WAITING FOR THE END: 3

by Vincent Daemon

HIGH RISE

They had been trapped in Ward’s apartment on level fifteen, the top floor of a New Beginnings project. The New Beginnings Project had been erected as a “government program”, a panic response to the sudden, severe homelessness and overcrowding issues caused by the widespread chaos of plague, famine, and vermin, all seemingly springboarded by the government's ever-worsening economic strife nightmare. The buildings went up quick and cheap, erected in filthy, toxic “waste neighborhoods”. Places where the dealers dealt, the whores whored, the users used, the children wailed, and everyone suffered. There were too many people, and nowhere for them to go. Almost overnight, more than five hundred of the projects had been raised in the United States alone, and several hundred more were to be built internationally. Cookie cutter, sterile, phallic-shaped buildings that reached high into the smog choked sky. They were propagated as a “second chance” at life, a fresh start for the downtrodden. But it was really where the everyman was put to die. Originally meant for senior citizens and desperate, disparate families, the New Beginnings facilities, like all social refuge programs, became the dubious home to degenerates and con artists of every vulgar variety. In no time at all the buildings became barely livable war zones, filling the disillusioned, good folks who did suffer dire straits and needed to be there with that old familiar (and all too true) realization: no one has their best interests in mind. It may have been a dump, but it was the best Ward was going to do. His bohemian, loose-loving, art/punk lifestyle had essentially already killed him, and long before any of this madness started. In his favor, the HIV he contracted from one of his last short-term, punk-boy lovers had assured him a spot in the facility. A little place to call home, to get high in, and stay out of the acid rain while waiting to die. Dexi mulled this over in her early morning funk. While reaching into her pocket for a cigarette, she thumbed the last of her stash. Eight bags. She had been careful, getting high only sparingly. In fact, not really using enough to “get high” per se, but to bring down the constant anxiety a bit. If she continued to be careful, she could stave off the sick for another couple of days. From somewhere on the fifteenth level, the faint haunting cries continued to ring out. She pulled out her smoke and lit it, drawing deep and exhaling long. She glanced over at her sleeping friends. Ward was low on his meds, if he was even still taking them, which concerned her greatly. Though he seemed relatively healthy, she knew the HIV could turn to full-blown AIDS overnight, and he was starting to lose mad weight again. But that could have been from their bad diet. There were too many factors involved, in any one thing, to be able to really properly gauge anything at all. And with the unpredictable N.E.C.R.O. creeping about, anything was possible. Conversely, Ward was always a good sport about his ailments, seemingly accepting his own personal plague with a shrug and a smile. It was Chas that really worried her, but for much different reasons. He was not dealing well with the state of things at all. His drug use, womanizing, and general delinquency had always been extreme, but after the planet began to actively and aggressively cave in on itself, he really began to slip over the edge. There were no more little punk girls to deceive and defile, no more pricey drugs to take. No more law to piss off. When his personal stash ran out, and they stopped sharing (or ran out of) theirs, Chas would go psycho. Withdrawal was a hard cold turkey that he would not deal well with at all. He would rage, loud, scary and hard, making everyone suffer in his agony. And just by being her natural “sexy punk bitch” self, she felt like an unavoidable carrot tied to his head. With Chas came these stressors, and they were not unique to the situation. This was Chas. As with the drugs, the food situation was in the dires. Some boxed mac and cheese, peanut butter, and Ramen noodles took up little space in bare cupboards. Things felt just as grim as they were, and Dexi did not feel like she had the where-with-all to face the already uncomfortable day. No, she was going to let Chas and Ward sleep as long as possible, and worry about going into the war zone later. That nausea crimped at her stomach, a sudden stabbing shock of pain in twisting guts. She went into the bathroom, not just sick, but sickened with herself. She pulled out her kit and a bag and locked the door. Time to shut out the world again. Time to silence the cries.

Tomorrow we reap ANOTHER PERFECT DAY

WAITING FOR THE END: 2

by Vincent Daemon

LET THE DAY BEGIN

A beam of pinkish-blue white light seemed to sear through a hole in the aging, crinkly newspaper covering the windows. A bright, razor-straight beam of off-color dawn light sliced across the cigarette smogged room. Dexi lay on a half deflated blue air mattress in the corner of the room, resting her head on top of a crusty pillow. The still of the early morning silence was broken by the repetitive, violent wail of a child somewhere on their level. The wailing was accompanied by the loud mumbling of an adult, possibly in a foreign language, but too distant and drowned-out to tell for sure. She tried forcing her eyes to stay closed, tried forcing sleep, but there was far too much noise both inside her mind and out. She had tried everything, even counting backwards from a hundred. In frustration she sat up, accepting finally the fact that she had gone another virtually sleepless night. Brushing her mid-length blonde and black-streaked hair out from in front of her foggy blue eyes, Dexi crawled across the floor to peer out the window at the dawning of a new wretched day. Fifteen stories up, she had a decent view of the turmoil around them. Clouds of thick black smoke rose in poisoned wool spirals to the off-color, phosphorescent sky. Fires seemed to burn all hours of the day and night, most likely set by looters or squat fires left unattended. Or perhaps some were the remnants of another head-in-the-oven suicide. Or another family blown to bits. She looked through the haze to the ground below. Lots of bodies, probably victims of the N.E.C.R.O. and each other. She wondered what it would be like out there. Not safe, not with all the rotting bodies. The stench could be noticed seeping in through the drafty window, the air outside a veritable poison of post-death stinkflesh. The smell will bring more rats. More worms will slither up from the sewers. The perfect death fertilizer of the two- and three-body-deep corpses will grow new vines from the seeds shat out by the rats. The Vines. Supposedly they were some sort of nightshade-ivy, crossbred by the government to grow more tomatoes. Truth was, no one really knew where they came from. Strange, emerald green vegetation that one day innocuously began to sprout up from beneath the streets and sidewalks, exploding unexpectedly into basements and buildings, houses and businesses. Thick, sturdy stalks covered with straight, sharp, pin-fine hairs. When fully blossomed they became large, beautifully vulvic and colorful flowers. An alluring, synthetic vaginal musk pheromone in the nectar drew the curiously horny and unsuspecting (usually men) to their own demise. The powerful scent of the pussy plant inadvertently causing a horny death of carnally carnivorous proportions. Every time Dexi had thought about the vag-vines she smiled to herself. It was just about all that made her smile. There wasn’t really much to smile about anymore. She looked over at her exhausted roommates. They were off in the blank, euphoric slumber of narco-land. She wished she could attain the same level of sleep and comfort with her own drug abuse, but there was too much else on her mind. It kept the horny of her usually over-amped sex drive away, but that was about it. There was no more comfort in anything. Right now she was worried about supplies, knowing they were beyond limited: food, drugs, and patience all on empty.

Arrive tomorrow for the HIGH RISE

WAITING FOR THE END: 1

By Vincent Daemon

BLACK PLANET

 

      Dread hung thick in the air, enveloping the entire city like a noxious humid mist. You could actually see the silky-seedy haze swirling around in the light of the dirty, faded yellow halogen street lamps. It gave the night a creepy, sepia-hued familiarity. Both familiar and fitting for the waking night terrors of humanity. For years had scientists, scholars, philosophers, and ethics professors alike rallied on and on about the condition of the planet, the state of our collective future as the human race. All these leaders, all this “intelligentsia” had seen it coming long beforehand. A projection of “not too far ahead” had been set. If we didn’t stop things from being the way they were, we were all going to die. The governments, not just the United States, but all governments worldwide, shrugged it off with clever cover-ups, fake wars, poisoned food and water, economic collapse, and terrorist threats. They propagated the lies of stability, safety, ample food, housing, and healthcare by keeping the people's heads in the sweaty sand that lay between the legs of hopped up, crazy pop-stars and their faux, Richie Rich sex appeal. They told the people that vaccines were ample, that the oil was not drying up, and that toxic wastes could indeed be safely disposed of. They said there would be jobs, healthcare, “going green” . . . that everyone would be taken care of. They swore the best interests of their people at the heart of every crisis issue. Fabrication, all of it. Around 2010, the first serious changes began. The water was beginning to taste different, like bleach, only more chemically infused. If you paid close enough attention, you could hear the open air whispers about higher fluoride concentrations and pharmaceutical waste run-off. If you opened your eyes you would notice the “no swimming” signs posted in every public park, creek, river, and psychotropic runoff- fortified reservoir. You could see the oily, gritty, gray foam that gently, silently began to collect on the shorelines. A terrible color. Little rainbow bubbles of slow death. Within the next year, people were beginning to get sick at an alarming rate. They grew ill from a strange and new fungal virus they called the N.E.C.R.O. The creepy, cryptic anagram stood for Necrotizing Enderma Cystic Respiratory Organism. There were two distinct types of the condition. One affected the brain, and set in within a few days. Disorganized thought, irrational behavior and speech, headaches, Parkinson’s-like twitching, and a “brain itch” were the most common symptoms. When the fungus finally ravaged the brain, leaving the victim in complete disorganized and painful lunacy, the brain itself would begin to liquify, and slowly pour out through the nose and ears. Depending on the fungal gas-pressure buildup inside of your skull, the eyes could even be dislodged during the leakage phase. Your body was consumed from the inside out, though not quite like an hemorrhagic fever. No, this was something entirely new. The other form was mainly respiratory, and took much longer to incubate in its host. The end result was the same, only it began in the lungs and not the brain. Hospitals began to suffer severe emergency room overflows and were forced to refuse patients. They turned away those with the N.E.C.R.O. and those without insurance, women and children alike. Barricades with high-voltage electric fences, barbed wire, and armed guards with attack dogs were commonplace at any “functioning” hospital. If you didn’t have insurance and somehow made it onto the grounds, or even into the hospital itself, you were zapped with a tazer for trespassing and literally kicked to the dogs or the street. It all depended on the armed guard's level of sadism. The civilian public at first displayed a wee bit of anger, when they could pull themselves away from this week's live T.V. nipple slip or ultraviolent sporting event, or the most recent teenage mega-vixen superstar's latest cocaine-fueled sex tape scandal. Then it became full on outrage with protests and misdirected lashing out. Confused and misguided intentions began to spew forth in abrupt flashes of everyman rage. Poorly informed, already angry, broke and hungry masses, all wanting someone to pay for this, and not willing to take any rational accountability for how things had gotten the way they were. Average Joe was afraid for his family, for his way of life. Average Joe had taken to the streets with the same rage and looter/hoarder mentality as the ghetto crack kids and the back alley squatter junkies. People panicked, acted out. In time, no one really knew who the enemy was, as everyone was out for themselves. Drugs, rape, and murder in the streets had, over time, become commonplace. Full on Martial Law had finally been declared. Cities, towns, and communities began to secede themselves, and trap their citizens in with barbed wire and fear. That was the easy part.

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