Slob

Death

The mist thickens, solidifies, begins dripping, settling over him like a wet, clinging blanket. Dropping down over the trees like a vast, ominous shroud that drapes the triple canopy in moist blackness. The night noises intensify. The air is redolent with the smell of rotting fish and the presence of death. This is cadaver country.

The spooky killer's moon has all but vanished now, the yellow almost gone, and yet he sees HE SEES each blade of grass, each slime-covered twig, every veiny leaf and every drop of every bead of moisture rain mist dew dampness glistening clearly sparkling and dancing on the leaves. HE SEES. It is not just night vision. He sees without seeing. Sensing would perhaps be a better word. Sensing the atoms and molecules of the air and the matter and the nothingness of the dark. He owns the night now.

The presence of death stands and breathes slowly, deeply of his nightworld. He hears the trees whisper and laugh there in the wet blackness. It is the faraway tinkle and shatter of jagged vampire laughter and it makes Death smile his huge, radiant, dimpled smile. In his mind's eye he sees a coven of witches moving now, gliding through the jungle night like a breeze rustling through rice paper, and he slows wills slows his massive heartbeat almost to a standstill.

It is the lurking presence of black, oily death waiting there in the jungle scarcely breathing, unmoving, still, infinitely patient, unspeakably evil. It senses the movement that is coming down the worn hardball trail, out there in the night somewhere beyond the great triple-canopied jungle edge, across the fields and paddies and beyond the far treeline, coming down the hardball that is their nighttime foul-lane blacktop, moving quietly through the darkness.

Tick . . . Tick . . .

But he is not in the jungle now he is driving in a stolen car, driving carefully if aimlessly, driving the darkened streets of a strange town, sensors purring, tuned, vigilant, concentrating on his surroundings. He is never lost, confused, he has his strong inner compass that always points him back on trail. His mind is a heat-seeking device that homes in on the warmth of a vulnerable human heartbeat. He likes it here, driving without purpose through these cozy suburbs. His smile is wide and dimpled. He beams with pleasure at the thought of the families inside those houses.

Death likes to drive through strange, darkened, suburban streets at night, sightseeing as you would take your loved ones to look at the Christmas lights on a chill and snowy December's eve, bundled up and filled with good cheer, your heart filling with joy at the sight of the brightly lit yards and homes bedecked in multicolored displays and scenes of the Nativity. He warms at the sight of the golden lights, the mystery of the darkened homes full of loving families. He loves it.

For to Death a drive through the suburban tract homes of idle America is to take a sightseeing tour through the strange, wondrous, and exotic locale of some unknown country. The residential landscape at night is as alien to this creature as if it was a vision of a far distant planet. Who could live in that home with those twinkling, golden lights, he wonders in something approaching awe. What are they doing in there? In that expensive, neat, well-tended home over there he senses that there are human beings living their quiet lives behind those walls.

And in the foreign landscape he sees, senses, an endless smorgasbord of humanity there for the taking. An infinite variety of humans all happy and snug in their little, brightly lit shelters, safe from all harm behind their ridiculously thin walls and flimsy doors with their televisions sets and pets and toys, and as he imagines the boundless delights that await his pleasure that are his for the TAKING he can taste the thrill of it and if he doesn't stop the spreading heat of it that is coming over him he will pull up in one of these concrete driveways and go kick down a door and feed this rapacious, awesome appetite of his, and he lets it roar up into his head and it is the color of blood and it has the rich, red, bitingly cuprous smell and taste of life's fluid.

And now he is out of the car and moving toward humans again, moving through the darkness on those powerful treetrunk legs, faster than anyone alive has ever seen him move, and in his right hand he is holding a heavy coil of taped tractor-strength safety chain. In a few seconds he will see the little people coming down the hardball there in the blackness and he feels the strong human heartbeat nearby and he churns ahead into the pitch black where the human is.

The blunt, thick fingers shaped like huge, steel cigars lash out with the coil of chain and it cracks into something solid and there is a scream and his face beams with the joy of it using that thick, rock-hard wrist and forearm of bulging muscle with the fluid snapping motion that he's worked on until it is a part of him all smooth and automatic as he makes the lethal chain smash out, uncoiling and striking like a big snake whipping out and splitting the human head open snakewhipping into the man killing him in that one powerful smacking wet bloodsmear.

And the hot, red, rushing thing has set his brain on fire and Death has dropped the dripping links of chain and is slashing out with that big, razor-sharp bowie all wild and insane with his surging pressure cooker exploding as he rips the human open taking the fresh heart in a tearing, gutting, rending of flesh and offal and bloody organs and bone as the profluent river of Death floods the night and nothing stops a river.