[1/2] Calcite Asteroids
The walker's chewed-off lips keep its teeth exposed to the chilly air, so it isn't much of a shock that the teeth that grip my wrist are colder than murder. My sleeves are pulled to the knuckles to fend off the cold, and I don't look down; don't resist the red soreness that rolls like a parasite in my spine.
When I wrench the walker's head from my body, the first thing I notice is the temperature of its rotting skin; the lack of blood rushing from a heart with swift speed and pulsing heat. The skin of a walker feels almost artificial, like rubber, taking on the temperature of whatever day it is when you happen to touch it. Beats me why I can't seem to ever get used to that. Something on the inside always gets a shock when I touch the angry skin and see the gnashing teeth and watch a walker's eyes, dead, black, assault me with a hunger that couldn't be more alive.
It makes me hurt. Makes me think.
And the thoughts that come to my head are things I can tell that people like Molly would never really take a look at. But we'd all be lying if we said we hadn't ever seen the eyes of a walker - seen its laugh lines; its pained expression - and quietly wondered what its name had been before all this. We'd be avoiding our own humanity if we denied having imagined its skin intact and its cheeks flushed under the sun of a hot summer day, their family brushing kisses onto their heads or their children stringing their arms around their waist and saying "I love you, so and so," or, "hey, uncle Jared, I think you're pretty cool even though you ate the last slice of pizza at my birthday party last year."
Strange, isn't it, that we live in a world where it's irresponsible - not profound - to think about the past. A world where our history is as doomed as the present and future of the humans who made it.
I slam my boot straight down onto its head one time - but then I have to repeat it again and again 'cause it keeps lifting back up on its ripped elbows. I can't help the grunts that leave me when the skull continues popping against the cement with a sick grinding noise once; twice; three times, each time rising back up and shaking a little harder.
My foot hits the walker's mouth and breaks bone where it lands, teeth spewing from red gums and clicking onto the sidewalk, sprinkling blood where they roll under tires and into gutters. When I yank in a breath, my body refuses the air. I just gasp. And then I choke. The walker's jaw droops to the pavement and a mouth of smooth red flesh stares at me as it lifts its head from a pool of its own skin and blood.
"Just fucking die," I say. Though the world declines to stir or take heed, I hear my voice for far too long like hammers in the dark of my skull. The gruff voice shivers in an echo, reaching abandoned cars and vacant churches two blocks away, stretching into a lingering whisper. The words I've just said have no train of thought behind them, but they push me out of my own body with shock anyways. My foot has stomped down again without me even knowing, and blood crests around the rubber sole; splashes like cold milk against my ankle. My own mind locks me out and my body takes charge, so my leg bears down again and it's almost like I can't even tell what my instincts are doing anymore.
I just hurt. The image of the walker's skull flattening into the crimson puddle pushes me farther away. I'd like to think I'm the kind of guy who can stop myself long enough to pull my shit together, but I hear my charging breaths and feel the groan of pain inside my bones and I know I'm not the man I used to be.
Funny, such a term would be referred to as a cliche in what one might call the Old Days. There isn't a moment when I touch my face that I don't feel the hair and feel the mud against my skin with some kind of disbelief. Feeling the skin as it peels from my lips, I see myself minus a year standing barefoot on the tile of a bathroom that belonged to me, deciding whether brushing my teeth is really worth the time. But back then, I could afford to worry about things like that. Back then, I saw the wrinkles in my skin and the largeness of the pores in my flesh like I'd been holding a magnifying glass to the flaws. Nowadays when I find the time, I just touch my face instead and the creases in my skin are so much deeper than I'd thought possible. My hair, to the touch, is overgrown steel wool matted with fragments of other people's flesh.
Exhaustion stops that restless drill that's been hammering my bones, and it gives me a moment to think. Under the drone of hundreds of swarming thoughts, I hear a sound that is an awful lot like color and hurt. It plays music the color red, spinning on a record inside my mind, skipping, tilting to the left and to the right, and I can't keep the disk steady enough to understand the words that it keeps saying. My hands fall to my knees and my lungs hurt when they spew cold air, spraying phlegm and blood behind my teeth. I let my back give in and curve beneath the ache; let my eyes fall to the ground as I heave my chest like an asthmatic, overweight outcast who's lost their fiftieth game of tag. God. Let me breathe a little.
The drill in my head and the quiet, buzzing excruciation in my neck pull at me - they pull at my hands and beg to be rubbed, but I can't feel my wrist well enough to make it move. My elbow and my arm are numb. I can't feel my hand well enough to hold my grip on my own leg, and, shifting my weight to the other arm, it takes me longer than I'd like to understand just why I'm facing this problem.
Clementine's white duck-bill hat slips from the hand and falls to the ground, where old blood on the fabric covers itself with fresh red when it smacks into the puddle. I flail, reaching for the hat, and my mind is in the middle of a race too overwhelming to understand the blood that seeps into my shirt from its newly-stained bill. I murmur, and something rises up inside of my chest and billows from my throat in hyperventilated breaths, louder than is safe, quieter than my mind wants. "Shit!"
The bite is in the form of five deep marks in the inside and outside of my wrist, and I scrub at it like it's profanity on a wall or a row of wrong answers on a test. An itch irritates the inside of my flesh, the bite crusting up along the wounds in a fluffy white paste - a sheer contrast to my natural pigment - and I wipe it with the other sleeve, but it's over with. "Jesus - God." The frenetic scrubbing of the wound and the bite of my nails into the scars irritate it more. Fresh, new, black blood spurts around the corners of the teeth marks like a border; capitalizes on the burn like a picture frame. "This wasn't supposed to happen. Fuck. Fuck - it won't work, it won't work." These words are piling atop my tongue and escaping my throat in whimpers soggy with tears, burdened with more anger than sadness.
I hold Clementine's hat close to my chest. It's almost like feeling her hair on my chin in the middle of a hug or her hands holding tight on my shoulders, afraid of a fall during a piggy-back ride. The tears on my neck remind me just how far I am from holding her ever again, and it's too much to ask of myself not to wrinkle the flimsy white hat, tightening my fingers into a fist. Held against my chest, the hat slows my heart.
When I was a boy, my mom would tell me all about how I would turn out to be a man who listened closely to his emotions. She said that this emotional tendency evoked vivid daydreams in even the strongest of men. My brother used to call them fantasies. Riding in the backseat of my dad's car, he would read his books and glance at me 'cause I always just… looked around. A few years ago, he told me how much it scared him when I did that. He wasn't able to see inside my head. He didn't witness the pictures that were being drawn in my brain; didn't understand that with my mind, I could make our front lawn become an ocean and our dad's lawn mower become a pirate ship.
We weren't the kind of brothers who pretended the carpet was on fire together, jumping from chair to chair and breaking our mother's furniture. He kept the straight face and left me to do most of the talking back and breaking rules. I had a few years on him, but that didn't exactly stop him from taking the position he knew was his: ' Most Responsible Everett Child'. And neither of us really minded the backwards ranking. Most Sunday afternoons, he was most likely smiling at me from over his comic books while he watched me eat down whole bowls of ice cream.
It makes it hard not to think about that now. Standing in the middle of a sidewalk in Savannah is about the most imbecilic thing I think any survivor can do, but my eyes catch the cloud-obscured sun and my legs freeze - just like that. I watch the light burn away at the sky; watch it move against the buildings; feel the air against my unshaved face with a shiver of discomfort.
There's a pain inside my head like the music of a military band playing the march of an army within the closed-off center of my mind, a cacophonous pain that breaks my vision into blurred shadows and unfocused shapes. My eyes close and shutter the world in a more complete black than the injured vision that had just begun to stave off the light. My thoughts suffocate the space inside my head and grow heavier, expanding, becoming painful where where pain does not belong. The feeling of falling cripples the air in my throat; whistles of breeze snap beneath my clothing, peeling blood from my chest where the red had glued the fabric. My lungs wheeze air from the raw flesh of my parched throat, throwing phlegm from my mouth and onto the cold concrete when my chest hits the ground like a boulder.
She'd told me I always dreamed more often in the light than in the dark, my mom did. It was a thing I'd never understood, and I chalk that up now to the usual difficulty kids face when made to grasp deep things at that age. She said she could always tell that I was dreaming by the way my eyes went vacant, going dark and reflective so she could watch the imaginations play on the surface of my eyes like a film on a movie screen. The light and heat of the sun are cold and far away, and my skin has lost its touch; my eyes can't see color anymore. The dark in my head at this moment is not the dark seen when someone shuts their eyes to block out the light; it's the kind of darkness that makes it feel as if the light had never existed.
And on this black canvas, the dull ache in my skull is the activity which stirs my dream to life.
I feel the discomfort in my stomach before my body registers anything else at all. While this whole issue is, by nature, peculiar, even the shadowy color of the grass below me is noticed too late, and it's even longer before I realize that I've been tied to it. My face is stuck to the ground where thick soil sticks to my skin and fills my mouth, lining my teeth with an impenetrable wreath of grime. The grass is short, stubby. It's sharp. The sky is more like a tarp pulled over my head, dark, like the sun is behind it and the heavens are far above, making the dead wind taste as if I'm breathing inside a plastic bag. My first instinct is to call for help, but my mouth defies my brain and moves to the words 'where am I? God, please.' The grass is bristle-like under my stomach, vomit forcing its way up my throat, and in this dream I don't have a voice. The rumble of my vocal chords pushes the bile further.
I try to move. It would seem to be the most logical of choices. When I wring my arms from their bindings - try to - the ground throws vines from the soil like they're beanbags at a state fair. Everything clenches on me, pulling my legs and arms and hands so I can use them no longer. My kicks have been stifled and my skin boils with sweat beneath the heat of the stuffy air. I'm pressed into the black meadow and my nose catches whiffs of the sickly mud caked onto my face, the bottoms of my eyes perceiving the soft pink of worms wriggling in the dirt.
When the world changes, it's sudden, but I don't feel the pain as soon as it all happens. The grass against my skin peels into a glittering ocean of razors and knives. I see my own hurt more than I feel it. My mind takes me back to a cool, wet porch, and I see mom telling me all those things about my imagination. I find peace in the lines that border the sweetness in her eyes. And then I see the pain again - I see it in the red that leaks from my skin, skittering onto the needles and staining them an angry color. I see it in the dark, purple skin that bleeds streams around the blade of a butcher knife. When I scream, my saliva tastes like the mud that stops my breaths; the vomit that burns my insides tastes like poison and water and something so heavy, my neck pops at its weight.
The tarp is pulled off.
I'm not where I was. I can prove this by the darkening of the sky and the coldness of the location, but why use such lacking information as evidence when I can just tell you that the elbow of a stranger is pressed into my chest so hard that my lungs can't breathe? My tongue is dry; heavy. I have trouble believing that it belongs to me until I feel the pain of it being pressed against my teeth. A remnant of the dream makes itself known to me when I choke on something cloth-like and coarse - something that limits the noise that can be heard when my mouth, against orders, begins violently cursing. My other arm - the unbitten one; the good one - is pressed into my spine against the sidewalk, and I feel my own grunt of pain bang a mallet on the inside of my chest. My elbow, my hand, my whole arm feels like the gravel on the street has been ripping holes into my skin.
The sky seems almost black, but I can tell that my eyes are defying me. The world is a plain of darkness with splotches of color atop it, making everything look and feel like the messy aftermath of a child's first discovery of the wonders of paint. The darkness is fitting for the temperature of the street, and so the coldness of my skin and body comes almost naturally. I wheeze into the cloth when the elbow digs in again, and it seems to be just what I needed to get a better gauge of the surroundings in my area. Not two feet away from my face, there's a road painted with a yellow stripe that reminds me of a roadrunner in an old cartoon. The tail of a sewer rat vanishes into a gutter. Blood, haze, cold. A wheel, a car, a moon, a shadow of black emitting heat as it looms halfway over me. A walker remains behind the foreign body, its head caved in and its teeth strewn in what looks to be tar.
A murmur consumes the static wind and my arm feels like ice. I'm held down, and when I fight against it, something pushes on my head, digging into my skin with sweaty fingertips. The cold stripe on the skin of my arm reminds me of a doctor's wipe; of antiseptic being pressed to the skin of a child before a shot during a doctor's visit. It's gone for a moment, and the cold numbness of disease piles into my nerves, tingling me with this itch. God. The cold - that stinging antiseptic - is removed by dullness of the bite, and just for a second, my eyelids break open and I spot the nose of the rat again, peeking from the sewer and dying his paw red with blood on the concrete.
My thoughts, in this moment, don't think. As if they struggle to dodge the implications of the haze, words pile into the forefront of my brain and tell me something I should've considered a long time ago: nothing about anything feels right. The dream is gone. The emptiness - the black breathlessness of the world beneath the tarp - it all remains. I know I've seen this place before. It's burnt into the inside of my head.
The voice overhead talks louder now, and the thing that strikes me in the chest with cold fear is how unrecognizable the tone is.
The needle hits me, but no-one speaks a words of comfort. The metal takes the vein deep, driving itself into my flesh in the form of a blade, cold, ripping bone and skin and meat and slamming back down when my body resists its intrusion. Another grunt; another smash. The pain; heat; cold; itch; scream - they all mix together and torment my mind, ripping a scream from my throat that torments my skin and send blood slamming forward to wet the back of my arid tongue. I smell the blood. The stench brews a heavy sickness in my gut. Heat: on the side of my face, in my senses, all inside my mind, uninvited and killing every thought my head can pull from its depths.
I remember always being told that I would be capable of telling the difference between death and unconsciousness whenever either of them happened. Unconsciousness is a sparing, fleeting thing. Blackness and stress kill the color in the world; mute it all like a blanket over a painting at a museum whose final hours have been met. Death comes in sparkles and lights which all wash out reality and dip the present in a thing that looks an awful like the end. In death, pain becomes dread. Dread becomes anxiety. Anxiety becomes stillness. Stillness becomes quiet.
And the quiet is a different thing immeasurable in terms of emotion, becoming something equally indescribable in all of its varieties. It becomes a peace that is foreign to the world and everything inside it; a bliss that shimmers red-white and glows inside and out.
No sound. No moon. No stars lead to me through the night.
"Must be time to turn out the lights, Clem."
"Can they see me?" Bubbling and frantic, yet patient. Too much trust.
"See you?"
"The... w-walkers. Can they see the flashlight?"
"No reason for them not to. But can they see the stars?"
"...Y-yeah. I think."
"Then they'll be too distracted."
"But if they can see the stars, then that means - that means they can see my flashlight, too!" Louder than her voice is the echoing 'click'. Louder than that is the sudden reign of darkness.
"They don't think enough to see it out of all those lights. They don't really understand what they're following." A forefinger traces a trail of heads through the gap in the curtains. It presses a line to the window through which the bumbling black skulls emit deep noises in the dark. "See? They look at the stars and move in one place trying to get 'em. As long as they have a reason, they'll keep on moving. Just like you and I."
"So they won't see me with my flashlight? I'm safe?"
"As long as you're far away from them. You just can't get too close."
Her eyes get larger in the dark. Somehow even through the pulled-tight curtains, the moon manages to reflect inside the brown disks, still and blue. "I can't get too close," she repeats. "And if I do, I'm not safe."
"If you're with me, the walkers can't get you, sweet pea. I'll keep you safe. Even if you get too close."
"Even if I get too close." She says it again in quieter breaths until the words are drowned in sleep. Her chin droops onto her chest.
Even if you get too close.