…but that was a memory, not a real sound.Gary probed again with his finger and heard the same sound. Almost like pressing a key on a piano. He pressed again and this time… this time he felt something real. Hard metal that resisted his finger.
The bullet. sucking life from somewhere, jesus you could see it move as it throbbed as the fluids flowed as the life moved under the fleshy white bark, inside the wet fibrous wood just a stump hear the creaking as its fibers crack open and apart but taking life from somewhere
Almost over now. Why keep striving, when there was no hope?
David Wellington - Monster Island
PHYSICIAN, HEAL THYSELF.
maybe they weren’t branches maybe they were roots
Thought became mercurial, slippery as a fish in a stream as your fingers reach for it, silver and bright under the splashing water, silvery and hard in your head reaching for it, going to take two fingers have to open up just a little wider come on say ah,aaahhh very good, you are easily the bravest little boy it has ever been my pleasure to perform open brain surgery on tee hee two fingers in, does it hurt? Does it hurt? Nothing hurts right now, man, I am comfortably numb like the song goes and now I’ve got two fingers in but the visuals, man, like this tree, this TREE Its roots go down forever. Up above in the sunlight there may be golden apples, tight little bundles of life force the color of… of… just such a lovely color nothing you could see with your eyes, though. None of the seven colors they teach you about in school. And up above, not here. Dekalb and the girls, sure, two dozen of them waiting, hunkering down in the dark so afraid and cold and hungry and alone but they didn’t know, they couldn’t know just how beautifully alive they were. Up there in the sunlight, metaphorical of course because certainly it’s still night up there it must be pitch dark in the megastore but in this metaphorical space, this place you’ve fled to because you’re literally trying to dig a bullet out of your head with your fingers and it's JUST NOT WORKING, in this metaphorical space Dekalb etc. are up there, up there in a summer day compared to what’s down here, down deep deep sixed eighty-sixed down in Davy Jones’ locker, down among the dead men, the dead men, the dead men
YES.
because they, the dead men, were there too, if only dimly perceptible. Down underneath in the soil in the dirt where the roots dug endlessly like blind worms searching, scratching, like fingers digging for the bullet because oh, yes, just grab for that brass ring, that lead sinker in the muddle, stop that, in the middle of your gelatin head.
But,Gary thought, I digress. I was speaking of the dead men who feed the tree. Stinking little buggers, stinking of the life force because it was positively dripping from them, fuming up like steam off their backs as it evaporated away not the golden shiny life of Dekalb and friends, no, this was the shadow of that energy-lacking dimension, cold instead of hot, dark instead of bright-but it was still energy of a kind. Enough to feed the tree. Enough to feed anybody if you could tap it and yes,Gary could.Gary could. Because unlike the discrete packets of energy inside of Dekalb’s Angels, those ripe bursting fruits of life force, the dead men were all connected, interconnected, tied together in a web of fuming darkness. There were what, six, seven billion people before the Epidemic but now there was only one dead Humanity. The thing, the Epidemic, the disaster that brought the dead back joined them together, made them as one, like a swarm of locusts so thick they darken the sky or like a cloud, an infinite number of tiny droplets of water but where does one end and one begin there is no answer it’s a zen koan there is only one of us with many bodies and I am its consciousness. I am its commander.
David Wellington - Monster Island
GOOD. NOW OPEN YOURSELF.