I can’t remember how it started. I was lost, but not lost like I’d taken a wrong turn or gone hiking without a map. I was lost in the existential sense, you feel me? Lost on my journey through life. Super lost. We all were… they all are, the ones still there I mean. You have to be real fucking lost to find your way to The Movement.
I don’t remember much of my old life. I wasn’t a junkie or anything like that, though. I had a house. There was a woman, kids… maybe mine, maybe not, I don’t know, but they were definitely around a lot. Maybe I was an Uncle? Fuck, what if I was a grandpa? Being with The Movement fucks your skin and hair, see. All that time out in the desert ages you some. I don’t know how much “some” is in my case though. I could be anywhere from 35 to 60. Guess I’ll have to wait until I heal up to get a clearer picture.
They can’t check using my dental, of course. Teeth got ground to dust from clenching my jaw so hard after a month or so, same as the others. Not like I had any ID when I got found, either, and my face is too banged up and swollen to be recognized on a database yet. Gotta sit tight for my answers. Ain’t that dandy.
Still, good thing I’ve got you to pass the time, right, Shitty Laptop? Maybe typing some of this out will jog my memory, who knows. Doc certainly seems to think so. So do the Spooks-in-Suits always guarding the door, the ones who check-in periodically to repeat the same line of questioning over and over.
“How many?”
“Do they have a leader?”
“Where are they going?”
“What’s the end goal?”
“Did you communicate?”
“How did you escape it?”
Such bullshit. Well, not bullshit I guess, The Movement has to be stopped. Spook 1 and Spook 2 have my full support there, that’s for damn sure. Asking me these questions four times a day for the past week, though? That is bullshit. I’ll give you the same answers I give them.
“At least a thousand.”
“Don’t know.”
“Don’t know.”
“Don’t know.”
“No.”
“Rock fell on my head.”
Let’s try and piece this shit back together, together, then, shall we? It’s you and me vs the world, Shitty Laptop, so let’s get to it. Maybe if I can get enough of it in writing they’ll leave me the fuck alone, let me rest, come to terms with… well, I don’t have any fucking legs man, nevermind memories. The Movement has to stop, but… well fuck, just if the spooks could just let me breathe a little first, you feel me?
Anyhow, as I said, I don’t remember much from before The Movement, but I remember I wasn’t homeless, an alcoholic, or on drugs. I was functional, speaking in the prejudicial societal sense. I fit in, had everything locked down. Had a good job, because I don’t remember worrying about money, but I do remember hating hours trapped in Excel spreadsheets and Python scripts. So yeah, I wasn’t lost like a Pastor would condescendingly describe anyone that shows up at a soup kitchen.
I was just… lost. Lost in myself, in the world, in the abject helplessness of it all. The immaterial death of the happiness I’d spent decades naively presuming comfort and achievement would bring, you feel me? Existentially lost, decades of trying only to realize you’d never bothered setting a destination. That whole deal. I wasn’t some dreg, some shell that was once a man who fell through the cracks. I was living… not the dream, but definitely the ideal, an ideal, one the TV and Movies paint a pretty picture of. That was the problem though, I think.
I wasn’t… I didn’t want to end it all. Not in the abrupt sense, at least. I just didn’t necessarily want it all to keep going. I know I lived in a small town in Cali, too, but that’s only because of the wildfires. We’ll get to the wildfires, don’t you worry. They’re important.
There was one blazing just outside town on the day I found The Movement. I don’t remember how I’d got there, but I was sitting on a bench at some park. I’d been working that morning too, but I only know that because of how much I can recall my eyes hurt. I used to wear glasses, right? They fell off and got crushed underfoot ten weeks ago. I’ll get round to that part, Shitty Laptop, don’t you worry.
That day… let’s call it W Day, it was smoky - the fire wasn’t in the town yet but was far off. There was an evac order, I think, or someone I knew had asked… maybe begged me to leave town (was it her, did I have a wife?). I don’t remember the conversation/warning, but I do remember feeling stubborn, remember resisting whatever impulse was urging me to leave before the flames hit and the smoke became suffocating. I was crying, too. That I remember. Fuck, was I planning to… I mean, I don’t know if “suicide by inaction” is a thing, but if it is, that might be why I was sitting on a bench in the park playing Russian Roulette with an encroaching wildfire, instead of heading to the freeway to hunker down in the city with… with whoever that woman and those kids were.
I hope I didn’t have a wife. Please, if there is a God, let me have been an uncle.
Like I said, I was lost. You have to be lost, real fucking lost, for The Movement to find you. Seeing them walk down the street is the earliest thing I can recall, like, properly recall. Recall as clear as the constant interrogations by the spooks over the last few days. It was like… do awakenings have opposites? Not an enlightenment, an endarkenment.
Yeah, I like that.
My awareness, my senses, shrank, but not in an adrenaline-fuelled laser focus way (although there was plenty of that too). Senses crippled by the endarkenment included things like of place, of self, of meaning. Fuck, how do I put this so you don’t compare it to booze or drugs or whatever… It’s like someone put the little voice in my head, the thing that watches and listens to the input from my eyes and ears, in a box. Then whoever put the little voice in there pointed a gun at said box, then fired said gun repeatedly while screaming “don’t get out the box, some crazy guy with a gun is out here!”
I knew what was happening but I didn’t. I was in control only insofar as I made the conscious decision to obey the endarkenment. I knew I could disobey, but I didn’t want to, because if I did my existential abyss would be deeper than ever. Before I knew it I was off the bench and walking toward the group - my feet adopting that loose-kneed, wide horizontal-swinging walk in pendulum time to God-only-knows-what. I didn’t decide to do this, I just decided not to decide not to. I told you it was fucking hard to put into words, didn’t I?
With every step, my mind sank deeper into that box, and our metaphorical gunshots were louder and louder. By the time I’d crossed the park through the smoke and reached the cluster of like-minded people in the street, there wasn’t much… whoever-I-was left. He was in his head, in that box where the endarkenment put him, surrendering himself willingly out of fear for what would happen if he didn’t. A fear… no, a knowledge, that it was already too late, that it had been too late since he lost himself in his own unfulfilling life. It was the understanding that if he chose to disobey now it would merely force the imposter’s hand, and he would be made to. The endarkenment would bulge its way inside him violently, would ruin him, if he denied it, so better to let it enter him willingly, right?
And in a twisted way, he… fuck, I, kind of wanted it, I think. At least at first. Just not… not like that. It all escalated so fast…
I remember a small-but-not-insignificant relief churning with the voiceless swell of boxed-up panic I’d become within my mind. A perverse mental exhalation, atomically small but not enough to be forgotten, because something was taking me, taking him, away from who he was, and the listlessness he wallowed in.
I remember the wildfire. The first of many. It chased us out of town, curling around the forest to the west to ensure we steered clear of the freeway and headed back out to the desert. Just like it was supposed to. We didn’t mind by that point. We didn’t really have a mind to mind with. We’d long since been reduced to pure momentum by that point. Had been since long before the smoke and heat and ash chased us through the eastern forest, away from the sleepy town where whoever previously owned this face died. Well, not quite this face, it’s a bit busted, but you get the point.
Descent into endarkenment isn’t a gradual decline. It’s a steep stumble into a shapeless, formless ravine, one that’s swallowed you up before you even realize you’ve lost your balance. It reached out to those going nowhere from The Movement, and by the time they know they’ve joined, they’re already pendulum-sway striding in time with the rest. There were seven of them in the street by the park gate. Fifteen of us by the time the town couldn’t be seen through the treeline. The Movement out on the sunbaked flats was 200 strong. When the rock fell on my head? Well over a thousand swing-stepping victims of the endarkenment surrounded me.
At first though, seven. One who’d been with The Movement for weeks, leathery and toothless and dead-eyed, leading the arrangement. Five lost-but-functioning office drones I recognized from other cubicle farms in the town followed, and then of course there was other one. The old woman in the wheelchair.
You can’t join The Movement if you can’t walk, you feel me, Shitty Laptop? You got to be able to walk. That’s why the infirm pensioner was screaming at the endarkened lady pushing her chair through the smoke-filled town and forest. It was her daughter, I think, the woman now walking with The Movement, or her granddaughter. Didn’t matter once we were on the other side of the woods though, did it?
They were ahead of me, high-heels step-swinging in time with my own while wheelchair spurs squeaked, the fifteen-or-so of us following the long-since-endarkened stray from the main grouping. The malnourished one that somehow slipped through the flames and pulled us back out with it. The old woman was shrieking the whole way - antique lungs giving more gusto than you’d have thought possible, looking at her hunched and shriveled frame.
None of us reacted when the chair tipped forward and clattered down the hill. None of the sixteen pairs of eyes moved from their fixed gaze straight ahead, not a single pair of lips parted that didn’t belong to an elderly mouth howling in pain.
The part of the man I was that still remained in that box in my head wanted to react, sure. He wanted, no, needed, to run down that root-laden incline, to help the defenseless nonagenarian writhing in agony at the foot of the hill. I could only see the back of her daughter/granddaughter’s head, but I know the tall blonde woman in the navy-blue skirt suit didn’t blink. I hadn’t since I got up off that park bench. None of us had. We’d just walked, already for a few miles, following the naked rakish stranger with the same uniform pendulous steps.
Inside his box, the man I was… the man I still am, I guess, screamed when he… when I, got to the foot of the hill. You know, the warmth of that broken old woman soaking into my socks is the last thing I remember feeling on my feet before the blisters, I think. The pressing heat of her ooze up past my ankle, the moisture of her most intimate abdominal regions filling my shoe as my foot came down inside the gaping rupture - it would have made me puke if my impulses and reflexes had any semblance of control left. Shit, I’m lightheaded thinking about it now, even with…
Not yet. I can’t.
We didn’t stop to help her. We didn’t stop walking. That’s the takeaway. The businesswoman who’d been pushing the wheelchair from the moment the endarkenment took her until a stray tree root in the spokes capsized it down the hill, was twenty paces ahead of me. Plenty of time to watch through the bullet holes in my box as she reached the base of the slope.
There wasn’t enough of me left to register the crunch that pierced the smoky forest air as the wet snapping of bone. There was enough left to feel the gut-tightening wave of dread that comes with such a realization though. Daughter/granddaughter’s high heels came down on an almost centuries-old spine with full force - a considerable pressure considering the woman’s height and broad frame.
The old woman didn’t stop moving, Shitty Laptop. Not until long after her child/grandchild removed the foot from the yawning visceral chasm in her thin brittle back. The pointed heel went straight through; crushing the vertebrae of the lower back, breaking through skin, piercing tired organs. A wrinkled kidney like an overripe plum remained impaled when the next swing-step pulled the footwear from the pensioner. The silver-haired body didn’t stop it’s gurgled moans even by the point the red-brown lump slid off the shoe a few unison movements later - discarded several feet from its owner to be consumed by the chitinous things in the undergrowth hungrily eyeing the spoils while they waited for us to pass.
Her broken body was still twitching when my foot sank into it twenty swing-steps later. I couldn’t look down to take in the spectacle. But I’m not sad about that, Shitty Laptop, not at all. Being unable to see where I treaded or what I stopped to pick up, my eyes being locked ahead and not on where my feet fall or what my hands held, is the only reason I didn’t smash my face into the ground so hard my skull cracked open when I became myself again.
Well, that’s a lie. Looking into the sky for the first time in three months and subsequently pissing down my leg would still be the first thing I did, after that rock I mean. I don’t know, though. I don’t think I’d have made it even a day without trying to end it, if I’d had to see the…
No. I don’t have to. Not yet, at least.
You never get used to it. The faint-but-noticeable resistance as your foot pushes into someone, as you drive your weight through them with the mercilessness and unrelenting determination of a machine. The slight bump in your step as your limb invades their person, the hiccup in your gait when the wet suction pulls at your ankles as you lift them again.
Nobody turned their heads. We walked, walked past the broken mother/grandmother until the forest thinned out into desert. The wildfire had served its purpose - it had shepherded us back to the flock. Really the old woman’s death was a small mercy, Shitty Laptop. The flats were wide and… well… flat. We walked for weeks before we stumbled across another town, surrounded all the while by the Apaches circling like buzzards. Always you could hear them overhead, the whumpf-whumpf-whumpf-whumpf of their blades crisp and clear, even over the scrapes of a thousand grinding jaws and the endless pleading of the unfortunate few in our midst not taken by endarkenment. The silver-haired pensioner’s abrupt collapse down the root-covered slope saved her from experiencing what so many others in her position had to endure in their final hours.
Better to die a slow death in the forest than an agonizingly slow death in the desert while you watch your daughter/granddaughter become one with The Movement, right?
There were more of them than you’d think in the two hundred-strong cluster of other endarkened strays that awaited us. At least five among every fifty swaying figures. The Movement only attracts the lost, the listless, those without place or purpose. A surprising number of these can be found in low-paid healthcare positions. Others were taken from the ranks of Americans nobly but self-destructively meeting the needs of helpless loved ones without support of their own. Those pushing wheelchairs when they fell into the endarkenment, like the woman in the blue skirt-suit had been, still pushed them. Some of these chairs were empty, the occupier long since fallen from the seat to be trampled into the flats by our pendulous synchronized stampede. Others were not.
In a few writhed rasping elderly men and women. In others sat sun-baked individuals of all ages, their only common trait being an inability to walk themselves due to injury, illness, or genetics. You could hear all of them moaning, begging, pleading - a quiet chorus of terrified confusion harmonizing with the crunch-crunch of grinding jaws. The occupants of the chairs lasted for days, sometimes. They say the human body can’t survive for long without food or water, but it’s easy to say that when you’re not the one slowly drying out while your body eats itself over 48-72 agonizing hours. The desert always took them in the end. Most of the endarkened that swing-stepped with dry knuckles wrapped around wheelchair handles carted a bloated, leaking corpse; their own milk-eyed, purple-skinned reminder, a waxen-fleshed effigy to whoever they’d been before endarkenment erased them from themselves.
Over the three months I walked, there was not a point at which I got used to the wheelchairs. Especially the ones with… that didn’t have grown men and women in them, the ones that belonged to parents. The strollers were a thousand times worse, though. Sometimes it would take days for the screeching to…
No. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I won’t.
Let’s take a moment to breathe shall we, Shitty Laptop? I need to take a minute. I’ve just unpacked a lot, you feel me? You’ve probably got a ton of questions too, I’ll bet. I’m afraid I can’t provide many answers. All I’ve got is a long list of I-don’t-knows, but I guess I could at least expand on what they are. Maybe it’ll help. Help who, you ask? Your guess is as good as mine, Shitty Laptop.
When I first arrived here, after the rock and the sky, the Spooks agreed to tell me what they knew (within reason) on the condition I stopped shrieking at them. I wasn’t exactly trusting or willing to cooperate at first. I still remembered the whistling, you know? There was always a little bit of me in that box that wanted to come out the other side of this. That part spent far too many nights drowning in bated-breath panic, hoping the next step-swing wouldn’t put me in the path of the shrill streaks of whiffling air, praying I didn’t get singled out. To gain my trust/obedience they tried a different approach than their usual - to corroborate, rather than interrogate.
The Spooks (yes, you two, Flotsam and Jetsam standing outside the door waiting for me to finish writing this) reckon that The Movement is some kind of cult or group psychosis. Or, at least, they did when it first appeared about six years back, a few months before the wildfires out west started getting real frequent.
They observed from a distance, but obvious questions started cropping up pretty damn quick. Questions I shared pretty much as soon as I’d managed to stop screaming at the ceiling above the bed. I walked in the desert, non-stop, for three months. I didn’t sleep or touch a drop of water all that time. The Spooks came to the same conclusion about this as I did - I should be dead. The Movement, every one of the endarkened pendulously swing-stepping through the salt flats, ought to have expired months ago. The one thousand-strong swaying cornfield of dead-eyed teeth-grinders shouldn’t be biologically possible. You try telling The Movement that though, you feel me?
We lasted way longer than we should have put there, walked so much it gives me a headache trying to comprehend it. I should be dead. I’m not immortal though. Oh, trust me, the endarkenment doesn’t protect you from death, pain, or any other kind of suffering. The tealight of awareness watching the world from its cardboard box spent every minute of those three months screaming. You’re not immune from any of it. You just get to experience it all through tunnel-vision bullet holes.
Many members of The Movement die. Just not from dehydration, malnourishment, exhaustion, or disease. The whistling notwithstanding, once you’re in The Movement you don’t die until your legs give out. Once you fall and you can’t walk, though, you’re fair game. Just like I should have been. I’ll get round to telling you about the rock though, Shitty Laptop, don’t worry.
I knew the endarkenment had a physiological effect from the moment I got to the desert. It took the Spooks a few months of observation, apparently, to work out that The Movement wasn’t on some kind of new narcotic. Some sort of super-crack or something was their initial theory, you see, once that could prolong the time before a body gave in to fatigue, thirst, or dysentery/cholera/other diseases… ha… gifted to us by our diet.
Only a few days of desert walking were necessary for me to figure I was changed beyond the absolute mental destruction. Changed, but not immortal. Even if the burning in my… well, my everything, wasn’t a clue that my mortality had only been adjusted, not erased, one of the first swing-stepping wraiths I saw die collapsed not long after I arrived. The naked male figure’s legs were caked in dried shit near his thighs and dried blood near his ankles. Weren’t enough left of his feet to say “near his feet”, you feel me?
He toppled over when the last chunks of his heels and arches weren’t enough to keep him balanced. Rest of us carried on swing-walking by, ignoring his sudden screaming as the endarkenment left and it all came flooding back. He couldn’t walk anymore, you know? You can’t be part of The Movement if you can’t walk. Didn’t take long for enough feet to fall on him that he lapsed into silence, though. His flesh had been out in the sun so long it didn’t resist any of the swing-stepping limbs that pressed down upon it. An endarkened only a few places ahead of me in the procession stopped to feed. I’m glad I didn’t. I was always glad when I didn’t.
I still did though, you’d feel me? Not then, not that time, but I still did, still stopped so many times, still stopped when my legs laterally swung me next to that… no.
Anyways, the Spooks worked out we remained just as vulnerable to most things when the first endarkened found their way into a population center, several years and many whistles and wildfires before I joined The Movement.
They already knew proximity to us was a gamble. The Spooks didn’t understand the preconditions (none of us were exactly able to explain why we were swaying through the desert with that clench-jawed parade), but even the spaghetti soup intelligence services aren’t dumb enough to miss that agents they sent to observe didn’t always come back. They also weren’t dumb enough to miss that said agents could be seen swing-stepping with the rest of us through the drones I’d hear zipping above me every so often, the ones hiding with the Apache’s just out of my fixed line of sight.
This understanding is why they didn’t think twice before gunning down the first endarkened that stumbled into a backwater Midwest town. Bath salts were the cover-up. You might remember the news stories back in the mid-2010s? Quote-unquote “crazy” people jacked up on salts or krokodil or PCP whatever, rampaging like infected cannibals from a zombie flick. All bullshit, shitty laptop, all of it. The first of many convenient coverups the Spooks sink tax dollars into black-box accounts to keep zipped, apparently.
The FBCINSA in Black, and later the National Guard, used a lot of these idiosyncratic national calamities to keep everything out of the public eye while they figured out what the fuck to do about the movement. The wildfires were the first solution. Then came the whistling, when there were too many of us for the flamethrowers and excuses about global warming to contain.
Not every forest fire is started by an army grunt shepherding The Movement, you feel me? They were happening anyway. Climate change just meant that nobody noticed when they started new ones. Fire seemed to be the only thing that they, that I, instinctively avoided (although Flotsam and Jetsam uncomfortably refused to tell me what kind of experiment had led to the Spooks figuring that out).
I know we didn’t avoid any other kinds of danger. Only the flames, only the smoke. I watched naked leathery figures swing-step themselves down hidden ravines by the dozen, saw them lurch into oncoming freight trains and off of bridges. And, of course, kept swaying forward in our grand movement throughout the whistling nights.
Even with the endarkenment, everything in me would tense on the nights I’d hear the Humvees over the circling military-grade vultures above. I burst into tears when Flotsam and Jetsam admitted the National Guard had opted for machine guns over precision rifles to… fuck, to cut down on costs. Cheaper to pay ten untrained recruits letting off hundreds of rounds a minute than a platoon of crack-shot snipers, you feel me? Fuck… fuck!
Sorry, Shitty Laptop. I just can’t believe I had to endure the fucking whistling, on top of everything else, because our cheapskate Government wanted to save a few thousand dollars.
Things got to a point, just before I arrived, where they had to thin our numbers. A cull. They’d wiped The Movement out completely more than once, but it never stuck. It kept restarting itself somehow, spontaneously manifesting in a new Patient Zero they still didn’t have enough of an understanding to… well, understand the selection process. Neither do I, before you ask, F & J reading this in the future.
Containment of the situation with deliberate wildfires to steer the direction of the movement back into the salt flats worked for a year or two. Then things escalated in 2016. More people than ever felt a spontaneous calling and traveled across the country, or fit the preconditions when encountering The Movement in the wild as I had. They started running out of black bags, to use a broad metaphor.
Then, a leaked video of The Movement by a rock climber getting footage for YouTube kept a steady trickle incoming when it started popping up more times than they could scrub it from the net. Thousands of views would sometimes mean hundreds falling into endarkenment at their computer screen. Someone in the Pentagon decided enough was enough.
The Spook’s solution? Get some grunts as close as they can without being within endarkening proximity, blindfold them, then point them in our direction and have them open fire. Give them enough ammunition for a sustained five-minute barrage. Five minutes is a long time when your next swing-step could collide with any of the thousands of whistling pieces of hot lead swarming the air. One missed my nose by half an inch. I can still remember the pee warming the shreds of my pants.
The chudda-chudda-chudda of the distant high caliber mounted machine guns were faint. The dull wet thud-thud-thud as the rounds connected with swaying bodies in the midnight darkness around me wasn’t. Three hundred agonizing seconds of swaying blindly forward, panicking but unable to run, duck, or even scream in terror. Minutes that felt like days chained to the burden of knowing the next thud might come with a flash of agony as pointed brass rips through your flesh, or that it may be the last thing you hear before the lights turn out entirely.
Of course, on more than one of the whistling nights I would have welcomed that. Like I said though, Shitty Laptop, a small part of the consciousness within that bullet-riddled box still wanted to pull through, was still cursing itself for not getting off that park bench sooner and driving back to where it used to live… back to the woman, and the children, and the place and purpose.
I’d stop sometimes on the whistling nights. We’d only stop for one reason - to eat. What did we eat, Shitty Laptop? What did the swaying congregation fill their stomachs with so the unnatural mass momentum could continue for as long as possible?
The dead. We ate the dead.
I would say the nights the Humvees showed up were the worst feeds, those times I’d stop and crouch without bending to scoop a fistful of meat from one of the recently fallen while a million near-death experiences whistled through the air. I would say they were the worst, but that would be a lie.
No, I can’t, I…
Shit, I have to, don’t I? If not now then when. They’re going to ask, Flotsam or Jetsam or one of the others that’ll no doubt start asking more questions after reading what I’ve typed up on you, Shitty Laptop. They’ll reckon it’s connected to this thing on my chest, you fucking watch. Won’t believe the truth I’ll bet, even though there’s no explanation for any of this shit. Especially if you can’t see the sky, and if you can see the sky you’re already too far gone to help.
Fuck.