Hi I'm a Social Disease: Horror Stories (5 page)

He didn’t put himself together and stand up after falling forty-three floors for nothing.

He tried to shake the vision from his head. It didn’t do any good. It was no longer just a vision. It was very real, slouching in front of him. The torches still burned. The bodies were still there. The rain continued to pour. Lightning continued to flash. He was in the belly of chaos. He was in the middle of Wall Street, adjusted to fit this savage world.

He turned toward the Chambers building.

This time he was going to enter through the front door.

He had encountered Chambers. He was still alive. He still had his dignity. He was still an under man, still a resident down there at the bottom of the world. But he was not unequal. He knew that now.

As he drew closer to the building he saw that it wasn’t made of brick and concrete like most buildings. Not anymore. Bones—gray, white, and black—made up the intricate framework. It was covered in a luminous membrane. The glowing, oozing tower contrasted against the black sky. He reached out to grab what may have been a handle or maybe just a jaw bone when the door opened to receive him.

He passed through it into the cramped, humid lobby.

12.

The door shut behind him and Myron knew he wouldn’t be going back out that way even if he wanted to. He turned to survey the lobby area. It was arranged much the same as the old lobby area. The receptionist’s desk was made up of various bones. These bones, enmeshed with the membrane and bone meal, made up the interior walls, as well. They made him think of fossils covered in semen. The membrane coated everything with that glow. It
had
to be glowing. He didn>

In front of him, the floor was moving, opening up.

He stood rooted in place, staring at the disturbance.

A pair of little hands reached up through the ashy floor, followed by a mostly familiar face.

Joanie.

He breathed the name aloud. “
Joanie
.”

This was Joanie after death. Gray and rotten but still mostly intact. She hadn’t really been dead very long. He reached out to help pull her from the ground. He took her hand and pulled gently. He could feel the bone separating from the joint and shuddered with the thought of the arm coming off in his hand. He released her.

“
Joanie,” he said again.

“
Daddy.” Her vocal cords didn’t work very well. The muscles of her mouth were mostly rotten. Dirt and insects filled her throat. It didn’t sound like Joanie at all.

She pulled herself the rest of the way out. Black dirt caked her deteriorated clothes. He wanted to hug her but fought the urge. What good would it do? This wasn’t his Joanie. He knew that. It would be impossible for his Joanie to be here. He imagined hugging her and having her fall to pieces in his arms just like she had died under his watch. He fought the crippling wave of grief and guilt threatening to pull him down.

“
Follow me,” Joanie said.

She turned to his left, walking with a quick, jerking shamble. She disappeared through a man-size opening shaped like a vagina. He followed her, pushing the thickly dripping membrane aside, the thick lips of the vagina painting him in the substance.

Once through the opening, he found himself in a claustrophobic chamber even more sickeningly humid than the lobby. It breathed around him. Slowly. A sleep breath.

“
Joanie?”

“
Up here, Daddy!”

He looked up. A deep shaft ascended up through the building. Perhaps this was the elevator at one point. It didn’t make any sense. The shaft was lined with what looked like circular bones, monstrous ribcages. He grabbed the first rung and began climbing.

His new body felt strong and powerful. Up to the task or merely equipped to take him to some awful end.

He knew where he was going.

All the way to the top.

Somewhere along the way, he lost sight of Joanie. But he figured he didn’t lose sight of her. She was probably never there in the first place.

He climbed the rungs smoothly and as quickly as he could.

The shaft continued to ooze and breathe around him.

On the way, he thought about the path that had brought him here.

13.

Shortly after the death of his family, Myron turned his back on the homeless shelters and the free government care that went along with them. As far as he was concerned, the only thing they had succeeded in doing was killing Melinda and Joanie. In the shelters and on the streets, he had heard whisperings of all kinds of things. It wouldn’t do to go out looking for a job because a storm was brewing and the factories weren’t hiring anyone and would probably be shutting down shortly. You could move out west but work was just as scarce out there and they paid slave wages for brutal days of backbreaking labor. None of that mattered to Myron. With his family gone, he didn’t have anyone to work for anyway.

But Myron had kept his ears open. Eventually, rooting through a trash can behind a diner in Hell’s Kitchen, he found Kevin Pierce. Pierce told him about a group of people who lived in the sewers and the subways. The Enclave, Pierce called them. Myron spent the day with Pierce. He was hungry and dirty just like everyone he knew. But he seemed calm. Toward the end of the day, Myron thought he had it figured out.

“
You ain’t searchin,” he said to Pierce.

“
Whaddya mean?”

“
Well, ever’body else’s lost ever’thin but they’re tryin to get it back. They’re all bunched up and anxious.”

Pierce threw back his head and laughed, scratching the thick beard on his neck.

Then he told Myron about the Enclave.

And Mama Hodap.

Myron, who didn’t have anything else to search for, followed Pierce down.

So Myron went below and embraced what he knew he had always been. An under man.

He was introduced to Mama Hodap and she told him what he needed to do. He didn’t disagree with her.

She was the closest thing the Enclave had to a spiritual leader. Or any kind of leader. She took him to that disused utility room. She filled it with incense smoke and laughter and a sense of life Myron hadn’t felt in a very long time. Meeting her for the first time, he had been nervous. All the nervousness melted away when he looked into her soulful eyes and felt her calming touch. She had told him how he could be one of them.

You gotta contribute fore you can partake.

And she had told him what he needed to do. He was skeptical at first. He no longer took anything at face value.

She had given him a vision and the vision had become a kind of truth in his heart and he hadn’t doubted her since.

Even now, climbing up this abstract elevator shaft, climbing to a fate that might very well be his death, he didn’t doubt Mama Hodap. She spoke from an under place and that place held a lot more truth than the offices situated quietly in the tops of skyscrapers.

14.

He reached the top of the membranous shaft and crawled out. He hadn’t noticed any other openings along the way. It was designed to take him to this place. It was designed to take all visitors to this place.

But what was this place?

He emerged into a low, narrow hallway. He stayed on his hands and knees. There wasn’t any room for him to stand. There were no windows in this nightmare hallway. The only light came from the glow of that mucous substance. Toward the end of the hallway, he searched for an entrance to Chambers. He saw something that looked like an anus at the far end. That was probably it. He crawled along thinking he should be exhausted after his climb but he wasn’t. He still felt strong. He still felt powerful and he wondered if this was from the gods Mama Hodap had equipped him with or if it was from the woman herself. Or maybe it was something that came from inside him. Maybe his instinct for revenge and survival was stronger than he had given himself credit for.

Drawing closer to the anus door, he noticed the awful stench seeping from it. It wasn’t completely unexpected. When he thought of sliding through it, he gagged. He raised himself into a crouch and placed his hands palms together before inserting them into the center of the anus. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes and sprang forward, hoping the sphincter wouldn’t constrict and trap him.

Finally thankful for the membrane coating him, he slid through effortlessly and ended up in a warped version of the previous Chambers reception area.

The same woman was still strapped to the receptionist desk.

Her skin was now a ghostly gray. Her clothes had been stripped off. Her sizable breasts fell to her sides. The ax he had used to chop down the door was stuck into her chest. Her dead eyes were frozen wide open with terror and a black tongue lolled from her mouth. Her legs were spread wide, dried blood crusting her sex. Myron’s stomach sank. It was the ax. He felt partly responsible for this. But he wasn’t the one who held the ax. He wasn’t the one who had plunged it down into the innocent’s chest.

Chambers was.

Would he still be in his office?

He turned to face the door, ready to make his final drive.

It wasn’t going to be that easy.

The door was guarded. Two men, maybe Steiner and Todd, with the heads of the dogs, watched Myron. The one on the left growled at him. The one on the right dropped to his hands and knees, his lean thigh muscles flexing.

Papa Legba opens doors for you.

Mama Hodap’s words came back to him but he still didn’t want to invoke the god to get through this door. He couldn’t help but think she had some other door in mind. This was still just a physical door and he had rapidly come to learn that all physical doors are made to be kicked down. He sidestepped quickly to his right and wrapped his hand around the grip of the ax. He yanked hard but it was firmly planted in the woman’s chest. He grunted and yanked again as the first dogman pounced on him, knocking him back onto the floor and clamping his teeth to his neck. His hand groped for the ax but found only air.

The dog certainly had the killer instinct.

And Myron should be on his way to death right now but knew he wasn’t. He’d made the offering to the Baron. Even better than a regular offering, it was a blood offering, however inadvertently that had been.

So let the blood flow.

Let the bullets fly.

Let the knives plunge and the teeth gnash.

With the dogman’s jaws still clamped to his neck, its head jerking back and forth to rend the wounds even wider, Myron rolled over onto the dogman. He clamped the jaws shut with his hands, squeezing with his new strength. He could feel the blood pumping out of his neck. It was blood he didn’t need. Not here, anyway. Until Papa decided to swing open death’s black door, Myron wasn’t going.

The dogman kicked beneath him, Myron’s blood filling its mouth.

He thought about the stock certificates being shoved down his throat and clamped the dogman’s jaws shut even harder. It gagged and tried to spit beneath him. Blood frothed out of its nostrils.

Myron wondered why the other dogman hadn’t attacked him from behind. Maybe it was afraid. Maybe it didn’t care. If they were Todd and Steiner, Myron figured they had been vicious backstabbers in the real world and didn’t know why they would be any less so here.

The dogman stopped twitching beneath Myron. Its eyes rolled back in its head.

When Myron stood up, he found out where the other dogman had gone. It was sniffing the crotch of the sacrificed woman. Even if it was part man, it still had the brain of a dog.

Good boy, Myron thought, as he finally managed to work the ax out of the woman’s chest.

“
Stay,” he said, and barely managed to suppress a laugh.

The dogman continued to lick at the blood caked between the woman’s legs.

Myron raised the ax back over his head. He brought it down as hard as he could. The dogman had a thick neck. The ax severed the half closest to Myron. A torrent of blood sprayed out over the woman, some clinging to her pallid skin, some dripping down the strange bone desk.

15.

It wasn’t a door guarding him from Chambers’ office so much as more membrane. Thick and oozing from the boned frame. Myron clutched the ax tightly and stepped through the opening. The membrane stuck to his skin. He walked slowly into the center of the breathing room. The sensation was almost like being on a boat, rocking back and forth in gentle waves.

The room glowed brightly. It was strewn with cash, gold, stock certificates, and currencies from around the world. He almost didn’t see Chambers sitting on something resembling a throne made from bones roughly where his desk used to be.