Thursday, September 16, 2010

"The Beginning" of the book

Alright folks, this is the beginning of the story, right after the intro finishes. Enjoy, let me know what you think, and if you want MOAR!

It was a cool summer night; I had the windows open and was naked except for a pair of boxers. I had a wife, before she decided to start fucking the manager at our local Wal-Mart, her name was Melly. She had gotten a seasonal position there the Christmas before, trying to make some extra money for presents and such for our boy, Nathan. Not like we needed the extra money, I am, well I was a psychologist, and a pretty damn fine one if I must say so myself. Wal-Mart took my wife and she took Nathan, while I got the house. I had only found out about a month before, and I had just started to become accustomed to sleeping alone, in a house devoid of any breath except my own and the whispering wind. Nathan was only 6, not accustomed to talking on the phone; my last conversation with him was at the court meeting in which the sexist judge sided with the power of estrogen and everyday low prices, instead of reason and logic. Oh well, that’s that, and I can only hope Wal-Mart man is some torso rolling around in the dirt; I can only pray Nathan is alive, if only praying seemed as effective as a round to those monsters’ heads. I kissed his forehead, told him to be strong (he was crying) I would see him soon; we would be together again soon. If only that promise, like every-other one made before that night, actually held weight, actually mattered to any person now self-aware. The air that night carried something sweet with it, some infectious chemical that seemed to overpower any-other smell. It literally stuck to everything; I remember tossing and turning from the overpowering humidity all-the-while breathing it in; waking up from nodding-off covered in moisture, thinking I was sweating. But it was so cool, such a perfect cool summer night. I remember turning on the light and feeling the moisture on the switch, it looked as if something was glossed over every surface in the room. It was almost if the walls were sweating; as if the walls and the sheets, the floors, and the lights all had pores and those pores had opened, pouring sweat from the intensive labor of keeping the house together. How eerie the sky-blue walls were as they gleamed in the moonlight. As if the Lowe’s trim was crying, weeping for its loss of its other two inhabitants. I remember standing, feeling the moisture squish between the pad and heel of my foot and the floor. Each step felt like a trek through lightly wet soil, soft and wet but not sticky. I walked to the generic white blinds (purchased at Target, since I was then boycotting Wal-Mart; as if my weekly 50 dollar grocery purchase really affected the company, but it was the principle of it damn it!) and pulled on the nylon string and felt the water it had absorbed through the night as I pulled up the blinds. It looked like a flood had passed through, or as if it had just rained a hard rain. Except, not a single thing was unsettled, everything was as it is when water is absent and things dry. But it looked wet; the entire world was glowing, as if glitter water had been painted over everything!  Nathan’s swing set did not move but glowed; the trees were still, but shone as if glazed over with a pearly coat. I remember being scared, as if this was a warning, Mother Nature was whispering, and I was praemonitus. My first instinct, like any person accustomed to modern living, was to turn on the TV. I flipped from channel to channel, watching as men and women with microphones were talking of a mass wave of high humidity that had appeared all over the world out of seemingly nowhere. Insomniac scientists, researchers, experts in every field that could possibly somehow have any chance of containing expertise on global waves of mass amounts of humidity were feeding bullshit into the camera, from global warming to the rapture, everything. And that’s what it all was, every interview, every sentence, every word, bullshit. As if carbon emissions had somehow caused nature to coat the world in a blanket of humidity; as if God had decided to bring hell on earth with a flood of moisture rich air. So I checked the web, I logged on and typed as the humidity never ceased, never continued to accumulate, just stuck to my computer’s keys like it stuck to my fingers. Besides the talking head’s spew of garbage there was a mass of blogs, news articles, and every other type of writing that had some theory, some explanation. But how were they, how were we to know what it really was, how were we to know what happened once it was absorbed through some open wound, if it was drank in a large enough quantity, from places such as personal wells and fresh water taps. We couldn’t have known, and it is because of this that everything became as fucked as it did. I spent an hour or so reading various theories: the end of days was upon us and all one had to do was drink and bathe in the humidity and Jesus would sweep you away to heaven. This theory alone explains why the infection spread as fast as it did; the religious fervor alone caused millions to indulge in the wave of moisture as much as they could. One man was postulating that it was some unknown chemical that had been frozen in the polar ice caps that had been exposed from such rapid melting, and hell, who knows, the bastard could have been right. But no one, not a single sole theorized about what it would do when ingested, when incorporated into the bloodstream. After reading every theory I could get my hands on I decided that whatever this was it wasn’t good and that maybe I should somehow be ready just incase I was right. I got dressed and decided to go buy some fresh water and a water pump, just incase it was found that whatever was happening did contaminate the water. I planned on buying some basic food supplies and some batteries, basic survival gear you know, because you never knew. My house was somewhere outside of State College, Pennsylvania, in a semi-rural area, and so it was about a 30 minute drive to the local grocery store. Half-way into town I realized that things were perhaps worse than I thought they were. I bent down to pop in some burned CD I had made the day before and when I looked back up at the road a person was standing there, with a deer-in-the-headlights look, covered in blood.

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