Turning Away Warm Bodies

Chapter Three: My Heart Refuses To Beat

(Photo: Jade Lamia)

[Renee Lamia]

  It's a rush of adrenaline, a flood of emotions. Fear, excitement, blood thirst; something so paranormal that no other experience draws even near it. Like skydiving, where you feel nothing but the air whizzing past you, except with souls, and at first, completely spontaneous.

  It's not something you can study and master, it's a supernatural force that at any given moment can fly out from you. It's both terrifying and exhilarating, so unexpected that you're both afraid and amazed with yourself.

  Even so, if I could take all of it away, I wouldn't hesitate to.

  As amazing as it feels, to know you have the ability to do what no science can makes the entire world around you fall into inferiority. It's no longer you in it with everyone else, all against the world, it's you looking down on everyone, them against the world and you pulling the strings. As great as that may sound, knowing you have that kind of power in your hands is truly terrifying. You become a god, able to defy even fates punishment for sin. Everything you believed in, vanishes. It's just you sitting on top of the hill, watching as the world around you falls into hell.

  To learn that everything you are is a lie, to learn that even someone as screwed up as you can raise the dead, it changes who you are, everything. Your first glance of the reality of it all will send your mind into insanity and your feet darting towards the trees. You'll never be the same person after you've learned you're a necromancer.

  I remember exactly how it went. That day is constantly replaying itself in my mind, as if I'm watching a movie. Every word spoken, every burning sensation, every detail; engraved in my skull like the carvings in a cave. It's all too vivid, all too real.

   Jade, my much older, carefree sister, drove our green 1998 Buick Lesabre Custom down the expressway without a care in the world of the others around us; everyone fading to dust. It had just been us in the car, no adults there to advise us away from the mistake we were about to make, for just two years before, our only parent figure passed away from breast cancer. As with what happened to our real parents, Jade filled me in.

  According to her, our mother passed away in the delivery room while giving birth to me. Earlier that year, about a month before my birth, our father was sentenced to fifty years in prison for first degree murder. That was when Aunt Nancy came in. After our father was taken away from us, she entered the picture to help out our mother. At the time, Jade was only fourteen, so her knowledge is only slightly limited, but what she told me was that Aunt Nancy was the only safe relative left. I say safe since almost every member on my fathers side was mentally distorted. As with our mothers side, cancer seemed to flow in her blood. Aunt Nancy was the only one left to die, so we were left with her. Ever since our mothers death, Aunt Nancy had taken us in as her own, that is until five years later when she finally passed.

  Jade was nineteen at the time, so by then, she was a legal adult. However, since jobs were scarce, she was forced to take the one job she always loathed, pornography. Openings were rare, but the pay was good, so for the next two years, she managed to provide for us both. Two years, though, was all she would get, for she'd reach her limit when she was at age twenty one. I was seven at the time, and I was there for it; I was there to watch her die.

  That was as normal as any other day for us; driving on the same roads we always did. From a glance, no one would expect that this would be the last day of her life and my sanity, but then again, no one expects to get a hard attack while walking down the street, but it still happens. To an outsider, everything was as normal as ever, however, I'm no outsider, I knew the difference between that day and all of the others. From the start of that week, I had gradually become a blazing furnace. The only catch is that no one could diagnose it. In fact, to this day, I still believe that I was the only one who felt it! Every hand on my forehead, every thermometer, they all said I was fine. Of course, I knew that that was all bull shit. I wasn't fine.