#5 – Black Metal

I hated taking a smoke break with Kenneth. Dude was always going on about heavy head banging or fairy tales- a weird guy- made me want to quit, to be honest.

“I like Black Metal best… the Norwegians and the Viking stuff, like screaming fucking northmen, you know? Warriors. The heart of rage, and all that shit.”

The shadows coughed, and I caught a whiff of something burning. A haunted, angry face, half hidden by a mop of unruly hair, a curl of smoke, a grey ghost in the night. Something barely suppressed, a tension, hung in the air. Something was different about him, that’s for sure. His eyes…

“In the old days, there were wyrms, man. Dragons. They could do all sorts of mean, really mean shit to, like, common folks. Change shape, to look like a regular dude, play mean pranks, stuff like that. Or burn’em all with, like, fiery breath. Most of ’em, they, like got destroyed by righteous kings, Templars or vikings like, I think, Eric or Beowulf or something.”

There is alot of smoke billowing around us now, and I wonder if the idiot has messed up something back in the refinery, something that could get us both canned. It’s usually right cold outside of the refinery here, frosty, but I break out in a cold sweat at the, I dunno, the whole wrongness of everything. And Kenneth, even in the sub- arctic freeze, he emerges from the shadows in a goddamn tee and hoodie, like it’s a balmy spring eve, and that’s when I see that the smoke seems to be envelloping him, like he’s on fire.

“But, not all of them big lizards got killed”, he says, as his orangy- colored eyes lock feverishly onto mine as he shakes in some sort of spasm, and I realize at long last just how messed up Kenny is, and once more, how deep in trouble I might be in.

“Not me.”

And then he began to grow.

Category: 2011, Horror