Content Warnings: It’s horror. Whatever.
CHUNK ONE__
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Dan Kowal had once been a reasonable man – of this he was certain, though he could not remember that time and never noticed that he could not remember it. The world was unreasonable, so fuck the world, he’d give it back what it had given him, every day in every way. He emerged from sleep like a poison womb, immediately forgetting sleep, immediately remembering waking life, and howling obscenities at the air he was cursed to breathe.
Thrashing limbs burst from the pool of grey grease, gripped the frame of rotting cotton and wire, jerked him upright. Slimy pale feet on the corroded hardwood, its texture nearly as weak and pliant as cork. He knew that he had a bitch of a wife and snot-nosed kids, but they must have left him. The bed could not hold two people. Probably he was paying alimony, but he couldn’t remember the details, just that everything in his life was a complete fuckjob. No sense of working toward a future when that would end – when his dues would be paid – he was only aware of the raw present. Gotta fucking go.
The TV crackled and hummed and nattered with solicitous tones and hammering irregular beats. Dan didn’t pay it any attention, didn’t regard it as part of his daily torment, although it was.
In the rusty bathroom mirror, time to shave. He looked like he hadn’t shaved in a month, but he must have shaved yesterday. Whatever. A more pressing issue was the broken cheekbone, the unmoored segment twisted to create a flat stretch below his eye – a depression into which that eye sagged, leaving his vision blurry. Fuck that shit! He couldn’t afford to take time off for medical care. Not now. He felt for the outer edge of it and tried to get a grip, so he could shove it back into place. Damn slippery skin.
Was there a little hole in that skin? Yes, there was. Like an entry wound from a bullet. But that would mean a huge hole in the back of his skull, and that wasn’t possible. He did dimly recall being shot by some asswipe. See if that happens again, you rat fuck.
The muscles and tendons of his face had a preferred shape, and when he managed to wedge the bone fragment back into its original position, they finished the work, propping his eyeball – but goddamn it hurt. He steadied himself with a palm splayed on the wall, clenching and unclenching the other hand in a fist. When his focus returned, shaving.
He couldn’t remember shopping but he always had a little cream left. Some kind of shitty gel type, probably his wife’s fault. Blue slime joined the grey slime in his beard and frothed into something like the shit that comes out of slugs when you pick them up. The razor was shitty but who has the time to replace them? It ripped out hairs as much as it cut them. The mess it left in the drain looked like somebody had punched a rodent to death and emptied a grease trap over the remains. The heat in the shower could close the nicks, right?
The shower was just a standing stall hemmed in with soap-stained textured plexiglass. It took all his self-control not to shatter the glass, just for the satisfaction of breaking something. The water had to be hot as hell to cut the oil of his shitty life, doing more of the work than the thin suds from his bar of soap and threadbare rag. He wanted to pull all of his skin off, but resisted. Again, he had to get to work. Self-destruction now would just mean having to talk to his boss about shit.
Back in the living room, just long enough to put on his clothes. The TV was always on, day and night, and always alternating between advertisements and traffic reports. Rush hour never really begins or ends, does it? Because some fuck is always trying to be smart and skip the rush by going in early, or was working some other bizarre shift, so the report was always relevant. He lucked out that the tube was between commercials so he could get the bad news.
“Highways 51 and 96, and Interstate 183 are all congested with multiple ongoing collisions.” Xaviera Holland was the ethnically ambiguous peroxide blonde rattling off the details like a machine churning out ticker tape of meaningless codes. “Tensions have erupted into gun violence by the Nelson Street Turnpike with four policemen and twenty commuters dead. Most of the gas stations on the Third Avenue Corridor are in flames. Authorities advise caution on all roads within city limits, and in the suburbs except for Diamond, Horace, Ballinger, and Cypress Row. In those areas traffic is sluggish but there are presently no collisions. Correction, a truck has spilled burning chemicals in the northeast corner of Horace, where they have broken through the retaining wall and are currently flooding the blocks between 144th and Flagston.”
Whenever she mentioned something that was inconvenient to Dan, he pictured her body being ripped apart. Or was it his imagination? Was she actually split open like a biology class frog, organs all spread out on t-pins, and then immediately not? The screen was full of digital artifacts and blotches of LCD bleed. Maybe he had no imagination left and the TV was just obliging his rage, like the way it was always so easy to find bullets in a pinch.
It meant little to him, just one more thing adding to the anger he felt every moment of his life. As the TV cut to commercials, he headed to the kitchen for breakfast. He’d skip it if he could, but the commute could take every last thing out of you, if you weren’t ready for it. In the background, the voice-over was so meaningless, easy to ignore except as a mounting static inside his body.
Again, Dan didn’t remember getting groceries, but the usual shit was in the cupboards and the fridge. Maybe his bitch wife had just left a few days ago. Who cares? Throw a bowl on the table. Pour cereal out of a cardboard box. It was all plastic, glass, and wire these days. Probably meant to be toys for fucking kids, so much that it didn’t leave room for flakes and freeze-dried fruit and marshmallows. He poured the milk into the bowl, and it was all sludgy motor oil. Probably just a scheme to adulterate the milk with something cheaper that got out of hand, but hey, not like he had anything else. Something wasn’t going down. Steel wool? He yarded it out of his throat with angry fingers, and got to work on the rest.
No garage. Can’t afford it because of the alimony, maybe. He slammed the door behind him and it sagged from the hinges. No need to lock it. He had nothing anyone wanted, and if he found someone in there, he’d probably just kill them. The cops didn’t care. Nobody cared.
Another day in paradise. Smog kept the sky a permanent rust haze, a low ceiling for the world that helped keep the idea of heaven at bay. There could be nothing above that bloody miasma. Helicopters sluggishly cut wakes in the lower reaches of it, doing who knows what for hell knows why. All grass was dead, all wood blistered, all concrete stained. Cars, trucks, SUVs, hatchbacks, station wagons, minivans, and commercial vehicles rolled by in a stuttering parade, five to ten miles per hour – the best they could hope for, without shit getting violent. Not that anyone had any hesitation about that, but they had to save it for later, if they were going to have any shot of getting to work.
All the cars on the curb were crammed together so tight their bumpers were flattened. The first person to get their car out would loosen the squeeze for the others, but it was a lot of effort, and nobody wanted to be it. Dan was mad enough to just plow ahead, kicking at his car until it bulged free enough to try the wheels. The car in front of him lost a tail light in the commotion.
Dan Carson crossed his lawn with aggressive strides, stopping only to rip a fence picket out of the ground as an improvised weapon. “The fuck did you just do to my car, neighbor?”
Dan Kowal wheeled around and walked straight up to him, chest puffed. Carson reflexively lashed out with the picket, smashing it across Kowal’s shoulder. Blood welled beneath his sleeve, but he didn’t flinch.
Kowal said, “Maybe you shouldna parked so fucking close, neighbor. Didja think about that?”
“Fuck you, pal. If my insurance goes up one solitary penny a month, I’ll wipe my ass with your face and use your fuckin’ skull for a mailbox.”
“And fuck you very much as well, Carson. We’ll see whose fuckin’ mug ends up in the sewer when we get off work, right? Or am I the only man in this motherfucking city with a goddamned job?”
“If I didn’t have to be at work in a half hour, we’d find out right now.”
“The feeling is mutual, friendo. Have a nice fucking day.” He saluted him and stomped back to his olive green honda civic, almost ripping the door off the hinges. It didn’t close all the way, already deformed by his efforts at dislodging the car, but that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except the commute.
Dan Carson watched him go, momentarily entranced by the cracks in the back of Kowal’s skull, who knows what kind of connective tissue the only thing holding his brain in place. Biting back the desire to pull the cracks open, just to see what it looked like.
Kowal started his car, and was shortly ramming it back and forth between Carson’s datsun and Susan Washington’s chevy S-10, each impact getting him closer to the freedom to drive away – such as that freedom was. Carson fumed and ripped open the door to his car, getting inside just to get to the glove box, and his big revolver. The jolts from repeated impacts made it hard to get the weapon free, but he finally did, gripping the handle so tight, using the gun in lieu of a free hand to brace himself, to shove himself back out onto the sidewalk.
He walked out into traffic behind Kowal as he started to pull away, only to get jerked to the asphalt by a tire bearing down on his heel. It was a low-speed vehicular manslaughter, dragging him slowly under an F-150, breaking one bone at a time until Carson stopped moving. By the time that had happened, he’d emptied his revolver into anything and nothing, just more noise in a city of traffic, gunshots, and screams.
–
You could jockey for side roads, but it was always a crap shoot. Most days you just joined the line. People who had to be at work by nine left as early as two, three in the morning. Timid types with darting movements and heads on swivels. Cowards. Most joined the river of metal around five. Both sides of the highway had motherfuckers driving the same direction, whatever the laws. Anybody unlucky enough to be coming home from a graveyard shift had to swim against that current. The only real risk to driving on the wrong side of the road was a police riot, but Dan thought it was worthwhile. Most days you didn’t get shot.
Highway 96, driving on the left side of the median, jockeying for position, bullying graveyard shift off the busiest lanes. Powering through drifts of splintered steel, composite fiber, safety glass, bone, blood. Near the Wasteyards a pileup had been driven over enough times to wear down to a crude metal ramp in the road, too easy to rip a tire on, but what could you do? Somehow he got over the hump with all tires intact.
At the offramp downtown the cops didn’t even bother moving their vehicles from the traps. Armored personnel carriers with roof-mounted machinegun turrets had been parked there so long the tires melted. The armored men in those turrets were as withered as burnt turkey, where their flesh was still visible through the dust and kevlar. Did arms and legs move the pedals and levers of the turrets, did fingers pull the triggers, or were the machines pushing the dead bones around? They fired with perfect efficiency, keeping traffic moving by blasting obstructions to passable smithereens.
If moving is what you call that. Every day every single commuter that passed that gauntlet had to imagine getting out and walking, just leaving the car and walking to work. Just do it. Just go. By christ it would be faster. So much faster. But nobody ever caved to that temptation, because of the principle of the thing. They made their goddamned car payments, they paid for gas, why should they have to walk? Fuck that shit. Better to sit there, blood boiling, grinding against each other, staring at the drivers around you in mutual hostility, frustrated bloodlust. If you can just get there, just get past the turrets, just get around the corner, they’d know.
They would get around that corner. The first block was demolition derby, with smashed cars and bodies everywhere, the first floor lobbies of every business blasted out and strewn with wreckage. The sense of freedom from the watchful eye of the law was celebrated with violence. Dan didn’t reach for his gun because he wanted maximum speed, instead using his honda as a weapon. He was rewarded with punctuality. Less than two hours late for work meant less grief from the boss, right?
Nobody was ever to work on time, except management, who seemed to grow out of the walls like mushrooms when no one was looking. The only reason there was adequate parking was that a good chunk of the employees didn’t survive the commute, but that meant everyone who did show up was doing more than their fair share of work. And yet it wasn’t really appreciated, was it? Surviving, showing up, you were still griped at. But most were over three hours late, barely getting any work in before having to punch out and hit the streets again.
Dan got into the elevator with Rebecca Tranh. She was holding her side, blood soaking her blouse, but she straightened up when she saw him. Don’t show weakness, understood. They didn’t say anything as the elevator lurched through the building. She was especially tight-lipped, nostril flaring with labored breathing. He knew the feeling – forcibly holding the nostril open to make the rasp of your suffering quieter.
He didn’t slip in her blood stepping out on their floor. The day was going exceptionally well. Yellow mayonnaise light buzzed from the ceilings between drop tiles encrusted with reddish dust. They punched their time cards at the thick dull metal clock and went straight to their cubicles. Chipping beige shellacked metal wrapped with cracking beige polyurethane, spongy yellow innards visible through the wounds. The desks were too covered with continuous feed paper to see the wood, the computers and office machines beige inside beige over beige.
Sticky notes along the top of the CRT should have said where he left off the day before, but looked like they’d bleached invisible in years of sunlight. There was only enough of a ghost left to tempt one to read, to tease one into frustration. He ripped one in half from surprise, when the Team Manager Ross Sparinger wrapped its talons around the edge of the cubicle and peered inside.
“Daniel, I see you’re late.”
“I’m earlier than everyone else.” He tried not to look at the being, focused on the paper scraps in his hands.
“Daniel, Daniel, Daniel. That is obviously untrue, and you’re already escalating the temperature of this exchange. It’s the kind of problem that gets people let go, mm?” Sparinger was an exceptionally clean suit containing something dark red, with sharp black bits at the extremities. To see its face was to look fully upon one’s self, which was the last thing anyone needed.
“OK, alright. Please finish your piece so I can get to this work. I need to… I need to…” Something complex enough to verge on meaningless. Or meaningless in a way that made it look more complex than it was.
“This is for your own benefit. As much as you need to do that work, you need to know these things as well. It is really important for every single person in this office to be here when they are supposed to be here. Staffing is a cost and the company can only remain profitable by reducing costs as much as possible. We are already operating on a razor’s edge, Daniel. A razor’s edge.”
Sweat dripped around Daniel’s head, coursed over pounding veins in his neck. “What can I do to help you with that, Ross?”
A manila folder joined the stack of work covering his desk. Sparinger said, “These are the reports Benjamin and Thomas were meant to input today. Get it done by close of business, Daniel. And your own work as well. We can’t miss a dot this quarter.”
“I’ll try.”
“And best succeed.” The thing slipped away, leaving Dan with his usual impossible amount of work.
If he could just remember how to do it. The notes he’d made to himself were all so faded. Nothing made sense. He was going to be fired and end up a bum, like those rat pedestrians. Until that happened, he had to keep trying. Better dead than a bum. A non-driver.
The new printed material helped. He was able to decipher how it related to the programs on his computer, and start doing the inputs. But what about his own work? What had he even been doing? As soon as he got into a data entry groove enough to free his mind to start wondering, the new work got to be more complicated. There was no place to enter the data from some columns, and every sixth entry in the BIF column exceeded the character limit. Rounding would be a problem. Can’t miss a dot.
Dan tied himself in knots and broke down repeatedly, shuddering and fumbling at nothing, grinding his teeth. But five o’clock was coming and he couldn’t be late out the door. You did not want to be that guy, late off the jump, unable to get home before two AM. His anger at being threatened, and at the possibility he’d get fired for only being the most productive worker in the building that day, finally broke through the stress and convinced him to half-ass the inputs.
At last, he was rushing to the elevator. He punched the clock and stepped over Rebecca’s corpse, ignoring the way it seemed to be twitching and dissolving into the floor, and descended the shaft. Work remained in his head and in his hands, just a poison to make him that much more insane on the way home. He could sense his car, like a dreamer returning to their body. He ignored the way Rebecca’s car was twitching and disintegrating into the concrete, pieces of frame moving like the legs of a dying spider.
There was no sense of relief in getting behind the wheel, just a sense that motion could resume after a seemingly endless red light. It wasn’t happiness, and in fact, just set him on a path to a new release of anger. His feet touched the pedals and he felt the argument with Dan Carson, heard his gunshots, anticipated what he’d do to that face when he saw it again. He touched the gearshift and thought about everyone who had cut him off, had come too close, had clipped the paint, had dared to shoot at his car along the way in – how much he wanted to make them all pay. He jammed his key in the ignition and turned, felt the impossible work task, the threat against his livelihood and by extension his life, the impossibility of facing the creatures that kept him in this state, and he wanted to destroy himself for his own cowardice. He pulled out, knowing he didn’t care if he lived or died on the way home, as long as he could hurt people.
–
Pedestrians were rare on the street. Something about them was just so killable, it was hard to resist the urge. And what would it matter? Taking the time to roll up on the sidewalk and do the deed, you might lose your place in line, might mess up your car, might be seen by a cop who would punish you… Still, tempting enough to just do it, sometimes. This was surely why they were so rare.
You could tell the difference between pedestrians and temporarily embarrassed drivers. They were both full of fear, but the fear was visibly different. Drivers were miserable, grey, yarded out things, ready to pivot to murderous rage at the drop of a pin. Pedestrians were like rats and pigeons, just timid animals quivering and darting from shadow to shadow. Maybe it was the spark of life in them, that you could see they had something left to lose, that fueled the murder impulse. Dan didn’t care which because he so rarely saw them at a close enough range or opportune moment to act on it.
The cars were bumper to bumper on Ennis, which was the closest thing to a reasonable alternate route to the on-ramp for 96. The sun was disappearing, though hard to tell through the smog and the buildings which direction. It was just a gradual draining of natural light, before it would be replaced by equally yellow streetlamps. The lamps didn’t turn on quite soon enough to make it work, making the dusk a great reminder of how much time you were losing to the jerks in front of you. Deep charcoal grey shadows and muddier middle tones cut up the sidewalks and alleys.
For the first time in ages, Dan saw one. Unbelievable! Her skin was so dark she was nearly invisible in the shadows, and it was only chance that his eyes had fallen upon her. She leaned against a wall, head darting back and forth, hoping for what? Racist slurs came to his lips, though the only slur that held any meaning in his heart these days was “pedestrian.” He’d lose his place in line, but it would be worth it.
He revved the engine for a burst of speed, drawing her attention, but he played it off like he wasn’t paying attention to her. Important for her to not notice he was targeting her until it was too late to dodge. Suddenly a car somewhere up the road distracted her, and he didn’t care why. It was the opening he needed to gun it.
What was that movement out of the corner of his eye, as he jumped the curb, a hubcap rolling free? Another pedestrian? A two for one deal? She was dead meat, at least. Suddenly, he was robbed! The woman flew out of the way, and a white man landed on his hood, bouncing around on Dan’s front end as it crunched and ground against the brick wall. Motherfucker was like popcorn, bouncing away from serious injury at every moment, then falling out of sight.
Dan reversed, his car’s maneuverability as warped as its frame, but came free of the wall. The man stood as he passed, and a moment later was in front of him again. No way I can accelerate faster than he can dodge now. He punched open the glovebox and reached inside for his gun.
Through the jagged frame of the blown out windshield, the young guy looked square at him with the most alien expression – something he’d only ever seen in advertisements – a smile. Then he shot Dan twice in the face.
–
Dreaming is the reliving of waking, of practicing the path you walk in the light of day. Daniel Kowal’s brain began again, each reborn part adding substance to that dream, to the pain and rage that could never end. His womb was steel springs and rotten tufts of cotton and hay, suspended in a vat of grease – an amniotic substance somewhere between the oil of engines and of human skin, continuous with the wombs of every soul that had not survived the previous day’s damnation. His flesh was knit from horror and pain, from animal aggression that could never be allowed to stay dead.
He woke again, screaming obscenities, flailing free of the oily mattress. Sun would not rise for hours but his alarm clock would go off in seconds. Another day another motherfucking dollar, Danny Boy.
–