Proofread it if you want. I'd love that, actually, as I'm too lazy to go back and check this shit.
Also? It's fairly graphic.
Chapter One – The End
October 17th, 2012
The first thing I noticed was the blood dripping from my shoulder, across my neck, up my face, into my hair, and then down onto the ceiling. When I tried to breathe it felt like my entire body had been squeezed to the breaking point, then let go. Everything ached. I coughed up blood and phlegm and spat it out onto the sunshade below me.
The seatbelt I was wearing when we crashed had pinned some of the glass from the windows between it and my shoulder. Every small movement, every time I struggled to try and get myself free, it pushed the glass deeper into my skin. Blood continued to flow. I wasn’t sure how much I was losing. Doesn’t really matter, I guess. I fidgeted a few more times before I gave up. I am stuck.
Brent and I are driving to Beckley when he asks me if I think he’ll make a good dad. I don’t really know what to say to that. Brent is self-centered. If he doesn’t want to do something, he won’t do it. If you ask him for a favor and he’s feeling the slight bit off about it, it’s not going to happen. If it comes between his life and your life, it’s his life, and he is going to step on you to avoid getting wet. He’s going to push you backwards if monsters are chasing you.
Despite this, he’s my best friend. I’m not sure why. Most of the time people say you have to be able to depend on someone to have friendship. That’s untrue. You have to accept someone to have friendship. I’ve accepted that I can’t trust Brent with money or my belongings and that I can’t ask him for help. It’s that simple. If he helps me out then it is just a nice thing that I wasn’t expecting.
I tell him ‘Yeah,’ and then I pause and finish with, ‘Yeah, I figure you’ll be okay.’
Brent smiles, but I doubt he believes my answer.
Brent is a stocky guy. He’s had facial hair since we were in diapers and he’s always been a bit wider than he is tall. He’s got dark brown hair that is almost black. His hazel eyes are almost always half-shut, as if he is perpetually tired or perhaps just too lazy to bother opening them fully. Either one may be true. Or both.
His shoulders move in a way that makes space wherever he goes. This suits his personality. He’s a caring person, despite his selfishness, he really does care about me and his girlfriend and his family, it’s just he still puts himself before us. The people he doesn’t know, though? “Fuck them,” according to him.
Me? I’m a skinny kid with long brown hair, brown eyes and a mouth too big for my face. I hunch too much, I walk with a limp nowadays, and I have an obnoxious laugh. I’ve never been good at describing how people look. I’m an artist, I drew comics for the school newspaper. Hopefully my little illustrations help you with figuring us out. God knows my words fail me when it comes to describing beauty, so I have no idea what I’m gonna do when it comes to describing Fei or Brenna. Guess you’ll just have to imagine perfect goddess-like women. Then imagine one of them is the devil and the other is an unattainable angel.
I notice Brent is gaining consciousness, eyes flickering, searching for answers. He grips the steering wheel and starts to look around.
From the shattered windows I can see all the way up and down the road we crashed on. I can see the chick’s car, a tiny little red sedan, that hit the SUV, and I can see the SUV that hit us. The girls are down the road a ways, outside of my window. The SUV is right outside Brent’s window. The girls’ windshield has a rather large hole in the passenger side and I can see bits of clothing hanging against the shards of glass. Blood, of course, is everywhere. The SUV is slammed into the ditch on its side.
The SUV bursts into flames like you see happen in the movies. It doesn’t seem real. They say this never happens. They say that’s only in movies.
They also say things always get better.
The family inside, two little girls in the back, the parents in the front. . . they’re alive. I know this because I can hear them. I can’t describe what it sounds like to hear someone burn to death. The smoke billows out and with it comes a smell that gags me. I vomit down into my hair and onto the ceiling. It comes out of my nose and I choke some more.
Brent continues, asking why I think he’d be a good dad. I pretend to take a phone call to escape this bullshit.
Technology is amazing. I click a button and in three seconds, my phone will ‘ring’ and a pre-recorded voice will start talking to me. Brilliant.
‘I guess that it’s because, you know, I’ve seen you for the past couple of years, you’ve grown up and—
(The phone rings)
I need to take this, hold on.’
I talk to a fake woman until we pull into Taco Bell.
As much as Brent is selfish and immature, I’m an asshole, too. I refuse to be honest with him almost all of the time. I am easily annoyed, easily aggravated, and I’ve learned this about myself. I keep most of it inside.
I know that I can’t be critiqued very well. I know that I’m hard-headed and arrogant. I know all this. I worry, still, about what I don’t know. I’m sure Brent has plenty of things he hates about me.
But Brent is my best friend. We’ve been best friends for more than a decade. That’s kind of a while when you’ve only been alive just over two.
Brent unhooks and falls into a heap, legs still trapped against the dashboard and the seat, until he manages to get to his hands and knees. He fumbles for my seatbelt, pulls on it, presses the release button, pulls again, holds the button and pulls, tries everything, gives up. Sits down. Reaches for the glove compartment.
When he opens it, he sighs in relief. The knife is still there.
‘Be careful with that,’ I tell him. He places it against the belt, pulls, and there I go.
Into my own blood and vomit. I put my hand on my shoulder and try to stop the blood.
Not that it matters.
Not the first time I’ve been here.
Not the first time I’ve been surrounded by my own blood. The vomit is new, though. Hardly a welcome addition, though.
I bet the ambulances don’t make it in time to save anybody who wouldn’t have survived otherwise. Again.
Brent is holding his nose and I pull my shirt over the bottom half of my face. It doesn’t work. The screams continue, occasionally one fades out until finally, just one remains. It remains screaming. Blood curdling, high pitched sounds that carry with them no words I’d ever be able to understand.
Burning slowly. Brains boiling. Hair matting, sticking together, sick clumps falling, skin bubbling and then congealing into the burning leather seats. Melting away. What would remain would sicken any police officer who arrived to find it. Who cleans this shit up?
They’re used to this, probably. I wonder if their job ever gets easier?
They say things always get better.
We’re eating when I see Fei walk inside with her new boyfriend. They’re engaged now. He works in the coalmines so, of course, he didn’t shower before he came here and he’s covered in coal dust. I don’t know for sure, I’d have to ask them, but do coalminers do this as a badge-of-honor? Do they purposefully walk around dirty to show they work in a coalmine?
I guess around here that’s a very respectable occupation. Money is made. Men die. I get it.
What I don’t get is that this is, this dirty-hobo look, is still happening in the year of our Lord twenty and twelve. They have showers. They can afford very nice cars. They can clean up. They have more money than me.
Perhaps they have less time for these things. I don’t know. Like I said, I’d have to ask, but I just. . . I feel that they can wash that shit off before moseying around town. They have time to come out here and eat inside and cruise around.
Maybe that’s the issue. They have a small amount of time and so, use it wisely. They can take a shower later, when they’re home and there’s nothing else to do. I get that.
I feel bad, immediately, for being so judgmental. But they’re so dirty. It’s annoying.
Fei looks at me and her eyes instantly narrow. I wonder if he knows who I am. I imagine she’s told him. Seems like a nice guy. I don’t know. A bit dirty, but I’m sure that’s fine with her. Had I shown up like that, though—dirty and raggedy—she’d never have come inside with me.
But I don’t drive a Camaro, I guess.
Fei is the devil. Satan. Lucifer. Beelzebub. All the same guy. Just really pretty and with tits.
Brent and I climb out of the car, scooting along among the glass and onto the pavement. I get up much slower than Brent, who has enough time that he walks around the car and helps me up.
I notice why that girl’s car has a giant hole in the windshield. The girl who was riding with her is gasping for air beside us. She doesn’t make eye contact as we walk closer.
One of her legs is ripped open, the bone exposed. Her face is cut apart. I bet she was really pretty about half-an-hour ago. She’s not completely naked but most of her clothing is so torn that all of her that she’d prefer having covered up. . . isn’t. I try hard not to look. It’s not something I want to see, anyway, as she’s so badly cut apart that there’s nothing here for any normal guy to find attractive. I feel bad that her appearance is something that concerns me, but it’s not like I’m shallow for thinking she isn’t beautiful because she’s been destroyed like this. She’s dying. There isn’t time to think, ‘Oh man I bet she has a nice ass.’
I smell the alcohol they must have been drinking. I smell it over the burning hair and skin. I crouch down. She still doesn’t look at me. She just reaches up.
Brent starts walking towards the car she had been riding in.
She reaches, fingers mottled and red, bits of bone shining through the tears. Disgusting. Something you’d never touch if someone asked you to.
The evening sun is setting. The forest this road splits down the middle casts eerie shadows. The lights from the flames flicker in her eyes. She never looks at me.
She just reaches up.
She . . . I dunno, hacks? Hacks for air? As she breathes in, you can hear it catch, wet and strained, in the back of her throat. Does it even get to her lungs?
I guess it does, kind of. She’s still alive, right? Is she?
She hacks again. I assume she’s alive. She still doesn’t look at me. I wave my hand in front of her face. She reaches for it, almost touching my finger as I flinch and pull my hand back. I instantly feel like shit, like I was taunting her, and I fall on my ass and scoot backwards, kicking my feet to get away.
Brent must not like what he found.
“They were drunk. . . fuckin’ beer cans everywhere. What is this?” He’s holding up a can of some alcoholic energy-drink that he found. You hear about this on the news all the time. Trying to ban alcohol, this type of shit, because they say it’d cut down on car accidents.
Alcohol didn’t swerve into us while it was texting and hit us, though, and alcohol didn’t set that SUV on fire, and alcohol didn’t shoot me or hold the gun to Rusty’s head or stop the elevator between the twenty-first and twenty-second floor or kill my neighbor or run over a dog or any of that. I think we need to ban people from alcohol. Ban them from grocery stores because that’d prevent a whole
“Fuck! Oh fuck, eugh. . . There’s a guy in the back seat. Like, he’s half in the back seat! His other half is. . . Oh. Here it is. Oh my God, man.”
Brent is looking under the car, hand against the door for support, and shaking his head. He gets up from his knee and walks over to me. I look back at the girl and she’s dropped her hand. She’s not wheezing. She’s dead. Her eyes, though, are locked onto mine when I turn to look, though.
I leave Taco Bell pretty fast. Brent doesn’t even ask questions. He sees her, and him, and we both decide we want no part of this shit. On our way home, we pass the grocery store Brent and I used to work at. We were the bag-boys for the longest time. Getting shopping carts from out on the parking lot, bagging groceries, eating customer’s shit off of the floor because if they asked, we had to.
That’s an exaggeration. I was never asked to eat poop. But metaphorically, I really think it works.
Anyway, the store is a wreck of burnt wood and left over brick. There’s still trespassing tape all around the parking lot. Wasn’t the first time this place was the object of so much negative attention. It was police tape last time, though.
“My cell phone is dead. Is yours working?”
I reach into my pocket to find my phone. It’s shattered, back to front. So much for a crisp new iPhone. I shake my head. “Dammit.”
‘We’ll just have to wait.’
The blood has clotted in my shoulder, I think. I start wiping off my face and make an attempt at getting the vomit out of my hair. Brent walks to his car, reaches in, and comes back to where I’m sitting.
“Probably shouldn’t sit in the road, man.”
I don’t give a shit. I’ve been here before. The second time isn’t as bad as the first. You’re not as scared. You’re not as nervous. You’re okay.
It starts to rain lightly. Not hard enough to put out the fire that’s enveloped the SUV, but enough to wash off the blood not completely dried to my face. Pink water, it looks like, and I think.
And I say,
‘I’ve been here before.’
“I know, man,” Brent replies. I reach up to him to help me to my feet. “I know.”
He helps me over to the hillside and tells me we’ll wait for a car to come. Then they’d call for help. Everyone has cell phones nowadays. Everyone is connected to everyone is connected to everyone. All the time.
Everything is connected to everything is connected to everything. All the time.
I’m fairly dizzy so I lay back. They say you shouldn’t try to lie down or sleep if you’ve been involved in a traumatic accident, or if you’ve hit your head, or whatever. Something about brain damage and dying, I don’t know, you’d have to look it up. On your cell phone. You can do it, I’m sure.
Brent is not intentionally riding the ass of the car in front of us. We just have this thing, I’d say a lot of people share it, where if the car in front of you is going ten miles an hour under the speed limit. . . you get on their ass. “All up in their bumper.” It’s not mean. Not even on purpose, really.
Sometimes they brake check you. The only problem is that they’re already going so slow that you can match them. Brake just as quickly. Continue riding their ass, only now, you’re actually upset about it. Now it is mean. Now it is on purpose, really.
There’s not a lot you can do now, though. You can get off their ass and go ten miles an hour under the speed limit back a few more feet like they want you to do or you can stay right here. Because now you’re mad. And you will stay right here. Right the fuck here.
This causes fights across the US, I’m sure. Brent isn’t worried. Since he got his concealed-weapon permit, he has taken more risks. Gotten even larger ‘balls’ than he’d already had. The gun was the last straw in Brent’s “Fuck them” attitude.
Whoever approved his request to get one of these had never met Brent before. They’d have denied him, I’m sure. Well I guess they couldn’t, really, this is the United States. . . it’s kind of his right.
We enter the curve a bit too fast, trying to make a point. Locked in a duel, so to speak.
The girls in the little red car coming towards us are in our lane.
The SUV doesn’t brake. They’re probably checking their rear-view mirror to see if we’re still up their bumper.
Hmmm.
Well,
It takes a while but a car finally shows up. Sure enough they call and sure enough it’s another ten minutes before anyone else shows up. Brent does all the talking because I am tired. I can’t really speak well at all. I feel like I’ve been dead for a while.
The SUV’s fire is dying down, finally. The smell is still fairly strong. I don’t know if I’m used to it or if the wind is carrying it away or if the rain is pounding it into the ground. It doesn’t matter. It’s not bothering me as much right now and that’s what does matter.
The officers are questioning Brent about what happened. They finally let the car that discovered us go.
How the hell did that guy get cut in half? Did they flip? Did he come halfway out the window as they rolled? Get caught with his bottom half outside of the window as they spun. Ripped apart, scraped off, torn from. . .
I shudder.
Did we flip? Did we roll?
Well, we had to, I guess. Our car is upside down. We had to get there somehow.
The windshield is intact. Thank God for seatbelts even if mine did cause me to throw up in my hair.
How did the SUV catch on fire? I’ll never know or even begin to understand.
The girls had been drunk and texting, the police say loudly.
We didn’t know for sure. We just saw them enter our lane as we came around the corner. We watched the SUV crash into the ditch, go up on the hill, and then crash back down into us, pushing us out of the way and then crashing on its side into the other ditch.
That’s when we flipped. We flipped and rolled and spun a few times on the ceiling before we stopped. Real “Hollywood.” They say this doesn’t happen so dramatically.
I say,
The girl was ejected.
The family was burned.
A guy is in two pieces.
The driver of the girl’s car is a strange color. What else had she been doing? Heroin?
Hmm.
That’s about it.
The rain picks up a bit. An ambulance has arrived and I manage the strength to start walking toward it. The police help Brent over, the paramedic hands down a towel and grabs Brent’s outstretched arm to pull him up into the ambulance. He looks back at me and has a weird look on his face.
Brent is halfway inside the ambulance when he collapses.
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