It’s 2 AM and I’m taking the Sangaree bypass between highway 17 and 78. There’s shit playing on the radio and the air spouting through my window is damp and moist. It’s the first time I have come through this area sober this late at night. I don’t do a lot of sober driving these days. I don’t have many places to drive. Just after the Baptist school, I see the blue lights of patrol cars. I need to make a left but I’m denied by tiny wooden blockades. Instead, I pull over and engage my hazard lights. Amongst the early dew and fog, I’m come upon a young officer laying on the ground. I think that he is dead but then I hear him laughing so I step over him and look. There’s a woman to my left jumping in place and a man in yellow jacket nodding at her as he snuffs out a cigarette on the pavement.
There are 5 patrol cars blocking the road and I look back towards my car. I see two officers ahead of me and they look like they’re laughing so I approach them. What I thought was laughter was sobbing, what I thought to be sobs were screams. Their faces quickly folded, shoulders slumped over as they retreat.
Once, when I was much younger, I shot a deer with a gun that my mother’s husband gave me. The deer had wailed and bayed until I was able to approach it. It wasn’t supposed to be that complicated. I was supposed to shoot the deer and it was supposed to die. Yet, it laid and it bleated.
Bleating.
She sat in the yard across from the barricade in a night gown. She bleated and bayed and in her hand was the small and severed arm of a child.
Now, vomiting before me, were two officers. A third sat ahead of a squad car, chortling into a blacked out mobile. I thought to speak to him until I saw the long-drawn lines of blood streaking from his eyes.
Still though there was a skirmish between three officers and a feral man of considerable size. I aimed to help the officers, not knowing what else I could provide. But, as I approached, the feral man dispatched the officers quite easily and turned his gaze upon me.
Here though, I thought I might attempt something magical or otherwise heroic and so save myself a violent end. Instead the feral closed in on me and held my arms ajar. And, as I felt my urine soaking into the cleft of my ass, this beast leaned over me and plugged a finger into his fowl jaw. With his other hand he made to grab his eye and there before me he split his skull apart.
By this time I was sobbing as his head fell in two. A large blackness evacuated the place laid between his shoulders. The two laughing cops stopped laughing, drew weapons and fired at each other.
And I was left panting and puking among the dead.