Username: Meara T
Story Title: Kane
Prompts Used: "It's time for both monsters and men to come out and play."
Story Length: 2013
Feedback: Why not? I love writing. It's nice to know what's working and what y'all think is a mess.
Entry:
My name is Abe.
It was just Kane and I, I and Kane. However they said it. Us in the city. Us in walls of desolate plaster and dust, in this concrete wasteland constructed out of steel monoliths and piles of rubble in the forgotten shapes of someone else's prosperity. Neither of us had come from there, but then again, no one had-- we were the last, the last on two legs, hobbling through what was remembered to be stability turned to rusty old ashes.
There was a pillar there. I remember it, mostly because it was nothing special; posters of our faces could be found wherever there had once been law, and he liked to rip them down, adjust amber goggles and grin with teeth sharp with vanity and tuck them into his coat pocket. And then a Consumed had fallen from the sky, not dangerous but a newborn, dumb and oily blob of a thing, and he crushed it under his boot, and I ate it. When he wasn't looking, of course. I didn't much eat while he watched. Food was hard to find, here. Food all right to swallow, anyway. And he turned to me, and he said "S'all ours," and he trudged off with me behind.
Kane and Abe, Abe and Kane. Before the Consumption, the names ruled the city with crime, before small animals began to become jelly, became mobile and rolling balls of acid with no purpose except to ingest everything they happened upon, be it stone, creature, flesh. And some grew, and became smarter, and rolled with some semblence of form whilst hunting in packs, and the law stopped thinking and began lighting fuses. The bombs ate the buildings, and the creatures ate the bombs, and the Consumed spread, and grew, and developed a taste for people.
Kane loved the idea of owning the world. The only man I'd ever known to so love the destruction, to crush mankind's greatest devistator under his boot and move on. To whistle and hum and take the ruins for himself. He was fascinating. He was insane, and he turned to me, and we climbed a building that day, standing on top of miles of ruined city and looking out in the sun. They were everywhere, gnawing on foundations and slowly dissolving pipes inside of them.
"Look at 'em, Abe," he said. "Our best friends."
And I smiled. And he pulled my ear, and I yelped, and he grinned at me through wild blond whilst looking immensely proud of himself.
Our best friends. Packs of chemical mistake that destroyed humanity.
"It wasn't the little ones, you know." Hoarse voice, not smooth like his, not the odd smooth roughness that made me wonder if ears could lie. This voice would never be near Kane's, but I made do. I reveled. "It was the big, smart ones that did it. The ones that ate whole people and mimicked them. Looked human. Used it to eat more people. You are what you eat. Those ones."
Kane snickered. I could never tell if his face was tanned or sunburned, if he would ever care for the drastic difference in tone the goggles caused around his eyes. Eyes I knew were brown, but I always saw as yellow, yellow like the lenses of the glass. "Wonder if I could ever be one've those ones. Maybe if I find one 'nd get ate."
"You want to get eaten," I snorted, "and become a monster."
"Do y'think they're monsters? Seem smart as hell t'me."
Kane was insane. That's what I admired. Insane, careless, stupid, but brilliant, brilliant even when he knew absolutely nothing about what he revered. Rubbing freckled arms in the unbearable sun, I offered cynicism. I always did. Arguments meant explanations, meant learning, learning how to think. "If you walked up to one, and it flopped right out've it's human shape, you think you'd still want to throw yourself in its mouth and hope some speck called You sticks around for the ride?"
"What's life without fun? And what's more fun than risks? That's what th'other ones didn't get, see." His arms folded. Familiar. Triumphant. When he'd rediscovered the face he'd missed in an alley, breathing and not destroyed, when he'd tought me things I could never understand, when he won an argument. "Sometimes men've gotta play with monsters, Abe. Sometimes there's not a damn bit'a difference."
His arms flew out to the sides. I ducked, carely avoiding the sculpted lines, the skin both dark with tan and red with perpetual burn, glancing across tattoos I didn't need to see to go over every line in my mind, every typical mermaid and oriental wave and merman for good measure. He stood there, sun lighting his face and reflecting around him in an uncanny halo. He laughed, wild and crazy and full of more life than I'd ever seen, even before the walls had been destroyed by bombs.
"They called me a beast," he grinned. "Kane th'bomber, cutcha faster than a chainsaw with a two-inch knife. I was their monster. We're the same, th'beasts and me."
I loved Kane. He was my idol. When the littles came while he rested, I kept them away. When I got caught in the rubble, he pulled me out. On those buildings, he marveled at death, I marveled at him, and he'd grin, like he knew something he wouldn't speak about how this abandonment came to be.
We owned the world, for months, maybe a year. City to city, wreck to wreck, desolation to empty solitude. Alone, happy-- we needed no one else, no one to validate our breathing. We enjoyed utter seclusion. We thought we were the last.
Humanity fell so quickly. Kane was tenacious-- he seemed inhuman, though human he was, with a body that bled deep red like any other creature that claimed urban wasteland. We gave no thought to oddly clean streets, to wrecks of homes that were not in utter abandon. They seemed cleansed by the Consumed, eaten by our Little Friends... Sleep had always been fearless, because there was nothing to fear. We crushed what came for us. We were the supreme.
Invincible.
Kings.
Until that morning, when we awoke to men living.
"Put bullets through their heads and let it be over."
Metal. Metal armor, like they'd had before... the law had been impervious to gunfire, but not to the demented, to the increasingly intelligent masses that could digest titanium and steel. They were dead, all of them, and they should not be here, they should not have made themselves a band of survivors because there were no survivors. There could not be. There was only Kane and I. Abe and Kane. They could not care what he had done, not logically in my mind, but he stood, and they were there, and my eyes grew wide; a hodgepodge of men in armor, perhaps former men of justice and perhaps not, but men who knew him and saw him not as one of their own.
Only as one of the same, the beasts and him.
So careful I had been, so against my nature. I was Abe and he was Kane, and we could be eternal-- he taught me that. So when he stood with a hand on the gun they shot through his, two to the chest and one to the shoulder, and he went down, and his blood ran red, like man.
I had been so careful. I had become different. I had loved Kane, but I lost. I had tried so hard to keep Abe for him, Abe who had been so thin and looked so surprised when I stumbled upon him, starving. The red took me over. I despaired. Abe's bony, burned limbs fell away. His face melted into black, the black oil of me, the mass I had denied, and I saw their faces, their eyes through the masks as they looked up in horror, as I began to tower over them.
As they met the Apocalypse. The Ultimate. I was what they feared. I was a body-wearer, and I raged.
My body ate their bullets. My mouth opened and roared, nothing but teeth, thousands of teeth I could feel, piece by piece, and they became red, red, red. So red-- I was starving, so starving whilst not feeding myself Kane, one I had found by desperately devouring another. I bit into them, too weak to take them whole but not yet so far disheveled that I couldn't take them at the waist, and I flew into rage, starved rage as I ripped and tore and consumed so many of them, one by one, possible shapes and bodies jolting into the makeup of my being and vanishing as soon as I swallowed another. I could not remember shapes. I could only take the last of my meals, as all of my kind could, and wear it as if it were my body, as if the skin was my DNA.
I heard laughter. Swallowing, suddenly feeling large, lethargic, frozen, I heard laughter I knew, I adored, and a feeling I was not supposed to know struck me with crippling violence. Horror. The remaining survivors were wounded, nearly destroyed, ready to be eaten, but suddenly my body would not move.
"Get them," Kane guffawed. He was still dark, crimson, and I could smell the death on him. I had lost myself. He knew. He laughed. His face held death, but mirth, satisfaction, and no horror.
Had he always...?
"Beasts, human, ain't a damn bit of difference. Same game. Same lack of rules. Just pretending. T'be different. T'hide. T'stay inside and away from th'other."
I couldn't take it. I slowly began to devour again, to gourge myself like I never had.
"'s time for both monsters and men t'come out. It's time for monsters and men to come out and play. Play without hidin'. Don' be scared. Can't pretend forever."
They were all gone. All consumed, and I could feel myself rumbling. I felt different, this way, primal, my body ready to condense into its last form, into the limbs of a stranger in metal and iron.
Laughter. Laughter, laughter... I couldn't see. I was not Abe. I was hunger. I was thirst. I was sentience, I was agony, I was frustration, I was--
Hands passed into me, into my corrosive body, and it shocked every cell, every part of the starvation as I moved my mouth through myself, to the other side, so I could see out of it to a tattooed and bloody body laughing and laughing and laughing to a gurgle. Joy, and fear, and tears, and laughter, endless laughter as two hands grabbed my teeth, two hands that were stronger than they ever should have been, and pulled thousands of gaping blades over his shoulders, and he laughed, and he laughed, and he laughed, and with a shove, I ate Kane.
My name is Kane.
The clothes I always cough up, and the goggles were cracked, the goggles that made brown eyes turn to amber. So long, spent there on the ground, knowing what it felt like to feel like that.
Body new, arms tattooed with a mermaid and oriental waves and a merman for good measure. Moon rising over suntanned and burnt knuckles on a sea of ocean grey. Pushed back to the world alone, back to the world different and changed because of two men I didn't mean to eat.
But y'know, life isn't about meaning.
It ain't about meanin' at all.
It's about fun. It's about livin'. It's about goin' through the wastes with the beasts and bein' entertained. Y'don't need a big purpose, see. Y'might find men and monsters, monsters n' men. Quite a might bit easier t'feel 'em, too. There's more people out there, 'nd I know it now. It'll be wild. It'll be risky. It'll be fun.
It's time for monsters n' men to come out'n play.
I am their beast.
Eternal.
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