Sweat: Part 1

Sweat

Roci Herrera

Written for the 6 people who seem to read every single one of my posts.

If you didn’t read the preceding story, Blood, then do. This story will not recap.

You may also want to read The Woods, another story I have made. The main character of that story is very prominent in this one.

Part 1

Well, it would have been it, if life was forgiving. But it wasn’t.

Layover is a bitch. The stewardess always sits you down, and then you can’t get up, or get out of the plane. It would have been better if I had just gotten on at the last second. That way, I would have only waited a small amount of time for the plane to take off. It took one good goddamn while to get that plane in the air too. I’d say about 2 or 3 hours. It would be much harder for me to be able to sit here and do nothing if I hadn’t had pain in my leg every time I move it. No kidding.

But, seriously, my leg kills. It was at this moment, this moment, of me sitting on a plane, next to someone sleeping, very early in the morning. That I decided that I should check it out.

I lifted up my pant leg to see the cast taken off and my leg looking healed and perfect. “What the fuck?” I whispered, as the person next to me continued to snore.

Over the speaker, I heard one stewardess say, “complementary snacks and drinks will now be distributed to those who want any. If you do not, you may politely sit and wait for the flight to finish for no extra charge.”

A bit hostile, aren’t we today I thought. I have never heard a stewardess talk that meanly before in my life.

When she walked down the hall, I started looking at my leg again. It was amazing to me. I truly was stupefied, by the fact that my leg, the one of which I had broken jumping out of a 3 story building only what I had assumed to be one or two hours ago, was healed. It was fine. It still hurt like hell, but it looked almost like I had never had a problem at all. Like I had never fallen, hurt it, or done anything bad to it in my life. All in a couple days.

I started rooting through my mind. I needed to know what was going on. Lets see, a man shot me, in the back.

I felt under my shirt on my back to find that there was no hole, no stitches, or anything.

My body was blemish free. I had no marks from anything that had happened over the past few months. It was like I had not lived in Tallahassee, gotten beaten, kicked, shot, had my bones broken. Nothing. I was completely fine, in every single way. I had nothing wrong with me. I would be able to go through the rest of my life without any problems, physically. It would be easy for me to get an entry level job in Salt Lake. I could get an apartment, and live the rest of my life there.

I looked over to the man sleeping next to me. He was old, maybe in his 70’s. I don’t know how he got on this plane either. He just sort of appeared. It seemed like the pants he was wearing had been pissed in at least 3 times. He was wearing a lot of layers, too. It looked like it was around 4 or 5.

I checked my phone. It said it was currently around 4 a.m. If I cared to, I could catch some sleep. Then I heard the stewardess impatiently yell at me, waking the old man and a few other people around me, “do you want any soda, or not?”

“Oh, sure,” I said, as she got seemingly angrier at me.

“Well then, what the hell do you want?”

“I’ll take a coke.”

She poured the drink, as I put down my tray table. I took the drink out of her hand when she was done pouring it, and she left, walking all the way down the hall, as I looked at her with a disgusted look.

The old man next to me looked at me, and said, with a smile, “what a bitch.”

“I know, right? It’s like, what the shit? She didn’t even ask if you wanted anything,” I added to the conversation, making him feel safer about talking to me.

By this time all the other people that were woken by the queen bitch had fallen back to sleep. They couldn’t keep up at this hour in the morning like I could, and, seemingly, like this old man sitting next to me can.

“Well, my name’s John,” said the old man, offering his hand.

“And mine is Gerry,” I said, trying to seem as though I was a respectable person.

After a firm handshake, the man sitting next to me flat out told me, “Gerry, I believe that we are going to have quite the adventure in this new city.”

I just had no idea how right he was.

When the plane landed, we stuck together. I guess that I usually do things like this, and it usually either gets me killed, or gets me a job opportunity. We landed in a mid sized airport, I’d say about 3 miles for the strips, and 2 miles for the width. It wasn’t the biggest airport, sure, but it seemed bigger than the one in Albuquerque.

We walked in the airport until we found our way to the exit. There were signs everywhere that told the time and date, alongside the current flights. One that I read said on it “March 14, 2017.”

I looked over at my new homeless friend, and I ask, “Is that the real date?”

“Well yeah, man,” he said, as I gaped at the screen that I was looking at.

When I had first paid for the tickets, it was in January. I could tell because it was cold enough, and I had a phone on me at all times. Remembering that I kept this phone on me, I got it out and checked it. Sure enough, March 14, 2017. I check the plane ticket. March 14, 2017.

The reason this perplexes me so much is because I have absolutely no memory of the past couple of months. Not of the rest of January. Not of February. Not of the beginning of March. But here I am. March 14, 2017.

“You alright, man?” asked John, who seemed like he was either dumb or wise, without me being able to tell the difference.

“Nothing, I just thought the month was earlier.”

“Hey, man. That happens.”

When I was finished thinking about everything that was happening to me, we moved on. Whatever happened in those two months had to have been bad, or else I wouldn’t have blocked it out.

I walked outside with this old man that I had met on a plane who I befriended due to a common enemy. We hailed a cab.

In the back of the cab, I decided to strike up a conversation with him that seemed it would be beneficial to me. “So, John, why are you coming to Salt Lake?”

“Well, Gerry, I got out of jail after a mistrial, and needed to get away from Denver,” he said. “I tried living in Albuquerque, but it seemed like it was too dangerous on the streets at night. I got robbed the first night I was there. I needed to get away.”

“What were you in jail for, John?”

“These cult assholes nabbed me up and threw me in the wilderness up in Denver. I got away from them after killing quite a few of them, and the police were pretty much ‘holding’ me until they were all captured,” he started. “These assholes, man, they were being accused of killing a whole bunch of people, because they did, and they were trying to pin that shit on me, man.”

“But I bet you didn’t let them.”

“Well, hell no, man. I fought with a public defender for a whole month on that case, all while I was in holding. Then, they found all the places where they were hiding the bodies once they got a warrant to search their warehouse. Then they pleaded guilty. They had kids and everything.”

“What did they believe in?”

“Natural selection. They thought that they were supposed to be responsible for it, or some shit. I don’t know, man. It’s heavy.”

The cab driver asked for $9.50 for the ride. I checked my wallet, and it was fucking packed. More packed than I had ever had my wallet be before. I had more money than I have had in my checking account, savings, anything. I have never had this much money.

I gave the man a twenty, and he kept the change. We stepped out at a days inn. It wasn’t nice, but it would do. Absolutely. $70 a night, free breakfast, and a coffee pot right there in the room. When I walked inside that 1960’s style room, I felt as though I was stepping into the past itself. I had never been in something like this before. It was quite literally like stepping into the past.

We had a room on the top floor, which meant we didn’t have to worry about anybody keeping us up that night. We went to bed plenty early. It was maybe 5 o’clock. We had been up a long time by this point.

Then, it all started coming back.

After I was shot, that colombian asshole dragged me over to some shop in Albuquerque. It was hard to remember where exactly, but I knew it was on Zuni somewhere. Somewhere scummy. There were car parts everywhere. It seemed like it was day, but I think that that was just because of the light in my face. I was sitting there under the light, while, slowly, I started to bleed out. I didn’t exactly feel very good. I was mostly sure I was going to die. When I looked down, I could see them ripping my shirt, and touch my open wound. It seemed like a nightmare.

I woke up in the motel room. There was do scar on my stomach. No problem with my leg. That was because I had been, seemingly, unconscious for the past few months.

March 15, 2017.

It seemed impossible. Somehow in the past few months, I have had no memory of anything, except in my dream. The shower was on. Somehow, John had more clothes than me.

The money in my wallet was still there. I decided to count it. One, Two, Three. 20, 21, 22. 47, 48, 49. 100. 100 dollar bills. All of them were hundreds. 100 100 dollar bills. 3 20’s. 2 5’s.

This is too much.

I am much too confused for this. Somehow, the people who had shot me, and seemingly kept me at good health, had given me this. Either that, or I made all this money, and I forgot everything that happened. No. I was too smart for that. I wouldn’t have kept it all with me. I would have put it in a dead man’s bank account and gotten it out when I got to Salt Lake. I wouldn’t just carry it in my wallet where anyone could take it.

John stepped out of the bathroom with a new outfit on. He looked like someone who was wearing something that they have never worn before. It looked wrong on him. Unnatural. It was good that he was out of the bathroom though, because I needed to shit. Bad.

Constipation, noun, a condition where there is a difficulty passing feces. I sat on the toilet for 20 minutes before the first thing came out of my ass.  

A condom or “rubber” is a small stretchy object that is normally used for sex, to prevent sexually transmitted diseases, and accidental pregnancy. However, in some illegal cases, these have been seen to go into the rectal cavities of both men and women in order to smuggle drugs and other illegal substances, helping them to be able to have the drugs without having to be in trouble. This is what happened with me. There, I assumed, was something similar to cocaine, heroin, or anything else powery in this particular “rubber.”

There were most likely more in me. You don’t get paid over $100,000 to smuggle one or two grams of cocaine. These had to have been building up in me. It was no wonder why I had to shit so badly. There was a lot of fucking drugs in my body.

“Hey, man,” began John, “you okay in there.”

“Yeah, I just got some blockage.”

“Well, I’m gonna go get something to eat, so you just head out when you’re done.”

I was still on the toilet when he got back.

It was around 1:00 p.m when he returned. This meant I was on the toilet for hours doing this shit. Literally shit.

I got off the toilet a little while after he got back home. It was maybe 10 or 15 minutes until I was off. It was hard to count all of the balloons, and I think that had a mixture of how many there were, and how much my brain was deprived of oxygen. When I was done, John was quick to check out the scene of the crime. He was amazed at all the rubbers. I estimate that there were around 4 grams in each. There were 55 rubbers in the sink, all rinsed, and cleaned. They were absolutely ready for me to snort at any time.

But raises the question, why do I have 55 rubbers full of an illegal drug inside me? Well, there were a few reasons that I could think of. The main of which involved ghosts. I don’t know why. I guess it has something to do with the fact that I have gotten on a plane thinking that it  was January first when in all actuality it was the fourteenth of March. In any case, I was thinking about ghosts for some reason.

After close thought and consideration, I decided that it could not have been ghosts that have put the drugs in my ass, because ghosts don’t exist. So, my mind drifted to the only other thought that came to my mind when I thought about drugs and anal cavities. This was that, some time over the last couple of months, I had gotten involved with a cartel, or a gang, or mexican people, and they had sent me off to smuggle drugs into the great city of the Salt Lake. If this was somehow true, the people that were giving the drugs to my ass should be looking for me. That would mean that I was going to be having another visitor in my humble motel room.

John was still amazed. “How the hell did you get all this into your ass, man?”

“I don’t really know,” I replied. “I can’t remember anything that has happened in the past few months to me.”

He looked up at me, obviously thinking hardly about what I had just said to him. “Man, how the hell big of a bender do you got to go on to not remember the past couple of months?”

“It seems like I was abducted by one of my old bosses, and he tried to kill me.”

“Bosses? You mean that you were in one of those cartel gangs, man?”

“Well yeah,” I told him, firmly, as I looked up, into his eyes. “That’s how I’ve made money for just about a year now.”

There was a knock at the door.

I don’t own a gun. I’ve never felt too safe around them, like they were going to get up, have a conscious mind, and go out of their way to kill me. When I had to start using and keeping guns around during my start in my criminal career, I started to calm down about them. They stopped being such a huge problem in my mind, and more of just a household item. Before I owned guns, I would keep a baseball bat to hit people with. It would keep them hurt, and, hell, maybe the law wouldn’t get involved. But I didn’t, repeat, didn’t bring a gun with me to salt lake city. There were a couple of reasons for this.

I know that, depending on which airline you take, it will either be okay or not okay to have a gun on a plane. If it were okay, it would have to be in your checked baggage, where you would have no access to it for the entire flight. I did not do this, because I had to baggage to check. I could, of course, literally give them a gun case, and they would check it and allow it to come on the plane. But this would also require you having acquired the gun legally. Whereas, every gun I have ever owned has been very, very illegal. So I had no gun. And there were people at the door.

“Housekeeping,” said an unusually high pitched voice on the other side of what I assume is a paper thin door.

Housekeeping hours from 2 o’clock to 5 o’clock, all days. The clock on the nightstand in between the two desks read 3:37 p.m. It was, arguably, a fair shot that this was actually housekeeping.

“Could you come back later?” said John, seeming alert, alongside relieved.

The utility of a housekeeping worker is to clean the room for either an extended visit, or for the next person that will visit. Despite popular belief, even if you have a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the outside of your door, the housekeeper will most usually not come to your room. We did not have a “Do Not Disturb” sign on our door, simply because there was no “Do Not Disturb” sign to put on our door. Because of this, the mostly-spanish-speaking Housekeeping lady walked into a room that had an old man, and a young half mexican kid. Oh, and, I must have forgotten, a large pile of full rubbers on the bed furthest from the door.

The term “narc” is short for narcotics. It was invented in the late 20th century that was used to mock people that would tell police about any illegal activities. The reason that it was chosen to use the abbreviation of narcotics for this term was because of irony. They knew that the people that would “narc” on people would hate, or despise all drug usage. They wanted these people to feel bad for what they were doing, thus the term came to rise, being used as the name of a video game, and as the nationally known name for people that are actually contacts with the police, but will pose to be someone’s friend to help take down drug empires.

This particular housekeeping woman was truly a narc.

A narc is dealt with, usually with death. However, I did not have anything to threaten or kill with, so in this particular case, the narc was dealt with by us throwing the rubbers in a bag and running.

Running is hard for me, especially with the pain in my leg. I have to sort of, limp while I simultaneously run. It does make it harder to get where you want to go when you have to limp over there. When I stepped out of this particular motel, I was overcome with the feeling of pain in my leg. I was unable to run. I was unable to do this strange limp/run that I had expected myself to do. Because of my predicament, I was forced to fall over, and hit my head on the pavement.

The pavement wasn’t too cold, but it sure did feel so against my head. When I looked up, I saw my new-found friend looking at me, holding the bag. He seemed to be saying something, but I  couldn’t quite make it out. Due to this quite obvious fact, he ran, shortly after I heard a loud grunt coming from behind me. Then I passed out.

It seemed that I was back in that building. I was laying in a hospital bed, with a bad feeling in my back. I think that this was the day after my last dream. The pain in my back grew large and larger as I could hear footsteps approaching. It peaked as the got as close as they possibly could be without being on top of me. When I looked slightly up at the person that seemed to cause them, he smiled at me.

The man was black. He seemed to have hurt someone recently. Someone very close to him. It seemed he was hurt himself, due to the gash in his neck that was somehow healed. As he walked around to the front side of me, it because clear who he was.

It was James.

I thought to myself, it can’t really be him. James had to have died, or something. He had a piece of glass in his neck when I saw him last.

But as I looked into his eyes, I saw the truth. Somehow, the past few days, James had had his neck fixed, and he had any bones in his body just as well, because he was standing in front of me, just as sure as I was about anything in my life.

He struck me. Hard. it felt like it was with a pipe or something, but it appeared to me that it was his fist.

I woke up in the office of the motel, and sure enough, a short asian man was standing in front of me, holding a roofing hammer. My hands were tied behind my back, and I felt like literal shit. My face hurt like fuck. That first hit he had given me had seemed to cut open my skin as well as break at least 4 bones. I could feel the blood running down my body.

The room was very short. Not at all small, but it seems that the man didn’t want to pay for extra space he wasn’t going to use. This was something that I had noticed when I first checked into the motel. The room was filled with paper. Files. He might have kept them for accounting or something, but I am at least mostly sure that he was just hoarding them for no reason. He had an entire table that was just filled with them. It seemed as though the man only ever looked at them when he wanted his tax refund.

After a few seconds of sitting there and not doing anything, I finally started to realise what was going on here. This man wasn’t interested in simply getting me in trouble. I think that he wanted to kill me.

“What is your name?” said the man, holding the hammer as though it was a baseball bat.

He didn’t look nearly as intimidating as I think he wanted to. When I looked at him more and more, I stopped seeing a man who is most likely going to kill me, and begun to see a man who just looks genuinely scrawny. He did not look as though he was a very strong person. But, the bones in my face would disagree with you if you said that he couldn’t hurt anyone.

“Gerry,” was what I told him. If this man was truly going to try anything like look me up, all he would find was some asshole from a T.V show. He couldn’t make me tell him any more. I wouldn’t do it. I’m not some asshole.

“What is your full name?” he said, making me think of either lying, or doing anything else.

“Well, what do you want? The full with my middle name, or just the first and last.”

“All of it.”

“Oh, well fuck you man.”

He struck me in the face one more time, and I passed out. I think he hit my temple.

I saw James again in my dream. This time more prominently. He was kicking me while some Colombian fuck stood behind him and laughed at me while smoking a cigar. James kicked hard, too. It seemed like he wanted to kill me or something. The scar was still showing well on his neck. It looked disgusting. Somehow, it looked even more disgusting than the day before. I think that it was just my mind doing it. Either that, or something fucking weird was going on here.

I woke up, tied to the same chair, with no one else in the room. I had a ball gag in my

Mouth. It felt horrid. I hated the way that I essentially couldn’t say anything. I wanted to scream. I wanted to scream louder than I have ever screamed in my life. Get attention. I am an American citizen, and I am being held against my will without any just cause. I deserved to at least scream.

There were new restraints on me as well. I could feel cuffs on my feet. They felt cold, and they went underneath my pants. The hair on my legs stood up with the thought of sitting here for one more second.

I started to be more calm. When I looked around to everything I could possibly see, I

Saw a slight of a window in the front door. I could see what time of day it was at the very least.

I started to hobble a bit, trying to scooch my chair far enough that I could see outside the door. I was there and I could see outside just the slightest bit. I saw almost nothing, but I could still tell it was dark. It looked really dark, too. Like it was maybe 12 or 1 at night. It was real late, and it was uncomfortable.

It was after this that I fell over in my chair.

The ground felt cold, after all, it was made of concrete and it was near 40 degrees every day, and right now it could be as low as 20 degrees outside. I guess I was just surprised that it was this cold in a heated room.

I sat there for a little while, struggling. I was sitting in such a way that my body began to crush my arm.

The hard part about this entire situation was the placement of my feet and hands. I couldn’t see my hands, and my feet were strapped to the chair using metal stronger than handcuffs.

I began rolling like a tortoise stuck on its back, except instead of being on my back, I was on my side. And instead of being a tortoise, I was a human. And instead of having body parts I could easily move, every part I owned seemed to either be tied down, stuck in place, or having my entire body weight resting on it. Every movement filled my arm with pain, as it seemed that the chair was digging itself further and further into it.

I felt a small snap in one of the sides. The wood wouldn’t let me move onto my front, but it would still break with enough effort. I kept at rocking like this for more and more time. It felt as though it was taking forever. My arm was sore and horrible. I felt like absolute shit. The coldness of the floor was beginning to get to me, as I started feeling it seem to pierce my skin. My body just felt worse and worse as I continued to do this.

Eventually, one of the arms of the chair seemed to break clear off, making the rest of the back very easy to get off by slamming my back into it. When this happened, I was then able to move my arms around enough to grab a hammer off the ground near me.

The wood made a lot of noise every time that I hit it with the claw side of the hammer. I was scared that it would wake up the owners if they heard it too much. Because of this, I tried to keep it a bit more quiet. I was moving much slower, and I was putting much less effort into what I was doing. That was when something terrible happened. I saw the sun begin to seep into the pores of the office.

I decided to say “fuck it” to being quiet and began to hammer harshly into the wood, trying to break it as fast as possible. Sunlight signifies daytime. Daytime means that people will wake up. If someone wakes up, come over and put a bullet in my head because they can see that I might try and escape again. The chair wasn’t coming loose to quickly. I could hear cracking, sure, but that didn’t mean that it was going to break. I could just barely feel the slightest restrictions for the longest amount of time, but I just couldn't make the wood break. It wouldn’t do it. I was making a whole lot of noise too. I was scared that the owners would see me, the person that they tied to a chair holding a hammer, trying to break his legs free, and taking advantage of the situation to kill him so that there was no chance of him coming after you, or at the very least attacking you. Rather than having a big old fight, why not just shoot him while he’s still on the ground, with his feet cuffed to a chair. It would be one hell of a lot easier than killing him while he’s screaming and running through the street trying to tell someone that he was locked up in a motel overnight for the “suspicion” of possessing drugs.

That’s when my leg started to bleed. There wasn’t a cut before I fell. There wasn’t any stitches in my leg. There wasn’t anything that was bad with it. I just seemed to start bleeding.

I looked down at my leg that was gushing with blood and started to feel more pain than when it had initially gotten broken. It hurt more than if someone had stuck a knife in it. But it wasn’t this that was worrying me most. Not the pain. Not the blood. But rather the fact that it seemed to come from the inside.a sharp object seemed to pierce the inside of my body, like a bee biting me from the inside of my leg. It was hard for me to even begin to comprehend how the hell this was happening.

Then I saw it. The reason that my body was in so much pain. The reason that there was a large amount of blood gushing out of my leg. There was a faint beeping sound, and the unexpected look of a red light in my leg. The light beeped just about once every second.

I broke the legs, after this ordeal and began to poke at the device. It hurt to touch it, but I was sure that I had to get it out of me. I started grabbing at the end of it with the tips of my fingers. It hurt like hell every time I touched it, whether it moved or not. I started twisting and pulling at the same time, as the vessel seemed like it was stuck in my leg with something I can’t even begin to comprehend. It was insanely painful to twist, but I had to break away the flesh that was attached to the device inside of my body. Once that happened, a whole new stream of blood seemed to start gushing out of me. It hurt more and more the more the vessel moved. It’s torpedo shape made it no easier to get out than if it were the size of a phone. I was covering my mouth, trying to stop myself from screaming.

I began to feel the device loosening up in my leg. It was becoming easier and easier to twist, like a loose tooth that your parents tell you you need to get out of your mouth right goddamn now. It seemed so deep inside of my body, and I seemed like I was helpless on the floor trying to pull it out. I was beginning to pass out when something amazing happened.

The front window was driven through. A really nice looking bay window, big enough to pull a couch through, and a 90’s looking sedan rammed it’s ugly head through it. An alarm sounded on impact. It was loud. Real loud. It sounded like someone was screaming at me to get up.

But that isn’t the kind of writing style I’m using for this book. Instead of waking up, I watched as that fateful man John walked into the room I was in with a gun. He was holding it in a slight ready position. Like if anything were to happen, he would be ready to fuck someone up.

He stepped into the room I was in and helped me to my feet. He stood there in front of me. I was ready to leave, when I fell down like a sack of bricks. My leg was still bleeding like hell, and it showed no sign of stopping. It was like I was somehow unable to move it because of this, and I just had to sit there, holding it. I felt defenseless. I didn’t think that there was any way to move out of this place. I felt sick with fear. Sick with knowledge of death. Sick with pain. Or, just sick with the loss of blood.

I looked up at John, and he was thinking. Thinking hard. Thinking long. Then he grabbed me by the arm, and lifted me over his head until I was plopped firmly on his shoulder. I felt all of the air leave my lungs as his shoulder blade began to dig into my stomach. It felt like I was having someone lay on my chest for an extremely long amount of time. My leg was still bleeding profusely, having itself bleed all over his back. He wasn’t phased at first because he was wearing so many layers. It started to soak in as he carried me more and more. It was totally disgusting.

In a mix of my seeming sickness and the loss of blood, I began to feel woozy. He really was laying it into me hard with his shoulder blade, too. I started to see things differently. I seemed to be nodding my head, and I could see everything like it was a swirl or something. It was weird, but I didn’t mind it.

John threw me down into the backseat of a car that I had assumed he stole. It was padded. I liked it. It seemed like I was sinking into the seat. He slid me a bit further in, and perched my head up on the window. I looked at him while he shut the door. I could see my vision distorting more and more. John looked extremely worried about, but I felt no pain in my leg anymore. I genuinely thought that he was going to bring me to a hospital or something.

But then I died.

Every religion is wrong.

I felt like it was necessary to say that.

I know from experience what is right. It isn’t heaven, hell, purgatory. And I sure as hell didn’t wake up as an animal. There wasn’t a blinding light. In fact, it seemed like it was the opposite. I was sitting there one second, and the next, I wasn’t. It was instantaneous. It seems like it shouldn’t have been like that, either. I would think that something was going to happen that would signify it for me. But it was more like going to sleep. You might be trying to make it happen, but you have no idea when it will. And that started to scare me.

It seemed like it was pitch black, but I could see my body like I was in a room where there is one big, bright light over everything. My point is, it looked black, when it seemed truly as though it was bright. It’s kind of weird to think about.

I just seemed to walk around in my life. It started appearing to me as I walked further and further along. I saw all the corny stuff. Learning how to ride a bike, going through kindergarten, all that. It was something that I’ve been remembering my entire life, so it wasn’t too big for me.

I wasn’t quite interested in what was going on until I reached the part of my life where I had been abducted.

James was sitting across from me at a table. There was a huge gash in his neck. He looked a lot better than when there was a piece of glass in it. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it looked like it was at the very least beginning to heal. I think that it might have healed slightly more than the last time I had seen him in one of my dreams. On the table in front of him was a small tablet. I don’t know why, but this had significance in my mind as something that had become very important to James.

There was a Colombian man sitting to my right. He looked a bit older, maybe around 45, and I recognised him as the man who shot me. I wanted to kill him badly. He had a bushy mustache that didn’t seem to fit on his face correctly, probably just because of the excessive size of it. I seemed to sit there and look at them for a good 30 seconds. The room I was in didn’t seem to have any walls. I mean, it probably had walls in real life, but I don’t think my brain was able to render that for whatever reason.

My hands were handcuffed to one of the metal poles that made up the back of my chair. They felt cold, and hard to comprehend without hurting myself. They were also really tight. As I strained, they seemed to actually get tighter, which sucked because I was straining a lot. It was hard for me not to, especially when there were two people that I know have tried to kill me in the past.

Both of them were staring at me, unblinking. I don’t think that’s what happened in real life, but it sure felt real in the moment. I was just sitting there looking at them, when some random person that I’ve never seen before walked into the room and sat down to my left. I felt like I had recognised him, but I don’t quite know whether I had or not. Nobody was talking yet. We were sitting there, just vacantly staring at each other. If I were to have started a conversation, that would have been neat. Except for when I didn’t. I never did. I just sat there with my hands behind my back while these people stared at me and I started to look back into their eyes.

Waiting is hard for me. Even with three people around me that I could technically talk to at any time that I wanted to. It seemed like we were all waiting for something. I didn’t know what, but we were waiting for something that seemed important to someone there.

I was sitting there, looking at these people, when suddenly I felt a compression in my chest. Somehow, in some way, I knew exactly what was happening in that moment, and I was perfectly fine with it happening. I was being brought back to life, through CPR.

It hurt more than the pain in my leg.

Once I started regaining consciousness, I looked at him leaning over me. It was like waking up after someone had been trying to wake you up for a few minutes. I was in a daze. It felt like my head wasn’t on anymore, like somehow I had twisted it off my body.

John seemed to blend in with where James was sitting. I was in the back of that shitty car he decided to wreck through the window. It seemed more shitty than before, but I think that that might just have been because I had less blood loss when this was all happening.

I didn’t feel as much pain as I had before in my leg. I like to think that this was because I had no sharp metal inside of it. But, it may also had been because I had lost it. That wouldn’t have been good.

John continued to press on my chest while I began to yell. He didn’t want to stop, because he knew that he would need me, somehow. I knew that he would need me. The world seemed to, at that very moment, know that one day, he would need me.

To tell a man to get off your chest while he is giving you CPR is both a blessing, and a curse. The blessing would be that you now know that the man is alive, and that your work is done, but the curse is that now you feel that someone owes you something. Now, if, say, I were to give someone CPR who had a very large bank account, I would most likely expect them to give me, at the very least, $20. However, if the person who was saved in this current moment too poor to even give me this measly $20, I would gladly accept a blowjob. It was no problem for me, just the thought of it, as a matter of fact, gives me a bit of joy.

But I wasn’t about to suck John’s dick.

I jumped up on the seat. He backed off immediately. “Holy shit,” he told me, “I saved your life, man.”

I began to feel my chest. I was positive that he had broken a rib. I couldn’t feel anything though.

It was hard to breath. My chest felt compressed, and if I took too deep of  a breath, I could feel my chest too much. By that, I mean that I was conscious that I had a chest, which is strange, because you don’t normally think about having a chest on your body. I looked over to John. He seemed more exasperated than I was. Like he had been to hell and back, even though I may very well have gone to hell and back.

He had a ghost face. Not like he had seen a ghost. Like he was a ghost. Really fit with his whole “I’m in my 70’s” thing that he has. I started shaking my body around, trying to feel if anything was hurting. Only my chest. I had no other injuries except for the one in my chest that was caused by someone bringing me back to life.

John seemed to want to avoid talking to me. I think he was tearing up, but I had no way of telling. He got into the front seat of the car and began driving. I sat in the back and thought about death. I could have been gone forever, but for some strange reason, I didn’t. John seemed to be a better friend than I have had in the past. Better than James, who tried to kill me. Better than the white kid, who Just smoked crack all the fucking time. It seemed to me that rather than assuming everything had been fine, and leaving me to deal with my own shit, I think that in a way, John actually cared that I lived.

We stopped off the road for John to take a piss. I didn’t need to, so I was waiting in the car. It seemed exhausting just sitting there, like somehow I wasn’t being useful. Like somehow, I should have been helping John take a piss. I was watching cars pass on the freeway. I hadn’t been paying too much attention up until this point. I started thinking about where we might be going. I hoped to god it was out of Utah. I was already sick of this shitty fucking state. I wanted to get out soon, so I guess I was fine with this impromptu road trip. I was totally fine in every way. I thought about trying to get John to talk to me a little bit more. It could be fine to have a longer conversation than just him shortly recapping everything that had happened to him preceding meeting him. It seemed like a good idea. But then we would bond. I wanted to stop on the road, too. I always liked being wired as fuck whenever I go on road trips. Not like drugs, wired. More like caffeine. I wanted to feel like a child who had too much candy. I wanted to be hyper as fuck. I could do it. I just had to walk into a gas station the next time we stopped. I just needed to have the caffeine rushing through my veins faster than I can run.

The road seemed to go on forever. I could practically see the curve of the earth on it. There were 4 lanes for the longest time, until we got out of the county. Then it was a two lane highway, with very little traffic other than us. When there was another car, it would either pass us, or stay behind us for a few miles before turning. There was nothing going on.

Utah is normally ridiculed for being a smaller state, in population. It has Salt Lake City, of course. But, despite having one or two big cities, it falls short, much like New Mexico. It doesn’t have much in the proportions, but it is still a nice state. Driving on this random, butt-fuck egypt highway, I saw sights similar to what you would think to see driving through the country.

I think that long road trips are always felt more fun with a nice window to look out of. However, the window that I was forced to look out of had my blood spurted onto it. Not exactly the best for seeing the sights.

I was bored of just sitting there in the back of the car. I wanted to talk or something. It had already been at least 2 or 3 hours that we have been driving on the road. I decided to initiate a conversation. “So, John, where did you get this car?”

“Well,” he started, “I found it, and I knew it had no car alarm in it, so I wouldn’t have to deal with that. I needed something I could use to get you out of that place.”

“How did you know it wasn’t going to have an alarm?”

“Well, man, I learned a lot about cars in my day. I had to, to steal ‘em.”

“But,” I decided to be defiant to what he was telling me, “how can you tell the difference between all the models?”

“It’s the little things.”

“Like what?”

“Whether or not it has an alarm.”

Now he was just being an asshole to me for the fun of it.

We stopped at a gas station a couple more miles down the road. I was ready to buy something, but the money I had in my wallet wasn’t there anymore. “Hey John,” I began, “You see where my money went?”

“No man,” he told me, “it ain’t my job to keep a check up on your shit.”

Well, I was shit out of luck. I had no money, didn’t know where I was going, and was still trying to make it in life. I could go back to selling drugs. I wonder if I could find some backwoods town somewhere that was taken over by a gang or something. I might be able to join then and get some money that way. I need cash. I need it to live.

“Hey John,” I said, “you got any money?”

“Yeah, man,” he said, looking up from wherever he was looking, “they gave me a decent settlement for false imprisonment. I still have like 4 or 5 grand left, man.”

4 or 5 grand. I needed to make some money. That was nowhere enough for us to live off of for the next few months.

We got back on the road, and I was glad of it. I thought we would sit at the gas station all day. I was now sitting in the front seat. I was comfortable enough to feel good about this trip. I was thinking again, about how I have killed men, how I can find a good way to make money. I probably shouldn’t worry. Things seem to work out for me. You know, except for the time I died.

I guess that worked out okay too.

I finally started thinking about the right thing. Where were we going?

“Hey John,” I said, “where are we going anyways?”

“East.”

There were about a thousand places east of where we were.

John seemed to be acting insane. He wouldn’t look away from the road. He was staring straight forward.

“Hey, John, you feeling okay,” I asked him.

“Yeah, man. I just feel a little bit weird.”

He pulled over. He looked sick. And I guess he was, because he rolled down his window, and threw up. I sat, in horror as this happened. I think that he might have been legitimately sick.

This particular roadside was not very populated, but we still didn’t want to stick around to see what would happen if we sat there with throw up outside our car. Probably nothing, but we still wanted to leave. We needed to figure out what was happening to him.

A nice gas station is the kind where, when you walk in, you can see that although it is small, it still gives you plenty of things to buy. My personal favorite kind of gas station is the kind that has exotic sodas, like Pibb Xtra, or Big Red. It would be an amazing sight to see my face when I walk to the soda aisle in a gas station and see 20 oz bottles of Pibb on the shelf next to Dr. Pepper.

This was a decent gas station. It had 4 aisles, a coffee machine, and a cooler for soda. John was waiting for me in the car. He was sick, and he needed medicine.

I asked the employee behind a counter where medicine was, and he directed me to the furthest aisle from me. He seemed content to tell me exactly what to get. He stood as I began to speak. “My friend, he threw up on the side of the road. I think I just need some cold medicine.”

“Well, what kind of throw up was it?” He asked, seeming so sure that he could diagnose John as though he had a degree in medicine.

“The kind that makes you want to look away and leave it on the side of the road,” I told him.

He sighed, like he was some genius. He whipped his Skrillex-esque haircut to the side, and bent down, picking up a small bottle of Claritin. “Have him take one of these now, and one tonight.”

I bought it and left the store. I went straight out to the car, feeling excited to “play doctor” with John.

He was laying down in the back seat, with his shoes on and his feet pressing against the window glass. I opened the door that he was leaning his head on and he woke up.He groaned at me, complaining that I hurt his neck. I feel like he was lying, though, because as I looked at him more, he seemed as though he was perfectly fine. I mean, he was still sick as hell, but he looked like he didn’t have a hurt neck.