It was one or the other. It couldn’t be both. His brain or his flesh, never the two.
Three times in his life Dennis had gotten stoned, and every time it was this choice. He could have his body or his thoughts, but not both at the same time. That little bridge between the hemispheres of his soul got fogged up by the smoke. That bridge had a name. Corpus Christi or some shit. Once it was severed, he had to choose. One or the other. Lie still and think or get the fuck up and lose his mind.
So he didn’t smoke. Was terrified of the shit. And now it was happening again.
Dennis marveled at the similarities of getting stoned and becoming a zombie as his willpower faded and his arm began to sting less and less. He watched, powerless, as his legs kicked. The movement was a relief, but only for a moment. Cornflakes crunched under the heels of his salvaged boots. And when he began to rise, he did it with the grace of a drunk, with limbs jerking out of control, unsure of themselves.
Dennis was a joystick with its wires crossed. He was playing Dead or Alive 3, that fighting game on his XBox, but the man on the screen wasn’t pulling off the moves he was sending it. He felt that video game lean, the attempt to urge the action in one direction through willpower alone, but that never worked. Instead, his body lurched across the aisle toward the nearest scent. The player was out of his control. The game had gone to a cutscene, and Dennis had an awful feeling of how it would turn out.
He watched as his arms slashed through sacks of disheveled coffee, digging for Lisa. Some distant and half-sane shard of his former self knew what he was doing. It was as though he’d been locked away in his own skull, some interloper crowding in beside him, and the confines and proximity meant that feeble thoughts and silent screams from the one could bleed over into the other. A monster had taken up residence in his head, and he could read the foul beast’s mind, know what it was thinking.
Entire shelves of organic and fair trade scattered to the tiles around his feet. Dark roast and decaf. Coffee from countries where Dennis imagined life continued apace, maybe a news story in Portuguese about an outbreak in Manhattan. Or maybe the entire world was overrun, who the fuck knew?
He heard Lisa calling for him. She was excited, had finally found some special ingredient to this secret meal she’d been promising for weeks. If they ever found a decent store, she’d said, one that hadn’t been stripped bare, one dangerous enough on the outside to be rewarding enough within, she’d make him something special.
Well, we made it, Dennis wanted to say, to shout through the shelves. The old part of him wanted to, at least. The new part grunted with hunger and frustration—it had a different meal in mind. This was the part that made him writhe between the tight shelves, forcing his body past rows of coffee. An inhuman gurgle dribbled past his lips, a verbal drool.
Lisa was reaching for something, telling him to come over. Dennis’s arms found her arm. The touch was electric—skin meeting skin on a first date, the feel of one’s own deadened limb in the morning as numbness wore away into tingles. Dennis’s fear for Lisa melted in a flare of endorphins. His worry disintegrated at this discovery, this touch of meat, of real food among pre-packaged and processed shit.
Lisa shrieked. Dennis was on his belly like a snake, lurching side to side, sending more cans to their dented fates as he tunneled from aisle eighteen to aisle seventeen.
His girlfriend’s screams grew louder and more panicked. It reminded him of all the times he’d hid behind a door before leaping out. Reminded him of the insane pranks of the past week, the humor only boys found funny, the madness wrought of dark survival and fading adrenaline. He would pinch Lisa’s calf with the claw of a hand when she wasn’t looking, making her think she’d been bit. He’d watch Matt do the same or similar to Sarah, the boys laughing with tears in their eyes while trembling hands slapped at their shoulders, girlfriends calling them assholes, thinking for a moment that the end had come for them.
He didn’t know why they did it, why there was this compulsion to strike terror in the hearts of those they loved. More cans scattered as Lisa fought his grip. She was yelling at him now. Her fear had flipped to anger. This was how it worked. Frightened for a moment until she realized it was him, and then just pissed. She tried to pull away, but Dennis wasn’t playing this time. He held her arm with a starving grasp, his brain dripping sick thoughts and remnants of guilt.
Why did he ever scare her for fun? He tried to make caveman sense of it. For Dennis, every human drive had to make caveman sense. Where had it come from, this universal oddity? Why did humans do the shit they did? Where did it originate?
Lisa smacked his head as he emerged through the shelves. She begged him to let go. Dennis made zombie noises, grunts and groans of lungs compressed by metal shelving, the air just leaking past his vocal cords. Why did they do it? Did they scare their women as some sort of training? Was it to teach them to never trust any man, even their own? Or was the fear some subconscious attempt to cow them, keep their women feeling helpless and reliant on the protective brawn they provided, like the mafia feigning worry for some shopkeeper who had only them to fear.
Dennis didn’t know.
He didn’t know why they did it any more than he knew why he was doing it for real this time.
Urges.
Caveman shit.
Like eating raw meat. Dennis had never eaten raw meat before, not even sushi. This was his last pre-monster thought as he wrestled his girlfriend’s arm to his lips, jaws parting, teeth bared, the anger in her shouts sliding to full-on panic.
She shrieked piercing wails, and Lisa knew. She had to know as he bit down on her forearm, a patch of skin he used to kiss, that creamy white with a single mar of a mole that she insisted was a freckle. When his tongue hit her flesh, there was a familiar taste, the salt from weeks of running and not bathing, the hot skin like a day on the beach, the same flavors that tinted their lovemaking. His girlfriend tasted the exact same on the surface.
It was the unfamiliar that lay beneath.
Dennis felt an eruption in his brain like an orgasm. Better. Better than an orgasm. This was what he was wired for. His teeth came together, and Lisa’s arm jerked. Desperation. There was desperation in both of them. Panic and starvation were at odds with each other. The desire to eat and to not be eaten. Dennis thought of make-up sex they’d had once, the rough sex. He thought of that first time, when she’d said she didn’t want to, but he had convinced her. They were both drunk. He was too far along to turn back. Both naked and willing to do so much, but then him wanted more. More than she did. The drive in him to eat was like that drive to fuck. He would’ve insisted it was something containable until he’d actually felt it, until he’d gone that far. That far, and you were going all the way. He couldn’t stop. Too weak.
Dennis also thought, as he bit down, that teeth were meant for this, just not his. He never would’ve guessed that they could rip flesh. Not his teeth. Maybe those of another monster but not his. The flesh of Lisa’s arm gave way, his jaw clenching on the softness, and then her skin stopped moving, became tight, could stretch no more, and with a pop, with a sudden orgasmic burst of power, his bottom teeth met his top teeth, a chunk of her arm in his mouth, him chewing.
There wasn’t a product on the supermarket shelves as delicious as this. Lisa’s safety receded from his mind. What he was doing faded; what he had become made the rest of him cower in fear. Lisa gurgled in pain and staggered backwards, and Dennis latched onto her like a rabid dog. He slid forward, cans bouncing, and emerged from the shelves a different thing than what had entered. He and Lisa were on the ground, rolling around like they used to wrestle, Dennis pulling his way up her body even as he chewed this first glorious taste and swallowed it down.