Terminal

The airport offers countless gates, a monorail, windows (through which one can see nothing save fire and smoke), but no doors. If you board the train, it’ll circle the building before it returns you right back where you started.

I have marched through every gate (save one), walked down the narrow, metal tunnel that connected the doorway to one of the planes stationed on the tarmac. The planes never leave.

The airport offers plenty of pay phones. I hear my younger self when I pick up one. I try to communicate with him, but he can’t hear me. The phones won’t work both ways.

I served as a soldier for the United States Army. Tomorrow would bring my twenty-forth birthday, except that I died about a month ago.

Misinformation multiplies, so I can’t say for certain who started the last World War. The American government swore that the Middle East started it, that the Iranians developed Rage Serum.

A person catches the virus in one of two ways. A bomb releases the virus via gas. A person inhales it and goes bat shit. She or he will attack anyone, which brings us to the second way that the virus infects someone: bites.

The Iranians, supposedly, launched the first bomb. We responded with one of our own. It might’ve ended there, if not for the whole infection-via-bites-thing.

I remember the day that old woman infected me. She smashed through the boarded up door of the abandoned house that a few other runaway soldiers and I found. I shot her down, but not before she sank her foamy teeth into my ankle.

I should’ve confessed my injury to the others, but I knew they would’ve hung me by my neck before the virus overtook me (we couldn’t afford to waste bullets on each other). I convinced myself that the woman failed to infect me. I felt fine.

My guts turned hot an hour after the hag bit me. My vision turned clouded. I felt paranoid, angry. Everyone spoke too loud, too fast. I couldn’t think. I drooled.

I attacked my best friend that night, sank my teeth into his throat before someone (probably Rizzo) hosed me with a shotgun.

I awoke in this airport . . . with the other ghosts.

We still have bodies. We still feel.

Many of us tried to kill ourselves again. We keep whatever injuries we acquire in the suicide attempts, but we never die. We can’t. We already did.

The “hobgoblins” attack us every so often. None of us knows anything about the creatures.

We call the one with the wide shoulders and bad posture “Regret.” His skin shares the same color as a wet sidewalk. Chains giftwrap him. He drags them along, so we hear him when he hunts us.

“Revenge” runs the fastest, despite her lack of muscle (all skin and bones, that one). She shrieks, especially when she runs across the walls. Her eyes glow crimson. Her narrow teeth drip amber poison.

“Doubt” oozes right out of his victims’ shadows, grabs them, and pulls them into their own darkness.

“Depression” attacks from the ceiling, slides down on a thin cord like a spider on a silk string. Her victims usually notice her shadow right before she pounces them, but few ever escape.

They can’t kill us, for obvious reasons. They eat our skin, and the ghosts they catch never regrow it. Most ghosts, after a hobgoblin catches them, crawl into a ball and scream, skinless muscles raw, wet, and bloody.

The goblins never catch me. I plan to keep it that way.

I tried to shatter the airport windows. I never accomplish a single crack across their glass surfaces and the hateful reflections stretched across them.

I often wander by Gate B4, the one guarded by my ex-wife, the gate I can’t force myself to enter.

Screams echo across the airport. Another soul lost her skin.

I raise the business end of a random pay phone, hold it against my ear, hear my younger self say something stupid, like “I can’t stay with you, babe. I can’t watch the cancer eat you alive like this.”

You coward, I want to tell myself. Stay with her. Hold her hand. You vowed to experience the rest of your lives together. Life. Death. You can’t separate them.

I didn’t stay with her, though. I fled. She died a few months later without a hand to hold—a year before the Rage Serum outbreak.

I still remember that abandoned house, my fellow ex-soldiers and I huddled and hidden within it while we waited for the sum of our sins to crash upon us.

I wander past the gate where my ex-wife, bald and skeletal, rests in her hospital bed. Her wet eyes watch me with silent petitions. I continue to walk, away from my past and towards nothing at all.

(You can catch my novels, such as "Daughters of Darkwana," on Kindle. Thanks for reading!)