From the Ashes, You Crawl

Chapter Two; Flashback

                A/N: Deeply appologize for an author's note in the second part, but I feel I need to make this clear; Every other chapter is a flashback from before the infection. This is the first flashback of what I think will be three.

Okay, sorry.

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Gerard was scared.

                He shivered as he leaned against a light post on Times Square, hugging his jagged ribs tight against his ribs. There was a breaking news report on the massive television screens above his head.

                Gerard tried to ignore it. He would never survive war.

                Especially, The Great War. Nobody was living through The Great War. Not war heroes. Not super soldiers. Men and women who had served full tours in Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom were going into The Great War and dying within the first week. It didn’t matter where the battles were happening; they all were dying.

                Gerard tried not to think about it. The war itself was scary. Russia was pointing their biological, mind-altering, radiation bombs at us and we were pointing our giant, hydrogen bombs at them, an imaginary finger hovered over the two launch buttons waiting for a reason to expose the weapons of mass destruction.

                A lot of things scared Gerard though. He accredited that to the anti-socialness and various other mental issues he had been born and grown up with.  Clowns scared him. Needles scared him. Loud noises scared him.

                And crowds.

                Gerard was in the biggest crowd he had ever seen right now. The people around him stirred, pressed together like sardines. They were all crammed too tightly, necks poked out of grubby, white collars towards the massive screen. The president was standing motionlessly, and for a moment, Gerard believed he was frozen solid with fear. The people around Gerard were motionless as well, and Gerard decided that was because they were scared to see their president; the president was scared to see them and they were scared to see the president.

For weeks, the government had only brought bad news.

The crowd shushed themselves quickly, watching the leader of their country stare at them. Even though he was nowhere near Times Square, for every man, woman, and child who was in the square that night, necks pointed at the screen, it was like the president was there with them. And for one solid, scary second, everybody in New York City, Times Square felt close.

“Good evening, Americans,” he said, after clearing his throat, “Tonight, I deliver to you some unfortunate news.”

Gerard shuddered, drawing his hood. The crowd around him began to stir again, but quickly shushed.

“Tonight, the threat of Russian takeover has reached an all-time high. At our current rates of volunteering…. Our attempts at exterminating their biological weapons will be futile unless our forces are massively increased,” There was a dramatic pause, and Gerard could feel the fear and dread in his face over shadowing his vacant, white mask. “So, Congress, the Supreme Court, and I have decided to impose a mandatory draft for males ages eighteen to fifty. There will be exceptions for persons with mental, physical or emotional handicaps as well as any man who’s the only living guardian of their biological children, as well as-”

Gerard began to pull away from the outer ring of the crowd, crushing his arms around his chest as he turned away. The crowd was beginning to yell and become rowdy; screaming at the president who kept talking and giving directions of the draft, but nobody was listening. Gerard couldn’t hear his voice anymore. He pushed through the people, zipping his jacket and bringing the hood over his face so nobody could see his tears.

The door slammed shut to his ramshackle apartment only a few minutes later, knocking a painting off the wall beside the door. He lived alone in a square, two roomed apartment that always smelled like stale bread and mold. It was not dirty or crowded. In fact, he kept it as clean as he possibly could for such a shitty apartment. Gerard had bought this trash heap when he had dreams of art and succeeding. That was, though, before he was rejected from two different New York City art institutes and his dreams were crushed like the cockroaches he smashed daily. His extreme poverty and depression had coerced him into finding a very low income job at a dingy, cockroach infested butchery down the street to fill his time and pocket. It was a job that he dreaded going to every morning.

As Gerard paced the tiled floor, bare of any unnecessary thing, he thought of the dead pigs he had sliced open. He would flinch as streams of blood squirted onto his face as his fat-bodied, pink-skinned boss stood over his shoulder, watching the young man cut the pig. When his boss would leave the room, Gerard would cry tears of utter sorrow, leaning his nose level to the pig’s frozen snout, propping his elbows on the cutting table, setting his knees on the dirty floor, and beg forgiveness to the dead swine.

Gerard felt much like he did when would cut the pigs; Helpless, scared, and very small.

He stopped pacing and strung his hands through his black hair and closed his hazel eyes, shaking from fear in the middle of the floor. He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t go to war. A part of him wished that he hadn’t ran off in the middle of the speech so he could have heard if there were any more ways to get out of the draft.

There was a sense of utter self-loathing in the room as Gerard opened his eyes and cried quietly, pressing his fingers to his cheeks as he stood directly beneath the only flickering, uncovered light in his apartment. He took his fingers off his face, tilted his head upwards and watched the light flicker. Two mayflies ran into the ball of light over and over, as if expecting it to open right up and allow them into Valhalla. He could hear a constant tap, tap, tap with every hit the mayflies made with the light.

Gerard pitied the mayflies. They wanted the light so badly, and they just didn’t understand that it was beyond their capabilities. Gerard reached his right hand up towards the light, his hand shadow magnified against the walls. He clasped his hand around one of the mayflies, feeling it buzz underneath his fingers. Gerard walked to the dust-covered window that opened to an equally dirty alley way. A cool night breeze entered his apartment. There was screaming outside and honking and sirens. The city was in panic. Gerard shivered as he opened his hand and the lone mayfly flew away.

Gerard turned to set the other mayfly free. He reached his hand towards the light. There was the constant buzz of the mayfly in his hands as he clasped his fingers around the tiny bug, just like he had done for the last. When he took the two steps to the window, the stirring in his hand stopped. He frowned, opening his hand on the peeling windowsill. In the center of a scarred, calloused hand, stained red from the crimson blood that covers it daily, was a dead mayfly whose heart had stopped at some point in the two seconds from light to window. The mayfly’s legs were curled towards the center, wings bent like paper. Gerard stared at the mayfly for a few solid seconds before his lip trembled, and he sank to the floor.

As he sat there, back pressed against the corroded walls, light flickering dimly, sounds of screams from beyond his sight, it occurred to Gerard again that he could never kill another human. He could never go to war. He could never carry a gun and shoot it. His paranoia and obsessive compulsive disorder wouldn’t allow it.

It was then that the truth it home.

Gerard Way was on death row, and unless he found a way to escape the draft, he was a dead man.