Sloughing Off the Rot Read Online Free PDF Page A

lunkheads?” John asked.
    Santiago sat and scratched at his beard momentarily, putting together an acceptable answer to John’s question, and said, “Lookie here, man…”
    But, before Santiago said any more, John fell fast asleep on the ground beside him, mumbling incoherently to himself.

     
    And John awoke with his eyes gummed up and a rotten mouth. A low drone of grunts and groans and snarls and moans stirred him as the flammeous daylight broke. Just outside of the piss-perimeter stood a shifting, stinking wall of men and boys, their skin greenish and pocked with sores. Their soulless eyes passed over John and Santiago but looked right through them, the giant dilated pupils having taken over most of the whites of their eyes and showing as stagnant pools of numbness. Those black eyes betrayed no emotions. No feeling showed itself on the lumbering creatures’ faces as they remained just outside the circle and shifted slowly back and forth on their feet. But there was a hunger, an urgent need for something that was clear from how their numbers were pressed in on each other around the circle but held back only by some invisible barrier.
    “Santiago! Wake up!” John rolled toward Santiago and shook him awake. “What is this? What the fuck? What are these people doing?”
    Santiago sat up slowly. He rubbed his eyes. He rejected the urgency in John’s voice. He scanned the slow-moving throng around him. He stretched. “What the fuck, Johnny? That’s a hell of a way to wake me. I told you about lunkheads last night. Remember?”
    “I don’t remember anything. We stopped. I was beat. I slept. We didn’t talk.”
    “We did, man,” said Santiago. He squatted low to the ground and tugged at his beard. “We did. And I’ll hep you to it all again. But first, you gotta tell me something. Do you want more worms? Are you jonesing for one more lunk?” He tittered his nervous laugh and watched John’s face closely.
    “I don’t ever want to see those stupid worms again,” John snapped. “My body aches all over. I feel empty inside. My skin is torn and scabbed and burned. My head is throbbing and the ground feels like it’s moving. I want nothing to do with lunkworms.”
    Santiago jumped up again and slapped John on the back. “That’s the answer I was looking for. You ain’t gonna be no lunkhead. If you don’t want more, then you ain’t a lunkie.”
    The gape-jawed men stood just outside the circle, watching and waiting. Santiago approached the edge of the perimeter and stood in front of a short, crumpled man. The man’s eyes were devoid of any emotion or recognition, but they locked on Santiago. The man’s jaw repeatedly shifted and chewed at his ragged tongue, his lips pursed and slackened, pursed and slackened. His arms twitched and thoughtlessly slammed balled fists against his own sides. The right side of his face hung, palsied and dull. Infected claw marks crisscrossed his bare chest.
    “These,” said Santiago, waving his hand to indicate the men who surrounded them, “these are your sins and your shame and your guilt, guy. These are the things that will dog you until you deal with yourself. These are the manifestation of your fucked up past. This is your shit looping back around and smacking you in the back. These are lunkheads. Some people take the lunk once and never have a need for it again. Some get helplessly addicted. Some suffer almost immediate mental incapacitation and only certain parts of their brains seem to work.”
    Santiago swaggered around the circle and waved his hand in front of an emaciated lunkhead’s face. Angry red patches of flesh marked spots on the man’s head where he had torn out his own hair. A red sore throbbed and oozed on one of the bald patches. “Look at this sorry sack of shit. Lets just call him Gary,” Santiago said. He balled up his fist and threw it within inches of Gary’s blank eyes, stopping his hand just short of the protective perimeter. Gary did not