They had found him and cornered him. Finally. He wasn't surprised. Comedy was simply tragedy plus time, though wasn't it? He had ran with everything he had, until his legs felt splintered and fractured. Like running on matchsticks. In a back alley with no where to go, the giggling mob of Small One's closed in on him. He closed his eyes, waiting for their small hands to start picking and prodding. He had clamped his lids down, refusing to give them the satisfaction of showing him his intestines after they'd pulled them out. Or at least he refused to afford them that for as long as he could. He knew they'd tear his eye lids off and make him look. He'd seen them do it to the others.
He tried to tell himself that this would be better. Tried hard to believe it. It was better then living in the streets. Dealing with the rats who had grown fat on putrid corpse flesh with their shocking, evil, naked faces and nauseating nude tails. Hiding and soiling himself in fear at every noise and shadow. Better then having to fight the constant urge to look at the sick vomit splashes across the horizon. Of living like filth, reeking of fear and garbage, With nails splintered and hair matted. This would be a release.
He wouldn't have to see other survivors with their sharp downy faces etched with all the awful expressionlessness of dead children. They're reduced to animals, they operate on instinct and impulse. They huddle together and don't notice the smell of their own manufacture, the greasy sweat sheen and musky stink that coats them. Their backs hunched and their knees sag, the are broken utterly. Their terror filled eyes deeper then forever and just as lost. He won't have to see their pitiful clenched hands or hear their screams echoing through the night on furnace winds telling tales of some unspeakable horror being visited upon their flesh. Paul won't find them with their guts pulled partly out and nailed to the wall so they can't get away as they seep blood dark enough to know it's dead. He won't see them so terrified that dare not cry out loudly, but with battered chests and torn bellies, arms and legs, only whimper softly for their mothers or their gods and cease as soon as one looks at them. Paul won't suffer the stench of the bodies piling and bloating in th midday heat with their stomachs swollen up like balloons. They hiss, belch and make movements. The gases in them make noises as the mixed smell of chloroform and putrefaction leaks out.
Deliverance.
Tried hard to believe it. He tried to latch onto it like a mantra, a gospel, as the semi-circle of Small Ones closed in on him. But he knew better. They'd cut off his feet and make him walk on the stumps, choking on his own vomit, the crotch of his jeans a darker blue. They'd pull back flaps of his flayed skin and reach into the fold, picking and pulling at the slick muscle within.
He tried hard to believe it.
They closed in gibbering their insane laughter. And as they did a new sensation rushed in, a new feeling that ousted all the vile fear that had built up in him like pus in an infected cut.
He was angry.
He felt cheated.
He found himself hating not the Small Ones, not their palsy seizures or their waxy sick skin. No. He hated every healthy human being before him that had died without appreciating their chance to expire peaceably. He wanted to reach back through the incomprehensible barrier of time and strangle every elderly person who died in their sleep, dreaming their last blithe Kafkaesque moments, without the means to realize eternal nothingness was imminent. He wanted to storm into nurseries and punt premature infants like human footballs and unplug all the gods of their life support machines. He felt the itch of his index finger as it curled around a nonexistent trigger pumping round after round of 45 caliber jealousy into the bald heads of cancer patients who had lived with their ailments long enough to conquer their fear of death. He wanted to reach out and caress the faces of those who smiled at death so he could rip their jaws from their heads. He wanted to make people aware of the car accident they never saw coming.
He hated everyone who had ever died in the antiseptic white of a hospital. He envied them with their nostrils filled with the stink of iodine and alcohol. And in their wet rheumy eyes swam in all the bland white of those hospital walls.
He hated them for it.

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