When faced with the option of doing homework and writing fanfics, one must choose the good path, the righteous path.

In this chapter, Johnny goes crazy, and other unrelated crap happens, or doesn't happen, depending on how you look at it. Review the fruits of my labor and you will be awarded with silent acknowledgement.

----silec

Johnny's diary lay in the otherwise empty trunk. It was one of the few things he had thought to take when he left home. He had hoped that he would not need to bring anything along with him, as a symbol of the casting aside of his human shell, but he had a strange affinity for the book, and so it became his sole companion on the long and lonely ride. However, once on the road and deep into his mission, Johnny found that he had no inclination to write in his die-ary any longer. In fact, it began to develop into a burden eating away at his integrity. Every time he saw it, it filled him with a burning hatred. The object just lay there, unmoved, beckoning him to open it up and unleash the floodgates of his soul, or at least just look into what had once been there. Nny's mounting rejection of the book and its constant invitations only made him beat himself up more about the die-ary's presence within his single means of transportation. It wasn't as if he needed to see his past anymore.

In addition to the book, the thing within Nny had dropped all the false pretenses of familiar faces and happy memories, and now had resorted to much more unpleasant methods of persuasion. Every day, new opportunities presented themselves for that creature to once again torture him. It no longer waited patiently for chances to plug itself into his psyche. The faces of his victims now floated into his vision, clouding his judgement in the worst possible scenarios. The spells of nausea were now much more violent, as well. Sometimes Johnny feared that he would be run off the road from an aching belly.

One upside to the new arrangement, he rationalized, was that it no longer spoke to him in that sweet, yet eerie voice. The victim's pleading faces were enough to illustrate its point. It was trying to turn him back into the old Johnny, the one that was a slave to people, to urges. He would always tell himself that that couldn't happen, that he was impervious to such things, at such a distant point in his objective. But now, he wasn't quite so sure.

Late in a black, starless night, Johnny found himself thinking, again. It was a despicable trait of the feeling organism, to think. "I must rid myself of this one, too..." he muttered inaudibly under sagging eyelids and hunched shoulders. His headlights had blown out over a week ago, and he was forced to squint at the road ahead whenever the sun went down. He was surprised he hadn't been arrested yet. Come to think of it, he considered, there's a lot of shit I'm surprised I'm not in jail for. "There I go, thinking again." He tried to laugh, but laughter, which had once come so easily to Johnny, was now reduced to a high-pitched, vaguely amused squeak.

Dark curtains covered his fatigued eyes every now and then. Johnny fought against the rising need to sleep. "How long, I wonder," he said, his speech heavy and slurred, "How long since I last slept. A week now, possibly."

Smirking mischievously, he swung his head around to face the empty seat beside him, and put a thin arm around the back of the head cushion. "Wha joo think, Devi?" he asked, his voice even more unintelligible now. He was delirious. Perhaps from the lack of rest, perhaps from his awful diet over the past few months; in any event, he was not entirely sane. Johnny kept a hard stare on the empty seat, still driving, seeming to listen to a silent voice. After several seconds, he threw back his head and cackled wickedly.

The force of his laughter was so extreme that his seatbelt gave way, causing him to tumble onto the passenger's seat in a giggling wreck. Keeping one foot on the accelerator, he turned over onto his back and gestured at random spots on the moth-eaten, greenish polyester roof of the car. "The stars, Devi..." he whispered, tears streaming down his sallow cheek. "Such an amazing illusion..."

The highway was illuminated in the light of a blazing heat. The tremendous noise of the crash brought police to the scene within a short amount of time. A man was found within the wreckage, crouched in the fetal position in the driver's seat. He was badly beaten, but he appeared to be still alive.

When they shone a light on Nny's face, he mustered the energy to crack a single eyelid open. "Hey, you!" the owner of the flashlight shouted. Johnny opened the other eye with a great amount of effort. "Yeah, you! Was anyone else in the car with you?" Johnny licked the blood from his mouth. He paused, seeming unsure. "No..." he said, his voice cracked. "No, just me..."

"You sure?" Sirens could be heard in the distance, and blue and red lights echoed around the empty canyon. Johnny shook his head, just a little. "Devi's gone now..." he added. "She was here, but..." He paused, to think.

"She's gone..."