Taken from a writing exercise I was given my senior year of AP English. We were given a set of phrases to base a short story around, with at least one "statement" sentence and two "descriptive" sentences per phrase. My first story was a very dull, very PC, completely guided piece about a bike ride. My second was this. At the time I was really into Nine Inch Nails' Yearzero, and a few things are based on that. What's his is his and what's mine is mine. Hope you enjoy.

It was dawn.

And nobody in this lazy world cared but us. While the orthodox slept, a homeless junkie girl (me) and a deadbeat, addict man (Walker) were hunting our next fix. The days were starting to drag, and we knew the remedy was out there. It wasn't weed. It wasn't coke. Not meth, not heroin, not even opal or iris. We wanted to find god.

We mounted our bikes and started off down the road.

I'm sure if we hadn't spent the last span of years scouting out various trips, I'd be driving; with a house and a job and maybe even a few little Walkers to trip over. As it was, we lived in an abandoned house. One that half the neighborhood would just as soon torch to the ground in favor of higher property values. We drank rain water. We lost consciousness of time and what it meant. We'd fuck randomly and without thought of consequence. We didn't even know each other's real names. He was walker. He walked around. I was October. The month we met. After my first experience with god, this didn't matter anymore.
Our evangelist was a shady, spindly, burnt out old man who told us to call him uncle as he rummaged through a makeshift pharmacy in the back of his van. At any given moment, he had twenty separate strains of mushrooms, Mary-Jane; powdered, crystallized and liquid forms of chemicals I could never keep track of. I was surprised he did. To this day, I have never seen him sober. He wore sunglasses all the time. We've heard it's because Opal had permanently stained his eyes black. Uncle Burnout invited us into the back of his van and his long, grubby fingers sorted pills. He was laughing the entire time. I didn't know why.
Like the junkies we were, we shook and flushed hotly at the prospect before us. All we wanted was a little god tablet in our greedy hands/body/minds.
And then we had it. To satiate us; or to shut us the hell up, Uncle popped one black ball each into our hands. We waited out the long drive into the cave (resisting the feds) all the while twitching and shaking and sweating and salivating. My body was a spoiled child about to get her way. One little black marble, with green "G!" painted on the outside. It rolled sluggishly with liquid chemical pleasure. Like swallowing a paintball bullet. Like looking straight into the eyes of God. I looked at Walker, who was staring enraptured into his hand. Didn't even notice me. I wondered if he realized (or cared) that he was pallid, and had a huge hard on. The van rolled to a stop. My heart pounded though I tried to make it slow. Uncle popped his head into the back, coughed, and said,
"Lookit you tweakers…(heh heh) You're good to go. Have fun, kids." Before he had finished, we had already rolled it in our mouths, swallowed, and were now trying to nest up in grimy pillows and blankets. I could feel my heart, and listened hard for the trigger.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump
Th—

Silence.
Thump.
"It's coming." I croaked. I didn't know it, but was told that five minutes later I was laughing uncontrollably with tears rolling down my face. Funny, I thought I was still sober.

The landscape stretched ahead for miles.

Part of the attraction of god was never knowing exactly what was coming for you after the hit. I've had trips lasting from a day to ten minutes. I've had hallucinations like dreams; like nightmares. Heightened sensory explosions, waves of pure comfort and panic wash over me like an imperceptible ocean. Walker once proposed a theory (after a three-day ketamine binge and two days without food) that god was the off-brand hotdog of drugs; all the left over remnants of spectrum of worldly chemicals all mashed together and concentrated into one pill. Then, I thought he was full of shit. I can't imagine anyone surviving that. Now, I believed he was fucking genius.
"Walker, you are a fucking genius."
He smiled and glanced back from glassy black eyes one thousand miles away. I can't imagine what was thinking. I wasn't thinking at all. I was on my back staring at the cracked interior of the van and the delicate curves of lines and shapes graffitied into the walls, the ceiling. It was alive. Breathing. Vibrating. Writhing. They were a moving picture frame; a little squiggle-tracey metropolis that was closing in over my eyes.
"Come over and take a look at this." Walker was in a trance so I pushed him down on his back and pulled his head upward.
"Look at the Graffiti Land. Do you want to go there with me? We can live in a scribble of a house…" I found a marker and drew out our future plans. "And, and this is you," I drew a long noodle with a beanie. "This is me," A shorter mess of lines, with long slashes down the sides for hair. "And we could make friends with all the rest of the shapes." The graffiti walls spun and pulsed with anticipation.
"We don't have to go anywhere," Walker mumbled, the stoned prophet. "We already are lines and shapes. We are the twisted scribbles living a world of patterns and shapes. Hiding from these straight, sharp lines."
At the moment, he was a genius again.
And my heart leapt up and down, started hammering in my chest. It was another wave. I opened my mouth to speak. Nothing came out. I tried again. It's happening again. My mouth formed the words, and I could feel the vibrations, the breath move from my lips. No sound. Again. My companion and co-pilot rolled his head slowly to face me. And this time, in the far backdrop of my mind, I could hear the echo. Suddenly I was hit with a barrage of my past spoken words. I heard myself tell myself that I was getting higher.
"Do I really sound like that...sound like that?
"Do I?"
Walker's voice, then his mouth moved. Evidently he'd started laughing. The sound flew out and smashed into the walls, crashed into me and ricocheted all over our small space.
"Stop or you'll drown us in your sounds."
From the front, Uncle cackles and starts to sing, "Stop or you'll drown us in sound, drown out the sound, drown us in sound." I needed to push stop on this japanese movie. Walking over, I felt that someone, my footsteps, were following me. My body was moving faster than I could hear or feel it. Crawled over to the body, twitching violently to the vibrations we felt, flying around our heads. Crawled over and straddled his hips. Blocked his view. I was in his trip now.
"My thoughts are talking to me. It's me but it's millions of different me's. All…" The sentence took him well over a minute and a half to articulate. He was distracted. I was, too.
"Can you move?" He shook his shaggy black locks, sweating slightly.
"Too high."
"Can you talk?"
"Nhhn. Too high."
"Can you feel?" I asked, slipping his arms out of his shirt, his shirt over his head.
"I think I feel you. And other stuff." His belt was a lock at this point. I wanted to cut it off. Decided to slow down.
"Can you feel your own body?" He nodded slowly. I dropped the strip of leather by his side.
"I want you in me."
He opened his eyes.
"Okay."
His body was hot with violent, furious life. Heavy and clunky and slow in the fog of some abstract fantasy. He was tripping on me, me on him. Twisting together in a hallucination; a journey in our minds. Uncle didn't mind at all. One hand on the steering wheel, another deep in his jeans, he revved up the van and followed every primal, organic sound.

Gradually, the way became harder.

My companion snapped in and out of sober consciousness occasionally. I'd drifted out of my first stage. The second one was edging closer. I could feel it. I felt it every lurch, swerve and bump in the road as we drove. It struck with every suffocating squeeze from Walker. He was anchoring me to keep him steady.
The Second Phase.
Settling over my body. Sinking into my bones. Saturating me. My mind was on fire. My body: about to collapse inward. It felt like: falling in love for the first time, being cradled as a baby, coming, and falling from the sky, all at once. The air was forced out of my lungs in a sharp, hollow cry that must have made the boy above quite pleased with himself. I gasped for air like a drowning victim, my body tense, head spinning, eyes watering and my energy fading. Walker looked down at me with a satisfied inward grin. Whispered something dirty to me that I couldn't understand. Fuck'em. The words didn't make sense anymore. He reminded me of my first crush. The cousin who'd molested me when we were ten. Then superman. My father. Adam, first man in the world. Jesus Christ. Elvis Presley. A skinny boy with choppy black hair and liquid black eyes. As he grinded against me I imagined him as a little boy; as an awkward teenager. I wonder if he was ever hit by his parents. If he ever cried past age 15. If he ever got beat up. How he looked when he lost his virginity. He was a whore. Then he was rich and powerful, a CEO or a Beaurecrat. He clenched his eyes shut, bit his lip, and slammed a fist on the floor. So this is how the fortunate looked when they came.
He rolls off me, then pukes in a trash can. My head swam and convulsed. Oh my God Oh my God Oh my GOD. He was dying. Expelling his dirty soul through his mouth; vomiting and vomiting until there was nothing but a hollow husk. I screamed until my head hurt. Uncle jerked the van to a halt and grabbed at me, shaking my body, which was now drenched in a cold sweat. Walker fumbled his clothes on, then coughed spasmodically, his scrawny build shaking every time.
"Chill out, chill out girl, it's okay… stop it!" I couldn't. I was drowning on the ammonia air like a goldfish. Somehow I now had my old clothes on. I could feel their harsh scrape against my tingling skin.
"Fuck, settle down. Chill out." A hard slap sent me down. Out of consciousness. Out of reality. Down, down, down to the darkest layers of banishment. My eyes were open. I saw an old man escort a nervous, black haired boy out of the van. I couldn't care. I was paralyzed in every way possible. Just another feature of the history of mankind. No thoughts; No beliefs, No purpose. No distinguishing characteristic to set me apart from street, the van, the sky above me.

What had began as a light drizzle now became a downpour.

My blood was alive and crashing through me. Slamming in and out of my heart, flooding my brain, washing a hot flush over my face. My companion's vein, twitching on his temple, told me he felt the same. There was a roaring in my ears. It was loud. Deafening, even. Filling up our small space, drowning my mind. We were primal, beastial, primitive. Ruled by our instincts alone, like the animals. We were the Neanderthals. The ignorant, wretched ones, listening to the voice of God as he shouted through our souls.
We beat the shit out of each other.
I guess we were actually angry, way deep down. He punched me hard in the chest. I pounded his face with my fists while he pulled my hair. I was picked up and thrown against the chrome siding of the car. He got a shoe at the back of the head. He slapped my ass. We both stopped, confused. Then I bit his lip. We couldn't feel, we couldn't hear our screams and snarls. He bit back. Afterwards, with my bruises and missing chunks of hair, and his cut lip and black, swollen eye, we took turns washing away the blood. In silence.

We stopped by the side of the road and donned our raingear.
Uncle had bills to pay, drugs to deliver. Our "raingear" kept us safe, warm, and protected us from the radar, the heat sensors; the many innovations that our smart Big Brother made. At night, we could be three black spots in a shadow. He drove and drove against the setting sun. We sat on two metal crates, with synthetic material covering us completely. Two silly drug addicts under a tarp. Walker sat in stunned silence. I learned later that I had been babbling incessantly the entire time. Unknown to us, we were in enemy territory, stepping around the mines. Security was at its highest here. So was the tyranny of our nation. In uneven levels it was omnipresent. And we were sitting on a goldmine of illegal chemicals. We rested our respective asses on 18,000 worth. More money than I will ever see in my lifetime. We guarded 685 highs, give or take an overdose or two. Possibly, we possessed governmental persecution, and all that went with it.
We went cloaked in synthetic blankets like an addict cult. Stumbling, falling, groping our way through a featureless area. Walker twitched and stumbled along, sloping eastward. To compensate I tugged on my end of the crate, tethering him to the path.
It wasn't hard to identify the consumers. They were a pack, all hooded, all tense and restless. Some were built heavy. Others had wasted away, like us. Skinny, starved creatures with tired eyes. Synthetic humanoids. A knot of people among them had pure black hollows for eyes; Opal users. I stared at the ground. It was a surreal reality perceived through a psychedelic trip. I had to look away. God was fucking with me, yet again. I tried to hold myself together, like holding water in one hand. I swayed. The words these cannabis cult members said sped up dangerously, like a chirping screech. Uncle answered back in a low, monstrous voice. The crowd beat like a human heart. Our raingear merged with theirs, and for a while we remained enclosed in the shield. Breaking off, we retreated, leaving behind the cargo. It was done.
And yet, heavy footsteps followed mine, pounding into the dirt. A streak of adrenaline exploded in me and I roared, swinging a fist behind me. I caught gnashing teeth, a flash of pinprick pupils in shining eyes in a pale, boney face. A bolt of lightning. The runner bucked backwards in the air and fell, looking skyward, with a hypodermic needle of a dart protruding up from his chin. Uncle muttered something, not understood, tucking away a gun. I shivered, stepping over her body.

Our destination loomed in the distant horizon.

Coming down. I realized it after noticing that I now had the power to realize. Suddenly I was in the back of a van. Kicking my legs, rubbing my knees with my hands. Light peeking through my veil of strawberry-blonde hair. Walker crawled over to me, and collapsed.
"God. Dammit. I was so close this time. But I can't see it all. Just a passing glance out of the corner of my eye, then it's over before I think to stare back. I could feel it, October. I could feel it and He was looking at me. Why would he look at me? Not one of them. Maybe if I was to look Him straight in the eye, my eyes would bleed. Or my head would explode. Or I'd just die."
"Maybe since we're Godless we only get a glimpse. If you go to church then you can look him in the face without dying. Maybe even touch him."
"No, I'll see him next time." And we drank rainwater in plastic bottles, daydreaming stories into the graffiti on the ceiling of the van. Uncle shot up some Heroin, then laughed again.

This, we agreed, had been our best trip ever.