I have to do this one quick because I need to leave in 3 minutes. This is the beginning of a Zombie/Paranoia type of thing I'm working on. We'll see where it goes, it's just an elaborate setup at this point.
“Jimmy is still out there?” Juan said, startling back to consciousness. He upset the bandages on his right arm, the blood soaked right through.
“Relax, Juan, they’re going to know we are in here.” Aunt Susan stared directly into Juan’s eyes with raised eyebrows and helped him back down onto the cot. He looked like he had just woke up from a nightmare.
Barrett brandished the big 12 gauge pump shotgun like a club, the casings littering the floor on the other side of the door.
An occasional arm scraping against the ouside of the room kept everyone from getting comfortable. Juan was the only one who got any sleep.
Afraid to leave apartment because he’s read “the book” which actually turns out to be a huge volume of books. This comes into play when lay people make uneducated comments about the world, where he has to bite his tongue instead of correcting them. Even for just saying middlingly intelligent things he feels their hostility start to rise, and has to quell it with sports talk.
One year earlier:
Juan stared out of the window, the doppleganger pedestrians wandered the street like mindless vultures. Some of them paired off in twos, like Aristophanes’s story about the two halves that seek each other out. Human nature seemed inherent, even in these mindless creatures, and Juan pulled his blinds shut in disgust. He thought for sure that when the closed them the people on the street would immediately stare up at his window, he could picture them out there with their beady eyes struggling to stand in one place, perpetually lurching.
He heard whispering from the apartment across from his, their window was open with the white and blue blinds shuffling in the air. Or maybe it was the wind whistling through his drapes, but he heard the wind playing tricks on him again. He put on his headphones, John Philip Sousa blustering away with his noisy ensemble.
Juan checked the door to make sure it didn’t let in a crack of daylight, checked the wall fixtures for secret cameras, and blew dust off of a thick volume called “Of Being Human.” He had just left off on the section called “paranoia.” He imagined someone cracking a joke about the irony of that being the title of the section he was reading and laughed, an uncomfortable between the teeth kind of laugh.
Paranoia was this concept that had been written out of the books, lost in history. The theory, as far as Juan could gather, was that if you didn’t have a word for something it didn’t exist. He was sure it was what he was feeling based on the sound of the word, and the countless illustrations that perfectly illustrated the situation he found himself in. Reading about it would only made it worse, as he flipped back to the dog eared page and then slammed the volume shut. A siren blared like a bee off in the distance, and he tucked the book back into the spare linen sheets in his shabby armoire.
“Typically at its worst when you spend a long time alone.” It said next to a picture of a characterization of paranoia, a little purple dinosaur with the covers pulled up to its eyes sitting in a room with all of the blinds pulled shut.
“Damn, all alone.” He thought. As he shut his eyes and sat back in his leather Lay-Z Boy, a crow squaked on the windowsill. It squaked again and again, louder and louder, like it was trying to make sure he didn’t sleep. He heard a tree branch scrape against what seemed to be the ceiling, but being as he had a neighbor upstairs it was neither a tree branch or the ceiling.
He thought the phone was ringing. It was just a nightmare. “Phew, just a nightmare.” He said, wiping a giant glob of sweat that looked like George Washington off of his forehead and placing the damp washcloth across his face. He suddenly imagined the washcloth getting very heavy and threw it off against the wall, and it slid down the wall to the floor like a slug.
Nights passed, Juan’s stocked fridge had diminished to baking soda, eggs, and old Chinese Food. The old Chinese Food was next, he decided, he could just microwave it for hours and it would be edible. The hot sauce might disguise the old cardboardy taste. Others were wandering around on the other side of the door, he scoffed as he heard footsteps, but the great reality of it was that he would have to leave soon to replace his supply.
The TV was on, and Juan watched it from the reflection in the mirror across from it. It was a news show, and the man inside had shifty eyes, Juan knew it was only his mind playing tricks on him but it seemed like he could see through to the other side.
“Next at 10: Shut aways and the detrimental effects they have on society.” Juan switched it to cartoons.
Part with high pitches squeeking noise that turns out to be his friend who can also make that noise. He has learned recently how to do it, but remembers going on a roadtrip with the friend years ago where he tricked his dad into thinking they had a flat tire. Why now why here?
The dusk had spread across the sky outside. Out on the street, the lamps flickered and cast a yellow over the sidewalks, the embers of lit cigarettes
He reached for the phone and it started
Juan knows what he has come from, he is hypervigilant, can’t sleep at night because the slightest thing wakes him up.
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