the silence of the room, he heard her whisper softly into his chest, "God… I’m just so tired. Tired of the death, of the loss, of the… fighting." The sound of slight sniffling came next. "Where’s my refuge? Where’s
my
happy ending?"
"Chikara…"
"Cleese, I once had people… people I cared about; people who relied on me. I had
a life
." She stared up at him. "Then, the whole world went… crazy… and I lost them. I lost them
all
. After they were gone, I swore I’d never love anything ever again. Yes, I’d taken lovers before… Creed, for one, but that was just scratching an itch, y’know?"
He looked her in the eye and nodded.
Yeah, he knew all about itch scratchin’.
"I knew I’d never have that kind of life again," she continued. "So, I gave myself to the League and killed hundreds—hell,
thousands
—of UDs. It all stopped… mattering to me."
She lowered her gaze and stared back into his chest, slowly running a finger through the hair there.
"Then, you came along," she continued, sounding almost embarrassed, "and now, everything seems to have changed. I don’t
want
to die, Cleese. I want to try to live again. I want to spend whatever life I have left away from this place… with you. Now, I only want to get away from all of
this
…" and her voice abruptly cut off.
He hugged her and felt the wetness of her tears on his neck.
"Besides, I’ve gotten kind of used to having you around," she whispered as if betraying a confidence and pulled him still closer. She wrapped her arms around him and ran the inside of her lower leg up his thigh. As she drew lazy circles across his back with a fingernail, she kissed him again, deep and soul-stirring.
Grinning shyly up at him, almost as if she’d just given away some part of her that she thought long concealed. She wriggled up deeper into his arms and buried her head into the well of his neck, this time making his skin wet with her kisses. She giggled nervously and slowly looked back up into his eyes.
It was in that moment that he caught a glimpse of the bright-eyed girl she’d been once. He saw her as she was, back when her days were long and full of hope and her life seemed to stretch out forever like an unchallenged vista. He saw her as she’d been when she was a child; once upon a time. Back when she could drink up a summer’s day like sweet cream, relishing its exhilarating taste of exploration.
For a second, he regretted not ever having had the chance to know her when she was younger. He silently wondered how, if he’d only met her years earlier, how things might have been different.
For him.
For her.
For them.
He leaned in, lowering his lips to hers, and once more felt the heart stopping spark of intimacy. He drank deeply from her mouth and savored the taste of her essence. With a full heart, he drew her body still closer to his own. Primal stirrings took hold and they gave themselves over to their rapture.
Afterward, Cleese lay in the dark as Chikara slept beside him. And in that cold silence, he began planning what he was going to do next.
… and to who.
Dead Rising
The UD opened its eyes and stared into the surrounding blackness of the Holding Pen. Its eyelids, still painted with the viscous fluid of corruption, were gooey and stuck together as if covered in paste. A thick, gummy liquid coated the lashes and made them difficult to open. Blinking, it rolled its eyes and looked around. The orbs grated in their sockets, feeling like they were martini olives dropped onto beach sand.
The thing had awoken lying on the ground, coiled in a fetal position. Its clothing, spattered with a kaleidoscopic array of mud, blood, bile and excrement, clung to its flesh like a moist second skin. Body torn and twisted, the thing returned to consciousness with no recollection of who it had been or from where it had come.
It only knew that it lived.
Raising its head from the soft, pliant ground, pain roughly wrapped its unforgiving arms about its torso and swept it into an embrace that was bereft of any solace, devoid of any peace. A raw agony twisted like a blade deep in its guts and blood pulsed like syrup within its necrotic veins. Its limbs felt stiff and its muscles were as taut as harp strings.
Overhead, fixtures suspended by cables from the ceiling cast columns of dull yellow light; pools of illumination splashed across the wet, uneven ground. The soft glow was quickly swallowed up by the icy black. Steam rose from the expansive enclosure and swirled lazily in the air only to evaporate into puffs of nothingness. A low moaning droned in a despondent chorus and imbued the Pen with a palpable sense of foreboding. Dreadful things were afoot in this profanatory place. It was as if even God himself had turned His eye away from it in disgust.
Circling about in the emptiness, other things such as itself walked. The things shambled back and forth, in and out of the sparse light, moving like schizophrenics in ever widening circles. Having lost their chance at salvation, their overriding instinct now was to hunt.
To hunt and to consume.
To find and to eat.
A woman clad in a blood-sodden medical scrub blouse stumbled drunkenly into one of the circles of light. Naked from the waist down, deep gashes had been torn into the meat of her legs. Nodules of bright, yellow fat erupted from deep within the gashes. Spaghetti-like blood vessels bobbed and dribbled globs of coagulated plasma within the folds of the lacerations. Bite marks, red and inflamed, were evident in the meaty folds of her labia.
A man stepped into view—dressed in a flight suit and covered with a black, inky substance—and clumsily bumped into the woman. His lower jaw was missing, the skin beneath his eye torn roughly away. As he turned in the light, a limbless sleeve swayed from the motion.
The two beings moved about one another in a macabre two-step, neither of them seeming to be aware of the other. Each existed in their own world, a solitary realm of famine and horror, of fatality and need. Behind them, a dark mass of putrefied humanity undulated like a heavy velvet curtain.
The newly awakened thing on the ground rolled over and onto its stomach. It felt acidic bile rise in its throat. The taste was sharp and sour on its tongue. Drool slithered from between its lips in glistening strands and pooled in the dirt. The creature pushed against the soil; urine and feces soaked mud pulsed up from between its fingers. Muscles groaned out painfully and fought back as weight was put upon them. Tendons cried out like abandoned children. Cartilage grated as bone slid against bone. Pain unspooled throughout every fiber of the thing’s tortured being as if it were a murderous snake.
As the corpse finally got to its feet, it teetered like a toddler taking its first steps. Its center of balance shifted and settled only to shift once more. The ground itself seemed to heave and gimbal just to spite it. The shifting perception did its best to thwart any feeble attempts at locomotion. It lifted a leg arthritically and did its best to walk. Almost as soon as the foot left the ground, gravity pulled mightily against the thing’s bulk and nearly toppled its delicate balance. After a bit of trial and error, the thing discovered that short, shuffling steps were all it could manage.
For now.
The dead man raised his head and tried to vocalize its frustration. For reasons it couldn’t understand, a distant memory of speech seemed like a natural thing for it to try and do. Only a hoarse, croaking sound tumbled from its lips. The tone was brittle and laced in a vivid torment. Memories flitted across its fractured perception, but the images were hazy and scattered; random sensations culled from a life long gone and now half forgotten. The recollections brought nothing but more confusion and consternation. Nothing, it seemed, could calm the soul-crushing bewilderment of being unexpectedly brought back to consciousness. Any attempt at understanding was met with a slicing blade-on-bone distress.
The thing slowly ran its mud covered hands over its trunk. Its fingers traced their way up its once muscular chest as if in search of something; something of great importance. It was a sensation experienced through a numbed and inadequate anatomy. Deadened fingertips moved in spasmodic motions and stuttered their way up to the cords of the thing’s neck. There, bestial bites dug savagely into the flesh of his throat. Long, raking furrows tore deep and were then pulled backward across the shoulder and down the back. As the dead man raised his hand to his face, deep crimson painted his palm and digits.
A deep and unabiding hunger once again twisted tightly in his stomach, calling him to a dark and single-minded purpose. The thing shut its eyes and tried to comprehend what it was that it was feeling. This onslaught of sensation was insistent and refused to be denied, much less ignored. Only one thought stood paramount: hunger. The need spoke to him as a conspirator might and told him how complicity could make all of this pain and confusion go away. It spoke of its plan and a way to get back a share of the peace that had been denied by death. It whispered of a possible respite from this world of torment.
Meat…
Meat held the answer…
The tearing of it…
The biting of it…
The oh so sweet taste of it.
The creature continued to hold its hands in front of its face. Beyond its gnarled fingers, reanimated bodies swayed and stumbled about in a dance of the living dead. The beast looked down in disgust and his dull, listless eyes caught a glimpse of his reflection in a puddle of urine on the ground. It was an utterly altered and decimated countenance that stared back from the depths of the dark pool. The skin of his face draped from his bones like a flag on a windless day. The flesh was drawn and tired looking; its skin leeched of its hue and the complexion as bloodless as a lizard’s underbelly.
Realization of what it now was, what it had become, carved its way roughly through the haze, through the hunger, and through the pain. The epiphany pummeled its rudimentary sense of reason with a truth that was undeniable. A minute sense of what it had once been took hold and its impaired brain aggressively chewed over this new reality. A long feared consequence of its Past had become its horrifying Present. The once unthinkable had indeed come to pass.
Feeling an overwhelming sense of shame, the thing that had once been a man ran its hands over his face, coating the sallow flesh with mud and gore. Moaning plaintively, it raked its fingers through its sweat-soaked, salt-and-pepper hair. Slowly, it raised its face toward the light and cried out in an inconsolable wail of mourning.
Connubiality
Cleese stood alone on the roof of The Chest and somberly looked out over the darkness blanketing the compound. The night had grown cold around him but it retained its calm and quiet ambience. The stars spread out across the night sky like a comforting quilt. Sporadic clouds hung like cotton balls against the clear, dark sky. He took in a deep lungful of air and breathed it out in plumes of cottony vapor. With each breath he infused his lungs with frigid air; the brittle oxygen helped clear his head and allowed him to think.
He lifted the fragrant Macanudo, which barely smoldered in his fist, to his lips and rolled the soft tobacco around on the tip of his tongue. He pulled a matchstick from his front left pants pocket and struck it sharply against the stucco of the retaining wall. The match flared with a soft and somehow reassuring hissing sound. He brought the fire to the end of the cigar in order to relight it and its brilliance dimmed as he drew the hearty smoke through its bitten-off end.