Harris County's John Doe

The body planted outside could barely be described as a man, yet It fit all of the criteria of one.
He rattled softly to himself, almost as if resisting the wind from the thunderstorm. Not out of discontent or out of a primal urge to flee the raging monsoon, but as if It were a flag attacked by an abnormally strong gale. As if It could blow away if It were not careful. But this struggle didn’t show on the body’s face. It remained ever content-looking in Its flesh. If you could call it that.
His skin was the color of an apricot, shining a greasy and unhealthy orange in the pouring rain. Temperate marks ran up, down, across and sideways abound the husk, as if It were a burn victim long ago, but had since healed to almost perfection. Almost. But It didn’t look like those wounds had depth to them. They looked stitched on. Fake.
Looking into the body’s eyes, they held only empty space behind them. There was no life in Its head, no soul in Its complexion, no breath in Its lungs. They looked like marbles in Its skull. No need for moisture, as if It wasn’t looking directly at the window with both eyes then one couldn’t tell if It was blind or sighted. With pupils as overly dilated as his, you wouldn’t be mistaken for assuming It had two glass eyes. But those glass eyes most certainly worked as normal eyes would. They just had to.
The rest of the body’s face followed its eyes and how they lacked life within them. It held a plastic smile on its unmoving lips, revealing a top row of overly perfect teeth held in place with black gums. To the sides of each lip were vertical lines that extended from the sides of the nose and around the mouth, framing Its mouth with a wrinkly cage that well defined where Its lips ended and Its cheek began. 
Its hair seemed to repel the water beating down on him, and it shined a valiant gray despite the night and the rain. Not as if it were alive, but as it were counterfeit. Like a cheap wig expertly pinned to its scalp. With extremely thin eyebrows to match, Its face felt complete in how false it was. Fully synthetic, yet free of the hands of man. No person would have made this. There was no evident account for it.
Unbothered, unblinking, unfazed, and unliving, the being lasted out in the storm, staring with an object’s malice at an inert building It’d never enter. There was no emotion in its body, but they felt all of the emotions at once. Lifetimes of hatred, of hostility and envy and rancor and disgust, all happening at once. Twelve fold thrashing to-and-fro in the shell of its creation. Its agony had no outlet.
“A life with the purpose of dying isn’t a life worth living,” ran through Its mind like locations run across the digital displays of an airplane terminal. It was true, and it believed that with the entirety of the heart it didn’t possess. 
It would have been trampled with despair if It only could. It deeply longed to. It longed to kick and scream and wail and break down, yet It lacked pieces to take apart. It was devilishly whole, it was one within itself, and therefore It would get no comfort from it. It hadn’t existed longer than It was thinking, yet It longed for comfort as if It had always existed.
Moving in jolting motions past all of the sleeping homes, the ceaseless rain might as well have been the body’s own tears. Trying to defy the path not quite set out for it but what It felt entitled to the misfortune of felt completely wrong in his mind. While It deeply regretted following Its urges and gutturally wanted to turn back, It had nothing to turn to. It had no other place to be other than the place where nobody can be. 
It struggled past the signs of civilization and deep into the wilderness by moonlight, until its thoughts told it that it had struggled long enough from where it had started. It was time to return. It was decided.
For both the first time and the last time in its pitiful existence, the body looked up towards the sky in which it felt the most serene. It searched the wet and dark treetops for a reason to carry on, but there was none. The leaves being ripped from trees gave itself no relief in where It should be in life. The dark, starless sky offered no guidance and the rain simply encouraged him to do what It felt it was sent to do.
As the world held no compassion for the body, the body deemed he should have no compassion for itself. It sat down on the soaked forest floor and grabbed its own leg, ready to do the deed, when it heard footsteps heading towards itself.
"What's taking so long?" A voice said, low and struggled. "You're not supposed to be here. You were supposed to do it where I placed you."
The body paid no attention to the voice, still twisting and scraping the ends of its man-made fingertips at the base of its torso. It heard, but it desperately did not want to.
"It's fine." The voice garbled, then it spit an amount of blood that shouldn't have been able to fit in the average mouth onto the leg of the body. "They'll find you just the same."
The body more frantically scraped at its legs, creating more scrapes and marks on its skin then what already existed. It needs to be done now.
"Do you enjoy the vessel I crafted for you?
The body thought it hated its form.
"It was made to rot nicely. Give the blowflies something to write home about."
The body was confused by this remark. Not even the bearer of the body enjoyed the body, why would any bug of any kind enjoy it either?
"Wherever you're fully ready to leave, you may do so. Just remember to struggle a bit before you go."
The body couldn't control if he did or didn't. He was going to, regardless of his wishes.
He heard the voice trail off into the deep brush of the storming woods, getting lost between the cracks of lightning that had started to form and the rustling of trees that threatened to give way if the storm progressed any further. The body was alone again. And this time, it wasted no time.
It dove its false fingers into the hollow shell of his leg, and like ripples in a pond, pain stung the body's entire being. The hollow insides of its body quickly were replaced with real human flesh, and it wallowed in the new feeling.
Without thinking, the body had become, and it threw itself about violently on the forest floor. It could feel. It could be released. It could finally exist as a person, And all it craved was to feel more.
Slamming his arm into the dirt out of masochistic ecstasy, they felt their hand pop off of its arm at the wrist as it made contact with the ground. Blood squirted from the wound profusely, and the hand writhed onto itself without purpose or reason.
As if they didn't want it to, but it wanted to itself, its other arm followed suit and shed its hand at the wrist. The hand fell to the leaves below and exploded on impact, shooting fingers like bullets and firing them deep into the woods.
The body rolled around in its own fluids for a moment while mixtures of pleasure and pain flooded its controls, leaving them unable to control their body effectively. It writhed and failed, not really knowing what was to happen next, but enjoying and fearing it regardless.
One by one they felt limbs get rejected by the self and deposited onto the ground, some slithering away like snakes into the forest, some burying themselves under dirt and earth, and some simply lying still after they left. Still full of blood, still full of life.
Eventually, after a while of this cycle repeating, the body had almost no limbs left to lose. They had most of their right arm up to the wrist, much of their left thigh up until the knee, and all of their head still intact. All other parts of the body had been rejected, and sent to roam the earth on their own.
In the body's final breath before blood loss took the life of the man without meaning, the last thought to run through his mind was that he was wrong before. His life had meaning. And his meaning was to feel. He hadn’t lived longer than fifteen minutes in total, but he died happy and it died with emotion.
It, they, he died full. He, they, it died content.
…
On April 1st of 1995 in Houston, Harris County, Texas, the corpse of a heavy male was found in a densely wooded area of the local woodlands by a group of ATV riders by mistake.
Upon forensic examination of the corpse, many pieces of it were left unsalvaged. The hands were completely missing, the legs had chunks of flesh missing from the thighs, and the body had been mutilated beyond recognition.
The corpse showed signs of decomposition that would have resulted from at least a month of being left unattended in the wilderness, but the place where the body was found showed that it was very noticeable from the trail and couldn’t easily have been missed for that month period it must have been there for.
A reconstruction of what authorities believed the corpse would have looked like during its life was created and the public was informed to the best of the abilities of the police in order to aid in an investigation, but no tips of any kind came in about the body whatsoever.
The body was not given a funeral for there was no family to which it belonged. No DNA test given to the corpse linked it to any missing person in the area, and no fingerprints could be taken for the hands were completely missing. It is still a cold case today.
The only defining feature left that could be used to distinguish the body from looks alone was the skin of the victim.
It was the color of an apricot. Greasy and unhealthy, covered in cut wounds from head to toe.
Category:Dismemberment
Category:Disappearances
Category:Weird