Perish Part 1

PERISH

Part 1 -Dirty Little Secret


The door slammed shut and a pungent smell of stale coffee filled the room.


“Glad you could make it, Detective Richards,” uttered the man.


The flickering light above his head allowed me to catch glimpses of his face; scruffy hair, stubbly chin, yellow teeth and cigarette in hand, your typical creepy cop.


“You might wanna lay off those cigarettes, top cop. They’ll kill ya!”  I chuckled.


He wasn’t pleased. I was strapped to a chair and he had a baseball bat in his hand ready to swing with practised bravado. The smart thing to do was to keep my mouth shut, but I’m not very smart.


“So, Richards, you seem to have stumbled across some CLASSIFIED INFORMATION!”


The hard wood came crashing down across my knees like a gladiator’s battleaxe, cutting deep into my skin, but I refused to scream.


“I don’t like it when people poke they’re noses into MY BUSINESS,”



Another swing penetrated my skin, this time splitting the bone in my shin. It cracked under the brute force and sent an agonising tremble through my body. Gritting my teeth, I still refused to scream.


“You want to tell me why you were in the Warehouse on 8th Avenue?”


“Is this going to take all night? I have a dinner to get to.” I asked.


He smiled ever so slightly.


“Look Richards, I’m a nice guy. I have a wife, kids. But I don’t have patience for people like YOU!”


I clenched my jaw as hard as I could, but the pain breached my mouth resulting in a deep roar as the bat collided with the entire left side of my face. Blood trickled down my lips, trailing down my chin and dripping onto my dark jeans. A tooth came loose and slowly fell from my gum and onto the tip of my tongue. I spat it forwards at the cop, along with a substantial amount of blood.


“You better tell my dentist that wasn’t my fault…”


He snarled at me as he extended the bat like a Golfer about to take his perfect swing, when suddenly there was a knock on the door.


“Sir, it’s here,” announced a young man dressed in a Police uniform.


I let out a sigh of relief and thanked God for that interruption; although after all I had been through I wasn’t sure if I even believed in a God anymore.
Creepy Cop looked me straight in the eye and dropped the bat on the floor, ”We’re not through”, he threatened and returned his attention to the young man standing at the door.


I knew what they were talking about; half the city knew, but they were too god damn careless to do anything about it.


The government’s dirty little secret, Alastor.


Alastor is a powerful hypnagogic drug that causes an acute sense of paranoia and delirium. You inject the drug into any working vein which will then pump the blue bane into your blood stream, where it will eventually rot you from the inside out.


It turns you into a walking voodoo doll, the puppeteer being the government. It destroys the mind, body and soul, crushing your will power and plunging you down a black hole so deep, you’ll most likely never see the light of day again.


I discovered the Warehouse earlier tonight. It’s where they store all of Alastor’s “Classified Information”. It was an old Police storage space which meant any Cop who dared enter could; just buy pinning their badge number into the keypad at the gate. But going against half the city was a suicide mission, so people turned the other cheek and pretended like it didn’t even exist.


But it is very much in existence and it is very much alive.


You believe whatever you are told and execute whatever task you are told to, like a twisted rebirth only, you were being born to do the governments dirty work. The streets will run rampid with drugged up psychopaths and no one will do a god damn thing about it. The shops will be looted by these people and the city will be terrorised by its own inhabitants. The entire economy will be destroyed by ordinary citizens.


Total power would be in the hands of the government, totalitarian power.


Alastor was infecting the city like a black plague; violence was ubiquitous as was death and terror. I had to find a way to stop it.