Wednesday, May 21st, 2014 - 14 Days Left...

A man lying semi-conscious on a concrete floor. Eyes twitching, a pool of sweat drenching his back as his eyes stare at the ceiling. His body cold, shivering. Near death.

When you decide to spend two months taking morphine to get into the character of a man physically incapable of moving his body post-serious injury, two things result from this decision:

Number one.

Those two months you spend recreationally taking morphine are fucking awesome.

Number two.

How terrible the subsequent withdrawal and how frequent the vomiting to cleanse your system is directly proportional to how originally awesome the effects of the morphine were.

The match was in two weeks. Nine days into quitting. It hadn’t started getting easier yet.

A meal of fine steak sits untouched at the table, topped with a fine garnish, slathered in a garlic that had felt the meat sizzling still on the plate. He’d been making them to keep up the practice, the predator wanting upon erupting from his cocoon a meal to sharpen his teeth upon.

However, this carcass would not see the beast’s rebirth. It had sat out long enough for fruit flies to have gathered and they had begun circling the second-hand buffet as vultures.

The only evidence of movement or life within the storage unit was the slow raise and release of his lungs and a light trail of sweat dragging along the floor to a bowl in front of a dog and back to his spot in the 'room's center. Huntress, Flynn’s greyhound, alternates between curiously staring at her motionless, decomposing master and nibbling at the pile of kibble in her bowl.

He had been quietly dead for almost a year now. Not waiting or stalking nor hidden, waiting for the opportune moment.

Like many things that pass on, he had originally had the decency to stay dead.

Then... Another inspiration of change. A new sensation... Transformation. Breaking him from within, cracking his bones, snapping chunks off.

Gathering the pieces.

To build anew.

Pain. Running through him, traveling up and down every corner of his being.

Nausea. Vomiting. The occasional hallucination. Every synapse in your body demanding you refill your bloodstream with sweet, sweet opiate. Kind of like the flu, if the flu felt like literal death.

Flynn wasn’t usually a quitter when it came to analgesics. Or narcotics. Or tranquilizers. Flynn wasn’t much of a quitter when it came to anything except quitting the XWF.

He had gotten pretty good at doing that.

Usually, he wasn’t much of a self-improvement kind of guy. He’d just as quickly accept the side-effects as a requirement for the good that the evil brought.

The pain relief that morphine brought out-weighed the occasional fit of double vision, involuntary quivering and the occasional horrifying hallucination lovingly crafted by his twisted psyche.

Just as the madness that plagued his mind brought on a clarity and vision into and through the world around him, an ability to see through the fake, pleasant motivations of others and into the twisted dark fantasies that lay beneath the surface…

Certainly out-weighed the hatred it brought on.

The inability to trust, the belief that the world was out to get you from birth. The condition that some, nay most, insisted on referring to, as a paranoia.

However, the term paranoia carries a connotation, a meaning within, that this belief is imagined.

Not actual.

But…Is it paranoia if it’s an accurate belief? If the world was out to end you like it certainly was the last time Flynn was in the ring?

Flynn wheezed. It was intended to be a simple exhalation, but his body seemed to be holding the majority of his respiratory system hostage in exchange for morphine.

He threw out his stash though. This one time, and this one time only, he was refusing to negotiate with terrorists.

In the past, he would have just kept using. Self-preservation wasn’t a high priority. But, he had a motivation this time to clean up…
The single light source in the storage unit was a flickering television set, connected to an old VCR.

A single static image frozen on the set.

That’s what he was doing it for.

He was doing it.

For her…

The concrete… began to spread…

Swirling sands beneath him. The swirling dunes biting his skin and cooking his flesh.

The hopelessness sets in. The inability to escape.

Endless in every direction.

Leaving him alone.

He feels his legs sink into the sand, his muscles failing all over again, the sand slipping into his mouth and down his throat.

He closes his eyes…

And thinks of her…

***
Love.

At first sight.

The average moron believes a lot of things are going to happen when you run into the object of your affection. Insipid poetic dribblings from the mouths of drooling mental patients and the poorly written clichés wrought in C-list romantic comedies designed to appeal to the morbidly obese and genetically inferior in the facial regions so they may perhaps go another day without looking in the mirror and slicing themselves from throat to belly button with a box cutter the next day at work.

Your heart suddenly beats faster, your breath quickens. Which physiologically suggests intense stress on your circulatory system, usually indicated by onset arrhythmia and resulting in painful death when the brain fails to pump enough blood to the rest of the body…

Your stomach starts painfully churning in a sensation described as ‘butterflies in your stomach.’ Which is appropriate since that sort of pain is also attributed to stomach parasites devouring your intestinal lining from within.

Your eyes dilate, which is typically a means to identify any amount of medical failures within the body, such as macular degeneration, literal tumors growing on the back of the eyeball or retinal detachment. Where the critical layer of tissue at the back of the eye pulls away from the layer of blood vessels that provides it with oxygen and nourishment.

Really romantic stuff.

No. I only loved one thing at first sight.

And it was blood dripping out of the skull of my first semi-conscious meal.

…

Yet…

There was… an undeniable… physical sensation…

When seeing her...

There always had been…

Ever since I’ve started…

I’ve felt that need. That burning desire. That lust.

But, what I’ve felt…

…

No…

This was not love.

…This was…

Obsession…

***
Darkness.

A mysterious… pulsation…

The subtlest of motions… barely visible within the black… liquid?

“Hello.”

A weak, quiet voice echoes within.

“It’s quiet here. I feel the tomb holding me.”

“Wanting me to stay within the chrysalis.”

“But I feel a desire… No… a drive.”

“A need… A biological compulsion to carry out what I was designed to do…”

“Like breathing. Like the blood coursing through my veins.”

“I can’t ignore, can’t stop…The urge…To rip… To tear asunder…”

“To devour whole that which is unable to defend itself adequately…”

“Like the three that stand before me…”

Silence. Quiet inhalation and exhalation. The motion… particles… cells… swimming back and forth, floating in mid-air… Controlled by every breath. Upon inhalation, they would swirl into the center. Exhalation, out.

“My breaths strengthen... I must be excited.”

“I wouldn't know for sure. It's been so long since I've felt anything, I can only guess"

"Maybe it's your company... I haven’t had guests in a while.”

The dust... sits in the air... stagnant.

“Do you like it in here?”

“Do you enjoy my chrysalis? My cocoon?”

“My coffin? My tomb?”

“I’ve lived here…. No. Not lived.”

“I’ve died here.”

“I’ve been dead here for many months…”

“I was killed, buried and interred here…”

“And here I’ve lain… Decaying… Waiting for the sweet taste of non-existence I was promised upon death. Every opponent guaranteeing they would silence me, end me… compress me into a thin dust and spread me into the wind…”

“And they succeeded.”

“They ended me.”

“Shoved me into a pine box. Read a few words.”

“And left.”

“And I welcomed the end I had promised the world…”
“…”

“…”

“And it never came.”

“I’m still here.”

The voice gets stronger. An edge develops within the darkness…

“Still trapped in this burning Hell.”

“My every moment a waking nightmare, my every thought a reminder of the unending torment that this life has wrought me. My every synapse, every mental twitch, every milliAmpere of electrical current still trailing through my cerebral cortex in the remnants of my central nervous system, refusing me my birthright.”

“To die.”

“I live. After death.”

“I feel nothing. I am incapable of feeling.”

“And nothing is more painful.”

“I am invincible.”

“I am a corpse.”

Traces appear within the dark… Fingers… A hand?

“Feel my hands… Cold… Years of sitting idly within this pit.”

“Wondering why I was alive… why I stayed alive…”

“…”

“And now… I know why.”

A faint crackle from above…

A thunder strike… The clatter of rain… The breathing is rapid…

“It’s so clear… It always has been.”

“I’m alive… because my work is left incomplete.”

“The world escaped my wrath.”

“The beast was struck down before he could finish his meal…”

“And if fate wanted the world to survive the coming of the beast, the world would have let the beast die on its first pass through.”

“This is a sign…”

Another thunder strike…

Closer…

Louder…

“That my mission is protected… Guaranteed to succeed. That chaos will rip through the world, engulfing it. Swallowing it whole and plunging all false prophets into a sea of blood, gushing and pouring from their own throats…From a thousand sources into one...”

“If death could not stop me… What could? Who could? Men? The three across from me that claim to be my superior?”

“I fear no mortal.”

“The dead cannot be killed.”

Thunder rips through the sky. Crackling, piercing, making its presence known. Coming ever closer.

“Do you hear the coming storm? Do you understand that which approaches?”

“Do you know what happens to the corpse that waits in a shallow grave when the rains rage through the graveyard? When the soil chains that hold the dead in their tombs rust and break...?”

A gunshot. One loud concentrated burst of electricity. A streak of lightning screams. A wake-up call…

“We... the forgotten… rise from our resting places…”

The cells… The dust that has built over the course of a year… Floating through the air… Begins to ascend…

The hands… push… Their force causing the dust particles to swirl…

“I…I can feel it…”

“A truly new sensation…”

"Motion... Oxygen..."

The sloshing of dirt into mud… The earth holding the coffin… Softens… Weakens…

A creak from above… The dust sprints toward freedom… The slightest crack… The whiteness of the moon barely visible.

“I must admit.”

“I’m starving. I haven’t fed in so long…”

“Thank goodness there are three of you…”

“Otherwise how could my appetite be sated?”

"I only pray you will try to resist."

"I want to choke on your bones."

"I want you to thrash as you slip down my throat."

"I want every waking moment within the ring to sing true of how doomed you were from the start..."

The door above quietly creaks open... Rain falling from above… Filling the box…

The edges of the cocoon splitting…

The new monster emerging…

"It's strange. You know me. But death has taken my memories..."

“My past life once knew two of you.”

“But now I live in death. I am born anew and yet am not.”

“It’s nice to meet you and re-meet you. I don’t know you anymore.”

“I’m sure we’ll get to know each other well in our short time together.”

“The way only predator and prey can…”

The moon becomes full… The coffin door swings to its apex… And collapses into the earth…

It is night.

“The darkness… The inescapable choking black…”

A silver smile pierces the black. The voice whispers…

“It’s divine.”

The feed fizzles out.