The day was like night, thick fog separated us from the sun. Every day was dark and gloomy like this. After the war, after the purging, they kept us in the dark. They kept us in the gloom, in the thick of the fog. The cities weren’t just in fog, we were too, in our minds. I thought this as I walked, I thought it as I walked on toward the little suicide shop. The only one I knew of, the one that isn’t sanctioned by the government, the one with blood still on the tools. With the rust of death, the gore of past escapee’s from this horrible realm of existence. The dark; thick like ink that’s congealed to tar. Like the blood seeping from the wound of the universe, of our little fucking slice of it. This dying mass of dirt covered concrete. The gloom that strips the face of happiness to the bone of the jaw in a moment where you mistake a humiliating and shaming gesture or words for a joke. That fog, that fucking mist that concealed everything.
I journeyed through the fog, scanning for my savior, the suicide shop. My fucking Christ, resurrected again and again, with a loaded, cocked, and shot attitude. I passed sex shops which were as much so clean as the ocean was a place to get good hydrating drink. Women dancing on their one good leg, putting their body weight on their prosthetic, or removing clothes, or jacking off a guy with their cyborg arm. Some men took a real liking to the feeling of cold metal on the flesh of their cock; it matched the temperature of their running blood. This was what was left of us after the war, after the purging. Drug shops which were an aneurism or overdose just one loaded syringe away, they were all synthetics anyways. Drugs that would leave you dead or a vegetable sitting on the couch in front of a digitally fried-static TV screen just like your brain, waiting to be unplugged. Waiting until you starved to death. No real organic drugs were left after the war, after the purging. Hardly was there anything organic left at “the end”.
These were the types of people that were left, the ones that were into the sick run of thrills until they were spent out of cash. Fucked out of drugs, balls completely drained of any inhabiting life, four weeks without sleep, and time to crash. Waking up to more needs than wants, and ending up like me, but I’ve been saving up for this and unlike them. I haven’t had these…these needless wants polluting my blood, which I long to drain from this unadulterated vessel. I am not just doing this to end my guts screaming for more drugs and hypnotic sex. It is for my salvation, for surviving what I have in this life, I have earned this, an end. I rounded the corner, a restaurant selling pieces of the cooked collected dead from the streets, the fucking cannibals. Sick as it was and sick as it would make you over time, destroying the brain and rotting your flesh away until you become one of the stalkers, one of the street walking, fog hiding, damned souls. The demons loved this trick they played on the humans. Not that anyone would walk in there without knowing. It was just they were in it for the fucking blood, for the fucking thrill, their thrill would end in terror. The abhorrence made me sick right there on the street, it was ghoulish, cruel, and perverted, but what wasn’t anymore. I could tell by the mans eye’s as the vacant light in the restaurant lit golden the hanging curtain of mist outside the building. He was smoking the flesh of the dead, rolled up into a cigarette, this was the sign of a torturer, I knew him as a demon, as our eyes met (red eye’s) I looked away and walked fast. At least there were better fates for us than just being pets for the damned.
My mouth was dry and tasted foul, foul like the air, if you could even call it that, it was a smog. A smog that choked the life out of any being that wandered in it’s touch. It maddened men, it caused them to wander searching the nights for freedom; from the enclosure, from it’s stench, which crept into the homes and haunted us, much like the stalkers. How did no one see it this way, I must be wrong about that. Others saw it this way, they were just dead now, dead by their own hand.
The store was at hand, and I turned the latch over which powered the door, it buzzed and the camera read my face, it was close enough to view my complexion through the thick haze. I didn’t hesitate, but I lit a smoke, and billowed like wherever the fog came from; whatever hellish device or location. The door began to slide open, and I slipped inside before it was all the way expanded. I wasn’t going to wait for some malfunction (which is not uncommon) to keep me from my goal, my golden goal. I burned my lungs as another wave of smoke washed from the ocean of carbon monoxide in my lungs. The lights which could not be seen outside the store, if you could call it a store, it was a rental, death rental. “little suicide shop, you borrow, less sorrow” rang in neons on the wall.
The light was dim, but the cases were lit which held various instruments of darkness. I stepped in further, deeper into this fate which had been hand selected for me by the gods, the overlords, the masters. I found no surprise, hardly ever did I anymore. “Ha-ha-ha-hallow-wuh-wuh-wuh” creaked out of a small elder woman standing behind the counter, (yellow eye’s) as our eye’s met, I knew she was a witch. A higher class witch, maybe even a priestess. She slid her hands over the glass, leaving slimy secretions of sweat on the surface, no longer allowing reflections like in it’s pristine crystalline state.
Slightly appalled and still queasy I simply replied “hail” and began moving into the room further. Deeper in the room I was met with cases displaying various utensils of death and self destruction. These weren’t just top of the line weapons used by the secret police or as they were known crusaders. These were crude, made with unrefined metals, were they crafted in this very building by this stuttering witch? I probed deeper as I thought, into what resembled a concrete cave as I did I found the answers I sought.
“Yuh-yuh-yuh-ou wuh-wuh-ont be finding what you seek duh-duh-dere.” Claimed the seasoned witch while her vocal chords were warming up like an old car, “you seem tuh-tuh-too strong a man to be a-taking your own.” She held his gaze. “I see it in yer eye’s, you have that color, that color of a….” she held her tongue a moment. “You seem more a crusader, no…” she moved closer across the counter space. “not even that though, something stronger, not devious or destructive, but with the power to…” He was disinterested but listening, this was something he knew the witch would play, trying to trick him into servitude just like a torturer. “I could read your cards sir-uh, I reckon it won’t be this kind of death we see in ‘em. But lots of death to be had, we’s’a’sure-uh”
“I reckon you’re fishing, baiting in polluted waters witch.” He wasn’t attempting to be ruinous, he began to realize the witch had taken deep interest in him, she was staring heavily at his tattoo that he realized was just now glowing in this light. It was centered in the middle of his right forearm on the backside of the arm, the part of the arm that barely holds any hair.
“A dragon…” the witch didn’t stumble on those words, and she wouldn’t ever imagine she could. A gasp left her mouth, “your eye’s my dear boy…I know exactly what it be you seekin’” she ran to the back of the concrete cave and flung the door open. She returned back a few minutes later baring a sheathed long sword. On the case there was a symbol, which was a match to the tattoo on his arm. “Here is your mate, my young dragon. I won’t sell you anyone else in this room.”
“Mate? This is just some ink from the war.” He was confused and a bit flustered. He wanted a gun. He wanted one fucking bullet, the kind that was carved into the tip with a cross so that it would mushroom out and he’d be done with this place. Done with the memories of the war, done with the fate of the loss he had succumbed. His suit, the dragons… every last one of them lost except him. Why him, why had he been granted pardon? He knew why they stripped his pilot license, “throwing spears for the wrong team” he muttered under his breath. This flood of thoughts fought desperately as he reached in his pocket and pulled out all his credits and tossed them on the counter. “Fuck it, I’ll take it.”
She leaned over to him “Take as much as you can give back, take nothing more”, with her own slimy secreting fingers she slid the money from the counter back into his hands. “take none, give all.” She finalized the prayer and he realized now she had cast a spell upon him, his mind felt frantic yet his body calm. “Now go” she smiled a nasty beam of expression, but it was the loveliest she could give and he accepted it with his own more handsome grin. It was more like a semi-smile, where the favored side of the brain lifts it’s bordering side of the mouth out of excitement or some sort of small panic. It was a panic that gave a thrill to the muscle of the being. “now, go play with the other children.”
Turning he began to head for the exit of the concrete cave that the witch resided in. He wasn’t angry for her casting a spell on him he barely knew if she truly did, but he felt it though, didn’t he? It coursed through him connecting to the cell life in his blood, not like a parasite, but as if a new connection was made in his dna. He didn’t know, that’s truly all he knew. The sword felt lighter in his hands, the sword! He almost forgot he was carrying it. How would he end his life with this? And it was all she would give him, this was going to be painful. He looped his arm through the strap of the sheath and flipped it onto his back. “I’m a real goddamn samurai.” He reached the door, buzzed through and trekked into the fog, and as if by some magic completely forgot where he was and what he was doing there. He turned both ways remembering only that at the corner there he had seen the demon smoking human flesh. As well as the sex shops on the way to…to…where? or to what?
He felt an instant of fear boil up in him as he heard a shrill scream muffled by the fog. He could feel the direction of the cry. He shook off the fear