Let's Walk Together

Coarse Hands

Travis Green was in pain. Granted, he's been in pain since childhood, but that was the more emotional, more self-inflicted, kind of pain. Yes, this pain was purely external—in a sense. A pain that radiated throughout his skull, a kind so sharp it hurt his sinuses.

Travis was regretting the bottles that lay at a stalemate on his kitchen counters. Travis regrets a lot of things, but right now, this headache has a fast-pass to the front of the line. His mouth tasted of yeast and his tongue was swollen and dry. The last time this happened Travis had sworn off the bottle, he does the same this time, and he'll do it all again the next time where he eventually wakes up to find himself in yesterdays work clothes feeling close to death.

It's not entirely Travis' fault. It was buy 2 get 1 50% off at the corner store, they were practically free. Just don't go repeating the previous statement to Travis' bank, they have a financial advisor that seems to always know better than him. So what if he was a weak man, he had never claimed otherwise.

Travis deliberated with himself one last time until all the options had been weighed and he could make the executive decision. Declaring his schedule suddenly free due to migraine-central, he closed his eyes instead of calling in sick to work.

He was a glorified plumber, using his degrees in civil engineering to work in the sewers of his home city. Although it paid good, even if you used it as soap, no amount of money could wash away the smell of thousands of peoples piss and shit. So excuse him for feeling a little rebellious, and for a lack of a better expression, rather sick of it.

Well, not that any of it would matter in a couple of days. Canada already issues their statement for a nation wide pandemic advisory, it was only a matter of time before the U.S. followed suit. The news has been pushing out story after story of this disease they say started in zoo animals. Travis doesn't know what to believe. The news has never told the whole truth, but then again, without a little bit of reality all the "stories" they tell would just be lies.

But Travis didn't want to lose sleep over morals. He was too tired.

And so he fell into a fitful slumber. With dreams of the past, pleasant nightmares that left him yearning for better times. He was startled awake, however, when something ran into his apartment's door and rattled its hinges.

Sitting up in a tense statuette manor, the kind that shook your abs and flexed your arms in odd ways. If someone were to push Travis, he wouldn't give an inch.

The sudden bang happened again, and this time, Travis could see his door vibrate. His door was one of those thick hotel doors, so heavy that they had the habit of drooping and sticking to the floor so that Travis had to use his shoulder and body weight to get in. He's never thought of his door as fragile before but as he saw it move and slightly bend like a popsicle stick, he began to grow afraid.

Now, Travis was not unacquainted with fear, rather, they were closer to old friends. But this fear was fresh and it was startling and caused Travis to gasp aloud. He got up in a hurry, looking around in his apartment to see what he could use as a barricade. Travis knew somewhat of what he had to do, as the TV has been telling him, in case of a national emergency, for weeks, he only thought that he had more time. If he had known beforehand, he wouldn't have drank yesterday... okay so he wouldn't have drank as much.

As Travis pushed a hickory shelf against the door, it made an awful sound of bowing and snapping, but there was a slight rattling sound as well that pierced through the aggressive pounding. Travis looks up to notice that the pegs holding the hinges were coming up and out of their sleeve.

"Oh come the-fuck on."

It doesn't take long before the bars drop to the floor one after another, ping ping. Travis' world starts moving away from him as he focuses on the door, waiting for something to happen. He waits. And he waits.

And he waits some more. He waits so long he swears that everything had to be over. He was sure whatever was trying to get in gave up.

So before anything else can happen, he leaves his position from the far side of the room to go for the fallen pegs. Just as he reaches the side of the shelf, the door promptly tips over the top of the waist high shelf and slides its way down the face where it slams itself on the fake linoleum. Nothing but profanities stream through Travis' mind as a disheveled man pokes his head through the doorway. Where Travis is standing, the man could easily swivel his head to the right and immediately see where he has pressed himself up against the wall.

As the stranger makes oddly loud noises and screeches, Travis notices his appearance. The unruly state of his grooming was the first thing Travis clocked as it was quite the amalgamation of ugly browns and reds, but now the floral two-piece seemed to be taking a different shape. At a second glance, the flowers look an awful lot like blood stains. Actually, the person seems to be covered in blood as Travis sees blood dripping from their ears and out of their mouth; a nasty gash on their side also spilling the red substance.

Travis can't help but be suspended in utter disbelief, "Whaaaaat the fuuuuu—"

The stranger's head snaps in his direction. Travis reflects that he probably shouldn't have done that.

The intruder contorts his body around the shelf as he tries to latch onto Travis, his teeth snapping and his fingers snagging on his clothes. Travis hurriedly slides away from the beast and into the kitchen.

A knife. He needed to get a knife.

Clawing a drawer open he hears the pushing of furniture and the unnatural sound of wood hitting tile as he finally yields a steak knife. Turing around he positions the dagger in front of him, with both hands on the grip and in a firm stance. He hasn't the slightest of clue what to do in this scenario but he had little other choice.

So, there Travis stood, in an oversized white shirt and boxers smelling like yesterday's garbage, holding a knife out to his former neighbor who was acting no better than a rabid animal. And there he would get the first drop of blood on his coarse hands, where he would spend the rest of his life trying to wash the stains from.