CHOOSE YOUR OWN MINDFUCK: A Night in Eighth Block Tower (B5)
Bedlam Bible fans! Explore the Eighth Block Tower! Choose your fate! New posts every Tuesday and Friday. September '23 through December '23. Don't succumb to the huummmmmmmmm...
You’ve decided to go upstairs…
You take the stairs up to the roof and as you open the steel door exit, your eyes are instantly drawn to the full moon blazing in the sky. It takes you a full minute before you realize there’s another person on the roof with you—an elderly man sitting in a foldable lawn chair, who doesn’t seem to realize you’re there. He too is enamored with the brightness of the moon, and you can’t blame him. It’s gorgeous.
You walk over to the ledge of the building and take a seat, briefly looking down at the dirty streets and the crumbling buildings that surround Eighth Block. You find an abandoned pack of cigarettes and a lighter on the ledge, directly to the left of where you’re sitting. You gave up smoking the first night you spent in jail, but now that you’re out, you wouldn’t mind starting up again. Now’s just as good a time as any, you think, then remove a cigarette from the pack, light up, and inhale deeply.
At first, the smoke entering your lungs feels like victory, as if your body is celebrating a six month battle with abstinence that’s finally ended in its favor, but the feeling quickly fades. You’re in it again, a slave to the tobacco industry, slowly poisoning your body until there’s nothing left of you except a black tar lump of cancer. Feelings of guilt slowly seep in as you think about all the years of life that just slipped away the moment you pressed that pale cigarette to your lips. And for what? A little jolt of nicotine a handful of times a day? When you think of it that way, it hardly seems worth it. Then again, the smoke can’t be any worse than the dense fog of pollution you’re currently breathing in, right? Even if you lived a totally healthy life, there’s still something in the air or water or medicine that’s going to get you eventually. There’s no way to win. You shrug off all dispiriting thoughts and take another hit.
A few minutes later, the steel door opens again and this time two men step out, dragging behind them a shop vac and about a hundred feet of bright orange extension cord. They’re both mumbling the same phrase in unison, “In Sheeak, whose word I praise, in Sheeak I trust; I shall not be afraid. What can flesh do to me?” What the hell is this?, you think, then position your body so that you’re facing them. Whatever it is, it’s sure to be entertaining.
The men drag the vacuum out to the center of the roof, then one of them leans over to flip on the switch. The hum of the machine immediately sends a chill shuddering down your spine, as you can feel the vibrations of it all around you, buzzing even in the deteriorated brick at your seat. For seemingly no reason at all, anxiety swells within you. Nausea digs its hooks into the base of your spine and slowly ascends each vertebrae until it reaches the base of your skull, where it finally bursts.
This feeling is quickly interrupted by a barrage of gunshots. One of the men has thrown his arm into the air, holding it stiffly in place, firing a pistol into the clouds at random. Startled pigeons take to the sky, twenty or thirty of them in total. Your heart jumps with every pull of the trigger, causing your anxiety to come rushing back all in an instant. Desperate for the feeling to stop, you cup your hands over your mouth and shout, “Hey, assholes! What’s with the gun? What the fuck are you even shooting at anyway?”
They both look up at the sky with a confused look on their faces. “God?” one of them asks. “Z’at you, God?”
“Not this again…,” the other one mutters.
You start to answer, but you’re interrupted by the deafening blast of the gun going off again. This time the bullet whizzes straight past you, missing by several inches, but still close enough that you feel the air bending around it. At first you assume to be their new target, but you soon enough realize that they don’t seem to be shooting in any one direction. They don’t even acknowledge that you’re there on the roof with them. Suddenly, you remember the old man and glance over at him to see how he’s dealing with all the chaos. He’s still sitting in his lawn chair, looking up at the moon. He’s either deaf or dead, but he’s too far away for you to tell which one.
Just then, another bullet zips by you, catching the sleeve of your shirt. A little too close for comfort. You drop flat against the roof and roll yourself over until you’re nestled behind a rusty old air-conditioning unit, the safest place to hide along the entire span of the roof. The gun continues to fire in your direction for a few seconds more, stopping the moment a bloody pigeon falls into your lap.
The bird’s been shot straight through the neck, its head no longer attached, likely blown into a million little pieces and carried off with the breeze. This, of course, startles you, causing you to leap to your feet, awkwardly juggling the dead bird in your hands. You let out a horrified scream.
“Dear Sheeak, what have you done?” one yells at the other. The guilty party just shrugs his shoulders and looks up at the sky. “You killed God, man. Buzz… holy shit, Buzz, you killed God!” the man continues. Buzz seems to stand by his actions, almost looking proud of the things he’s done. The other one, however, is totally distraught. He’s standing with his hands cupped over his mouth while staring at nothing at all, and with the greatest intensity too. Buzz calmly leans over and turns off the vacuum. You find this new silence disturbing and almost wish he’d turn the vacuum back on, despite knowing how the vibrating hum makes you feel.
You watch as they struggle to make sense of what’s just happened, trying to find the common thread that links every peculiarity together, something that tells a story, even if it’s the wrong story—something that makes sense…to them… and one that incriminates neither, preferably.
Though before they can agree on what story to go with, another bloodied pigeon falls from the sky, smacking Buzz right in the face. A red streak leaks down his left cheek. This causes him to once again lift his arm into the air and fire at random.
“Birds! They rain from above!” the worried one shouts. “God’s final plague! This is some Old Testament shit! Take cover!” They huddle together, crouching on the rooftop, hiding from a rain of birds that never comes.
Buzz unloads yet another round of bullets into the air, and this time one of the stray bullets catches you right in the center of your chest. Every muscle in your body stiffens at once, causing you to lurch forward until you’re flat against the surface of the roof, belly down. You can’t scream. There is no air. You’re choking on a liquid that once gave you life. Warm blood gushes out of the wound with every pump of your heart… until the color in your vision flickers… until you see only in black and white… until at last even the white fades and there is only black.
A final thought forms in your mind, then fades as quickly as it comes.
At least it’s not cancer.
THE END
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