Ardor

Eleven: Blood On Our Hands

And so we walk.

Have you ever just walked without a purpose or direction? It'd the most confusing thing in the world. I mean, it's hard for you to so fully trust yourself to go on with no particular destination. That's not what the human mind was built to do; believe in something so fully that you have no questions about it.

We ignore the blood staining our fingertips.

The blood of the bullet-eaten woman; the blood of countless people who are now nothing more than corpses; guilt gnaws at the edges of my mind, tears into the very center of my stomach, ripping an empty hole in my gut; my bones are riddled with worry that now replaces what once was marrow; my mouth is dry as a desert, and yet my tongue is an oasis of lies.

Stay alive, stay alive.

I think this over and over again, repeating it like a mantra. Another heartbeat, another pulse, another breath, another step. It becomes a habit for me to think about every little movement and function my body usually maintains on its own. A blink, a swallow, a pump of my stomach, a twinge of my kidneys.

There is an insurmountable collection of dirt under my fingernails and I have dust in places you wouldn't believe. Never have I ever felt so grimy and utterly disgusted with myself, inside and out. I wish I could stick myself in a washing machine and feel the dirt and lies wash away from my skin, my mouth, my soul. My breath is so disgusting that I can taste just how God-awful it smells. I run my tongue over my mouth. I can feel the residue left over from both my throwing up and my meager meals building up behind the metal wall encircling my teeth.

And suddenly it worries me that there are no more orthodontist practices around to keep my braces tightened and my teeth aligned. "I just thought of something," I announce, breaking the silence. "What?" Kobe sounds robotic.

"Am I stuck with these things on my teeth forever now?" I gesture to my mouth. Kobe laughs and shakes his head. "You're so stupid. The world is probably freaking ending and you're worried about your teeth."

"No, but seriously! I'm actually really scared now."

"You'll probably be fine."

"But--if I survive that long--I don't want the same braces from when I was fifteen when I'm, say, twenty five!"

"Rhys. Stop."

"It's not my teeth I'm worried about; I couldn't give a flying crap about what my smile looks like five years from now. But what if--" Kobe turns around and glares at me. Even though we're both tall, he can still look down on my barely six-foot frame. I shut up after that and we continue walking, careful to make sure the ground is stable enough to hold up our weight.

But for some reason I can't stop worrying about my braces. How the heck am I supposed to get them off? Now I'm panicking because I'd rather have horribly crooked teeth than metal wires cemented to the ones I do have for the rest of my life. I'm contemplating all the ways I could possibly remove them in case of emergency when Kobe stops and I run into his back. "What the hell?" I snap. Vertebrae and noses are not meant to collide so forcefully with one another at such a close range.

He points to something off in the distance. Why does he always see everything before I do? I squint and see another body. This one is way farther away than all the others, which immediately strikes me as strange. Kobe takes off, bounding across the unstable wreckage. I clumsily follow after him, occasionally getting caught among the rubble. As we grow closer I see that the body is that of a boy probably about our age. 

"Freddy," Kobe says softly, almost reverently.

"Who?" 

"God, you're so stupid. It's Freako Freddy."