I'M NOT DEAD: The Journals of Charles Dudley Vol.1

by Artie Cabrera

  Bryce slammed the trunk shut and pulled me aside.

  “What the fuck was that, man?” I yelled. I would have gone into a full-blown panic attack had Bryce not closed the trunk.

  Proud of his trophy bug, Bryce waved his hand over the chest like a Las Vegas magician, smiling, eyes widening and calling it evolution.

  No, this is not evolution, man. This is an abomination, and I don’t like it.

  “Why in the hell do you have it? Are there more?” I asked, looking around the room for trap doors and anything else large enough to hold three-foot insects. Jane pulled on my arm and gave me the “let’s get the fuck out of here” look.

  Bryce took a moment in complete silence, looking out onto the commune through the windows. “Charlie,” he began, “we are all living on borrowed time here.

  Those fences out there…they’re just prolonging the shitty inevitable. Every day you wake up telling yourself it’s bound to get better, but does it? Every day there’s less food, there’s less water, and there are people and orphans who are sick and dying because they’ve gone without their medicine or clothing. Look at them out there. What do you say to a father whose children have the croup when we can’t get them to a doctor soon enough, and one of them dies? What do you say to a child who doesn’t want to be alone? We’re losing, Charlie, all we are doing is just waiting around to die,” Bryce lowered his head and stared at his feet.

  I didn’t care for Bryce’s doom and gloom pity party, and he was wrong for feeling responsible for anyone’s death. Death is circumstantial, and there is nothing you can tell anyone to change that. Shit happens. Sorry we’re all living in fear, sorry we bleed, sorry we need food to live, and sorry it takes something like this to remind us that we’re all just human. We weren’t meant to be here for long. Maybe now’s the time for the next species to come along and take our place on this dying planet. After seeing what happened to the dinosaurs, I knew not to get too comfortable. So, before I slit my wrists as a result of listening to Bryce speak, I wanted to know more about the bugs, of course reluctantly, and without the use of props.

  “Ah, yes, the bugs,” Bryce comfortably snapped back into magician mode minus the cape and wand. “We came across this one here just sitting by the train yard. My son neutralized it and brought it back to the camp. Fascinating isn’t it?”

  “Not really,” I thought.

  “Whatever this thing is, it’s here, Charlie, and once they migrate and breed, there isn’t a damn thing we can do about it. There might be hundreds of them down in that subway tunnel, a nest of some sort,” he assumed.

  “Where did they come from? Does anyone know? Have you heard anything?” I asked him.

  Bryce shrugged his shoulders without much interest and looked away back toward the tent’s plastic window again.

  I felt my brain burning with thousands of questions, but answers only made it worse.

  “How are we not sick?”

  “How do you know you’re not?” he snapped, turning back to me with those stone cold eyes.

  “Huh?”

  “I’m sorry, Charlie. It’s not you. I just have a lot on my mind with this whole damn…anyways.”

  I don’t know if Bryce was stalling from giving us anymore information or if he was just doing that for dramatic effect.

  “Okay, here’s the thing!” Bryce continued. “There’s someone I know, a colleague of mine. We don’t know where he is, but he’s off the grid, and we need him, Charlie. He can help us fix this. We need to find him real soon and could use your help. Join us, Charlie, we could use a good man on our team. What do you say? At the same time, we’ll keep our eyes peeled for your boy.”

  Bryce recruiting me to become a Freedom Fighter in his little day camp militia, that’s funny.

  More cues from those very, very low budget action flicks again, and using Dusty as the carrot was a cute touch.

  A coalition sounded promising, but I don’t know how I feel about going on a wild-goose chase to find a crackpot that I don’t even know exists. Besides, I had my own set of problems. It was getting late, and Jane and I had to be on our way back to the house before the sun set.

  We parted ways with Bryce at the main gate and headed down the stretch of main roads where a layer of fog descended and rolled over us like an omen.

  Jane kept quiet for the walk back home, scanning the trees for creepy crawlers, while I struggled with thoughts of giant bugs and killer plants.

  It’s worse than I expected. The odds were stacking up against us, and I really hated bugs. Especially gargantuan bugs big enough to eat me.

  It brought me back to the time I was doing odd jobs as a handyman working for my father in Corona. I was installing a bathtub in this shit-hole apartment over on 113th Street.

  I punctured the bathroom wall, and an entire nest of water bugs flooded out of the opening by the hundreds, scattering and desperately scaling the tub at my feet. I was never the same again.

  I will deal with Deviants and their bullshit as long as I don’t ever have to see another one of those bugs Bryce kept in his trunk again. Or the hundreds he claimed lived in the subway tunnel.

  PEEP SHOW

  Tuesday, January 28th, 2014

  Jane and I trudged along 45th avenue with plastic jugs and rubber hoses in search of older trucks we could siphon gas from because we were running low on fuel this morning. I used generators to boost the house when the power clunks out on occasion, but the motors make a shitload of noise. I don’t keep them running at night because their rattling attracts Deviants like flies to a steaming pile of crap.

  Jane and I finally settled on a red and black monster truck looking Dodge RAM ruined by dozens of decorative decals along the bumper and back window. One read, “If God didn’t want us eating animals he wouldn’t have made them out of meat.” Amen.

  “Can you not watch me?” I asked Jane as I inserted the tubing into the tank.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “It’s embarrassing. I feel like I’m sucking someone off and you’re standing there watching. Just turn around.”

  “You want me to turn around? Fine, now you know how I feel,” she said.

  Touché, Jane, touché, but it’s sexy when you do it.

  I leaned forward a couple of times with my mouth gaping over the round, clear hose before I could actually do it. At the same moment, Jane and I heard yelling and screaming coming from the building ahead of us.

  “Los Diablos vienen! Vete! Apurate! Apurate!” the elderly woman screamed, dragging three young children away from the building complex. “What is she saying?” I asked Jane.

  “The devil is coming.”

  Oh. You do speak Spanish.

  Someone came crashing out of a third story window followed by a nude, female Deviant catching him in midflight and slamming her victim straight onto the hood of a parked SUV two cars ahead of us.

  A second Deviant flew down from the same window, landing face first onto several shards of glass as it hit the concrete. I know that had to hurt even though he was built like a brick shithouse.

  It screamed and grabbed at the blades embedded in his face as the female pinned her bloodied victim to the hood of the car, dominating him with brute force as he wrestled to get away.

  It was painful to watch, as we crouched behind a car doing our best not to be seen. She stretched him, pulled him, and pounded on him, hitting him with a turbulence of fists, driving her head into his. I wouldn’t wish a beating like that on my father.

  “No, noo, nooooo!” he screamed. I never heard a sound like that come from any human before. It must come from a place so deep inside, you could only reach it when your life is flashing before your eyes.

  This was a first time for me. I’ve never seen them do it—KILL SOMEONE that is.

  Jane was pulling me away, but I couldn’t pry myself away from watching through the back windows of the Dodge as I hid from the Deviants.

  “Look Jane!” I insisted. “No, stop, don’t look.”
It was intriguing, it was surreal…it was...pretty... disgusting.

  “No, no, wait, where are you going?” I whispered as Jane collapsed to her knees, crawling away to quietly hack and vomit behind the tree.

  The Deviant’s victim screamed and yelled for help as he continued fighting to get away, but he didn’t get far as she tore the tendon and bone from his body. His scalp flapped violently above his head hanging from a piece of skin, like a lid attached to a can by a tiny piece of metal. It wasn’t long before it was finally over.

  The female Deviant continued to bash his melon against the pavement, emptying his head out like a change jar as the contents of his skull spilled out onto the curb.

  “Why? Why is this happening?” Jane cried from behind the tree. I had become so lost in the moment that she became background noise.

  I had forgotten about her.

  It was that moment when I truly realized how bad things were. I was no longer hiding behind a curtain in my bedroom, behind the safety of my walls.

  Sure, killing Peter should have been that moment, or the military shooting at me, or helping Joe kill himself. Scraping Jerry off the street and putting him in a guitar case should have been that moment, but now I was no longer a spectator.

  I was the final glimpse in that man’s bloodshot eye and now am the scumbag in his forever after. He made the haunting connection between us as his white knuckles stretched in my direction. The last thing that he’ll have ever seen was a coward.

  I could have saved him, couldn’t I? He saw me there, hiding between the cars, but I didn’t do anything. Why didn’t I do something to help him? Why did I hesitate to pull the gun? I could have. He wondered the same before it was over – “Why isn’t that asshole over there doing something to help me?”

  After the Deviant and his bride took off with the remains, I felt like the lowest piece of shit on the earth.

  ANATOMICAL MAN

  Wednesday, January 29th, 2014

  In my 5th grade homeroom, we had what we called the anatomical model. Anatomy Man stood upright and naked in the corner of the room with all of his plastic organs exposed for our young impressionable eyes to see, for our grubby little fingers to touch.

  Later, courtesy of the Deviants, I would learn that human organs were heavier and felt squishier than the plastic ones living inside Anatomical Man’s plastic assembly.

  “Tom,” as Mr. Finkleman, our teacher, would call him, stood there with one hateful eye looking back at the world scuffed up with crayon and years of abusive elementary school kids putting him back together the wrong way.

  If Anatomical Man could have his first words and use of his tongue, they would probably be “Fuck You.”

  His finest revenge would be coming to life for a day and returning the favor. He would have most likely turned all us children into lab frogs and kept us in jars.

  He would take Mr. Finkleman and shape him into the image of an Anatomical model, leaving him to stand in a corner of a classroom—decaying in dust for several years.

  So long as every little bacteria infested bastard can come along and yank out his spleen, his liver, use his intestines for jump rope and kick his brain around during recess until their little hearts were content.

  I sat the closest to Tom for a full school year, just a hot flash away from his descending colon and bladder.

  Henry, the fat Armenian kid who sat next to me, smelled like sour cream and pickles and didn’t speak a word of English. In the winter, with the radiators in full swing, Henry sat within an impenetrable force field of his own body odor—the odor, emitting from between his heavy thighs like fumes from a bad muffler.

  Between Tom and Henry, I was the nine-year-old in Nervous Breakdown 101, with a collection of phobias and anxiety.

  Today, my world is filled with hundreds of anatomical men and women, and we’re all sandwiched between the odors of Henry’s thighs. Like Tom, the dead stared back at the world with frozen eyes and misplaced body parts, as scrambled up as a western omelet served with extra sides.

  The dead reminded me of life-size rag dolls, abandoned and junked by their predators along the sides of the streets. Unfortunately, now we’re faced with a far greater threat—ourselves.

  We are at war and it’s every man for himself.

  DOG EAT DOG

  Friday, January 31st, 2014

  Some nights Jane wakes up in hysterics, screaming at me not to touch her even when I stood on the furthest side of the room shielding myself with bed sheets until she fell back to sleep.

  Jane was acting strange again this morning. Lately, she’s been standing at the door looking into the beyond, and I have to nudge her to snap her out of her trance sometimes. I believe she is suffering from sleep deprivation, despite sleeping a lot. She’ll ask me if I saw clouds in the sky. Sure, there’s nothing strange about that.

  “No, Charlie, that cloud over there,” she said, pointing at the sky where a large cloud hovered over Queens. “It hasn’t moved in a couple of days.” Honestly, I think the poor girl has lost her mind. All clouds look the same to me, sorta’ like the Michelin Man.

  She’s become a tough nut to crack lately, and a lot of questions still remain unanswered about where she came from, yet we don’t discuss it.

  “You should sit this one out and rest, hun’. You’re not looking so good,” I said – to say the least. I ushered her back to the couch and grabbed my bag to leave. “I’ll be back soon, I promise,” I told her, shutting the door quickly as she sat on the couch—motionless.

  The air stung my eyes when the wind blew, and it was becoming harder to breathe out there with the waft of chemical air. Jerry and I called it THE STINK. The stink smelled like a drifting Vomitorium.

  After a while, your senses start to swim in the pollution and you begin to feel like everything on the inside of your body wants to be on the outside.

  The neighborhood was nothing but a ghost town, with a few phantom stragglers and children moving swiftly through the deserted streets.

  The best time to go outside was during the day, not because the Deviants would burst into the flames from being in the sun or anything like that. They were nocturnal beings who were feral during the night—like the Ingrid. Deviants are normally inert throughout the day, sometimes sleeping in trees, bushes or even on the hood of a car, but you don’t want to get them going.

  Not all Deviants will attack on sight either. For the most part, a lone Deviant tends to be shy and apprehensive, like the one I scared away the other day trying to climb through Mrs. Strunk’s kitchen window next door.

  It’s a good twenty-five minute walk to get downtown (Red City) from the house, which allows me time to think. I occasionally play a game Jerry and I invented called “What Happened Here?”

  Whenever Jerry and I came across a dead body, Jerry would always stop and play “What Happened Here?” because the Deviants had innovative ways of killing things. The arms and heads of people and dead animals were often found twisted and turned in incredible ways, like the limbs of action figures removed or swiveled in unnatural directions by some crazy kid.

  I came across an inverted dog on the side of the road this morning, half-picked apart and snout partially chewed.

  I disapproved of Jerry examining the dead for shits n’ giggles. “Don’t do that, Jerry,” I’d beg. “Please stop jabbing and prodding them with the stick, that’s not cool, man. They’re dead. Have some respect.”

  “Yeah, but look at their eyes. Fuck,” he’d say, ignoring my pleas as he playfully continued poking the carcass in the face with twigs and sticks.

  The eyes of the dead always reminded me of dead fish my dad would bring home from the market, vacant and hidden behind a wall of cloudy white gook.

  Oh, man, we were going to Hell.

  Jerry thought he was a forensics expert because he watched “C.S.I.: Miami” and always tried piecing the scene together like David Caruso speaking in methodical prose.

  “You see, Charlie, the Deviant
must’ve pulled this guy’s leg off here and then flung it over the telephone cable over there then dragged the one legged man’s body across the street. The Deviants, at some point in time, removed the eyes from his head and shoved them into his mouth.” The possibilities are endless when you’re bored and borderline insane.

  It doesn’t take much to make me happy. I’m a simple man who doesn’t ask for much and can get by with little. I can tell you I like my beer cold, I like having a cigarette after sex or a steak dinner, I love baseball, my truck, and my family.

  Then there are the things I don’t like. I especially don’t like bullies and predators. I don’t like people who think they can get over and prey on the weak.

  I once told you I saw a couple of young men having their way with a young woman, who I believed to be a C2, behind a convenience store.

  I didn’t understand why it was happening but above all, I didn’t care.

  At 1:45 p.m., I was standing at the corner of Main street and Cherry Avenue when Tom, Dick, and Harry came meandering around the corner with another young girl. I remembered them. There were three, one hooligan down from the last time I saw them, and the girl wasn’t any older than seventeen.

  All three punks looked emaciated and ragged as if they hadn’t showered or eaten in weeks. Maybe they caught a disease. That’s what you get for sticking your dicks in zombies, assholes.

  There was one kid with a cleft palate. I believed he was the ringleader by the way his two little lackeys followed and excitedly listened to him. He had a frenetic and shifty energy to him—the kid you just wanted to punch in the face because his face asked for it.

  I overheard them talking, dangerously plotting away, as they walked by me with the young girl in their arms. They lowered their voices and shot me a dirty look when they noticed me standing there on the corner. I knew that they were up to something.

  They knew I knew they were up to something.