Joe Dead Guy (standard:horror, 8261 words)
Author: Renny	Added: Jul 29 2004	Views/Reads: 3348/3111	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
An average joe [hence the title] dies in a car wreck and is resurrected as a zombie for reasons unknown. The story is his journey, as his girlfriend leaves him, he kills a man who has tried to kill him in a fit of rage, and goes on the run across the coun

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on its own, when it seemed like out of nowhere this pickup truck comes 
over the little hill down the street, and I'm sliding across both lanes 
and he's only like fifteen feet away from me and I clearly heard him 
step on his brakes before he plowed right into the back of my car. 
There's this jolt, and then before I'm even sure what's happening I'm 
going off the road and there's a really steep dropoff a couple feet 
from the breakdown lane and I just go sailing over that, and there's 
this one little stumpy tree standing all by its lonesome at the bottom, 
and the last thing I remember before I blacked out was slamming into 
that tree and me flying forward into the steering column and feeling 
something break inside me. 

Yeah, that's what it's like to die. I'm here to tell you how it was. No
life flashing before your eyes, no bright light to heaven, no great 
revelations, none of that. Just bam and then blackness.  It reminded me 
of when I had my wisdom teeth pulled and they put that morphine or 
whatever into me. It was like no time at all had passed between when I 
hit that tree and when I woke up in the morgue. Uh huh, not a hospital 
room, the goddamn morgue. 

Why? How the hell should I know? That's what everyone wants to know,
isn't it. They need reasons for everything. I don't know why I came 
back from the dead, all right? I don't know if it was radiation or a 
toxic waste spill or a freak supernatural occurrence or what, and 
frankly, I couldn't give less of a shit if I tried. Whatever it was, it 
happened, and now I have to exist like this. 

Okay, anyway, on with the story. I remember I slowly came out of it and
found myself staring at this white tile ceiling. It took me a couple 
seconds, but then I remembered what happened and figured I had been 
knocked around pretty bad and was ironically now a patient in the same 
hospital that provided me my checks every other Friday. This was what I 
thought, anyway, until I turned to look around and saw the guy with no 
head lying next to me. 

What the hell? I thought to myself, and sat up. A longer look confirmed
that yes, he was nonexistent above the shirt collar and he was lying 
not on a clean white bed but on a clean white porcelain table with a 
trench and a bucket at one end. Another look around revealed that I was 
sitting on the same thing and that I was wearing the same clothes I had 
on when I punched my time card in the break room eight hours earlier, 
except now they were ripped to hell and spattered with what I was 
pretty sure was blood in a couple places. My feet were bare, and I saw 
my shoes sitting neatly side by side on a nearby table. There was this 
funny coppery taste in my mouth, and I put my hand to it and felt the 
blood all over my lips and chin. I guess I panicked a little then, 
thinking all kinds of horrible possibilities. I didn't feel any pain, 
but I was sure I was hurt somewhere, and then I happened to put a hand 
to my chest and felt this...this crater in the middle of it. I kind of 
poked at it and heard bones grinding against each other. I cried out, 
not because it hurt, but because I expected it to hurt, you know? It 
was like my mind provided the actual pain instead of my nerves. 

I kind of jerked when I did that and almost fell off the table, so I
very carefully swung my feet around, put them on the floor, and stood. 
I glanced at the headless guy again and felt sick to my stomach, and 
that was when the big metal door at the far end of the room swung open 
and in walked this skinny, balding, stick-up-his-ass-looking guy eating 
a meatball sandwich and looking at a clipboard. Every employee of a 
hospital who makes over ten thousand a year has to carry either a 
clipboard or a folder stuffed with papers around with them for about 
ninety percent of their work time, I've observed. Sometimes I think 
it's just so they look like they're actually doing something. 

This nimrod, who was likely the one scheduled to cut on me and my
cranially-impaired buddy, happened to look up from whatever it was he 
was studying and saw me standing there, swaying back and forth. He 
stopped in his tracks and stared at me, his mouth frozen in mid-munch. 
I stared right back, because I was still pretty zonked and the guy 
looked like someone with authority who could maybe tell me what exactly 
what was going on. 

That didn't happen, though. His hands loosened, and both clipboard and
sandwich dropped onto the floor. The guy's face didn't change its 
mildly perplexed expression the whole time. He turned to the side a 
little, seemed to think to himself about something, then turned around 
completely and just walked right back through the same door he had come 
in. I didn't know how to respond to this at first, and then, I don't 
know, it was like some interior drill sergeant slapped me upside the 
head and yelled in my face, How can you be so stupid? 

I noticed a little sink area with a mirror above it over to one side of
the room. I slowly shuffled over there and looked at myself. What I saw 
almost made me fall over from shock, let me tell you. My skin was this 
ugly pasty pale, and the blood stood out starkly against it. My eyes 
looked like they were sinking back into my head, and their color seemed 
milky and washed out. 

Man, this is harder to explain than I thought. It was like, I knew the
whole time what had happened, you know? Like an instinctual thing. 
Somewhere back in the back of my brain, I knew I had been cold stone 
dead when they pulled me out of that car, and now here I was walking 
around like I just got away with a few bumps and bruises, even though I 
could figure out that sunken area in my chest meant my ribcage was 
shattered and bones were sticking through who knew how many vital 
organs. 

The rest of my brain hadn't caught up to that fact yet, though. Most of
me was just sure that something very wrong was going on and that I had 
to get home. That was upmost. I had to get home to Jamie and tell her 
what happened. Finally with a clear course of action decided on, I 
turned from the mirror and saw a back door next to a wall of big metal 
drawers. I headed for that, and accidentally bumped into a table that 
had scalpels and scissors and all that nasty shit on it, and it toppled 
over. I didn't have time to remember that my feet were bare before one 
of them completed a step and came down on one of the scalpels. 

It went in, I could feel it punch through the skin, but there was no
pain. None. I lifted my foot and plucked the thing out. There was 
blood, but it wasn't right, somehow. It was too thick and dark, and it 
seemed to ooze out of the wound instead of flowing freely. It was half 
clotted already, you see. When you die and your heart quits for good, 
your blood isn't being pumped anymore and it just kind of settles down 
inside you. "No," I said. I didn't talk to myself back then except in 
times of bad stress, but this sure as hell qualified as one of those 
times. "That didn't happen. No, it didn't." 

I put my foot down and just kept going. I went out through the back
entrance and somehow found my way back to the highway through this 
dense, weed-choked field behind the hospital. I was making sure nobody 
saw me leave without even knowing I was, you get what I'm saying? This 
kind of low survival instinct I had never known I had was getting 
bigger. I also discovered something else as I was crossing that field 
and breaking through all those weeds and vines and bushes: I wasn't 
getting tired. I wasn't even breathing hard. In fact...yep, that's 
right. I wasn't breathing at all. I tell you, it felt weird as hell 
when I came out on the other side next to Route 31 and realized I had 
just walked through a mile of overgrown field like it was my goddamn 
living room and I hadn't even broken a sweat. 

I didn't think about it for too long, though. I wouldn't let myself
think about it for too long. I scrubbed the dried blood off my face as 
best I could, then stuck out my thumb and stood there in my bare feet 
and torn clothes and eventually some trusting, good-hearted idiot came 
along and stopped. I tried to kind of hide myself, you know, ducked my 
face down and pulled my hands into my sleeves, but he must have seen 
something. He didn't mention it, though, just asked where I was going 
and I told him. He drove until I told him to drop me off by the Piggly 
Wiggly just outside of town. That was the longest awkward silence of my 
whole life. 

I walked to our apartment without seeing anybody out on the street, not
a single person or even a moving car. It was pretty creepy, and what 
added to it was the fact that I was walking through snow in my bare 
feet and couldn't feel a thing. I'm not talking about that numbness 
that cold and eventually frostbite brings on, I mean there was nothing 
going on. Eventually I made it to the apartment, found I still had my 
keys in my pocket, but the door was open, so I walked in. 

Jamie was there. She was sitting on the couch with her face in her
hands, crying, that quiet crying which means serious pain. Stopped me 
in my tracks. I didn't know what to do, so I just stood there looking 
at her, and eventually she must have sensed there was someone else in 
the room and looked up at me. 

Her eyes were wet and streaming and she looked so miserable, so fucking
broken, man. I opened my mouth to say something; what, I don't know, 
but before I could she screamed and jumped off the couch and backed 
into a corner of the room shaking her head and screaming, and I knew. 
It all came down on me right then. She had been to the hospital when 
they took me in, she had to identify my body and now here I was 
standing in her living room. I wasn't supposed to be, you understand? I 
was supposed to be dead and somehow I wasn't, but I was at the same 
time, and I couldn't take it anymore. I bolted and ran back out the 
door and across the parking lot to the woods on the other side. I 
didn't know where I was going and I didn't care. I was just running, 
man, running away from all of it, and then I tripped over a fallen 
branch and fell and something broke without pain. 

I was crawling then. Yeah. I crawled under a big old skeletal pine tree
and lay there and tried to cry. I couldn't. I could only make these 
sick noises in my throat and feel this horrible lack of ache. Yeah, you 
think that sounds weird, but I wanted to hurt, because pain meant life. 
You hear me? Pain equals life. It took dying for me to really 
understand that. 

I don't know how long I stayed like that, under that tree, hugging
myself and rocking back and forth like a sulking little kid or some 
fucking lunatic in a rubber room, but eventually I felt a light hand on 
my shoulder. I jerked and looked up and it was Jamie, Jamie standing 
over me in her adorable fur-collar coat that I bought for her last 
Christmas, Jamie with tears on her cheeks. 

"Dave," she said. "Dave, it is you? Is it really you?" 

"Yeah," I said. I sat up and looked at her and something in my eyes must
have spooked her, because she pulled her coat tighter around her and 
stepped away from me a little. 

"I saw you," she said. "You were dead." 

"Still am," I said. "I just..." I didn't know what I wanted to say, a
plea or an explanation or what. 

"But...how? Did they make a mistake, or..." 

"I don't know. I...I just got out and came back and...I don't know who
else to go to. You gotta help me. Please, Jamie. Please, help me." 

She just stood there, looking at me, and God, the expression on her
face! The fear, the distrust. Finally, though, she bent down and took 
me by the shoulders. She gasped when she felt the clammy cold of my 
flesh, but she helped me to my feet, and we both saw my left arm 
swinging limp from a broken elbow. A piece of bone was sticking through 
the skin. 

"Oh, no, here, we gotta do something about that," she said, and we
walked back to the apartment and everything that came after. 

We tried to make it work, we really did. Jamie tried to treat it like I
had some disease that we would just have to deal with. Of course, in a 
way, that's just what it was, but it was a whole lot worse than she 
could have anticipated. Than I could have anticipated, either. It was 
the smell that was the worst for her, I think.  My own sense of smell 
was long gone, but I could tell it was everywhere. I could see it on 
her face; she couldn't escape it. Since we both didn't want anybody in 
our small, closely-knit town to know about me, and I didn't have to 
work and make money to survive anymore, she'd go off to her job and I'd 
just sit there in the apartment, literally rotting away. I could feel 
it happening to me. It itched. 

Anyway, like I was saying, the smell. It got into everything, since I
was inside all day with the windows closed, and sometimes Jamie would 
just reel back from it when she got home and opened the apartment door. 
She must have gone through twenty cans of air freshener that first 
month, but nothing helped. It kept getting worse as time went by, too, 
so she couldn't even get used to it eventually, like most bad smells 
you have to live with. What was especially bad, though, was that I was 
having gas problems. I don't mean just the farts you get after a 
beans-and-franks dinner, either. I mean gas as in this noxious shit 
that would build up in my guts and bloat me out something awful until 
finally I would have to take a knife from the kitchen and poke my belly 
like a balloon to let it escape. One time, without thinking, I did that 
when Jamie was in the same room, and she just ran out of there, crying 
and crying. 

That was another thing: I wasn't looking as good as I used to. My skin
was turning green in places and I had these funky running sores, 
and...oh, it was bad. It was really bad. Flies would get into the 
apartment, I mean crazy flies, all of them following me around, buzzing 
around my head and landing on me; wanting to eat me, I guess. One 
morning I woke up; well, actually, I never really went to sleep, I 
guess I just made myself sort of shut down sometimes. Anyway, I woke up 
and there was this itching on the side of my face. I didn't think too 
much about it, until Jamie woke up and saw me. She screamed, then 
puked. Seriously, that fast: one second she's wailing in shock, then 
she just stops, leans over her side of the bed and unloads on the 
floor. I got up in a hurry, ran to the bathroom mirror, and there's 
this nest of maggots in the skin of my left cheek, just squirming and 
burrowing all over the place. 

I cleaned them out and washed them down the drain, but that was the
breaking point right there, I think. For both of us. We were still sort 
of a couple when Jamie led me back to the apartment that cold February 
night, and splinted my broken arm, but I don't think we'd said three 
dozen words to each other since then. When she was home, toward the 
end, she didn't want to even come near me: she'd just make herself 
dinner, then go in her bedroom and not come out unless to go to the 
bathroom or run an errand. I'd try to talk to her, make some kind of 
contact, but she would just avoid me or pretend to be too tired or 
think of some other excuse to not acknowledge me as her boyfriend, or 
even as a fellow human being. When she was at work, I'd just be sitting 
around the apartment with my flies and my stink with nothing to do. The 
splint she'd made was slowly unraveling. I could move my elbow, but the 
bones never healed. Sometimes pieces of my skin came off on the 
furniture and I'd have to clean them off before she saw. I felt 
so...God, I felt so useless and worthless. I wanted to do something, 
anything, but I didn't want to at the same time. Can you understand 
something like that? Sometimes I'd sit on the couch and stare at a wall 
for hours and hours on end. Maybe I thought I'd eventually see 
something there, like whatever it was that made me this way would send 
down some divine wisdom on what my purpose was. 

That never came, though. I was, and I guess I still am just a lazy bum
who happens to be dead. About a week after the maggot incident, I 
decided I wanted out of the apartment for a while and told Jamie I was 
going for a walk in the woods, that I would be careful and not let 
anyone see me. She was sitting at the kitchen table with her back to me 
and didn't answer. I went out and walked around the woods for about an 
hour, maybe, marveling at the new April growth on the tall trees, the 
small animals that fled from my footsteps, the crunchy, fragrant drifts 
of dead leaves. And when I came back just as twilight was starting to 
descend, she was gone. 

Just like that, man. At first I thought maybe she was gone to the store
or something, but I knew that was bullshit when I saw the slightly 
cleaner space on her bedroom where her Jackson Pollock print had been. 
That had been her father's last gift to her before he died. Her 
clothes, her makeup, the food she'd bought. Everything that was hers 
that could be fit into her little Honda was gone. 

That was it. My one reason for existing was finally over. Total block,
man. I mean, I had not a fucking clue as to what to do next. All I knew 
was this hurt, this was more pain than I'd ever felt before, than I'd 
ever thought was possible to feel, even when my parents died. At that 
point I wished my mind were as dead as my body, that I was some 
brainless animal like in the movies, then Jamie wouldn't matter, 
nothing would matter. But I wasn't. In my mind, I still had at least 
the illusion of life, and it was killing me. It was killing me where it 
counted. 

I was standing in the middle of this empty apartment as I was thinking
all this, and eventually, I thought I should leave. It wasn't a big 
decision. I had no grand plan to set my new existence on some kind of 
forward track. All I knew was I couldn't hang around this apartment 
full of rancid flesh and memories any longer. I found an old gray 
hoodie sweatshirt that still fit me in the back of a dresser drawer, 
put it on, pulled the hood up over my hair, which was starting to fall 
out in big patches, went out, closed the door behind me, and walked 
down the stairs and out into the world. 

Night was starting to accumulate thicker and thicker, which suited my
mood. The streetlights were on and their anemic yellow light seemed 
somehow sickly and ominous to me, I don't know why. Maybe being undead 
gives you a little different perspective on the world. No, fuck that, 
there's no "maybe" about it. I just started walking then. There were a 
few people out in couples or by themselves like me, strolling in shorts 
and t-shirts, so I guessed it was warm out, though I couldn't feel it. 
I knew a lot of them; not well, this wasn't that small of a town, but 
enough to nod at them and be at least a little interested in the gossip 
floating around about them. I didn't want them to notice me, so I 
hunched my head further back into the hood and shoved my hands deeper 
into my pockets, making myself small. I'm sure they noticed the smell, 
though, because I saw a couple of them wrinkle their noses as I passed. 


Nobody stopped me or said anything to me, which was just fine. All that
was about to change, though. I had no idea, but it was soon going to be 
over for me in Bedford. It happened when I got to the Dunkin' Donuts on 
the corner of Fifth and John Street. They were closed early, probably a 
slow day, and there was one lonely schmuck in there mopping the floor. 

I was looking at him, remembering my own lonely nights swabbing the
floors of empty rooms with wet rags, when this red pickup truck, 
seemingly out of nowhere comes roaring up and bumps over the curb and 
blocks the sidewalk in front of me. There were four guys in it, two in 
the cab, two in the bed. Big guys, the kind of beefy good ol' boys that 
worked the farms around Bedford for their daddies and wanted to join 
the army. 

The passenger side door opened and I heard the clinking of many empty
beer bottles on the truck's floor being shifted around by feet most 
likely clad in either cowboy boots or Red Wings. Oh, Jesus, what now? I 
thought to myself, and then the guy stepped out and my heart really 
sank. 

It was TJ Corray, Jamie's old boyfriend, a hefty six-footer with a red
face and a John Deere cap askew on his bullet-shaped head. He also had 
what looked like a .44 magnum tucked into a pocket on his overalls. 
"You fucking freak," he said, and the other boys, taking their cue, 
jumped out of the truck and took their places next to him. They were 
all holding hunting rifles. "You goddamn zombie motherfucker." 

I looked around and of course the street was completely empty except for
us and the dork in the Dunkin' Donuts uniform, who was leaning on his 
mop and watching this little scene with a kind of half-awake interest. 

"Hey, TJ, man, I don't want trouble, what the hell is this?" I said. 

"Jamie came to me crying today," he said, wiping his dripping nose. "She
told me all about it, all about you. You're dead, Davey. You're a 
fucking walking dead freak. We're here to put you down." 

"TJ, you're drunk, why don't you-" 

"Shut the fuck up!" the guy on his left yelled, and waved his rifle, a
little unsteadily. "Ain't gonna talk your way out of this!" 

"We seen you in the woods today. We came over to make sure what she told
me was right and we seen you. We seen how ugly you are. Somethin' ugly 
as you shouldn't exist." 

"Look, you guys, I haven't done anything to you. I haven't done anything
to anybody." In the middle of this I pulled my hands out of my pockets 
and was holding them out, trying to calm them down or something, I 
don't know. "I think we should-" 

TJ pulled his gun out of his pocket, pointed it at me and fired. The
bullet hit my wrist and tore my hand off. I'm telling you, man, there 
is nothing that can prepare you for something like that. I saw my own 
right hand get shot off and fall to the ground. For a split second 
everyone froze. They were looking at me, and I was looking at my arm, 
which now ended in this ragged, oozing stump. There were drops of cold, 
jelly-like blood spattered on my cheeks. I was absolutely 
flabbergasted. I couldn't believe what just happened, and especially 
that it happened so fast. 

Then the moment stopped when the other three jerked up their guns and
started shooting, too. I was hit I don't know how many times: in the 
chest, in the stomach, the groin, the arms and legs. TJ shot his big 
old Dirty Harry gun again and again and his last shot hit me in the 
forehead. I felt my skull open up like a flower and some of my brains 
being propelled out into the warm spring air. This was all completely 
painless. 

Eventually everyone ran out of ammo and stopped. The air was filled with
gun smoke and vibrating from the noise of the shots. I was standing 
before them, perforated by many large caliber holes, and blood and 
shreds of skin and meat were scattered over the ground all around me. 
We looked at each other like little kids after a prank or a stupid 
playground stunt had gotten a little out of hand. 

Now, I'm not quite sure what's the best way to explain what happened
next, but I'll do my best. It was my hand. My hand had been shot off, 
but I could still feel it. Not in that phantom limb way, either. I 
looked down and saw it moving around on the concrete. I thought about 
making a fist with that hand and it did it, even though it wasn't 
attached to anything, and I could feel, okay? I could feel little 
pebbles and other stuff shifting under my palm and fingers down there. 
It was like I was sending nerve signals out from my arm stump, through 
the air and into my hand. It was the most amazing thing I'd seen in my 
life. 

My new buddies saw it, too. One of them, this guy in a grimy yellow
wifebeater and jeans that were mostly patches, dropped his gun and made 
the sign of the cross over himself. 

"It didn't work, TJ," said the gentlemen who had politely requested my
silence earlier. "What do we do now?" 

"Hell if I know," TJ said, and that seemed to be the end of that
discussion. They were a row of wide, child-like eyes on me, and I was 
still kind of staggering from the pretty intense experience of being 
shot a few dozen times. A gust of wind blew across the hole in my head, 
and it made this mournful whistling noise for a couple seconds. I 
looked down at my hand again, and I started getting mad. 

That's all it was, when you get right down to it. I got mad. But it was
more than that, somehow. It was so mad it was scary, man, even to me. 
It was like this boiling red soup coming up over my mind, swallowing 
everything. I looked at these four pathetic idiots and I just wanted to 
destroy them. I'm talking total annihilation. I think I was literally 
crazy in those few minutes, and they saw it, too. They backed up a 
couple steps, and when I let out this...this shriek and ran for them, 
they scattered in every direction. 

All of them but TJ. He was so scared and I was so fast that I was on him
before he could really get it in gear. He lifted his gun, and I knew it 
was out of bullets and he was only instinctively trying to ward me off, 
but I didn't care. I slapped it out of his hand and he screamed because 
his finger had gotten caught in the trigger guard and I'd broken it. I 
kicked him square in his fat belly and he went to his knees, gasping. 
There was absolutely no threat left in him, no will to fight, but I 
didn't want to fight him. I wanted to kill him, and when I happened to 
glance into the truck bed and see this tire iron lying next to a spare, 
well, that was it, no turning back. 

I grabbed the iron up and laid into his upturned, pleading face with it.
His eyes rolled up and he fell down sideways, slow and semi-conscious, 
like a sedated walrus. There was a cut between his eyebrows in the 
middle of a huge rising lump, but that wasn't enough for me. This is 
going to sound bad, what I did next, but it's what I did, you know? 
It's what happened and I can't go back and change it. I brought that 
tire iron down one more time with all my strength and drove the sharp 
point of it straight into his ear. 

There wasn't as much blood as I thought there would be. It was pouring
out of his head and puddling on the ground, but it was far from the 
gore-fest I had been expecting. He convulsed once and this huge ripping 
fart blasted out of his ass, and then he was done. I bet he never 
expected to go out with that as his final word to the world. 

Am I sorry I did it? Yeah, I guess so. TJ was an asshole who beat up on
me a couple of times when we were growing up together and he treated 
Jamie like shit, but still, when I came down off that red high and 
really saw him lying there at my feet, I felt bad. I did, I felt sorry 
for him. I felt scared of myself, too. I never suspected I had it in me 
to do something like that. It was like the real me, you know, who I am 
most of the time, was up in the air floating like a spirit, watching 
all this while that rage had taken over my body. I know, I know that's 
a crappy excuse, but it's all I've got. 

That wasn't exactly when the Bedford, Nebraska period of my life really
ended, though. That came a couple seconds later with a piercing scream 
from behind me. I whirled around and saw this couple in a black 
Trans-Am parked on the gravel road that serves a row of cheap rental 
houses behind the donut shop. The girl was staring at me walleyed with 
fear, and I realized that my hood was down and she could see 
everything: the green, peeling skin, the sores, and the maggots as well 
as the blood, the bullet holes, and the fact that I was standing over a 
man with a piece of metal sticking out of his brain, a piece I had 
planted there. I could just barely see her boyfriend frantically 
dialing on his cell, and through the much better lit window of the 
donut shop I could see the geek with the mop jabbering into a pay 
phone. I think it was right then that I thought it was time to try 
settling down someplace new. 

I bent down and grabbed my hand. I made a fist with it and stuffed it
into the sweatshirt's pocket. I started running then, cutting across 
streets and through alleys and people's backyards, heading for the 
interstate. I heard sirens ululating in the night air and whenever I'd 
see something that looked like a cop car coming down a street, I'd dive 
into a bush or get behind a wall and see their spotlights sweeping the 
area and wonder what they'd do to me if they grabbed me and found out 
what I was. 

Eventually I reached this little illegal dump in a section of scraggly
woods, and I stopped there. You see, the splint on my elbow, which was 
made up of a couple pieces of wood and a lot of bandages, was coming 
apart, and I knew walking around with my hand as a separate thing, like 
a piece of luggage or something, would really start to annoy me. I 
wanted to see if I could find something in the dump to fix myself up. 
Oh, yeah, and the bullet holes, couldn't forget about those. I looked 
around and found some metal rods in a plastic bucket, and I stuck the 
end one of those into my arm stump, then stuck my hand onto the other 
end and wrapped up the whole works with some duct tape I found in a bag 
of kitchen trash. I replaced the wooden splint with a couple of hinged 
pieces from this big discarded machine, I don't even know what it was, 
it was so rusty and ripped apart. I attached those to my arm with some 
nails I found, wrapped more duct tape around the bandages, and I was 
good to go. 

I found a rag to pack into the big exit wound in the back of my head,
which was the only one that was really bothering me, and then I set out 
again. On the other side of the woods next to I-70 was this trailer 
park and I saw a good-sized bike lying on the ground next to one of 
them and without any hesitation I ran over and stole it. Needless to 
say, a little thing like that didn't matter much to me by that point. 

And that was how I eventually wound up here talking to you. I got on
that bike and started riding. When I got on the interstate and had two 
directions to choose from, I decided to go right, which happened to be 
west. Pretty cliched, huh? Well, maybe not quite so cliched: I didn't 
really have any cool adventures to speak of and I didn't come across 
any interesting characters like all the heroes in the road trip stories 
do. Mostly I just ride that bike along the side of the road; all day 
and all night I rode it for weeks on end, and I'd only stop to either 
sit and enjoy some nice scenery if I came across it and could be sure 
nobody was around, or to fix my bike and myself. 

It was a cleansing kind of thing, you see? If I just kept riding, not
thinking about anything but the road ahead of me and my pedaling feet, 
I'd be able to keep the past down deep where it couldn't get at me. You 
know what I'm saying? It was like I was remaking myself. The more miles 
I put between me and Bedford, the more I put between me and all the 
pain, all the loss, all the disappointment. I was shedding my old life 
like a skin, shedding Dave Ivy off and replacing him with...well, me. 
Just me, just a guy, someone who didn't need a home or a family or 
friends or a place in society or even a name. 

This new existence of mine wasn't without problems, though, as you could
imagine. I had to stop riding and duck and hide whenever I saw a cop 
car, or even think I saw a cop. I had to make sure to keep my hood up 
at all times, and eventually I stole a pair of gardening gloves off 
someone's porch because I'd rubbed all the flesh off the palms of my 
hands from holding the handlebars. The rest of me wasn't doing too 
well, either. I'm sure I'm rotting a lot slower than if I was 
completely dead, but I won't last forever. As of a week ago, I had 
almost no hair left and I lost my nose and this eye when I spilled my 
bike on accident and landed face first on a bunch of sharp rocks. Whole 
sections of skin and meat on my body were gone, including my stomach, 
which meant I had to keep holding my guts in somehow. One time when I 
was sitting under a tree and just trying to enjoy some quiet time, this 
hungry raccoon came up and bit onto my colon and tried to run off with 
it. I had to play tug of war with that little son of a bitch for twenty 
minutes before I could get it back. 

What the hell are you laughing for? Okay, yeah, I guess it could be
funny, but it sure wasn't at the time, you know what I'm saying. Shit 
like that was happening to me pretty frequently. By the time I got to 
this town, let's see, that was about two days ago, over fifty percent 
of my body was either metal or plastic or duct tape from trying to hold 
myself together for a little longer. I'm telling you, being dead's a 
real pain in the ass sometimes. 

Like right now, as a matter of fact. I was just walking back to my bike
when this happened, you know that? A stray dog had ripped one of my 
feet about halfway off at the ankle a couple miles back and I stopped 
here to patch it up. I found that collision yard over there and bolted 
my foot back on- yes, bolted it on with a couple of big screws. Why 
should that shock you at this point? 

Well, anyway, after I did that, I was walking back to my bike, which I
put over there behind those boxes- yeah, right over there. You can look 
if you want. See, told you. I was just walking back here to get out of 
town when, well, you heard what happened, didn't you? Guy wandered into 
the wrong lane, other guy didn't react in time, a collision with a nice 
big explosion at the end? Well, I was only a couple feet from ground 
zero of that shit. I was walking down the street and I saw that happen, 
and this idiot's car tumbles over and lands in front of me and then 
blows the fuck up before I could even think to run. You know what being 
blown the fuck up feels like? Can you even begin to imagine what it's 
like for this huge, blazing hot force to hit you and rip you apart and 
scatter bits of you for fifty yards in every direction, and you being 
entirely aware of this going on? 

Well, that's what happened to me. My whole body was completely
incinerated in the space of a half a second. I know this. If it wasn't, 
I'd still be able to feel my parts, and I can't. They're ash in the 
wind, and this is all that's left. At first it was kind of like a weird 
roller-coaster ride. My head flew, like, twenty feet up into the air, 
and for a couple seconds I was looking out over the rooftops of these 
buildings and it was great, like my soul was finally free and flying up 
to heaven, you know? But then reality re-established itself when I came 
down and landed on this pile of crap where you found me. 

And actually, I'm glad you did. There is the fact that I'd have probably
been eaten by rats or something with nothing to defend myself with 
except maybe harsh language if you hadn't come along, but you're also 
the first person I've really talked to in two months. I didn't tell you 
this before, because I don't like to talk about it, but I did encounter 
people on my travels. It was unavoidable, and mostly nothing happened. 
My sweater's hood and my gloves kept me pretty well hidden, and with my 
dirty clothes and my general smell most people assumed I was just 
another bum, maybe deformed or retarded or something, and left me 
alone. 

A few people have seen me, though, seen what I really am. I've been
reading the newspapers, you know, listening to the radio if I happened 
to hear one. I'm not alone anymore, probably haven't been since the 
middle of March. This freak happening that produced me is starting to 
become more common, and people are scared, aren't they? Yeah, they're 
scared, and fear becomes hate so much of the time, because that's 
easier to deal with, isn't it? People have yelled at me, which wasn't 
so bad, and once a couple of kids threw rocks at me, but I didn't want 
a repeat of TJ, so I just ran. That wasn't so bad either, once I got a 
fair distance away from them. What's bad is the people who scream and 
run. That's what gets to me. I'm not a monster, you know. I've said it 
before and I'll say it again. What happened with TJ was...it was a 
mistake. Yeah, right, understatement of the century, but I'm trying to 
tell you that I'm sorry for it, okay? I don't want to kill people.  I 
wanted so bad to talk to those people who kept their eyes averted and 
stepped around me when we passed on the street. I wanted to make some 
kind of contact, some kind of human bonding, but I knew that could 
never happen. I've been alone for all this time, but...I'm not a loner. 
Never have been, never will be. 

Well, shit. I guess that's about it. My life story. Took a lot longer
than I thought it would, but it was still kind of pathetic, wasn't it? 
No, bullshit, it was. I mean, seriously, a severed head bitching about 
his problems for an hour, how is that noble or enlightening? What? You 
like to hear me talk? Man, that's something else. Never considered 
myself a great conversationalist. Yeah, I guess. Well, what are you 
gonna do now? I mean, are you gonna leave? I'd understand completely if 
you want to, I know I smell pretty ripe. No, no, I do, I know I do. If 
you want to go on with whatever you were doing, that's okay, if you'll 
just... If you could just get me off this box and maybe put me on that 
trash can back there. It doesn't look like anyone uses that part of the 
alley, and rats can't climb up there, you see. 

And then what? I don't know, I guess I'll just sit up there until I rot
away completely. It won't be so bad, you don't have to feel sorry for 
me. I'm tired of running, anyway, I'm tired of wandering around with no 
purpose or plan. I'll just sit and watch people pass by until whatever 
happens, happens. 

What? No, no, come on, you don't have to do that. You want to? But why?
I mean, look at me! What kind of a roommate would I be? Really? You 
really do? Man. Oh, man, that is...that's great. That is really great, 
man, thank you. Thank you so much, sure, I can hang out with you. Uh, 
it's easy, just put one hand under my chin and grab the back here, just 
watch out for the bandages, they're getting old. Yeah, you got it, I'm 
good. 

So. Where are we going? 

THE END 


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