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+----- Thread: The Mercury Man (/thread-1131.html)
The Mercury Man - yoursavior - 06-30-2008
Contains some nudity (not much) towards the end, so if that offends you, you may not want to read it.
Today’s the day, I thought to myself as I watched my target go into the Medical Supply store.
I've been sitting out at front of this store for three weeks, trying to decipher between the potheads and the ill, seeing if there was one suitable target for me to rob so I could get my clients more drugs, and me more money. I had finally found one.
I had seen the man a week ago, staggering out of the store with four overstuffed grocery bags. At the time I thought nothing of it, but when I saw him the next day walking out of the store with four more bags, I knew something was awry. He came back every day, purchasing the same thing, and slowly, I began to realize what was happening; he must’ve been buying hundreds of bottles of pills to mix in with whatever drug he was making!
I pulled a cigarette out of the carton in my jacket pocket and lit it up. “Today’s going to be a good day”.
“Um...I would like purchase thermometers”, the odd man said as he placed them on the table.
The cashier stared at him, then down at the thermometers piled up on the table. He sighed and began to scan them.
The odd man looked around, smiling. Everyone in line was staring at him.
“That'll be seventy dollars and sixty nine cents”, the cashier said.
The man turned back away from the line to face the cashier. “Here my card”, he said as he handed it to him.
“Just sign right there on that pad”, the cashier told him in a most monotonous voice. He did.
“Eugene Hatter”, he said as he looked up from the pad, giving the cashier a smile.
The cashier shoved the bag full of thermometers at him and pointed at the door. “Thank you, Mister”, he said as he was shooed out of the store.
As he approached his car, he saw some kids keying it. “Hey kids, stop hurt her!” he screamed. They looked up, saw him, and ran. “I hope learned their lessons”, he said to himself as he got into his car.
“Show time”, I said as the man's muffler started exerting exhaust.
As the man pulled out of the parking lot, I pulled out a car behind him. As I stopped at an intersection, I turned on the radio.
“And in other news”, the news caster announced, “Mercury has been claimed to cause a new form of skin cancer, which causes blotches and mini tumors all across the body. It has also been liable for causing cases of severe mental retardation after several successful testings, including a test on the late Eugene Hatt-”. I turned the station too some light rock.
When am I ever going to be in contact with mercury? I thought as I threw my cigarette out the window.
As the man passed the city limits, it started to drizzle, and then transformed into a full-fledged thunderstorm. As he passed a couple of farmhouses, the lights streaming out from the windows suddenly flashed and went out. Then the radio reception died. “Must be a outage”, the man said as he continued driving on down the road, the only sounds audible over the pouring rain the squeaking of the window wipers and rattling of thermometer tubes.
He pulled into his driveway and pressed the garage button. It didn't work. He pressed it again, and it still didn't work. He pondered the predicament for a while, and then pressed it again. It still didn't work. He grabbed the bag of thermometers, opened the door, and ran through the heavy downpour up to his door. He fished through his pocket for his house keys. “Got 'em!” he said as he opened the door and went inside.
It was around midnight when I pulled into his driveway. I was wearing a black ski mask, a heavy trench coat, and a pair of fishing trousers and boots. I got out of my car. The fog around the man’s house was almost too thick to see through. I carefully shut my car door and made my way around to the back of the house.
I looked in through a window. I saw the man sitting at a table, his back facing me, with buckets upon buckets sitting all over the room. Every couple of minutes I heard the sound of breaking glass. After about an hour he got up and moved the buckets into his freezer, and then left the room. Definitely concocting some kind of drugs, I thought as I stalked him around the house, glancing in through windows to see what room he'd stop in. He ended up stopping in a bathroom. As I peered in through the window, I saw him lighting some candles that were around his bathtub. Then he started to strip.
When he took off his shirt, I saw that his back was horribly deformed, with bumps and splotches of red covering it's entire surface.
I started coughing, decided I had spent enough time out in the rain, and ran around to his front door. Jesus, what’s this guy on? I thought when I saw that the keys to the house were still in the lock. I carefully opened the door, and as I closed it, I slipped and slammed it.
I froze. When I heard no other sound than the pounding of rain, I continued.
As I walked into his living room, something caught my eye.
“That’s some nice silverware”, I said as I pulled a bag out from under my coat. I carefully placed the silverware at the bottom of the bag and continued rummaging through his living room.
When I had done a thorough search for valuables in his living room, I started in the kitchen. The room was pitch black, so I pulled out my flashlight. When I turned it on, I didn't dare to take another step. Broken glass was laying everywhere. It was on the counter, in the sink, in a fruit bowl, everywhere. Jackpot, I thought to myself, his drugs must be around here somewhere. I tiptoed around the shards of glass to search his kitchen
As I began looking through some knives, I heard a dripping sound. I walked over to the sink. It was completely dry.
As I began to search some cabinets, lightning struck down outside a mere 20 feet from the house and the whole room turned a blinding white. Blinded, I stumbled back and fell down onto the linoleum tiles of the kitchen floor in a huge puddle of metallic liquid.
I tried to get up, but the liquid was flowing over and constricting my body like my cars seatbelt system. The dripping sound was nearer, and I turned to face the freezer. Silvery liquid was oozing out of it.
When I finally managed to get back up, I turned towards the freezer. The door was twitching a little, and liquid was leaking out of the sealant on the sides of it. Curiosity got the best of me, and I opened the fridge a crack. A little bit of liquid flowed out of the bottom of the freezer and the steam coming out of the below freezing fridge into the ninety eight degree room was thicker than the fog outside the house.
After the steam cleared, I got a good look at the contents inside. There were buckets. Tons of buckets filled with silver liquid. As I pondered what kind of drug this must have been, the liquid started pulsating, and then began to rise. Startled, I jumped back. The liquid started pouring forth from the fridge, and in one robotic motion, formed a giant blob of mercury. As the blob began to grow in surface size, I hightailed it out of the room. I ran down a hallway and, in a frantic effort, ran into the first room I saw. I stood there with the door closed, trying to catch my breath.
BOOM!
Lighting struck down outside near the house, lighting up the entire room.
I looked around the room. There were thermometers. Hundreds of them, edge to edge, corner to corner, around the entire room. Lightning flashed again. The light reflected off the hundreds of ounces of suspended mercury, turning the room a dull metallic color.
I spotted a chair on the opposite side of the dimly lit room. I walked over, sat down, and closed my eyes to rest. Just then I heard a popping sound. I just dismissed it. A couple of minutes later I heard more popping sounds. I opened my eyes. Across the room were empty thermometers. “What the hell?” I said, “Those were full just a second ago”. And then I saw it, on the floor sliding in from under the door. The liquid flowed silently across the laminated wood floor, slowly beginning to encompass the entire room.
POP!
I looked across the room. A thermometer that had once been full was excreting mercury from the cap, and more began to follow.
POP!
I hopped from the chair, landing a few feet at front of the queer liquid.
POP!
I started rushing towards the door, hopping over stools, books, and de-walled paintings to get there.
POP!
I threw open the door, and was welcomed with a wave of mercury.
BOOM!
Lightning lit up the hallway. I stared down the hallway into a window down at the end. The hallway walls were packed to the brim with thermometers. Almost all of them were empty.
I looked down at the ground. The liquid was almost up to my knee. I started throwing open doors trying to find a way out.
I opened one to the right of me and ran inside. I ended up tripping down a small flight of stairs.
As I got up, I saw a waterfall of liquid streaming down the steps. I backed up, wanting to stay as far away from the animated toxin as I could, but ended up walking right into a collateral gas line. I turned around, and saw it was bent and bruised in multiple places and was ejaculating puffs of petroleum.
I tried turning the gas knob, hoping to limit the flow of gas, but I ended up making it worse. Petroleum was spraying everywhere, and was inter-mixing with the mercury. I gave up on trying to fix the problem and turned to run up the stairs. The liquid in the boiler room was almost up to my chest as I got out of the doorway, and it was a welcomed relief to be in a shallower area.
I stumbled over to the door across the hall and threw it open. Nothing in the room but more thermometers.
As I trudged down the hallway through a vacuum of mercury, I opened up the door closest to the window. I gasped at the horror that lay before me.
An old, nude man was laying in an empty bathtub. He looked like a skeleton, with no fat or muscle on his body. The dim glimmer from the candlelight was casting queer shadows all over his body, enhancing his features, causing him to look more like a zombie than someone in the ranks of the living. His eyes were sunken into the back of his head, and his face was blotchy and covered with acne. Mercury was leaking profusely out of his nose, mouth, and ears. The rest of his body was covered with a weird rash and bumps the size of golf balls.
He started gurgling, and began to raise his arm towards me, but then he went limp. His arm fell and hit the bathtub faucet. Mercury started gushing out of it. I backed up and fell into his shower. I closed the shower door, hoping to keep the mercury out, but it sept in through cracks in the shower door. The shower was quickly filling up with mercury, and I couldn't see the handle through the opaque liquid. Fearing drowning, I smashed my elbow into the door, shattering both the shower window and my elbow. I ran out of the bathroom as quickly as I could. In the frantic craze I was in to leave the room, I knocked over the candles set up in the bathroom. I turned around. Almost every towel in the bathroom was beginning to spark.
I ran out into the hallway. The mercury and petroleum that was in the boiler room was now quickly spreading down the hallway. I looked at the entrance I had tripped down. The room was completely filled up and letting into the hallway.
Then I heard it. First gurgling, then hissing, then the crackle of an open flame. I turned around. A fire was winding down the hallway on the petroleum trails in the mercury. Worse yet, the mercury that was evaporating was letting off a flammable gas. I turned and began to run for my life through the waist deep river of liquid metal, away from the locomotive fire shooting down the hallway.
I ran through the living room and into the front hall were the front door was. I tried opening the door, but my hands just flailed around as I began to loose sense in my arms. I turned around and looked. The fire was spreading across the room, licking anything that was flammable and turning the house into a hellish nightmare. After a couple of seconds of fidgeting with the doorknob, I managed to open it. I started to run, looking behind me at the massive fire that was engulfing the house, when, WHAM! I ran right into a wall and fell over. I started choking on mercury, and I got up as quickly as I could.
I felt around. I had run into a coat closet. I began to panic. This is the end, I thought as the fire began picking up it's pace, gaining more momentum each time it swallowed anything capable of fueling it. I dashed out of the closet, the fire nicking my jacket as I rushed by, singeing and disintegrating the seam that was running across it's backside.
I ran into the kitchen and turned on the sink, hoping to get some water to put the fire out, but what came out was nothing short of disappointing. Mercury was spitting out of the sink faucet. I turned around and saw the fire creeping around the corner.
The flame crawled underneath the freezer, and then, like a geyser, shot up and engulfed it. The thin plastic lamination on the freezer was peeling off, and the handle caught aflame. As the flame jetted in through the freezer door, I knew I was done for.
I sighed, opened my jacket pocket, and took out a cigarette.
RE: The Mercury Man - mors ontologica - 06-30-2008
You can write pretty well at least, but I wasn't particularly gripped by the storyline. It just wasn't believable. x.x
I did quite like the last line though. : D
RE: The Mercury Man - yoursavior - 07-01-2008
It is kind of out there. Thanks for the compliment, though.
RE: The Mercury Man - mors ontologica - 07-03-2008
You should write another. ^.^ I do like your style.