Plague

took a pretty good drunk and right now he was only drunk enough that he didn’t want to get up off the couch.
    His stony fingers lifted a bottle. Wild Turkey. Only about half an inch of brown liquid left in the bottom. He twisted the cork. The glass neck of the bottle shattered in his grip. That happened fairly often. Orc had a hard time gauging his strength when he was a little drunk.
    He blew slivers of glass away. He raised the bottle high, careful to keep the sharp points away from his still-human mouth.
    The one part of him that could be cut: his mouth.
    Well, his mouth and his eyes.
    He drained the fiery liquid into his mouth and swallowed. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But not enough.
    Orc levered himself up. He was heavy, like you’d expect of a boy made of wet gravel. Like a walking creature of wet cement. He couldn’t fit on a scale although Howard had tried once to weigh him.
    He had crushed the scales.
    He stomped toward the booze closet where Howard kept his stash. With the exaggerated care of a person not in control of his body, Orc opened the closet door.
    A few bottles of clear booze. A few bottles of brown booze. A couple bottles of Cabka, the liquor Howard made by distilling cabbage and rotten oranges. It was nasty stuff. Orc preferred the brown booze.
    He snagged a bottle and after a few seconds of clumsy fumbling he gave up and twisted the glass neck off.
    “Is that you up there, Orc? I hear you stomping around.” Drake. The girl Brittney was gone now, replaced by Drake.
    “You still alive, you stupid, alcoholic pile of rock?” Drake taunted. “Still following Sam’s orders? Doing what you’re told, Orc?”
    Orc stomped angrily on the floor. “Shut up or I’ll come down there and smash you like a bug!” Orc roared.
    Drake laughed. “Sure you will, Orc. You don’t have the stones. Wait, that was a funny! The stone monster who doesn’t have any stones.”
    Orc stomped again. The entire house shook when he did it.
    Drake called him various names, but now Orc had about a quarter of the bottle inside him. The warmth spread throughout his body.
    He yelled something equally rude back at Drake. Then he staggered back to his couch and sagged heavily into it.
    He didn’t mind Drake so much. Drake was a creep.
    It was the girl who made Orc want to cry.
    She was a monster. Like Orc. Begging for death. Begging for someone to let her go to her Jesus.
    Kill me, kill me, kill me, she begged every day and every night.
    Orc took a deep swig.
    Tears seeped from his human eyes and fell into the rocky crevices of his face.
    Someone was knocking at the front door. Normally Howard would answer. But then Orc heard Jamal’s voice yelling, “Hey, Orc! Open up, man.”
    Jamal was one of the very few people besides Howard who ever came to see Orc. Of course it was just so he could get a drink. But still, any company was better than listening to Drake or Brittney.
    “Want a drink, Jamal?”
    “You know it,” Jamal said. “Albert’s busting on me all day.”
    “Yeah,” Orc said. He didn’t care. He snagged a bottle and handed it to Jamal, who took a deep swig.
    Orc flopped onto his mattresses, the floor groaning beneath him. Jamal took a chair and kept the bottle.
    “Who is that up there?” Drake’s voice floated up. “Is that Jamal or Turk? Too heavy to be Howard.”
    “It’s Jamal,” Jamal yelled.
    “Don’t talk to him,” Orc said, but without much conviction.
    “Hey, Jamal, how about letting me out of here?” Drake asked, almost playful.
    Orc yelled something obscene back at him.
    “Only if you kill Albert first,” Jamal shouted, then laughed and took another drink.
    “How come you work for Albert if you hate him?” Orc asked.
    Jamal shrugged. “I’m tough, he needs someone tough.”
    “Yeah,” Orc said. “But he treats me like crap.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Should see how he’s living, man. You think he’s living like the rest of us? Get this: at night he doesn’t even go out to take a leak. He’s got, like, a jar he pees in.”
    “I got a jar I pee in.”
    “Yeah, well, he’s got a maid to take it out and dump it for him.”
    Orc’s head was buzzing, not really paying attention, but Jamal was getting fired up, listing complaints about Albert, starting with the fact that Albert had meat every day and kids to clean up after him.
    “See, man, he loves it like this, right?” Jamal said, already slurring his words. “Back in the world Albert was just some shrimpy little nothing. In here