Friends

“Imagine having friends. That would be pretty cool. Until they inevitably try to kill you, of course. It could be done in any number of ways. Most you’d never even see coming, probably. Especially if you were the type to relax enough to let people get close to you in the first place, the type to let your guard down enough to give some ill actor the perfect chance to plunge the knife in and twist. Not that stabbing is necessarily how they would do it. In fact, it very likely isn’t. Any number of ways, remember? At any given time there are dozens of much better ways to kill someone than by stabbing them to death. In any given room, in fact, there are thousands of methods for killing just waiting to be elicited, teased out by human hands and human brains, the wrong confluence of people and emotions and thoughts and circumstances all colliding in the worst of all possible ways. This is why rooms with too many people in them have always terrified me and, consequently, why having friends is so utterly impossible for me. It’s either them or the rooms, and I never much liked being outside. My intense hatred and fear of almost everybody likely stems from one incident in particular. How quaint, when I put it like that. I’m like some kind of character from some braindead movie. A caricature who is born, lives, and dies all in one disposable hour and a half. A fake person inside some cheap, forgotten popcorn flick. A pantomime of a human whose entire personality, whose entire being — whose entire soul — is decided by some singular and ridiculous occurrence in their childhood, which is, inevitably, revealed at the story’s purple, melodramatic climax. Well, guess what? The first time I almost died was when I was 12, and we’re nowhere near the end of this story. I’ll never forget how it happened. I was at a beach. Hell if I remember which one. Beaches are like people. All the same and all terrible. If not actively offensive and harmful then at the very least constantly mildly irritating. I was there with two friends. These two leaned more towards the ‘actively offensive and harmful’ end of things, primarily because they tried to drown me. Here’s how it went down. Or rather, how I nearly did, never to resurface. We had this floating thing. It was like some kind of cross between a raft and one of those foam body boards. We had gone out to deep water. Still within sight of the shore, but far enough that the sand at the bottom had sloped off and all that was underfoot was only the frightening nothingness of the sea. If my two friends had had their way, I would have died out there. They just kept pushing me off the raft thing over and over again. They wouldn't let me get on it. At first treading water wasn’t too hard and I was laughing along with them. But the funnier the joke got for them, the more serious the situation grew for me. And the more deadly. Unable to use the raft to catch my breath, I began to grow tired. By the time my friends started talking about what a fool I’d made of myself over a decade ago at the kindergarten play, jeering at me, evil lips peeled back, practically frothing at the mouths about how they still remembered what, dressed as a tree, I had said I was most thankful for all those years ago, I suspected that an attempt on my life was being made. And by the time they started screaming about how they would never forget what I’d said, how they would never let me forget it for as long as I lived, hate in their crazed bloodshot eyes, I was sure beyond any doubt that they were trying to kill me. They’d never let me forget my mistake “as long as I lived,” they had said — I remember that they used this exact phrase. If it was up to them, “as long as I lived” would not have been much longer. My legs were growing sore. Pretty soon, they started burning, muscles inside on fire, sinew screaming. From my toes to my torso I was under an assault of immense pain that I could only subdue, I knew, by grabbing hold of the raft, giving myself a minute to breath, a minute to rest. But as I said, whenever I tried to grab onto the raft, my two friends pushed me off in unison, like two separate puppets both operated by the same cruel mastermind. Then as my head started to bob up and down dangerously, and then to sink under the water, they began to hold me down, their clammy corpse-cold hands enforcing my burial alive at sea. By that point I was flailing, thrashing. Burning salt water invaded my nose. The vile taste of ocean swill filled my mouth, an assault of watery filth stealing the breath from my lungs. My heart was burning. My eyes were searing. My brain was on fire. Their unavoidable hands were on me, hunting me, trapping me like a scared animal in a cage of water. I was sure I was going to die. Sure of it. I remember clearly that the lifeguard was yelling. At me. She was sitting at her station thing on the shore. The three of us were just close enough to shore that she could see exactly what was going on. ‘Get OFF. NOW!’ She was screaming into her megaphone or whatever it was as I attempted to clamber onto the raft. Her voice was like a series of brutal slaps willing me not to reach safety, violently urging me to give up the struggle, give up my life. ‘I’m not going to warn you again. No more than two on that raft. You need to get off!’ It was that last phrase that I remember the most acutely. ‘You need to get off.’ ‘You NEED to.’ You NEED to stop struggling for your life. You NEED to die. You NEED to not live. You NEED to be held down and killed like an animal. Your life is not merely not required, not necessary; it is actively unwanted and disdained. Anyway, I told my mom about what happened after I managed to slip away from them, swim to shore, my whole body burning white hot with life-saving adrenaline, just running on instinct, trying to keep me alive no matter what with a final, sudden burst of strength that somehow got me to land safely. She just laughed and told me to lighten up. Told me to ‘work on my attitude.’ I didn’t even know what that even meant. What does that even mean? I still don’t know what it even means. ‘Work on my attitude.’ Seriously, what the hell does that even mean? I know one thing. She loved those two boys. Loved them like they were the sons she never had. I, of course, was the son she had and she resented me for it every day of both of our miserable lives. ‘Why can’t you be more like them?’ she’d always say. More like those ‘very nice boys.’ More like what? I would think, seething privately. I rarely dared talk back to her, though I certainly did fantasize about it. More like people who try to kill people at the beach?! was what I thought about saying. Pathetic, isn’t it? Futile. I don’t know what she would have said if I had actually said that. I think she just wanted me to be normal. To fit in. She may have wanted it even more than I did. I don’t know. I know she hates the way I am though. I know she hates me, because everyone hates me. But her especially. I think in her mind I’m like some kind of blood-sucking, soul-sucking leech, some million-pound parasite she carries around suctioned to her neck and bleeding her dry, sapping out all her strength and keeping her down just by the very fact of my existence and the fact that I am the way I am, never fitting in and all of that. By the way, I still hang out with those two, even after the whole incident. As much as I tried to put a divide between us, I was too weak willed to disavow them entirely. So yeah, sorry, I fibbed a little bit at the beginning. I do have friends. The kind who try to kill you. In my defense, I don’t particularly like them very much. And in theirs, at least they made their attempt on my life openly. If they hadn’t, who knows how crazy I would be by now? Always wondering whether my friends are secretly conspiring to murder me behind my back. At least this way I know they want me dead, you know?”

“Hey, Chimp?”

“What’s up, Doc?”

“No offense, but why the fuck did you just tell me that story?”

“Oh, Doc, I just thought I would—”

“Look. Chimp. Look. Listen. No offense, ok? I mean that. No offense. But I don’t give a flying damn. Ok? No offense, but we’re wasting time here.” As he said all of this to me, Doc vigorously probed his ear with a gnarled finger. It came out blobbed with dark yellow, and he promptly popped the snack into his mouth with a wet smack. Not sure what to say, I just looked at him.

He looked back at me like I was crazy. I was. Or wasn’t. Still not sure on that one. All I know was that I was never like everybody else. So if everyone else was crazy, I wasn’t. And if they weren’t, I was. Am. My money’s on the latter considering my current lofty and elevated place in this new, turkey-controlled society and how I never would have gotten where I am today if I wasn’t at least a little squirrelier than everyone else. But you know what they say about hindsight? Me neither.

Either way, you’ll have to excuse me. I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s just that the first time I ever felt like I belonged, the first time I ever really had any peace of mind at all, was after the world as I once knew it ended irreversibly and the entire human race was condemned to slow but certain death. I was wrong about that, of course, that feeling of belonging. I think I understand now that I don’t belong in this new world either. I didn’t belong in the old one and I don’t belong here. I’ve never belonged anywhere. The only place I belong is in the ground.

But anyway, like I said: getting ahead of myself.

That afternoon human society was still very much intact, which is partially why I agreed to hang out with Doc: to get away from the majority of it. Not many people came out to Doc’s usual stomping grounds after all. In fact, they tended to stay away from the place at all costs.

Me and Doc were at his laboratory. At least that’s what he liked to call it anyway. I tended to call it the dump. Technically it was a municipal solid waste repository. In layman’s terms, a landfill.

This was where Doc spent most of his time. You see most of Doc’s research involved death and the attempted reversal of it. So he needed a constant and reliable stream of deceased remains to keep the tests going, fuel to feed his crazed lust for life eternal. All the organic waste that wound up at the dump apparently served that purpose nicely. The cooked and discarded carcasses of animals. Scraps of flesh abandoned, grisly, fatty, greasy, reeking with putrid slime and mold in those rolling hills of waste. Shreds of undesired meat and wiry sinew clinging to brown and rotten bone. Thick and chunky slurries of who-knows-what, smelling of malaise and swarming with flies. All of these Doc would squish together, glob into grotesque animalian forms of his own design. These were his test subjects. Sometimes I wondered how Doc managed to find so much thrown-out meat. I think he may occasionally have supplemented his findings with the rats or the roaches or any of the other vermin that called the landfill home — Doc’s neighbors. That was the other nice thing about the place, Doc always used to tell me: the rent was cheap. $0 per month, in fact. Which helped Doc a lot. He didn’t really have a job. No time, since he spent all of his attempting to electroshock the spark of life into his custom agglomerates, his frankensteined flesh puppets. As a man of science, Doc had many objectives, all of them insane. But this was his holy grail: to defibrillate a soul into one of his creations, take one of his deranged animal-forms reconstructed out of moldy globs of garbage meat and make it come alive. He spent all day and all night intoxicated by this mad science, chasing all the unreachable dragons of his own demented brand of bioelectrochemistry. He never truly succeeded. But at the same time, he never failed to come close to success every single time. Each gruesome experiment meant another sick chimera electrified back to spasmodic life and subjected to instant and certain doom, their ghosts unsustainable in such awful, ramshackle shells. Intense seizures would rattle their insulting makeshift bodies and end in a disgraceful second death. It was hard to watch. It was harder not to.

As for what I thought about the dump itself? Personally, I was of two minds. Obviously the place stank. Worse than you’d expect steaming mounds of concentrated garbage to stink, even. Just setting foot within half a mile of the dump made you feel sickly and sticky and gross and wet with a smelly heat and a dampness layering on top of you like an invisible blanket of scum and getting inside you like a disease. It felt a little like diving headfirst into sewer water and gulping it down by the mouthful. But people can get used to anything, and to my continued dismay, I am a person. So once the smell glued itself into my nostrils and I stopped being able to detect it anymore, things were mostly ok. Gotta say, it was pretty nice how there were never any other people there. So at the end of the day I kind of liked the dump. Kind of felt like where I was always meant to be, in a way: in the trash.

And then there was what I thought about Doc. Frankly, I hated him. Hated him almost as much as everyone else hated me, I suppose. I tried so hard — so, so hard and so much — to stop hanging out with him so idiotically much. To divide myself permanently from his company and his acquaintance. But it never worked. Never stuck. I always ended up hanging out with him in the end. Caving. Giving in. Partly cause he was the only person who was ever even mildly friendly to me. And partly because I always thought he was kind of like me. A misfit. A reject. An outcast. Even though it didn’t quell my hatred, I felt a strong sense of camaraderie with him. If only he felt the same about me.

On top of all of that I felt I was indebted to him for what he had done for Cheese. Cheese was the only one of his experiments that was ever a real success. Maybe it was cause Cheese was only really dead for an hour or two, tops. Or maybe it was cause he was still mostly intact, in one piece and still raw, not already cooked and half eaten and rotting off the bone like the rest of Doc’s material — just sort of flattened, really, stamped with a big tire tread. Or maybe it was cause he was still himself instead of being lumped in with the remains of a dozen other dead animals. Or maybe it was because Cheese was the only time Doc had experimented with reanimation via a serum instead of his usual electricity-based methods. Or who knows? I didn’t know why it worked. Whatever the reason, Doc was able to return him to some form of life. I’ll never forget that moment when he reopened those beautiful green-brown eyes of his. He never closed them again. His eyelids were the first part of him to rot off.

“Alright, Doc, Jesus.” That was what I finally said to him. I figured I had to say something. Cause he was just staring at me in silence and sucking his earwax. “I get it. Storytime over.”

“Thank you.” He ran a hand over his bald scalp, through the wild hair spiking out around his ears.

“You’re welcome.”

“And one more thing. Wipe that stupid makeup off. You look like a goddam disgrace. A goddam clown.” I still hadn’t bothered taking my work makeup off. Doc threw me a filthy greasy hole-filled rag to wipe my face down with.

I am a goddam clown, I thought. I wiped the makeup off with the rag. Except I guess I must not have done a very good job of it, as I would learn a mere 40 years later.

Doc’s face was covered in grime. His eyes were dull pools like oilslicked rain puddles gleaming out of the surrounding filth. I remember he used to cry all the time, big gross tears pooling out of those murky pits. It wasn’t because he was sad. It was because the dirt and filth on his face would get rubbed into his eyes as he went about his atrocious business.

“By the way, Doc?”

“What?”

“What is that awful smell?”

“Chimp. What is going through your head today, amigo? What, did you think it was gonna smell like strawberries out here or something? Some kinda Thanksgiving miracle or something? You know better than that.”

I guess I did. He was right. But something was bothering me. That day, Doc’s lab — the dump — didn’t smell like usual. It smelled even worse. It smelled like…

“... turkey.”

“Huh?” Doc honked. He had a way of saying “huh” that made him sound like an angry goose or something.

“Just talking to myself.” I looked around. The landfill was filled with the foul carcasses of Thanksgiving fowls. Hundreds, thousands even, littered in with the rest of the garbage. None of the birds’ remains were intact, and for an obvious reason: they’d been eaten. Gorged on by friends and family around beautiful dinner tables the nation over just days prior. The leftover bones were strewn about. A leg here. A wing there. No wonder it smelled so bad around here.

“Anyway, what’s going on, Doc? Why the sudden house call?” Doc didn’t have a phone, so whenever he needed me to play sidekick for him and his crazy experiments, he would swing by my place to pick me up. That was what he did that day too, only I’d been sleeping, which is why my mom had to relay the message that Doc had called for me, if you remember back to the first chapter.

“I have something I need to show you,” he said to me.

“Alright, so show it to me.”

“First I’m going to need you to promise you won’t flip once I do.”

“I promise.”

“No you don’t.”

“Yes I do. I literally just promised.”

“Chimp, I’m going to give this to you straight. You’re not a man of your word. So I am seriously going to need you to cross your heart—”

“Yeah, heart, needle, whatever. Just show it to me, would you?” I never should have asked that. Never should have been that eager. My curiosity was getting the better of me.

“Alright,” Doc finally said. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

I followed Doc as he crested a hill of trash, rotting garbage avalanching down behind him and straight into my face as I pawed up behind him. We summited the trash mound steaming in the godawful mid-autumn heat. We looked over the other side.

Doc was right. I wasn’t prepared for what I saw there. Not by a longshot.

“Wh… what the hell is that?” I asked this aloud, but truthfully I already knew what it was: turkeys. Hundreds of them. Thousands. So many you wouldn’t believe. So many it’s hard to even remember what they all looked like, spread out as they were across the vast ocean of trash. They were just like the turkeys I had seen before, the carcasses scattered about the garbage mounds. Only these ones had a little more meat on their bones. And more feathers. Not to mention the fact that they were all standing upright, proud as peacocks, huge feathers fanning lavishly out.

They were alive. But even from afar, I could tell that they, like Cheese, had once been dead. Mixed in with the unbearable smell of turkey was a familiar scent: the signature reek of zombie flesh. Undead turkeys. I was looking at an entire congregation of them. Enough to make up a small nation.

And that’s not even the scariest part. What really set my heart cold with fear was how they were all lined up. Neat and orderly. In rows. Rows and rows of zombified birds. Feathered creeps standing stock still in line after line of the undead.

“Those are turkeys,” Doc whispered, answering my question. “Obviously.” He was lying down on his belly in the garbage, head just peeking over the height of the hill, and he had pulled me down too. I stayed there alongside him, trying to remain hidden by embedding myself into the refuse so that I wouldn’t be seen by the birds.

“I know they’re turkeys, I’m asking what the hell they’re—”

“Shhhhh.” He pressed a leathery finger to his cracked lips. “Just look. And listen.”

“Listen?” I whisper-yelled. “To what??” Aside from Doc’s heavy breathing, all I could hear was the turkeys going gobble gobble! or sqqqquuuaaaaawwwwwk!! down below, brainless bird corpses babbling mindlessly.

Only it turns out they weren’t so mindless after all.

Doc pointed, and I followed his finger. At the front of all the rows, one turkey stood apart from the rest. A leader of sorts, it seemed. Sovereign to the reborn fowls. It was hideous. Its ravaged feathers emerged haphazardly from its raw reanimated meat, sticking every which way but the right way. Its blue waddle flapped in the wind like a sick yo-yo of diseased flesh. Its beak was half fallen off and drooping on a goopy string of goo from its vomitous face. It made me want to throw up.

And then it started to talk.