I carried Lazarus in my arms a good hundred meters from the trail end where I stopped the SUV and set him down. I put together the little army shovel that I had picked up along the way and started digging. I dug for hours it seemed like, but I wanted to make sure that the hole was so deep that no scavengers would dig him up.
"I love you, Lazarus," I cried and sniffled. "You were the best friend I ever could have." I covered him, crying the entire time. I packed down the spot good, stood up, and stuck the shovel in the ground for a headstone. I reached in my pocket and pulled out my bottle of "happy pills" and popped the top off of them.
"I ain't gonna cry no more, buddy. It's just me now. Oh God, I miss you so much!" I sniffled and turned the bottle up and drank about four or five of the pills. "I ain't gonna cry no more." I took another two pills just for the hell of it and then stumbled back toward the SUV. "So long, Lazarus ol' buddy, I love you so much. God, if you're up there, then you suck for letting this happen to such a sweet creature like Lazarus. I'll miss you forever, Lazarus ol' buddy . . ."
I sat down in the SUV and turned on the air conditioner and chased down four more pills with some soda that was beginning to get warm bottled up and sitting in the front seat. I tried to stop crying, but I just couldn't, I felt as though I needed to cry. I felt like dying wouldn't even make the hurt stop. So I took another two pills. Maybe thirty minutes went by with me just sitting there staring out the window at Laz's grave and bawling. Finally, the crying turned to light sobbing, and then a few more minutes later to just a frown with a sniffle here and there. Then I was beginning to feel a little more rational.
Jesus, I had driven across the country in two days with my poor dead buddy. There was a slight red bloodstain on the passenger seat where I had put Lazarus's body. Something in me had to bring him home to bury him with my past.
Before I left Dayton with Lazarus's body I had nearly committed something akin to treason. Was I thinking rationally? I don't know, but I was at least beginning to think now. I was beginning to realize what I had done, but I had no regrets and I felt I was in the right. I had been royally screwed. My sadness was becoming anger. I was becoming more and more awake and so I started driving toward home. I was pissed off at what had been done to me and . . . to Laz.
I had been up for two days straight and was now very much wide awake and my heart was racing. Then, on top of the anger, rationality hit me a little harder; did I take too many pills? My heart was racing wildly and I didn't recall exactly how many pills I had swallowed. It was such a long trip and my mind was so cluttered with grief and anger and loss I hadn't paid attention to the number of pills I had taken. I'm a big guy and have developed quite a tolerance to the happy pills. After all, I had been taking the drug for a long time, but how many of them did I take anyway? I couldn't recall exactly and my heart continued to race and my head was beginning to hurt as though my blood pressure was through the roof—but I kept on driving toward Dayton. Soon, I started to feel numb all over. There was a bright flash of light in my eyes and I started to tunnel out. I was only out for a second—or so I thought.
CHAPTER 11
I came to on a stretcher in what seemed to be some sort of post- or pre-operative room. My guess was that I passed out or had a heart attack or stroke, and then ran off the road and had a wreck. Somebody must've found me and got me to a hospital. The thing that bothered me most was the fact that I couldn't move. That would put the icing on the cake, wouldn't it? Not only did everyone I know get erased from existence, but also now I'm paralyzed with nobody to take care of me.
Although my body wouldn't move my mind seemed to be working and there was no physical pain anywhere. Was that a good sign? I could roll my eyes up, down, left, and right. In my peripheral vision to my right was a young lady on a stretcher. She was obviously unconscious. To my left was a man in the same situation. What had happened to me? And where was I? It was obvious that I was in some kind of hospital room. The bright light on the ceiling shining in my eyes was proof enough of that.
I lay there staring at the white light, only occasionally blinking my eyes for what seemed to be nearly an hour, and nobody checked on us. Good thing we weren't dying, or we would have been in trouble. I tried to scream for a nurse, but couldn't muster the strength to make my voice work. I only managed an inaudible whisper of, "Nurse . . . help, please . . . somebody." That exhausted me and was all I could manage. However, I was beginning to feel that my feet were cold and my back was cold. I also felt my hands tingling as if they had fallen asleep.
Then suddenly there was a wiggle in the room's lighting. I heard movement and rustling of people behind me, but I couldn't see them. I tried to speak again but nothing would come out. The table to my left with the man on it was moved backward just a bit and then I could only see him from the waist down. For the first time I realized that he was naked. Then I rolled my eyes back downward toward my body and realized that, as far as I could tell, I was naked, too. I rolled my eyes to the right and, yes, the girl was nude from head to toe. I heard motion again to my left so I rolled my eyes back over.
Then a stream of bright red blood shot upward and appeared to have come from somewhere in the man's torso. But I couldn't see his body, something was in the way, I could only see the stream of blood since it shot upward a good meter or so and then the strangest thing happened. The stream of blood stopped in midair and held there for a couple of seconds. Then it disappeared.
Then I realized that the man's right foot was missing. It had been there just a minute before hadn't it? Oh God, what was happening to us? I heard more rustling noises and a faint gurgling and clicking sound and could see two shadows flickering on the walls occasionally. The clicking, I could now see, was coming from a bizarre-looking instrument that floated in midair above the man's body. Segmented tubular appendages uncoiled and snaked and whipped around it, and darted in and out and to and from the poor man's body. Each time the metal snakelike appendages would dart inward, a new stream of blood would appear, solidify, and then disappear. Each time I could hear a thump followed by a squish. Then a bluish-gray three-fingered hand reached up to the instrument and touched a panel on its side. The metal snakelike appendages zipped back up inside the thing with a metallic clang. Then the bluish-gray three-fingered hand gave the instrument a light push and it vanished through the nearby wall of the room. The wall rippled like water for a split second as the instrument pushed through and then solidified back to a normal, solid-looking surface.
The gray thing turned something over in its other hand and peered at the thing closely with its huge, oval-shaped, deep blacker-than-black eyes. It held it up with its right hand and the thing floated in midair. the thing was a human heart—and it was still beating! The gray whatever-it-was made a hand-waving motion, and the heart floated through the same wall the other gray thing had vanished through. Aliens. No human, or human machine, could pull off something like that wall trick!
I looked down at the man's lower body and noticed that both of his legs were gone from the knees down, but there was no blood. There was more gurgling and clicking and motion as the moments passed. The gurgling increased, and the alien held up a human head in his right hand. The eyes in the head were still open and staring at me. The alien stabbed the head with a sharp needlelike instrument and then retracted it. Blood oozed from the poor man's nose, but then froze, solidified, and vanished, the eyes on the floating head still staring at me. Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!