Heart Eater's Garden

A paramedic once stole the heart riding on ambulance 03, locals often mention. The people living around the near-devastated pockets of city have many common folklore, and some are ridicules and others are straight out asinine and some are worth telling. The paramedic folklore starts differently depending on how told the story. Most start by saying the ambulance 03 crashed. One reason is that a tank carrying acid lost control down down a hill and the ambulance either ran off the road or was swated from the road. One old woman started by saying that he never was a paramedic- but a mafia professional impersonating a paramedic. Whatever the case, the locals each sharpened their gazes, and made clear to us in a very different tone that they knew “what really happened that night”, and they pointed to the dark pocket in the recesses of slumping buildings. “The paramedic stole no heart that night...”

                  The paramedic walked down the sidewalk unaware of how near misfortune waited her. The cooler strained the joints in her hand. The weight within swelled. Pressure drove nails between her elbows. Wet wind hurled black leaves from dripping rooftops. Cat eyes watched from a dark strip between the street light pavement and yardside glow. A mugger blew on his finger tips. He wrapped a pipe in fabric and took a deep breath. The footsteps of his target melted into the slime coated sidewalk.

           The mugger wiped hair from his face and hurried to keep him. The target walked thirty feet away and paid no mind to the rapid footsteps. The mugger licked his lips and held tight to his weapon. He passed by three houses, one with no windows, one with no doors, and one with a stone porch guarded by empty flower pots. Two hounds barked from behind a short chain link fence. Merrymakers within the home partied the night away, their windows concealed by flowered curtains and doors locked tight. Ten feet away, the mugger felt his blood tingle, his stomach harden, the same feeling as when the judge ordered a restraining order against him. His teeth grinded until they cracked. The target turned around at the block’s end, crossed his arms. “Well?” he said with narrow defiance.

The mugger rose his weapon. “Empty your pockets.”

“I have nothing for you. Go home.”

“No- give me what you got.”

“I remember you. You’re that motorcycle dealer. You tried to rip me off on an Off-Roader.”

A car’s headlights flooded the street with illuminated exhaust. Deep scars ridged the mugger’s face. “I sold good machines...”

“I’m in a hurry.”

     The Mugger dug his heels into the sidewalk, rose his pipe, but his target moved faster than his malnourished bones and muscles ever could, and before the mugger understood that he’d been outperformed, the target had him bent backwards, spinning his hips, sending him to the ground with his arm still in tact- until he bit the pavement. The Paramedic held onto his arm as he fell, and before he landed his joints twisted- once his ribs smacked the ground all the air broke from his lungs, and the joints in his wrist, elbow and shoulder each snapped free.

“Instead, you’re going to give me what you have.” The paramedic rifled through the mugger’s pockets, who groveled in a circus of shame and agony. He found nothing, but for the pipe. “Your pants. I’m taking them.”

“Not my pants!”

“Yep. They’re mine now.”

He peeled them free and slung them over his shoulder.

“One hour left! One hour-one hour...”

“Doesn’t matter anymore. Come with me, and you’ll get your pants back.” 

A shadow arrowed through the street light fog. A human gargoyle crossed under a halo of light and pushed through a fence coated in dead pine bush.

“….Your time is up... now.”

         The paramedic reached for a flashlight on his hip. The intruder stepped into a ray of light. His beady, shark sharp eyes- and round divet scars in his patchy cheeks. Ancient wanted posters came to mind. “Don’t move with that hear. Once I’m through-”

The mugger pulled a wound up stack of cash from a cavity in his cloaks.

“It’s all here...”

      The intruder swiped it away- counted it. “Just as I suspected. Stolen. I’ll be back for the rest. Soon. Maybe sunup. And about the heart, if you don’t mind…”

The intruder pried away his metal buttons and opened his coats. A worms and blacked vessels wound from a cavity in his chest.

       The paramedic shook until the cooler dropped from her grasp. The intruder tore the cooler away and looted he contents. He spun around, crouching in the dark. His flesh fizzled and steamed, staggering into dark portals between lifeless homes.

       The paramedic lifted the mugger up, smacked him hard across the face, than held him up again. “I have a secret to show you.”

       The mugger’s thighs shivered as wet cold slid wires of sensation up his body, into his empty stomach, though his blackened lungs and rotten liver.

“Please, understand, someone is after me and if I don't-”

“I have a solution for that problem. Just come with me, and all of your problems will end.”

      They walked together. The target gripped the mugger’s good arm as the disjointed limb swung back and forth like a chicken’s broken neck. The night sky developed into a haze of orange and lunar colored street lights. A single contorted tree trunk extend from an iron tile in the sidewalk, half of its limbs cut off to avoid the hanging power line, and the other half shrunken by illumination gas. A branch snapped and a squirrel came down with it.

        The mugger looked to the cooler. The Paramedic still still carried it.

“Want to see what’s inside?” The paramedic shook it and let the mugger peek. Cold air escaped, and for a brief second he saw the vessels and tubes of a heart but as his pupils scoped in the dark, the heart and its carnage sunk into canvas shade. The paramedic snapped the lid shut, and patted his new companion on the back. The mugger pulled as his scum strained facial hairs. Many of the friends he made in the streets stopped showing up to his place, only to turn up somewhere else with their bodies intact, but ribs broken apart, their hearts torn from their bodies.

“but I have offspring!”

“I’m probably doing them favors.”

The endless shower of highway drones emerged as the houses thinned to brick buildings and alleyway playgrounds. They turned down a curved sidewalk that dipped below a dripping overpass where burping shadows cackled behind tents. Four bums leaned against a fence reaching from the overpass roof to the dirt below. A shelter warning them to keep straight heads steamed with watery soup only a few blocks down. The mugger cried for their assistance, and they alerted to the cries- until the paramedic called them with elated whistles.

“Ted, Bill, henry-” she knew them all by name. “How’s the new kidney? Is your back feeling better?”

They shared a good laugh, and she shared with them each ten dollars.

They left the humming shade of the overpass and came to a razor wired fence separating grain elevator tracks from the rest of the city. They followed the border of the fence until they found a spot of eroded earth through which the target pushed the mugger through, then went in after.

        They walked over the rails until the grain silos looked like pen caps and the urban glow looked like halos over glowing statues of ancient heroes. The sky darkened and tiny sparkles emerged from the smoggy skyline.

        As they went further, more and more sparkles poked from the sky like invading aircraft. The mugger forgot his numb legs and the swelling of his arm like a sock stuffed with lint. The enforcer looking for his payment retreated to the back of his mind, the restraining order meant nothing.

The sky darkened even more when they slid through the back fence bordering a brick bridge over a pond shimmering with silver ripples across an obsidian surface. The world sounded quiet- a stillness never before discovered by the mugger. No cars, no dogs, no people- their sights and smells, and noises dead to the arch they hiked across. A panic overcame him. The absence of population struck him like alcoholic withdrawal- All around- a ring of urban towers barricaded them like glowing ghosts. Only sinking voids smoked in the shadows besetting him.

The ground rolled like gravel. The mugger looked down to see pieces of rubble and debris filled the path they walked down. All around them, broken bricks and fractured beams. They walked over piles of fallen structure, past skeletons smashed into the ground, Between rows of abandoned cars left to rust in empty lots., then stepped into an alley with walls suffocated by ivy vines that spread across the building like veins of green blood. Leaves and tangles caught their feet. Water dripped on their heads from above. They stood tighter together as the growth filled the alley. When thorns and branches obstructed the forward way, the strange target merely cut his palm with a box opener, and bled over the plants. The foliage uncoiled and the target pulled the mugger through. He dragged his feet, let his body limp until the target dropped him to the nestles on the ground. The mugger looked up at the flowers blossoming from holes and fractures in the walls. The building seemed to bend and wave as the stars and clouds swirled to grieve or laugh depending which eye he closed. He saw them crawl up branches stretching from broken windows. They breathed not with lungs but through pockets in their cuticles. Without eyes, they leaned forward, their nostrils thrust from slits in the middle of their head, and a dozen tiny hooks unfurled from their mouths. Water didn’t drip, but chlorophyll nectar from between each rung of their curling dentures.

The alley opened. The mugger beheld a stone lot broken apart by leafy stems and overlapping roots. The heads of foliage, bushes died and rose and sunk, crawled through cracks in distant walls. the moon shone. Particles of moisture shined silver. Yellow and green plumes of spore dust suspended in the air like cotton tails. The mugger sneezed until his nose swelled shut.

The paramedic left the mugger alone as he stepped into the jungle breaking from the urban decay. A small creature stood from the moss coating. The mugger felt blood in his dislocated joints again, but he heard the same soil and wood clipping as the creature before him at his back, and overhead dangling from ropes of growth connecting the fallen buildings. The flesh between his toes itched and burned. He looked down and saw the fibers of his shoes curling under faint heat waves. The paramedic sunk into the green gusts of abiotic vapor.

The mugger grabbed a vein with his good arm. It broke and = hit the ground. More and more bricks slid behind the walls. Venomous hisses and rolling eyes seeped into the alley alcoves. He sneezed again, his clothing more covered in the pungent pollen. He kicked and slapped with his free arm, but the more he fought the faster the vines constricted and dragged him further inward.

The enforcer looked all over, but didn’t recover the rest of the debt. His boss didn’t care about the lowlife, but he needed an answer as to what happened to the man that dealt with them in the past. He weighed almost three hundred pounds and never spoke unless utterly necessary or to his wife or son. His knuckles red and callused, his neck like an owl's. He crossed an alleyway, when he heard guttural calling from within.

A destitute staggered from the alley mouth, his hand over his heart, blood seeping from between his fingers. The man collapsed onto the enforcer, and begged him for help. The enforcer parted his lips, and recognized the man he wanted, stepping back and letting him fall to the pavement where blood blossomed around him and sunk into the jagged cracks of the sidewalk. Drops of blood lead into the alley. The enforcer took out a utility light and followed the drops over the trash bags and torn boxes. He listened to slushing rips, and over sweetened gnashing, wettening clasps dripping blood in the tarnished niche of the  alley way. A creature with the hands of a saw, and a mouth of a dozen hooks gnawed on the loose fibers of the pulmonary valve. The heart kept beating. When the enforce saw its pulsating chords he stared deeper into the exposed vessels. The creature, coated in moss and leaves glistening with crimson, held out its dinner for the enforcer to share. He took the warm, throbbing heart in his hands. The howl of a forbidden relic stalked the alley.

Something grinded against the alley floor slime. They plowed over the refuse and waste, bleeding and near blinded, breathless, but without fatigue, without the closest sensation of exhaustion. The paramedic crawled into the alley, bleeding, her clothes soaked in crimson, one leg tendons and vessels.

The enforcer watched for a short time in the narrow strand of light from the end of the alley way. But circuits sparked, and the city’s power dimmed until at last breaking to full darkness.

The heat beat against the enforcer’s palms, and its blood leaked between his fingers. He took his first bite into the tender flesh.