Neon Black

By Jim Johanson

A cynical, embittered man undergoes heart surgery following injury sustained in a terrorist attack. Under anesthesia, he dreams of bizarre confrontations with lovers from his past in a surrealist odyssey reminiscent of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. The man's ghosts of the past demand retribution as he comes to realize that memories (and people) cannot always simply be buried and forgotten.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jim Johanson
• Release date: Dec 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9798224445721

Jim Johanson

An intrepid researcher of the human mind, Jim seeks to find a greater understanding of human existence and to depict his findings in fiction. With a true appreciation for anything new and unique, Jim refuses to rehash old stories in his writing, rather does he prefer to expound on weird and otherworldly things that humans so rarely experience, and in the case of his horror genre writing, hope never to experience themselves.

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Neon Black

Jim Johanson

Copyright 2018

JimJohanson.com

1: Conscious / Beta Brainwave Cycle 13hz

I had to wonder if everyone else was feeling the same way I was, thinking everything that happened was somehow our fault, even though we’d done nothing wrong. I think it’s just an in-built mechanism of guilt that our generation is afflicted with, to constantly assume that we’re responsible for all of our problems, that nothing in our environment is just inherently bad. We all found our own ways to suffer the knowledge that we’d been struck by something horrible, invisible, intangible but most certainly real and unavoidable.

They told us there was a bomb squad coming in to check for more explosives, but we knew something was wrong when we saw the men in radiation suits combing through the charred wreckage and twisted steel of the city bus. Surviving the initial blast without serious injury made us feel lucky until we found out later that the dirty bomb had contained caesium-137, a radioactive isotope.

Somehow an advertisement on the bus for men’s deodorant had survived the blast. The goofy expression on the model’s face, smugly satisfied by his lack of body odor, rose up from the piles of burnt seat cushions and broken glass to mock us, first in the street where we gathered like gawking pigeons, then through the lenses of the cameras broadcasting the images through our televisions, computers, and phone screens.

We couldn’t hide from those images of the attack any better than we could hide from the radiation. Right in the middle of a major intersection, with apartment buildings rising up high on either side, practically everyone nearby had their phones out recording the aftermath even before the news teams arrived (and quickly departed, after they realized why the Hazmat people were wearing radiation suits). We couldn’t help but watch the videos. We sank our teeth right into them, indulging like addicts, cooking the raw video streams up in spoons and injecting them into our veins.

News teams tend to censor footage. They don’t show you the bodies being carried out in black bags, or the blood spattered across bus seats amid broken glass, all of it looking like a morbid Jackson Pollock painting. The people recording with their phones eagerly uploaded their uncensored videos immediately, hoping to be the first person to get the most views. We instinctively flocked to them, stupidly, in the way that ducks swarm over pieces of bread, and we seared those images into our memory.

I had some long conversations with friends over unhealthy levels of coffee about our mutual radiation exposure. Most of us were fond of slipping some bourbon or gin into our cups