We stopped in some Eurotrash bakery/bar. I was drinking a light arrack and soda. There was an empty bottle of Wild Turkey in sight. The music was absolutely blaring from the Eurotrash bakery just outside. As a benefit, however, they served warm chocolate chip cookies. They were round and lumpen more than flat, upon biting they seemed to reform into their original structural integrity.

I left my companions and ended up in the bakery. There were two walls of pastries, but the music was absolutely blaring. Horrible Danish or something uber disco disco disco. There was a second door into a corporate mini mall, full of stooges on their coffee break. It was near closing time. I saw a journalist I knew, under some sort of cover. Being alone, I walked in and out of corporate land a few times, just to walk past another girl girl. White, black hair, bad English. She was already flirting with the waiter who seemed to have got her number.

The journo was there and I began to ask her something. Actually, we were discussing something we both knew in nods and shrugs, something we already knew. Something was going on, obviously. I acquiesced. Security started herding us out and someone dropped an inside pass on the ground. It looked like a large paperclip, one of the Y shaped ones. The journo looked at me as if I would grab it and go explore. I smiled.

“I’ve been to jail here before.”

We were heading out. There were lines out of this building, large men in suits, looking cloudy, grumpy and powerful. The gloved hand of repression. There were stacks of digital hazmat stickers on the ground, looked like a digital clock, a countdown. They were yet to be pasted, but it looked like they were getting ready.

“You know what gets me,” she said, “no one gives a shit. They just keep doing what they’re doing and no one gives a shit. They’re up to terrible things in there. Absolutely terribly things.”

I though about terrible things, medical experiments, tortures, horrible poly pharmacological experiments. I then flushed my mind and kept walking. We ended up going around the rotating doors, ending up in some part of the outside that was walled off by industrial ET-style thick plastic.

“Not here,” a grey-brown suit said, “you have to go through decontamination.”

I’d lost the journo, but I was walking out with a middle aged businessman I knew. We passed through the sliding doors and one of the hazmat stickers was pasted to the glass. It didn’t read anything yet. Just an empty digital number. We looked at each other. Salarymen and women were piling into buses on the way out, two were spinning out, in motion. We were walking out to catch when we noticed two middle-aged men just standing.

Their faces were ashen. They were bleeding from constantly emerging cuts and pores. One turned his head and the flesh cleaved, he turned along the joint of a slitting throat. They were like zombies, their flesh was liquifying into blood, melting from the bone. Their suits were on and briefcases were in hand. Civilization like the wrapping of a sausage.

These two men had a plague, or something like it. They were dying, worse than dying, they were melting from this earth, being flipped inside out into blood and ashen gore. I hewed away but my friend stopped to look. To help or something, to understand. I urged him to move on, to move away. I waited for him. I hesitated.

The bus was moving on, people were hanging out the doors. It was a modern bus mind you. I was close to the front entrance now, my friend was near the rear. I reached a hand and grabbed to pull myself up, looking at him one more time. ‘Hurry up,’ I thought.

He was in sight of the entrance but he’d stopped. He was ashen grey. His hands went limp at his side. His eyes lost recognition of anything except his plight. Blood flowed from contact with his collar and the lines of his forehead. It drained the color from his space and out ever emerging cuts and he turned to a zombie, liquifying mess. His flesh was rotting off the bone, in front of his ever sunken eyes. I turned away, pulled myself more resolutely onto the bus.

I looked down and there was a fleck of blood on my fingernail. I tucked it in. In my palm, however, there was a bit of blood in the lines of my finger. I was scared. I tried to resolve myself to my inevitable death but the chasm was terrifying, the exit too dire. I woke up, afraid.

Drawing by the amazing Searcher. Full set is worth checking out.

Posted on Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 in fiction, Future.