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Adventures In Living With The Mythical |
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A military veteran is adopted by a werewolf and brought into his pack. Insanity ensues. About "Life With A Werewolf" Life with a werewolf is a dramatic blog. As such the characters in this blog are not real but maybe loosely based on real people. The situations represented are not real but maybe loosely based on real things that have happened in my life. There are a multitude of ways to view life, this is simply one of the ways I have chosen to view mine. Updated Every Friday unless I can't or don't want to. If this is your first time reading this...start here: https://www.writing.com/main/books/entry_id/1040400-Welcome-To-The-Pack My book, "Dreamers of The Sea" is available now on Amazon: https://a.co/d/0uz7xa3 |
| It’s been a couple days, but I finally got my roommates to talk to me again. They say it’s my fault and it was mean. In a way, I can see how. As I’m sure you know by now, I’m the type of guy who will pick up a lost kitten on the street and take it home. I can’t just pat it on the head or step over it and ignore it. That’s the way I see a lot of these zombies. They’re lost undead kittens. No homes to speak of, no living friends they know or family they even remember. They’re just lost, wandering towards a central location in a grand celebration / gathering to remember who they were. I can’t just ignore them. Zack wanted McDonalds. I don’t mind McDonalds, and he didn’t want to drive, so he agreed to buy if I agreed to fly. Sean decided he was bored and asked to come which didn’t bother either one of us any. The trip over to the restaurant was filled with the usual jokes and chatter that’s shared amongst roommates. Sean teased me about my grannie car, I teased him back about his hair. Zack tried to join in, things like that. I have a thing about eating inside a restaurant. I don’t mind a drive thru but damn it, if I’m buying the food from a place I’d rather just eat it there than try to eat it and drive at the same time. I know, I’m in the minority, but to me It’s a more pleasurable experience to eat inside a place. Yes, even with greasy, salt covered tables, screaming kids, and a line about a mile long in front of the register. Besides, there’s no eating inside the Topaz. Everyone knows that. After a fine meal of cheeseburgers and half cold fries, we went back to my car. Or as Sean calls her “grandma.” Standing outside of my car was two zombies. The Mercury Topaz is not a large automobile by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, Crash has compared it repeatedly to a compact car he could fit inside his glovebox. Which meant that either I was going to abandon two zombies here, or my roommates were about to get up close and personal with the undead. “Shit,” I grumbled. “Dude, you’re not seriously thinking of giving a ride to those things,” he asked. “Look at them! They’re like lost puppies or something,” I waved an arm in their direction. I swear the zombies looked at Sean and Zack then with as much sorrow as they could muster. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had started sprinkling fake snow over themselves. “If you let them in your car, I will seriously lose my lunch,” Zack said. “Well, it’s only to the cemetery, I know where they’re going. It won’t take long, I promise!” Sean and Zack looked at each other, a message was communicated in a single glance. Then, they cried “Shotgun!” in unison. It was too close for me to call, so they played paper, rock, scissors. Sean won. “Oh, great,” Zack groaned as we all started climbing in the car. “Oh no, deadites ride together,” Zack shouted, pointing at one who tried to get in on his side. The two zombies in question looked like a younger couple, who appeared to have the wounds of a traffic accident of some kind. I’m guessing it was a closed casket funeral. Their faces took the brunt of the damage. Green mottled skin, and maggots completed the look. They road next to each other, like a young couple unsure if what they were doing were the right thing, even though they must have been in their forties when they died. Sean rode with his head almost out the window. Zack was crammed against the door. “You’ve got to stop giving them rides,” he shouted. “This is gross!” It wasn’t a long ride back to the house, and I didn’t have to take the back roads and hit every bump on the way, or drop the zombies off first. In fact, it would have been a nice gesture to take the smooth, shorter path and drop off Zack and Sean first. It also would have been a very mean thing to stop in front of the cemetery, open the car door for the zombies, and accidentally shove them against Zack so they touch him and have to lean on him for balance. I’m not saying that’s exactly what happened. I’m just saying that sometimes I’m not a nice guy. “oh God, I can feel their skin sliding around on their flesh,” Zack cried as he threw open the door and bailed out of the car. He leaned against the side of the road, dry heaving as another zombie walked up and tried to help him up. With a banshee cry that sounded part Xena: Warrior Princess, part scared school girl who saw a rat, he jumped and rolled over the trunk of my Topaz, then began pointing and shouting gibberish. Finally, he settled on “No! No! Bad zombie!” All of this of course had the soundtrack of my laughter. As I slowly petered out Zack glared at me. “You’re an asshole,” he growled, then sat in the car and slammed the door. “Yeah, dude. Not Cool,” Sean cried then sat back down in the car. I dunno. I thought it was pretty funny. Of course, I didn’t tell them that. Instead, I looked over at the zombie who tried to help Zack up, who looked genuinely hurt. “It’s okay,” I said. “I appreciate the effort. Zack has a phobia.” I told him. The zombie nodded as if he understood, then peered through the window and waved. Zack crossed his arms in front of him, and glared at the back of my seat. He looked like a giant kid who was just told he couldn’t have ice cream for dinner. By now the dead couple had sauntered around the car and over to the cemetery. I don’t pretend to understand what they’re doing or what purpose they serve. But the cemetery did look as if it was more…I don’t know if alive is the right word, but cared for. As if they were starting to work on the upkeep for it or something. There was less vines and leaves over some of the old tombstones. The tombstones themselves appeared to be cleaned and almost legible even. I’m not certain what the zombies are doing, but I’m sure someone out there knows. I’d be glad if they’d tell me. So, yeah. I had silence from the roommates for a couple days. Then Zack gave me a new nickname: Undead Uber. “Very funny,” I said, “but I think there’s already an audio book series out there with that name.” So far, at least where Zack and Sean are concerned, the name is sticking. Crash isn’t picking it up, though. He says, and I quote “I’m staying out of this.” I’m glad he is. Halloween is literally right around the corner, and I’ll be glad when it gets here, and this whole undead thing is done for another year. |
| Last time I had it open only to Crash, but this time you can ask any of my blog characters anything. If interested, please just shoot your questions down below. Thanks! |
| As much as I wanted to help, my physical health must come first. I made that decision staring at that zombie pulling his leg along slowly as he attempted to make his way towards whatever cemetery they were using for their latest gathering. I simply could not risk diving head long into alcohol addiction again. I know what Crash said about not having to drink. But if it’s there, and I’m looking at all those corpses, I’m going to be drinking. There will be no way I’ll possibly be able to say no. So, in essence all I had to do was put my foot down. Just simply say no. No. N. O. Sorry, but I can’t make it. My invitation was lost in the mail. I’m gone on vacation. There’s no way that I will be there. Absolutely not. No. Can’t. Nuh-huh. No way, no how, no. The plan was to just tell the first zombie I saw “no thanks,” hand them back the bottle of liquor, and keep walking. Don’t stop and chat. Don’t say anything else. Just keep going and pretend they don’t exist like everyone else. It works for Zack, Kris and Shawn. Why couldn’t it work for me? Someone much smarter than I am once said ‘no plan ever survives first contact with the enemy.’ Boy, this one certainly didn’t. This plan worked for all of twenty-five minutes. Well, I was stuck at a red light so, twenty-eight minutes. I didn’t cave though. However sad and depressing things may have gotten, I simply did not cave. My point may have gotten muddied, but I still stood my ground, as shaky as it grew to be. I had some bills to pay and things to do, so I prepared myself to leave the house. As for grabbing that expensive bottle of liquor, I did plan on doing it. Crash hid the darn thing from me before I could. Guess he claimed it, though he’ll swear up and down it was to prevent me from drinking it. Sure Crash. Sure. When I left the house, there wasn’t a single zombie on the street. But that wasn’t a strange occurrence. They seem to come in waves, with little to no timing or spacing for the waves themselves. All I can figure is a few free themselves from a cemetery, then they start moving as a group. Sort of the natural way us humans will do it when we’re in a city or something. I could be wrong; it could be some sort of self-preservation thing? Like the reason ducks fly in groups and such. But I wasn’t so sure. After all, who would want to attack literal walking rotten flesh? Who would try to eat or harm corpses that were past the point even buzzards would care about them? It was a short drive to the next town over. The larger community where we did most of the running around and things. Most small towns in America exist near a larger town. A place where you can bank, have access to the fast-food places you probably don’t have in your own town. Where your local Wal-Mart probably is. A bigger brother type of community, that doesn’t enjoy you being there but tolerates you mainly because mom and dad would ground him if he picked on you too much. I had gotten a new pair of shoes, did a few personal errands and was just leaving the bank when I saw them. Two corpses, both in suits. One was male and one was female, I think. Though the dirt covered condition of their clothing, the bloated and well, I won’t go into how they looked but suffice to say it was difficult to tell at this stage what their race even was let alone if they were male or female. “Look,” I said staring at the two of them. “I can’t do it. I just can’t get into drinking and all of that mess. I’m sober. I can’t slide back into that.” They looked at each other, then looked down, a sad, pathetic look on their faces. “God, you both stink, you know that,” I grumbled. They looked at each other, and each one of them, to my surprise held up a trash bag. “You want a ride.” They groaned in unison. “Fine,” I grumbled. “Keep the windows rolled down please. I don’t want the smell to linger.” They did the best they could with what they had, but eventually I rolled out the trash bags for them. Lord only knows what the traffic driving by on the highway saw or thought was going on, but at least it was quick. Thank God for small favors. They directed and I drove. Through twisting back roads and highways that only locals know. Getting stuck behind the occasional tractor going from one field to another to do….something. I’m not all that certain. I didn’t grow up in a large city, but it wasn’t exactly a farming community where I was from, so we tended to not see huge John Deere’s rumbling along the roadways. It takes some getting used to. I think I’m only five years away from getting used to it, myself. The zombies weren’t all that happy with the denial. They would occasionally groan as if asking ‘why’, and I’d have to tell them: “I’m sober. I can’t drink. And being around all of you, well, I’m living. I’m going to want to drink. As soon as I see it, I’ll drink again.” Then the ‘why’ came again. “Because, I’m addicted to it. I have a thing broken in my brain. And drinking, it does something to me. It changes me, makes me someone I don’t like being. Someone my friends don’t like seeing. It, well, it hurts so many.” Another groan that was a ‘why’. “It’s not as if I don’t want to help you! I do! I just, I don’t know what help I can be. Besides, playing taxi driver for you two I’m not certain you need my help. You have your loved ones here who cared for you a great deal. That means your souls on the other side, where ever they are, can’t be in that bad of place, can it?” The cemetery was on the side of the road. A forgotten spot that looked as if it was a family spot of some kind at one point. The shady trees gave it a nice welcoming corner of the Earth to spend a little slice of eternity in, despite being a bit overgrown. I stopped and watched as they climbed out of the road. “I would love to,” I told the zombie, “But I just can’t drink. I can’t drink.” I think finally my words sunk in, because they looked at each other, shared a glance that I didn’t know about then shuffled onward, towards the others. It was my one good deed. I at least gave them a ride, so I did help. Hopefully that will settle all of it. I won’t have to deal with these zombies anymore, and they will move on with their…well death I guess and find a new way to enjoy being unalive. Or something. There is a lost art of saying no. These days, everyone wants to shove the word down your throat, or have no ability to say it themselves. I admit, saying yes is easier than no and dealing with the repercussions later. It is after all part of how I live my life. Yes now, duck later. But, at times it’s just better to say no. Especially when it means you’ll end up doing something you’ll regret. Or something that can ruin your life. I have no regrets. I stood my ground. And now, after all this time, it’s over. Isn’t it? |
| That bottle of booze presented a problem for me. Up until that point I had been sober. I’m not, and never have been a “twelve weeks, five days, thirteen hours, thirty-six minutes, four seconds and counting” sort of recovering addict. I’m more of a “another day survived” type. True, rescuing Sarah, and going through that madness that we went through in Arkansas did help me in one respect: it allowed me to bury a lot of the heartache and self-loathing that I had about that relationship. It was eye opening how cathartic doing a simple act of kindness for her was. The poison got squeezed out of my soul, leaving me feeling fresh, empty, clean. But that doesn’t mean every day was perfect; not by a long shot. There was plenty of times when Crash came stumbling through the door complaining of needing a drink and I was very tempted to accommodate him by joining him. Not to mention that drinking is still my natural stress response. That’s what the non-addicted doesn’t understand about the addicted. No matter what you’re addicted to, whether its alcohol, drugs, eating, exercise, work, sex, collecting bottle caps, whatever it is: your addiction is your stress response. When life gets hard, it’s that addiction that’s wired into your brain that flashes first. Have an entire neighborhood of crazies chase after you to try and drink your blood? When that fun episode of spontaneous marathon running is over, you’re going to want a drink. Kheid and his stupid lawn gnome brigade decided to shove a ceramic carrot into your tire? You’re going to want a drink. Your housemate werewolf coming home coated in more blood than mud and asks you to help him hose off before he gets in the house (and before the neighbors catch him)? You want a drink. That’s part of what addiction is, to be honest. It’s your own brain telling you “This is how we handle this situation. This is how to feel better.” For the past several months now, almost going on a year in fact, I’ve been telling my brain “No, it’s not how we handle this anymore.” Most days it works. Some days, I crave, but never I caved. But that expensive bottle of booze sitting out on the front porch with the note on it, written in such desperation, well it hurt. I honestly, earnestly, wanted to tell them yes. But I honestly, earnestly, wanted to keep my lunch down, too. When you see things that are gory or horrific, part of how you deal with it is that you don’t. You don’t talk about it, you don’t think about it, and you certainly don’t put yourself into more gory and horrific situations to add to the fun flashes of memory that your brain will enjoy throwing at you when you least expect it. Most of the gang had the same advice: stay out of it. “Don’t forget,” Kris said, as he sipped a cup of coffee in the kitchen, “they’re dead. They’re literally walking sacks of meat with Alzheimer’s. All they know is they miss something. They don’t even know what it is they miss. And come a week or so after Halloween, they’ll be gone for good.” That was the general consensus. It was essentially like having a may fly as a pet. The friendship will only last so long. But the earnestness and pain in their plea, the way they were all out literally looking for me, it was beginning to get to me. Yes, I have a heart. A cold lifeless thing that pumps ice water, but it still technically counts as a heart. Watching the zombies had become something of a past time for me. In the mornings, I’d grab a cup of coffee, walk onto the porch, and watch them as they fumble and move around among the population, heading in a general direction towards one end of the county. No one ever saw them, or wanted to see them, I guess. Just a general stench of decay, dirt and death, then they moved on. Forgotten just about as quick as they smelled it. The stench written off as a dead animal, or someone passing gas. Crash watched with me one morning. It was a couple days after I’d gotten the bottle of booze and the note. We stood out on the front porch, sipped our coffee, and watched as the zombies stumbled, occasionally moaned, and moved outward in an eastern direction. “Seems their shindigs on the other side of the county,” I said. Crash sighed, and sipped out of his ‘This is my human costume, I’m really a werewolf’ mug. “Yeah, another cemetery down there. A larger one I think.” “You suppose they have a vote or something? This worm for this cemetery, that worm for that one sort of thing?” He shrugged, “Maybe. The ones who know for sure certainly aren’t going to talk.” “Not without a Ouija board or something,” I grumbled, then took a sip of my coffee. We watched a zombie shuffle. A younger man who must have gotten on the wrong end of a car accident. His leg was dragging in an awkward manner behind himself. He shuffled forward, leaned back onto it, dragged his other leg forward then shuffled again. “Is doing a nice thing worth going back to someplace awful,” I asked. “Dunno. This a place you’re thinking of staying?” “When you go to a place like that,” I sighed down into my coffee. Crash waited for me to continue. “It gets very difficult to leave. Despite how much you may want to do it.” “No one says you have to go back,” Crash said. “In the service, I figured out the appropriate time to drink.” “When was that,” Crash asked. “When I was awake.” Crash gave me a look. “Jason, you were bad, but never that bad.” “It doesn’t ever seem like it is, you know? But I did drink every night. Two beers with dinner. And every weekend. I had a method of drinking Gatorade with the alcohol, so I could wake up without the hangover.” He just shook his head. “That is a hell of a thing to go back to.” “Yeah,” I sighed. “I know they’re not alive. I’ll make them feel good for a night. They’ll make me go back to doing something stupid.” “That’s what’s bothering you,” Crash asked. I sighed, then nodded. “My kindness will be for nothing, and I’ll just have a fresh new start on an old addiction.” We watched a bit more as leg dragger finally made his way across the road. The man behind the wheel of the truck at the intersection instinctively waited as if he saw him while he crossed. Either that, or the man was busily typing away on his phone for a moment first. “Two things,” Crash said. “First, no act of kindness is for nothing. Second, no one says you have to drink.” “Crash, I’d be spending an entire night with a group of corpses that used to be people talking to them about the people they used to be. To survive a night like that, I’m going to need a drink.” “You know when you describe it like that, you make it sound a bit like a high school reunion.” “Yeah,” I said, “and to survive my last one, I had to drink.” Crash laid a hand on my shoulder. “No, Jason,” he said. “You don’t.” His words stuck with me. The phrase that almost made my mind up was my own, having a fresh start on an old addiction. But his stuck with me as well. No act of kindness is for nothing. Perhaps, somewhere, the souls of who these corpses used to be hear, know, and understand the kindness I’m trying to show them. Perhaps that will make it all worth it. But can I do something like that without drinking? That will be one stressful night. You can’t rewrite years of hardwired stress response in a span of a few days or months. It just doesn’t work like that, as much as I’d love it to. Addiction, no matter if it’s alcohol or something else, just doesn’t go away with a little will power and a can-do attitude. It takes daily work to keep in check. Helping them may mean drinking, and that will mean all sorts of trouble for me. I want to help, I sincerely do, but will my sobriety even survive this? |
| Why does trouble always find me? Why does trouble follow me around like a lost puppy searching a home? Why does trouble seem to always want me involved to solve it’s issues? And why am I such a damn sucker for all of it? Give me some sad, puppy dog eyes and I’ll always cave. Just ask Crash, who has used it to my detriment on more than one occasion. In wolf form or human, he’ll stick that lip out just so, curl those eyebrows over his eyes, and you can almost hear “hearts and flowers” playing in the background on the world’s tiniest violin. The invitation I had received in the mail I politely wrote I “No thank you” on it and dropped it back in the mail box. Part of me hoped that would end everything, but of course that’s not how life works. Especially in my little corner of the world. Can’t simply just say “no” and go about living life. No sir. Instead, they come up to you, give you those sad, dead, puppy dog eyes, and away we go, wrapped up in another crazy adventure. In the effort to avoid such an outcome, I found myself, well, it’s embarrassing. But I pledged to not hide this kind of information from you or anyone I’ll go ahead and tell you what happened. Our local town has a thrift store. It’s not attached to Goodwill or Salvation Army. It’s just a local run shop that a lady does out of the kindness of her heart. It’s a kind hearted supported place ran out of an old two-story building that looks like it was built almost a century ago. I’ve been frequenting it a couple times a week now. I want to go as John Travolta from Saturday Night Fever for Halloween. That means finding that white polyester leisure suit. And if I’m going to find one, I know this is the place to start my search. Nothing so far had proved to be fruitful, but I was hopeful. After all, people in small towns tend to hold on to trends longer than people in the city, relying a bit more on “what I like” versus “what other people think and wear.” You can find unique things being tossed out of closets in small towns. So far, I had found parachute pants, a shirt with puff-out paint on it, slap bracelets, a ruffled shirt that I swear is either from the sixties or the set of “Austin Powers”, and a pair of Doc Martins. But so far, no leisure suit. As I was searching through the pile of dead fashion choices and bad decisions, a stench of death wafted up at me that wasn’t caused by the MC Hammer pants or the bedazzled belt buckle. I looked around. One other lady was inside shopping. Though she swayed unsteady on her feet I was quite certain she was alive. Mainly cause instead of groans she asked me “do you smell a dead cat somewhere?” She moved on, mumbling something about talking to the owner of the place about it. I turned, and looked outside, and of course, there stood right at the window of the thrift store, a zombie. His pasty white flesh stood in stark contrast to the colorful makeup that was on his face. I could tell he was groaning, but couldn’t hear it, swaying back and forth in front of the window. I froze, holding the shirt in my hands for a moment. There was a sad, lost look on his face. One that tugged at my heart strings for a moment, until I remembered the smell. Oh God, the smell. Three-day old roadkill magnified by a billion. Quickly, I walked towards the back of the store. The owner was back there in her office talking to the old lady about the smell when I walked by. “Uh, you mind,” I asked, “If I go out the back?” “I don’t hun, but why you need to do that?” The owner was a bigger lady, with a large heart and a kind smile. Her cheeks almost dimpled when she smiled, almost like an overgrown cabbage patch kid, complete with adoption papers. I smiled back at her, and shrugged. “Saw my ex, don’t want to talk to her,” I lied. “Go ahead, darlin,” she said, then continued her conversation. I knew once I was out the door, they’d be searching for this mystery woman that could vex my heart so. Such is life in a small midwestern town. Everyone is friendly. Everyone wants to help. And tell everyone else about it after they’ve done so. You combine that with meth and questionable teenage pranks and you have midwestern life in America. Technically the line about seeing a woman I didn’t want to talk to wasn’t a lie. There was a woman. Sure, we hadn’t dated before. Tell you the truth, I’m not certain we ever met when she was alive. But alive she was, no longer. She was now a corpse, standing near the street, wearing an old dirty dress, mussed up hair, and maggots. I saw this blushing former beauty as I rounded the old building and started making my way towards the path back to home. She was standing near a curb, in a fairly nice dress with some dark brown smudge stains on it that could only be dirt, and two clouded over eyes, and pale white, dead skin. Thankfully, she didn’t see me as I raced by. Midwesterners are curious by nature. They love to know a little bit of gossip about their neighbors especially when that neighbor is alternating between running between buildings, slowing down in the street, and literally doing a high crawl in front of his house to get around seemingly nothing. If you don’t know what a high crawl is, think Rambo. The scene where he’s under the huts in the village trying to get back soldiers? That’s it. That’s the high crawl. What my neighbors saw was typical craziness from the crazy house on the street. Lord knows what they even think about us at this point. What I saw was a zombie standing between buildings. A zombie on a street corner, moaning and swaying, staring at me. And a zombie in front of the house, watching the front door, like it was waiting for me to come out. That’s why I crawled from the street corner, down the road, across the drive way, to get to the side door. At times scraping my face against the ground, trying my hardest to be low. To be unnoticed. To be ignored. Into the driveway. Passed my car. Up the hill towards the side door. Then I hear the shuffling gate behind me. The low moan of someone trying to say something, but not knowing what to say or even how to speak. The stench of death. I stood and ran, yelling the entire way, and slammed the door shut. “What’s wrong with you,” Zack asked, yawning. It was his day off at least. “Zombies,” I said. “They’re going to get you again,” He laughed. “No they won’t,” I grumbled, then walked towards the front door to look out. The zombie was gone. As was the rest of them. In their place sat a single bottle of one of the most expensive liquors I’ve seen. Jack Daniels has some very expensive bottles and if you get the right year and make, you can easily spend over one thousand dollars on a single bottle. What was left on our front porch next to our mailbox was one of those bottles, with a note attached. The bottle, the note it all was dirty of course and had a feint smell of death. Inside the note was a single word: “Please.” |
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