Dances with Death

(Author’s Note: Thanks to my sole reviewer, who is a very kind person: I hope you didn’t feel insulted that I didn’t reply sooner. I’m very glad that you enjoyed my writing! All of the rest, the silent people, please can you comment? It would make me very happy if you did. Here is chapter four.)

Hey. It’s me; I’m back. Some kid’s just jumped from a eleventh storey window with a bomb strapped to his back three blocks away from here. He killed three people. It was on the news. Did you see it? Every day more people try and find a new way to die, or so it seems. This is a disillusioned generation, and most of us know by now on some level what is happening to us, the default state of humanity.

Death, which may or may not be the point of all life, depending on your specific viewpoint, is in most cases the end of the line. Not for me. I make no claim to divinity; I can’t walk on water, I can’t heal the starving, can’t feed the sick. I just do death, and miracles don’t come into that. Walking the streets, a sense of overwhelming hopelessness prevails. Just because I am different, it doesn’t mean that I’m not human. At least, not yet. I feel this as much as every other veteran of the last war. A fear of everything, a fear of life, a fear of what’s going to happen next. But you don’t get this yet. You don’t understand, not really. You don’t even know quite who I am, do you? I will try to elaborate as best I can.

This is when I brought someone back from the dead. They made out I was some kind of messiah or something. I smiled, and said I wasn’t. They didn’t believe me. Bloody fools.

It was no-one in particular, just some guy who was dead. A man, maybe twice as old as me. He had a tattoo on his right forearm. Faded greenery, something like that, and he was lying, naked on the table, in the mortuary, being dead. Most definitely dead. It was very cold, and quite dark. They were nervous, afraid we’d be caught. The girl called Stephanie who used to wear the blue bangle, didn’t wear it any more. Said she had lost it. For some reason, that disturbed me. I bought her a new one. She didn’t wear that, either. She hadn’t come that night. She didn’t need to watch, didn’t need to witness. I think she had a pretty good idea what it was that I could do. I put both my hands, on the cold hard chest of the corpse, felt that it had been alive once. I frowned. The others looked at me, worried. Did they doubt me? I don’t remember.

I exhaled deeply, and did not feel the air as it rattled past my lips. I could not feel my hands, bare on the cold chest of the dead body, and I could not feel my feet in my shoes. An absence of sensation, I could not feel the hairs on the back of my neck as they rose up like the hackles of some primodorial dog, though I knew that they were there. The dead moughoughed. I took my hands away, folded my arms and walked to the wall, staring at the metal doors on the refrigeration units whilst the others admired my handiwork. The dead man seemed bemused.
“Where am I?” he asked of the room.
I was the first to answer, cynical as ever, as the girl called Stephanie would be all too quick to observe. “This is the end of the world.” I told him.

Christmas came and went; people were decieved into thinking that they were happy. Then New Year’s, when we stayed up quite late getting smashed on some food additives that my friend James had refined in his mother’s kitchen. LSD eat your heart out, GME is the way to go. A colour for your every mood; a poisin for your every synapse.

(GME- Genetically modified enzymes. About six years ago, they were heavily sanctioned by just about every government in the world, but the corporations continued in their use, each claiming sole copyright for their own, even after persistent raids on their premises they made sufficient profits to pay off the governments of most countries, excluding this one, of course. The reason? GMEs are highly addictive, and thus were assured a steady market, even in times of recession. The GME trade battles are often cited as one of the causes of the third world war, however, to the best of my knowledge, this is not true.)

We lounged in his front room, the three of us, James, Steph, me, talking abstract philosophical concepts, most of the othersbeing either passed out or too far gone to talk at all. The toxins exuded by the GMEs suffused the air around us, making our actions blurred. I think I was the only one aware of this at the time, and as a result I became increasingly lucid, to the irritation of the others.
“Neurotoxins are wasted on you, Frank,” she said. She was ranged out, full lengthon her side on the thick, lush carpet. She stretched, touching her heels with her fingertips. James, slumped over an armchair, passed out. I felt slightly insulted at this.
“They’re not.” I contradicted her.
She giggled. “Are too.”
“Not.”
“Too.”
“Not.”
“Too.”
“Not.” My speech had become loose, I noticed, and slurred. I felt vaguely embarrassed, and fell forward onto my face.

A few hours crawled on by. I’m reasonably sure that I wasn’t dead. When I came to, Steph was straddling the small of my back, and was playing with the curls in my hair. I rolled out from under her.
“You sober?” I asked, dusting crumbs of some description from my jeans.
She rubbed her eyes, slightly bloodshot. “Yeah, I guess.”
I stood up, and looked out the window. The first fingers of dawn clawed their way up from below the horizon. I blinked, then yawned, stepping over someone who was asleep.
“You want coffee?”
“Sure.”
I watched the kettle boil. An old plastic model, loads of limescale, floral pattern up one side. I wondered if it would leak. Stephanie had her arms round my neck, her chin resting on one of my shoulders, and I could feel her hip pressed against my leg. The kettle whistled loudly. I poured boiling water into the two chipped mugs with instantfee fee granules in them, saw the granules dissolve. Then I gave Steph her coffee, and she drank it. She was wearing both bangles, the one she had had before, and the one that I had given her. I felt somewhat disappointed, though; the one that I had given her was a slightly different colour.
“I don’t care whatour our it is,” she whispered in my ear, her lips brushing against my cheek. “What matters is that you gave it to me.”
I realised that I had not voiced the thought that she replied to, and I knew that it mattered.
“I don’t know how-“
“It doesn’t matter how.”
“It doesn’t?” I felt small, and profoundly foolish.
“No.” I felt her smile against my face, and first daylight seeped into the kitchen.