Love's Battlefield: After the Battle - Monsters
Love's Battlefield: After the Battle - Monsters Featuring Andrew Klein By Joseph Raszagal
"High-octane nightmare fuel. Pretty blunt and to-the-point, I know. I've been referred to as that before. I remember it as though it were yesterday.
I remember everything.
There he was, doubled over on the ground with a stab wound in his chest and a river of blood gushing out of it. Blue fur stained a deep and unforgiving red. He was drinking a beer when I got him, had the bottle up to his lips and never saw it coming. As long as you're precise about it, an ordinary steak knife can do a lot of damage.
Certainly more than enough to put your ass on the ground.
He looked up at me, equal parts fear and confusion in his eyes, and asked me what I had done. Being the cheery sort that I am, I didn't answer. Instead I just stared down at him, shrugged my shoulders, and adjusted my tie. Then he gave me that wonderful title.
Then I finished him off.
I have very little love for pedophiles, especially ones that prey upon my friends. Because of what that bastard did, my friend very nearly matured into exactly the same sort of scum that had taken advantage of him.
Pedophiles going around inflicting emotional trauma, thereby breeding more and more pedophiles. Not a great bedtime story, that's for sure.
Fortunately, my friend had the dumb luck to prey upon a pair of young men with hearts big enough to forgive him. They assisted him in his rehabilitation. They saved him. For what little it's worth, I helped, guiding them in the right direction with my usual grace and style, but the fact remains that I couldn't have done it alone.
Oh, and another fact remains too. Fathers shouldn't rape their sons. Argue otherwise... and I'll kill you.
My name is Andrew Klein and, yes, I guess you could call me high-octane nightmare fuel. As a spotted hyena, I suppose all I'm missing to better fit that bill is a ridiculously villainous cackle. While I might look like an ordinary high school student, graduation nipping at my heels, I am in fact much more. You see, I know things.
Lots of things.
Everything.
Okay, maybe not everything, but a Hell of a lot more than most. More than a city consisting entirely of libraries could contain. Enough ink to fill a lake. Enough paper to cover the surface of the moon. So much wisdom and experience that it hurts.
And there you have it, that's my problem.
I know these things against my will. I don't want to know them and I've tried hard to forget them, but they're there now and to the best of my knowledge they always will be. Quite like The Master, I've got a nagging noise in my head at all times and no way to shut it up.
Actually, the drums would've been nicer.
Instead, I hear voices. Or, to be more precise, I hear thoughts. Your thoughts, her thoughts, his thoughts, their thoughts; all of the things that are kept secret and go unsaid sound like wailing screams to me. As loud as gunshots, all of them, and as plentiful as you might find in the middle of a war zone. Imagine a mind-reader incapable of controlling their power. Rather than selecting one specific person and covertly listening in on their thoughts, they hear the thoughts of everyone around them whether they want to or not. Every man, woman, and child; their heads splayed open like books for me to read. The thing is, it's like I'm reading them at gunpoint. I don't have a choice.
How do you think I knew to knock off Tommy's dear old dad? Little Boy Blue certainly didn't blow the whistle on him. No one did. No one needed to. I already knew.
And that's not all.
Have you ever heard of photographic memory? I have. I have it, or at least some mutated hyper-advanced form of it. It's hard to explain. I can flawlessly remember every single thing that I've ever seen. Whether it's a juxtaposed image in a textbook or something alive that I've viewed in the flesh, I can recall it all with perfect clarity. The cracks in the sidewalk as I walked home from my first day of school. The patterns in the clouds when I first looked up into the falling rain. The snaking trail of smoke as it danced from the end of my first cigarette.
If I were the sentimental type, these memories would likely be near and dear to my heart. Sadly, after you compile so many there's just no point in maintaining any emotional attachment to them.
Besides, it doesn't just stop with the things that I've seen. I'm not that lucky.
Smells, sounds, tastes, the things that I've touched; it's all permanent. I could tell you how a cheeseburger I ate three years ago tasted. I could tell you that I asked for no onions and that there were onions on it anyway. I could tell you that they used almost an entire bottle of mayonnaise. Don't they always?
Above all else, I could tell you how much it hurts having all of this useless information crashing about in your head. There are so many things that we're supposed to remember, so many important things throughout our brief lifetimes, but we're not supposed to remember everything. We can't contain it all, we were never meant to. I've fallen to my knees because of the deafening pain in my head. I've woken up at night with blood running from my ears and nose, like I was the victim of some kind of plague. But I wasn't sick though, I wasn't dying. That was just the information regulating itself. Making room for more. Eventually I'll bleed all of my blood away, I'll be come an empty shell, all just to clear out enough space for a few more random facts and thoughts.
The temperature of the sun. The airspeed of an African swallow. Some passersby' favorite color. Something so completely and utterly pointless that it could only ever matter in context once and only once.
Yeah, that's what's going to kill me, a fucking Jeopardy trivia question.
But then again, I guess that's what brought me here. Standing on a chair, all alone, in my empty bedroom. After a while you just get tired of waiting for death to creep up on you from the silence and the shadows. Every day that passes begins to feel like the countdown on a time bomb. Eventually, you just get fed up with the whole thing and wish it would fucking explode already.
Or maybe I'm impatient, who knows?
The point is, I didn't want to wait for my brain to pop like an overinflated balloon. I would have rather gotten the whole ordeal over with. Suspense is all well and good, but there's only so much of it a man can take before it all starts to feel repetitive. So, with that in mind, I adjusted my tie for the last time, making sure that it was nice and tight around my throat, then kicked the chair out from under me. Being strangled wasn't a very pleasant feeling, it's probably among the worst things that I've ever experienced in fact. The lightheadedness that followed suit was even scarier. To think that going numb is more frightening than going through extreme amounts of pain, what kind of cosmic joke is that? Not to mention the violent spasms; my body retched from side to side with more strength than I ever even knew I had.
My body fought to live even after my mind had decided to die. Instincts are a funny thing.
Not that they helped much. I hung there for a minute or so, everything going dark around me. My tail lashed uncontrollably, as though it could have ensnared the discarded chair and brought it back to me. But it couldn't, of course it couldn't. That would be silly. Almost as silly as a psychic hyena hanging himself in his bedroom on a Tuesday.
Oh, Tuesday, you naughty girl.
The very last thing I did before I blacked out was smile. I was happy. I was so goddamn happy. It was all going to end right then and there and that made me so unbelievably happy. I wouldn't have to remember anything ever again. I wouldn't have to suffer the agony of knowledge any longer. The voices would stop screaming in my ears. Everything would stop. Everything would end.
And then I blacked out.
...
...
...
Notice the inconsistencies in the past and present tenses that I've been using? If so then you're starting to get it. Only half of this story has been a recounting of events gone by. The other half has been my feelings on the matters. Feelings that I'm still sorting through, piece by piece.
I'm not dead.
Oh, sure, I stopped breathing and my heart stopped beating, but I was as conscious as I had ever been. I was conscious, I was thinking, I was listening, and the voices were still there. Everything they said still rang crystal clear in my mind and couldn't be purged. Stupid, meaningless things like dinner dates, exact change for cab fair, the top ten celebrities on TV, why collecting stamps is superior to collecting coins, and how many beans really were in the fucking jar!
As it turned out, the only thing that I didn't know was that I was immortal.
Heh, guess I'm more of a monster than even I had first thought."
-Andrew Klein