I am no stranger to delusions. From the white mice to demons and angels, I have witness more than I could remember. Best of which were, most often than not, caused by the hospital staff that experimented with my medication. And the happy go lucky pill they give you to dissuade you from another attempt, if you survive your own stupidity that is, can easily top off most of what you would buy in the neighborhood. Not that I would go buy anything. Whatever I took, I always had a prescription. A sad little thing in our society, doctors thinking that a pat on the back, a peep talk and a vial of rainbow colored pills will fix anything.
It won’t. It didn’t.
At least not in my case. But who am I to criticize them? I would gulp my pills, say “hullo” to Bob, the invisible man living next door and go count dots on the ceiling. Then one day I found a knife and then… they found me.
Was I relapsing? The warm wind tickled my nose with spices of forest and summer mixed with a tint of ozone like the air after a storm. Combined with the spectacle I saw in the sky, it felt so real. Or was it surreal? Knee deep blue grass, twin moons and constellations I have never seen nor heard of.
But I was not alone. Other people around me, seemingly baffled, stared at each other unsure of their own senses.
Standing like an idiot with a half empty glass of water in my outstretched arm, I surveyed those surrounding me.
If this indeed was a delusion, I must admit my imagination had a knack for details. We stood in something resembling a circle. An egg shaped circle. Give or take, I could count about twenty people, standing in what was now rapidly decaying blue crumbles and dust. And about fifty more, waiting outside where the grass was still green.
It was easy to separate “us” from “them”. They had an unanimous look about them. They wore a sort of tenth century monk garb and a terrified facial expression of a child, signifying that something went wrong.
We on the other hand were a wild bunch. From medieval knights, shaolin monks, a geisha and a samurai to the US marine, a cop in Kevlar vest and a Japanese glasses girl. Somewhere in there was I, next to me a middle aged man and some steps ahead of us two wet, foam covered women, making out. Probably fresh from the shower.
“They’re coming. The cavalry is coming” The man next to me spoke. Before I could grasp his words, I heard it too. The regular thump-thump of heavy hooves against the ground that pierced the night silence like sudden thunder.
I wished to ask him something, I don’t remember what it was now. I never had a chance to ask him anything. There was an arrow sticking out of his chest.
We both stared at it with disbelieve until he collapsed, face first onto the dust covered, blue ground.
More arrows in an instant killed most of the cloaked people that gathered around us. Some clunked against and bounced off the knights armor. The geisha woman took an arrow through the neck, while the samurai blocked another with his sword.
One arrow zipped by, taking away a chunk of my ear and killing someone behind me. Within a heartbeat we were down to a handful of people.
And then they came.
Heavy cavalry with armored riders atop armored… well these weren’t horses. Some sort of overgrown, black gazelle would be the best description. They rode around us, stomping anything and anyone in their path.
And I stood there in the middle with a glass half full of water in my outstretched hand.
Out of all people, the cop died one of the most gruesome deaths. He shot several of the riders before they turned him into an arrow cushion. The gut turning, squelching sound his body made when the hundreds of arrows impaled him… And I stood there and did nothing.
One of the naked women died almost instantly, impaled by a spear. The other started running towards me though, she had no chance to outrun a rider. After a stride of two, in a wide swing, a sword went through her neck as if it wasn’t there. Her head tumbled down while her headless body managed to make three or four more steps before collapsing in a puddle of blood. Her open neck bathed me with a spray of hot sticky liquid.
And I just stood there with a glass half full of blood, half full of water.
Of all the people I saw, only the knight and the glasses girl remained. We stood in a circle of riders while the knight battled one of the warriors. He won.
Seeing this, one of the riders dismounted and approached him, brandishing a sword. Something between a saber and a katana.
I don’t know what happened, all I saw was a blur of movement and the knight was down, dead in the dirt. His opponent shook of blood from his sword in a fluid motion, all while slowly walking towards us.
I am not sure who was more surprised. Me, seeing a beast walking in a human manner or him, meeting someone that did not reek of fear at his sight. He roared into my face than stared into my eyes, looking for some kind of reaction. There was none. I just stood there with a glass in my hand and stared back into his large, unblinking yellow eyes. I could see his vertical iris slightly opening as he studied his prey that refused him the pleasure of fear.
His nose twitched, testing air, looking for familiar terror induced scents. There were none. I did not lose control of my bowel neither did I sweat in fear. No. I just stood there with a glass in my hand, unmoved, staring back into his inhuman eyes.
By all means I am no hero. I have not gained any super power and certainly I am not a brave man. All I am, all I ever was is a broken human being.
I had my own daemons even before I ended up chained to my bed in ER of the nearest hospital but being officially dead for eleven minutes does not help either. That day a part of me truly died. At least that’s what all those black spots on my CT scan were supposed to be. The doctors were unable to clearly state what am I going to face in the future but certainly, it did not improve upon my sense of humor. I’ve completely lost all feeling in the left side of my body while the right side... was not much better. Color perception in my right eye was as good as gone, unless you count fuchsia which was the only one it recognized. Though the most bizarre one was my total lack of emotions.
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Love, hate, compassion, fear, motivation. I had none. As if my previous interpersonal skill weren’t lacking enough, the complete absence of empathy made me even more ”popular”. Well, at least I would never again experience feeling awkward.
I left the hospital in a state of permanent apathy. I had no care in the world. I wanted nothing. I felt nothing. I did nothing.
I went to work because I required money, it was necessary to pay for food and a roof above my head. I ate because a doctor told me to. In fact I don’t even feel hunger any more. I woke up. I ate. I drank. I went to work, then back home. I ate again. Drank again. And went to bed every day at the same hour just to avoid tripping and falling asleep on the side walk when my body would give in to exhaustion.
Because of all that, and not because I felt like some sort of hero, I just stood there and stared in the eyes of the beast. Feeling nothing, fearing nothing, expecting nothing.
Soaked and covered in blood. Surrounded by the smell of ozone mixed with stench of feces from the slaughtered corpses. Amidst all that, I stood there with a glass in my hand, defiant of what just occurred here in this small, grassy clearing, somewhere in the forest I did not know. The glass I held in my outstretched arm was half filled with blood of the woman slain before my very own eyes and half full of water I drank just a short while ago.
The last thing I saw was the hilt of a sword approaching my face before the darkness replaced it all.
=========][ Apathy : Chapter 2 - Dead man walking. ][=========
Some sell old carpets, piss warm beer, cracked stones or molding wood. Others sell fermented peanuts, rotted carrots, spoiled meat or some other stinking unguents. Okurto sold people. People as ugly as old carpet, as disgusting as piss warm beer, as useless as molding wood and generally as stinky as a cart full of rotting carrots and spoiled meat mixed together.
Even though he sold them like that, he still made quite some coin. Depending on the weather, he made his rounds once or twice a week. He started early in the morning when the streets were empty and he could move with greater ease and he paid a visit to each and every slave trader in the city. No, they were not his clients, they were the source of his merchandise. He knew on which doors to knock, what words to utter and whose servants should he pay off. And it worked. Slavers tolerated his existence, some even occasionally paid for his services and he took care of their issues. It was a perfect symbiosis.
Slavers, as Okurto clearly understood, took care only of those goods they could sell at a high price. Beautiful women, strong warriors and clever craftsmen were quite valued and cared for. Sometimes their life was better than that of free people. The rest however did not fare that well. The weak or ugly simply awaited their death in the slave pen. The lucky ones were sometimes bought by the arena managers and given the illusion of chance as they fought against wild beasts or much better equipped, seasoned warriors. These died a quick death. Most of the remaining slaves often ended their life somewhere down in a sulfur mine or starve to death in a slavers pen.
This was where his services were required. Every once in a while he would visit a slaver with his cart and pick up all those that were no longer useful. They gladly gave him the spoiled goods, happy they would become someone else trouble. Often they laugh at him.
Okurto did not mind for he knew even a corpse would fetch a few coins if sold to a proper buyer. And these were a plenty. Magicians, alchemists, perverts… Sometimes it scared him how many people would wish to buy a corpse, even one that was still breathing for the time being.
One of such customers was browsing through his wares at the very moment, the scarlet witch. She often bought large batches and payed good money for them but there was something in her that made his guts crawl. He stole a glance at her. Even though it was summer, she walked draped in excessively long, red fur coat. Her face hidden deep within its hood. She bend over one of the slaves laid out on the ground, most were unconscious or too weak to move around. Okurto used this moment to study her. The way her fur hugged her frame tickled his imagination though the puzzle of whether she wore anything underneath her coat was not one he would tackle willingly.
Apparently finding what she looked for, the witch turned around and came to face him.
“I’ll take them” She spoke while from the shade of the hood , her red eyes glowed at him.
“If this humble servant may ask, which ones Your Ladyship?”
“All of them.”
To that he had no answer. It rarely happened when a client would buy out all of his inventory. He bowed deeply and moved aside from her way. There was no need of discussing payment. He would not dare to insult her. The witch always paid her dues. Tomorrow he would find a sack full of gold in his shop, it was as sure as the fact that the sun would rise in the morrow.
Suddenly all the people that could not move just a while ago, rose and followed her shambling into the night. He could never get use to that, he would swear some of those people did not breath anymore.
A young naked man with strange scars on his arms and half of his cheek missing pass him by a step to close for comfort. Okurto cringed, beneath the soulless eyes on the man’s face he could see exposed bone and muscles.
Truly, the dead were walking.