Drippers

When I was a little kid I would sometimes wake up in the dead of night so thirsty I felt like I was dying. I knew I wasn’t. I was a logical kid, never prone to misgivings. Those, and the delusions, came later. So I felt like I was dying but I knew I wasn’t, and I would just get up, cold feet lightly sticking to the hard floor, and I would go to the sink and get some water. Those nights I always felt so alone. Like I was the only person in a dark world where the sun would never rise again and I would never see anyone else except maybe a shadow out of the corner of my eye and when I looked it would be gone.

But I wasn’t alone. Those nights, I knew I wasn’t, no matter how lonely I felt. Because as I walked back to my room, to my bed, down a dark hallway that may as well have been an eternity, a forever distance, the shadows would shift and the darkness would quiver and fold and there were human forms, there in that darkness, there were human forms. They were the shapes of the people in the dark, where I would go one day. And I knew, even as a child I knew, that on those nights I was walking through people’s bodies. Bodies waiting for me in a line of the dead.

#

I was tired and sweaty. I had managed to lose Dingo and Mystic Eyes, somehow. I wandered into a park I used to play in when I was a kid and took a piss off the slide, right onto the head of the stone turtle thing they had for kids to climb on. “Sorry.” I apologized to the turtle. I somehow felt like I was drunk even though I wasn’t. I wished I was. But all I’d had the entire night was those stupid energy drinks. I could still taste the slick of them in my mouth, their residue, their aftertaste, a film of their grossness left behind as a gift. It tasted so bad it made me want to puke. I did, chucked everything in my gut into a chunky pile on the sand. It burned. I felt like I’d never wash the flavor out of my mouth. Like I’d never taste anything else ever again. In hindsight, I was right.

Suddenly I was hungry. Starving in the way you only ever are after your gut force ejects like mine had. My stomach was screaming at me for food, anything, didn’t matter what, just something edible.

I had to settle for water out of the drinking fountain. I hunched over to suck it from the faucet, which was like three inches tall because it was meant for kids. It was warm and tasted like metal. It reminded me of when me and Dingo tried to make money running con games. We sucked at it. We got beat up a bunch of times, or straight up got our money jacked, or both. But for some reason we just kept trying to scam people in the same way, like we were stupid. We were stupid. I was broke the entire time. I only ate once every two days and the rest of the time I just tricked my belly into thinking it was full by drinking like 20 cups of water in place of meals. This kind of reminded me of that. I stood up, back aching, and wiped my slimy mouth with the back of my hand.

But I was still hungry. Hunger is a sign. It’s your body telling you the lights are still on no matter how dead you feel inside. Hunger means you’re alive. Hunger could piss off.

I was flat out of ideas. I figured I should probably just go home. Go to sleep. Forget about all of this. Let my mind stop racing and give it some time to rest. That would’ve been the smart thing to do, so naturally I didn’t do it.

Maybe, I thought, maybe Dingo and Mystic Eyes are waiting at my place. To ambush me. I was nervous. I wanted to call Wonderbaby but my phone was dead. There was a graffitti-clothed payphone nearby. I didn’t have any money so I just hit it a few times and miraculously the thing started working. It was probably just happy someone was using it after all this time. Now, what was Wonderbaby’s number? Fuck. I didn’t memorize people’s numbers. My phone did that for me.

I sat. I waited. I thought. Then I was at the Drip. I didn’t even realize it till the smell hit me. I guess at some point I had gotten up and started walking and wound up there, but hell if I can remember doing that. I was way past the line of lunatic worshipers. There was always this kind of ring around the Drip, like a treeline on a mountain, that nobody, not even the most zealous devotees, dared cross. They all just edged in around it. Most who were nuts enough to get that close lived there permanently, in filthy tent congregations, all praying to the thing, breathing its rotten air, drinking its stinking juices, bathing in piss-yellow baths of them.

Well, I was way past that. Way closer than even the biggest basket cases would go. There was nobody and nothing else here but me and the massive, towering exterior wall of the Drip and the dead gray grass. All around me was bright with a heavy scent hanging in the air. My eyes stung. My lungs burned. I was close enough to touch the thing, the giant zit, the huge pimple bulging out of the decaying earth. I did, just a poke. It was soft and fleshy, sticky, its skin thin like a membrane. And it was hot. No, scalding. It burned like hell. That’s what I remember more than the texture. The heat. The searing pain on my fingertip. It only lasted a second, but if I concentrate I can still feel it even now that I barely even have hands.

I kept walking the perimeter of the Drip. Eventually I came to a huge tall slit that was queefing out a gas cloud that smelled like a rotting corpse. Carefully, minding the heat, I peeled back one side of it. It opened to the interior. I slipped inside.

Two seconds later I was halfway to passing out. The inside of the Drip was a gas chamber of toxic fumes so thick you couldn’t see even two inches in front of you. I started coughing and didn’t stop. I couldn’t even open my eyes. My flesh was crawling like there were a million spider eggs laid under my skin and they were hatching and tiny translucent baby spiders were all crawling around, taking their first steps into the rotten world and clambering over each other and eating each other, cannibalizing their brothers and sisters, and the ones that survived, the ones who didn’t think twice about killing, were burrowing into me.

But obviously that was just my stupidass imagination. My head felt light and everything hurt, like every water particle inside me was getting superheated and was boiling me alive from the inside out. I stumbled forward blindly. I wondered how many people had ever been inside the Drip. And how many of them had ever made it back out. I thought about turning around. But there was nothing outside for me now.

Almost passing out, I caught myself on a wall. It was soft, sticky, even hotter than the outside of the Drip. A fleshy pulsing meatslab, veiny and red and watery, slimy, marbled with fat, throbbing with inhuman life. I managed to crack my eyes open a bit and saw its surface glistening with slime where I saw the reflection of my empty soul.

I heard something. It was like some shrill laughter, like a kid who had just gotten away with a prank but couldn’t help snickering about it and was giving himself away. The snickers turned to cackles turned to full-on howling. There’s someone here. Someone else on the inside.

I ran. Ran towards the voice, which I realized was Wonderbaby’s, chased after it. The inside of the Drip twisted like a maze, a hall of mirrors, contorted reflections in reeking slime. I was sprinting. Didn’t know where. Didn’t care. I just went. I stumbled into Wonderbaby. He wasn’t surprised to see me. He was holding the bomb and the gun. I was still trying to keep my eyes open, but I could hardly see anymore. I slipped on the soft ground. I remember thinking I didn’t mind if I just crash landed right there. If I just fell asleep and never woke up again. Just stayed there, dreaming sick dreams forever in a toxic wonderland. Slipping into the deep moist hot darkness.

Then Wonderbaby slapped me. I snapped back to reality all at once, nose burning, eyes boiling, brain on fire. I forced myself to concentrate. We were out of the meat maze. In some kind of clearing of fleshy white, some place devoid of color, filled with glowing light and a polluted stench that threatened to knock me out. In the middle was some kind of soft tree-like structure, like a cross between a fungal growth and a nerve ending, with soft branches. Gasses fumed out of tiny tight-packed pores on its skin. Wonderbaby nestled the bomb into a crook in one of the branches.

“We’re gonna blow this place sky high,” he said. “Turn it all inside out.”

“You—” I was interrupted by a hacking fit. Then, when I’d finally caught my breath: “You’re insane. I always knew you were insane.”

He just ignored me and asked me if I wanted to be the one to do it. Asked me if I cared to do the honors. He lifted a latch on the bomb to reveal a big red button that read: “DO NOT PRESS.”

“What’s gonna happen if we press that button?” I asked stupidly.

“POP!” With gnarled hands way too old for such a childish gesture, Wonderbaby made a big explosion sign, moving around his fingers crazily like they were fat pink dying worms.

I was still hacking my esophagus out. I had fallen to my knees. Wonderbaby lifted me up by the armpits. I don’t know where he got the strength. Then once I was up he got behind me and pushed me towards the bomb. I nearly slammed into it face first and set the thing off then and there. “Piss off, Wonderbaby,” I tried to tell him, but my voice was gone and it came out as a whisper or as nothing at all. I steadied myself on the tree thing and tried to catch my breath. Pointless. All I ended up doing was downing more fumes. I should’ve known better but I’m an idiot. There was no air in here. This poison gas stuff was air inside the Drip. Now it’s air everywhere, and it’s all because of what I did next.

I turned around. Wonderbaby was gone. Even his voice was gone. I kind of had the feeling that was always how me and him would go our separate ways, truth be told. That he’d just disappear, almost like he was never even there to begin with. Kind of got that impression all along.

But he had been there. He had. And I had proof. The gun. I could feel its metallic cool soothing my left palm. I was holding it. Wonderbaby hadn’t taken it with him, wherever he went. Somehow or the other, it had wound up with me.

There was more proof too. The bomb. I read the words again, shocked I was still brain-alive enough to read anything at all. “DO NOT PRESS.”

I knew what would happen if I pressed the button. An explosion big enough to wipe everything out at once, a white heat ripping and searing through the heart of everything everyone alive right now had ever known, had ever loved. If I pressed that button, everything would be over. The Drip. This stinking city. This rotten existence. Wonderbaby, wherever he was now, whatever quadrant of this too-small world he was stinking up with his wrinkled putrid filth. Dingo and Mystic Eyes, wherever they were. Everyone. Everything. It would all go POP. Even me, I thought. Even me.

Of course that’s where I was wrong. Dingo had been right. I wasn’t an intelligent guy. I was an idiot. Right up until the end, the sour, stinking end, I didn’t realize the most obvious thing ever. It took the whole world going to scud for me to see what everyone else could tell with just one look: that I’ve never been on anybody else’s side, and nobody’s ever been on mine. That this world is not for me, nor am I for it.

#

The day you realize you don’t need anyone else is the day you become invincible. I’m not afraid of death. Death has always been with me. Those people-forms, those left-behind shapes, those shadows filled in by the cloud of death. Those bodies waiting for me in the dark. Death has been inside of me this entire time. What I’m afraid of is that that’s where it’ll stay. That I’ll never be able to let it out. To set it free. Where it belongs. Afraid that it’ll stay inside me and fester and rot and I’ll decompose from the inside out and join everyone who used to be something but is now not much of anything at all besides a foul stinking mound of collective flesh. That I’ll never go bang. Never go POP. But that was how I survived, come to think of it, and why everyone else gooed into mulch while I remained. When it all went down, when the zit blew, I was probably the only one in the whole world at that moment who was in any position to POP.

Because the only one I had was me.

I should probably explain a little about what happened. While I still can, y’know? Well, yeah, I pressed the button obviously, and the bomb went off. Blasted to hell and took everything with it. Everything but me. Only took me halfway there. And then, everything changed. That was what I thought at first, but to be honest, life isn’t much different now. A little slimier and flakier. Little scalier, itchier. A little smellier, I guess, not that I would know anymore. And yeah, sure, everything’s turned into stinking mounds of rot and filth, but in general the world’s a little easier on the eyes now that I don’t have to look at anyone anymore.

It wasn’t like I didn’t search for anyone though. I did at first. But no matter how far I look, the only thing left that even looks kind of like anything used to look is me, and not for much longer. And even if I did find someone, somewhere, out there, they probably wouldn’t be worth much of anything in a world like this. Wouldn’t even be worth the itchy red pimples scabbing and scaling and flaking off my back. When I think about it, I almost laugh, sometimes, until I remember I don’t have distinct vocal folds anymore.

As for what’s inside the Drip now, who knows? Maybe inside is everything the world used to look like out here. I’d like to think so. To think that all I really did that night was make it so that we could all see what this world really was, what it had been hiding under the surface this entire time. That all I did was turn it all inside out so that all the vileness and cruelty and hatred and puke-rotten insides were now on the face of it. That all I really did was scratch the itchy skin so that for the first time in all of history we could all sniff.

Not that there’s anyone left with a nose. Mine fell off about… well, who knows when? I lost track of time ages ago.

So that’s about it. Now all I can do is wait. Death by decay, by deflation. I blew up the entire world, but in the end, I never did get my chance to go bang. Feels pretty bad, constantly. Nowadays I spend most of however long I have left thinking about how everything sucks and letting it get to me till I can hardly even think straight anymore.

It’s times like those when I remember the gun. Dingo’s. I still have it. And it’s still loaded. I keep it within arm’s reach, if you can even call these things arms, at all times. When I think about that, it makes me feel a little better. Because that’s how I win. It’s my ticket. My salvation. My victory. How I go bang while the best everything and everyone else can do is turn to mush.

POP!

POP!

POP goes the ______!