Chapter 1: Chapter 1. No Friends in Low Places

Something was burning.

My foot was burning. The pain was excruciating. Was I in medical? Reflexively, I pulled my foot back and realized I was covered in a heavy, spongy mass. I could barely breathe.

A faint squelching noise reached my ears as I yanked my foot back. The pain continued, but I started fighting, moving my arms and legs to try and get free of the mass. I opened my eyes to darkness, but the darkness had a quality. I was covered with something, although one arm and my burning foot appeared to be free.

I started wriggling to get out of whatever was over me, pain lancing through my foot every time I moved, and finally clawed free enough of whatever was covering me to breathe. Bodies. I could see again, and realized that I had been in a pile of bodies.

But what kind of bodies were these? They were not human, of that much I was certain. They looked fairly humanoid, and had not been butchered, they had arms, and legs, blue skin, scales, and long tails. They looked a little like much more slender versions of the Gorn, from that space TV show, or maybe sleestax with enlarged reptilian heads, hugely oversized eyes, and feathered crests.

Were they aliens? Was I dreaming? If I were dreaming, my foot wouldn’t hurt so abominably. I had never been a lucid dreamer, and this felt real, not flashing and elusive like dreams were.

I quickly scraped back from the pile of bodies, my legs coming free as I used my arms to scoot myself across one of the bodies and finally rest on… what felt like stone. Stone covered with a layer of dust, or dirt. I could hear the faint trickle of water, and a weird gurgling noise coming from the pile of bodies. There must have been over a dozen. The light, what there was, added a faint red tinge to the scene, but I could see clearly, even though I couldn’t see any sources of light nearby.

The smell was… atrocious. The stink of rotting flesh matched by the reek of what smelled like decaying fecal matter. Beneath that was the smell of water, and urine, and even rotting wood and vegetables. It was almost painful, but I could make out and identify each distinct odor rather than blending them into a repellent whole, which almost made it worse.

I looked down at my burning foot and saw that it looked burned, the skin and scales sloughed away, bit of red muscle visible where hard callous and scales should be. My toeclaws were intact, the three big toes in front skinned but still attached, as if I had ducked the bottom of my foot into hydrochloric acid and just left it there for a bit. The feathers on my calf were pasted to the skin of my leg by dark-colored effluvia, which covered most of my blue skin, although some of it was flaking off, dried, from where my three-fingered hand had been exposed to the air.

Claws? Blue skin? A TAIL? I freaked, and went into the zone.

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Okay, time to break the fourth wall a bit. I grew up a fairly normal kid, Born in the seventies, in a trailer in West Virginia. Before you think ‘trailer trash’, I should probably explain that in the Appalachian Mountains, trailer parks were really not a thing. Getting building supplies up into the hills was a logistical nightmare. If you wanted your own place, you bought or squatted an acre or ten on the side of a mountain, borrowed or stole a tractor to clear a dirt road, used it to haul a trailer up to the closest thing to a flat spot you could find, and parked it forever. Most people would cut timber or haul up rocks to expand it or make it more homelike, but unless you wanted to live in a tar paper shack, tin shanty, cinderblock shed, or a cave, you lived in a trailer.

My pop had taken off when I was three, and my mom had worked for Union Carbide. That’s because everyone worked for Union Carbide. The area was coal mining country, and up until the 40’s it had been company store territory too… Everyone that lived up there were basically slaves to the company, up until unionization had eased the strain a little.

Trailers were a big step upwards in the housing department for most of those who had sold their soul to the company store.

In those days, you were either working for Union Carbide, working for yourself as a Union Carbide contractor, working for the Piggly-Wiggly, or you were on the dole. Lots of people were on welfare.

My mom, even with a three year old boy, chose to work, leaving me with my aunt, who’s husband was a manager for Union Carbide thus she could afford to be a stay-at-home mom for her own two boys and me.

Welfare was weird, though. Mom chose to work, which meant that we had much, much less than the welfare families. She barely made enough to survive, but far too much to get welfare and food stamps or government handouts, like cheese, flour, corn meal, milk, and the like.

I grew up learning how to take care of and slaughter the chickens, rabbits, and goats we kept on the property. I grew up in the woods, learning from my uncle how to shoot, clean, and be safe with a rifle or black-powder shotgun when I was eight years old, how to hunt, and especially how to gather from the wooded mountains food and stuff we could trade to our welfare neighbors for cheese, Milk, and the like.

Yeah, I grew up fairly normal. But also not. Today, they had a word for it, ‘High function autism’, but when I was in school, they gave it tons of labels, hyperactivity, attention deficit disorder, sociopathy, psychopathy, or even just being too lazy to learn to get along with other kids or do schoolwork.

Sure, I was smart enough, I guess. I would read the textbooks and anything I could get my hands on, when school classes started, and then just ace any tests or classwork. But I couldn’t pay attention to the droning teachers, most of whom were minimum-wage zombies that only worked in poor town USA because they could barely qualify as teachers and didn’t want to work for Union Carbide, and when school was done, it was DONE. I had more important things to do, like hunting, trying to find patches of raspberries or lambs-quarter to supplement our diet or trade, tending or butchering animals, or even trying to copy some of the crafts in my dog-eared Time-Life book ‘back to basics’ or the Boy Scout’s handbook from the 40s.

The problem with being spectrum, is not that you are not emotional. Psychopathy or sociopathy was just ignorant. You have emotional responses just fine. In fact, more than fine. When you have an emotional response, it tends to be overwhelmingly powerful. That, and you have a tough time recognizing emotional responses in other people, because they don’t tend to match what YOU feel, so they are all wrong.

High-function types learn coping mechanisms. We learn to squish our emotions down into a ball and lock them away, and they fade quickly once whatever caused them is gone. We intellectually try to learn facial expressions, and analytically memorize as much of other people’s social cues as we can. And then we try to fake it. Or we get a football helmet and spend our days getting better acquainted with a dented corner to keep the emotional stimulation to a minimum.

Ever hear of uncanny valley? That’s where someone tries to fake something realistically, like with computer graphics, and it looks realistic enough, but there are tiny cues that just scream ‘wrong’ to observers. The picture is too sharp, the face doesn’t do micro-expressions right. The teeth are too defined. It’s usually not even conscious, they cannot point at what is wrong, it’s just there.

Well, when you spend most of your time squelching tons of inappropriate emotional responses, and the rest of it faking what other people were feeling, and you had very little ability to otherwise be social, You tend to give everyone around you that uncanny valley feeling.

This meant that no matter how good-looking you were, girls would avoid you like the plague because you set off that creepy stalker serial killer vibe. Not all girls, but the ones that were interested were either absolute ditzes or wore black lipstick, shaved their heads, and spent their evenings cutting grooves in their thighs or writing bad poetry about suicide and Satan.

Not that that mattered. Sure, sex with girls was fun, and I had done it a few times with aforementioned ditzes and cutters, sometimes they were the same thing, but I could take it or leave it.

For boys, though, it was different. It made them mad. It didn’t help that by junior high I had already had a growth spurt and towered over the teachers. It didn’t help that I worked my ass off at home, and the only elective physical education I could tolerate was weightlifting. There was something cathartic about lifting heavy shit until your muscles almost gave out, and by the time I hit high school, there was a reason cutters and ditzes overlooked or were attracted to the creepy vibe.

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When you get into fights constantly with guys that were trying to ‘make you right’ or ‘prove a point’, you expand that squash-down-emotions thing into a sort of meditative exercise. A lot of people, when the adrenaline kicks in, experience a feeling of sort of slowed-down time. When you take control of your own brain as a spectrum does, you do that every time a fist swings at your face.

I was bigger than almost everyone else. When I fought back, I was much larger and more muscular, and all of the blame always devolved onto me, as the ‘bully’. It didn’t help that when I let my emotions loose during a fight, I rampaged, losing all control of my body and laughing, screaming, and crying as I pounded whatever it was that caused me to lose it.

Thus the zone. I hear a lot of us can do the same thing. It’s not much, but when a fist is headed for your face, it all seems to slow down a little. You don’t react any faster, it’s not like a cool superpower where you stop time, you just have time to push down your emotions and instinctive responses, notice what is happening, and decide on your best course of action.

In high school, my physical electives were weight training and a skinny guy who taught something called Capoeira. He was the coach, and also taught physical electives, but I think he surprised the principal by teaching dancing and Martial arts as the electives. He was one of two black teachers at our school and was from someplace with musical speech patterns and a propensity for smoking pot, but there was no way they would fire a minority teacher, and he was a really good teacher if a really bad football coach.

The zone was kind of like meditation, and I used it to try and avoid any fights. I didn’t want to hurt anyone, and I could! So, big guy, strong, scary, and creepy, but if you swing at him, he won’t do anything… he will either let you hit him or dodge and run away.

Junior high and high school were very exciting times. High school was better, though, because Mister Louis ranted at me for a while about letting bullies make me ‘their bitch’ so the very next shrimpy guy that threw a punch to prove their manliness at me got his shoulder dislocated and accidentally fell down the handicapped ramp for about 30 feet. A few weeks of suspension later, and a few stern talking to’s, I was clear of fights for a few more years before I dropped out of school, got a GED, and joined the Navy… as far away from the mountains and hollers of Appalachia as I could get.

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Time seemed to slow a little as I forced the panic down and really took stock. I didn’t think I was hallucinating. I had hallucinated once when they had tried to get me to take some kind of weird pill like they stuff into boys nowadays by the handful to stop them from acting like boys, and this didn’t feel the same.

There was no waviness, no weird indecision, and no misplaced convictions. I was in pain, but my mind was clear, and my eyesight was sharp… far sharper than I had ever possessed before. I could see badly-fitted stone bricks fifty feet away as sharply as if I were gazing at them from two feet away, and the bodies next to me were just as clear.

It was my body that was wrong. I had blue skin, much like the bodies piled near me, I had three toes and a claw on the back of my feet, broader, thicker, and longer toes than I remembered. I had scales here and there, as well as tufts of blue feathers on the bottoms of my forearms and wrists and at the backs of my calves, as well as on my head and shoulders and the top of my chest and a light downy layer covering up what I hoped were my boy bits. It was similar to where thicker hair would grow on my human body.

My hands had three fingers and a thumb, but that felt natural, and pressed against the stony floor behind my back was a tail, a thick, heavy thing that extended from the bottom of my spine over my butt, getting scalier until it reached the sharp tip. It extended almost a foot past the bottoms of my feet.

Inside my mouth, my tongue felt teeth. Sharper than I was used to in front, but I still had grinding molars at the back, and I think my tongue was longer than I was used to and wider.

Taking stock, maybe I was hallucinating, or in a coma or something. Fear and panic raged away behind the walls I had stuffed them behind, but fear and panic almost never helped, and as I considered things analytically, they started to fade a little.

First, I had a bad injury. That was going to suck. Based on the stench and a stream of disgusting, polluted water with floating bits in it nearby, as well as the dampness in the air and darkness, I was in some kind of sewer or underground dumping ground.

If I was in a coma or hallucinating, nothing I could do would make that go away. Everything felt real, so I might as well treat it like it was real. My pain implied that slapping or pinching myself would be pointless, and... I don't remember ever smelling anything like this in a dream before.

Whatever the pile of bodies was, they were not from Earth. They sorta resembled monitor lizards, but monitor lizards don’t have an obvious bipedal stance of a humanoid, and they were not blue and feathered. So either I was not on Earth anymore, or there was a secret lizard society hidden in an ancient sewer somewhere that used this as their dumping ground.

Honestly, one conjecture was just as likely as the other. I was in a body like the ones in the pile, and I could think and reason, so it seemed that the bodies probably could think and reason too. Was I in some kind of lizard serial killer dumping ground?

I wasn’t particularly religious. Sure, I believed in a God of some sort, because of the Occam’s razor thing. Ever hear of Pascal’s wager? Look it up. Religious morality, in general, helped grease the wheels of human social interaction. So like normal emotions, I faked it. If the religious people were right, following their social rules about not killing each other and stealing each other’s shit, breaking up marriages with cheating, avoiding lies and that kind of stuff cost me almost nothing and assured me a place in an afterlife.

On the other hand, if I was wrong, when I died it wouldn’t matter what I did. It was like getting a free lottery ticket. Sure, it might not win, but you stood to gain a lot if it did. The religious thoughts came because I had to wonder if I was in an afterlife for evil jerks. Maybe I hadn't joined the right religion or something.

Looking more closely at the bodies, I noticed that most of them had terrible breaks, broken necks, or impacts where they had died. I looked up and there was a hole in the rock ceiling, a very very long hole, so deep that I could not actually see the top.

It looked like they might have been tossed in the hole, and died when they either hit one of the narrow walls of the hole on the way down or on impact. Maybe this body had been tossed the same way, but it had gotten lucky, landing on a soft enough surface, the bodies beneath it, to survive the fall… and not hitting anything on the way down. The hole was very narrow, so that was a pretty slim chance, but here I was, alive, which meant that a slim chance wasn’t none.

Someone was breaking the first law of robotics, or religions, and killing people. If they could think, feel, and reason, they were people, even if they were not human-type people. I was in a body dump.

I had dropped out of my zone after I’d gotten my emotions under control, and noticed on the far side of the body, there was some kind of goo. It looked like a semitranslucent bit of the wobble slime that little kids love playing with, and it was covering a good chunk of the pile of bodies. Beneath it, I could see through it, the bodies were slowly coming apart, melting and flowing into the thing. The only thing left behind were the bones, and I could tell by the crap at the bottom of the pile of bodies that this was not the first time the blob had come this way. Underneath the bodies, bones were spread widely.

Whatever the refugee from a 50’s horror flick was, it was moving slowly. I didn’t have a fire extinguisher handy and I doubted very much that the claws of my hands or feet or punching it would have much effect on it, so I decided to take the better part of valor and retreat.

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