Love Is A Fucking River

Love Is A Fucking River Part 2 of 2

Something smells and obviously, it's not me. I'm damn near metrosexual about my personal hygiene, especially on the fragrancy tip. That is to say, I generally smell impeccable; swoonworthy even. Not to brag. But the harshness invading my nostrils right now is another thing altogether. An evil thing. It reminds me of the time Cespedes killed a mouse and hid it under the fridge and I had to track the stench to the little crimpled corpse. It's a wretchedness that enters me like a poisonous gas and I can almost feel it clouding up my airway, corroding the tiny vesicles in my lungs. Or whatever it is that's in my lungs. If I breathe too deeply, I'll probably die, so I concentrate on taking shallow, hopefully not-too-loud gasps of air.

"Take a right," Creature says and I do. It directs me north, north and further north until all the quiet little midnight blocks have turned into factories and then it tells me to pull over in a gravelly area surrounded by rusted out industrial skeletons. I'm sweating. Maybe because I know I'm about to die a gruesome, supernatural death at the hands of my geriatric neighbor. My mind races through possibilities: beg, make a break for it, fake a seizure...but all the mini-movies that play out afterwards are stupid and end with me dying anyway.

There's an awkward pause. Absurdly, my mind still fills with thoughts of this strange and amazing new woman, Janey. What does she do in her spare time? Who are these odd comrades of hers? Is she possibly possibly wondering about me, right at this very moment? Then the thing breaks into my reverie by croaking, "Vanessa." I damn near fall out of the car in surprise. I turn and face it full on for the first time and I see the old man and something else very hideous lurking in the air all around him, something writhing and dying and salivating all over his empty form. For a second my thoughts are all confusion and then it clicks into place. Nothing that happened tonight was an accident at all.

"Devin," I whisper.

It looks up, heaving rattely, mucous-filled breaths, and nods.

"It's not like that anymore," I say. "We 'aint a thing any more." I'm kinda improvising, but it also happens to be true and I pray that Devin's dead ass can see that through my fear. I've been in this situation before. Okay, that's not true, but I've talked down more than a few angry exes. Usually though, I'm the one with the upper hand. "She left me. She..." as I'm speaking I realize I really don't care that much any more. In some perverse way, I'm happy. She left me. And she took all her crap baggage with her.

Well, almost all of it.

"Out," the thing belches. When I don't move, the air gets heavy around me and I have to yawn to unpop my ears. I just look straight ahead because if I look it in that decrepit face again I'll probably turn to dust. A cold, cold hand reaches slowly out, grazes my cheek and then slithers down to my neck. First I'm breathing way too fast and then not at all. I pull and pull for oxygen but it's like there's nowhere for it to go; my lungs have closed up shop and shut down. Feel my eyes get wide, all the vessels in my face seem like they're about to explode and I imagine blood streaming from my ears, my nose, my fucking soul.

And then it's gone, whatever it was and I'm sucking in desperate mountains of air, wrapping my whole mouth around that sweet empty savior and coughing and blubbering and carrying on. When I recover myself some, DevinCreature says, "now: out!" and I stumble out of the cab.

We pass through a hole in a fence, walk along beneath giant shadows of cranes and scaffoldings, breach another fence and come out on a rocky embankment by the water. Trucks thunder along the expressway a little further down the creek. Queens is sparkling back at us from the far shore, oblivious to the tiny horror show my life has been reduced to. I wonder briefly if I could make it across but then I remember all the filth and pollution that they've dumped in these blue-green waters and I think about all the mutant diseases I'd probably get and I opt to try my chances with the demon-Devin-thing. And then the demon-Devin-thing shoves me hard and I trip and land face first in the shallow rocky river edge, scratching my arm and bruising my chin.