Clay remembers being shot. He remembers the bullet ripping through his abdomen and saying goodbye to Ivan for the last time as he slipped away from the plane of existence. But he doesn’t know why he is awake now, and looking down at his shirt that has a bullet hole and blood stains, he doesn’t understand why there is no wound in his stomach. He stands slowly and none of it makes any sense. He should be dead but he isn’t. He remembers the face of the woman who almost made it impossible for him to ever see Ivan again, and suddenly his confusion is replaced by a need for vengeance and he storms into his house to throw away his shirt and replace it with one that was not evidence that he had been murdered at his own home. When he is changed, he storms out of his front door to the home of the drug dealer/purveyor of prostitution where he hopes to find the woman who had shot him. He doesn’t think about what he will do once he finds her and when he is about to cross the street, he stops. This isn’t important, he thinks. This doesn’t matter. Clay remembers those feelings that were supposed to be his last. He’d seen Ivan in the clouds and he reached for him while his vision narrowed. He wasn’t able to strain against that fading sensation and all he knew was a mounting fear of losing the one thing in his life that felt right with no conditions, even if it had been a brief encounter. As he remembers it, experiencing death and only being able to say goodbye to the memory of the man he loved and not the man himself, Clay feels his eyes burn and then slow tears falling. None of this shit matters.
Clay turns back to his house and on the way, he calls his sister.
“Hey, I’m going out of town for a little while.” He says when she answers.
“Where are you going?” She asks.
Clay doesn’t know. Ivan hadn’t told him where he was going when he left. “Just out of town. I have to visit a friend.”
“Well, you know we got the house payment coming up soon.”
“I know,” Clay sighs. “I have that already. And I shouldn’t be gone too long. But if you can come up with anything for the other bills, that would be helpful. I’ll call you when I’m back.”
“You leaving now?”
“I have to,” Clay says. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
She doesn’t have the chance to say much else before Clay ends the call. He packs clothes and other things in a bookbag and rushes to his car. He is driving with no music, hoping that he will somehow hear Ivan calling him to his location. And even though he hears nothing, Clay drives purposefully on roads out of town heading west to TN for reasons that he could not articulate.
Before the sun comes up, Clay feels his eyes getting heavy. He doesn’t have the money to afford the cost of a hotel room and decides to pull off the road and sleep in his car. He can’t know how close he has come to Ivan’s current location, but he is just outside of Knoxville, TN in a wooded area just off an exit of the main highway. He has slept in his car before and he has no trouble falling asleep, but just as soon as he closes his eyes, he hears a loud crash on the hood of his car that makes him sit up suddenly. It is dark through his windshield and he turns the key in the ignition, then turns on his headlights to reveal a shocking creature standing wide-eyed just in front of his car.
Clay doesn’t know this, but it is a woman who had been changed by medical experiments. Clay sees the long arms and legs that are covered with mounds of skin, like moles with boils erupting from them, and the woman’s face that is oblong, like it had been stretched and her features seem to have wandered to weird positions on her face. Her body has no symmetry, one of her eyes practically sits on her cheek bone and her nostrils are slanted on a different plane. Clay can’t help but recoil at the sight of the woman. She screams at him and her scream is louder than Clay expects, and then she starts to wail her oversized fists on his car. She dents the hood of the car so badly that it damages the parts underneath and she crawls on top to smash the windshield. Clay is stunned but slips into the back seat and shields himself from flying glass. He doesn’t know how this will end, but before he can start imagining his demise for the second time in a twenty four hour period, he hears the woman shriek and then her body hitting the ground next to his car.
He looks out of the passenger’s side window and if not for a green glow that radiates as an oblong sphere that showed the woman in a tall and grotesque silhouette, it would have been pitch black in the woods. He sees the woman swinging wildly at the source of the glowing green light and then a bright flash that sends the woman flying off into the darkness. She screeches and then Clay hears her rustling through the foliage, the sound fading as she flees.
The glowing green light approaches the backseat where Clay stares out of the window. He is transfixed on the light that is radiant, but not harsh on his eyes. There is something soothing about it and he does not realize that his own body is glowing ever brighter as the source of the light moves closer. Clay gets out of the car and stands before the light and then flashes of electricity streak from the source to his body. He feels stronger than ever and it is a familiar sensation.
“Ivan.” He says and extends a hand as the glow dims to reveal the man he loves standing before him.
“You always find me.” Ivan says and the two embrace.
PRL Serials 