I used to live above this really loud restaurant. Back when I was in college, and didn’t have a lot of money. The rent was really, cheap, and I was usually so drunk I didn’t really notice the noise.
 
Sometimes my friends and I would sell our plasma to buy beer, or other alcohol. They take out two pints of blood, and put it in a big centrifuge. Then they spin the blood down, separating the plasma from the red blood cells. They take out the plasma and replace it with normal saline. Then they put it back in your arm.
 
That way, you can give plasma once a week. It only takes your body so long to regenerate the plasma, compared to the couple months it takes your body to regenerate the red blood cells.
 
The plasma donation center was in a really shady area of town. Where a lot of sketchy things take place. A lot sketchier than the restaurant I lived above, and was always too drunk too notice.
 
Apparently, a lot of the types of people who live in those sketchy places like to give plasma as well. You got thirty bucks. And back in those days, thirty bucks got you a lot. At least a couple of days of food and booze.
 
So this one bum invites us back to his house for a party. Since we’d kind of conditioned ourselves to crave some kind of drug or alcohol induced mental state after giving plasma, we readily agreed. Usually when we finish getting our red blood cells back, our first question is:
 
“How are we going to get high?”
 
But that guy right there answered it for us before our adolescent minds had time to formulate the very question. Boom.
 
We followed him down these skanky alley’s with equally skanky residents, but we figured we were on a journey. An adventure into bumland. This is what stupid college kids do.
 
He led us into this old abandoned building. There were people camping out, cooking things with sterno stoves, and sitting up against the wall. Some prostitutes were doing what they do for money. Our new friend said the real party happens downstairs. We shrugged our shoulders. In for a penny, in for a pound.
 
We walked down this spiral staircase that seemed like it was built in WWI. And I’m pretty sure we went down at least three stories, which meant we were in the deep underbelly of bumland. I was partly nervous, and partly wondering when we were going to access the special bumstash.
 
When we finally got off those winding stairs, the ground beneath us was dirt. Not concrete or cement or bricks or whatever. Dirt. He started walking, and told us to follow his voice. After a while we could hear this river. Now I was starting to try and remember if we’d taken the drugs yet or not, because I wasn’t really sure what was happening.
 
It was still dark, and we had to follow his voice. My friends kept cracking jokes, and I was wondering if they’d even noticed if we’d walked off some city street, down into some basement, and now were walking outside somewhere in the pitch black.
 
Finally I could see a light ahead. A flickering light. Not a steady light. One that gave off the telltale sings of firelight. But it was obscured. The closer we got, we started to notice some figures sitting around the some huge bonfire. It was a lot bigger than I’d expected.
 
Beyond the bonfire there was this vast field, with tents and lean-to’s and tarps. People’s clothing were hung up on the branches of bushes and trees. The smell of feces and cooked meat hung in the air.
 
I turned around, looking for the sign of the city skyline. The plasma center is in the dead center of downtown. Where they have a lot of big buildings, which have lights. Lights you can see for miles. We hadn’t walked for miles.
 
Or did we?
 
I wasn’t really sure. Maybe we’d never left the plasma center and this was all a hallucination. Maybe we did drugs on the way and I didn’t remember.
 
“Where are we exactly,” I asked our host.
 
“The party place,” was all he said, and disappeared. I tried to follow him, but soon found myself in the middle of the vast field of tents and hanging clothes and tarps. A couple of dogs looked at me quizzically, as if I was supposed to feed them or something.
 
I looked around for my friends, but they were gone. I asked a couple of people who were lounging about on their blue tarps if they’d seen my friends or our host, but they just smiled. Too far gone to even understand English, by the looks of it.
 
I sat down, needing a rest. I leaned back, closing my eyes. At least it should be light in a few hours, and I could find my way back. Ask for directions. Find a road or something. Somebody that wasn’t high that could point me in the right direction.
 
When I woke up, I was on the beach. That sound of water was the ocean, not the river. Which perturbed me even more, since the plasma center was nowhere near the ocean.
 
I walked for hours, and never saw another soul. I walked up to the highest hill I could find, and didn’t see any signs of people. No houses. No cities. No roads. No power lines. No telephone poles. And certainly no plasma center.
 
Now, you may be beginning to ask, how is it that I came to write my tale? Every day I’ve been writing various versions of this. Each time it gets a little bit harder to remember. I’ve built myself a small hut. More like a lean to.
 
Sure, I can hear you say. Where’d you get the pencil or whatever and the paper? And how the heck did this end up on the Internet?
 
Well, eventually I did find an old schoolhouse. But it appears that it hasn’t been used in many, many years. I can’t sleep there at night, because very strange, and very bad things keep happening there. I must retreat to my lean to before the sun sets.
 
As far as how this ended up on the Internet? Well, to tell you the truth, as I write this (as I write the final paragraphs of this story every day) I do not know. I only hope that it does. I write every day, and let the wind carry my story away.
 
If you are reading this on the Internet, that means somebody, somewhere picked it up. And typed it in. If you know who this person is, please find me. And help me.
 
Because every few days I keep moving my lean-to away from that schoolhouse, but it keeps getting closer and closer. I’m running out of space.
 

Download Healer - Free

A boomtown on the edge of economic liftoff. An evil lawyer with inescapably psychotic power. When Marcus Canfield, an underachieving bartender realizes his gift has been reawakened, only to have the girl of his dreams snatched away, he knows he must stop the horrific threat to both her and the entire United States before it's too late.

Download Yours

     

00