Table of Contents

• Home
• Introduction
• Where Goths Come From - Neef
• The Watcher - Hobbes
• The Resurrection Shuffle - Barbarella
• Cassandra - Cosey Mo
• Drunken Old Bastard - Sandro
• Alcohol - Trayce
• Shadows - Entrippy
• Entropy - Kage-Ryu
• Is There A Point - Trajik
• Whispers - Kitsune
• Confessional - Sandro
• Garden - Entrippy
• Radio - Cam
• Cold Spell - Nikolai
• Slices - Neef
• A Bottle of Something Strong - Jraff
• The Light Fades - Tim
• Rain - Tim
• Self Help - Gothic Gallae
• Cato - Trajik
• Addiction/Fragment - Trayce
• Heal Thyself - Nikolai
• Shattered - Hobbes
• Travelling Song - Solitaire
• Distance - Stranger
• Legacy - Stranger

Heal Thyself

I found the car jack that I'd brought last time, wedged it under the end of the block and lifted it to about knee-height. While the virus in Horowitz's body began repairing him - building a human body out of a half-inch-thick mat of piebald brown pulp - I sat back and watched.

I'd never asked Horowitz about the details; they would have been beyond my understanding anyway. The results were what counted: the virus he'd invented repaired damage to the human body. Once infected, if you cut off a finger, it'd grow back. If you cut off a leg, you'd bleed until you lost consciousness and then it'd grow back over a period of twenty-four hours. If someone hacked you into small pieces with a scimitar, the pieces would try to grow back together over the next week; if they couldn't join up, they'd try to rebuild your whole body. The virus would use any spare tissues to rebuild vital organs; once that was gone, it'd use any organic matter to hand: trees, animals, food, anything.

If you cut off someone's head, the body would grow a new head - complete with blank brain - and the head would try to grow a new body, somewhat limited by the lack of tissues from which to build. Severed heads became a common sight; lying in gutters, skin stretched tightly over the skull, starving with tiny, rat-like bodies attached to the neck stump. There was usually a fully-grown body lying nearby, expression blank, arms slowly writhing in some kind of spinally-directed Tai Chi. Eventually they got hungry, too.

If you sliced a person right down the middle, both halves grew back; you ended up with two identical people - one with no left-brain functions, and one with no right-brain functions.

All of the variations were tried in the first few years while society fell apart. There was a man who'd been impaled on a street-sign pole in the middle of the city, early on; he was still there, the pole going through his pelvis and ribs. He'd become a kind of mascot. People occasionally fed him, although no one tried to help him down. Just outside of town there was a wheat silo full of hundreds of copies of some high fashion model; a gang had dragged her there, cut her up into bite-sized chunks and tossed them in. Some of the pieces rejoined. All of them absorbed the wheat and grew back. The people who'd kidnapped her hung around the top of the silo throwing grenades down onto the bodies as they grew. Eventually, all of the wheat had been used up and the silo was neck-deep in moaning, clawing, starving women. I heard that some guy jumped down in there, 'just to see what it'd be like', and he never came out. I'd heard that a lot of people had followed him.

The puddle that was Horowitz was almost human-shaped now. I could see lumpy bones forming along an axis running from the head down to the pelvis. The head was almost head-shaped. For some reason, that part always grew back first, which was either a blessing or a curse, depending on how you looked at it. If, for example, your body was impaled on a street-sign and was still reporting pain signals to the brain, it was a definite minus. I nudged Horowitz' head with my foot; he tried to speak, but his lungs hadn't grown back properly. I kicked his face, breaking his nose, and waited.

He'd obviously given little or no thought to what the virus would do once released. Women didn't dare get pregnant because the foetus had its own unique genetic make-up, which the virus then tried to realise fully. The results were put on public display as a warning. In recent years it had become an assassination technique to arrange for a target to eat some human flesh, which then tried to grow back inside the victim. The two strains of virus would fight a battle that could never be won. The result looked like one human body thrust through the middle of another, both partly alive.

Horowitz moaned and managed to lift his head up to look at me. I waved, grinned and casually broke his newly healed collarbone with the axe. I liked the sound of breaking bone so I worked down one side, breaking his arm in six places. He opened his mouth and tried to scream, but didn't quite have the wind for it. "Changed your mind yet, Horowitz?" I asked. His lips worked frantically as he tried to speak. "Take your time. You've got forever, after all."

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