hurt you

It was like night of the living dead out in the graveyard, hands bursting from beneath the soft soil of the earth, moans ringing on the wind, a full moon illuminating the horrors that clawed their way from the graves they’d been dug. The Earth would scream and cry as they swarmed over the land, eating all in their path, slaves to a mindless hunger that drove them to kill, eat, kill, eat, kill.

  Except… there’s only one hand waving above the soil, and only a faint voice can be heard, instead of the wailing of a zombie horde.

“Hey, some help? Can someone help me outta here?”

  Jude’s cursing himself and his need to show off. He’d jumped off the top floor of a building to freak out some kids, nothing he’d never done before, nothing he wasn’t probably going to do again. They always screamed at the sight of the guts on the ground, the splattered blood- it was pretty great.

   But the idiots had panicked this time. Before he could reform, they’d gathered him up, dug him a hole on the outskirts of the nearest graveyard, and bailed.

   And now he was six feet under, stuck until someone grabbed a shovel and moved the dirt.

Yeah, right. Who’s gonna help the waving hand in a cemetery? They’re more likely to run screaming in the other direction.

                                          At least it wasn’t Halloween.

Oh, it was only a little pack of cigarettes. One little pack, which he needed- he really did! He couldn’t understand why the police were so angry over this one little thing being missing from the store shelves...

...And some gum. A candy bar. A magazine. Two pens. One of those scratch-off lottery tickets. Maybe the store clerk’s wallet.

Details, Schme-tails.

   Only, he’s running now, and it’s a little hard to stay inconspicuous with arms overflowing with merchandise. People stare at him as he dodges them on the sidewalk, weaving through the crowd with ease. But there’s no effort to stop him, less stares than he’s used to, and Jude wondered what city he’d ended up in this time. The details from last night were a little foggy...

Oh, he should think about this later. There’s sirens behind him.

                                              It’s almost flattering. 

He needs to get rid of some of this stuff but he can’t just drop it; that would be like Hansel leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for the witch to find them.

So, he does the next best thing.

“Hey-o there miss, have I got a deal for you!” Jude pants, out of breath from his sprint. “Today only, for the next twenty seconds, half the things in my arms are free! That’s right, you can be the lucky owner of all this stuff, as long as you leave the wallet and cigarettes and run in the opposite direction. Deal?”

--Breath flits across split lips, shallow, panting. His lungs, bereft of the air for too long, are only just learning how to work again.

--Fingers twitch as muscles come to life, little movements to signal that he has not died. A cheer goes up among patrons, crowded around like cattle to watch this man bleed out. Some are truly relieved, some are not. 

                                 They wanted to see a dead body. 

--Groaning fills the air and a stomach heaves, rebelling against it’s owner. He’d been dead for a few minutes this time.

--Prone form suddenly moves, rolling over, guts spilling out across the wooden floor of the room. People scream, people laugh, people watch him offer back the alcohol he’s ingested. Perhaps an offering to Dionysus, perhaps his apology to himself.

--A head throbs, still leaking blood from where he’d struck it. Dancing on tables was fun only some of the time.

--Jessie wonders if someone will help him, knows he needs it. His regeneration is slow and coming back to life is painful. The numbness only just left his hands, for fucksake. 

At the very least, he’d like to get off the floor. There are splinters poking into his back.

“There had better be at least 500 dollars in your pocket.”

{ The words are a growl, spit in anger, caked in malice. He’s considering pulling the knife from his back pocket and his fingers twitch. }

“Because that bottle cost me over a thousand, and i’m expecting ya to pay for part of it up front.”

    Of course he hadn’t killed her. She’d begged him to do it, begged him to guide the needle into her vein, one more hit, one more... It wasn’t her fault she hadn’t known it would be her last. It wasn’t his fault he’d forgotten to tell her that little detail.

Had he actually forgotten? He couldn’t remember.

   His memory was so terrible sometimes. His body healed from whatever he put in it, of course, regenerated organs and tainted blood, let him keep chugging. But sometimes he thought that the replacements for the brain cells he lost were messing with his mind. It was hard to think when things were constantly being rewritten, new stuff added, new pathways made. Jessie wondered if his mind was so scrambled because of the shit he put into it, or because of the healing from said shit. He wondered what it would be like to think clearly for a change, without the healing messing him up even further.

Gross.

   Jessie liked living in a haze, wandering the world. There was always someone to wrap his arms around, hold tight. They would whisper how much they loved him, kissing his cheeks, his fingers, the track marks permanently etched in the corners of his elbows. They didn’t actually love him, of course, nor would there ever be a record of the skinny guy named Jessie; if they wondered where they’d gotten the drugs he’d given them, they’d soon find they’d met a new dealer. (Of course they had. They’d bought from him last night, why hadn’t they remembered that?) They needed him, but love? Never.

   His head tilted back to the stars as he held the cold body, watching the lights wink back at him from the velvet of the night. They looked like little pinholes: he liked to imagine they were where the night had joined him, sticking herself with her drug of choice, the wind her moans of ecstasy and cries of pain.

   Jessie shifted after a while, shaking himself awake. His arms were beginning to go numb and he stood, swinging them around as the woman’s body slumped to the pavement of the alley. He looked down at her as he stretched, trying to recall her name: Sarah? Sally? Shannon? Some ‘s’ name. He liked ‘s’ names. He wondered why he hadn’t given himself an ‘s’ name sometimes. He wondered where his names had come from sometimes: he certainly hadn’t chosen them, but he didn’t think anyone else would have gone through the trouble of naming him either. Maybe if his mind was clear, he could remember.

    The alleyway was cold and he shivered before dancing his fingers up his arms, materializing himself a jacket. It was summer- it wasn’t supposed to be cold, was it? Was summer or winter the cold season? He laughed at himself after a moment.

Did it matter?

                                                              Not really.

   He should change his appearance, something different from the man who’d held a body all day. Jessie traced his fingers over over his face, removing the nose ring, taking away the tongue stud, adding a bar trough his eyebrow, some cute little rings on the rim of his ear. He didn’t know why he liked piercings- maybe because they made him feel tough. Or maybe because the little pinpricks when they first punctured his flesh felt familiar, comforting.

    Fingers wiggled over his head, turning the blue to yellow. Brilliant, high-lighter yellow, so no one would think he was a natural blonde. Jessie didn’t like blondes but he couldn’t remember why.

    His ripped jeans melted away, replacing themselves with a clean pair that weren’t soaked in the grime of the alley. He stretched once more, cracking his back with a loud pop that made him sigh with delight.

There was a different crack, one that came from footsteps behind him.

   Jessie took his time turning around, wondering if they’d seen him change his appearance, his clothes. It wasn’t that big of a deal if they had, no one would believe them, and he smiled, large, happy. The buzzing in his head seemed to clear up when he was around other people; he’d forgotten that little detail, it was nice to know it again. 

“Hey there! Nice night for a walk, ain’t it?”

   Hopefully the body on the ground wouldn’t scare them off too badly. Maybe they’d think Shelly was sleeping. 

   He doesn’t remember much of anything that happened last night but he knows he’s in his own bedroom, familiar dirty sheets wrapped around his body, familiar slant to the light coming in his bedroom window. Jessie’s head pounds and his body aches and he knows he could make it go away with a flick of his hand, but it’d be nice to grab some painkillers later. Even, god forbid, have an actual reason to take them.

    There’s someone next to him. Jessie groans into his pillow, realizing he’d broken one of his cardinal rules- never take anyone back to his place. Too much was easily traced back to him. He’d have to move again. Police were so tenacious, he’d already had to quit jobs at several bars because they came around looking for him. Something dumb about drug charges, assault, selling alcohol to a minor... Oh, they could alway find something one of his identities had done.

    Blue eyes stare at the form, currently turned to face the opposite wall, presumably still deeply asleep from the night’s splendor. Can’t really see much, under the damn blanket. Christ, he can’t remember if they’d fucked or not- but he also wasn’t in the mood to continue anything.

    A shaky hand reaches out to prod the intruder’s shoulder and he watches his trembling fingers for a moment, wondering what in the hell would have caused that reaction in him. He didn’t normally get hangovers, didn’t feel the after-effects of whatever drug he took; yet here he was, body aching, wincing at the sunlight. God only knew what it did to the human lying next to him, if it’d had such an effect on Addiction itself. 

Maybe they were dead. 

                            Fuck, that was going to be such a bitch to clean up.

“Hey, are ya still breathin’?”