Unmade: A Neo-Nihilist Vampire Tale (15 page)

            He
relaxed his muscles and he felt the bubble make its way down his intestines and
to the fleshy valve of his sphincter, where it halted. He made an extra push
and out it came. The smell was immediate and the feeling was anything but
satisfying. Besides the gas that now filled his little box a decidedly mushy
substance had come out as well. It’s warmth clung to his buttocks as he froze,
attempting not to mash the warm substance against his own skin. He had shit
himself.

            Gas
was one thing, but he didn’t know many people that could stand the feel of
their own shit. He began pounding on the sides of his coffin as he
simultaneously gagged.

            “Get
me out of her! Close the fucking blind!”

            There
was no response from outside of the coffin. He banged harder trying to get the
Old Soldier’s attention.

            “Wake
the fuck up, you old drunk! I shit myself! Close the goddamn blind.” The more
he yelled and banged the more the smell invaded his noise and throat until it
felt like he was swallowing his own shit. Even worse, his efforts to bang on
the side of the coffin had him moving enough to smear the hot paste of his own
crap all over his backside, and as it smeared the smell became even more potent,
as if he was breaking open a fresh loaf of bread. The retching muscles of his
esophagus finally managed to fulfill their reflexive duties, and fresh stomach
acid billowed out from between his open jaws and onto his face.

            For
a second, he was too shocked to register what had just happened. The dark of
the coffin certainly didn’t help any. As he breathed in, some of the vomit that
now covered his face managed to work its way up his nasal cavity, and he began
to cough and thrash. He banged on the sides of the coffin desperately hoping
that anyone would come up and close the blind on the window so that he could
step from his cradle of filth and cleanse himself. He continued to gag and
dry-heave and then he stopped.

            He
had to pee.

            The
Old Soldier found his way home a half an hour later. The sounds from inside the
coffin had ceased by then, and except for a peculiar odor, he didn’t notice
anything. He sat on the floor and began to roll his handmade beauties, slipping
them into his jacket pocket when he was finished with each one.

            As
he rolled his beauties, he looked around the apartment for the source of the
smell. He checked his jacket; it smelled awful, like stale wine and butt-musk,
but it wasn’t anywhere near as complex an aroma as what permeated the
apartment. He checked the floor to see if he had vomited in the night. It was
rare with a tolerance like his, but he had been known to wake up in a puddle of
his own making, and the smell that filled the apartment definitely had a tinge
of puke in it. He walked around checking the corners of the apartment, behind
boxes, and even in the bathroom on the odd chance that he had actually made it
to the bathroom, puked, and forgotten to flush.

            His
next place to check was the kitchen. From his many years of experience, he knew
that if there was a smell in a place and you couldn’t quite figure out what it
was, chances were that whatever was making the smell was residing in some dark
corner of the kitchen.

            He
began sniffing and smelling like a bloodhound, his old nose wrinkling and
twitching as it led him to a new offensive odor, an odor more subtle than the
one that had been assaulting him. The new smell was coming form underneath the
sink and quite possibly in the sink. He opened up the cupboard and was
immediately greeted with a swarm of freshly hatched flies. They buzzed around
his eyes and ears, up his nose, and around his tightly clenched lips. Even
though he had no proof that he had thrown up the night before, he was certainly
seconds away from making it happen now.

            He
ran from the pile of garbage that sat rotting underneath the sink. Flies
streamed out from the decaying remains of his friend’s dinners. They weren’t
giant flies, but tiny little flies that looked like diseases with wings
hovering in the air, looking for a comfy place to land and trample sickness
with their legs. He sat back for a second and contemplated what effects closing
the cupboard would have. On the positive side, he wouldn’t have to clean up the
mess, which meant he wouldn’t have to smell the rotting corpses of rats and see
the things that crawled through their rotten flesh. On the other hand, he knew
that the fly miasma would not disappear on its own. The rats had only been
rotting underneath the sink for a few days; this was just the beginning. In a
few days, flies would be crawling on everything, leaving their filth throughout
the apartment, congregating around the toilet bowl, having tea, and talking
about how rough life was. There was no choice in the matter, he couldn’t stand
flies. Even the sight of them made him feel uncomfortable and nauseous. He had
seen death in Vietnam, and that had bothered him, but it had always been fresh
death. Even the people that had been strung up in the clearing next to the dead
village had only been dead for a little while. They hadn’t had time to putrefy,
to rot, and to sprout forth new life in the shape of flies and maggots. He had
to get rid of the flies before they became a buzzing hoard of disease that would
choke his mouth and cover him in their excrement and bile.

            He
looked around for anything to cover his mouth and nose with. The thought of any
of those rotten-rat fed mites with wings flying up his nose was more terrifying
to him than anything he had seen in the world: the vampires, the death, his
friend in the box. The only thing he could find to put over his face was a
towel that had been hanging on the handle of the refrigerator. He decided that
it had been too close to the kitchen and the swarm of flies that he had
unleashed upon the apartment. The only other thing that he could think of was
to use one of his socks as a mask. He immediately threw that idea out of the
window; he hadn’t washed his socks in ages and the smell from those might
actually be worse than the smell coming from the garbage can or the mystery
smell that filled the apartment. He decided he was going to have to go in
unprotected, no cover fire, no backup.

            He
took a deep breath before he ran into the kitchen, then he pursed his lips and
tried to make his nostrils as small as possible as he ran to the garbage can
that sat underneath the sink. He attempted to grab the liner of the garbage
can. His fingers slipped at the first attempt. He almost panicked and opened
his mouth to utter a swear word or two; instead, he kept his mouth closed and
made another attempt for the garbage liner, this time meeting with successful
results.

            He
lifted up on the bag and felt the sickening shifting of the contents as the bag
sagged with the liquefied insides of rat remains. The moving of the bag
disturbed the flies feasting and a new cloud of flies buzzed around his face.
He stopped breathing and prayed that none of the buzzing specks would find his
nostrils or ears interesting enough to explore. The flimsy white plastic of the
garbage bag began to sag with the weight of its contents.

            He
ran out of the apartment with the bag at arm’s length, wondering at the
mystical nature of garbage bags. They always seemed to want to break whenever
you were carrying something that you didn’t want to splatter your shoes.
Perhaps that was because the heaviest things in life were most often the most
disgusting things.

            He
pounded down the stairs almost leaping down the landings. He tried to hold the
bag as still as possible and still move quickly. He could see the white plastic
at the bottom of the bag stretching and becoming clear enough for him to
distinguish colors through the bag’s surface. The bag now hung like a comet
full of filth pointed directly at the earth’s surface. He reached the bottom of
the stairs and burst around the corner, like some child in a spoon and egg race
during field day. Maybe he would get a ribbon.

            As
he rounded the corner, he brought the bag up in an arc, using its own
centrifugal force to toss it into the dumpster that waited with an open lid. As
the bag reached the highest point of the arc, the plastic gave way and the
contents of the bag splattered all over the side of the open dumpster. A few
drops of the putrid mix landed in his hair, and the Old Soldier added his own special
mixture to the side of the dumpster. He stepped back and surveyed the mess that
he had created. He decided to leave it for someone else to clean up and then he
turned and went back into the apartment.

            As
he was going up the stairs, an angry face peeked out of one of the apartments.
The face looked like he was about to say something, maybe complain about the
Old Soldier’s mad dash down the stairs, but then he changed his mind.

            The
Old Soldier paused to let the man say what he was going to say, but the man
said nothing so he moved on. As he passed the man he got a good glimpse at his
face, and for a moment, he felt a spark of recognition. He turned to the man
and said, “Don’t I know you?”

            The
man’s face lit up at the question and he said, “I don’t think so. I was just
expecting someone and I thought you might be him.”

            “Oh.”
The Old Soldier climbed back up the stairs trying to shake the feeling of
familiarity out of his brainpan. He heard the door close behind him. Maybe it
was just some sort of weird déjà vu. He reached the door to his friend’s
apartment and strolled on in. He left the door open in the hopes that the flies
that were in the apartment would feel the warm breeze from outside and fly out.

            He
cleaned up the sink area, making sure that the flies had no food source to
multiply in, and then he put a new garbage bag in the trash can and replaced it
under the sink. Once he had finished with his tidying up, he sat down again to
roll some more cigarettes.

            He
finished rolling the first of his beauties, wet the seam with his tongue, and
placed it in his jacket pocket to dry, before he noticed that the original
smell that had precipitated his cleansing effort was still lingering in the
apartment. He couldn’t find the source of the smell so he opened up the windows
of the apartment. The fresh air, as fresh as it can get in the city, was
pleasing and helped with the smell. The open apartment door helped create a
nice crossbreeze that swooped out flies and stench. The flies went but the
stench still remained, albeit in a less pungent state. He suffered through the
reek of the apartment, and the tainted sense of ghost flies on his skin. Is
this what it feels like to be dead, things crawling on your skin, rot filling
your nostrils, and nothing to be done about it? He rolled his beauties until
the sun went down.

            He
awoke again in his stultifying, lightless environment. He was splattered all
around the waist with shit and piss. Vomit caked his face and chest. If he
could have seen the blanket underneath him, he would have thought it had been
used in some sort of scat film. He couldn’t stand his mess anymore. He reached
up and shoved the cover of his coffin open on its hinges, sunlight be damned. To
his surprise, it was the evening and the Old Soldier sat, smoking one of his
beauties. He stood there, trying not to step on any off the filth that he had
filled his coffin with.

            The
old man choked on his most recent puff of cigarette smoke, startled by the
appearance of a man that looked like he had just come crawling out of a sewer.

            “Where
the hell were you!?”

            The
Old Soldier looked up at him in surprise and said, “What are you talking about?
I’ve been here the whole time, sleepin’ and rollin’ smokes.”

            He
had no time for the old man’s antics and protests of ignorance. He ran into the
bathroom, trying not to drip any filth onto the carpet. He jumped into the
shower, scrubbing the waste out of every crevice, not waiting for the water to
even heat up or to take off his clothes. Once he was in the teeth chattering
chill of the shower, he stripped off his soiled clothing and dropped it to the
floor of the shower next to the flower-shaped adhesive bath grips. He had to
pick chunks of crusted vomit out of his chest hair. He had to scrub bits of
filth from in between his ass cheeks. He yanked on the hairs that grew out of
his ass, making sure that no shit clung to them. Even when all visible signs of
waste were gone from his body, he still thought he could feel it clinging to
his skin, in his hair, on his hands, in his nose. He scrubbed his hands until
his skin began to wrinkle and prune, and then he scrubbed some more until all
the dead skin was gone from his hands and all that was left was the fresh pink
under-layer.

            When
the water stopped running hot and began to get lukewarm he stepped out of the
shower, slipping on the carpetless linoleum. He toweled himself dry and walked
into the main room of his apartment naked, not even caring about the Old
Soldier’s questioning eyes. He found an old Social Distortion t-shirt and slid
it onto his pink skin. He found one of his many old pairs of jeans and slid
into it, enjoying its relative cleanliness on his skin.

            A
fine layer of sweat had accumulated on his upper lip from the heat of the
shower. He licked the sweat from his upper lip before he spoke to the Old
Soldier. “Where the hell were you? I needed you to close the window shade so I
could go to the bathroom.”

            The
Old Soldier looked at him, trying to hide his guilt in the back of his mind and
play it off like he really didn’t know what he was talking about.