I'M NOT DEAD: The Journals of Charles Dudley Vol.1 Read online

  Consuming like the high-pressured injection in Roy McCrery’s arm, festering to the point of infection until you wind up losing a part of yourself when it’s too late.

  BLUNT OBJECTS

  Saturday, December 28th, 2013

  My father once told me never to trust anything that bleeds for seven days and doesn’t die. That was Seymour Dudley’s pigheaded outlook on women. He viewed them as voiceless evil servants programmed to reproduce and make men happy.

  My father did everything with the approach of an unapologetic Neanderthal and thought anyone who appeared smarter than him was a homosexual. If a man was too good looking, he was a homosexual. If a man dressed well, he must’ve been a homosexual.

  If my mother ever suggested that someone on the television was attractive, my father immediately scoffed, huffed, and accused the person of being a flaming homosexual.

  “Jesus, Lorraine—look at him, he’s a fag for Christ’s sake!”

  If any of my friends had exceptionally good grades in school, my Dad wanted to be sure they weren’t homosexuals. Any man who became successful without blowing something up, tearing something down or killing something at some point in their life must and will have a dick in his ass.

  My father was so homophobic, he would break out in hives if he knew there was a male with a limp wrist in his presence. He thought homosexuals were witches who cast spells on you so they can sodomize you at will.

  No, Dad—that’s your brother Richard.

  If my mother ever dared ask me to help her fold laundry, my father flew off his recliner like a caped crusader fighting crime.

  “Goddamn it, Lorraine, the boy is going to grow up queer as a deer if you keep having him do a woman’s work! What are you teaching him?”

  That’s how it was in the Dudley household. We were all captives to my father’s backwoods ignorance.

  Stewart and I couldn’t use the bathroom at the public pool because we might catch “the AIDS” if we sat on the toilets. Therefore, if we ever had to take a shit, we had to hold it in until we got home.

  Thanks to my father, I shat myself in the station wagon on the Fourth of July, 1987, sitting in traffic on the Grand Central parkway.

  I sat on a mound of my own warm stew for a good half hour, praying my father would avoid potholes and sharp turns that would suddenly jerk and chafe my bottom against the car seat and underwear.

  “Lord almighty, boy! It stinks to high hell in here!” my father yelled while fanning the air with his hand. “Who’s going to wash that out of the seats now?”

  It was my fault because I couldn’t clench my asshole for four hours? How could Nana raise such an ignorant bastard? Chlorine and hot dogs don’t mix, you stupid bastard.

  My father did not understand nor was he interested in trying to understand anything other than the tools inside his toolbox, because his toolbox was the breadwinner of the family.

  “You see this, Charlie?” he’d ask while holding up his ugly beat up rusty olive-green metal toolbox in the kitchen.

  “Charlie, you see this? This is what puts food on the table, son. This is what keeps the light on in the house and food on that table.”

  My father compared his simpleton mentality to the blunt objects in his toolbox, and I did see how fitting that was.

  He was in control, and they never talked back. To my father’s credit, he was an excellent carpenter…but incapable of fixing his broken family.

  THE SUIT THAT YOU WEAR

  Sunday, December 29th, 2013

  The old man in the suit stood in front of the house again today. He stared at me through the window as if I owed him money or something. He was tall and rickety, had silver hair, and dressed like a wedding singer on his way to a funeral.

  When he first came to the house days ago, all the clocks in the house had become wildly uncoordinated. Naturally, I replaced the batteries in all of them, but it occurred again today when he was outside.

  He stood underneath the peach tree in front of the house tinkering with his pocket watch like yesterday and the day before that, before vanishing.

  After minutes had gone by, I decided to go out there to see what he wanted, but he was gone before I could get out the front door.

  Who can blame me for being excessively paranoid, right? We’re all living under the loaded gun with the Deviants, the hoarders, and the psychos who have been going ape shit on the town.

  I don’t want to bury any more friends. Knowing Joe’s dead body is still up in his bedroom is unsettling.

  I can’t go back there, even though my heart tells me to put him in the ground like I did Jerry about a week ago. I should’ve walked out of the house when I had the chance and let Joe die without me knowing it. Assuming he was dead was good enough for me.

  The sound of the gun going off and Joe’s body crashing to the floor still resonates in those quiet moments. BANG! CRASH!

  Not only do I aid in suicides, I am also a thief and occasional gravedigger.

  I must do away with Peter Chen’s carcass before he begins rotting and stinking up my tool shed. I keep forgetting.

  I can’t save the world, not this world. I’m having a hard enough time as it is trying to feed Dusty, Cooper, and myself these days. I can’t do two things at once. Hell, sometimes I can’t even do one thing at once.

  I SAW YOU

  Monday, December 30th, 2013

  8:23 p.m.

  I was in the kitchen feeding Dusty and Cooper when the man in the funny suit came knocking at the door today.

  I saw his dark slinky silhouette through the curtains as he pressed his face up against the bars of my window to look in. I ignored him. Whatever he was selling, I wasn’t buying. He knocked slowly like a wall clock. Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock…And then he was gone.

  I dressed Dusty and myself in tall garbage bags and duct tape in case it got messy out in the shed. I didn’t trust leaving the boy alone in the house, and it was time I got the job done.

  Eight days ago, I laid Peter across my utility table like a trophy deer tied down to the hood of some redneck’s pickup. I wasn’t proud of it.

  I propped Dusty in the corner facing the wall, and before I had any second thoughts on slicing Peter up, his body sprang to life and let out a shattering scream.

  He began thrashing, kicking, and slamming his arms down onto the table.

  I tripped over myself and fell back into a corner of shovels as he snarled, spit, and sneered at me.

  With forked tongue lashing and swirly eyes rolling to the back of his head, Peter, like a starved animal, turned his crazed attention towards Dusty. It dawned on me I had a dilemma on my hands.

  I grabbed Dusty, pulled him out of the shed and locked him back in the house. I frantically paced the yard thinking of ways to kill resurrected Peter now that he was alive—again. I had no idea he was in stasis while he was in the shed.

  I would’ve killed him sooner. Goddamnit, I kept forgetting! Goddamnit! Fuck!

  I weighed my options. I could burn or blow the shed up from the outside with the kerosene I kept in the garage. I could go in there and blow his head off with the shotgun I took from Joe’s house.

  The more I thought of killing him, the more I thought how these creatures have destroyed my life or what they might’ve done to my family.

  They’re the reason I’m without Morgan and Kate. They’re the reason Jerry and Joe are dead.

  They’re the reason I’m here in Hell alone.

  Something terrible boiled over inside me and the only solution I could think of was—

  There can be no mercy.

  I stormed back into the shed and saw that the restraints on Peter’s arms were giving way.

  I punched the switch on the table and raised the saw right up through Peter’s back as his body wrenched and twisted, screaming and fighting to break free.

  His eyes bulged from panic as blood shot and sprayed from beneath him, spilling over onto the floor.

  Don’t stop.

&n
bsp; Yes, that’s it.

  The sound of his skin ripping, meat flinging, bones snapping, and blood splattering on the concrete drove me as I furiously pushed and pulled him by his feet across the spinning blade of the circular saw until it finally tore through his chest.

  No mercy.

  I yanked a tire iron from the utility rack and repeatedly slammed it down until I left nothing of the creature’s face. His shrieking slowed to a suffocating gurgle. Dark bile rose, filled, and spilled over the sides of his mouth like a dark waterfall.

  I raised the iron one more time and struck with the first of the fatal blows. Crack! Crack! Crunch!

  Sorry, Peter.

  Shaken, spaghetti legs, I sat in the shed with the iron still clasped in my fist, still feeling the adrenaline, still feeling the sickening rush in my stomach.

  I stumbled back into the house where Dusty stood looking at me from the living room, mortified in his little garbage bag/hazmat suit. He stared at me with glazed eyes as the remaining curds of Peter’s body dripped off me and onto the kitchen tiles like batter.

  “What? Are you okay?” I figured I must have somehow knocked more of his screws loose with what just happened in the shed.

  Why did I take him out there?

  I pulled him away from the windows in case the old man was still lurking. What the hell is wrong with my goddamn clocks?

  Blood never washes off as easily as you want it to. Scrub-scrub-rinse-REPEAT. Glob on the green apple scented antibacterial soap under the scalding hot water.

  Hum a couple of verses to your favorite children’s tune while you’re scouring—blood falling away from your hands like paint chips.

  Don’t have to know all the words, just make them up as you go along while the soapy red water circles the drain. The blood from my hands goes round and round, round and round, round and round...

  That’s it, you’re almost there. Repeat chorus and you’re done—air dry—throw up.

  Get it all out.

  Nana always said cleanliness is next to godliness. So, what would you call this? This is more than getting a little dirt from under the fingernails before dinner, Charlie.

  This is someone’s blood on your hands. Cold blooded, oh, you’ve done it now. You’ve done a terrible thing.

  Blood crisp and hardened in my hair and now all over the inside of my shed and tools and floor like some German fetish porn gone haywire. I’m not a killer.

  Killers kill for sport, food, fashion, sheer insanity, or for the best and honorable reason—WAR! Kill ‘em by the dozens, boys! There’s more where that came from! It’s okay…it’s war, go ahead, come on, baby.

  What’s my excuse? That was insane, wasn’t it? The tire iron to the face was a bit much, I have to admit.

  Maybe you could even say it was unnecessary. Peter was a casualty of war then. There you go.

  Justifiable homicide, a necessary loss, self-defense, but I chained Peter down to my table, Charlie. If you hadn’t then he would have killed me, and that’s why I killed him. That’s right, Charlie, that’s why you killed him.

  I killed Peter.

  THAT’S THE SPIRIT

  Monday, December 31st, 2013

  1:40 a.m.

  I stood at the back door because I couldn’t sleep and Peter was dead inside my shed.

  The night terrors and voices, all muffled and coming from inside the house, but I can’t make out what they’re saying. Whispering and haunting. First, they come from upstairs, then downstairs, inside my head, and then all at once, they go away leaving me in silence again.

  Sometimes at night, I can hear the creaking, skulking of someone’s footsteps walking around opening doors inside the house, but when I look, there’s no one there.

  I spend close to a half hour chasing the invisible man and talking to myself almost every night—up the stairs, down the stairs, up the stairs, down the stairs.

  Cooper sleeps in Kate’s room with Dusty, and neither one has managed to get over the baby gate yet.

  They’re always asleep when I check in on them. I can sense things watching me at night, sometimes touching my hands, breathing on me. Maybe it’s nothing but my imagination. Maybe.

  It’s like the time I tried the nicotine patch because Morgan couldn’t stomach the cigarette smoke when she was pregnant with Kate.

  Smoking in the house was off limits, but I always snuck one into the bathroom with me every night before I showered. True smokers smoke with the patch on, double up on the nicotine—get that head rush!

  The patch was timed-release evil.

  The nightmares were so vivid I’d stay up half the night watching reruns of ‘80s sitcoms in the living room until the morning came. Maybe it’s the ghosts of Jerry or Joe coming back to haunt me for taking their Led Zeppelin and gun collections. Wouldn’t that be something? Hmm, Jerry would do something like that, I’d imagine.

  Thank God for a sense of humor or else I think I’d be jumping off the Whitestone Bridge by now.

  Sure, I’ve thought about ending it, swallowing a red hot bullet like Joe did. Then I’d be missing out on all the monsters, assholes, freaks, famine, death, and murder—yeah, that’s the spirit, Charlie.

  MEAT PLOW

  Tuesday, December 31st, 2013

  Heading eastbound on foot from the Long Island Expressway ramp, a shortcut around the Botanical Gardens, was an ideal route back after spying on the pirates. I can never let the night beat me home. It’s always a race between man and nature if you stray too far.

  Taking the scenic route is like blindly dangling chum over the side of the boat in shark territory, or worse—swimming in it.

  ‘‘Chug! Chug! Chug! Chug! Chug!” the brown pickup truck spat as it bounced and coughed down the street behind me—dozens of limbs flapping and bursting over the sides like a party caravan.

  A weather eaten teddy bear hung to the front grill and the Mariachi mix-tape wailed and howled from the oncoming barge.

  The passengers’ faces hid and made obscure shapes behind a filthy brown windshield until stopping alongside me.

  Jesus Christ, that SMELL—exhaust, gasoline, and odors you couldn’t begin to describe because you have never smelt anything like it before.

  It’s what you would imagine the bottom of a dumpster behind a Chinese restaurant smelling like in the height of a heat wave, but worse.

  It hugged your face and clung to your clothes if you hung around it long enough.

  “Hey! Where you going, papi? You need a leeeft?” the driver called out, silencing his radio—his English mangled by a thick South American accent.

  His face radiated with windburn and smiles underneath the brim of his dirty baseball cap. The passenger was a fresh kill middle-aged male, propped with his head against the door and both eyes landing on mine.

  I was waiting for him to blow kisses and proposition me for a cheap thrill—How much for a good time, baby?

  “Hey, papi, You need a leeeft or wha’?” the driver asked again, waking me from my stare down with the dead man.

  “No, I’m okay. I’ll walk, thanks,” I said waving him off.

  “No problem, papi. I take you, no problem,” he insisted.

  “I’m fine with walking, buddy. It’s not far.”

  “‘My name is Cheff!” he smiled bashfully as I began to walk ahead.

  “Okay, nice to meet you. How ya’ doin’, Cheff?”

  “No, not Cheff, papi. Cheff with a Chay!” he said proudly.

  “Oh…Jeff with a Chay. Okay. Whatever.”

  Heaps of dead bodies were on their way to the “Bog” for the melt down, bundled together with zigzagging blue and yellow bungee cords on the back of Cheff’s pickup truck. It looked like a game of Twister gone horribly wrong with feet, arms, and hair weaving around everywhere, over and under each other. Where did “Cheff” propose I sit, on the truck that had the word SEMITARIES spray-painted on the side of it had I taken him up on his offer?

  “Is okay, my freng, no problem! I go now. Hasta la
huego! Happy New Jears!” Cheff waved and the truck chugged back to life once again, accelerating ahead of me. A heavy deceased woman tumbled off the truck and onto the road.

  Wheels screeched to a halt, the truck zoomed in reverse, and Cheff slammed on the brakes again nearly plowing over the body.

  “Som’o’nah’beeesh!” he cried, hopping out of his dead people delivery truck. Cheff was about five foot two and pushing 50.

  Sluggishly scratching underneath the crevice of his oversized belly, he took a minute to calculate his next step like a mover who faced an odd-shaped piece of furniture and a long flight of stairs. Dead man riding shotgun watched me from the side mirror.

  “This one is nice, huh? Que linda. She’s preeetty,” said Cheff, sucking his teeth, towering at the dark-haired woman’s oddly twisted feet.

  Cheff swung and scooped her up from underneath her arms, fully palming her breasts on the second try.

  Pumping and lifting, fighting to maintain his balance, Cheff probably never felt breasts like these from a living willing woman.

  “She’s still warm, eh?” he said, grappling her lifeless limbs like a Greco-Roman wrestler, but she was larger and thicker than he was and putting up a fight.

  Two more tries and a gut-wrenching toss back onto the truck finally did the job, but not a good one.

  “Papi, you see something you like, you take, no problem,” he offered with dancing eyebrows.

  “No thanks. I’m not into feeling up dead chicks, Cheff. I think I’m going to go home now.”

  “Okay, no problem, my freng.” Cheff looked at me as if I were crazy for not indulging in a good thing and took off to the SEMITARIES in his gagging Death Barge again.

  JANE’S REMAINS

  New Year’s Day

  3:48 p.m.

  It was late afternoon when I discovered her limping and wandering aimlessly in a tattered powder blue hospital gown outside. Something told me she was up shit’s creek because her bare ass was showing and it was twenty-two degrees out.