THIS CITY IS ALIVE
CHAPTER 3
(This excerpt should stand alone pretty well but there may be some points of confusion which I'd like to bring as much clarity to as possible... first of all, anybody new to the drug "protoplasmic flash" may get lost at some of its references; I would suggest reading a pseudo-scientific article on the drug entitled "Euphotan, Protoplasmic Flash, and their Properties" at The Journal of Precognitive Memories... secondly, for a better understanding of the people involved in the excerpt simply read the summary included on the page you just came from... and hopefully, for the rest of it, the writing will speak for itself.)
The next few days pass as fruitlessly as the first. Mesa consumed all of the food on the raft the first night while they were asleep, and their every thought is now designated by their overwhelming hunger; hunger they didn’t know could exist, the morbid feeling when a stomach, desperately searching for something, starts consuming itself. Worse still, Nail just shot his third to last dose of flash and realizes that soon he’ll experience a new hunger, deadlier than the first. Starvation is one thing; trapped in the sinking ship of a nightmare is a different matter entirely.
And that’s when he sees it: a dead ship, a hundred yards long, looming in the distance. For a moment he thinks it’s one of his hallucinations but it lacks clarity, the crisp realism of a phantom. It feels hazy and out of touch. He wakes up the Captain and points out to sea.
“That’s a ship, all right,” says the Captain. Thick sheets of fog draped from clouds hang between them and the ship causing it to waver and pass momentarily out of sight. They start making their way towards it.
Nail suddenly finds himself transported. One moment he’s lost at sea with Chevy and the Captain, blinks; opens his eyes in a long hallway with pictures planted on either wall every few feet.
He can feel the hall sway and crash in rhythm with the ocean and knows that he has somehow boarded the ship. Whether the past few minutes were lost in a protoplasmic-induced time-crunch, or they simply appeared on board, cannot be discerned. He sees no end to the hall in either direction, in fact, has the distinct sensation of being in a room larger than space. How can this be? He could clearly see the boundaries of the ship from the outside. He decides not to question it and starts to walk in the direction he’s facing.
He scans the picture to his left: scattered features, Picasso paintings take flesh, swirls of thick crustacean hair, rigid and deep green like seaweed. Under the fat, rolling face is a nameplate that reads “Captain O’ Malley.” The eyes are a hazy shade of turquoise.
The picture next to it is of a man with a tall, jet black top hat. A bright yellow feather sticks out of the brim and juts through the painting at the tip, the end bristles drooping in the dead breeze. He has pallid, gray flesh; angry cheekbones tearing through skin, sandy yellow hair strewn lazily across the scalp.
None of the men in the paintings have any division between iris and eyeball. Their eyes came in solid shades, dark, misty blacks and blues and reds. Nail continues down the hall for a while before the portraits stop and a new series of paintings begin. These ones are exclusively washes of color; the next fifteen are a string of dark coats of black and blue and red.
The next painting catches him off guard. A grillo sits on its hind legs in a vast field of snow, rust, and decay…
The next painting hits him harder: the same grillo spliced open to reveal its dissected internal organs. The forefront of the image, the organ that shines more vibrantly than anything else, is the one that emits protoplasmic flash.
He feels weak staring at the next one. Himself, sitting on his couch, a needle digging into his vein, already a victim to the grip of flash. He has time to see the unspeakable terror in his own eyes before he runs off.
He enters the first door he can find. Inside the door is a man strapped to an upright bed with giant rubber bands around his torso and nails in his hands and feet: Nail sees the terror in his eyes, identical to that in his own. There are four extremely long and thick needles pointing towards the man, geared for incision.
“GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!” scream-cries the man, his eyes wide and bloodshot.
He runs out of the room and trips over a grillo, sitting on its hind legs on the floor.
- - - - -
The Captain sits in a hyper-modern cocktail lounge. Everything is gray and smooth and dimly lit. The counter is made of thick, transparent glass and a neon green fluid runs under its surface. On top of the glass he finds a clear bubbling martini with a slim olive in it. He reaches towards it.
“Greetings, sir.” The Captain jumps in his seat. He looks up and sees a face looming before him; dull, slick gray like all the rest. “Please, have some. I think you’ll find it quite agreeable.”
Against his better judgment he sips the drink. It is sweet and warms his insides, lagging in his chest and coming to a comfortable rest in his stomach. “Where am I?” he asks.
“You have boarded the S.S. Soupalt, sir. We were once one of the most reputable cruise lines on the planet, though I assume you wouldn’t have ever heard of us.”
“No, I have not.” The Captain finishes off his drink and immediately the man behind the bar pours him another. His eyes are a solid wash of misty black…
A different man comes out of a door behind the bar and walks up next to them. They’re skin is gray and the Captain notices that everything about them resembles death, decay. The sparks in their eyes have been shut off. They stare at him through embers of ash.
“Unfortunately, we have come to a screeching halt,” the second man says.
“I’m sorry to hear that. Ship troubles?”
The first one smirks. “Of the most severe sort.”
“Anything I can do to help?”
“It’s funny you should ask,” says the second.
First: “You know, the S.S. Soupalt has been anchored for two-hundred years. We’re getting a little anxious for a captain.”
“Two hundred years?”
When the second drink hits the stomach the Captain knows he’s been drugged.
- - - - -
In the bottom level of this cancerous ship Chevy fumbles with the latch of a large chest. Behind him he hears metal tear-clanking – Mesa doing the same. He could feel the hot waters rush over him, dip into a dream; woke up on this ship with a pain in his stomach as strong as ever and decides he has a better chance finding food here than in his previous residence.
The first box contains nothing. He searches through several more to the same effect. Finally he opens one particularly heavy box and finds several cans of processed meat. He digs into the lid and pries it off; warm preservative juice and blood from his fingertips on his soaked hand, the smell of meat centuries dead rising in a stiff heat wave.
“Mesa,” he calls. “Come here, I got some food.”
His son drops an empty crate and hobbles over. His back juts out in the dusty light from the basement. Chevy hands him the open can and sits down on the crate, watching Mesa take cautious nibbles at first, accelerating into depraved hunger-quench.
“Do you miss home?” Mesa stares at him in wide-eyed wonder. “You know why I’m doing this right?”
In the silence Chevy continues. “I don’t want you to grow up like me, Mesa. I want you to love your life. And I don’t want you living on that rock the whole time.” Mesa slides the last chunks of meat down his throat. “It’s for you, Mesa. I’m old anyways. You’ve got your whole life. I just want you to live it, really live it, you know what I mean? Am I making any sense to you?”
Mesa drops the can at his feet and returns to work. I don’t know why I bother, Chevy thinks. Does anything penetrate his autistic glaze? Can he possibly understand what it is I’m trying to say?
He passes on the meat for now, hungry as he is, and starts trying to work more boxes open. The next one he lifts is huge, the size of a coffin, and he drops it immediately with a behemothic crash ringing throughout the cold room. He notices the cold in these fading reverberations and wonders how cold it has to be before one starts freezing to death. Then he lifts the lid of the unlocked box:
Fragments of a body cut up and reassembled to form a new Burroughsesque corpse. A slow blood still seeps out at the points of separation, collects in the bin and drops/splatters onto the floor. He freezes and drops the bucket – feels hot waters rush over him, ankles – he turns around in dumbstruck panic and finds Mesa carving an axe into the floor, as deep as he can – gash in Mesa’s foot where his severed toe should have been – the water is up to his knees now and he realizes this cancerous ship is sinking fast…
- - - - -
The Captain drags himself up the stairs as fast he can, pursued by two ghosts. He can feel his body deactivating, all sensory response lost in a cesspool of broken synapses. The stairs shuffle in front of him like a deck of cards, the two visages palpitate the floor behind him… he slips and collapses, feels ribs snap on the awkward edges of stairs, lets out a ghastly wheeze into the dust… the decrepit faces lull sweet behind him, call him back to them, “please, sir, stay for a while. You don’t seem to realize what exactly it is you’re passing up.”
From the blurred rims of his corneas he can see Nail pounding down the stairs, following the grillo, stopping short at the sight of the apparitions behind him. There are no surprises left on this ship, thinks Nail, and he cocks back a fist, leaving the grillo to scamper away. He flairs a punch into the bartender’s face.
His fist is enveloped in the bartender’s features – arm extending out of the nose – and he is sent disarranged down the stairs. His limbs splay like tumbling fireworks, the room spins and reassembles like a rubix cube… He says to himself in a crumpled heap, “It’s all fake. Nothing in here is real.” The excitement of an addict upon finding a fix fades; every cell of hope dies; only the pained, fatigued screams of the Captain are enough motivation to pry him off the floor and begin climbing the stairs.
He walks through the ghosts and grabs the Captain at the armpits, hauling him to his feet and guiding him up the rest of the stairs. The ship sighs loudly and jolts; there is a thundering clap of splintering floorboards as the ground only a level below them erupts. Water rockets towards the ceiling in thick geysers.
The ghosts are lost in the rising mosaic of diluted debris, the Captain staggers under the heavy weight of exhaustion without a torso for support. They climb the stairs, barely faster than the water. Back on the floor filled with portraits of the former captains of the S.S. Soupalt, they hear screams emanating from the room in the hall. At last they reach the surface, where they find Chevy huddled over his son, panic in his eyes. A lightning bolt cuts the sky like a jagged dagger.
The lip of the ship is only a few feet above the surface of the water and they plunge in, a thunderous pop behind them as the ship disappears completely into the ocean…
As they drift through the dark ocean, Nail can feel a constricting wave of eels and fish pass by, their body-slime rubbing off onto his skin. He reaches out and grabs the Captain, yanks him up for air. He catches a glint from their diminutive raft about twenty yards off and breaks for it; throws the Captain’s body on deck and turns to see Chevy doing the same with his son.
Before the drugs completely overwhelm him and knock him out, the Captain sees Mesa’s dripping foot and lets out a shrill scream.
“Blood!”
“We had a bit of an accident in the basement of that ship,” Chevy says.
The Captain struggles to keep his eyes from rolling back into his skull as he mutters, “rust monster…”
- - - - -
A rust monster follows the blooming-cloud blood trail seeping out of Mesa’s foot back to the source. His body glistens with the darkness of a starless night as he plunges out of the water. Pitch-black scales dance across his snake-like body, twenty feet long, three feet in diameter. He sinks his teeth into the boy as his body whiplashes over the boat, collapses back into the water on the other side with a half-corpse sticking out of his mouth. The other half of Mesa drops like a rock, quickly painting their raft a new shade of red.
