Yes that’s it!
That’s it!
We must go to Wahjamega!
Their joy felt exquisite, all-encompassing, a drug that instantly roared through his veins and pulsated in his brain. The strange symbol again filled his world.
A pattern of lines and angles. The image seemed to swell before his eyes, glow with power like some mystical talisman. Everything else faded away, the world turned to black, leaving only the symbol floating before him, powerful and undeniable. This was Triangle overflow, he knew, but he couldn’t stop it. He didn’t want it to stop. The symbol was their purpose, their meaning for existence. They wanted it more than they wanted food or even survival.
They have to build this, and I have to help them, help them build…it’s so beautiful…
Perry shook his head, fought his way out of the narcotic trance. His breath came in short gasps. The fear again, but different this time, different because he’d actually wanted to help them. They’d been in his thoughts before, but never so bad as that.
He realized he was holding a knife in his left hand. The map lay on the counter, drops of blood blocking towns like the craters of some nuclear bomb run. He saw that the knife tip was bloody before he felt the pain. Like a ventriloquist’s dummy, he slowly turned his head to examine the underside of his right forearm.
In that short trance, he’d carved the symbol into his skin. Three inches long, it shimmered in wet red lines. The deep scratches oozed a little blood that trickled down in thin rivulets, rolling past either side of his thick biceps. He hadn’t felt a thing. He stared at his handiwork:
The Triangles wanted to go to Wahjamega, needed to go the way a junkie needs another fix. Wanted to go to Wahjamega and build something this symbol represented, whatever the hell that was. If they wanted something that badly, it couldn’t be good for him. But he didn’t have anywhere else to go. The Soldiers were coming, and at this point one direction seemed as good as the next. The important thing was to get the flying fuck out of the apartment.
Putting his exhaustion up on a mental shelf, he hopped to the bedroom. That strange smell hit him again. A nasty smell, a rotting smell. This time it didn’t waft away on some invisible air current, but lingered. He ignored it-he had more important things to worry about.
He hauled a duffel bag out of the bedroom closet, then thought better of it and grabbed his backpack. Nothing big, just the nylon one he’d used to haul books around campus a million years ago. He imagined that hopping with a weighted duffel bag hanging from one arm might prove difficult.
As he put the backpack on his bed, he saw that it glistened with spots of wet blood. It took him a few seconds to register that the sticky red smear had come from his hands.
He was still covered in blood, both Bill’s and his own.
Time was a factor; he knew that far too well. After all, there was a man crucified to his living-room wall. A dead guy with friends and coworkers who wore snappy little uniforms and who would love nothing more than to put several bullets into Perry’s diseased body, but he couldn’t go outside covered in blood and gore.
He quickly hopped to the bathroom and stripped his clothes. They were soiled with blood, both wet and flaky-dry. Perry felt the burst of overflow excitement as the Triangles in his back, his arm and in…in…in other places…looked upon the world together for the first time.
There wasn’t time for a full-out shower; a naked sink-washing would have to suffice. Besides, he didn’t even want to look in the tub and see the floating remnants of the scabs that heralded the start of this waking nightmare.
The last clean washcloth quickly turned pink as he scrubbed the blood from his body. Flakes of dry blood fell into the running water. He turned off the sink, let the washcloth fall to the floor, grabbed a towel and started drying off.
It was at that moment he noticed his shoulder.
Or rather he noticed the mold.
The mold was under the Band-Aids, green gossamer tufts peeking out past plastic edges. The fine little hairs looked like the last downy strands growing on an old man’s head before baldness finally takes hold.
That’s where the strange smell had been coming from: his shoulder. The musty, rotten scent filled the bathroom. The Band-Aids remained firmly affixed to his wound, but under the strip he saw something else, something black and wet and horrible.
The Band-Aids had to come off. He had to see what was in there. Perry used his fingernails to pull a small corner of Band-Aid off his skin, enough for him to get a good thumb-and-forefinger grip, then slowly tore it off.
The flap of skin peeled back; a gummy ribbon of stagnant black goo ran down his chest, hot at first, and ice cold by the time it had reached his stomach. The smell that had only hinted at its power during the past day was now released, a satanic genie billowing out of a bottle; it filled the bathroom like a cloud of death.
The dead stench instantly made Perry’s stomach turn inside out-he spewed bile into the sink, where some of it mingled with the running water from the tap and headed down the drain. Perry stared at the wound, not even bothering to wipe the vomit from his mouth and chin.
There was more of the viscous muck packed in the wound, like black currant jelly at the bottom of a half-empty jar. The dead Triangle had rotted. Horror stole his breath and made his heart hammer a triple-time beat of desperation.
The consistency resembled a rotten pumpkin a month after Halloween-pasty, runny and decomposing. Green tufts of the same gossamer mold spotted both the wound and the dead Triangle. Shiny black rot clung to the mold filaments.
The most disturbing part of the image in the mirror? He wasn’t sure if all the rot came from the dead Triangle’s fork-punctured corpse. Some of the green mold looked as if it grew right out of his skin, like a creeping, crawling messenger of demise.
The sink’s running hot water slowly clouded the mirror. In a daze, Perry wiped the steam clear-and found himself face-to-face with his father.
Jacob Dawsey looked haggard and gray. He had sunken eyes and thin, smiling lips that revealed his big teeth. He looked as he had in the hours before Captain Cancer finally stole him away.
Perry blinked, then fiercely rubbed his eyes, but when he opened them his father still stared back. Somewhere in his brain, Perry knew he was hallucinating, but it didn’t make the experience any less real.
His father spoke.
“You always were a quitter, boy,” Jacob Dawsey said, his voice the same thick growl that always preceded a beating. “You get a little booboo and now you want to give up? You make me sick.”
Perry felt hot tears well in his eyes. He blinked them back-hallucination or no, he wouldn’t cry in front of his father.
“Go away, Daddy. You’re dead.”
“Dead and still more of a man than you’ll ever be, boy. Look at you-you want to give up, let ’em win, let ’em put you down.”
Perry felt anger surge. “What the hell am I supposed to do? They’re inside me, Daddy! They’re eatin’ me up from the inside!”
Jacob Dawsey grinned, his thin, emaciated face showing the teeth of a skeleton. “You gonna let ’em do that to you, boy? You gonna let ’em win? Stop acting like a woman and do something about it.” The steam steadily clouded the mirror, slowly obscuring Jacob Dawsey’s face. “You hear me, boy? You hear me? You do somethin’ about it!”
The mirror clouded over. Perry wiped at it, but now only his own face stared back. Daddy was right. Daddy had always been right; Perry had been a fool to try and escape what he was. In a violent world, only the strong survive.
Perry took a slow, deep breath, and prepared his mind for what he had to do.
Time to get his game-face on.
61.