Johnny gulped as the limo came to a slow stop. He could practically smell the blade hiding behind his girlfriend’s back—but then he stopped to consider what a blade actually smelled like, and couldn’t come up with an answer. As the driver got out and opened their door he could feel his flesh tightening against bone. This was it. The executioner was waiting on the roof of the automobile with his giant ax, waiting for that split second Johnny stepped outside so he could behead him once and for all.
His girlfriend grabbed his hand and pulled. “C’mon, Johnny, let’s go.”
But he resisted. This would not be a voluntary suicide—if it was going to happen it would be forced and as tragic as tragic could be. There may not have been a lot he knew, but what he did know was there was no way he was going to go out without a fight.
“No, I wanna go home,” he whined.
“Oh, don’t be a baby. Now let’s go!”
And this time she tugged a little too hard, and he came spilling out on the icy cement that was the sidewalk of downtown Chicago. Rolling over on his back, he shielded his face and winced at the blinding sun stained into the sky. The anticipation of a ready executioner quickly drained as he realized there was no one standing on top of the limo wielding an ax.
There was, however, a small bird perched at the edge of the car’s roof, cocking its head at him in a rather queer amusement.
So much for putting up a fight.
Johnny got to his feet and brushed the snow off his butt. Before he had time to actually look around and study his environment, his girlfriend was yanking his arm forward and dragging him toward a solitary wooden door in the center of a brick wall. There was no sign to identify what was inside this building, nor were there any noticeable windows. He had never seen a place quite like it. Perhaps this was where the executioner hid in waiting; crouched in the darkness that camouflaged his wickedness with his huge bloody ax.
Johnny tried to dive back into the limo but his girlfriend’s freakish kung fu grip was too strong for him to overpower. Like a five year-old on his first day of kindergarten, he was violently dragged through the murder door on his hands and knees, fingernails digging into the wet cement like that of a horror movie victim. The last thing he saw before being completely swallowed by the building’s cold darkness was a sign hanging from across the street—it was too faint a glimpse to be positive, but he was pretty sure it was the portrait of a zombie butterfly.
He screamed as the heavy wooden door slammed shut behind them.
He was given time to stand up and compose himself. There was no retreating now—the door was closed, what else could he possibly do but move with the current? Johnny was led down a short set of stairs into a dim lobby. His girlfriend directed him to a line of chairs propped up against a wall and left to talk to a woman standing behind a counter.
There were three other people sitting down in this lobby: two men and a woman. The woman held a tiny compact mirror in her palm as she stared critically into the glass, sliding her tongue out and licking her lips. A man next to her, wearing a suit two sizes too big, bounced his knees up and down as he waited his turn, gnawing away at his dirty fingernails. The other man, this one in a trench coat, wore dark colors in a poor attempt to disguise the hideous scars burned into his flesh. He looked like he’d been to Hell and back on more than one occasion. His outfit gave him the appearance of a private investigator for the undead.
Johnny sighed and took a seat next to the Devil’s private dick. The man glanced down at him and grunted approvingly. “What’re you here for?”
Johnny shrugged. “I’m not even sure where it is that I am.”
“We are everywhere. We are here and we are there and we are inside and we are out. I can feel it and so can you.”
“Um.”
“We all begin as an egg. We all begin as an egg.” The man coughed. Purple spit flew from his mouth. “Then comes the maggots. Oh, hellish legless white spawns! We feed! We feed! We feed!” He coughed again, and this time the man reached inside his mouth, as if digging for something stuck in his teeth. He pulled out a dead fly and flicked it across the room. “Then the transformation—the motherfucking metamorphosis of a nation! Oooohhh baby, yes! And then? Oh yes, oh yes. And then? And then, and then, and then we are grown, we are adults, we are…we are…WE ARE INFINITE!”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
The man burst out into hysterics and Johnny realized the man had no lips, no nose, no eyes. This sent him shooting off the chair and hurrying over to the front desk with his girlfriend. The lady, dressed in all white and reminding Johnny of Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, was handing her a stack of paperwork.
She pulled out a rectangular nametag and said, “Addiction?”
His girlfriend said, “Excuse me?”
The nurse clicked her pen and huffed belittlingly. “What is the participant’s addiction?”
“Oh, he does purple.”
Now it was the nurse’s turn to be confused. “What in the world is that?”
She shrugged. “I dunno. Purple. Jericho. Soul spray. Ya know, comes in like a black can, shoots out this purple mist shit?”
“Ah,” said the nurse, as the words clicked in her brain. “I know what you’re talking about. I’m still not used to it yet is all.”
She moved the pen along the nametag and wrote: HYPNOSPLICE.
Johnny’s girlfriend grimaced, as if the word was enough to make her vomit and insult her mother alone. “What the hell is a hypnosplice?”
“It’s the shorter version of splictic hypnotranical oxide, the correct title for that ungodly drug you kids seem to be calling—for reasons that escape me—‘Jericho’.”
“Oh,” she said. “Uh, I knew that.”
“Uh huh. Just fill it out, will ya?” The nurse turned her attention over to Johnny, who had tried to make himself as invisible as possible. “Are you the junkie?”
Johnny squealed at the sound of her voice and leaned forward. “Are you going to make the flies disappear?”
The nurse nodded. “Yeah, you’re the junkie.”
She pulled out a tiny plastic cup and placed it on the counter in front of him. “We’re gonna need a sample of your urine. Go down that hall and the first door on the left you’ll come across a bathroom. Make it snappy.”
Johnny fearfully obliged. He grabbed the cup and left his girlfriend to fill out the forms, skipping off down the hallway to whatever may.
The bathroom was a small dingy thing. He locked the door behind him as he approached the mirror and turned the facet, splashing water in his face. He wasn’t sure what this place was, but maybe they could help him after all.
These goddamn flies…
Would they ever go away?
The buzz.
It was louder in this bathroom. Much louder than he had ever thought possible.
The piss cup fell from Johnny’s hands and he doubled over into a coughing fit. Palms smashed into his skull as he tried to beat the noise from his conscience, but he just wasn’t strong enough. He would never be strong enough.
He pounced over the toilet and discharged a stream of vomit into the bowl. It ricocheted back into his face, which only caused another spell of puke to spray from his exhausted mouth.
Hell, he didn’t even have the strength to pull his head out of the toilet—how could he be expected to fight the flies in his own head?
His neck went limp. His head just dangled there in the toilet, hair soaking in the ruined water. He closed his eyes and prayed for an answer. Any reasoning for the madness that consumed him. For the evil that ate him alive day after day.
Why was this happening to him? What had he ever done to deserve such cruel treatment? Better yet, who was it that was in charge here anyway? God? Satan?
The…the Fly?
“Dig deep for the answers you seek.”
Johnny mumbled a series of words that were barely intelligible even to himself: “Who are you?”
<
br /> “I am the one who holds the key.”
“To what?”
“Everything.”
Johnny tried to laugh but he just couldn’t find the energy. This mysterious voice couldn’t have been any cheesier.
“Dear Johnny, I’m afraid the only cheese here is truth cheese.”
“That makes no sense.”
“Nothing will ever make sense without risk. Now take a risk and dive into the truth.”
“How?” At this point he would try anything. He craved to understand the meaning of peace again.
The voice spoke one last word before it faded away:
“Swim.”
And that’s just what Johnny did.
It wasn’t hard. He had seen the same thing happened once in that movie, Trainspotting.
Every muscle in his body loosened as he surrendered himself to gravity, allowing its magnet pull to drag him down into the toilet water with his own puke. Soon enough, his skull was squeezing through the hole like a wet tissue. The rest of his structure liquefied along with it, and before anyone could say splictic hypnotranical oxide, Johnny Desperation had vanished into the Chicago sewer system.
He had followed the buzz into its home.
The powerful current of recycled feces carried Johnny through the series of mind numbing tunnels like a running back carries the football toward the end zone. Nothing could ever interrupt this mighty flow. Nothing at all.
Except, of course, the brick wall constructed in the center of the tunnel, blocking all water from continuing forward. One would assume the same consequence would be held for the human body as well, but it was not the case. Expecting at the most, death, and at the least, a bloody nose, Johnny braced himself for the approaching impact.
He smacked into the concrete at full speed. There was no pain. The wall was not solid. When his face smashed into the bricks there was no blood. As it turned out, it only had the appearance of bricks. Instead it was made of…marshmallows?
When he connected with the blockade, Johnny’s pace only slowed down slightly. The spongy material of the wall absorbed him whole, and before he could give the circumstances a second thought, it was spitting him out on the other side. Feeling like Mother Nature’s placenta, Johnny shot through a new dimension covered in the portal’s sticky goo, splashing into the shallow shores of a deserted beach before he could truly comprehend the reality of leaving the bathroom.
An ashy wave threw him forward and he found himself rolling in the sand, stinging particles burning his eyes while whirling a cloud of dust. Choking on the sand, Johnny sat up and wiped his eyes. This, of course, only made it worse. He screamed out and blinked furiously until the burning subsided.
He looked around at the vast emptiness of this new world. The sky was electric and purple.
“I don’t think I’m in Chicago anymore,” Johnny said, and immediately felt like a moron.
Johnny searched as far as his eyes would allow, but he did not see any other sign of life. There were no buildings off in the background—there was no anything. The sand, the miserable old sand, it just stretched on and on, finally coming to a stop at the edge of the globe.
The water continued forth, sharing almost the same distance as the land. But, as Johnny studied it longer, he determined the water was not like any other water. It was not blue, and it was not in the least bit clear. The liquid was more ashy, like a darkened gray that had failed to fully die.
It was as if God had started using the world as His own personal ashtray.
Johnny recognized that he was truly alone in the world. No one was real anymore. He wasn’t even sure if he was, either—but at least he was aware of this fact, unlike the rest of the masses.
A thousand sketches drawn into a notebook and only one character realized it was a drawing. It was whatever the artist told it to be. It did not have a mind of its own. It did not have freewill. The other sketches ignored this drawing, and continued to remain in place until finally fading away over the years.
Which of the subjects survived the longest?
“HELP!” Johnny screamed, hands cupped around his mouth. “IS ANYONE HERE? HELLO! PLEASE, IS THERE ANYONE AT ALL? HELP, HELP ME!”
It was useless. No one was here—Johnny probably wasn’t even here. But where was he, then?
Did it matter?
Johnny raised his head at the sky. No, it didn’t matter all. Die or live, people would continue as if nothing had happened. He was just another pawn in a big scheme of bullshit.
There was no sun in this new world, and yet there was still a projection from the sky brighter than any sun he’d ever laid eyes on. He squinted as he studied the purple textures above. Any sign of clouds were long erased. Leftover was a straight sheet of violet, taped against a plain board lacking any distinguishable features.
It may have been a basic and goosebump-inducing sky, but man, was it a bright one.
Johnny snapped away, at last breaking from its hypnotic spell. Quickly transgressing into a cold sweat, he began trudging down the sand in hopes of discovery. But after two days of walking, he realized in horror that he had failed to take even a single step from his original marker.
Wherever he was, he was stuck. Worst yet, it had been two days and the need to eat had yet to arise. Sleep did not feel necessary. The only thing that mattered was to keep on moving—and he couldn’t even do that.
Johnny gave up and collapsed to his knees. Tears erupted down his face as he raised his fists toward the sky, daring to pursue the layers beyond the purple.
“What is this? I give up. I’ll do anything you want. Please, just someone, anything, anywhere, please, just talk to me. Say something.”
And finally, a voice:
“This is your future, Johnny.”
He recognized the voice. Of course he did. It had only been following him around for his whole life—that is, when it wasn’t buzzing like a little bitch. It had no face, only words projected within the nerves of his own brain.
“This is what your world is coming to. Total and utter nothingness. Soon enough the water will swallow the land, and hidden survivors will drown in its wake. This is the sea of Armageddon, Johnny. The final ocean to ever flow over this planet. No one will survive this war. Every soldier, on either side, will perish. There are too many of them out there. We may be stronger, but we are outnumbered. We need the advantage, Johnny. We need your help.”
“What do I do? Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it. Get me out of this fucking place and I’ll do whatever you want, I swear.”
“Join our legions—take a step forward into the light. Fight for us and you will never suffer at the bottom of this tyrannical sea, strangling in its abusive seaweed. The demons of tomorrow will be the close encounters of yesterday. What you humans speak of paradise—Heaven—we can offer you the real version. Follow my commands, without question, and you will be taken care of as long as the stars burn in the universe.”
“Why me? Why am I so special?”
“You are one of the few who have the ability to open their eyes wide enough to understand. The mist in the bottle is your key to surviving this war. Under no circumstances must you lose your token. Otherwise, all will be lost.”
Johnny gulped. Shit had just got real.
“What do I have to do?”
“Further instructions will be delivered when the time is right. There is no backing out of this, Johnny. Your devotion has been saved and locked. You are one of us now.”
“Who are you?”
There was a pause. “I am the Fly that buzzes last.”
Johnny had more questions to ask, but before another word could leave his mouth the beach crumbled beneath him, opening up a pit of darkness. A waterfall of sand kept him company on a fall that lasted more than his mind could ever comprehend. After he lost the will to be scared, he just closed his eyes and accepted the indefinite fate that waited for him at the bottom.
If there was a bottom.
And when Johnny
opened his eyes again, he was no longer falling, but instead back at the methadone clinic, in a fetal position beside the toilet.
He felt the sharp bottom of a high heel stabbing into his fragile spine. His girlfriend was kicking him awake, looking awfully pissed off. “What do you think you’re doing? Get up.”
Johnny grabbed the toilet and propped himself to his feet. He wiped a coat of sweat off his forehead. “What happened?”
“How the hell should I know? Come in and you’re on the floor like a damn crackhead. C’mon, we’re getting outta this place.”
She grabbed his arm and led him out of the bathroom, away from the hallway, through the lobby.
“I thought they wanted my pee!” Johnny squealed, not particularly fond of being rushed like this.
His girlfriend grunted and said, perhaps a little too loudly, “Yeah, well, turns out they won’t touch you unless you’re eighteen or you have ‘parental consent’. Like your folks are really gonna bother with something like that. Oh well. Sorry kiddo, but looks like you’ll have to die at seventeen because of a fucking law. God forbid someone try to help someone else. Bunch of fucking cowards.”
Johnny shrugged. “Well, that’s okay.”
Considering what he knew now, he would have rather died than be taken off his medicine, anyway. Hell, he was clean. It was everyone else who was so dirty.
His girlfriend slammed the front door of the clinic hard enough to scare the wind. “No, it is not okay!” she cried, throwing Johnny into the limo like he was nothing. “This sale is going to be a once in a lifetime opportunity!”
DAY
THREE
PUPA
Chapter Twenty-Three
A Little Peanut Butter On Her Pancakes
It was only 7:00 A.M. when Addison woke up, wrapped in a warm quilt, sinking into a cloud disguised as her boyfriend’s mattress. She loved sleeping over at Connor’s house. His bed was always so comfortable. There wasn’t another one like it.
She was alone in the bed. It would have been better if Connor was there to hold her like he had last night until she fell asleep. She had liked that a lot. But now he was gone. Off to the bathroom maybe, who knew. She stayed there until she felt strong enough to start the day and crawled off of her wonderful cloud of quilts and pillows.
Toxicity Page 14
