And in the Morning…
A short story
By
Nathan Ley
Chapter 1
The People Carrier
1“The people carrier takes care of our souls. Our safety barrier won’t let us fall.”
My eyes blink twice. They’re adjusting to the light. I’m stuffed back in a corner and yellow dust is collecting on my lap and clothes. I look to my right and see my friend in the same state. He looks at me and we slowly rise. Using the walls on each side of us, we climb to our feet. Dirt and filth has collected on our jeans, our shoes are scuffed and our shirts are patched and torn all over again.
Above us a line of clothes hangs drying and above that, a smoke-filled blue sky reigns supreme. We hadn’t fallen from that sky. We had fallen from one that was dark with patchy gray clouds and threats of thunder and lightning. We had fallen from the tree, and it was nowhere to be seen now.
The tree was the end of one chapter. It ended one part of the journey. There was nothing more to say about it.
We appear to be in the back of an alley. As we walk forward, my fingers slide across the clay or brick building I had used to help myself up. The alley is short and as we near its mouth, we hear noises. I hear children shouting and running, clothes being dunked in water and rubbed against boards. I hear the chatter of gossiping wives, the sweating of young men and the silence of the wise. Among these sounds, the last I hear are the screams. Shrill and piercing, I just barely make them out above the other commotion. Is it her? Looking to my friend for confirmation, I begin running at his nod.
We burst from the alley looking all around for the origin of the screams. Looking right and then left, I can just make out a young woman. Dammnit, I still can’t tell if it’s her.
Her screams attack my concentration and imprint themselves upon my memory. She seems to be stuck on something. I can’t tell what, but that something keeps getting further and further from me. She’s throwing her arms out pleading with anyone to help her. “Please,” she wails, “Please someone help me.”
Do I recognize her voice?
I run towards her, my friend following closely behind. “Help her,” I shout. “Someone grab her arms!” My feet pound against the dusty pavement as the girl continues to slip away. Her arms are flailing about, searching for any form of help. No one helps, no one moves. I shout again for someone to grab her arms, but no one seems to notice except the girl. Her eyes scan and find mine still trying to catch up. Why can’t I recognize her?
Her eyes plead with mine, and my pace grows faster and the pounding of my heart grows harder. Catch up. Catch up. Catch up.
Her eyes are filled with desperation and fear. Damnit what the hell is wrong with these people?
The soles of my shoes begin to slip against the pavement and my breathing is getting ragged and short. She’s slipping away, disappearing from sight. Her eyes beg mine once more before she’s gone forever.
My mind presses forward, wanting to continue the chase, but my body doesn’t understand. The saliva in my mouth has disappeared, my lungs are caving in and my legs have tangled themselves. I fall to my knees still mouthing tattered sentences for someone to help her. My head falls back into my friend’s arms and my eyes roll back in my head. I black out from lack of oxygen and all anyone does is stare.
. . .
“It’s the devil you know.”
Swimming through layers and planes of consciousness and questions, my eyes open. The room is dark and stale. The air is coarse and filled with the same yellow dust that now coats my clothes and body. I see a shadow of someone rocking in the corner and as my eyes adjust, I can only see their outline.
“Excuse me,” I ask without attempting to sit up.
“It comes and it goes. Much like our own evils.”
My eyes aren’t adjusted yet, and I can’t see this person’s mouth move. My body is against one wall while my head is nestled up against another. I think it’s made of clay. Although it probably isn’t, I imagine it to be very much like a pueblo style house. There’s no clay oven, but I am lying on a clay floor. I don’t really know anything about the pueblos besides what I faintly paid attention to in high school; the homes were built on top of each other, they were generally one roomed and they were hot as hell.
I’m sweating now. The chair and its occupant are diagonal from me, and in this small four cornered room, there can be no one else. In fact, I can’t make out a door anywhere. Remaining calm I try to sit up.
“People like to talk about all kinds of things. They like to proclaim themselves and gratify themselves in the face of situations they will likely never face. The truth is, no one knows how they will react at any given time or in the different situations they find themselves in. Most of the time, we react in the complete opposite manner that we have boasted and spend the rest of our time rationalizing our cowardice. The true cowards spend all of their time explaining themselves to everyone they meet, while those who are lost retreat inside themselves and spend all of their time fighting with their own feelings. These are the people that will risk everything to understand who they are. Unfortunately, something is always lost. Whether it be our ideals, our integrity, our ambitions, our fear, or our friends.
The thing talking blinks and I lay back down.
“We get caught up in things. We follow things. And we regret things. Things are not what or who we really are, but they are what and who we decide to be at that particular time and place. They come and go. Things. Most of the time we follow them in large groups. Some of us in full belief and some of us just tagging along. Other times, we don’t follow them in order to believe that we are unique or special in that aspect. We are only lying to ourselves. Either way, we are usually lying to ourselves.”
It pauses and I close my eyes.
“To truly believe in something is all we can ever hope to do. Whether it be the most sinister evil or the greatest good, we should always believe in something. True beliefs are hard to come by though. We are influenced by too much.”
What the fuck is this thing talking about?
“Something is coming for you. It comes for you every night. You wake in terror of it and in cold sweat of it. You fear it the most and yet you turn your back and close your eyes to it. You are a slave to it. It controls everything you do and everything you want.”
Out of the chair now, the figure comes closer to me. I sit up. Eyes wide soaked in sweat. It has grown huge and towering, changing shape and form. Before my eyes its nose burns to a crisp black and begins to flake off its face exposing two black slits. It runs its hands through its hair, coming away with wet clumps of hair and skin. Slowly it begins to melt, revealing dark black and brown scales all over its body. The thing’s arms have broken and contorted themselves down at its sides. Its legs have elongated and begun to twist around each other. A giant tongue unfolds from its mouth and like an old cartoon, envelopes itself around my head causing me to scream and seizure in horror. In return, it lets forth a piercing scream that quickly changes pitch and volume into a steady hiss. Its skin soaks in a pool at its feat as its arms disappear into its body and the realization again causes me to scream.
As the serpent shrinks to normal size and begins to snake up my body, I can do nothing but watch.
…
I wake up in a room. Not the same room, but one much like it. A blanket covers me and my head is resting on a pillow. I’m lying with my arms at my side and my face looking toward the ceiling, as if someone had just laid me down in this position.
I hear laughter coming from somewhere. Outside most likely considering this is a one room shack. Or pueblo home. Again, I have no idea.
I sit up. I’m sweating again, but in this place how could you not? I stand up. I walk toward the door and open it. Outside the sun is shinning and my friend is running around in the street with the children kicking a crudely made soccer ball. The children are nameless and faceless. They populate every town and city everywhere. They are the unwanteds. The vagabonds. The orphans. Their joy is not that of having loving parents or bountiful friends. Their joy is being alive and they seem happy so I stand and watch. After a while I can stand it no longer and I join in. I’m sore and tired but it feels good to pump oxygen into my lungs and laugh with the children. There is no object to this game. No need to score or keep the ball from anyone. The pleasure is simple and easy. Kick the ball around, dribble it, and run around. Pass to the others around you and just keep the ball always moving. The children are happy and in this moment my friend and I are free from our journey and able to bask in this moment. Imprint it on our memories, take mental pictures and enjoy it. It never lasts as long as we’d like.
We play with the children for what could have been days or what could have been only a few minutes. You never really know in this place. We never tire physically or of the game and it never loses its simple nature. All I know is that something is changing quickly. The ball is moving among all of us when the children suddenly leave. Their faces grew somber as if they could feel something coming. They broke off and each ran into a different shack, closing the door behind them. I realize this, but my friend doesn’t. He’s too caught up in the happiness. He’s soaking this moment for all that its worth. And why shouldn’t he? After all he’s through, and all he’s lost. I’m still looking for mine, but he found his and lost it. I know why I feel so happy. I feel happy because he is me. In this moment and every moment before and after he is and will be me. He is the best and worst parts of me. He carries our weight. We’ve lost it all before and it drained him. We won’t be able to live through it again. His happiness is contagious, because I know that I am happy. But happiness doesn’t last. I know we’ll lose her again, or she’ll change again or we’ll just simply wake up. Either way, happiness precedes sadness, so I’ll soak in this happiness while it lasts.
The shadow is fairly big, but it betrays the enormity of the object it belongs to. It was preceded again by sounds of laughter, but the laughter was different. I can’t tell you how it was different because I don’t know. It was just different. As the object came closer, the laughter grew stronger. It moved as a man would move and I realized that it had legs. It was walking at a steady pace and it continued to grow larger and larger as it approached.
It’s close now and I can make out what it is. It’s a large man and on top of his shoulders are people. Not people standing on his shoulders in any kind of order, but more like a soup of people. The man’s arms extend upwards and disappear in this tangle of people. This tangle of arms, legs, eyes, ears, mouths, torsos, noses, fingers toes and hair. All of it a giggling laughing mass of people.
My friend is still dribbling the soccer ball in circles and running around when the mass comes upon us. He must have sense nothing wrong with its laughter; either that, or he’s so caught up in his own that he doesn’t sense anything at all. With the mass laughing and him laughing, he begins to circle it, still looking entranced and child-like. The arms and hands within the pile start reaching out to him and call for him to join them. The pile and him are dancing around each other, each seemingly happy. The arms continue to reach for him and before I’m able to understand what’s wrong, he’s grabbed hold of one of the arms. He’s climbing the pile when the laughing stops and I feel something start to crush inside me.
The people are all staring like they had when I ran after the girl. This is when I realize it. This was that thing. The thing that carried her away. My friend is still climbing when I yell after him. Looking back at me and smiling, he starts to become part of the tangle.
So I run again. I run straight towards the thing and jump. His head is disappearing and all I can see is his arm and outstretched hand. At the height of my jump I clasp his hand in both of mine. My body swings and slams into the mass and my left hand comes free of his. Using my momentum I swing my left hand back up and grab his again. The whole mass has started moving and is back on its steady pace; almost as if it knew I wasn’t going to win. My feet fight, trying to find a grip and balance on arms and faces. Taking each step at a time, I position my feet in front of my chest on the bridge of a nose and left-cheek of an ass. I bend my legs and pull at my friends arm with all of my strength. You’d think in this place I could have powers, but I fucking don’t.
His head starts to emerge from the pile and I can feel myself making slow progress. His eyes are looking at me but seeing nothing. I scream at him to try and push off with his legs. My own legs are being grabbed and scraped and even bitten, but in times like this not much else matters but the thing in front of you. I can feel my friend finding some footing and I can just make out his torso. Blood runs down his chest mixed with sweat and small pieces of skin. Almost all of his body is snaking out now and only one leg is left to grab, but now his eyes have glazed over and he’s no longer pushing off. A lone hand is holding his ankle so with my last piece of strength, I kick it and pull.
We land hard on the ground. His body is limp. I cradle his head in my arms.
“There there, there there.”
He’s breathing but not responding. I don’t have water to throw on him, nothing to comfort him. I frantically look around.
The town had disappeared. The yellow dust was gone. The day was gone. We had landed on a paved road. It looked like a lone highway. Plains of grass on either side of us and nothing else for miles. So it goes I thought. I held my friend in my arms and stood up. Looking behind me at what should have been that maybe pueblo town but wasn’t, I started walking. Toward nothing.
Chapter 2
Strangers
2“Strangers on this road we are on. We are not two, we are one.”
She called him at 3 a.m. He answered hazily.
“I just got out of the hospital.” She started to cry.
He sat up in bed.
“What happened?”
“I was turning onto Barker and I didn’t see a car coming from the right. It t-boned me and I spun around two or three times. All I remember is screaming.”
“Are you ok,” he asked.
“They had to cut off all my clothes in the ambulance.”
She started crying again.
He didn’t know what to say.
“They told me my hip came out of place during the accident, and they had to pop it back in. I have some minor cuts on my face and body, but I have to go back in tomorrow to make sure I don’t have any internal bleeding. I’m on crutches now, but it’s hard to walk.”
He tried to stay calm and say something comforting. It seemed to only upset her more.
“The accident was my fault. Do you understand that? It was my fault. I should be dead.”
Silence.
“I’m coming home,” he told her.
“No,” she said.
“Yes.”
She didn’t reply, but he could hear her breathing on the other line.
“Try and sleep tonight, I’ll go to the hospital with you tomorrow.”
“Ok,” she said.
“Ok.”
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you too,” he said.
She hung up the phone.
He sat on his bed and stared. And then he started to cry. He cried because she was still alive and safe. He cried because of what could be. He cried because he didn’t know what else to do. And then he tried to cry away his guilt.
He didn’t tell anyone he was leaving. He threw some clothes, his computer and a toothbrush in his backpack and walked out the door. If people needed him, they would call him.
He looked at his reflection in the driver’s side window and wiped his face. The drive was four hours. He had plenty of time to hate himself.
The roads were dark but empty. It was just him. He turned on some music, but he wasn’t listening.
He had been trying to rationalize the decision for weeks. He had tried to tell himself over and over that it was the distance. He needed to see someone every day, and be able to share more than just one weekend a month with that person. He tried to tell himself that sight was the essential element in a relationship. He knew it was bullshit. He knew if you really loved someone none of that mattered. He knew that. He just didn’t know why he couldn’t love her all the time.
He had also tried to tell himself that he faced too much temptation. Again, bullshit. Like she didn’t? She loved him. That should be enough.
As the curvy roads turned to stretches of long plains, his mind drifted.
Would she look the same? Of course she would. He saw her wavy long brown hair swept across one side of her tan face. He imagined small cuts on her forehead and under her eyes. He saw her straining on crutches, her long legs bent and weak. He saw her face grimace under the pain and her eyes grow sad. Why was she looking at him like that? Did she know how he felt or thought he felt? Did she know what he had been planning to do?
His head started to hurt and he tried to focus on the road. He couldn’t.
On the day his best friend had gotten in a horrible accident and almost died, he had been planning on ending his relationship with her completely. He had been planning to stop talking to her completely. Why? Because he didn’t know if he was in love with her. Because she was so good to him and he didn’t know if he could be to her. He was selfish and he hated himself for it.
He turned the radio up partly to stay awake and partly to try and not think.
3“I will follow you wherever you go, if your offered hand is still open to me.”
He pulled into his house around 8 a.m.
He woke his parents and told them the news.
. . .
She called and woke him up.
“Do you want to give me a ride to the hospital?”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he answered.
He picked her up and neither spoke.
She looked at him. She could see the guilt in his eyes.
“I’ve known for a little while. You’ve been different. I knew it was coming. I need you to understand something though. I need you to understand that I need you right now. You’re all I have, and I need you to stop being selfish for once in your life, and be there for me.”
They drove in silence the rest of the way.
Chapter 3
Mr. Ambulance Driver
4“I’m not a real survivor, ‘cause I’m wishing that I was the one that wasn’t going to be here anymore.”
Walking with my friend in my arms, I find myself looking out at a Midwestern spring thunderstorm. The sky above me is dark blue and the clouds black. Just about ready to burst with rain. To the left across the plains, I can see that it has already started. To my right, a tornado is forming. Straight ahead is my rain. Waiting.
My friend is still unconscious. His eyes are open, but they’re pure white. Glazed over and seeing nothing. His breathing is slow and he feels light in my arms. It was strange to see him this way. He’s my protector, the strong one. Now it’s my turn to be strong. To carry on and understand. But I don’t understand. Yet.
Cracks of thunder and flashes of lighting light up the sky around me. I need to find cover for the night. Usually you can count on a barn or some broken down house to be found around here, but as of now there’s nothing.
I take another step and feel the first raindrops. Each successive step brings more and more until it begins falling steadily around me. I look behind me and see an open road and no rain. So it goes.
It’s a few minutes before I hear it. It isn’t the smack of rain on the pavement and it isn’t the scuffing of my feet shuffling back and forth. It’s a siren and it’s starting to get closer. I look behind me again. An ambulance, its sirens blaring, is zigzagging down the road towards me.
As it comes closer, I start to see that it’s covered in all sorts of things, most prominently blood and sparkles. The windshield is splattered with bugs - bugs that had apparently eaten a big meal just before flying themselves straight into this vehicle of medical transportation. Besides the blood and sparkles, the outside of this ambulance appears to have cold cuts of beef and chicken nailed to its sides. I secretly hope this is the reason for all the blood. On the back are magnets or bumper stickers that display nothing. No message of any sort. Only some trickling blood and interspersed sparkles.
It screeches to a stop cutting off the road in front of me and the driver leans across the passenger seat and rolls down the window.
“Get in!” He screams. “It’s almost caught us.”
I look behind me puzzled. I don’t see anything. If anything though, we needed a ride so I pile my friend in and climbed in after. Before my door is closed, he’s thrown the vehicle in drive and we’re tearing down the road straight into what looks like the heart of a storm. He turns to me.
“Did you know that Komodo Dragons, Polar Bears and Tigers are the only animals on earth that if they smell the scent of man, will instinctively hunt it?”
“Is that what we are driving away from?” I ask.
“Good god no,” he screeches and lookes genuinely appalled at my question. “It’s something far worse than that.”
Not wanting to know what something worse could be, I let his answer pass.
“What’s with the raw meat and chicken?”
“To attract the Komodo Dragons, Polar Bears and Tigers.” He answers.
“But I thought you said that they instinctively hunt man?”
“They can’t smell us inside the ambulance. The beef and chicken are just for the initial attraction.”
His answers are beginning to scare me so I decide to take a look at the man I’m riding with. He’s not dressed like a paramedic or even a normal person. He’s wearing a bluish gray suit, with a white satin undershirt that is open at the last button. The collar is pointed with no buttons. He’s wearing beaten up casual Asics shoes that are all white with a blue and red logo. His hair is black, with streaks of white, curly and in somewhat of an afro. Sparkles and what might have been remnants of silly string are strewn inside and on top of the mop that bears some resemblance to hair. His left eye is blue and it seems to be smiling at me while the other is black and searching. He has a small goatee and mustache that’s bushy like his hair and I’m not sure, but I think some blood is around the corners of his mouth.
“Don’t worry, it’s not human blood,” he reassures me.
What a weight to be lifted. I make sure my friend is close to me and decide to engage him in conversation in order to take his mind off the possibility of eating us.
“I noticed you had a bunch of blank bumper stickers on the back, why don’t they say anything?”
“They are all of the ideas that I haven’t had yet. When I get an idea I take a blank bumper sticker down, write the idea on it and put it in a bag. My bag of ideas so to speak. A man only gets so many ideas in his lifetime, so I think they should be saved so he always knows where they are. Unfortunately though, like all ideas, some work and some don’t. If you’ll notice, there are only about twenty stickers left back there. I’m about halfway done with my life, so that seems to be about right to me.”
“But what about keeping your ideas in your head? Aren’t you afraid that someone could steal them while their in that bag?”
“Keep them in my head? That’s where I’d keep them if I really wanted them to get lost. Nothing stays put in there. It moves around way too much for me to keep track of. I tried keeping them in there when I was young and I lost all of them. Some of them were really good too. I learned my lesson though. Nothing important should ever be kept in a mind.”
I don’t agree with that, but for the time being, I’ll keep my mouth shut and try to make it to where ever we were going alive.
“I’m sure there’s a lot that you don’t agree with. But you’re wrong about almost everything,” he says this without actually looking at me. His tone is cold and although he hasn’t said he’s going to kill me, I feel it. Up far ahead I can see another car on the road and I decide that whether he knows it or not, my friend and I will be switching cars as soon as we catch up.
“So where all have you been?” I ask.
“Who knows in this place?” He replies.
I have to agree.
. . .
As we start catching up to the car in front of us, the storm seems to sense it, and begins moving faster than us. I look at the ambulance driver. He’s sweating and his foot is jamming the pedal hard to the floor.
“Don’t we want the storm to pass us?” I ask.
“No. We are running from the calm. There is nothing more detrimental to man than a comfort zone. A man can never know the true nature of his character if he is always serene. If everything is perfect and there is no conflict, man becomes a waste. He’s not meant to sit and be a vegetable, he is meant to test his limits and fight. What he fights for is up to him, but if he finds a comfort zone and stays in it, he has given up and is a looter.”
I hate Ayn Rand, but no need to tell him now.
The car in front of us has stopped and so have we. The storm has passed us now and we are sitting in complete calm.
“Why did we stop? What about the storm?”
“That wasn’t the storm you had to face.”
He turns towards me now and I see an attribute of his that I had missed earlier. Two of his teeth have grown longer and are coming to a point at the end. Blood stains were clearly visible on the ends of those glowing incisors. Quickly, his mouth flies forward and so does my fist.
In retrospect, it was a bad decision on my part.
His teeth sink deep into my knuckles and remain there as I throw my legs up and into his chest. He slams back into the car door taking chunks of my hand with him. Recovering from the blow, he lunges for my friend. I’m able to kick him in the face, but his hand swings out and catches me in the nose. My eyes water and I’m temporarily stunned. He lashes out again with bitten finger nails that scratch the skin underneath my eyes. What in gods name are the people in the car in front of us doing?
I swing blindly with my left hand and hit him weakly in the chest. He grabs my arm and I’m able to kick him in the chest again. As he’s reeling from the kick, I lean over, open the passenger door and pushed my friend’s body out onto the pavement, hoping that now the car in front will notice. I begin to scramble out myself when I feel piercing pain in my ankle. His teeth are deep in my ankle, and trying to tear a sizeable chunk of skin away. I swing my left leg up and planted a kick right on his forehead. With the time I have, I notice the car is still on. I hit him twice in the nose and push my foot against the pedal. As he sinks his teeth into my shoulder, we slam against the car in front of us, and she turns around.
She’s been in the back seat. I wasn’t able to tell earlier, but now I’m sure it’s her. I scream out her name in pain and desperation. She’s looking me straight in the eyes and pleading. My mind goes blank. After all of this time, I’m finally near her. The man next to her places his hand on the back of her head and slams it into the seat in front of her. The car in front of us begins to move.
With his teeth still in my shoulder and now his hands scratching at my eyes, I keep my foot on the pedal. I move my body back and forth into the seat trying to gain momentum and knock him out or at least throw him off, but every time we hit the seat his mouth engulfs more of my skin. The car in front of us is screaming forward, with us in hot pursuit, but how close I can’t say because his hand still somewhat covers my eyes. I need to see how fast we were going.
In a last ditch effort, I swing my right elbow back and strike him right in the temple. His teeth come loose with a good amount of my skin, but at least he’s off. He’s shaken so with the last bits of strength I have, I try to push him off to the side. I don’t have much luck, but I can see now. I wish that I couldn’t though.
The car in front of us has put some distance between us, but for reasons completely unknown to me, it’s come to a stop. In the maybe 2 seconds I have before impact, I see that we’re going seventy miles an hour and that I don’t have a seat belt on. I grab the next best thing.
We slam into the other car and as the part of my body that isn’t being shielded by the ambulance driver’s body crashes through the windshield, I hope she isn’t in the car. I hit something and lost consciousness.
. . .
I wake up and see both of the mangled cars. I’m pretty sure they’re cars. The one that had been in front of us was now covered with stray meat and sparkles and well, the back of the ambulance was there. The ambulance driver was off to my left. From what I can make out, his head has been stomped on. I look over to my right and see my friend picking through the wreckage. He comes over to me holding a bag.
“Is she alive?”
“Yes, they took her that way.”
He’s pointing straight in front of me.
“You need rest,” he says
He grabs a small piece of one of the side mirrors. I look. I’m cut and covered in blood.