After Stasis #8

Dog carcass in the alley, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face… The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and finally when the drains scab over, all the vermin will drown…The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waste and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout “Save Us!”… And I’ll look down and whisper “No.”

I can’t seem to remember from where I have read or heard that. I could not even explain why those lines popped out of my head as I drove away. They just did, even if the semblance of what had just occurred could be very well explained by the first two words alone. Yet even those two are in want of the adjective “fat” preceding it.

I wish I could say that I felt a pang of guilt gnaw me from the inside, until it had wormed its way out as a grunt punctuated by the bang of fist against the steering wheel. Or maybe a sob resulting from the choking back of self-revulsion after having just slain someone who had the same fucked up physiology as I. I had none of those. Not even the numbness you would have expected for me to have felt, owing to the scores of killing I had made the past decade. There is no joy either, nor a blood lust to satisfy.

Instead, for the very first time, I left with a question racing in my head… No, what Fat Johann said about us did not get me thinking as to how close to an automaton I have become for you. Even so, I could have easily shrugged it off, having come to terms as being labeled your pet far too long ago- for a price, of course.

It seemed to me then, that this whole sordid affair was concocted by Fat Johann all along. I don’t know how he got you or the coven convinced that he was being held against his will by the Seventh Seal Fellowship (or why them of all assholes), and thus it was necessary to have me go after them and try to bring him home. Then he would have me believe that he had suddenly acquired Stockholm Syndrome; making it mandatory to kill him before he could kill me- when he knew for a fact that hell would have a better chance of freezing over than he besting me.

I think it was the death wish he had which my instincts responded to. It was something beyond my power or right to deny him of. I might have not identified it at once, but I more than made up for it by not hesitating or giving it a thought. Fat Johann has always been regarded as one of the elders of our kind. Loved and respected and revered, no… but an elder nonetheless. He had the right to demand for this boon.

My head began to pound as I struggled not to drift into incoherent thoughts which bordered on sex, music, mayhem or any philosophical bullshit we try to glean from being around far too longer than what mankind could actually tolerate. I tried my best to keep one and only one question in the fore: why did Fat Johann want to die by my hand? (Or teeth, if you want me to be more apt).