I entered the Arby's absolutely wasted. I was feeling good. I was feeling normal. I was on a mixture of cheap booze and even cheaper heroin. "Friday I'm in love", I muttered to myself. My vocabulary consisted of random phrases from bits of my life when I was relatively sober. I figured I'd ask for a cup of water and kill a few hours listening to the music spilling through the scratchy Arby's speakers. I was in my natural element. I got my water cup from the employee, ignoring all the dirty looks I was getting. I went to a booth and promptly passed out.
About an hour later, I was woken up by the manager roughly shaking me. "Come on buddy, you've been here long enough", the manager's tired voice says. "I'm tired of dealing with all this crackhead bullshit....", the fast food fellow angrily mutters. I was having many strange dreams during my substance induced nap. I generally didn't dream. But today was different. Today everything felt more vivid. I was having even more trouble telling what was what than usual today. I got up spilling the water cup everywhere and bumping into the manager and walked out of the restaurant. The sun was starting to set. I needed somewhere to sleep. I decided it was time to go in search of any homeless shelters. I felt sober enough to do that after his nap.
I wandered around aimlessly for a while. I was in a stupor. I had forgotten what I was even doing. "Little beetles, little beetles.", I said to myself over and over. I kept picturing Robert as thousands of tiny beetles. He had a strange urge to see those beetles again. I craved the beetles. I craved many things and the beetles were standing out to myself quite a bit. I sat down on a curb for a minute and took a sip out of half full Pepsi can someone had left there. I didn't taste anything. I felt completely numb. I saw something fly out of my mouth. An orange beetle. The beetle landed a couple feet away from me. It started crawling away. I felt compelled to follow it. The beetle and I walked for a good twenty minutes to a large abandoned warehouse. I crawled in through a busted window ignoring the glass shards scraping my dry skin. Suddenly my vision started flickering and the warehouse came to life with many, many insects, but most primarily, the beetles.
The insects were in the warehouse in mass quantities, swarming and swarthing and crawling. Ants, wasps, bumblebees, flies, and many, many other types of bugs were everywhere. The beetles were covering the most area by far. I walked through the dirty warehouse, bleeding profusely from my arms and abdomen area. He walked to the center of the warehouse where the beetles were. They swarmed around me and came together to form my dream. Robert was in front of me, formed by thousands of tiny insects. I was still in a daze. The beetles stepped forward. They put their arms around my neck. They squeezed. I started to choke, my neck firmly in between the armpits of this nonhuman figure. Some sort of inert emotion of fight or flight kicked in and I began to violently struggle against the grip of these foul crawling bugs. I managed to escape the grasp of this foe. I ran away back toward the window. I quickly looked back before climbing through the window and everything was gone. All of the insects. Everything. There was no warehouse. I was in an empty field. Before I passed out I felt an intense searing pain everywhere in my body. I let out a blood-curdling scream before everything went black.
YOU ARE READING
Permanent Trip
Mysterie / ThrillerA homeless junkie has constant hallucinations of beetles that become real and push him towards violence and insanity.
