An excerpt from Jeremiah Stone

The smell of this monster is killing me.  It’s rank; even above the decay of the Cataclysm, it’s like nothing my terrorized olfactory senses have ever encountered.  Like an animal’s cage at the Audubon zoo, a searing mountain of feces littered with the bones and blood and bile of the missing zookeepers; shit piled three feet off the floor, and urine that had fermented into glowing green ammonia.  The air around it an appalling black halo of flesh eating misery that annihilated lesser life forms.  A veritable well of sorrows like a stinking invisible force field radiated out from its pores, a personal plague.  And now he was here, in my face, breath like a wild acid wind from damnation and shadows burning my resolve to ash.  Grinning, chuckling.  Why?  Because he had never felt the pain of a broken bone before a simple over medicated man had broken it for him?  Or maybe, because he liked the pain?  He giggled like a little school boy, stared down at me with contempt in his superior serpentine eyes, and I realized what he was.  He was… he was... a distraction...