Hogs Get Slaughtered potential chapter 2
The corner of my mouth curls up into a grin. Looks like they aren't going to make this easy for me.
I firm up my grip on the fireman's axe and checked my corners. Nobody - but there should be. In a better world, I should have at least two men here to help with my assignment. In a sane world, I'd have three. But enough bitching. I swung the heavy axe in a slow, deliberate arc, cracking it against the door. The thing was a cheap hollow-core - I only needed a few more swings to bust it down completely.
The scene beyond was a horror beyond comprehension - just another day at the office. Piles of laminated plastic tubing covered the floor, climbing the walls like vines, hanging from the ceiling in places. The stench was familiar, yet unmistakable: vomit mixed with feces mixed with bile. Death. A naked, bloated corpse hung in the middle of the room, suspended by an elaborate beaver dam of rubber bands, bungee cables, and miscellaneous elastic odds and ends. The plastic tubes attached to its mouth, stomach, and privates... A network of skinnier tubes fed fed into injection points in the subject's arms and legs. Adrenaline, Blood, Monster NRG, all readily available at a thought.
This entire room was just one big digestive system. Incoming delivery fast food would be placed on a tray, dropped into a concentrator, and fed to the subject as a nutritious paste. Waste products would be sent directly to the sewer line, without the subject having to de-harness.
As I crossed the room, I tripped over a tube, and the cheap thing just split open, spewing an acrid, dark brown sludge. Probably the "output" tubing, but the kind of food these things run on is so terrible that I couldn't be sure. The effluent fit right in with the thin pool of mucus that seemed to coat every surface in the apartment.
Technically, my job here was done. Whenever a user goes flat, a call gets automatically sent to the fire department to check on the individual. So I go. If there's a fire, I put it out. If there isn't... I call the undertakers. There is no protocol for what to do if the user is alive and well and just decided to stop playing video games for a day. Would that even be possible?
As if on cue, a searing bolt ripped through my skull, almost knocking me down. Withdrawl symptoms, unusually severe. I'd been offline for too long -
I had to get back home. Back to the warm embrace of my tender, loving headset.
But before I could go... I owed this former human being a final farewell. I walked up to the body, and gently pulled the visor from it's face. From the hard facial features and alopecia, I was 70 percent sure that it had been a man. What always struck me about these kinds of corpses was the eyes. The eyeballs had long since shriveled up into blood-red prunes, each tipped with a chocolate chip that used to be a pupil. I reached out with one hand and pushed the eyelids down. Unfortunately, they hadn't been used in so long that they sprang back open immediately. I tried a couple more times, but eventually gave up.
Based on the user activitiy logs, this individual had been deceased for about two hours.
Allegedly.
The people who come up with time-of-death have never looked a dead man in the eyes. But I had. A terrible feeling crawled up my spine, like a foot-long spider on my back. It whispered to me. It told me that the corpse in front of me had died far earlier than any brain-scan, vital sign, or activity log would suggest.
The Purgatory 2.0 system had dropped three weeks ago, and it was already claiming its first victims.
4.13.1984.
April 13, 1984.
The End.
What happens when you die?
I wish I would've known the answer
before now
when I'm
dying.
February 26, 1984.
Miami Grand Prix.
I took photos of her face.
Bloody,
streaked with an unholy combination of
tears and makeup and gore.
You could tell,
beneath the carnage
that she used to be
beautiful.
The idea of it,
the disconnect between was and is
thrilled me.
and thus began my quest.
February 1, 1984.
Sent to observe.
Arrival.
Phone in one hand
and new identity in the other.
I marveled
at the name I had assumed,
at the way it felt coming from my tongue.
A good name to blend in.
A good name to hide.
A good name to
take pictures with forbidden tech
from the sidelines
watching history
in first person.
March 5, 1984
When the gas station condom broke.
She looked at me with wide eyes and I
sobbed.
A facade of love that became a little too real.
I hope that she knew,
in the following moments,
that I, her lover,
would not be the one
that killed her.
She was killed by something far larger
than both of us,
some cosmic fury
that retaliated
against the imbalance.
Even as I photographed
her still living eyes
forbidden to intervene.
I should never
have accepted
her invitation.
Should never have joined her
in her apartment.
I had planted a seed, however
unintentionally
and she was paying for it,
history scrambling to erase
what I'd done.
She looked at me with wide eyes,
could not contemplate what was happening
as her body
dissolved.
I photographed the space
where she used to be.
March 18, 1984.
Her name was Theresa.
I've started to realize
the implications
of what I'm doing.
Not in the future,
but here. In the
past
where consequences are beginning
to feel too real.
Do you think
they will take me back
into the present?
I am
out of place.
Starving for touch
as everything I feel
crumbles to ash.
I found her body and dragged it
towards Canaveral Groves,
where I hoped
she'd be
remembered.
Watched the news
and waited
until I saw
her name,
five days later.
I took a photo of the headlines
a sick trophy of my good deed
that did not save her life
but gave her
a proper Death.
March 20th, 1984.
A blow dryer and super glue.
She was blind.
A deer in headlights she saw
the flash of my camera.
A flash she should not have been able to see.
I watched her cry super glue
watched it melt like crayons under a hair dryer
watched her run.
She cannot outrun the Fates.
They are after us both.
March 23, 1984.
And she fell, bleeding, into the river.
My fault?
Could this all be my fault?
I did not stab her,
and yet the knife is in my hands
and her body is in the river.
Please take me back to my time.
I do not belong here.
I cannot think. Cannot retaliate
against forces larger than me
wishing me gone.
I think they are winning.
March 26, 1984.
Room 30.
She slept besides me
in a hotel neither of us were supposed to be at.
She seemed afraid
as she slept, like a man was hunting her
in her dreams.
At breakfast, she told me
she needed to run.
I offered
to run with her.
And we drove
towards Milford Reservoir,
hoping we could outrun
God.
He comes in many forms.
Hers different from mine.
Her God followed us there and stabbed her with my hands
as she attacked me with a will that was not her own.
An illness that in my world may have been treated
but here, had no cure.
My God coerced me to drag her body
under the cedar tree.
Where she sat
as if resting.
The world would never know
what she'd done
or almost done.
And hopefully would never know what I'd done.
Send me back, please.
I cannot keep taking photos of this.
Cannot keep chronicling the side effects
of a time-traveler's disease.
March 31, 1984.
Las Vegas with a stop in Durango
The end of a month and the end of a life.
This should be
the end of my journey, too.
We made it out of Colorado, only to
vanish amid the highs and lows of Utah.
A mediocre place to end a mediocre life.
She was only 18.
I couldn't have done that.
Surely someone placed
these weapons in my hands
as a cruel joke.
Surely someone slathered her
in stage blood,
and not lamb's blood,
a lamb to the slaughter.
I have to get back to the present. The future?
Which one is it now?
I cannot tell.
No one is responding
to my texts.
Still, I send my photos,
still-frames of mutilated bodies
propelled by some uncontrollable force
of duty,
loyalty to the vultures
that sent me here
to bring them back
fresh carrion.
April 1, 1984.
This one, they won't identify right away.
I feel as though
I'm not
the only one here.
I could've sworn I saw
someone else taking a photo
of me.
I am being watched.
fleeing towards SoCal
in someone else's car.
Their 17 year old daughter is in the back seat.
I let her off
at a rest stop.
Yet again,
history has been altered.
I watch her
decay,
watch her identifying features
melt.
This one, they won't identify right away.
April 4, 1984.
A second phone like mine.
My watcher; another like me.
She is only 16.
Tina Marie.
She tells me she's
going crazy.
Her phone holds the only evidence
of my existence on this plane.
I snap her photo in return and wonder
who my competition is.
I am not the only one
being sent to observe.
Who else
is here with me,
out of place,
out of
time?
She's coming with me.
I cannot afford to let her
run.
April 10, 1984.
She tells me she's going crazy.
When she said crazy
I didn't think it would come to this.
She dragged this child into my car and told me she needed to die.
I told her I couldn't.
She told me I would,
and I found
she was right.
I would.
Hell, maybe we're both
a little crazy.
Maybe that's what time travel does.
She tells me to check on the body.
There is nothing there.
A space where a sixteen year old bleeding girl
used to be.
And the seventeen year old girl beside me
is pissed.
She floors it.
A mall I shouldn't recognize looms ahead
and the next thing I know there's a new woman in the car
and I'm driving.
Tina follows behind,
in a stolen Pontiac Firebird.
Gotta get the hell outta
Dodge.
And when the woman next to me
begins to die, a mass of bleeding flesh and agony,
I stop driving and dump her, still bleeding
into a gravel pit.
Wasn't it Muhammad Ali who said
"It isn't the mountains ahead to climb
that wear you out;
it's the pebble in your shoe.”
This woman has worn me out
and she is with
the pebbles now.
Send me home,
I beg.
Something evil
is coming.
And the crazy girl buys a ticket to LA.
I don't bother
to stop her.
April 13, 1984.
Where's the quickest route to Canada?
What happens when you die?
I wish I would've known the answer
before now
when I'm
dying.
Is this where i end?
Alone in a timeline under a false name
accused of murders that I
didn't
commit.
I didn't.
I didn't.
What does it mean to die
before you were born?
It hurts
just as much
as dying in the present.
Maybe more, but
how should i know?
I've never died
before.
I've sent my photos,
evidence of a timeline unwoven,
and I,
the spider at its center
being eaten by the fly.
backwards-upside-down-right-and-left
all directions at once
and then motion
ceases.
My real name will be
forgotten.
Now the world will only know me
as Christopher Bernard Wilder.
The man I never was, but now I am
and will always be.
