Survival

A sudden burst of pain, followed by darkness… the metallic taste and smell of blood mingles with the unmistakable feeling of cold steel against the side of my head, and I collapse. Down, all the way down to the asphalt. I don’t have time to catch myself. One last thought starts to wiggle through my brain, just before I lose consciousness… but somewhere along the way, between conception and creation, it gets trapped in the abyss as the walls come down around it. It’s only after I wake up that this fragmented thought resurfaces and forms into words:

Son of a bitch.

... ... ...

My senses return to me, in a flood of confusion, with the sudden appearance of light. Reduced to little more than a warm, red glow, after passing through my eyelids, it does not burn, but nonetheless startles me into consciousness as if someone had thrown me into cold water. Unable to focus my eyes, once I open them to my unfamiliar environment, and unable to hear anything but my own blood rushing through my head, I am for a moment unsure of whether I am asleep or awake, dead or alive. When I finally become self-aware, and discover that I have just woken up, it is only to realize that I am unable to move; my arms, bound behind me, are raw where the rope has been digging into my skin. Every bone and joint in my body aches, as I roll over on a rough concrete floor, and when I’m finally on my back, with my arms beneath me, I find myself staring up at a basement ceiling. Cobwebs hang in the corners; leaking pipes and extension cords run above me. One single light bulb hangs from a chain directly over my head, swinging slowly, moving the shadows in a sad, frightening dance around the room. Before I can even try to sit up, a voice rings out in the deafening silence, and I freeze, holding my breath in absolute terror.

“I never expected you to wake up,” the voice tells me. “It’s always easier, for me, when they don’t.”

Frantically, I search for any shape or sign of movement in the darkness around where I lie, but the light above me is blinding, and all of my surroundings are washed out in the yellowish glare. “Who’s there?” I cry out helplessly. “Where am I?” I can hear my own voice echo back at me from the walls, but my questions are ignored.

“I am truly sorry,” the voice continues, instead of answering. “I know how frightened you are. Believe me, I know. But it’s not my fault. I don’t want to do this any more than you want to be here, but it needs to be done.” I can hear his footsteps… slow, and seemingly aimless, around the room… back, and forth. He’s pacing, taking his time. “You’re not the only helpless victim here,” he says. “To be honest, I wish I didn’t have to kill you.” As the last two words from his mouth go through my mind, I pray that I’ve misheard them. A knot tightens in my stomach, and my heartbeat quickens; his footsteps on the damp floor begin to wander closer. “But if I let you live, after tonight, you’ll only cause trouble for me.”

“Wait,” I shout, my feeble voice echoing through the basement once more. For a moment, I fear that I might have been better off with my mouth shut… but what else can I do? Carefully, I try to sit up, but it is far too painful to move, so I simply turn my head toward the dark place where I think the voice is coming from. “You don’t have to kill me,” I plead with the man in the shadows. “Take my money. Just please, just let me go. I haven’t seen you… I won’t tell anyone.”

“You don’t understand,” the voice informs me, patiently yet condescendingly, the way an overconfident adult speaks to an ignorant child. “It doesn’t matter whether or not you can keep a secret. This is about survival.” The man steps into the light, and kneels over me so that I can clearly see his face – the pale skin, the crooked nose, and haunting, almost unnatural green eyes. To my surprise, he is not very large; from where I lie, he looks tall, but also feeble… his eyes sunken in, his long, black hair untamed, his arms bony and thin… not the kind of appearance I imagined when I first heard the deep, intimidating voice. “Now, you have seen me,” he says, suddenly angry, “and you’ve already made things more difficult for both of us by waking up. I have too many voices haunting me already.” He stands, and walks off into the darkness. A few seconds later, I hear the horrifying sound of metal sliding across metal. Immediately, I know that he’s pulled a weapon from somewhere.

“Please,” I say, entirely aware of how pathetic I sound, yet given no choice but to plead with him. “I don’t want to die…”

Suddenly, the man comes back into the light holding a knife. “Shut the hell up,” he shouts, throwing himself down on top of me, and forcing the blade up to my throat. I close my eyes tight, as he screams into my ear: “I don’t want to hear you beg. I don’t want to hear about your wife, or your family. I don’t want to know your name. I don’t want to know how much you enjoy your pathetic life.” His screaming then becomes a whisper, as his free hand pushes the side of my head down into the floor. “Face it… we’re nothing more than animals. I am the predator, and you are the prey.” For a few seconds, he falls silent, and all I can hear is his heavy breathing, as he slowly runs the sharp knife harder and harder against the side of my neck. He could kill me at any moment, and I know it. Is he hesitating, or taking his time? Suddenly, I can feel the blade break the skin, leaving a sharp, burning sensation in its path. When I open my eyes again, and begin to squirm in pain, the man pushes himself off of me, as if I disgust him. I’m left there, bleeding on the ground, but alive, left to wonder why he stopped… why I’m still breathing.

The man, after standing up again and staggering away, turns and looks down at me, tilting his head with curiosity. For a long time, he says nothing, and all I can do is wait, expecting that knife to come back down on me at any second. At the same time, I become keenly aware of a horrid odor, creeping across the floor from elsewhere in this dungeon. Finally, the man speaks: “I told you things would be more difficult, now that you’re awake… now that I’ve heard your voice. But it must be done. I have no time for games… please, just die quietly, or I’ll have to bludgeon you out of consciousness again before I kill you.”

“But why are you doing this?” I whisper, listening to the trembling in my own voice. My fear seems to repulse him further, and he quickly turns away and walks back into the shadows. Suddenly, my fear turns to rage. “At least tell me why!” I scream into the cold darkness, fully aware of the possibility that this man is just a raving lunatic who cannot be reasoned with, nor understood. Ultimately, I decide to remain quiet, as I realize that the ropes tying my arms together, though rough, are not very tight… all I need is time. Silently, I begin working my way out of them, as I wait for my captor to return, but he seems to have vanished into the shadows completely.

Once again, I’m left only with his voice, this time accompanied by the metallic scraping sound of a knife being sharpened against a stone. “You’re unlucky,” he begins, seemingly in response to my last question, although he speaks as if he is talking only to himself. “And whether this makes it easier or harder for you to accept what is about to happen… I chose you at random. I did not want your money; I left your wallet in the alleyway.” The memories of my last moments before blacking out return to me. I had been walking home, in the rain, when a sharp pain in the back of my head had sent me tumbling towards the ground. “I figured that knocking you out with a lead pipe and killing you in your sleep would be the easiest way to go. I hate killing, I really do. But I owe my life to this courage that I’ve somehow found… the courage required to end another’s life, as sickening as it still may seem to those who still believe that life has meaning. Or perhaps it’s not courage that guides me, but the same instinct that drives a starving lion to mercilessly hunt down and kill his prey. In any case, it’s not my fault. I’m sick, my friend. I’m dying…

“They didn’t know what was wrong with me, at first. I became violently ill, upon returning from Europe, and when I went to the hospital, the so-called doctors there were baffled at my condition. My body, you see, was quite literally dying, piece by piece… first the red blood cells, then the skin, and then the organs. Every attempt to save me seemed only to delay the inevitable. Eventually, after three weeks of barely clinging onto life, they got tired of wasting time on me… declared me a lost cause, and gave me two more days to live, if I was lucky. But I lived for another week, while they did nothing to help me. They gave me morphine, to make me more comfortable… morphine, for God’s sake! It shut me up, but the pain was still unbearable, and worst of all, I still lived through it… suffered through every miserable second of it. They never did know what was wrong… after all, I had neglected to tell them what had actually happened to me, in Europe.

“But I had already figured it out, by then.” The sound of the knife sharpening abruptly stopped. “This was not a disease that I had. It was something far more sinister… it was a curse. An ordinary disease, attacking the blood and organs with such ferocity, would have killed me outright… but this… well, if it was indeed killing me, it was doing so incredibly slowly, and painfully. Existence was agony. The only thing that could stop the pain was something that the doctors never would have given me.

“So I took it… and then I left.

“The doctor who had taken me in – the one who had tried so many times to save my life – I stabbed him in the eye with a scalpel. I slaughtered him in a state of delirium, for I was at the brink of death; now that I think about it, that action must have been pure instinct, rather than insanity. How could I have known what I was, at the time? Had this disease not already driven me insane, I would have laughed at the idea. But something inside of me must have known… some darker part of me – one that I never knew I had – took control of my actions, and saved my life. After leaving the hospital, which had given me no hope of survival, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I was more open-minded than they could ever be, and I already knew, and had accepted, what needed to be done. Even so, it was no easier. My second kill, and first on the outside world… I regret it, even knowing that it was necessary. I found a beautiful, young girl on the streets, at night… alone. I cornered her, and I killed her. Afterwards… I felt alive, again. Her soul, her life, straight from her veins, had rejuvenated my deteriorating flesh.

“Whether or not you choose to believe any of this is none of my concern. I’m not asking you to believe. But I think you already understand. You know what I am… a nightmare, and a thing that, to most people, is nothing but a myth. I am no longer mortal… I am a god. But it is far less glorious than it sounds… for in actuality, I am nothing more than a parasite… unable to live without destroying those around me, and somehow unable to force myself to die. I would love nothing more than to cease to exist, but that’s the irony of it all. It’s not a choice I can make.

“I pray every single day for this to end. Unfortunately, as long as I keep doing this, I seem never to grow old or get sick. Worse yet, I have been rendered unable to destroy myself, although sometimes I still do try. I figure that I am just as easily killed as any other man, if anyone would try… and if left on my own, with no one to prey on, I would become ill again within a matter of weeks, and slowly, slowly perish, in agony. But when given the opportunity to survive, in the face of death… what can I do? The curse keeps me alive, but at the same time, I am too weak to choose how to live.

“I have only tried to end it once… I stopped, for three whole months. And yes, I lived… but the pain was unbearable. To die like that would have been impossible, for me, and although I swore that I would endure it, that each day would be my last and that it would all be over soon, the suffering went on for weeks. Instinct eventually took over, and I killed again, for some deeper part of me wants nothing more than to live on. From the very beginning, I think I knew that I was not ready to die… that I needed to fight for my survival at all costs. Sometimes it is not necessarily survival that I am fighting for, but the avoidance of pain. Other times, I realize that I, like you, have the right to live. If I have to deprive others of that right to secure it for myself, then so be it. It is simply a law of nature, as unnatural as my condition may be.

“I will not deny that, after the first time I killed a man, I spent days trying to repent for what I had done. With fresh blood inside of me, I actually felt alive again – or, rather, among the living – and feelings of remorse for the dead were unavoidable. But soon, I needed more. I realized that I had to abandon all hope of leading a virtuous life, and survive. It had worked once, I thought to myself, so surely, it would work again. And so, I chose sin over pain and death. After all, I only need to do this every few weeks. I can live my life, in between, and forget about all of this until the hunger returns.

“Twelve years have passed since this all began… twelve years of suffering… and you’re my one hundred and sixty-seventh victim. And I regret to tell you that, after all this time, it has only gotten slightly easier. But enough talk. We understand each other now; that’s all I needed.”

Finally, the man emerges from the shadows, holding the long knife at his side, and stares down at me with sympathy and disgust. While I cannot believe a word that he has told me, there is no doubt in my mind that this man will kill me, mercilessly, if I make one wrong move. Reluctantly, I decide to play along with his game. “So what are you?” I ask, already knowing what his answer would be. “Are there others like you?”

“Yes, there are others… the man who did this to me, if he’s still around… possibly more.” He smiles… he’s just as insane as I thought. “And you… you would become like me, too, if I were to make that happen… if I were to let that happen. But that would be far too cruel. You would only suffer, as I do. I’ve always been careful not to leave anything behind.” The man sighs, examining his knife, and then looks down at me. “You see… I might have mislead you. I do not have to kill. I only do this because it is more merciful than the alternative. I am not as sadistic as the fiend who made me what I am. Trust me… you’re better off dead. You will die eventually. And now is as good a time as any.”

A burst of adrenaline surges through me, as he steps forward, and I manage to pull my right arm from the ropes just as he strikes. There is a brief struggle, as he reaches down and grabs my throat and raises the knife; I briefly manage to get a hold of the weapon with my free hand, but before I have time to fight back, the sharpened blade slices across my throat, deeper than before, tearing open an artery. The sudden loss of blood sends me instantly into darkness; my vision fails me, and my breathing becomes weak; but something keeps me awake and alive, long after I should be dead. And even as my mind wanders on the fringes of delirium, I know that some part of me is still lying there on that basement floor. I can feel a cold, rough hand let go of my neck, while a hot liquid runs across my body. I can feel that I’m being lifted from the ground.

Then a more curious sensation comes over me – one that, in my state of panic and half-consciousness, I am unable to understand: Something else seems to be pushing its way into my skin, around the wound… something like teeth, like cold nails, like fingers of ice going down my neck, all the way to my heart. I can no longer feel my own blood running across my skin, but I can still feel it leaving my body, as if being siphoned into another set of veins. The stinging pain from the knife having sliced through my neck has already subsided, and has since been replaced with a tingling numbness, one that begins moving from my neck down to my legs, until I can hardly feel anything at all. The fingers of ice run deeper. The blood comes out… something else goes in.

After what seems like an eternity, the man lets go of me, and my head hits the floor. All of the light has faded from the room now, and the bulb hanging overhead is nothing but a dull glow. My whole body is cold… lifeless… and my attacker, silently and slowly, stands and stares down at me, before wiping his face on his shirt sleeve. There I lie on the floor, my eyes rolling back in my head, while he turns and walks through a doorway into another room, perhaps already disgusted by what he has done. The wound in my neck has already stopped bleeding, as if there is no more blood to bleed. Yet somehow, I am still alive… or, at least, still able to think, like a living mind trapped in a dead body. Carefully, I try to lift my arm off the ground, and am able to move it, but I drop it again when my lightheadedness threatens to deprive me of my consciousness entirely. Even as I stay perfectly still, flat against the ground, the room keeps getting darker… I feel dizzy and confused… the oxygen is not getting to my brain. All I can do is lie where I am, and listen to my own shallow breathing, wondering how many seconds I have left before I die.

Suddenly, there is a sharp pain in my stomach, followed by the dull and agonizing feeling of nausea. My attacker’s story comes to mind, and although I do not believe it, I have to consider the possibility. I understand, now, what the man meant when he said that he had become violently ill… and I also understand that this pain is nothing more than hunger, or something like it. The story was true… all of it. How else could I still be alive? I have become what he is… but that also means that I won’t live much longer without a victim of my own… more importantly, it means that he’s going to finish me off, presumably for my own good. Regardless of what I’ve become, I’m a dead man. That is, unless I find another way.

Turning my head to one side, I look toward the source of a rather irritating sound… a scratching, squeaking noise that has been bugging me for several minutes. There, just within my reach, is a large rat. The animal stupidly crawls over and sniffs my hand as I wearily reach out to it. Perhaps all hope is not lost, after all. I can smell the blood in its veins…

Squealing, and hissing, it tries to wriggle free as I grab it, but the more it struggles, the more I squeeze. As I listen to the panicked animal’s cries of pain, I realize that there is no time for hesitation. Sitting up, I bring the rat’s filthy body to my mouth, and sink my teeth into its flesh. At first, I’m surprised by how warm the blood is, as it covers my tongue. It almost burns. But as I swallow it down, the pain and hunger and suffering all melt away, and I’m overtaken by a sudden surge of energy, albeit a small one. Whether it’s really the blood that brings me back, or the very life force of the creature that I devour… I feel alive.

It’s only after the creature stops moving that I become aware of my surroundings once again. I still feel weak, but I have the strength to move, and breathe properly. The light hanging above me is bright again, and there is a constant dripping sound coming from somewhere nearby that I hadn’t noticed before. Now, sitting up for the first time since I found myself here, I take a good look around the room. There are piles of boxes, presumably filled with discarded junk… several old cabinets… a broken grandfather clock against the wall. Straining my eyes to see in the darkness, I notice a pile of bones, in the far corner… far too large to be anything but human.

My heart, already beating faster than ever before, nearly jumps out of my chest as I hear a door open. The man is coming back. Panicking, I scramble to my feet, and scurry off into the shadows, just as the door opens. Watching from the far wall, I can see the man enter the room with a bright red can of gasoline. I watch, with amusement, the expression on his face when he realizes that I have moved. I hear him curse aloud when he notices the rat’s body, left there on the floor. Slowly, I creep further into the darkness, and behind one of the many stacks of cardboard boxes of discarded junk. Just as I expected, he begins to look for me, walking around the other side of the convenient obstacles, and past me. By the time he realizes where I am, my teeth are already at his neck. Even though I’m only mildly aware of what I’m doing, and unable believe that I’m doing it, everything feels right… I feel as if I’ve done it a thousand times. I can hear flesh tearing, as my jaws contract, and I pull at his throat. The splash of warm liquid that covers my entire mouth, neck, and chest when the skin finally breaks… the taste of it, the feeling, is indescribable.

Without thinking, I begin to swallow the blood, holding the man still as he squirms, until he no longer moves at all. Bones crack as I let him fall and hit the cement floor. For a moment, all I can do is stand and stare down at him. It’s the first human corpse I’ve seen, and it’s my own work. The sanity that I must have lost somewhere along the way returns to me in an instant, and I fully comprehend what I’ve done… but I also know that it is too late for remorse. It was too late to save him from the moment he decided it was too late to let me go.

Like the man said… it’s all about survival. I never deserved to die. Then again, maybe he didn’t, either… then again, maybe he did. Perhaps it won’t be so bad, at all, if I seek out the ones who truly deserve it. Then, surely, it won’t be so hard to continue living. In any case, I can’t make the same mistake he did. This world is too small for both of us.

Now where’d he drop that gasoline?