Blood Rage

1

1. Slimy

It was the year twenty-thirty-two and the beeping of the alarm caused him to wake up in a panic-induced state. The sound of the alarm, although a beep, was sharp, loud, and somehow screeching at the same time. Jeremiah had meant to change the alarm clock for a new one—or no one at all. To put it mildly, Jeremiah found this one to be very annoying, the way it rang sounded as though the makers of the alarm did not want the purchasers of their products to have eardrums because he could swear that his eardrums atrophied every morning from having to listen to the obnoxious alarm clock.

Jeremiah could not comprehend neither the build nor the thought process that had gone into making the alarm clock; the clock’s packaging upon purchase had touted certain features of the product that were programmable but somehow the annoying tone that played every morning persisted no matter how much he tried to change it.

Another curious thing about the clock was Jeremiahcould recall unscrewing the back and removing the brick that powered it on several occasions in the past but it always worked the very next morning. Jeremiahstirred awake, widened his hand, and slammed his palm down on the clock, the dismissal button was so small and so tiny that Isiah couldn’t be convinced that the manufactures of the clock did not want the users to play a game of whack-a-mole every morning.

He slammed his hand against the top and brought it to quiet itself, although the clock had done its duty of waking him up, Jeremiahremained on the bed, his eyes fixed towards the ceiling on top of him. He did not move for a while and kept his eyes trained on the ceiling. He stayed there, unmoving and unthinking before his eyes caught a stain on the ceiling, how did it get there? Jeremiahasked himself. Had one of them played on his bed? It was highly unlikely. He then went on to muse within himself on how the stain could have come about, at that point in time; the case of the stain on the ceiling was his biggest unsolved case. He went on to spend an extra five minutes in bed before giving up on the case.

It was not that the stain on the ceiling was either intriguing or mystifying; it did not look like a person’s head when looked at from an angle. Jeremiah had tried but found the stain on the wall to largely remain the same. The real reason for his bemusement at the stain was that Jeremiah did not want to go to work today. If it had been up to him, he would rather not go to work today or ever again, there was a feeling he got from work that he could not accurately begin to describe. If it were up to him he wouldn’t run about trying to solve cases that did not matter, but it was not up to him if he could or could not go to work. They were expecting another, and Jeremiah found that it was generally not a good idea to cut off his only source of income following what was going to be his wife’s third baby, and his first daughter.

Jeremiah, tired of the stain on the wall, redirected his attention to something else, to someone else. Jeremiah raised his hand above his body and moved it across his side of the bed. The swing of his arm had been an attempt to hug the person he shared his bed with. His hand had not felt anything except for the pillow and the clothing that was the bedsheet, there was no one there.

Where is she? Where did she go to now? He thought to himself. He maintained that position and looked at the wall on the left side. He needed an excuse but he knew he was not going to get one, not today. Jeremiah straightened himself against the bed, looked at the ceiling once more, and pressed himself off the surface he was lying down on. The bed sank in the places where Jeremiah used as support; it began to give off a slight tremble when Jeremiah put the full weight of his arms behind it. The tremble was the beginning of the end for the mattress, Jeremiah thought, it had served its purpose and there was a need for a replacement now.

He climbed out of the bed and into his pair of flip-flops that were lying idly by the side of his bed. He walked away from the bed, wearing the flip-flops that were now busy on both feet. Jeremiah moved forward to the path in front of him, a path that led him past the side stool, the drawer, and into the bathroom.

The bathroom smelt off heavy bleach and disinfectant, the smell reminded him of the morgue in the bureau's compound. For some reason the smell of the room made him think about Dr. Wilson Wilson’s face. Jeremiah shook his head immediately to get the face out of his head and mind. He instead anchored his thoughts onto the bathroom that he was inside. The bathroom in question was the size of five people and could only be stretched to fit half a person into it, it was going to be a tight fit though. Jeremiah walked up to the bathroom sink and picked up the toothbrush by the side of the dish. He began the morning ritual of a slide up and a slide down. The bristles of the toothbrush moved through the top part of his teeth, it wasn’t long before he felt pain after the bristles moved on top of a tooth that had a hole in it. Jeremiah had gotten used to the pain, and it was not that bad anymore, at least that was what he told his wife anytime that she asked. He did this in a bid to stop her from forcing him to go see a dentist. Jeremiah was soon done with the care of his teeth; he ran water over the toothbrush and through his mouth to force out the fluff that opted to stay back in his mouth. His mouth was clear in two cycles of this. He placed the toothbrush back from the stand he got it from, looked up at the mirror in front of him, and looked at his reflection.

Jeremiah Jones was thirty-seven years old, although his face had aged higher than that in the past few years and had aged roughly too. The worry line on his forehead stood out even more prominently now, and for some reason, it almost seemed as if he had gotten even darker in the past years. Jeremiah Jones didn’t worry about his skin getting darker, what he worried about were the gray hairs as they tended to stand out when contrasted against black skin, which his skin was. He had noticed the gray hairs on his head begin to surface earlier in the year. He had plucked out three strands from his head the day before and went on to pick two more as he stood in the mirror.

There were also rings around his eyes; he had to keep a late one at the office yesterday. Jeremiah found that he was not far off from mutating into a zombie of sorts especially when the job that he did was considered. Jeremiah Jones was an FBI agent working as a detective in the violent crimes division. The hours were long and the pay was piss s**t. It had not always been this way for him and the other agents that worked there, the advent of the conscience gene had sent their salaries plummeting into the ground. The pay of the job was s**t, but it was a pay nevertheless, and the FBI now, everyone knew came with less crime at least not the violent sort.