This happened a few years ago. I know its really long. But it was really painful. Thanks for reading guys.


Christoph is shouting from the driver seat. Skully, having twisted his body around from the front seat, is pummeling my face as hard as he can. All three of us are drunk. The fraternity brothers at the house we just cleaned had been force feeding us beer. A 30 pack between 3 freshmen is a little much, and as a result the cleaning job we were assigned did more harm than good.
Christoph turns around before we get to the window to pay and asks if I’m alright. He flinches when he looks at me, but I’m so drunk I can’t tell how bad a shape my face is in. I tell him I’m fine. Christoph nods, and turns back around. Skully doesn’t seem to like the idea that I’m okay even after such a severe beating and as we pull up to the window he turns around again and starts throwing more punches. Confused and drunk, tears start rolling down my swollen cheeks. I hear the lady in the window give Christoph our total while I try to absorb my drunken buddy’s hits with my arms instead of my face. Christoph hands her a 20 dollar bill and rolls forward, too distracted by the brawl in the truck to wait for his change. Skully stops for a moment and looks around as his Ford F-250 slowly creeps toward the end of the line. Then he looks back at me again, I’ve started sobbing.
“Oh, so you’re gonna cry about it?” He winds up and punches me square in the nose. I fall back from the impact. That one I definitely felt, and my nose, already permanently broken from playing football, feels like its stabbing the insides of my skull.
“Jesus Christ, stop it Skully!” Christoph screams from the front. Skully complies, nodding and repeating that he just had to be sure. I sit back up in the backseat but I’m still crying. We get to the second window to pick up our food. Christoph leans out the window, unrestricted by the seatbelt he refuses to wear, grabs the bag of food, thanks the server, and speeds off. Skully snatches the bag and digs through it like an animal until he finds his burrito. He throws the bag into the backseat.
“What the F*CK was that for?” Christoph asks.
“Yeah, dude, what the F*CK?” I repeat.
Skully comes at me once more. He must hate my voice. I don’t blame him. But this time I grab him by the temples with my left hand and squeeze as hard as I can. This is a dangerous and dirty thing to do. Tightening my grip on the soft spots of his skull, I start punching him in the back of the head as hard as I can. He’s clawing at my left hand trying to get it off his face while I beat him back. Christoph is pleading with me to stop.
“Ok, Ok.” I say, letting go of Skully and sitting back in my seat.
Skully tells me I throw a pretty good punch and rubs the back of his head. I laugh to myself, thinking about how the amount of damage he took is a fraction of what I received. On top of that I think I’ve re-broken the ring finger on my right hand from punching him. Wiping away the wet spots from earlier, I feel hills and mountains popping up all over my face. I glide my fingers over the new topography, poking at the raised flesh, amazed that I can barely feel anything except with my hands.
When we get to his one bedroom apartment, Skully heads straight to the table with the food while Christoph and I take a good look at my face in the bathroom.
“Holy crap dude, are you sure you’re ok?”
I barely recognize the person looking back at me in the mirror. My left eye is swollen, and though I can see out of it, it doesn’t look like I should be able to. The majority of my face is a dark purple, my nose is busted and blue, and my lips are bright red. My teeth are pink from the blood dripping into my mouth. Christoph helps me wash my face off. The soap burns like crazy.
We go back in the other room to eat. Skully is sitting at the table taking his Xanax, using straight rum to help him swallow. Christoph sits down and starts to devour his burrito. I try to follow his lead, but I just can’t force myself to eat. I’m too nauseous. Skully asks me if I’m alright, then laughs and tells me I’m a pretty tough F*CKER.
“You sure did get me pretty good there, Mock. My head is killing me.” He says.
“No. My head is killing me,” I think, maybe out loud.
I give up on eating and go sit in Skully’s leather recliner. I lean back a bit and close my eyes. Stars the color of Christmas lights flash behind my eyelids. I’m falling down a deep hole, spinning as I go. I grab hold of the cool arms of the chair and ground myself. This helps me relax.
“Skully is just wasted again,” I tell myself. “It’s probably a combination of all that beer and the Xanax.” I had always enjoyed Skully’s company; he was pretty entertaining for the most part, even if he could be a crazy asshole. Before I pass out completely, Skully comes over to the chair and tells me to get out of his seat.
“Huh?” I say, barely out of my punched-up drunk sleep.
“I said get the F*CK out my chair,” He smacks me upside the head. I roll out of the recliner onto the floor.
Christoph shoots up out of his seat at the table and tells Skully to go to bed. Skully glares at him then turns, walks into his room, and slams the door. My hero walks over, helps me onto the couch, and tells me to lie down.
“No,” I tell him. “I think I might have a concussion, I’ll just sit up.”
Christoph nods, and asks if I need to go to the hospital. I shake my head. He tells me the recliner will be more comfortable and guides me back to it. I drop into it and put my feet up. Christoph goes to the kitchen to get some ice for my head while I drift off and start swimming in my thoughts again. There’s a crackling noise when I breathe and I feel chunks of what must be phlegm floating around in my lungs. I fall asleep before I know it.
When I wake up, it feels like I’ve slept for an eternity. I hear Skully’s voice and open my good eye to see that the lights are still on. Skully has come out of his room and is arguing with Christoph in the kitchen. I can’t tell what it’s about, but Skully sounds pissed again. I hear a drawer fly out and hit the floor with a crash of metal ware. Christoph is shouting louder than Skully now, telling him to stop. I don’t see it coming when Skully walks up behind the recliner and swings a kitchen knife downward and into my chest.
I’m wide awake now; I scream but can’t hear it. I double over and fall onto the coffee table in front of me. I see Christoph trying to wrestle the knife away from Skully, who is pacing around the room, throwing his arms up in the air and shaking his head. I ignore them and try to breathe. I can manage to take short breaths, but each one feels like another knife entering my chest. My shirt that reads, “I’m really excited to be here” is streaming blood onto the table. I close my eyes only to see the all-too-familiar look of disappointment my parents’ faces. “I’m going to die…”
Now I’m out of the apartment, walking with the help of Christoph who is screaming “Oh my God!” all the way to Skully’s truck. He frantically puts me in the back seat and tells me to hold on for 2 seconds. He runs back into Skully’s apartment and gets back to the car maybe 10 seconds later. I try to call him a liar for taking so long but nothing comes out.
We’re moving now. Christoph tells me he’s going to get me to the hospital and I’ll be ok. I believe him. Before I close my eyes again I see him look back at me for a split second. He’s crying—really crying—like a little kid whose dog just ran away. I feel sorry for him. I want to tell that little kid everything will be ok. “You can always get another dog,” I mumble.
I’ve now reached a point where I’m accustomed to the pain in my lung when I take a breath. I actually almost forget there’s a hole in my chest. I lift my left arm to touch it, and feel a big fluffy towel instead. I run my fingers over it. It goes from being really rough and dry to being warm and moist, then back to dry, and wet again at edge. For some reason, I imagine the American flag.
All the faces of my pledge brothers I met that first semester at college are smiling at me. When I see them I address them by their full names. They call me “Mock” and tell me with wide, confident grins that I’ll be ok. Next I see my high school friends, old girlfriends, and kids from my neighborhood. My neighbors are laughing and talking about the time I fell out of the magnolia tree in the front yard. Back then it seemed like such a long fall, but I didn’t even break anything.
I am about to say goodbye to my parents when something jars me. I open my eyes; we’re still moving but something isn’t right... We aren’t exactly rolling forward—we’re sliding. A terrible shriek fills the car and my heart drops. A second later we crash into the concrete divider at the exit of the freeway. The truck flips up into the air, lands upside down on its side and slides down the off-ramp. Lying on the ceiling of the car, I feel glass everywhere. It feels like God himself just reached down and tried to squeeze the life out of my body. My shoulder hurts more than anything, and the pain is so sharp that I really do forget about the stab wound in my chest. I scream out to Christoph but hear no reply, only the sound of creaking metal, cars flying by on the highway, and eventually sirens.
#
When I awoke next it was to a consistent wheez-click sound. It was daytime and I was lying in a small hospital bed, hooked up to all sorts of monitoring systems and IVs. I tried to look around but couldn’t move my neck. I wanted to shout out to someone but my jaw wouldn’t move, so I started making a whimpering noise. I waited, and tried again, slightly louder this time, but no one came.
I couldn’t actually move my legs, but when I tried I could feel the muscles twitch. Next I checked my feet, then my arms and finally my hands. Everything seemed to have feeling in it still, but I was too sore to move anything. I felt something hard and plastic under my right hand. It was a remote. I mashed all the buttons on it and waited.
“Well, we’re up mighty early today aren’t we Mr. Mock!” I heard a female voice say.
“Mutt… Mutt Mappun’d??” I mumbled.
“Oh, ‘What happened’? Don’t worry about that right now, you just need to rest. Your parents are on their way from Dallas to see you. And don’t you worry, everything will be ok.”
But everything wasn’t ok. Not long after my visit with the nurse, the doctor came in and told me everything that had happened to me. My jaw was broken, my collar bone snapped, I’d suffered a concussion, and my lung was in pretty bad shape, but I’d be ok. He said that after a while it’d be like it never even happened. Other than that I had a fractured tibia on one leg and a fractured ankle on the other, two broken ribs, one broken finger, and a herniated disc in my lower back.
The doctor told me I was lucky to have been asleep and laying down in the backseat of the truck cab when we hit the divider at approximately 55 mph.
“It’s a good thing you were all loosey-goosey,” he told me. “Usually people tense up right before an accident and fight the impact. You just got tossed around like a ragdoll in the backseat.”
We had crashed right in front of the hospital too, just a block or two away down the service road. I later found out the accident was a result of some kids trying to race Christoph down the highway. They had been drunk and saw him weaving through traffic and decided to chase him down. Christoph made contact with their SUV while going 90 miles an hour and lost control of Skully’s truck. Christoph died from a broken neck immediately after the impact. His seatbelt wasn’t on and he was thrown through windshield.
When I heard about Christoph I cried. I didn’t stop seeing his face when I closed my eyes until I had been out of the hospital for a few months. He should have been the one dealing with that pain, and I should have been dead. It wasn’t fair.
Later, I asked about Skully. “He’s not doin so good…” was the answer I got from one of my frat brothers.
Christoph’s shouts that night had aggravated a German Shepherd in the apartment across from Skully’s. The dog barked all night. Skully, who killed a bottle of rum after we left for the hospital, decided he was going to finally shut that damn dog up. He took an aluminum baseball bat, kicked down his neighbor’s door, and bashed its brains in. When the owner got home that night and saw what happened, she already had an idea of who was responsible. When the cops came to Skully’s door, they searched his apartment, found the bloodied bat, and took him away. But the worst part for Skully was that his neighbor was a cop, and the dog was part of the local K-9 unit. Skully had killed an officer of the law and would be gone for a long, long time. When I heard this, I decided I wasn’t going to actively pursue charges. There wasn’t much a little aggravated assault could add to his sentence. And anyways, I had always enjoyed Skully’s company. Now someone in prison could enjoy it even more.

Ho.....ly..........mother..............of christ! That's absolutely insane! You really are one tough son of a bitch o.O

Holy F*CKING hell dude, that's quite a story. Just be glad that it's just a story and not the words inscribed on your gravestone. Hope your life has changed for the positive since then.

Jesus Christ

WHOA.....

You are a gifted writer an inspirational storyteller and have a huge e-peen.

Damn dude, that's scary crazy. I agree with kwang that you are an excellent writer, and that makes an excellent story.

Christoph sounds like an amazing guy, thanks for sharing this story. It's been a while since I've read such an engaging tale.

Holy F*CKING shit man, I thought what my little brother went through was close when I read a few paragraphs but shit kept getting worse. If I had someone like Christoph, he'd be a very great friend or at least a brother to me.

This man^ such a good story and i honestly have no sympathy for skully, so fucked up.

Man needed tequila. Man was not himself when he was drunk, that was a stupid man. <3unfaggable

Wow.

Damn!

Jesus dude! I hope you got your shit together and stopped hanging with people like Skully. I don't care how humorous someone is. If they beat the shit out of me and stabbed me, I'd forget about good times pretty quick.

Great writing, sorry about your friend, he did a good job helping you through that night.

Interesting story, not sure I buy it all. The drunken fight and the accident part might be believable, but a K9 dog is unlikely to go into a barking frenzy because it hears people shouting through the walls and there is no way a drunken moron with a baseball bat would stand a chance against a trained police dog. Alcohol only makes people have super powers in their minds. I know people who can be massively aggressive and still fight like hell after a few shots, but no way anyone kills a bottle of rum off when they are already plastered and is still quick enough to take on a K9.

There is no way a guy walks away from that without major injuries...as soon as he brought the bat up to take a swing that dog would be on him something fierce. K9 dogs are trained to defend themselves from exactly that kind of threat, it is drilled into them from the time they are puppies and the dog's reaction would be instinctive.

The thing with K9 dogs, well at least with the two my neighbor has, is that they are trained like you said, but their training really only kicks in when their handler's uniform is one. My neighbor's dogs are friendly as hell until that uniform is on and it's time to work. Maybe it's just how his are, but yeah input.

Wow. You're a great writer man. One hell of a story. Sorry about your friend... he's a great man.

dude do you think that many sees r going to read that crazy amount of shit
what drugz you on

Wow. I am speechless.

i read it rage. and i honestly felt my heart in my throat. that was messed up. i feel bad that christoph died. he sounded like one hell of a guy. may he find peace.

Thanks for sharing that story. I reread it several times.

Old Ode...