Death

I changed my books from locker to backpack. Put the textbooks I didn’t need into the little metal space, put the books I wanted into my pack. Grabbed the earbuds that would be confiscated if seen in class. School policy.

I picked up the novel I’d laid on the bottom of the locker, and stuffed furtively into the smallest pocket of my backpack. I can’t remember what it was. Dune I think, but around that time I was on a vampire kick. No, that must have been it, because I can remember stuffing it in my backpack before anyone could see it. It was what they call a “bodice ripper,” the majority of vampire novels being romances. The cover featured a woman, corset pulled aside almost to the nipple, while some male figure, given much less prominence than the naked breast; began to sink his teeth into her neck.

That might have been ambiguous enough, to a classmate who wasn’t acquainted with the conventions of romance cover art. I could blow it off as a horror novel. The title however was in pink, and curly cursive. No ambiguity there.

Backpack zipped, and secret safe, I closed the locker and walked for the bus. Through the press of students, down the stairs outside the front door, earbuds in, ignoring the crowd. I tried to get lost in my own world. A little island of calm in a sea of voices. People shouting at each other, calling names, waving, pointing. It was Friday, and this was high school, the topic of discussion among the masses was how drunk they were going to get over the weekend.

The prevailing opinion seemed to be, ‘so fucking drunk, bro, you don’t even know.’

The allure was lost on me. As a theoretical it seemed interesting to go to a party where alcohol was feature. As a practical, I didn’t get invited to parties.

I walked slow. In a few weeks I’d learned to time it so that I could be at the door as soon as my bus showed up. That way I didn’t have to wait, and try not to look like I was waiting alone.

Up the steps of the bus, into a seat near the middle. The cool kids sat at the back, but the back was where the bus bounced most, and got in the way of my reading. And I wasn’t cool enough to sit back there. The back of the bus wasn’t the kind of place where you could show up and fit in. You had to deserve to be there.

The front of the bus was where the kids who were too cool to be cool sat. Good students, with blond hair and expensive shirts. The ones who had a future, and cared about it.

I was a middle of the bus kid. A guy who didn’t have a crowd, and convinced himself he didn’t want one. Willing to let the world pass by while he read a book. Other kids had learned that sitting with me wouldn’t bring conversation, and I was left alone.

Once a pretty girl sat in the seat next to me. She talked to me, but didn’t talk about what I was reading (Lloyd Alexander), or what I was listening to (Beats Antique), and instead asked me about what I did after class. It was hard to have a conversation about it, because I didn’t do anything after class. I tried to tell her that I played a badass medic when I felt like it, and I mained Blitzcrank, when I wasn’t turned off by the community. She asked if I had a girlfriend, and terrified of the implication that I might be a loser, I responded that I did.

I didn’t.

After a bus ride of failed communication I got off at my stop, said goodbye, and was ignored.

She never sat next to me again. Sometimes I wished she would so I could try to figure out what I had done wrong. Most of the time I dreaded that someone else might try to sit next to me and keep engaging me in conversations I couldn’t relate to, until I died of boredom on the bus.

The bus driver waited three minutes for stragglers, before closing the door. She did it in a way that made it clear she wasn’t opening it for Jesus himself, should he have missed the last ride to Jerusalem. Jesus was going to have to ride an ass, just like he had last time.

Then she slammed the bus in gear, and took off. I switched play lists to something ambient, I was really in to Digital Daggers at the time, and they had kind of a tragic, angry, Lost-Boys-sort-of-vampire vibe. It didn’t fit with the romance, but it was good enough. I opened the book and found my page and got back into it.

I was deep into the part where the protagonist has discovered her love interest is a vampire. It’s my favorite part of a vampire novel. The author decides what legends about vampires to keep and what to throw out. “Sure they’re the living undead,” she (or he) says to herself, “but being killed by garlic would be inconvenient to the part of the story where they order in Italian. I better leave that one out. The spaghetti really ties the scene together.”

When you think about it for a second, every part of the existence of vampires is equally unbelievable. Immunity to mirrors just requires more creativity from the author, and usually gets tossed out the window. “Oh,” says the vampire in the novel, “You believe that trash about socks? That’s silly! Take it from me, a creature that catches fire when exposed to sunlight!”

It’s hilarious every time.

That’s why I missed my stop by three, and when I got through the scene in the book and looked up, realized my mistake.

I got off the bus, lying to myself all the way down the stairs, that this was good, and I wasn’t disappointed in my day. I was going home, it would only take another 15 minutes. I had a little homework to do, and then I could read or lounge around for most of the weekend.

It was late September, and the school year hadn’t taken hold. Most of the freshmen were still finding friends. I had transferred in when my dad got a job there, so I didn’t have anyone who would be ignoring me this weekend. But I’d been around this neighborhood before, and I knew my way home. It wouldn’t be long. I’d cut through the alley connecting Florida and 13th and shave off some time.

I walked as fast as I could, feeling the heavy backpack on my shoulders, and wondering what I would have for dinner and stopping dead in my tracks as I turned the corner inside the alley.

It was sort of an industrial sector out here. Car mechanics, and people that did things with glass, and boxes, and laser cutters. The alley made a sharp right angle, and then came to a dead end, so only the cars that needed to get into the shops around it used it. But there was a narrow drainage path at the far end a pedestrian could fit through.

There was a group of people clustered in the alleyway, gathered around something that looked like a metal trash can with rods stuck through it. Because of the angle I came up within five feet of them, and tried to figure out the most polite way to get around whatever they were doing there.

I’m good at noticing things, and while I was stopped there I began to notice some things that were… alarmingly impossible.

They looked like they worked construction, but each one of them was wearing a suit coat and nice trousers, with snow boots. They all had winter hats on.

That wasn’t impossible.

What was impossible is that their arms and legs would occasionally ‘clip’ out of their clothing. One of them would bend his (its) elbow, and I would see the joint, and their skin, poke through a previously solid object. Then it would disappear inside it again.

Having noticed that, I moved on to noticing that their arms and legs were weirdly out of proportion. Upper arms too long, forearms too short. Knees in places they shouldn’t have knees. Just how many knees does a person have anyway? Not that many, I’m sure.

Then one turned away from me, and I saw that he didn’t have a head, just a face. Under the hat was empty space, while a face, like a mask, floated in front of the hat.

No it wasn’t a mask, like their head was invisible. This one was wearing an ushanka, and with his back to me, I could see the inside of his face. His eyes were attached to something back inside the hat, and his tongue went down the back of his throat. I could see the inside of his mouth, and if I had thought about it at all, I would have thought, ‘so that’s what teeth look like from the back.’

I didn’t think that. This is what I thought, oh crap. Oh shit. Oh fuck. These are impossible aliens like those Alex Jones freaks are always talking about. Oh Jesus, oh Zues, oh Ishtar, oh Abrahamic god. One of you might be real, and I promise to sacrifice a goat, or whatever, to your glory, because I need to be saved from this unholy shit.

Which is a lot to think in just a few seconds.

I don’t know if I was breathing too heavy, or what, but at some sound, they all stopped, like startled deer. Then, as a single unit, ever one stood straight and turned to face me.

Very carefully, like nothing at all was happening, I walked as far around the group as I could, keeping my eyes on them all the time. I’m sure I looked like a harmless scared kid. Who am I going to tell about the freaktures in the alley way. This kind of crap would get laughed off of reddit!

With my face toward them, I made a large path around, and then backed toward the culvert, and the freedom of the real world. Without moving their legs, their bodies moved to follow me.

Then one of them made a mistake. It was standing on top of the metal thing, and turning with the others, and suddenly cried out and fell.

Sideways.

It fell down sideways.

Like gravity didn’t work on the thing, it was flailing its arms and pinwheeling as it fell, parallel to the ground, and right at me.

I held my arms up bracing for some kind of impact, when it just disappeared, a few feet away from where it would have bowled me over.

My only memory then, is one that still wakes me up in the middle of the night. Blinding pain.

#

I first felt a drop in my pelvis. Like a weight had traveled down the trunk of my body, and landed on my solar plexus. The shock wave traveled down my legs, and I and felt my knees shift, twist and give way. Dropping onto them, onto the pavement, hurt. I barely noticed it with the fire in my back.

There was a tugging on my shoulders, and in the small of my back. It felt like I was carrying a bag of water on each shoulder. I could feel my shirt as my chest inflamed and swelled up. I’ve been stung by something. A scorpion probably. I’m going to die. Death would have been a comfort at that point.

The fire spread to my face. It felt like someone was punching the bones from the inside of my skull. I felt my cheeks and my nose contort, while my eye sockets lit on fire.

My shoulders contorted, I might have been screaming. I don’t know now and didn’t know then, what a dislocated joint felt like. Whatever that was, this was the opposite. Like my elbows, shoulders, wrists and ankles were being slammed deeper together. Crammed into my body.

They say that bone pain is second only to burns on the pain scale. They say a lot of things are the most painful thing. Whatever they say to you is wrong, because whatever this was, it wasn’t comparable to a human feeling. It was agony personified.

Then it all stopped. Or I passed out. I don’t remember anything else after that, in any case.