Watch Your Step

HUNGOVER [ep. 5]

Make it stop. "Make it stop," I hear myself mumbling. When I opened my eyes again, I felt rejuvenated like I had a good night's sleep. My body clock tells me it's nearly midnight. For the second time, I am lying on the shining table, in the middle of this eerie dark room. Nevertheless, the room is neatly organized, like what happened earlier was just (again) a horrid dream. Now that I recall, my head whirls as if in a mild jet lag. My eyes get cloudy and unsteady. I try to sit up but something felt heavy on top of me. Connected to me...

I place my hand on my stomach and it feels round, big, and bulging. I'm not sure if it is disgust that fills me or dread when I see a sac of my skin stretched like it's going to burst. Either way, what championed is the horror that came after.

"The transplant was a success," a childish voice emerges. I was transitioning to a mad state of disbelief when I saw Tommy sitting on the floor beneath his parent's hanging bodies. He is playing with a belt that I now realize is a collar, tinted with dark red blemishes.

"The first time I experimented was a failure," he continues as he gestures to his mother's corpse. "Now, it's almost possible," his voice is quiet like the candles were also listening.

"Just what the hell did you do to me?" I growl without an ounce of trying to understand what he's saying.

"Inside you is what I call a miracle."

Miracle my ass. A fervent loathing is what's boiling inside me. I'd stab myself if I had to.

"Once you incubate them, you will vomit them, then they'll be finally alive," he chuckles.

"That's not how it works, you stupid motherfucker!"

He plays with an ugly laugh. "It's different when you are knowledgeable of the powers you can possess with dark medicine!"

"Oh yeah?" I challenge as I slide onto the table, my head starts pounding and my heart racing. Bottles of alcohol are flaunted beside the cart. It made me stumble and clatter the tool tray to the wooden floor. I bolt to pick a metal knife then point it directly to my bulging belly. But Tommy, as fast as a speeding bullet, lunges at me to stop my hand.

"I won't let you do that," his voice squeaking and deep at the same time.

Grunting, with unexpected force, I pierce the knife in his eye. It was incredibly tender like a yolk in a sunny-side-up egg. Although I'm in a state of being half-awake and nodding off, a feeling of divine providence guided me to level the atrocity I'm facing. As his eyeball seeps a red and white pus, Tommy gives a yelp of agony. I closed my hand on one tool and stabbed it again, now on his shoulder. AND AGAIN, and again to where I can reach him.

He roars with an unsettling loudness. He staggers back to where his sitting before. My conviction is running out as well as metals to stab. When push came to shove, I stood up and seized one of the glass bottles. As wildly as I can, I break it on the edge of the table and threaten Tommy with it.

"CAREFUL," he bellows. And with a gesture that glides through my body, I know he's not talking about the tip of the broken glass. He is not concerned about himself. Tommy is pertaining to this hideous sac of demonic abomination in between us!

"The time is near," his eyes pleading but his voice is still fiendish. "At midnight they'll be reborn!"

"I not waiting that long!" I extend my arm at the top of my head, mustering all the strength I can manage. Biting my lip for the incoming pain. And let one swoosh of the ragged shard of glass to my belly.

"NOOOOOOO!" Tommy's voice thunders.

For a second, I thought it would pop like a balloon, or blood will gush out and I'll die instantly. But what comes out is what I expected. The pain explodes in my head with an unnerving whiteness. It makes me dizzy. Shock wires straight to my spine. It is constantly irritating and almost unbearable. In one hellish, twisting torment, my stomach blows open and drains what's inside.

Instead of organs and blood, a fetid smell and a sticky moisture spray from the gash of my stomach. Gurgling with black bubbles, leaking out of it are the same hairless rat-like creatures with no eyes and a distinguishable bit of fur that I puked this afternoon. I am beginning to faint, slipping on the brink of hallucination. The image becomes a blur. Puppies?

Oh no... but once and for all, I don't give in. With my thoughts speeding at a thousand light-years, I start to vomit all the way.