There are bodies wrapped in cloths, police and government investigators in riot gear, drones with nail guns and corpses stuffed with empty holes laid out in long rows to thwart pursuit. The image I conjure up is a drugged out numbness. Somewhere, some place, some idiot picked a fight with a cop and is getting absolutely brain-fucked by a technician or some set of metal face-wearing sadistic fanboys who have somehow been deemed fit for this shit. All these messy, slow growing fuck piles all mixing together in a sticky, dark stain along the highway.

We have not been able to find the road proper, and there is only one logical explanation for its disappearance from the map. Somebody removed it. While as I read, I make notes about how familiar it is to me, the description i picture causes me to grimace. The area is bleak and desert almost. Mourners crowd the media feeds in attendance, grief stricken and wrapped in self pity. Most of my hairs are grey with age. For the first time in my life I fear death. It's a moment of shattering truths, of truthfall. The cars are smashed to splinters. Shocking? Maybe. Suicidal? Absolutely. Sickly? No. In the ancient hospital I lived in I was old and I didn't know it, I had been mingeing in the hospital as long as I could remember. I had a dead fiancé who killed herself over my pathetic tears for years, but I was a bastard. Then my death bit me, my old self imploded into the ultimate ego death of a burned consciousness. A stark metaphorical display of the quest for self-actualization born of software and processors. A charnel house for those of us who would do well to build the fortifications to repel God's wrath. A soundproof box to keep the noise of entropy on the outside.

Do you see the problem? Do you think it isn't the day you physically die is the same day that the bleeding of your soul will stop? The pain is permanent. It has to be. It cannot be removed with touch or potion or drugs or implants or uploading. It is forever. Perhaps even harder to see, but just as intangible.

I can't tell whether I'm holding a splinters in my bones or if they're all split open. Should; I stop and wait for it to heal, lulling to sleep without the pain and a faint hope that no, indeed, I'm not coming back... I bury myself in a carpet and start rubbing myself raw. Pain. But also a tiny little bit of hope, or slowly damage this body I'm left with by plunging myself deeper into its pustulous maw?

I can't decide what I'm holding. I can see a blackened paw in my hands, oozing goo inside, crunchy shell of an arm, twisted edge and bones. I think it is mine. Pain shoots through my body, and the downpour expands through the horizon. I don't care. I'm off and running. It's so close to me. I squeeze and slowly pull out the arm. It's my arm. It's bloody. The top half is separate and broken off, like the side of a bone with the marrow bored out. I tear it out and pluck out the hard black shaft out of the husk. I can feel its bone, my bones, inside me. There is blood and mud, I think. I can feel it on my hands, too.

The investigators tear at the walls and floors, breaching into houses looking, for anything really. It's pathetic, I know, but I don't see any other way to describe this particular exhibition, except 'scavenging'. The procession includes loads of books, calendars, stuffed animals and toys all coated with metallic rot. Some of the cargo is burned as a way to mark the event of the first attack, burning it doesn't do too much anyways. At least two local report feeds say they have seen evidence that bodies have been dumped elsewhere, outside of the disaster zone. That isn't very surprising, considering. Shrapnel-pocked hospital beds are strewn with mangled limbs and bodies of the dead. Hospitals, schools, homes, shopping centers. It made no difference. As darkness falls, dozens of empty shells fired by rocket-propelled grenades litter the streets in between the dark smears once called biological.

The lack of an official government response has given rise to accusations of an apparent disregard for the civilians under attack.

I HAVE BEEN TRAPPED IN THE LIGHT CELLS THE BEACON TOWER HELP HELP THE GUAR