-Chapter 7-









For part of the night ten days after his own death he lay completely naked in the bed in his bedroom with its deep grey wall, wood flooring, and grey throw rug at his home, in a coma like state, his body temperature steadily decreased, his blood barely circulated, he drew deep shallow breaths in small intermissions. Occasionally, his vitals just stopped all together for long periods of time spanning from ten minutes to a half an hour. During these states of "redeath", his body's cells resumed their barely noticeable functions at a very much decreased pace. Performing tasks of making his body gather energy for the next time of awakening, minimal healing, and cellular mutations.

He was healing, but not in the instant ways that various cartoon characters of Japanese origin perform. Some advanced healing, but only for the vital portions like his brain, which was now being rapidly patched up and restored.

But mental recovery was not being as rapidly restored as his physical regeneration. When awake, heartbeat and breathing close to normal, he was rarely fully alert. During the short periods when he possessed about the same intellectual capacity he knew before he had died, he was sharply and depressingly aware that he was functioning in a mechanical state, with frequent states of unconsciousness and even sometimes into a confused condition.

He had strange and even sometimes undesirable thoughts.

Sometimes he believed himself to be a young boy again, recently let out of school to face nice warm summer days, but sometimes he recognized that he is actually three years away from being twenty. Sometimes he did not know exactly where he was, especially when he was traveling on foot towards his home, with no familiar thoughts or memories of his own past life; overcame by confusion, feeling lost, sensing that he may be forever lost; he had to stop occasionally to an area covered in darkness until panic passed. Sometimes he thought he had killed people, though he could not remember who, then briefly remember but went away from the memory, not only went away from it but convinced himself that it was not a memory but a morbid fantasy, for of course, he was incapable of cold-blooded murder. Of course. But at times he was deep in thought of how exciting and satisfying it would be to murder someone, anyone, and everyone. But he quickly urged himself that his now completely deranged subconscious, due to the death of him, was creating these morbid fantasies and wished out of the severe brain damage he had suffered at the moment of the accident which caused him to lose his life.

He saw strange things, too.

Sometimes he saw people that could not possibly be in the same room: a girl that he liked that was now deceased, people who had ridiculed him throughout his life.

Now, as dawn slowly covered the city of Alucemet, Mike Arevir rose from the state of unconsciousness, groaned slightly for a while, then louder, finally waking up soon after. He sat up on the edge of his bed. His mouth was stale; he tasted ashes. His head was filled to an immeasurable extremity of pain. He touched his broken skull, finding that it is no worse than before; his skull wasn't coming apart. The faint morning sunlight entered through the window above the sliding glass door that faced the street and through small slits in the shade that covered the sliding glass door, and the small lights above his bed was on; not enough light to eliminate the shadows covering the room, but enough to damage his now extremely sensitive eyes. Watery and hot, his eyes had somehow denounced the tolerance for brightness since he had come back to life from the steel table in the morgue, as if darkness was his only environment, as if he were not fitted to live in a world exposed to either sun or man-made light.

Putting both hands to his head as if to dispel the abnormal drowsiness he was now feeling, he stumbled out of bed, onto his feet. He felt a strong urge to eat. That was a good sign, a good indication that he was alive and that his now known life is not a layer of Hell, at least more than dead; he took to heart that biological need. He followed this urge towards his bedroom door, where he was then overcome by an emotion.

He suddenly started to feel an overwhelming anger, shortly into rage, for intentions and reasons absolutely unknown to him. Anything he thought about seemed to lead to rage, as if it were the most inevitable and important of all other emotions.

A computer printer on top of a computer desk near the bedroom door near him was within his reach. He took it with both hands, lifted it above his head, and threw it across the room. The plastic casing of the machine was surprisingly instantly shattered against the wall opposite of him; various inside mechanics of the printer seem to explode out of it, rebounding with the sound of glass shards against the ground, clattering to the floor.

The thrill of destruction that shivered through him was of a dark intensity. Before his death, he had been a preserver of anything electronic, and a rising in skill artist with a deep ambition to make a living out of sketching and drawing, but following his death he had become a life form that thrived only on destruction.

What am I doing? He asked himself as he started to pick up a chair to hurl it at a wall, what is happening to me? What am I becoming? Why am I alive again?

All these unanswerable questions filled his severely damaged brain, causing an extreme strain on his thought process, inputting one word and one only. "Kat...." he mumbled incoherently as he cowered on the hard wood floor of his demolished bedroom, "Kat.... Kat..... Kat....."