Futile Efforts by Piccirilli Tom

Author:Piccirilli, Tom [Piccirilli, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Horror
Publisher: Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital
Published: 2011-07-10T23:00:00+00:00

It sounded easy enough. He'd done some fairly ridiculous shit in his life up to this point, and he figured this wasn't going to be much different, considering.

One bad time, he'd seen the face of his father pressing forward from the spines of all the books on a street vendor's table down on 59th and Fifth. There he was, hugging books, crying for daddy, while the tourists took photos of him and the cops dragged him down to lock-up. Eventually, he was put on a new medication that made him think he was talking to time-traveling puppets in the shower, and it turned his piss blue.

All in all, he was looking forward to discovering if he had what it took to fight on the side of angels.

Wynne had to step into blood to get out his door. The hallway was littered with the dying and the dead, most of them pressed to the edges of the hall as if someone had cleaned up the bodies, stacking them beside one another. He counted seven people, but couldn't be sure who it was he heard groaning.

He knelt near Mrs. Rhyerson. Her dress was torn, eyes still wide and full of dread. He whispered her name and touched her cold face. Wynne's stomach churned with doubt. The wounds in her chest looked like they could've been made with kitchen utensils.

Had he finally gone off the big edge and run rampant through the building? Was he already in a padded cell, or heading for one in the back of a police van? Five years ago he'd been given shock therapy. It was much more civilized than you see in movies, the rubber wedge jammed in your mouth, the giant electrodes burning the flesh at your temples, your body flopping and snapping wildly on the steel bed. It was sophisticated and the juice sort of relaxed him, but instead of helping him back into his head, Wynne had hallucinated like a son of a bitch for three days.

Now, the bodies–the mewling moans quickly ebbing and falling silent in the corridor, you had to wonder. This had the same structure of a drug-induced, electrified dream.

He started down the stairs and turned up to look towards his apartment door one last time, hoping Gomez might be there, lending him courage, urging him on. But the doorway was empty except for the blood. Even the bodies were gone now.

The silence surprised him. He walked down Columbus Avenue, sort of strutting, seeing how the city had emptied. There were still some floaters up there in the sky, but not so many anymore. God did fast work.

Wynne hadn't even gone half a block before he saw half a dozen other ex-crazies slinking out onto the sidewalk. In this city, there had to be thousands of schizoids, paranoids, catatonics, spiraling obsessives, extreme bipolars, and dissociative identity and dementia praecox cases left. The homeless, the alcoholics, the borderliners who could function well and looked beautiful but behind closed doors acted out their lunatic drives.

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