Speeding Evil

"But you don't understand!" She was frantic, crazed, almost out of her mind. "They are evil!"
"Yes, you said that before." He replied, looking at a woman who looked as though she had been through hell. By what her testimony was, it was damn near close. Beaten, raped, bitten, the list went on.
The culprits: two eighty three year old men. Staples in the small community for decades. Upstanding.
The story didn't make sense, but here the woman was, telling this story that sounded straight out of a horror story.
"They said they want to hurt a lot of people. I'm just alive because they wanted you to know. I shouldn't have come here."
"They said you had to come here, or they would kill you."
"Yeah." her voice had gone hoarse. Lindsay Balmer, now Linny McQueen, was not one to make things up. She was in recovery from drugs, but even in her heyday this was a stunt no one would want to pull. It would be risky to put these allegations up in the first place, which was what Officer Leo Molnak had been thinking for some minutes by now
"You said they were armed."
"Yes...but they don't need the weapons, really."
"Why not?"
"They...they can kill with the power they brought here."
"Oh, right the 'evil incarnate' that they had conjured up. That power?" She nodded her head solemnly. That was where her story fell apart. The old men being some kind of sorcerors and bringing to life some evil creature. Their reasons were very unclear at this point. Linny had come screaming into the station to see someone. They had given her a drug test and found her to be negative on all accounts. Her speech was normal, she wasn't high as far as he could tell. She believed what she was telling him, that he could see, without a doubt.
But the story was so...unreal.
"They said they're going up the road to Milner. To have some fun, they said." She said the words softly, looking down, caught up in bad memories. How badly wounded the woman's psyche must be, from telling the truth, or not, could not stand up to the world in all its rugged edges and sharp points.
But really, what could two men in their eighties really do?


The truck sped down the road, and the evil came in close pursuit, invisible to the human eye. Chester and Roan sat quiet, but happy. In their laps fingers were on the triggers. Chester was driving, smoking a cigar, about halfway through. The smell made Roan almost queasy these recent days, but he wasn't about to say anything, his life's goal was achieved at last. Now they could roam free, however long they wished.
Milner was just ahead, and the people there were going to find a new meaning the word pain.
Evil followed with them.


Jason liked to do his running at dusk, just as the sun was setting, and getting into the early darkness of the night. It was quiet out here, he enjoyed that, too. There wasn't anybody waiting at home for him, and he liked it that way for now. The last relationship had been long and messy, now he just wanted to be him. Life was good.
Behind him he heard a car coming, he glanced over his shoulder to see it was a truck. He moved farther to the side of the road as they passed.
Then he felt something suddenly strike him. Where, he didn't know. He just didn't know. He just knew nothing anymore. He was gone.


Roan was looking in the rearview mirror to see it happen. The young man running on the side of the road suddenly bucked, and fell straight forward onto his face, dead. He smiled, a gap-toothed one.
"One down." Milner was only a few miles away, and he was feeling especially giddy, He told himself so many times that he could do this his whole life, always doubting his words. Now it had come to pass and it felt right.
    The truck sped down the road to Milner, and the evil came in close pursuit.

Alpha Or Omega?

Jules almost didn't care about the bones the more he stared at them. Of course people had died here, people had died everywhere. Nothing registered in his mind as off, almost like a sticky honey had blotted out his fight or flight mode. The tree was too beautiful to leave. The leaves were so beautiful, that dark hue of green, he never thought he had seen a more vivid shade of any color in his life, almost as if the color itself were alive.
Jules knew he had to sit down at the base of the tree and just enjoy being against it. He had seen seldom living things he had liked in his sixteen years of miserable existence, and of all of them paled in comparison to his feeling of ecstasy as he relaxed against it.
It felt as if the world melted off of his shoulders. Nothing mattered, there was nothing he could do. He accepted that freely now. It had been harder before. Life went on as it had, or it didn't for some, while others, such as the tree, grew in the devastation and had purpose, that defied the prickly law of nature. There was no possible way the tree could be here. There hadn't been any trees in close to fifteen years now, when he was only a baby. The fact that it stood here meant something. Something cosmically deep. Jules couldn't seem to think too much harder on it before that, too slipped away.
When he awoke the roots had already begun to twine around his feet.

Thoughts and Truths About Me

           I am an alcoholic. I am a drug addict. I have depression, anxiety, occasional anger issues and many other problems. I'm not going to let these stop me. For years they held me down in my tracks, like moving through mud. They are not good qualities, but they make up part of me. I try and be the best person I can be, despite this, and I think I do a good job most of the time. I know I'm not living up to my potential, and it galls me. It is the worst when I get into a depression. I know I need to do more things to help myself. I need to go to more meetings, I need to focus on living I guess you could say a 'Godlier' life. My religious beliefs and feelings have seemed to take a back seat lately. I want to be able to live my life like God or any other higher power would intend for me to. I try this on my own, but it doesn't always follow what I believe his will would be. I always look back on my day and realize what I could have done better, how I could have acted better, and who I could have helped more. Sometimes it's me.
          It's time I stop relying on saying and telling myself I'm depressed or have an addiction, because that's not all there is to me. Sure, for a while when I was in recovery and getting through the toughest stages it was the biggest part of my life, and I'm not saying it isn't now. Recovery should be my number one thing still, because I want to stay sober. I want to not be depressed. I don't want to be known solely for my negative qualities. Getting sober is hard, it takes time and it takes resolve and it takes fucking up and falling many times. There is not much trust with those who are very familiar with me, mainly family. I put them through the shit so many times that I am surprised they haven't yet given me the tough love and thrown my ass to the curb. Building trust has not been easy, because I have broken it so many times. My depression on top of my addiction is where I get to rock bottom. I feel like I don't belong. I don't deserve to live. I sometimes have felt like if I died, I would save my family and friends grief in the future. Almost like that one bad thing of me dying would be less grief in the long run to me keeping on breaking trust and losing myself and having them worry about me constantly. It's a fucked up way to think, that if I were gone there would be less trouble for them in life. I have never attempted suicide, I have never gotten to planning it, either. I have had friends die from suicide and I know how it feels to lose someone like that. If I kill myself by overdosing then I am essentially pulling the trigger myself. I can't do that. I can't lose my focus and my drive to live. It's hard not to, especially when I can't pull myself out of bed, sometimes for weeks when I'm in one of those black moods. I don't have self-confidence. I used to joke how I don't have mojo, i only have 'mo.'  I will always believe I am not good looking, that is something I can't get over. Maybe I have nice eyes or something, but I can't bring myself to admit I am a decent looking man. It's one of those things, maybe something like an anorexic at eighty pounds believing they're overweight. I don't know. Maybe I'm right. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I look good to only some.

I want to be defined by my good qualities. Not my bad ones.

          I try and give more than I take. That is so fucking taxing, though. I give and I give, even most times when I am not asked, I just do it because I feel the person could use what I am giving more than me, or I just want to put a smile on their face. I feel like an asshole sometimes because then I see them not giving back, even though I gave without them asking and should not expect anything in return, it's like I do, though.  I expect to get something back after I have given. This is not a Godly way of looking at it. I am not the normal Christian. I don't have the same beliefs as most people do, I follow my own, but it does follow close to that of Christianity more than anything else. I like to go to church, I enjoy listening to sermons, and I believe in the message more than anything in most of the things I hear. But expecting things from people is not right. I suppose it makes me feel like people don't care about me as much as I care about them, and that is probably true, because I care about people too much almost. I care if they are having a bad day. I try to make them smile or give them a compliment. I try to talk to them and listen to their problems. I know that listening can do a lot more good than talking does a lot of the time. Being a good listener is a quality I have possessed for most of my life. It's hard not to listen only to wait to speak, but to listen to everything the other person says before making a response in my mind.
          It's time for me to make a push. I need to push myself to do more. To be more. That's one reason I started this blog, so I can get back into writing so I can push out stories and send them to publishers. I am going back to school, and this time I am not slacking. I'm reading the chapters, I'm doing the work. I've been told so many times to 'get my shit' together that I want to pull out my hair, but it's true. Priorities. Always priorities. School. Work. Housing. Writing. Abstinence from drugs.
          I've felt so alone for a long time now. It's been two and a half years since my actual last relationship and I just want someone there who I can talk to, that I can joke with, have things in common with, fuck, watch movies. It was so hard with being in the middle of so much shit in my life, but now that it has hopefully started to calm down, maybe I can find someone. They say that you can't love someone until you love yourself. I think that's bullshit. I don't think I will ever truly love myself, but loving someone else is different. Maybe I'll never find a love that will last, who knows.  I know how eccentric I am, and it will be hard finding someone who appreciates my oddities and can accept them along with my anxiety and everything else. I find it hard as hell to love myself, but I don't find it hard at all to love others.
          Just please let me be the best me I can be. I'm going to be the best I can today and maybe tomorrow I will be even better. I'm working on loving myself, and that is a tough thing to do.

Periphery

I have always been interested in the paranormal. I had a surprise when a fellow co-worker told me he had been dealing with spirits his  whole life, and that they were all around him. The ones that followed him he believed were good. Now, I am not one to disbelieve anything of this sort. I believe him. I am not skeptical, I am intrigued. He had me come to his house and we just waited to see if something would happen around us that was 'off.'
I told him of the sleep paralysis that people experience. You wake up and you can't move, but you see things. He told me simply, "That's a demon on your chest." The only way to get them out is to speak the name of Jesus Christ. This was strange because in the documentary on sleep paralysis I recently watched on Netflix, there was a woman who no longer suffered from sleep paralysis. You want to know how she got rid of it? Praying to God and Jesus' protection. Now, I was really intrigued.
He told me that you can't see demons when they are close to you. They have to be at least twenty or thirty feet away from you to actually 'see' them. He told me he has seen them, but would not go any further in depth on what had happened or what they looked like. I could tell that this was truly something he was, I don't want to say comfortable with, but more he was accustomed to the whole thing, the way a race car driver is accustomed to speeding around a loop, ready for disaster at any second.
We went into his garage, where he said he had heard pounding, loud pounding on the door several times. As he said he felt something, I immediately felt the hairs on my neck rise, and an almost electrical current rush through my spine.
We went onto the deck, after not seeing much in the garage, and spent some time there, just looking across the yards and the nearby houses. It was maybe midnight, so it was dark. He told me of seeing someone in his back yard several times. He knew who the young man was, and the first day he did not see the kid, he had committed murder and killed himself only a few blocks away.
Standing on the porch we did not see much. I didn't see much, I should say. He is always perceptive about things and told me the peripherals are where you usually see things.
After about twenty minutes of him showing me things that he might see, he pointed across his yard. There was another house there, maybe a hundred feet away. He told me to look toward the ground in the back yard of the house, and sure enough I could see an almost inky type of fog slowly moving across the ground.
As soon as I said I saw this, the back light of the house turned on. We thought it was strange and he told me "I'll bet they heard something."
Five minutes later a man had come out of the house with a flashlight and began looking around in the darkness around his house. Now I was not freaking out, I was a little excited, but thought maybe something else had happened. I presently left.
Twenty minutes later I got a call from him.
He told me the police had come and were searching around the house with flashlights. Had something happened? A window break? I don't think I'll ever know, but it was my first experience being with someone so tacked in to the supernatural, or maybe we should call it 'the natural,' because maybe it isn't as far away from our sights as we think.
It's right there. In your periphery.

Validation?

I don't understand what it is with me, but it seems to be that I'm always needing validation from others. Did I do this right? I did that right, right? Do I look okay? You're not mad at me, are you? It's a personality trait that I have always had. I am a person who thinks of others more than myself, and I think about what they are thinking of me. If someone is talking about me behind my back. I can become so almost self-centered because I believe the world is out to get me. NO you did that wrong is what I shudder at. I have to get to the point where I am in control of those thoughts and by in control I mean being able to see them but go past and not need that validation every five fucking minutes. I need to be more comfortable being me and realize some of the other people are thinking about what others think of them. Then there are those who straight up don't give a damn about validation. That is where I want to be, not needing that shit because it's childish. It's a childish trait, I'll admit. Sometimes I just wan to be sure everything is okay, I need that saying 'it's good' or something positive, otherwise I get anxious. Sometimes I believe I get vibes from people the moment I say hi to them. In the way they reply and sometimes look at me, it makes me think that someone said something about me or he just doesn't like me. I hate this so much, but it's me. I need to put my priorities in order, and what other people think of me should not rate high on the list. It's a good thing to know that you are good and nothing is going on, but I do it all too much. Sometimes, however those vibes I get from people are true. I can read subtle things in the way people talk and then hear about what happened after the fact that solidifies what I had been questioning. Man, that's a bitch when that happens.

Man's Disease

There were beasts on the field that day. There were ghosts. It was a place where the living and the dead collided like a front-end collision. Nothing could have prepared us for what lay ahead. We were young, naive, and blind. Blind to the fact that man can be the most dangerous and evil whirlwind in the heavens and the earth, maybe even hell for that matter.
     The corpses were still fresh as we walked over them. Picking clean the items we needed for survival. She found a compass and a map from one of the dead men. I gathered the weapons and ammo we would need to continue on. Our journey had been arduous, and now on top of it we were alone. Milo and the others were dead. We would be dead soon. The enemy line was miles back, and we knew the risks of crossing it, but there had been no other way.
Food was scarce, and we had not eaten in two days. Rifling through the bodies did help some. A few M.R.E. meals and multiple bottles of water would be one saving grace. If the word grace could be found on my tongue the rest of my life. The smell of blood hung heavy in the air, along with the smoke. Powder from the firearms and the small brush fire burning off in the woods from an explosion that had shaken my bones and resolve.
We continued on foot. Julia washed her blackened face in a stream while I scanned the area before taking a dehydrated piss. My mind spun like a record. Two days ago we had been enjoying life at the resort. Bed and breakfast, sex and the beach. It was what two newly weds only dreamed of. It had taken a turn when the local militants rebelled and began their path of destruction. The lucky ones died first. The rest were left to pray for help, which was not coming soon.
The first bomb took out half of the guest rooms and the small lobby. It wasn't a big resort. In fact, it was one only few knew about. The fact that it had not been a hot-zone only a week previous was a plus to be basically alone with her. The guests were few, maybe fifty in all. At least half had been  dead when they left with the militia. The men whom had not gone radical in the blink of an eye. It was strange, they admitted. Some of the men that turned had been not just allies, but friends only days before the coup.

To be continued...