Prologue
“I was trying to find God in the eye of a needle” Seth said to his brother Michael, his voice dripping with a dismissive sarcasm like he knew what he was saying had potential to be profound but was so taciturn in it’s delivery that his brother should roll his eyes. “Turns out he doesn’t exist.And its not like that wasn’t something we didn’t already know.” His tone changing from abject cynicism to an almost commanding tone as he began to recite their family history. “We were brought to church every Sunday and preached to about the rules of God, laid out in this book that had been translated thousands of times by thousands of different people and told to believe in this idea of a benevolent all powerful overseer who could do anything. Who created the universe and in turn could make it do whatever he wanted. The parents that brought us there, they divorced when we were 13. So much for believing in the rules of God. Dad? Dad decided to leave and never contact us,don’t worry Mikey God loves us right, doesn’t matter if Dad didn’t.God loved us enough to drive our mother to alcoholism and death when we were young adults.”
“And that justifies overdosing on heroin in the back of a beat up Chevy, Seth?” Michael retorted at his brother.His voice was hallow and muffled.“That justifies being sent to jail for the majority of your life?”
Michael knocked on the glass between them as he held the rough looking black phone that they were speaking through.Seeing him wasn’t enough. Michael wanted to punch his older brother in the face.Seth looked tired and sad. Fitter than he had ever been but he was lost. His hair was slicked back like it was permanently wetted by something and he had let a unkept scruff grown on his face. Michael had shaved his head down almost to the skin and was clean shaven.The family had been through a lot.Seth was right they were raised in a very Christian family. Michael knew his parents didn’t really believe the doctrine but had thought it ideal to raise their children with it.Their father didn’t want to have Children but stayed as long as he could because their first born happened by surprise. Potentially another reason Seth lashed out at first with petty crimes, and then drugs.
On the day in question, Seth hand’t intended to overdose. It wasn’t a suicide attempt. He had gone to the alley that he normally goes to to shoot up. A quiet hovel of darkness illuminated slightly by the neon lights of a strip club across the street it looked out to.He had always thought that the glow of the bright red lips and the yellow name of the club “Glow Girls” was like the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. That night it was the only light he saw as the darkness of death crept up on him.
An overdose. The drugs hit you like a bolt of pleasure. It’s something you have never felt before and as it fades you fear you may never feel again so you go out and search for it, you crave it, you need it because life has enough misery that that bolt of pleasure and clarity is necessary to get you through. It becomes the air you breathe. You trust it to get you through. It is impossible to describe to those who have never been high as to what exactly it does and why exactly you need it so bad. You just know what it does and you know that you need it.An overdose is like all that love and need betraying you, at first it embraces you and holds you tight and you feel that comfort that you felt before and you only slowly come to realize that the embrace is becoming stifling, like an arm around your body turning into a hand around your throat.Seth was caught with that hand around his throat. He was alone in his beat up chevrolet looking at himself in the faint reflection of the glass knowing that he was going to die. He was ready to meet God and say “Fuck you” for all the need in his life that drove him to this moment.The need for calm, the need for clarity, the need for love. He expected the light of the afterlife breaking through the darkness of death but all he got was the bright red lips of the glow girls strip club casting a haze through the front of his car and onto his face as the world turned to darkness around him and his heart stopped beating.
He did remember light when he woke up but it was in a hospital bed. The pale mass produced lights that hospitals use had blinded him at first. He blinked in irritation and in that irritation he knew he wasn’t dead.Looking around he saw he was being pumped full of something through an iv. The room was the usual stale discolour that every hospital is dressed in.Standing to his left a man in a white lab coat writing something on a clip board that he placed back at the foot of the bed Seth saw he was lying in. To his right was the only real colour in the room. A shade of blue he would only describe as police blue. The standard looking police officer stood watch over him. Tall and muscular, hair in a short but trendy style and sunglasses inside like he was trying to look like the coolest person in the room.One look at him and Seth was ready to run for his life. He shirked upward as best as he could but he was weak and as he moved he discovered he was handcuffed to the bed. He was not going to get out of this.
Seth was tried and convicted of possession with intent to distribute. He never thought of himself as a dealer.He would buy enough to last a long time and attempt to use it in a controlled fashion. Every so often he would sell to some desperate soul who paid him two or three times what the heroin was worth, but Seth never thought of himself as an actual dealer until the judge said “guilty, guilty, guilty.”
“Jail is not a place I thought I’d find myself, Michael.”Seth said to the glass between he and his brother.“The first time I had to fight for my life was in here,the first time I had to protect myself from other people. I ended up shanked and raped and left for dead. Still I survived. I cleaned up my habit pretty quickly. Which was tougher than I ever thought. I kept to myself and out of everyone’s way. Learned to become a little better and a little stronger.I had to.”
“Another thing I’ll never understand, right?”Michael said remembering the time he found his older brother high on the floor of his apartment loosely clutching a used needle with a rope still tied tight around his arm.Seth had told him it wasn’t something he would understand until he tried. A cop-out a lot of addicts tell people who question their habits Michael thought. He still had respect for his older brother, if he didn’t he wouldn’t come to visit him once a month. He believed addiction was a weakness. Addiction to drugs, to money, to people, anything you needed in life was only showing something you couldn’t do on your own he thought to himself.
“Another visit and we still end up arguing about why you ended up here Seth.” Michael said a little desperately through the phone. “You know every time I come to visit you I think to myself, when is my older brother going to stop needing me to be the older brother?”
Seth looked quietly at his younger brother. Michael could tell that the words had hurt him but every month the same conversation happens, the sentences are slightly different the words aren’t as sharp but they are all there.
“What do you want me to do Michael?” Seth pleaded.“Im stuck here for at least ten more years. “Do you want me to pray to be released sooner? To go back out to the world now that Im cleaner? do like our parents taught and put all our faith and hope in God?They didn’t know better, but I do.God doesn’t exist, he wouldn’t let innocent children like us be raised by family that didn’t care about them.”
The guard came and took Michael away, visiting time was over. Seth looked stunned as this was the toughest conversation he had had with his brother. His eyes were widened, the elevated brows showing wrinkles in his forehead. He thought to himself if he could take that conversation back he would.
Seth went back to his cell that day and went about his routine in the prison. Push ups and sit ups in his cell, a book to read from the library while out in the common areas so he could keep to himself and keep out of trouble. He would read with one hand holding the book and the other on a shank he kept in his pocket, just in case. Always ready for anything that could happen that became his motto.
Before Michael visited again the hand of God came down on the planet earth.
That was not something Seth was ready for.
Smell was the first thing he noticed when he woke up. It was putrid, it was of death and decay.It was accented slightly by the scent that can only be described as the aroma of the forest. The wind blew gently carrying the aroma with it.He opened his eyes slowly and his world was filled with dead bodies. One staring right back at him, decay slightly set in, the jaw was broken and aghast and the lifeless eyes were open and widened and looking right at him. He jumped up and found himself standing at the foot of a pile of dead bodies. They all appeared to have died violently. The clothes they had on were tattered and torn and stained in reds and yellows. Their limbs tangled across each other like a motionless orgy.His body froze for a second as he tried desperately to figure out where he was, why he was there, how he got there and even who he was.Quickly studying what was in front of him he saw crosses assembled and placed in various spots of this pile. There wasn’t enough for every body but they were arranged in rows to show that this pile of dead was in memorial to these fallen people.
It was silent. Looking around he saw he was with this pile of dead in a forest. He was still in shock by this putrid mess of death he woke up in.Everything in his head was gone. Not only did he not know where he was or why he was there but he barely even knew who he was or what he had done to get there. The quiet didn’t help him at all. All he could hear was the sounds in his head begging for answers that he didn’t have. There was the sound of the breeze through the trees, a few wildlife sounds in the distance, maybe birds singing. There was a clicking sound behind him, he didn’t know who he was but he knew that was the sound of a weapon, a gun being cocked and ready to fire.
“Who the hell are you! Are you a scavenger! We kill scavengers here! Do you wanna end up another body in this pile”He turned around slowly with his hands up in the air. He wasn’t sure who he was but he knew he was in danger and he had to be calm and convince the owner of the weapon that he meant him no harm.
