Tiny Horror

The warehouse was a carcass, a hollowed-out god of the industrial age that had been left to rot in the grey Detroit rain. Deke knelt in the gloom of the sub-basement, his world reduced to the beam of a dying flashlight and the dull, orange-brown glint of the prize. For months, he had been obsessed with the copper. It was the only thing that made sense: the weight of it in his pack, the sharp, metallic smell that stayed in his skin, the way it could be stripped, burned, and traded for a few more hours of quiet in his veins.

His fingers were raw, the skin split into red topographic maps of pain, but he didn't feel the cold. He felt the "itch"—the frantic, burrowing parasite in his blood that demanded he strip this giant of its veins. With a grunt, he hauled on a trunk of wiring. It groaned, a sound of metallic agony, before giving way with a wet snap that sent him tumbling into a pool of stagnant, oil-slicked water.

As he sat in the filth, gasping, Deke looked at his reflection in the black water. He was fifty-two, but the face staring back was a ruin of deep-carved canyons and yellowed eyes. He remembered a version of himself that wore a clean uniform, a man who had a mortgage and a wife who smelled like lavender soap. That man had died in a factory accident fifteen years ago. It started with a crushed leg, a prescription for oxycodone that never ended, and a slow, agonizing slide into the "lean." He had traded his life for a chemical peace, piece by piece, until there was nothing left but the scavenger.

The tale continues...