Page 12 of Devil Inside

The bodies part, a gulf between us and everyone else.

We’re trapped inside this failing body.

We’ve exhausted ourselves. This particular host, new to us, is a dead end. I shouldn’t have slipped in, whoever he his. Now I’m trapped inside. I can sense it. Corrupted cells. A weak heart. Poison in his bloodstream. He’s sick. Veins laced in narcotics. His heart... it’s failing.

I need to escape.

All eyes are on us. Staring down. The music continues, that throbbing beat pounding down on our temples, a hammer now, bludgeoning our brain. Not ours.

We can’t speak. No one can hear.

I’m trapped inside. This body—broken. Valves collapsing. Synapses disconnect. So sick. His heartbeat is out of sync with the song. Their veins constrict, wires slicing.

We are gasping, unable to reach any air. A fish out of water. Our lungs shuttering.

A corroded host. A prison. A cage.

No one offers their hand to us. No one helps. “Jesus, is heODing?” someone above us asks. We can barely make out the words over the song. “He just puked on my shoes...”

Look at their pity. Their disgust. The circuit has severed. The conduit broken, snapped. I can’t escape. Lost on an island of flesh and bone, surrounded by an ocean.

“Someone call 911,” another shouts.

The bodies drift, dissipate, while I’m stranded. Trapped on this tiny island of a body.Someone, anyone, offer us your hand. Please... offer us just a little bit of your skin.

Something to touch.

To escape.

flood zone

Jordan

one year later

The swirl of bodies won’t stop. It’s hypnotizing, watching this whirlpool of limbs churn in front of me.Join us,they all call out, begging me to enter. Dive in, head first.

A part of me yearns for it, to lose myself among all the other lost souls.

This must be hell,I think. It’s so hot here. This incandescent heat seethes through the air. Makes it so hard to breathe. I’m almost choking with every inhale.

I can’t stop watching them. All those people. I wonder who they were before they entered the fray. What lives they had that led them to this very moment. To this abyss.

I’m supposed to go in. Join them.

The heaving mass of men and women moves to its own rhythm. What dim glow there is—it’s so dark in here, faces cast in colored light, red and orange shadows—leaves a sheen across everyone’s skin, glistening as they writhe over each other. I clock a myriad of different expressions: agony and ecstasy, a certain giddy insanity, that mischievous glint in the eye, there and gone before each face slips back into the roiling cesspool of body parts.

I could step right in. Get swallowed up by the pit, becoming one with every last lost soul. Drown with them. Never come back up for air again.

Is that what I want?

I’m so outside myself. I’ve been trying so hard to sync up with my sense of self, try and connect to my own body again, but nothing seems to work. None of this feels real—

like me

—anymore. This doesn’t feel like my own body, like I’m... like I...

Who even am I now? What’s happened to me?