One Rainy Day

A man sits at his desk, stooped over a leather-bound journal. His posture is stiff, his eyes fixed on his work. What was once a nice suit drapes loose upon his body, shrapnel-stained and coated with ink. The man is a writer. He is, however, a clumsy penmanship, too eager, too jittery. Too on the verge of falling apart. He can barely read his own words. He would prefer to use a computer or tablet or text-to-speech, but he knows better—knows that to change the world, his Bible must be written by hand.

A second man steps out of the shadows. He floats to the first as a phantom of torn coats and wide-brimmed hat, and in one fluid motion, produces a gun. He presses the barrel to the back of the first man’s head.

It is raining outside.

“Mr. Carver,” the second man says. His gun shakes. His hand is covered in fresh wounds. One of his fingernails is missing. “John. It’s time to put the pen down.”

“I’m almost done,” John says. He sounds far away.

“I know.”

And I walked naked through that liminal space, my arms outstretched to part the before from the after, all breath stopped in forever anticipation. No cold, no heat, no birth or decay. I was between Between, a fragment space that not even Death can enter. Only God. Only me. Only the last breath escaping dying lungs. I felt Death watch us, his eyes upon me, black tongue running across black teeth, his face pressed against the glass, waiting for his turn. He—

“John!” The second man says the name like a beg. “John …. John, please. We can still fix this.”

“But—”

The barrel of the gun digs deeper into the back of John’s skull, leaves a red mark 45 millimeters in diameter.

“I don’t want to do this. I want to throw up.” Underneath his coats and pistol, the second man is pale, sickly. His breath smells like copper and stomach acid. He wonders if this is how all the mice felt during his first tests. Ready to fall apart but incapable.

The desk is a disjointed state of terrible mess and brand new. There are no gouges in the wood, no dents or scratches from dropped keys or fumbled steps, yet it carries decades of hand-written words. John sets his quill into an inkpot. He runs his finger across the smooth wood. He purchased the desk from a department store three days ago and assembled it himself, using the little L-key wrench that came with. He remembers—or he thinks he remembers—that the young woman who swiped his credit card asked him if she needed to call an ambulance.

Three days ago, he had been a young man, clean shaven and ready to change the world. A business deal. A partnership. John Carver had money; Jay Irving had Aevum, an experimental drug that could kill aging in a single breath. Now both are old. John’s beard is full, his skin is cracked and bubbling like old asphalt. His hands cramp from writing, but he is almost done.

Outside, it is raining.

“What color is the rain, Jay?” John asks.

“We have to burn it all. All the research, all the evidence. Maybe if we erase it, the monster won’t notice.”

John looks out the window. His desk faces it, is jammed so close to the wall that he can lean forward and press his forehead against the cold glass. He is like Death. He is waiting, but not for a turn.

“There are no monsters anymore, Jay. Only rain. But the rain can’t hurt you. And the—”

“Stop!” Jay barks. He tries to sound threatening but steps back instead. Genie wishes run through his head, every hope a twist into ruin. The mice didn’t start screaming until after they took Aevum. “Stop. Let’s just, let’s just stop. Go to the nearest bar. Have a burger. I’ll buy you a beer. There’s a football game on, The Saints are playing, I think. We can be normal for another hour.”

John shakes his head. “We’re not supposed to be normal. We’re supposed to change the world.”

is not the king we claim him to be, but a cog in an ancient, golden clock that is God’s to unwind at his will. The gears are made of gemstone glass. The hands point to the heavens. It all smells of iron, or maybe, the place between iron. We walked through that infinitesimal space between molecules, so small the electrons were planets in the night sky. They twinkle brighter than Venus on a summer morning.

“What time is it?” John asks. His eyes hurt from squinting. He needs glasses. Three days ago, he had perfect vision, but the need for Walmart cheaters runs in his family. Both his parents need the help to read, as had his grandparents when they were alive.

“Quarter to six.”

John shakes his head. “No. What’s the real time? What year is it? How long has it been raining?”

“I don’t know.” Jay shuffles, twitches. His body cramps from nerves that want to snap in half. He’s had nothing but coffee and Advil since the accident.

“I think it’s been 22 years,” John says. “My watch stopped working when we woke up.”

“It’s been three days. It’s quarter to six.”

“We didn’t age when we were there.”

“Help me, John!” Jay shouts. His voice cracks. He’s so tired he wants to shoot himself. He’s so scared he’ll go back. “Help me stop the monster.”

Raining is outside it.

John looks out the window, watches the rain, hunts for words between the falling drops. The two men are in a cabin, out in the middle of a Wyoming forest so remote John has to write by candlelight. The trees are gnarled, ancient things that fight to paint the sky with dark leaves. The sky is rain clouds. Fog whispers between, skittering and hiding, waiting. John finds his words in the wisps, his next paragraph. He reaches for his quill.

“I can do it,” Jay says. “Shoot you.”

“What color is the rain, Jay?”

“I think I need to. I think it’s why he sent me back.”

John gestures to the space next to him. “Come. Watch. Help. Keep me company. Tell me what color the rain is.”

“I don’t—”

Jay looks out the window. It’s dreary outside. He spent what felt like a day hiking to this cabin, fighting branches that snag and muddy ground eager to make him slip. His clothing is torn, his shoes so dirty their only hope is to be thrown away. Three days ago, he had looked brand new, a biochemist on the verge of saving the world. He wonders why so much can change in 22 years. Water beads against the window, runs down it slowly, like it might be mixed with syrup. The candlelight makes it look yellow. The stains on his face are red. He pretends it’s all mud, but he knows better.

There’s a bar 48-hours away by foot, one with greasy food and cold beer. He believes if they leave now, walk briskly, they can be there in 20 minutes.

“It’s red, John.”

“I thought so.”

I found God sitting in a rocking chair, squeaking with each rock. He was asleep. I didn’t mean to wake him, but he feared the ticking of my watch. Time isn’t supposed to move, not there, not anywhere—not without his permission. He was angry, furious, a thousand images of my father with a closed fist, but then he saw the blood and the pain. My father could be a compassionate man, when he wanted to be. We can all hug just as easily as we can hit. I tried to breathe but had to stop, because lungs don’t work in Between. God smiled, nodded. When he wasn’t looking like my father, he looked like a creature made of light and jelly all stuck together. I think he comes from a prism planet.

“What do you think?” John asks. He knows that Jay is reading over his shoulder. Some day soon, everyone will be reading his book. His Bible will be titled Aevum.

“You need to burn it.”

For the first time in years, John turns away from the window, from his work. Jay holds a gasp. Recognition plays a painful game across his face. He sees his business partner, but he also sees a corpse. John’s skin is brittle, flaking away to show exposed muscle beneath. His eyes glaze with dead-fish scales. He smells like a rotted bone being chewed apart by farm dogs.

“Jay,” John says. He looks disappointed. He sounds old. “A deal is still a deal.”

“We died, John.”

“No. We only almost did.”

Jay wants to scream. Instead he finds himself begging, pleading for reason when facts don’t matter: “We have to burn it all. Throw my research into the sea. We can’t do this to innocent people.”

“God wants us to.”

“I didn’t see God!” Now Jay does scream. His voice rattles with black tissue. “Just that black skull. It was so dark. So cold. We have—”

Because Jay is stuck, an old man with old ways, John initiates the hug, pulls his business partner in close. His body is cold. So is Jay’s. The two men embrace in a single, heavy sob while the gun falls to the floor. It hurts them to cry. Jay knows he needs to grab the .45, kill them both to end the rain, but he is afraid. There’s a piece of bent plastic sticking from his thigh, and if he shoots himself in the head, he will go back. Death is waiting.

Is outside raining it.

“You saw me, Jay,” John whispers. “Only me. I promise. The monster can’t hurt you anymore.”

“John….”

Jay lets the word fall. Something slaps against the roof of the cabin. The room shakes. Jay jumps, but John only shrugs. Sometimes body parts fall from the sky. Sometimes the rain is more than rain. The rain has to be more than the sum of its parts for the world to change, for his Bible to make sense. Between has to become the present. The newly-dead have to walk again. But only the newly-dead—Death has already claimed the long gone.

John is of the newly dead. Jay is of the newly dead. Now they walk. Now they remember. In a few short years, with a little dose of Aevum, all can become newly dead. That last exhale will last forever.

“I’m afraid,” Jay says.

John nods. He turns back to his desk, his window. There’s a severed arm bleeding on the front lawn. “I know. But you don’t have to be.”

“The monster—”

“Death.”

“Yeah.” Jay gulps. At some point, the gun returned to his hand. It is heavy. He wipes at his face, feels scabs against his skin, feels four-days worth of beard get stuck in the scabs. A broken leg thuds to the ground in a swirl of fog. “Yeah. Him.”

John grabs his pen. “You killed him, Jay. Not the other way around. That’s all.”

There is good in this world, with its many ticking clocks converging into broken cogs. Sometimes, we even sparkle. I remember, once upon a time, I wedged a lifetime into a single breath. A hundred years in a single gasp. Nothing moved but everything mattered. The cosmic shook around me, breaking the placid into colors I could paint with. I am not an artist, but even the clumsy hand knows how to put Spackle over a nail hole. A touchup there, a touchup here. I saw it all, and God showed me the way. He paused Between so someone else could understand. I’m still there, I think. On a fundamental level I’m—

The gun presses against John’s skull again. It’s warmer now, more desperate. John rolls his shoulders, tries to find a comfortable spot so he can finish his book.

“Do you remember what our business deal was?” Jay asks. He is back to being a phantom, a cold man in a cold coat with congealing wounds. Rips in his skin turn to scars. Broken bones heal in strange ways because they were never set. Everything about him is stiff. “The pills we took right before the truck hit us?”

“No.”

“I don’t either.” Jay frowns. “I think it was important though. I think we were going to change the world.”

Now John laughs; he laughs so hard a tooth falls from his mouth. A little drop of blood mingles with the ink on his page. All Bibles require blood.

“Jay,” the old man says, a little drool falling from his mouth. Strokes run in his family. Are hereditary. “What do you think I’ve been doing here?”

Outside is raining it.

The lawn is covered in body parts, broken, bleeding things that thump into the dirt with enough force to move the world. Jay tries not to look at them. The arms and legs he can stomach, but not the organs. Not the strange, peeled faces that aren’t attached to skulls. Everything is a mess, and all he has is an old, rusted gun. He isn’t even sure it will fire. It needs to fire twice.

“I’m going to do it, John. I’m going to pull the trigger.”

“Death won’t go easy on you just because you’ve helped him.”

Jay nods, closes his eyes. The gun is heavy, the heaviest thing he’s ever held. He hasn’t eaten in years. Headaches pound behind his eyes, and his tongue swells with rigor mortis. Moths have eaten most of his clothes. He almost laughs, because there isn’t a living thing around for miles. Only the dead. They pound against the roof like hailstones.

“I’m sorry,” Jay says.

“I forgive you,” John agrees. “Just one more year, and it will be finished.”

Jay pulls the trigger.

Is raining it outside.

a God too. Dead but not dead, lonely but not for long. I waved at the sky and it turned to shrapnel plastic, split metal and little puffs of fire. It’s so easy to create when you know how, when you’re given the opportunity. God smiled at me. He offered his hand. I know a business deal when I see one. Beside us, so far out of reach I think we all forgot him, Death pounded on the glass. When I was a kid, I remember being told not to try and go in the attic. It was dangerous up there, not scary but dirty. Boring. Stupid. So of course I spent all my energy trying to get up there. I stole a ladder from the garage one night, and I ascended that little hallway door. Dust fell upon my face. Death is like that. He wants the one thing he cannot have, but that thing isn’t worth the effort. Let him keep his kingdom in the living room. Let me expand the attic for everyone. We can be as we are. Forever.

Bodies begin to fall from the sky. They smash into the little cabin, and the world becomes a raucous thunder of breaking bones. Glass shatters. The bodies stand on tired feet, naked corpses that try to scream but don’t have lungs or teeth or tongues. They shamble. Death reaches his hand through the glass. He reaches for John Carver.

It is strange, but while God and I make our deal, our pact to change the world for the better, I am reminded of my last real memory. I think it is real. I think it is a memory. I am in a car, driving with a person who I hope will one day be my friend. We are talking about something so important I lose track of what I’m doing. We are excited. There are so many ways to change the world. I want to do that, change the world. Make it better, or if not better, at least less scary. I want the chance to forgive everyone that wronged me.

John Carver scribbles his final words. His face breaks into ecstasy. Blood water pours into the cabin through a thousand holes in the roof. The room stinks of gunpowder.

There is a truck. It is in the wrong lane, or maybe I am. We’re heading towards it. I’m about to change the world.

Death grabs John’s soul and pulls. It blunders out of him with all the force of a tired breath. Jay watches the car crash in slow motion. He’s still holding his gun, a relic of a time long gone. He’s old. He’s tired. He lets the gun drop. It’s no good to him anymore, not when he’s been dead for a thousand years.

“Is it always so messy?” he asks.

Death nods.

“And did we matter? Did we change the world?”

“Yes,” the black, dust-made skull says. Jay is surprised at how nice the end looks. It seemed so scary all those years ago, so violent and angry. A monster shrieking against glass. He wonders who has changed, him or it. “Yes, you did. Everyone who lives changes the world.”

“Burn my work. Kill it all, and take it with you.”

“Thy will be done.”

Death reaches out a cold, skeletal hand. Jay grabs it. His watch ticks a single second. John’s body crumples to the floor. Rainwater wilts his book to mush. Blood and pain fade to black.

It outside raining is.

Torn Between

They arrived at Deadmouth in the early hours, a black mark against summer breeze and lilac skies. Ocean waves attacked the cave. Thunder boiled beneath the water. When Scylla closed her eyes and breathed deep, the whole world smelled seafoam green. She leaned against the railing of The Nomad, chains rattling iron, and tried to relax her rage. This wasn’t home, but it was close. A single, piercing scream away. Beside her, Drake scowled with the half of his face that still worked. His fist squeezed knuckle-white around an iron pistol.

“Watch yourself, witch.”

Scylla cast him a bitter glare. She could almost taste his rage-sweat. Could almost feel the blood pumping through the vein on his forehead. Instead, her tongue burned with iron. The lock kept it quiet.

“You’ll die before you betray us again.”

Unable to talk, the sea sprite rattled her chains. The clink was musical. Waves crashed into The Nomad, listing with just a little more danger than was expected, and whirlpools formed around the hull. Scylla pointed a finger at one. It disappeared in a blink. She made a wish. Whirlpools made better wishes than shooting stars—they actually came true. One by one, Scylla vanished the dangers for her captor, untilthe pirate shiprested safe outside the cursed cave. Drake grunted a sound that may have been approval. He did not lower his gun.

“Good, but not good enough,” he said. “Not by a long shot.”

Scylla held up six fingers. The captain struck her with the butt of his weapon.

Drake was a harsh man with a soft background, the kind of boy that grows up never wanting yet always needing more. Eventually the thefts piled up so high it was either the seas or the noose. He choose piracy. In appearance, he stood tall, stone-faced and barrel-chested, dressed in black and covered in scar tissue. His knuckles were either white in restraint or stained red with blood. A fear aura draped his body like a wizard’s robe. His claim to strength was both in the magical and the mythical, though Scylla knew better. Four months ago, both halves of his face worked.

Four months ago, The Nomad carried a full crew. But 20 men had a strange way of becoming 14, and Scylla knew Deadmouth would claim the rest. Whirlpools granted wishes. Cursed caves contained cursed treasure. The sea sprite looked up. A small cloud hung softly in the sky. She was almost home.

Boots stomped as the rest of the crew filtered onto the hull. Like all pirates, they were a ragged bunch: hairy, broken, all kindness replaced with brute strength. A few moved like walking hangovers while most skulked like crows ready to rend. Those that didn’t carry guns kept swords or long knives, not capable of killing Scylla but sharp enough to cause pain. When the voyage began, they had taken turns, but now they gave the sea sprite a wide berth. It turned out, women and pirate ships made for ill luck. Rigging ropes became nooses, and dry decks slipped as if wet. Cooked food spoiled with poison. Scylla showed them her six fingers. When they cringed with fear, she grinned. It hurt to smile, burned with iron, but she couldn’t help herself. Not here, not when she was so close to freedom.

“Frhyftsyrz,” a skinny creature covered in coral jewelry sighed. He waved a wand. Scylla fell to her knees, wrists burning, her skin cracking apart. She wanted to scream but couldn’t. Her entire body felt like a ceramic bowl that had just been knocked from a counter.

The ship’s wizard jabbed a boney finger into the back of her neck. If the rest of the crew were crows, Roland was a cat. He liked to play with his food.

“You are not as close to freedom as you think you are,” he said. “Not here, not ever.”

Scylla tried to rise, but Drake put the barrel of his gun to the back of her head. It smoked against her skin. A whirlpool appeared beneath the ship, and after a nod from the wizard, Scylla made it vanish.

“I wish,” Roland said, his voice a whispered hiss. Scylla’s blood ran cold. “I wish for all your little wishes to come untrue, fae. Every. Single. One.”

Scylla screamed—at the world, at the injustice, at being so close to revenge yet so far away. They had captured her far from home, a small sprite with a big curse trying to flee the deaths that followed like a shadow. Even now she saw them, the possibilities. It was so easy to slip aboard a ship, to hit one’s head or plunge overboard for no reason. Bad weather. Bad health. One more could yet die. She looked out at the water, with its white crests and salt smell, and saw no more whirlpools. Then she looked up. The cloud was still there. They were safe to enter Deadmouth, but they were not safe to leave.

Dressed in grime-stained white, the sea sprite rose and brushed herself off. Her chains clinked. She was a small thing, no taller than Drake’s shoulder, skinny, with sickly-blonde hair and dark green eyes. Fish scales covered her body in patches of rash. She smelled like wet dog. But she had enough rage left to make them all scream, and soon, they would. Roland controlled the sea, but he did not control the clouds.

“Let’s go,” Drake ordered. “Get the boats loaded. Ropes, torches, bags. We have until sunset before the tides return in full. I want to be rich before then.”

What was left of the crew cheered. There was nothing in the cave to be afraid of, not when Drake held them so. Beside the captain, the wizard gazed with black eyes, his vision not on the present but the future.

Scylla needed to kill them both, but she only had enough magic left for one.

*

Roland threw her into the last boat with a rough hand and a muttered curse: “Arytigu.” Scylla felt her body go numb, turn to glass on the outside while her insides cracked with desert. He pushed; she fell. It was hard to instill fear when pain made her whimper like an injured animal. Roland was a dark wizard, more skeleton than man, with skin so thin she could see every blue, spidery vein in his body. Most of the crew said he was a dead thing brought back to life by his own magic, a Lich who kept his blood pumping with curses. Scylla thought it might be true. For their entire voyage, she never saw a death possibility around him. Not even during the big squall that had almost sunk the ship. Cursed, the man was uncursable.

Her teeth chattered against the lock in her mouth. With her tongue locked away, all she could do was rest against the floor and wait.

“You could at least look grateful,” Roland said. He nudged her with his boot. “To serve a king is an honor.”

“I am not a king yet,” Drake said from the bow. He used an oar to push their boat around a dangerous chunk of rock. The mouth of Deadmouth was filled with them, jagged teeth ready to chomp at any ship that got too close. The wind whistled with strange direction.

But with Scylla on board, the water obeyed. With the wizard on board, she obeyed.

“Not yet, but soon,” Roland said. “I see two paths, and one of them is you on a throne.”

Drake smiled, but only with half his face. “And the other?”

Roland shrugged. “Death is always the second path. It does not concern me.”

Even with a water sprite captive, it still took hours to navigate the jaws of Deadmouth. Tired, angry, the pirates beached upon a cracked bed of white sand. It scraped at the boats with a rattling sound, bone on bone, and the wind shifted to a colder temperature.

“Dysmf,” Roland said.

Scylla got up. Her body ached. A crest of water washed to the shore, and she stepped towards it. Drake stopped her with a point of his gun.

“No,” he hissed. “No. You do not get to enjoy this.”

“Look!” one of the crew called. “The … the color’s changed. It’s….”

The view of Deadmouth from The Nomad was a tapestry of sunrise, ocean green, and speckled rocks. The view from Deadmouth saw a land of black, white, and grey. Not a single speck of color could be seen from the cave entrance. The Nomad rested at anchor atop a grey ocean, its sails the proper black but its hull as monochrome as the water. The rocks, once mossy green and strange shades of brown, now stood dull white.

Roland stepped into the sea, his hands stretched out. He still held onto color.

“A trick!” His coral jewelry clacked together. He shrugged at the water, and because Scylla was his slave, the water obeyed. Then he pointed at the sky, at the little cloud that hadn’t been there an hour ago. “Cheap magic, and nothing more.”

“But the gold,” another of the crew tried to ask.

“Gold is gold,” Drake grunted. He turned to Scylla. “But not all treasure is gold, is it witch?”

Scylla stepped back. She watched the cloud drift closer. Fear overtook rage, not for herself but for the weather. Her chains clanked. The wizard was amiss, knew something he wasn’t supposed to.

“Good,” Drake said. He patted at his chest, where under his shirt, he held the key to her. “That’s more like it.

“Let’s go!”

Drake used his gun like a king’s scepter: He gestured and watched his kingdom obey. The crew marched, each carrying sacks and empty chests ripe for filling.

Roland sauntered behind, more spells on his lips. Scylla knew what he was doing. He was crafting another key.

*

Deadmouth widened the further they went, growing deeper, wider, and more desolate. Their torches burned with cold light. Soon, the sounds of the ocean faded away, replaced with a stagnant emptiness that skittered along the stalactites. Footsteps trudged along the ground. Though the cave was empty, the pirates kept their voices low, each taking his turn to glance up, at the jagged fang-shaped rocks reaching for them. They wanted to know why it felt like something evil was watching. No water dripped, but strange, cloud-like fog swirled along the ceiling. Scylla watched her captors breathe deep, drawing in stale air and letting out little puffs of moisture. She wished for the water. She needed water.

“How long,” one started to ask.

“Minutes,” Roland said. “No cave is this deep or wide. We are being tricked. I see through it, and now, so do you.”

The pirates nodded, but none relaxed. It didn’t feel like minutes, and the weight of the cave tricked the heart into thinking the place was a tomb. Iron burned against Scylla’s teeth. Iron burned at her wrists. When she stumbled, the butt of an iron pistol burned against her face.

“Move!” Drake ordered.

A scar-tissue of a man named Herch picked her up, only to shove her forward. Scylla tripped over a rock and landed hard. Everyone laughed when Roland told her to, “Dysmf,” and his magic forced her to her feet like a puppet.

“Out front,” Roland said. He waved her ahead. “You lead. Find all the rocks worth tripping over, so we don’t have to.”

Scylla moved to obey but a heavy hand grabbed her shoulder and yanked.

“No,” Drake said. The light from a torch caught his cheek, making it look sallow. Dead. “She stays next to me.”

Roland shrugged. “If you wish, your highness. But she is out of tricks. Six are dead, and six is all she can kill. She is harmless.”

“No one is harmless. Not here, not in this cave.”

Herch took the lead, a torch in one hand and a pistol in the other. Confidence kept his shoulders back, his head high, but the uneven ground made him walk with a slow, shuffling gait. Scylla saw possibilities swirl around him. He could trip on a rock and crack his skull open; he could blunder into a stalagmite, barely illuminated. She could make his pistol go off, blowing his hand apart and bleeding him dry before anyone could save him. All of these things would please her, but none would help her. No, she needed a wish. And if she could not get a wish, she needed to kill Drake. He had her key.

Because Roland was wrong and the captain was right, she was not out of tricks. She had one more left to play.

Her sister had the other.

*

The squall struck The Nomad with all the power of an angry God. The sky blinked from clear to storm-cloud black in an instant, and rain pelted the hull so hard it sounded like rocks beating against wood. Men ran for rigging ropes or cover depending on where they stood while Drake screamed orders no one could hear. Roland promised the captain a crown and a kingship, but the weather cared for neither. He was too mortal for that. Scylla watched them fight to survive, following the possibilities with her mind. Any one person could fall from the ship, get struck by lightning, snag against a rope. It was early in the voyage, and she had only killed two so far. She was hungry for more.

They deserved to suffer. Every. Last. One.

Scylla found her victim, but before she could take the sacrifice, make the man disappear in a puff of violence, the storm snapped a piece of rope. It whiplashed into the pirate hard enough to tear him in two. No one heard his bones break, his flesh rend, but they all saw the storm carry his torso over the railing. The rain washed the rest away.

Scylla ran for a better look, hoping to see a whirlpool where the body had fallen. She had wishes to make. Instead, she found dark waves and angry white foam. The ocean swallowed the body.

“I wish!” she screamed. “I wish they were all dead!”

She looked around, saw the possibilities through a haze of rainwater. The storm drenched her from head to toe, saturated her with so much water that despite Roland and his magic, she felt powerful. So many could die today, yet only four more by her hand. She began choosing targets.

But like all squalls, this one vanished as quickly as it appeared. A thousand possibilities shrunk to just a handful, and every set of eyes locked with hers. Scylla held up her hands in surrender, but to The Nomad, they were red with guilt. And blood.

Calm, kinglike despite bleeding from a fresh wound that made half his face look like exposed meat, Drake walked over to Scylla and shot her twice in the leg. The iron burrowed deep into bone. It would take four days of pain before she found the courage to pull the bullets free. By then, Roland had stolen her magic with curses, and all the pirates had threatened to throw her overboard.

She was bad luck. She was a witch. She had conjured the storm. She would kill again.

With the temperament of a pirate, Drake hauled Scylla to the deck and forced her down. Roland hissed with magic. From a deep pocket, he produced an iron lock.

“You are mine,” the wizard shouted, his arms moving, his jewelry clicking together with the pageantry of it all. “And now, all of the ocean is mine.”

Scylla screamed until she couldn’t.

*

From the outside, Deadmouth appeared a small, sharp thing unworthy of its many rumors and legends. Now deep within, the pirates began to reconsider. They weren’t exploring a cave but a chasm, one with cathedral-like ceilings and a thousand whispered riches. Jewels glimmered in the deeper stalagmites. When Roland touched them, they burst with color: sapphires, rubies, garnets, and strange, square-shaped hunks of metal made of rainbows. The gems came freely from their homes, and the pirates rushed them into their sacks and chests. Deadmouth contained enough treasure to buy Drake his kingdom and then some.

When the shiny rocks were claimed, Drake ordered them further in. Water dripped up ahead, and even the most cold-hearted pirate thought it sounded like gold.

“What is wonderful about the fey,” Roland said, giving Scylla a jab with his wand. “Is that they must follow rules. Tell me, why do you collect treasure?”

Scylla scowled.

“For pleasure? For fun?” The wizard shook his head. “Or is it because you are nothing more than dogs collecting bones?”

Spite made the sea sprite defiant, but magic kept her docile. Were it not for the lock in her mouth, she would have threatened the man first, and then spoke the truth second. Scylla wanted treasure to buy her way to womanhood, to shed her scales and her rage. Fae hated, and fae played, but they had holes for hearts. Only the desperate horded treasure, and Scylla knew desperation better than most. It was why she had left her home, why she had journeyed so far away with a promise, a hope, and one last contract.

Deadmouth ended in a sheer rock wall decorated with old paintings, tapestries, and anything else of value that could be hung. Fog swirled around the ground like snakes, coiling and twisting between mounds of gold. Even in the colorless world, it shined, radiated more wealth than a God could spend. Drake grabbed Scylla’s arm with painful fingers, only to let go.

“It’s more than I ever dreamed,” he whispered.

Roland shook his head. “A fancy, your highness, but I’ve stepped into your dreams. They are bigger than this.” He watched the fog with a hunter’s eyes, his hands flexing not with claws but spells. “We will make them bigger.”

“Is the key ready?”

“Yes.”

With a nod from their captain, the remaining pirates descended upon the golden horde, whooping, hollering, all fear forgotten. They moved as if invincible. Scylla watched them plunder. She hated them all the more.

“You,” Drake said, speaking more with his gun than his voice. “Make her appear.”

Scylla felt her skin crack with fear. She tried to shrug. Roland spat magic.

“Do it.”

Scylla shook her head. She tried to look confused and not terrified. Her gaze betrayed her. Drake followed it to the fog, and to the cloud hidden in the fog.

“We know, witch,” the pirate captain said. “And we know who she is, too.”

“Right on time,” Roland said. He reached into a deep pocket and pulled forth an iron key. “Just like we dreamed.”

The cloud grew in size, twisted bigger, brighter, until even the treasure-hungry pirates took notice. Gold fell from hands to plink against the ground, and heavy sacks slumped half full.

“Captain!” Herch called. “Captain, what’s that?”

“Treasure,” Drake said. “Worth more than every ounce of gold in this place.”

Charybdis grew in size, swirled and spun on strange axis, a tornado without rules. Scylla tried to scream at her, to run away, to leave before it was too late, but the lock kept her tongue swollen with pain. She stepped away. Her chains burned hot against her skin. Roland laughed. He held up his key with one hand, and then two fingers with the other. No possibilities swirled around him.

“Water and wind,” he said. “A kingdom that is the entire sea. All seven oceans.”

“Every ship that crosses my path will be torn between you two,” Drake said. “Except that’s not true. They’ll be torn between me.”

“You’ll make a good king,” Roland agreed. Then his face broke into a snarl. “Pnru! Grra Qsom smf pnru!”

Scylla dropped to the floor in convulsions, just as Charybdis made to strike. The spell struck the cloud and stopped it cold. A crack like glass breaking echoed throughout Deadmouth, and in the midst of that angry storm, a spirit fell to the ground. She landed in a heap, a thin, broken creature with malnourished limbs and white hair. Roland dug into the many pockets of his person and found a set of iron chains.

“We’ve learned,” he said.

“Do it,” Drake ordered.

Everyone gathered in close to watch. Charybdis stood on shaky legs, only for Roland to throw her to the ground. Scylla needed to kill him, but no possibilities formed. Herch shoved her into the ground. He could still die. The pirate next to him could still die. She watched them tear at her sister’s home, take the treasure that might one day buy freedom; she heard them threaten and promise and laugh.

Charybdis screamed in pain. “No!” she cried, her voice a starved sound. Roland grabbed her by the tongue. Drake shot her in the stomach.

Scylla hunted for deaths, the sacrifices that were her burden, but none would help her. Only Charybdis could sink full ships. She hungered, and hunger killed more than hate. It’s why Scylla could only take six. No, she needed a wish. Her hands dug into dirt, gold coins, and sharp rocks.

A possibility struck her then, just as Roland was clamping his iron prison around the air sprite. Scylla could harm herself—she could spend a death on her own blood. It would flow. It would twist into the ground, where it would disappear. The whirlpools at Deadmouth granted wishes. With shackled hands, she reached for a sharp rock.

“Good luck,” Herch whispered. He kicked her. No one paid them any mind. The ground was hard, and the scattered treasure made a makeshift basin. “You can’t stop a king.”

In a clumsy flash, Scylla jabbed the rock into her wrist. The possibility vanished. She was out of tricks. Pain dug deep, and blood flowed free, spilling into the ground. She begged it to obey her. Far away, crouched over her sister, Roland spun and waved with the coral pageantry of his magic. Scylla watched the movements. Her blood followed suit.

“Hey!” Herch called. Roland almost stopped what he was doing to see. Drake looked back in alarm.

“Watch her!” he barked.

Herch bent down, his knife flashing in the strange, colorless light, but it was too late. Scylla’s blood spun a single circle and vanished. To Deadmouth, it was a whirlpool. She made a wish.

“Charybdis,” she roared around the lock in her mouth. The words slurred, and the iron burned two of her teeth to pus. “I wish you could kill them!”

The fragile, starving girl vanished in a puff of tornado. An angry cloud formed in her wake, a twisting cyclone big enough to fill the entire cave. Pirates screamed. Shots rang out. Roland yelled magic words that didn’t work, and then a hand reached out from the center of the tornado and yanked. The wizard flew into its maw, into a swirl of angry clouds and sharp rocks that were teeth. Blood fell like rain.

Herch ran towards his king, his gun firing at the monster cloud, his sword flailing. Charybdis grabbed him next. They all watched him fly into the air, never to be seen again.

Panic overcame the remaining pirates, which made them all the easier to kill. If Scylla was an angry flood, then Charybdis was a revolted God. One by one, she picked the pirates up and devoured them, until all but Drake remained.

He tackled Scylla to the ground and put his iron pistol to her head.

“Do something!” he roared. “I command it.”

Scylla raged. She had her magic back, but she couldn’t kill him. The six deaths were spent. She could, however, hurt him. Make him scream. Make him wish he were dead until he was. She flailed with her sharp rock and caught the pirate captain in the arm. Blood spilled. Red. Iron. Water. She grabbed at the water within and yanked. Drake howled as a chalice of blood spun from his arm like thread from a ball of yarn. His gun fell to the ground.

With a delicate, cloud hand, Charybdis reached into Drake’s shirt and found his key. She handed it to Scylla.

“No!” Drake roared, but he was already being lifted off the ground, and into the tornado maw. The would-be king became food.

*

“Welcome back,” Charybdis said. She walked barefoot among the wreckage, her pale feet collecting cuts and leaving beige footprints. “I missed you.”

“Yes,” Scylla said. Talking felt strange, painful. Everything was swollen. The word whistled through her missing teeth. “I am home.”

Charybdis held out her hands, and Scylla fell into the hug. She was too angry to weep, so she did not. She could hear her sister’s stomach growl.

“You’re not human.”

“No,” Scylla said. “No, it didn’t work. It wasn’t enough.”

The air sprite let go, stepped back so she could look around her plundered, stained home. It held enough treasure to buy the world. “Do you think there will ever be enough?”

Scylla shook her head.

“I am hungry,” the air sprite said. “So hungry.”

She fell to the ground in a heap, letting gravity find her resting spot. Gold trinkets cut her skin, but Charybdis didn’t care. She did not feel pain. Scylla joined her. She ran her fingers through a stain of blood and let her magic find the water in it, twisting it into little shapes. First she made Drake, then she made Roland. Then she drank the blood and hated.

“I’m still angry,” Scylla said.

“I know.”

“I wish I could drown the world.”

“I know.”

Charybdis reached for Scylla’s hand. Her grip was weak, starved, a child’s hand with a thousand corpses staining the fingernails. Scylla leaned into her sister and squeezed. She wished she could feel more than fear and rage, because deep down, she knew this was love.

“I’m still angry,” she whispered. She was too angry to weep.

“I know.” Charybdis said. “I know.”

My Top-10 Albums of 2023

Another year, another ten albums. 2023 was a fun year for music. I listened to what feels like a hundred albums in a hundred genres, though I wound up not purchasing … 90% of them. I’m finding as my music library gets bigger, the harder it is for me to buy more. I only rate albums I bought though, so we’re in a bit of a pickle.

Shoutout to Powerwolf, Ed Sheeran, Bebe Rexhe, Kesha, Orbit Culture, Tash Sultana, and too many more to count. I really did have a blast this year.

On the concert front, I got to see Ronnie Radke throw a fit at Rockfest, Jinjer jam so hard we couldn’t hear the storm right outside the tent, The Lonely Ones twice at a local venue with barely a hundred people around, and Tash Sultana in Madison, who was one of my major highlights of the year. Top-5 concert, that one.

So, with that being said, let’s begin!

10: Godsmack – Lighting up the Sky

Genre: Rock

I’m a long-standing fanboy of Godsmack and their brand of radio-friendly rock. I’ve been listening to them since I was nine. So when I say their musical trajectory from 1999 to 2023 has been an interesting one, I really mean it. Lighting up the Sky combines the best of When Legends Rise with Sully Erna’s solo output. This means it’s their least “Godsmack” album in sound. Some days, I don’t really know what to make of it, and other days, I’m really happy to have it on. It’s certainly got some of their best guitar work, and the emotional songs hit harder lyrically than ever before, but … “Red, White, and Blue” is easily the worst tune they’ve ever put out, and I miss that wet guitar tone. They make my list because it’s what the heart wants, but I won’t pretend they’ve put out a masterpiece here.

9: Ava Max – Diamonds and Dancefloors

Genre: Pop

You know what’s fun? High-energy pop music I can dance and sing to. Do you know what Ava Max does? That. There’s not much more to say about this one. It’s exactly what it sets out to be, filled with fun, catchy ear-worms and an audio mix that’s as massive as the voice behind it. We stan Ava Max here.

8: Heretoir – Nightsphere

Genre: Black Metal / Post Black

Every year there’s a new black metal album I latch onto and turn into my personality for a spell, and this year it’s Heretoir. Nightsphere is a funky combination of that raw, black metal we all love, with the more mellow, melodic post black atmosphere we also all love. There’s just as much singing as screaming in this one. It jumps around in sound seamlessly, going from heavy to somber, twisted to melancholic, all the while feeling like you’re wandering through a forest. I adore this genre of music.

7: Illenium – Illenium

Genre: Electronica

It’s always fun when a new Illenium record drops, because I can eagerly hit up the song list to see what powerhouse vocalists he has on board this time. For his self-titled, that means Teddy Swims, Chris Motionless, Avril Lavigne, Grabbitz, and Courtney fucking Laplante from Spiritbox! In some respects, this album is more of the same—we’re getting killer production, killer drops, and amazing, emotional songwriting. However, I feel like there’s a bit more experimenting going on here. The songs with Grabbitz and Courtney get heavy in ways that make me smile like hell, while songs like “Starfall” and “Drwn” play with atmosphere in ways I don’t think I’ve heard Illenium do. There’s more vibes than ever!

6: Kalmah – Kalmah

Genre: Melodic Death Metal

Melodic Death Metal—aka melodeath—is maybe my favorite genre of music, with the good stuff being the tipytop best but the bad stuff being borderline unlistenable. Kalmah hit that first camp. They’re Finnish, which is probably why. That country puts out the best melodeath…. Anyhow, combining groove, a bit of thrash, death metal, and even a little bit of folk here and there, Kalmah have released what is an amazing guitar-driven record with riffs for days. The songs are catchy as hell, brutal and somber, but still super fun because it’s death metal.

5: Ashnikko – Weedkiller

Genre: Hyperpop

Hyperpop isn’t a genre I can say I like, but Ahnikko’s newest effort might be a masterpiece. I don’t even know how to describe the music as it seems to jump genre every other song (or in the middle of songs), with pop choruses, bits of rap here and there, some upset screaming now and then, and at least one full-on cheerleader ensemble. It’s just strange. In terms of emotion, it hits all of them. Some songs are angrier than a Cannibal Corpse tune, others more tragic than the saddest Ed Sheeran joint. It’s minimalist yet bombastic. Just all the things. I love it. What a treat.

4: The Lonely Ones: The Lonely Ones

Genre: Rock

Wow, 2023 was a big year for self-titled records. The Lonely Ones are are what happens when you take Bobaflex and grind off some of the strange but add in more depression. Which is to say you’re in for some of the best rock music this side of your local radio station. Honestly though, this is kind of exactly what I want out of rock music. It’s got dirt and grime to it. It’s produced but not perfect, everything feels real, and while the guitar riffs aren’t always complicated, they groove hard as hell. Everything just fits.

3: Demi Lovato – Revamped

Genre: Rock / Pop

Did you know Demi Lovato put out a rock album this year that’s basically just her “best of” record but with more guitar and even more impressive vocal runs? Jesus Christ can Demi sing. All of these songs are so good, you don’t even know. You don’t even know! I honestly didn’t expect to love this one as much as I do, but I just cannot stop listening to it. It’s so fun!

2: Mental Cruelty – Zwielicht

Genre: Blackened Deathcore

The only band to do blackened deathcore right, Mental Cruelty put out one of the best albums of the year in Zwielicht. It’s gross, bombastic, loud, atmospheric, and filled with nasty-as-fuck breakdowns from beginning to end. Lukkas’ vocals are absolutely insane, filled with more acrobatics than a Cirque-du-Soleil show but also layered with proper storytelling. This an album with a cohesive sound yet none of the songs sound the same; it’s a blackened album where the black metal bits take center stage. See, there’s this divide between, “sure deathcore sounds evil, but black metal is evil” and this album has moments that are just evil.

1: Floor Jansen – Paragon

Genre: Pop

Floor Jansen is my favorite singer right now. I swear she can sing literally anything and it will sound amazing, so when I heard she was putting out a solo album of pop tunes, I grew irrationally excited. That the album lived up to those expectations is wonderful. I adore Paragon. The soundscape is almost more rock than pop, filled with guitars—some distorted, others acoustic—a proper drum kid, piano, and the occasional string ensemble, but it hits that pop vibe. Every song is a bombastic ear worm, easily learned and easy to join in. Vocally, Floor is flawless. She might as well be casting magic, because that’s how good she sounds.

Ov Worms and Dirt

“Go ahead, boy. Stick yer head in the grime.”

Eadwin looked at Brother Consul with a thousand pounds of fear in his eyes. His face paled to the color of old candle wax.

“It won’t bite,” the eldest monk encouraged. Over-sized robes draped his body, regal in shape but not color. They tied at the waist with old bailing twine. “Do it. It’s time.”

“But—”

“Please. Ya need to see this place as I see it. As we all do.”

He spoke with command, not the magic kind but earned respect. His voice held a kindness betrayed by the sour, worn-away gravel from decades of chronic cough. Eventually they’d all sound like him: bone weary, throat sore, and bored with life at the Monastery. Like him, their hair would fall out; like him, their limbs would grow thin and weak despite the daily labors of keeping the catacombs in operation.

Like him, they would all die.

Brother Consul’s bloated lips cracked into a half smile that promised nothing bad would truly happen. The grime was just another bit of boredom, in the end. A zombie routine. Like scrubbing the floors or keeping the furnaces fed.

“Okay,” Eadwin said. He coughed. Something tickled the back of his throat, but that was routine now, too. He looked into the grime.

It stilled as a pool of opaque grease. Magic swirled underneath, deep below the ground where the furnaces burned, but on top, the contents in the stone cauldron did not move. The grime was as smooth as fresh glass. It was hard to tell if it was brown, green, grey, or black. It smelled like stale dirt. Runes rimmed the cauldron, etched with a sloppy hand and filled with the tired glow of magic at its final fade.

“What … what should I say? What should I do?”

Brother Consul waved a cold hand. “We stopped with the rituals when the moon stopped moving.”

“I feel like I should say something.”

“Then say something.”

Eadwin looked the elder monk in the face. His living eyes locked with dead ones. A thousand pounds of fear passed through him. “I want,” he whispered. “I want to go back. To normal.”

Brother Consul leaned in close. His grin hardened into sorrow. “No, boy. No you don’t.”

The air in the large room hung about like a stale, mildewed curtain. Empty pews watched, each as stuck to the ground as the moon to the sky. Long ago, the Monastery had thrived, a home the size of a village, but now only four people kept it running. Three of them were zombies. One would become a zombie. Already Eadwin barely needed to eat. Soon, he wouldn’t need to breathe.

“What … what … should I do once I’m on the other side?”

Brother Consul nodded. His jaw clicked. He coughed, even though his lungs did not work. “Don’t look up.”

With his last truly human sigh, Eadwin stuck his head in the grime. The world went black.

*

Eadwin’s inner ear did a somersault, and his stomach flipped a circle to match. The cold, chill of death coiled around his face. It seeped into his ears, his noise, his mouth, killing his senses and giving him a drunken sway. He blinked; he coughed. Everything hazed with grime, like looking through a window so dirty it would be easier to break it than clean. Panic tried to strike him, sink its fangs into his soul, but the grime kept it at bay. Or maybe that was undeath. His heart slowed. His fingers grasped at the cauldron so hard they split open.

The Monastery was no longer empty.

Eadwin stood on shaky legs. He looked around the wide room, with its pews and aisles, and saw them—the ghosts. They cowered with fake form, their limbs thin and misshapen, the color of old yogurt. Their faces cried long, silent prayers. Many swayed from side to side, but none moved.

A hand gripped Eadwin’s shoulder. The touch was familiar, a dead friend’s comfort. Eadwin tried to find Brother Consul, to hold him and feel safe, but the grime did not care for balance or for living blood. Eadwin stumbled. He put one foot in front of the other. Momentum carried him into the ghosts.

The dead followed him with their misshapen, yogurt eyes. Little blue pinpricks glowed within their sockets. Eadwin fell, and they reached for him, strained against their bonds. They cried, and they begged, and he saw: Each ghost was chained to the floor. Ropes of flesh coiled around their ankles, locked in place with screws made of bone. One ghost shook his leg, and though Eadwin could not hear the chain rattle, he knew that it did. Dirt leaked from the links.

“Help us,” the ghosts prayed with silent screams. “Free us.”

“How?” Eadwin tried to shout in turn, but all his lungs could do was cough. Grime stained his teeth. He tasted blood.

A ghost leaned in, its hands outstretched. Eadwin reached for it. He needed help. The ghost’s fingernails were made of ooze.

“No!” a voice ordered from miles away.

Eadwin jerked back, but not before the ghost touched him. A burning pain erupted from the tips of his fingers, like he had stuck his hand the furnace. He tried to scream. He coughed up grime. He felt a hand on his shoulder, but this time it did not grip with kindness.

“Follow the dragons,” the ghost wailed. Its face almost looked alive. There was panic in it, and underneath that, a desperate hope. “Go! Go and see!”

Running, stumbling, Eadwin shouldered his way through the Monastery. He couldn’t see well, but his body knew the church. He had lived here for over a decade. Footsteps followed close behind. Shouts of, “Stop!” came with them.

The courtyard swarmed with prisoner spirits, hundreds—thousands—of ghosts stood chained to the floor with flesh and bone. As one they turned to look. Eadwin screamed. As one, they all pointed up, towards the sky. The grime distorted his vision, made everything swim with dirt, but Eadwin’s soul understood even if his eyes did not: The dead stayed stuck. There was no afterlife, no god to hear their prayers. Only chains. Only forever.

“Help!” Eadwin called.

Then he looked up.

Eadwin expected to see the sky, the moon in its place, the stars dull with sleep. Instead he found dirt. He was buried alive, trapped in a giant grave of tattered wood and black embers. The furnaces smelled like dirt. The ash smelled like dirt. Brother Consul smelled like dirt. Everything was dirt. Everything was—

The underground sky shifted. Eadwin coughed. Little bits of sand fell into his face as he watched his graveyard prison pulse, as if something big swam underneath. The ghosts prayed. A few covered their heads; their chains kept them from hiding. Eadwin waited. Someone grabbed him by the back of the head with rage strength. Brother Consul forced Eadwin to his knees. He tried to bend him down, to make him look at the ground, to make him close his eyes, but the dirt moved. Something lived inside. Eadwin needed to see it. The ghosts needed him to see it.

Dirt showered the ground. A head burst through. It was thick and pink, coiled ropes of scales and horns with a gaping circle of tentacle teeth. It wriggled down, as wide as a horse and ten times as long. It was a worm, the king of dirt and carrion, and from its back sprouted two, leather dragon wings.

It did not roar, but it did see.

*

The heat of the furnaces did not bother the zombies, but it did give them a more deathly aroma. Their dirt smell turned damp, the air thick. Eadwin coughed. Sweat streamed down his face as little rivers, tinged with grey like the water in the wells outside. Brother Alfric worked beside him, his dead hands diligent, his skin peeling like cracked paint from a wall. He tried to whistle as he worked, but his lungs were only capable of coughing, and his lips were too dry. Instead he made a series of strained, wind noises that almost carried a melody.

“There, there, ol’ lad,” he said after one chorus. “It’ll be okay. First time in the grime is always a bit of a shock.”

“Yeah,” Eadwin mumbled.

“The ghosts can’t hurt you.”

Brother Alfric had entered undeath short and round. Being a zombie kept him short, but without food or water, the roundness became slop. He carried his loose skin like a blanket. When he worked, he would drape it over his legs to help catch anything he might drop. Brother Alfric had clumsy hands.

Eadwin slit an envelope open. Without thinking, he threw the letter into the furnace. Its envelope evaporated into a little pile of ash. Another envelope appeared in its stead, and he repeated the process. The furnaces had to burn, and the letters were never ending.

“I looked up,” Eadwin said.

“Oh.” Brother Alfric dropped his letter opener. It landed blade first on his loose skin and parted it easier than the paper. “Oh. Well, you shouldn’t have done that.”

“No. Brother Consul was furious. Terrified, but furious.”

“Yes. But that’s his job. He runs the Monastery.” The wrinkled zombie pulled the knife from his skin and smiled. “He’ll forgive you, lad. That’s his job, too.”

“It’s dirt.” Eadwin hissed. “The sky!”

Brother Alfric shrugged. “It’s all dirt. That can’t hurt you, either, you know. Dirt.”

“But—”

“Did you pray?”

Eadwin nodded. “Yes. But there’s no moon, Alfric. Not in the grime. Only ghosts and dirt and—”

Brother Alfric chuckled. He leaned in close, and cupped a dead hand around Eadwin’s ear. “Can you keep a secret, lad?”

Eadwin nodded.

“We don’t pray to the moon anymore. Not since it got stuck.” Brother Alfric’s voice was like the wind, cold and empty. It tickled Eadwin’s face. “No, we pray to us, because only we can hear. But that’s enough. Did you feel better?”

“I think so.”

“Self control and self promises. That’s what it’s all about, lad. That and feeding these furnaces.”

Eadwin split another envelope. It evaporated; he tossed the letter into the fire. Another appeared. This was his duty for the day, and his penance for looking up. For seeing a secret he wasn’t ready to handle. The worms killed humans. The ghosts lied to humans. He wasn’t far enough into undeath to face either.

“Ya can’t trust a ghost,” Brother Consul had scolded. “You can pity them, for we must, but ya can’t trust them. They’ll kill you if they touch you.”

So Eadwin worked the furnaces all day, sweating grey water and burning little squares of paper until cuts covered his hands. The letters were an infinite source of fuel, and as long as the furnaces kept running, then everything would be okay. The Monastery still functioned. The worms stayed away. The The grime remained placid in its stone cauldron.

Eadwin grabbed another letter out of thin air. He cut open the envelope. He readied to throw the paper, but a pinprick of color caught his eye, a dark squiggle. The letters never had any writing on them. Thousands appeared every day by magic, addressed to the monks of the Monastery in various scrawls and foreign characters, but they were always blank. Empty.

“What?”

Eadwin looked around. Brother Alfric had waddled off a few hours ago, eager for his next round of chores, and the other monks were performing their duties. Chores ran nonstop at the Monastery. There were only four people left to take care of it, not even half a dozen to do a village’s worth of work each day. Feed the animals, tend the garden with its sick, little potatoes, clean. It was all dirt, after all. That meant lots of cleaning. Once Eadwin became a full zombie, he could work nonstop and not have to eat. It would help, but only a little. They still needed to keep food and water on hand in case someone else wandered out of the mist.

Feeling like he was breaking another rule, Eadwin folded the letter open. He expected blank parchment, or maybe a stain, but found thin, black text. It read, “Help me!”

“Help me,” Eadwin whispered.

The letter disappeared in a flash of blue magic. Another appeared. Eadwin slit it open and read that one, too, “Save me!”

“This can’t be,” he said, as the letter popped with little blue sparks.

Eadwin tore open more letters, not even bothering with his knife. Each contained a message for him: Help me. Save me. Please watch over my wife. God, protect my children. For my loving father. Help me. Save me. My flesh hurts me. Please. Please. Please. Please!

Something crashed up above, where the grime lay. Eadwin barely heard it. He found another letter. He opened it.

“Find me,” it read. “Stick your head in the grime, and find me. There’s still time.”

“What?”

But the letter disappeared before it could answer any other questions. Eadwin looked up. Brother Consul stood in the doorway, arms crossed under his thick monk robes, lips cracked. He’d been a zombie since the first day Eadwin showed up, but not the scary kind that wandered the outside world. He didn’t eat brains or rip flesh from bone with his bare hands. He smiled; he prayed. Sometimes he sang. He showed Eadwin how to clean their holy relics without scratching them, how to sew rips in clothing, how to open a letter and burn it to ash. Now though, he looked scary. His eyes were as dead as the ghosts in the grime, his teeth sharp. He glowered, and Eadwin shrank in his chair.

“Didn’t know you could read,” Brother Consul said.

Eadwin shook his head. “I can’t.”

“Oh?”

“We never owned books, when I was young. When I had a family.” Eadwin choked on the word. A decade had passed since then, but not a day had changed. The moon never moved. The trees had stopped growing. Ever since he was born, there had been more ash in the air than actual weather. “All we had was our farm.”

Brother Consul nodded. Kindness returned to him. “You’re a good farmer, boy. Never had potatoes so big until you showed up.”

“I—”

“Our horse has never been happier, either.” Brother Consul sat next to Eadwin and grabbed a letter from thin air. He tore it open with a loud rip. “Here. What’s it say?”

Eadwin took the paper with a shaking hand. His fingers were dry and bloody. It said, “Come quick, and bring a knife,” but Eadwin didn’t like how Brother Consul was watching him. He swallowed. Sweat dripped down his face. His armpits were soaked with it.

“It says, ‘Help me, please.’” Eadwin lied. “They all say something similar. The letters want help.”

Brother Consul tapped the paper once, and it burst into a little blue light. “Not the letters, boy. Ghosts.”

Another letter appeared. Eadwin opened it, but stopped before he could see the writing. He handed it to Brother Consul, who tossed it into the flames.

“We aren’t gods, Eadwin. We have no business reading other people’s prayers. Those are between the ghosts and the moon.” Brother Consul shrugged. “Or us and ourselves.”

More letters appeared. Eadwin watched them like he would a snake. Under the table, he worked his letter opener into the folds of his robes. He didn’t want to be a zombie. He wanted to go back to normal.

He was no longer afraid.

“Can’t we help them? The ghosts?”

“No.” Brother Consul stooped his dead shoulders. He smelled like dirt. His face crusted with flaking skin. “We aren’t gods, Eadwin. All we can do is garden. Garden, and not look up.”

Despite himself, Eadwin looked up.

*

With a tense hand, Brother Consul led Eadwin upstairs. It was time for supper. Because even though Eadwin believed he should fast as penance, the elder monk would not hear it. “Strength, boy,” he said in his dead voice. “You need it more than ever, now that you’ve had a look in the grime. Strength, and rest.” They wandered the empty halls to the kitchen. Most of the sconces on the walls were empty of all but dust. A few held candles, but they weren’t lit. Only Eadwin needed to eat. Sometimes Sister Burgwynn made herself food out of habit, but until he became a full-fledged zombie, the kitchens belonged to Eadwin.

“I will pray before I eat,” the young monk said.

“Good.”

“For guidance.”

“Oh?” Brother Consul didn’t have any eyebrows, but the skin above his eye lifted all the same. “Guidance for what, boy?”

Eadwin felt the letter opener in his palm. The blade wasn’t very sharp—he could squeeze it and not cut himself—but it parted zombie flesh with ease. Could it cut through chains, too?

“I’m not sure.” Eadwin shrugged, swallowed. Thoughts of life danced through his head. “What fell while I was feeding the furnaces?”

“Hmm?”

Eadwin looked up again, though they were no longer below the grime. The kitchens were in the back of the Monastery, out of the way so food could be delivered without bothering anyone. There were shelves and ovens and long, stone tables for cutting meat and vegetables, though Eadwin only ever used the corner of one. The rest was for the dirt.

“I heard something crash, earlier. I thought maybe Brother Alfric fell.”

“Alfric does do that a lot, don’t he?”

“Yeah.”

Brother Consul gave Eadwin a pat on the shoulder. He spoke in a commanding tone, but without magic. “Eat, and rest, boy. Undeath will be upon you soon.”

“Yes.”

“Our chores await.”

Brother Consul left along another path, his footsteps making little slip, slip noises as dead flesh left footprints in old dirt. Eadwin waited until he was out of sight and sound, and then turned for the church. His knuckles whitened around the knife hidden in the sleeves of his robe.

He needed to stick his head back in the grime.

He needed to free the ghosts.

He needed to stop the worm.

*

The church was dead empty but not empty of the dead. Eadwin could feel them all around, standing in their spots, leaking with yogurt-flesh and silent prayers. His eyes wandered the aisles. Something was different. He didn’t know what, only that things had changed. Instinct made him look up. He flinched, because there was a crack in the ceiling, as if something had fallen on it. But the only thing above the church was the moon.

“I think the moon will hear my prayers now,” Eadwin whispered.

A little bit of wind blew through the aisles, not strong enough to do anything but let Eadwin know it was there. It smelled like death, but underneath the death, it smelled green. The grime rested in its stone cauldron. Eadwin ran to it. Today, his chores meant something. Today, the stagnant could move.

Without a prayer or a magic word, Eadwin stuck his head in the grime. Like before, he spun a nauseous circle. The ground became ceiling; the ceiling became a dirt sky. Grease clouded his vision in cold streaks. He looked out at the church, at the cluttered ghosts, and they looked back with prayers on their misshapen lips. Each would become paper. Each paper would become flame.

Eadwin swayed forward. There were less ghosts than before. He wasn’t sure how he knew that, only that they seemed a little further apart. There was more room to walk. They reached for him, prayed for him, begged for him.

“Help us,” they wailed. “Save us!”

Eadwin didn’t know where to begin. He flashed his letter opener and almost dropped it. In the living world, it was a dull knife made for tearing paper, but in the grime, it was heavy and long, a proper sword. Both its edges gleamed with oily sharpness.

One ghost made a living motion with his arms, a “come here, quickly!” that Eadwin recognized. He ran as fast as the grime allowed.

“You must dig!” the ghost wailed. It pointed up. Eadwin followed.

Something had fallen on the church when he was feeding the furnaces, big enough to shake the building. In the living world, it had left a simple crack in the roof, but in the grime, it had struck a savage blow. There was now a hole in the ceiling. From the hole, leaked bodies. They hung in place, a pile of twisted corpses stuck like a stalactite to the dirt sky.

“You must free us,” the ghost said, “and then you must dig!”

“What? But the worms—”

“Follow the dragons!” The ghost grabbed Eadwin by the shoulders. Its yogurt-hands burned. Eadwin screamed. “That is my prayer. Bleed. Then hurry!”

The ghost disappeared in a flash of blue smoke. Another body oozed from the ceiling. Eadwin looked around, his heart barely beating, his eyes barely seeing. He waved his sword, stumbling more than walking, as he found the nearest ghost. He tried to get on his knees and fell. Somewhere outside the grime, his body hurt.

“Help us!” the ghosts all screamed.

“I will!”

Eadwin swung his sword at a chain. He expected it to part, to slice in two or burst with magic, but his sword hit flesh and bounced. The ghost reached for him. Eadwin cringed away.

“Help me!” the ghost begged.

“I’m trying!”

The grime did not care for quick movements. Each sword swing felt like it took minutes, and each clang burned through Eadwin’s wrists, arms, and shoulders. The ghosts touched him, their desperation burning with literal pain. Eadwin cried. His tears clogged with grime. He pounded his fist against the ground so hard he heard bone snap. Blood spilled on the floor. The ghosts wailed, and when Eadwin tried another swing, his sword worked. The chain parted, and the ghost disappeared. Its body appeared in the ceiling.

“Bleed, then hurry,” Eadwin said. His speech slurred as if he were drunk. Each word tasted of grime.

Eadwin went from ghost to ghost, hacking at the chains around their ankles. The stalactite of bodies thickened, grew stronger. It reminded Eadwin of a potato root. Arms and legs spidered in all directions, but the trunk, the tube of bodies, went straight for the grime. Whatever the this plant was, it was thirsty. For the first time in Monastery’s history, the grime bubbled.

Something shifted in the dirt. Eadwin looked up. There were dragons swimming above him.

“What are you doing, lad?” a voice called. It was distant, more echo than question. Eadwin flailed.

“Stop,” he shouted. He swung his sword in random directions. In the real world, it was just a dull knife. He wasn’t sure he could even cut himself with it.

Brother Alfric stopped.

“Now, now,” the zombie said. He broke into a coughing fit, and his body shook with the effort, though Eadwin could not see it. There was too much grime in the way. “Let’s just calm down, lad. Calm down and go back to our chores.”

“I have to help them!” Eadwin could barely hear his own voice. “The ghosts need my help.”

Alfric approached with quiet steps. His jowly flesh dangled from his body. It was filled with cuts and tears from his time spent in the furnaces. “Shouldn’t talk to ghosts,” he said. “Their words are for the moon, not us. We aren’t gods.”

“I can help them.”

“No you can’t.”

“Yes I can! We all can! It’s—”

Someone coughed behind Eadwin’s shoulder. He screamed, stumbled—swung. His letter opener gored Brother Alfric’s chest, and in the grime, his sword struck soul. Blue magic flashed so bright it reminded Eadwin of stories of the sun. Once upon a time, there had been one of those, an orb of light in the sky. It let things grow. It kept the zombies at bay. Maybe it even let prayers reach the moon.

“I’m sorry!” Eadwin cried as Brother Alfric sighed into death. His soul vanished, and his body appeared on the stalactite. “I didn’t mean to!”

“Help us!” another ghost cried. “Save us.”

Eadwin freed it from its chains. The nose of a worm burrowed through the dirt ceiling. Its tentacle mouth sniffed the air.

Just as Eadwin was saving another two ghosts, he heard a magic command. The word “Stop” struck his spine. His sword fell from his hands.

“No!”

Eadwin fell to the ground, searching. Grime covered his vision. His bloody hands left stains on the floor.

“Boy!” a voice roared. “Boy what have you done?”

A dead fist struck Eadwin in the face. It blackened his left eye and smeared the grime from it all in one go. His stomach doubled over as his inner ear tried to process being both in the grime and outside it. He coughed. His tongue tasted like stomach acid.

“Please,” Eadwin tried. His right hand was broken in two parts and bleeding from more cuts than he could count. Outside the grime, it hurt. Inside the grime, he didn’t care. “We can help them.”

Brother Consul gripped Eadwin with zombie hands. His claws burrowed into Eadwin’s skin, drawing blood and pain. With half his face hazed with grime, the monk looked like any other zombie that roamed the earth: dead, bloated, leaking fluids and bad smells. His breath smelled like ash, and his teeth sharpened into that of a wolf’s.

“Yer not a god, boy. You can’t help the dead.”

“But—”

Brother Consul shook Eadwin until blood leaked from his wounds. The zombie brought his face in close. His eyes were terrified, furious, and dead, all in one go.

“We’re all that’s left, keeping the world alive, boy. It should have died long ago. Do you want to die? Do you?”

Eadwin screamed. He heard more footsteps, though he couldn’t see them. The rest of the zombies had come. The ghosts cried for help.

“You’ll doom all the people in the mist, those still alive, and those not.”

“But we’re already doomed.”

“Not if the furnaces keep burning!”

A new voice coughed. Eadwin felt a hand on his shoulder, and then he saw the tip of a blade. Sister Burgwynn had his letter opener. She brought it to his throat.

“He’ll pray for us, if we let him,” she said. Everything about her was thick, hard, and acidic. “We can burn him forever.”

Eadwin looked up. Brother Consul slapped him with his claws, raking bloody lines in Eadwin’s face.

“Do not look up! They’ll see you!” The elder zombie coughed. “Quick. Grab a rag and wipe the rest off him, before the worms come.”

“We can help,” Eadwin whispered. Out of the corner of his grime eye, he saw something move. Something big, something with scales and dragon wings.

“You are not a god!”

“I don’t need to be a god to help,” Eadwin screamed. “What good is this church if—”

Sister Burgwynn cut him off with a scream. “Brother!” she roared, “Brother the grime is bubbling!”

“What?” The claws holding Eadwin up let go, and he fell to the ground.

With his good eye, Eadwin watched both zombies shuffle to the grime as fast as their dead legs allowed. They bent over the bowl. Brother Consul put his hands on the cauldron to brace himself, readied his head, and then crumpled to death. There was a glittering, silver rock in his skull. Sister Burgwynn had just enough time to look up, at a hole in the ceiling, before she, too, was struck. Eadwin followed her gaze and saw the moon overhead, stuck in place, and maybe just a little smaller. Explosions thundered in the distance. Big things landed with even bigger thuds.

With his grime eye, watched the dragon ooze in front of him. It was huge, the king of carrion. It arched up, rearing like a snake ready to bite with poison. Eadwin coughed. The worm struck. Brother Consul exploded into blue parts so small they didn’t even collect on the stalactite. It then swallowed Sister Burgwynn whole. She appeared next to Brother Alfric, and her foot dipped into the bubbling cauldron.

A thousand panes of glass cracked as every window in the Monastery shattered. Flesh chains burned with blue flame. The worm coiled towards the mountain of bodies, and as it slithered up, the bodies hardened into a stone road. Runes appeared in the stone, glowing faintly with magic at its final fade. The ghosts formed a line.

Eadwin struggled into a sitting position. The grime was mostly off him now, and he hurt worse than death. The worm dug its way into the dirt ceiling. The ghosts marched after it, following the dragon up, up, into the dead plane beyond. Each ghost looked to Eadwin before they began their march and thanked him. Their yogurt mouths smiled. Their voices no longer screamed.

The moon answered their prayers.

Portraiture

The girl stepped from of a dust-worn carriage and into the night. The trees were deep, the air chilly with fog. Animals made animal noises—but in a hushed fashion. Monsters lurked in the woods this far outside Nantes. Aalis closed her eyes, breathed deep, but instead of the familiar scent of Atlantic salt, found raw earth, dead leaves, and gloom. It was a lost path, yet this was where his letter said to stop.

“Lady, I don’t recommend this,” her driver said from his perch, and not for the first time. He hid behind a struggling lantern and a white horse. “The respectable do not live out here.”

“I cannot afford the respectable.”

“You’ll be able to tomorrow.”

Aalis rounded on the man. He was a brackish sort with a scowl as starched as his doublet. He served the rich aristocrats of the city. She was a poor aristocrat. “If I am not back in two hours, you have my permission to leave.”

“It will take him more than two hours to paint you. And Master Douais will have my head if I don’t bring you back.”

She held up two fingers. “He is the best, sir. The absolute best.”

Today, tonight, before her life fell further apart, Aalis deserved the best.

“At least let me accompany you. You’re only 16.”

“I am old enough for Master Douais.”

Aalis felt 16 going on 30. She stood tall but slender, with long, brown hair that spilled every-which-way no matter how often she brushed it. Her nose was hooked, her lips full. A red, puffiness rimmed her eyes from crying. She had grown fast, and then she had grown up even faster. Tomorrow, she would age another ten years.

The artist’s letter said there would be a cobblestone path, and now that her eyes were adjusted, Aalis found it. The stones were yellowed with mold. She took her first, careful step. Her long skirts threatened to trip her legs. She was not dressed for a walk through the forest, because portraiture demanded gowns and jewelry. Aalis was wealthy enough for both, but only if they were kept modest. Her dress swallowed her body in excess fabric around the shoulders, sleeves, and skirt, but the color was brown with only dashes of red to make it look regal. She wore a silver necklace with a ruby to match. The chain was cheap, not silver but polished steel, and the gemstone was misshapen. Both belonged to her mother. Aalis owned exactly one beautiful dress. It was white.

For his part, the driver huffed and cursed. He then promised to go find her if she was not back in two hours, “or else!” The trees soon swallowed his threats. They were as thick as mud, their branches so intertwined they blocked much of the sky.

It felt like shrinking, and it felt like time travel, but Aalis followed the artist’s path which soon arrived at a clearing, and then at his house. Dead trees grew around it like hands protecting something fragile. No lights shone her invitation. The home had a small, impoverished look that spoke of peasantry, yet it was two stories tall and built like a castle. Bricks made up its walls, and dark tiles its roof. Its windows were large and grand; its door was heavy enough to stop King Francis himself.

Aalis took it all in with her first real sense of unease. Her driver was minutes away by foot, she was alone, and the artist was a strange man in a strange forest. He painted his best work in the dead of night.

The door slid open. A small candle burned from further inside. Aalis saw the outline of a man appear in the doorway, and when she raised her hand, he beckoned her forward. She stepped from the cobblestone path. Her shoes were made for fashion first and function second, pointed at the toe and easy to snag on roots or rocks, but the grass around his house was dry, more like dirt than meadow. The closer she got to his house, the easier it was to keep walking.

Aalis reached the door and curtseyed. “Master,” she said. Her voice whispered with nerves.

“Malo,” the artist said. “My name is Malo.”

“Aalis du Roux.” Aalis looked away. “For now.”

Malo eyed Aalis in a way that sent her sixth sense screaming: of monsters and ghosts, of wolves tearing into cattle. Yet she was star-struck too, because she had seen his paintings. He was the best.

“You are too hungry,” he said. He gave her a slow wave, an almost-polite dismissal. “You do not belong here.”

“Please!” Aalis begged. Her fear of danger became fear of rejection. “I followed the rules. I paid ahead, and I came alone. I burned your letters.”

“You—”

“I want to remember myself as I am now, before things get worse!”

Aalis forced herself to meet Malo’s gaze. His eyes were dead, but so were hers. So were most peoples’. If it wasn’t the war with Italy, then it was something else. Poverty, sickness, dead brothers or dead husbands. The monarchy. The rich aristocrats spoke of Renaissance, but they built their rebirth on the backs of others. Her shoulders ached from the strain.

“It is too easy to die, Master Malo.” Aalis swallowed. She wasn’t sure if it was fear or sorrow that made her want to cry. “But I’ve seen your paintings. They will not.”

“You accept my terms?”

“I do.”

Malo nodded. He stepped aside. “You may enter.”

Aalis did. Malo’s home was cold, colder than the woods outside, and she crossed her arms against the chill. The lighting was bad, the smell strange. She caught whiffs of chemicals, things she recognized and things she did not. Before her father died, he owned a paper mill, and she had wandered its rooms on a few occasions. Malo’s home was like that, only damper. The ceiling was low, like she had stepped into a cellar instead of a castle, and the floor needed sweeping.

“This way,” Malo said. “I will paint you.”

Malo looked strong, and he looked sick. He was tall, so tall his head almost touched the ceiling, with a gauntness to his face, shoulders, and chest. Everything about him was pale. His mouth was so thin it might as well not be there. All of the rich men in France kept their hair long with manicured beards, but Malo was bald and clean shaven. While Aalis wore her best dress, he wore a simple grey undershirt and a black jerkin. The jerkin was stained with paints. He seemed to like the color brown.

A single candle lit the next room, which was disheveled from floor to ceiling with paintings. Aalis sucked in a breath. Malo jerked at the sound.

“What?” he twisted about to look at her. His eyes were a deep, cold blue.

Time was short, but Aalis couldn’t help herself. She approached the nearest painting for a better look. It was of a white rabbit, so realistically depicted that at first she thought it was a living, breathing animal. From far away it appeared it be sleeping, but as she got closer, she saw that it was dead. Two trickles of blood ran from its neck to soil its fur.

 “Why would you paint a dead rabbit?”

Malo hovered close. Aalis flinched. “To forget,” he said. “I remember too well, but when I paint, I forget.”

 “I don’t understand.”

“You don’t need to.” Malo gestured towards a door. “This way. My studio is over there. Your canvas is ready.”

Aalis regarded the next painting. It was of a woman’s neck. Her clothing was gone, ripped or stripped away, revealing just a white shift and bare skin. Two trickles of blood flowed from her throat. The blood was so well painted that Aalis believed if she touched it, it would stain her fingers.

“Maybe I should go,” Aalis whispered.

“I will paint you.”

Aalis backed away. She turned for the door and watched it close on its own. The wood creaked as it shut, and the lock clicked loud enough to echo, even though the rooms were small and cluttered. The harder she peered through the dark, the more paintings she saw. Each one depicted a neck; each one depicted blood.

“I will paint you,” Malo repeated. “As you are right now. You will change, grow or shrink with time, but the painting will not. It will remember if you forget.”

“What if I don’t want to change?”

“Then you must learn to die.”

Malo grabbed Aalis by the arm. The movement was slow, lazy and without force, yet his hands were as strong as iron. She couldn’t escape him. Like a gentleman escorting a lady, Malo lead Aalis to his studio. When she stepped through the door, it closed on its own behind her.

The studio was pitch black, but Malo lit a few candles. The flickering of yellow lights made his skin all the more pale. Aalis swallowed. Malo followed the movement of her throat. He reminded her of a cat stalking a mouse.

“Do not be scared,” he said. “It will not hurt.”

“Please,” Aalis tried, but she was in his world, his court, and she could not escape.

“Change hurts. Remembering hurts. What I do is neither.” Malo held out his hand. “Come. Sit.”

His studio wrapped around them with cramped mess, an easel on one end, a hundred or more canvases strewn about the sides, and a great couch on the other. Malo gestured to the couch. Once upon a time, it had been gorgeous, an expensive piece of furniture fit for a king’s chambers, but age and use took their toll. Its fabric was brown, its cushions visibly lumpy. Scratch marks covered the backrest, and long rips showed the wood behind. Aalis both did and didn’t recognize it. The paintings she saw months ago had featured this exact place, this exact seat, but it had been depicted as brand new. Beautiful.

Feeling his dead eyes on her, Aalis approached the seat. The closer she got, the more rips and stains she saw. People fought on this couch. People bled.

“Sit how you want to be painted,” Malo instructed. He slid behind his canvas and watched. His eyes never blinked. Aalis wasn’t sure he even breathed. “In any position you like. I will paint the couch as it once was, when I first bought it.”

“It … it is old,” Aalis said. “Very old.”

“Yes.”

Malo grabbed a brush. Aalis sat as gingerly as she could, trying to avoid the worst stains while also not looking at them. Her heart drummed with fear. All around her hung paintings of throats and blood. Most were of women, always naked, always pale as death, but a few were of men. Aalis recognized beard styles that no one in modern France would ever wear. A few were of animals, a dormouse there, a deer there, but like the rabbit in the first room, they were dead.

Some of his paintings, the biggest ones, were covered with burlap tarps.

 “What are those?” Aalis asked.

Malo followed her gaze. He seemed surprised. “I don’t know. I painted them to forget, and I covered them to keep them forgotten.” He turned back. “Are you ready?”

Aalis shifted positions, crossing one leg over the other and adjusting the middle of her skirt to better show off the red in it. She then flicked at the fabric of her neckline, making sure just the barest hint of the white shift underneath poked through. All the rich ladies were doing that now.

“Do I look scared?”

“Yes.” Malo cocked his head. “You looked scared from the moment I saw you outside my home. Scared and hungry. I do not know what you look like happy.”

The candles flickered. The couch felt sticky. Aalis both wanted to laugh and scream at the same time—she couldn’t remember the last time she felt happy. Not since that letter. “Sorry,” the man in black had said, dressed like a member of the court but walking with an executioner’s gait. “Sit down before you open it.” So they sat. So they read. So they all collapsed with sobs. Her brother was dead, slain in Pavia for King Francis, a thousand and more kilometers away to end a war that began anew one year later. Their family fell apart. Her father grew distant, angry, and then sick. Her mother cracked at the seams like a woman made of clay.

When typhoid finally finished with her family, what was left of it went to Aalis. The business became shambles. Her mother withered into an angry stranger who spoke in Bible verses. Aalis’s suitors grew older in age and worse in quality, each one eager for just the one part of her before taking over the paper mill.

Circumstance forced her to pick one. He did not love her. She did not love him.

“My life is hard, and it will only get worse,” Aalis said.

Malo nodded. “Yes.”

“I am scared.”

“Yes.” Malo touched his brush to the canvas. He made a single tap. Aalis couldn’t even tell what color paint he was using. “But now you look mad instead of afraid. Is that okay?”

Aalis nodded. She wanted to cry, and found that she was. “I think maybe that’s all I have left to give.”

“Not all.”

Malo worked his brush, making a half-dozen chopping motions—stabs instead of strokes. Aalis expected his hand to fly, to create her clone with something akin to magic, because he only had an hour left before it was time to go. But just as fast as he grabbed the brush, he put it back down. He turned his gaze towards her throat.

“I will finish later,” Malo said. His eyes were so, so cold. “I will have it delivered to your home.”

“But—”

“I do not forget.”

Aalis needed to run. Her hand found a stain on the couch, crusty with brown and still lingering with the smell of blood. She screamed. Malo approached. As Aalis put her hands in front of her face, Malo kneeled. He grabbed her wrist. His fingers were as gentle as nails.

“I paint everyone twice,” he said. “One for you, and one for me.”

“No!”

“These are my terms. It will not hurt.”

Malo shifted Aalis’s skirts aside so he could kneel over her. She pushed at him, but his skin felt like bricks. His body was as unmoving as a castle wall. Up close he smelled like nothing, like he wasn’t even there, yet he also stank of old dirt and older blood. His eyes glowed blue, his frown deep with difficult work. His hands worked at the neckline of her dress, yanking the extra fabric towards her shoulders. He pulled at the shift underneath so it was more visible. Aalis watched. She made herself look into his eyes. They were dead, but hers were not.

“Interesting,” he said. He slipped his palm around the necklace Aalis wore. The jewel shined with bloody crimson. “Do you know this shape?”

Aalis breathed deep.

“It’s a heart. A human heart. I have never seen a ruby this shape before.” Malo let the jewel fall back into place. Then he repositioned it, so it was exactly where he wanted it. “It is a queen’s gem. You will make a good picture.”

Malo smiled. It was his first smile of the night. “You do not look scared,” he said.

Then he gripped Aalis by the face and shoulder. He opened his mouth wide. It was a black chasm with fangs. His tongue was bloated and blue, like a leech.

The vampire bit, and for an hour, he drank. He did not breathe. His heart did not beat. Aalis watched with disgust in her eyes and a scream on her lips, but she did not fight back. She did not fight when that letter came, and she did not fight when she overheard her father wishing it had been her instead of his son. She would not fight on her wedding day. Life was cruel. She deserved nothing.

When the hour ended, Malo sat up. He wiped the fresh blood from his lips and bid Aalis leave.

“I will forget,” he said.

“I will not.”

“Then you will hurt.” Malo looked at her as uncaring as ever. Her blood stained his hands. “But you will learn to live. You hunger, and now you are no longer afraid.”

Aalis walked out of her own accord. She crossed the artist’s front yard, and she marched down the yellow, cobblestone path. The forest night stretched deep with gloom. Soon she saw the glow of a lantern, and the white flank of an impatient horse. The driver said nothing as she stepped into the carriage. He took her home. She snuck inside, removed her mother’s dress, and got into bed. Aalis spent the rest of the night remembering what it was like to be alive. What it was like to have a family uncracked with change. She missed being a little girl, helping her mother with the housework and playing with dolls made of paper. She would wrestle with her brother and tattle when he won, and she would sit by her father in the living room while he read aloud to her from the Bible. Love had once thrived in her home.

Aalis remembered, and for the first time, she wondered if she could fight. Make change her own. Let love thrive once again. She deserved nothing, but she wanted the best, and maybe that was good enough. She did not belong with the dead. Her mother’s misshapen ruby gleamed against her throat, now crusted brown in spots with her own blood. Aalis grabbed it. It was hers. She was no longer afraid.

A week later, Aalis Douais received a package addressed to Aalis du Roux. She opened it and marveled at the work, at the absolute perfection of the portrait. It was like staring at her twin. If she didn’t know better, she thought she was looking into a mirror.

She barely recognized herself.

Follow the Red Horse

Graduation took place in a church. All the priests carried guns

“Victory rides a red horse!” the deacon sang. He was an ancient construct, clothed in red and covered in metal sores. A mini soul forge powered his body. “Today, you are his red horse.”

“Victory rides a red horse,” the students repeated. Most of them believed it, too.

Lights flickered in the church, not new tech but old. Even the small, thankless ceremonies required tradition. Caleb had spent all morning getting the lamps to work. He was the only person in his congregation who knew old tech. Wires and batteries. Gasoline. Everyone else preferred souls and bullets.

He closed his eyes. His body felt clammy all over. The wind howled through cracks in the church, filling the building with a faint smell of stomach acid. Mildew grew where metal wasn’t. Outside, a blanket of dirty clouds covered the sky from horizon to horizon. No one had seen the sun in hundreds of years. Caleb only knew about it from references he found in old-tech manuals.

“Those who have passed their final exam will go to do great things,” the priest continued. His eyes were so bloodshot they looked red. “Those who do not will be still be blessed. Victory rides a red horse.”

Heartbeats thundered with the flickering lights and the smell of gunpowder. A light tremor shook the church. The earthquakes were getting worse.

 The priest approached the first student. “Anthy,” he said to the woman, not a day older than 18. “You have passed, child. What will you do?”

“Fight,” Anthy said. She spoke in an already-dead voice. Tomorrow, her reproductive organs would be removed and given to the birthing factory. In life’s place, she would be given a gun.

“Good, good.”

The priest approached the next student, and the next. Both offered to fight. Caleb was fourth. He squeezed his hands and told himself it would be okay. He was smart, and he was capable. War needed him. No one else could work the old tech like he could, so if he joined the sciences, he could keep learning. Keep working. Old tech had air purifiers and generators and lamps that could grow crops. Electricity. All he needed was a chance. War was destined to win, but he didn’t need to. Neither did Pestilence or Death.

The sun could shine again.

“Caleb,” the priest said. His sore-covered lips twisted into a delighted frown. “Oh my child, I’m so sorry.”

Caleb’s heart skipped with fear. “What?”

“You have not passed your exam.”

Caleb shook his head. Darkness closed around him. “No. No you must be mistaken. I can fight. I can do whatever you need.”

“Yes child, yes you can.” The priest got in close, his lips a breath away from Caleb’s ear. He smelled like an engine. Another tremor shook the church. “Fear not child. Fear not. You are still blessed.”

“No,” Caleb whispered. His mind screamed to run, but his body couldn’t move. “No you don’t understand.”

“It’s not because you are wrong, Caleb. It’s because you are kind.”

The priest shot Caleb twice in the stomach. Pain would make the transformation faster.

Ten minutes later, Caleb’s corpse rose to a standing position. To War, the only way to change the world was to end it.

*

Souls experience the world not with pain or pleasure, but in color. Caleb’s world flashed with bright pinks and strange, washed out blues. Sometimes he found coherent thoughts, and those cried in searing, white-hot shame. He had failed. He wasn’t smart or capable but dead, and now his body would kill and kill and kill until there was nothing left to kill but himself. Then the world would end, and the apocalypse would be over. God would come next. It’s what the priests said.

Caleb was placed in a weapon of war. A tortured soul produces more fuel than one at ease.

*

Sasha approached the tank with a surprised whistle. Life rarely gave her good things, but today was one of those lucky ones. Maybe she’d even get to kill something.

“She’s a beaut,” she said. Her voice was hoarse and phlegmy. Her smile featured burnt lips and missing teeth. “The most perfect thing I’ve ever seen.”

“The rest will die,” Zeke said in his best priest voice, though he was too excited to hold it. They were marching to war! “It’s almost over. For real.”

“Victory rides a red horse.” The prayer was automatic, but Sasha meant it. She would die a thousand times for War, if the horseman let her.

Zeke gave Sasha a hard poke on the shoulder. He smiled, whispered: “Keep this a secret, but we’ll meet him. War.”

Sasha’s eyes went wide. “Do you mean it?”

The priest-in-training nodded. “I can see it.” He tapped his right eye, which was made of rusted metal. “He’ll appear in South America. After we win. Then we’ll follow him to victory.”

“You and me,” Sasha said.

“Me and you,” Zeke agreed. “We made it.”

Sasha looked the tank up and down. As far as the new technology went, the stuff made after the sun disappeared, it was gorgeous: Bulky enough to bulldoze cities into rubble and armed with more cannons than she could count. Even Death himself would balk, and the pale rider was rarely surprised. The tank stood over thirty feet tall on legs thicker than her. It could jump; it could run; it could stomp. It was armored like a knight, with thick sheets of bent steel, and each plate was as red as War’s sword.

“Get in,” Zeke said. “And I’ll see you when we get there.”

“Really?”

Zeke wiggled his index fingers. They flashed with little bits of red magic. “I’ll be raising the dead. Leave the bodies intact, if you can.”

Sasha laughed. “Never.”

Before Zeke could leave, Sasha pulled him in for a quick hug. “Stay safe,” she whispered.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Zeke hissed, pushing her away and glancing all around to make sure no one saw. He blushed redder than the fire of his magic.

“You too,” he mouthed.

“Yes sir,” Sasha barked. She gave him a salute. Zeke returned it with all the awkwardness of someone who doesn’t know how to boss his friends around and is now expected to.

Sasha scaled the tank, hand over hand because new tech wasn’t made for ease or comfort. Her hands worked the controls, pushing buttons and spinning dials. The tank’s engine roared to life, and while Sasha was delighting at how quickly the guns reached 100%, Caleb’s world went from blue to bright pink. His soul screamed in ways his mouth never could.

“Come on,” Sasha said. She used her fist to persuade the computer monitor to life. “Show me victory.”

The cameras flickered. They were old tech, which meant they worked better than her eyes—like magic. The monitor showed a full view of the hanger, with its thousands of little movements. Soldiers climbed into cockpits and loading bays. Engines thrummed to life. Priests barked orders and watched them followed with a mad fervor. Souls screamed in silent agony.

The monitor flashed information, most of which she couldn’t read or understand. Caleb could though. He knew how to work the old tech, and that information was stored in his soul, not his body. The tank was operating at max efficiency. It had enough power to fire its plasma cannon thirteen times, two dozen missiles, six thousand armor-piercing rounds, and if all else failed, its entire body doubled as a hammer. He hated everything about it.

“Alright,” Sasha said, happy with what she was seeing. “Let’s go.”

Caleb shifted in and out of consciousness as Sasha led her tank into the diseased world ahead. Heat lightning turned the distant clouds from black into grey mist. People screamed, and explosions popped like bright thunder. The air smelled like poison because it hadn’t been truly safe to breathe for over a hundred years. The armies of War marched south. They wore red, black, and blood, and on the outskirts, the failures—the murdered and the victims—shuffled as zombies, controlled by Zeke and those like him.

The apocalypse was almost over.

The army marched. The details were lost on all of them. Countries, boarders, history, it all stopped mattering when mankind crossed the threshold from life into death. Now the Horseman reaped, what the priests called Revelation. There was no going back. Caleb had his hopes, but Caleb powered a tank. He was more guns than person. His corpse marched with the rest of the zombies, carrying a gun and waiting to be told when to shoot. Miles crumpled into ash and salt. Not even weeds bothered to grow now, because Pestilence controlled this area of the planet. She killed the plants first.

Tremors followed them. Sasha barely understood the numbers, but Caleb did. Little earthquakes slithered underneath the entire planet, vibrations so small that only the oldest of technology could read them. Blue and pink swirled until Caleb settled on a white thought:

C:\> There’s something underneath us.

“What?” Sasha said. She tapped at the screen, but instead of more information, the message vanished. “What’s underneath us?”

C:\> Something.

Caleb’s soul stretched from one end of the tank to the other, but it was like oxygen filling a room. He existed, but passively, just enough for the tank to breathe. It was more alive than most of the planet. He thought of air purifiers, and he thought of the sun.

“Hey!” Sasha pounded at the computer. “What’s underneath us?”

But Caleb’s soul had already retreated into the washed-out blue of incoherent thoughts. The army marched on.

*

It took four, agonizing months to reach the heart of Pestilence territory. A green tint formed over the clouds, and boils covered what few roads hadn’t been washed away in disease. Every puddle overflowed with radioactive mud. Empty homes withered in the hot weather while the skeletons of giant trees threatened to topple. There was no food; there was no clean water. The air stank so bad it kept the army from sleeping. Those out front caught a bad cough that soon spread to every living person and even a few zombies. It killed, and quickly.

War’s army thinned with every step. Those that didn’t die of sickness either killed themselves or someone else for food. Zeke and his fellow priests were hard at work to keep the dead marching.

“Here,” Zeke said as he slipped Sasha a stale bread roll. He looked for priests with his good eye, and he looked into the future with his mechanical one. “Eat it quickly.”

Sasha didn’t need to be told twice. She was starving. “We should have brought more food.”

Zeke shrugged. “War wanted death. That meant bombs and guns.”

“I can’t kill if I’m dead.”

“Yes you can.” Zeke snapped his fingers. Little bits of red magic flashed at the tip of his thumbs. He tried a smile, but there were too many worry lines around his eyes. He was afraid. “We all can.”

“Victory rides a red horse.”

“We’ll win,” Zeke said. He put his hand to his mouth to cough but stopped himself. His fist was red from all the blood. “I know we will.”

Sasha ate, coughed. She poked at one of her teeth and felt it wiggle. Sometimes her gums bled for no reason, and sometimes her back itched so bad it was like someone had lit it on fire. It made piloting the tank uncomfortable. But she was one of the lucky ones, because she had a roof over her head and metal walls to keep her safe. When the clouds rained their acid, she was protected.

“Hey Zeke. Can the tanks talk?” she asked.

Zeke blinked his good eye. “What?”

“Nothing. Never mind.”

Zeke reached into his robes and pulled out a flask. Instead of wine, it held water. “Here. Don’t get sick on me, okay? We need you tomorrow. We’re almost there.”

“I’m already sick.”

“Well, don’t get sicker.

Sasha took the flask. “Then what?”

“Not sure.” Zeke closed his good eye and stared with his mechanical one. He saw them flying over a vast horizon, where roiling grey water met a thick, grey sky. “But far from here. I think we’ll fight Death next.”

Sasha pocketed the flask and climbed back into her tank. She watched Zeke wander back to his fellow priests, his head down, his hands in his pockets. She couldn’t wait for the world to end, to see the last life vanish for War, but she also hoped Zeke would be okay. He was the only friend she had.

*

Caleb came to when Sasha forced one of his dials to 100%. His plasma cannon charged with pink screams. His sensors picked up earthquakes, gunfire, and death. All around him, war raged.

“Go, go, go!” Sasha screamed. She pressed buttons and flicked switches, shifting power from Caleb’s legs into his weapons. “Fire!”

The tank launched a bolt of blue plasma at an ugly skyscraper of a building. For a brief moment, it stood tall, a dark factory cutting through an even darker sky. Smokestacks spewed green slime. Pistons the size of houses moved up and down as they pumped the apocalypse into the planet. It was a familiar building to everyone—they had all been born in such a place. It was Pestilence’s birthing factory. It housed infants, children, nurses, priests, food. Then it was on fire. All its windows shattered at once, and the green slime turned crimson.

C:\> No!

“Yes!” Sasha roared.

She fired again. And a third time. The building wobbled, its steel structure giving way. Caleb’s cameras zoomed in on flaming bodies as they jumped from the windows. The ground did not put out the fire.

While the building fell, Sasha took aim at the rushing soldiers of Pestilence. She flipped more switches, and Caleb screamed energy into the tank’s Gatling guns. They revved with a loud whine that made his hull shake. Sasha grinned a smile that was more blood than teeth.

Bullets tore into the poisoned army. Pestilence’s soldiers arrived leaking blood and acid, and they died in little pops of it, sending clouds of poison into the sky. Any foot soldier that touched it melted. A few returned fire, but Caleb’s hull was strong. The bullets pinged off. He tore people to shreds and rent zombies into ash.

C:\> Stop!

“What?” Sasha slapped the computer. “Shut up and shoot!”

C:\> I don’t want to kill people.

“Well I do!”

War’s soldiers rushed with no regard for their own lives. With his cameras, Caleb had a clear view as they died by toxic bullets and poisoned knives. When he found a brief flash of red up ahead, Sasha zeroed in on it. The priests had split, with half moving forward to bring the enemy dead back to life, the other falling back to direct.

“Zeke!” Sasha hissed. He was a novice priest. They wouldn’t keep him in the back. He was too expendable.

She drove Caleb into the fury, using his massive body to batter anything that got in their way. Soldiers crumpled, and jeeps flipped over. Poison burned holes into his armor panels. Caleb screamed. A helicopter that looked like it was made of old swords spun overhead, launching missiles into Caleb’s midsection. They exploded in more poison. Alarms flashed red in his cockpit. Caleb fell back a step, and his soul spun with pink and blue. Steam flushed from his back.

“Don’t you fall over!” Sasha ordered. “Don’t you dare!”

She took aim at the helicopter and opened fire. Her bullets tore harmlessly through the air. The helicopter closed in and fired another set of missiles. Caleb felt his leg buckle.

“No!”

C:\> It didn’t have to be this way.

“Help me!” Sasha ordered. She punched a crack into the computer monitor. “We have to win! We have to!”

C:\> I don’t want to fight.

C:\> I want to see the sun.

“If I die, then no one will protect Zeke.” She smashed at the button that would power Caleb’s plasma launcher. “So help me!”

Caleb understood wanting to protect someone. And despite hating his new body, he also didn’t want to die. His cameras could still see the sun. In a way, the cameras were better than his eyes. They were made with old tech; they had computers and nutrition and real doctors who healed the sick instead of killing them. They could calculate a thousand equations in a simple blink.

C:\> Switch to missiles.

“How?”

C:\> Third button from the left.

“The red one?”

C:\> They’re all red.

Despite herself, Sasha smiled. “Yeah. Victory rides a red horse.”

She readied the missiles, and Caleb worked the tank’s targeting system. Circles appeared over the helicopter, trailing it left and right. When they beeped green, Sasha pushed fire. Two missiles erupted from the back of Caleb’s shoulders, soaring into the sky as white-tipped javelins. The helicopter swerved, but old tech was better than new. The missiles followed the movement. The helicopter exploded into a shower of shrapnel.

“Yes!” Sasha hooted.

Caleb’s left leg barely worked, but his torso could spin in a full circle. It gave Sasha enough movement to rain more death onto the diseased soldiers that remained. She searched for pinpricks of red magic and gave the priests cover fire.

True to Zeke’s word, War showed up near the end. He carried a red sword, and he rode a red horse. When he swung his blade, thousands fell over dead.

Sasha and Caleb didn’t see it, but Zeke would tell them later that he witnessed the final strike. Pestilence slid from her white horse, knelt, and handed her older brother her crown and bow. Then War split her in half, from shoulder to thigh.

South America belonged to the cult of War, and the apocalypse marched on.

*

They loaded Caleb onto a monstrous fusion of old tech and new. A hundred souls suffered to power the warship across the salt-water desert, working in consort with circuit boards and computer programs no one truly understood. The cargo bay alone was the size of a birthing factory. Caleb’s sensors picked up and categorized everything, the tanks, jeeps, trucks, and weapons. It was War’s final push to consume the planet. Pestilence was gone. Famine had died hundreds of years ago. That left Death.

While the ship lurched through the water, Caleb drifted into a blue sleep. It let him hate himself without pain. The longer his soul stayed in the tank, the more he became it. He couldn’t remember what it was like to have hands or a voice. Talking through text commands came as naturally as firing weapons.

C:\> I am not supposed to be a weapon.

C:\> I want to die.

No one was around to read the statements. The lights in the cargo bay were off.

Caleb lived in his blue world for seven months as the ship traveled, and the more his soul thinned, the more cracks and crevices it found. There were bits of text locked within his new computers. Documents and books. The first was the tank’s manual, but he didn’t need it. He knew his new body better than the people who made it.

The rest though. Those were landscapes worth visiting. A dictionary with ten thousand words, letters written during the first years of the apocalypse. The priests of War did their best to burn everything, but they didn’t know about hard drives or the cloud. Caleb slept inside words, and just as the tank became him, so did history.

Mankind had a choice, those hundreds of years ago. They could fix the planet, or they could die. Good intentions lost to better deals. Riots swept cities. By the time humanity was ready for change, it was too late. Cancer was up, and the sun shined through a bleary film of pollution and heat. The Horseman arrived when the first explosions went off. Under mushroom clouds, they reaped.

But at some point it turned into a game. Each Horseman wanted to win in his own way. They established rules and kingdoms. Doctrine. Humans worshipped them because they had nothing else to live for, and the earth died because it had no more life to give. Armies formed, and when humans died by the tens of thousands, the priests built birthing factories. Souls replaced electricity as a power source. Corpses became a currency.

The apocalypse could last forever, if everyone just let it.

*

“What do you see?” Sasha asked.

Zeke shrugged. He looked haggard, with veiny streaks of blue under his eyes and in his cheeks. His red robe floated around a body that hadn’t had a proper meal since they graduated from the birthing factory. Sasha didn’t look much better. Pestilence may have lost, but she made sure to give everyone a parting gift. The lucky just had a bad cough.

“I don’t know,” the priest said. He lay on Sasha’s bed. Sasha stood to block the door, in case anyone saw. “My eye stopped working once we left South America.”

“Oh.”

Sasha coughed thick phlegm into her first. She had lost more teeth since taking the continent, as well as most of her fingernails.

“I don’t have any more food, either. The deacons are keeping a watch over it.”

Now it was Sasha’s turn to shrug. “It’s okay. Guy two bunks down is sicker than me. Worse comes to worse, I’ll survive.”

“I didn’t hear that,” Zeke said.

“You can’t make a zombie pilot a tank! We can’t win if we all die!”

Zeke sat up. “What I did hear,” he said, hoping to replace a bad conversation with a safe one, “is that we’re heading to Africa.”

“Yeah?” Sasha knew a bit about Africa. It was where Famine took hold. Word was that Famine got a little too apocalypse hungry and slaughtered the entire continent. It was a wasteland, uninhabited of everything but skeletons. “Why?”

“To build a base. We can regroup, restructure, and then take Europe.”

“Death’s home.”

Zeke smiled. “The pale rider himself. But victory rides a red horse.”

Sasha coughed. She tasted flecks of blood. “Red’s a lot of things these days. Not all of them are victory.”

“We’ll survive,” Zeke said. “There are supplies in Africa. Famine was too quick, and he didn’t salt the earth like War and Pestilence did. We’ll build an army, and then we’ll win.”

Sasha reached for Zeke’s hand and squeezed it. It was metal now, a gift for doing so well. She liked it. It felt strong. “Do you see that? With your eye?”

Zeke shook his head. “No. But I feel it. And I trust that more than my metal eye.”

“Survive, Zeke. For me.”

“We’re supposed to die.”

“We will. But not yet. Not until we win.”

*

Caleb stomped his way onto Africa with Sasha in his cockpit. Those that survived the trip followed, the foot soldiers marching with less life than the zombies. There were more dead than living people. Jeeps and trucks spilled along the front lines, their guns pointing north, their drivers hunting for signs of life. They had the infrastructure to build a base, but not the power. The priests promised that would change. They promised a lot—the world—because victory rides a red horse.

“God,” Sasha muttered. She coughed into her hand and looked at it on reflex. Still bloody. “What happened here?”

C:\> Famine.

“He did a good job.”

Instead of deserts and jungles, villages and cities, Famine left dust. There were no hills, no rivers or streams; there no gullies or broken homes. Just dust. It stretched from one horizon to the next, blacker than the poisoned clouds overhead and too flat to be real. It did not move. As they marched, Caleb found that nothing did. The sky did not get darker with night, and the clouds did swirl or threaten rain. Famine left even the weather starved.

*

The first bullets came from behind. Caleb’s sensors picked up the pops. Sasha heard the screams that followed. The army ground to a halt, guns pointed every-which way. Something exploded into red fire.

C:\> The tremors are back.

“What?” Sasha forced herself awake. Her heart thudded too fast for her starved body. Her vision wavered in and out. She flipped dials and turned switches, powering Caleb’s cannons to 100%. “What’s going on?”

C:\> War.

“We need to head back. To help.”

Sasha spun the tank around, doing her best not to step on anything important. Caleb’s new body wasn’t made for fineness. People rushed to get out of her way, and a few even took aim and fired, but the bullets were half-hearted. No one had the strength for war today.

C:\> I want to see the sun.

“Not now.” Sasha scanned the world with Caleb’s eyes. Zeke was in the back. Zeke was in danger! She had to save him.

War’s army parted for the tank like a rip. Soldiers waved weapons, and soldiers yelled. Zombies fell over by the dozen. Soon more gunfire ripped through the air, but not from Death’s army. Sasha watched people she knew open fire on each other, spilling blood into the famine-worn dust. A jeep drove into a crowd of people before exploding. The wounded crawled out to lie on the ground and die.

“Why!” Sasha roared. She blinked at a grey fog forming around her senses. Part of her wanted to sleep. “It wasn’t supposed to end like this.”

C:\> Yes it was.

C:\> War doesn’t care who is fighting as long as there is war.

Sasha spotted Zeke running towards them, waving his hands and shouting something. They were no longer red with magic. Soldiers followed, their guns drawn. Zombies crumpled into dust.

“Zeke!”

Sasha tried to take aim, but the screen was too blurry. Caleb understood though, and his cameras didn’t need food or water to work. He targeted those chasing Zeke. Red circles formed over each. When Sasha pressed fire, the soldiers turned to pulp.

Zeke reached the tank with a scream on his lips. “They stole the food! The priests took the rest, and now they’re dead! Everyone is killing—”

Then a stray bullet clipped his skull. He slumped over Caleb’s foot. Caleb could see the body, but he couldn’t feel it. He was made of metal now. Tremors rumbled beneath them all.

“Zeke!” Sasha screamed.

C:\> I used to think the apocalypse would happen to everyone but me.

C:\> I used to think I could stop it.

Sasha fell into the controls. She was so tired. Tears blurred what was left of her vision, so she slapped at buttons and yanked random switches hoping something would happen. Caleb’s weapons fired in starts and stops, not caring who they hit. Soldiers returned fire. A truck barreled into him and flipped over. Red war overtook black dust.

C:\> If you fire my plasma cannon at the sky, I think we will see the sun. The clouds are not as thick here. I can see the math.

“Zeke,” Sasha sobbed. “They killed him! Why did they kill him?”

C:\> It will be over soon.

“Why can you talk?”

C:\> I don’t know.

C:\> But I am sorry.

Sasha licked her lips. They tasted like blood. The tank around her felt cold and lifeless, yet it was warm too. It didn’t love her because death couldn’t love, but maybe it cared, in its own way. She found the button that would lock its legs. Caleb ground to a halt. Soldiers opened fire on him, and the few zombies still moving turned on their masters. They had Africa’s first real meal since Famine took hold of the continent.

“I hope it’s worth it.”

C:\> Me too.

Almost blind now, Sasha found the buttons through muscle memory. Caleb’s weapons charged to 100%, and when she pushed the fire button, his soul screamed with pink and blue. A bolt of plasma split the sky. The war stopped long enough for everyone to look up.

Bright lights shined from above the clouds, beautiful with blue landscapes. The sun stared at the planet as a ball of yellow flame. It was gorgeous. Healing. So bright it could make all the shadows go away. It could grow food and raise spirits, let people laugh and sing. The sun was everything despair was not, and Caleb’s soul collapsed into white-hot sobs of joy. Inside her cockpit, war starved and dying, Sasha screamed.

Because all around the sun were monsters, creatures made of wings, eyes, and fire. They looked down at the last war humans would ever wage, and they waited. They waited with greed.

Underneath the ground, tremors swam towards the surface with chitin movement and black teeth.

Victory rides a pale horse.

Playing God

The holy trinity of bad ideas are loneliness, power, and vodka, and Frankie Stalone had all three in spades. Enough to dig himself an entire mausoleum with dirt to spare. So he wandered. Down broken hallways that smelled like war and looked like genocide, because his legs knew where to go even if he didn’t. Some primal, shambling part of his soul wanted to play God, and he had nothing better to do. He’d spit in Death’s face while he was at it. Satan too, if he could find the red bastard.

“Fucking shit!”

Frankie slipped on a pool of blood and into a revenant. The corpse toppled. It tried to catch itself but didn’t have the dexterity, so it hit the floor and bounced.

“Thought ya’ll got all the blood!” Frankie bellowed.

The revenant crawled itself back into a standing position. Its bones creaked, ready to snap. It wore grey scrubs and the remains of a white lab coat that hadn’t been white since the attack. Blood prefers brown over red. When the dead scientist resumed its hobble, its arm spun into its forehead in a poor-man’s imitation of a military salute. Frankie grinned. He saluted back.

“Good job, son. Real damn good.” He dropped his hand. “Now grab a mop and take care of the blood. You were supposed to have this all cleaned up last month.”

Instead of heading towards a janitor closet, the revenant stumbled along the hall, towards the cafeteria. Its broken arm flopped with every step.

“Fucker!” Frankie called after it. “Gave you an order!”

The zombie tripped over a broken pipe.

“Insubordinate!” Frankie roared. “That’s a demotion!”

The zombie wandered around a corner. Frankie swore again, then called out one last order. “And stay the fuck out of my kitchen!”

Frankie considered the necromancer lab and his liquor closet to be separate places, each with its own rituals and prayers, but the last few months had brought the two together. Dried vomit acted as glue. Empty bottles as trip hazards. The room was huge, cathedral-like in size and scope, but instead of murals and glass pictures, the walls were covered in tubes, racks, energy cells, bits of green stuff, and dead bodies. It had a chemical smell that Frankie couldn’t place but assumed was carcinogenic. Half the lights didn’t work; the other half were stained with blood. The monsters made a real mess when they died. Frankie made a real mess when he worked. Fair was fair.

The room ran on dead bodies. Corpses lay everywhere, the newest ones torn apart and scattered around, the oldest stacked against the left wall like they were guns ready to be picked from a rack. Their arms crossed over their chests like ancient mummies. Their eyes were gone. Decay made them all look like dry-rotted rubber, though only the mummies felt fake to the touch. The recent dead still had a human texture to them.

“Fucking hate this room,” Frankie said as he kicked parts aside, heading to the rack. “Fucking hate you, too.”

He picked one at random because after so many months alone, everything in this room was reduced to meat. The corpse was heavy, but Frankie knew how to heave and ho. He slung the body over his shoulder and walked it to the machine.

On his way there, he stepped into another pool of wet blood. All the human blood had dried up by the third day, but the monster blood remained forever wet. Frankie watched it stain his shoe. In the strange, yellow-and-green room, it almost looked like barbeque sauce.

“Hmm,” he said. He followed the blood to an alien body part. He gave it a nudge. It wiggled like fresh Jell-O, only putrid beige instead of lime green. “I’m a cook, you know.”

Frankie picked up the piece of alien meat. “Cooks need ingredients.”

The machine was a strange, twisting ball of black panels and clear, plastic tubing. It wasn’t quite circular—it had over a thousand pointy edges to it—but the effect was a circle with more circles. Cables attached it to the ceiling, most thicker than Frankie’s leg, others thinner than his fingers. They liked to take turns leaking. The smell was more of that cancer-stench mixed with grease.

The lower part of the ball had a slot for bodies, and Frankie stuck the corpse inside. He tossed the alien piece of meat in with it.

“Good enough,” he said.

Frankie walked to the computer station. He couldn’t do much with it. He was the most powerful man in the universe because the toy was his, not because he knew how to work it. All the necromancers died in the attack, and they left their manuals locked behind passwords. His gut told him green meant go, and so far, green made the machine go. If the button broke, then he’d have nothing. Just booze and boredom.

Frankie pressed the green button. The spaceship-sized ball of flat panels sucked the corpse up, into whatever strange world existed inside. The alien goo went with it. Lights flashed, and a headache exploded behind Frankie’s right eye. He had tried helmets and safety glasses and headphones; he had even tried pushing the button and running out of the room. No matter what he did, the machine gave him a splitting headache that made his teeth rattle.

“Fucker,” he spat.

Despite the headache though, running the machine made Frankie feel powerful. Like he could survive this shit and get out unscathed. Only God could thwart Death and make the dead rise. God and Frankie.

After a few minutes of painful thinking, the machine spat out a new revenant. It fell from the machine with no good graces, but it got back to its feet without Frankie’s help. Its empty, skull eyes turned towards him.

“Well now soldier,” Frankie barked. “I need you to grab a mop and a bucket and clean up this here place. Can you do that?”

Frankie expected the zombie to fall over or apart, but instead it tipped its head. Like a nod. Frankie cocked an eyebrow. “Yeah?”

The zombie shuffled off, through the door and down the hallway. It hung a right at the nearest junction, towards a custodial closet. Or about a thousand other rooms. The station was huge.

Frankie shrugged. “Bet it gets stuck in a chair like the last one.”

Bored with his toy, Frankie left the necromancer lab. Next stop was the liquor closet, where he’d drink until his headache was gone or he passed out.

Frankie woke up in a stranger’s room, turned on his shoulder, and vomited. Stomach acid burned his gums, and a headache throbbed behind his eyes. His back was covered in sweat. Frankie was a sweaty drunk.

“Fucker,” Frankie said, to no one and everyone. He ran a head through what was left of his hair and pulled out a clump of it. “Fuck.”

He heaved himself out of bed and stumbled down the hall, trying to figure out where he was. It had taken him long to realize that if he passed out in other people’s rooms, he could vomit his hangovers onto the floor and not need to clean up.

Frankie was in the civilian section, a few hallways from his own room. They had all been together at first, the low-paying cogs that kept the station running while the scientists did their thing. Cook, clean, fix, mop, unclog toilets, order supplies, pay bills. The lab coats worked on their science, and the military kept everyone in line. Less ray guns, more plastic handcuffs and metal sticks. It was a four year stint where the prisoners ran the prison, but only the sections they were allowed to run. The pay was fantastic. Hard to turn down triple-digit salaries for four straight years, even if it meant living on a hunk of metal spinning a million kilometers per hour around a pulsar. All the shielding kept the cancer at bay. There were only six windows in the entire station.

Tempers didn’t flare, but they did swell as the years passed. Gambling became pissed-off gambling; drinking because pissed-off drinking. It was almost a reprieve when the first zombies showed up, the necromancers finally succeeding with their science. It made it so everyone could hate them instead of each other. That lasted a solid six months until the attack. Then it was everyone against the monsters. Then everyone was dead. Well, everyone except Frankie.

“Never thought I could ever hate a place more than Sheet-Metal Florida,” Frankie mumbled. He found the showers and washed the booze from his pores. The steam helped his headache. If that shower broke, that’s when he’d kill himself. Until then, he was holding out hope he could make it to the end of his fourth year. Another cargo ship would come to pick him up. Him and the rest of the bodies.

The station smelled different—less gore, more bleach. Frankie walked down hallways that always tripped him up with alien blood and did not stumble. He shoved his hands into his pockets. He wrinkled his wide, tired face into something of a bemused scowl. The station was clean. Well, not clean, but cleaner. Nothing could ever truly clean these hallways. Not after the attack.

“The fuck is going on now?”

He wandered into his kitchen. It was his kitchen then, but it was really his kitchen now. Brightly lit and stainless steel from top to bottom, Frankie kept it cleaner today than the day he arrived. There were few things left to savor on the station, so he picked this. His kitchen and his cooking. Stove number six with the back right burner. Powdered orange flavoring and vodka. When he ate, he chewed with his mouth open, and when he drank his morning coffee, he made sure it was hot enough to burn his tonsils. The vodka was just a bonus.

For a short five minutes, Frankie smiled big and wide, like all his problems were gone. Then the door swung open and a dead body walked inside.

“What in the fuck?” Frankie yelped, dropping his food and reaching for a knife. His kitchen was full of weapons, but his shaking hands found a soup ladle.

The revenant swayed itself into a dizzy salute. It had a vomit-stained rag in one hand, and a blood-stained mop in the other. It left footprints so gross with dirt and gore that they were black.

“You,” Frankie said. He put his cookware down. “It’s you. From yesterday.”

The revenant tried a nod, but it moved its head too quickly and three teeth fell out.

“Well get out. This is captain’s quarters. You ain’t allowed.”

Half bowing, half falling over, the zombie shuffled out the door. It swung its mop in a wide arc, spilling dirty water all over the place.

Frankie almost swore again, until he realized what this meant. He had spat at God, and the wad had found its mark. Right in the Father’s stupid eye. Death too. He had got them both. A tired, sore-covered grin cracked across Frankie’s face, so big it almost touched his ears. The holy trinity of bad ideas watched him pour another ounce of vodka into his morning OJ.

Six hours and just as many shots of vodka later, Frankie stomped into the necromancer cathedral, a ray gun strapped to his hip like a cowboy six shooter. His first revenant stood behind him, armed with a mop. Its eyeless head stared at the machine that had brought it back to life with a slack-jawed idiocy that Frankie aimed to fix.

“Just want to talk,” he said as he scanned the ground for alien parts. There were hundreds to choose from. He chuckled. “Just need to cook first.”

One little piece of alien flesh let the dead follow orders, so what would two do? Frankie grabbed hunks of monster meat and tossed them into the machine. He then found a dead scientist. The woman—what was left of her—wasn’t much to look at. Her neck was broken, and most of her stomach and legs were scattered around the cathedral, but Frankie could strap her to a chair and make her work the computer. He didn’t need to her to move, just work.

“Come on, missie,” he said, propping her up so he could pluck her eyes out with a knife. “Get you in tip-top shape in no time.”

Like the first zombie, the god-hating sphere sucked the corpse into its Tabernacle stomach.. Lights flashed with green headache. Frankie touched the handle of his gun. He felt hot, sweaty, and gross, and also more powerful than he had ever felt in his life. He knew within the very depth of his bones that this would work. The machine finished giving Death the finger, hissed one last complaint, and spat out a body.

The first thing the zombie did was fall over. Frankie ran over and picked it up. “Come here, you,” he said. “Let’s see if you work.”

He plopped the zombie in front of the computer terminal.

“Make it work,” he said. “Captain’s orders. Help me.”

The dead scientist had no control over her neck or legs, but she could use her hands. She tapped hidden screens and menus open, entering passwords that not even Death could take from her. Soon the machine was running again, and this time without all the strange headaches. Frankie tossed more bodies in, each with bits of alien meat. First it was two chunks, then three, then four, then seven because bad ideas never take things slow.

“Troops,” Frankie said, hands behind his back, gait uneven with drink. “We are the best the army has to offer. You, me, but mostly me. Now, I want you to fix this place up! Make it work!” He turned to an engineer, someone he had hated in life but now saw as his new best friend. “And you, Private Withers. I want you to fix up the laundry machine. I’m fuckin’ sick of doing all my clothes by hand.”

With an uncanny resemblance to living people, Frankie Stalone’s platoon marched from the necromancer lab and into the wide facility beyond. They got to work. He stopped drinking at a reasonable hour, and for the first time in many months, fell asleep without the need of a blackout. But he locked his door, because the even the most foolish of Gods do not trust their creations.

Frankie never played with sober dreams, but the mind of a functional drunk runs smoother than a suicidal one. He dreamed in vivid colors, and each color was red with blood. The aliens attacked during the third year. They arrived on a chunk of space debris, what looked like a small asteroid from afar and a large, misshapen tumor from close up. It crashed into the military barracks with a shotgun-blast that rattled the entire station.

Chaos came next. Ray guns, screams, blood, death. For his part, Frankie hid in his kitchen until it was safe to come out. He had food and water and a corner for a bathroom. He hid for what felt like weeks but was probably only a few days. Time lost a lot of meaning during the attack, and it never regained its footing. Thankfully, Frankie had booze for that.

But he saw the aliens before he hid. They were creatures made of mouths and teeth, the color of inflamed gums and pissed off at anything alive. They walked like apes, with two large forearms that looked more at home on a praying mantis. Each arm split down the middle, and inside was a mouth, complete with fangs and a tongue. They had no heads, but their torsos found room for more mouths. If they had eyes, Frankie never saw them.

“Again,” Frankie said to the half-woman/half-zombie at the computer. “I think we got it this time.”

He was dressed in his normal scrubs but wearing an admiral’s hat, which he found in the admiral’s quarters after the resurrected corpse let him in. The admiral was a tall, skinny man, and his clothing did not fit. The hat would have to do.

The revenant waved an affirmative. The more alien parts in them, the more the dead acted like living people. Too little and they were like the woman, capable of obeying orders and nodding yes or no. Too much and they returned to their alien nature. They howled and thrashed until their bodies exploded with mouths and teeth that had no business on a human body. Frankie had to vaporize four in the last few months of experimenting, and he had the scars to prove it. The aliens liked to bite.

This next one though, it would be the sweet spot. He had done the math, or rather, he had made a reanimated scientist do the math for him. Numbers do not lie, and neither do the dead. Frankie trusted his soldiers. This next one, it would work.

“I won’t be alone no more,” Frankie said.

He waved a dead mechanic to his bidding. The revenant picked up a fresh corpse, this one a young scientist with most of his body intact. The missing pieces could be plugged with medical putty. Frankie wanted someone he could talk to, a necromancer that knew the proper theory as well as he did. They could drink and be best friends, and they could swap stories on thwarting Death and God until a ship came to save them both.

“I won’t be alone no more,” Frankie repeated.

The revenant propped the body into the machine, along with a precise amount of alien matter, weighed on a gram scale. Frankie nodded to his mangled secretary, and she nodded back. It was like talking but not quite. This would be the real deal.

Time passes in fits and starts for the nervous, and so Frankie waited with alcohol on his breath and a thudding in his heart. The machine worked the corpse. Green lights flashed on the outskirts of his vision, and the thicker tubes leaked with fluids that smelled like cancer mixed with grease. The revenants watched and waited.

Just as the machine was winding down, it occurred to Frankie that he forgot to pluck out the zombie’s eyes.

“Aw fuck,” he said, reaching for his gun. “Aw stupid, shit, fuck!”

The dead woman nodded in agreement.

“Well you shoulda told me before ya hit start!”

She nodded again.

“Fucking idiot. See if you ever get promoted in this man’s army.”

Well, best case nothing happened. Worst case, Frankie had to vaporize another zombie into dust. They’d try again. There were more alien bits all around. Plenty of ingredients, the flesh still jiggly, the blood still wet.

The revenant fell from the machine like the others, landing on its knees. It didn’t look any different. Mangled, scrawny, uncoordinated. Instead of crawling to its feet, it slammed its head into the ground and pounded at the floor with its fists like a toddler throwing a tantrum. Then it screamed.

“It can talk!” Frankie shouted. He whooped with victory. The zombie woman with no legs nodded. “It can talk!”

The revenant’s scream was human, or close enough. It had a light voice, small and thin like its body. It sparked a twinge of a headache behind Frankie’s left eye. He ran over to great his newest creation, to welcome it to the world. The zombie, meanwhile, beat at the floor until its hands bled.

“There, there son,” Frankie said. He picked the zombie up into a big, bear hug. The zombie gargled something halfway between a curse and a shriek, and Frankie patted it on the back. He tried to make the gesture feel like a military admiral and a worried father all in one. His breath smelled like whiskey. “It’ll be okay. Just a little tense is all.”

“You!” the zombie said.

“Yes!” Frankie roared in its face. “Yes it worked!”

Reanimation had given the revenant’s features a strange once-over. It tightened every muscle into what had once been a fairly normal corpse now looked like a thousand rounds of plastic surgery gone wrong. Its eyes were green with necromancer magic, and its lips were a bloodless grey. The corners of its mouth stretched all the way to its ears.

“Son,” Frankie said. “You’re the best damned thing I’ve ever seen. Or at least, in the last year.”

“You hurt me,” the revenant said. It eyed Frankie up and down. “Hurt every organ I have.”

Frankie gave it another pat on the back. “That’s called being alive! We just spat in God’s face. Death too. You want a drink?” Frankie gestured at the table behind him. “It’ll make the hurt go away.”

The zombie rolled its neck, its shoulders. Frankie could hear its muscles threatening to rip. “No,” it said. “I want the hurt to stay.”

“Yeah?” Frankie blinked. “Well, if you insist.” Then he laughed, because it had been over a year since he had talked to anyone but himself, and it felt so good to not be alone.

With a movement too precise to be human, the zombie ripped at its torn scrubs, revealing missing pieces of skin and bone underneath. A monster had gotten it good. Ripped a chunk right out of its ribs.

“I can see everything wrong with me,” the revenant said. “There’s so much.” It turned to Frankie. “I can see everything wrong with you, too. There’s even more.”

“Hey now!” Frankie said, his hand turning into an angry point. “You watch yourself. I brought you back. You should be grateful.”

The revenant shook its head. “I was never gone. You just hurt me.” It laughed. The sound was of aliens tearing each other to pieces. “You weren’t supposed to spit in Death’s face, Frankie. Only God can do that.”

Frankie took a step back. A touch of fear worked its way through the booze in his system. It made his blood feel cold. “How’d you know my name?”

“I know everything,” the revenant said. “I see everything.”

“Yeah.” Frankie shrugged in apology. “I forgot to take your eyes first. Like a rule or something.”

The zombie looked Frankie up and down in the same way Frankie might examine a mediocre piece of meat. Sure it was edible, but he could do better. But that was back in Sheet-Metal Florida. On the station, any meat was gift, a cause to celebrate. Frankie laughed and hollered, but the zombie did not. Children don’t know how to be grateful. Neither does the Devil.

“Come here,” Frankie said. He grabbed the revenant by the hand and tugged. “Let’s have a drink. I haven’t had a drink with another living person in almost a year.”

The zombie lurched forward but did not fall. Its tight face burst into an evil smile, one with too many teeth. It waited until Frankie was mid pour before it spoke: “Frankie. It’s been three years.”

“What?”

Before the attack, that kind of statement would have seen Frankie drop the bottle, but muscle memory knew what to do. Frankie poured himself a stiff drink.

“You’ve been here for three years, alone,” the zombie said.

Frankie shook his head. “Nope. Signed up for four years. Spent two before the monsters showed up, then another year alone. Got one more left.” He took a swig and delighted as the raw bourbon burned his mouth. He had found that bottle in the admiral’s quarters—for special occasions only. Like today. “Aw fuck,” he said. He looked around in a quick panic. “Only brought the one glass.”

“We can share,” the zombie said. “I do not mind.”

“Okay!”

Frankie handed it the glass, and the zombie took a careful taste. Bourbon dribbled out a hole in its mouth, where a stray alien tooth and aimed for its jugular and missed.

“It is good,” the zombie said. He raised the glass. “To God.”

Instead of taking it back, Frankie grabbed the bottle. They clinked glass.

“To me,” Frankie said.

The zombie shook its head. “Not you, Frankie. You are further from God than I am, and right now, I am a monster.”

“Hey!” Frankie turned his spare hand back into an angry point. “You got a real attitude, you know?” He pointed to the military hat on his head. “You see this? You know what this means, son?”

The zombie laughed. It was not a kind sound. “That you are a thief.”

“I’m the captain!”

“And the president,” the zombie said. It took a drink, which spilled down its neck. “A king, a sultan, a warlord. You are the last human in the universe. But you are not a God, Frankie, and Death is very, very mad at you for trying.”

“What?”

“Follow me.”

When Frankie didn’t move, the zombie snatched the bottle from his hands. Frankie yelped, because the zombie moved too fast. Like it was a monster and not a corpse. The strained skin on its hands looked ready to burst, and underneath wouldn’t be muscle and bone but mouths with teeth.

Frankie reached for his gun. “I’ll kill you before you kill me,” he said. “My soldiers will help. This is my ship.”

The zombie smiled, and its smile went all the way to its ears. Its teeth were jagged and sharp, like a monster’s. “Watch this,” it said.

Frankie still had his spare hand in a point, so the zombie mimicked it. It pointed at each revenant in the room. One by one, Frankie’s small army of dead bodies crumpled back to Death.

“I can see how they work,” the revenant said. “I can see everything.”

The muscle memory in Frankie’s hand finally went out, and he dropped his glass. It hit the ground and shattered. The smell of bourbon filled his small corner of the room, just thick enough to mask the cancer and grease, but not the blood. They had spent hours cleaning, but it would take a lifetime to remove all the blood.

“Now follow me.”

Frankie still had his gun, but he didn’t see much choice in the matter. He followed his zombie through the ship, down broken hallways that used to smell like war and look like genocide. The blood was gone; the ghosts were gone too. Lights flickered off as they went. The temperature in the facility began to drop.

The station had an observatory of sorts, but it was never used because no one actually wanted to view the pulsar. It flashed too fast, burned the eyes too much. Even with all the shielding in place, the neutron star hurt more than it inspired wondered. Frankie hadn’t been there since his third or fourth day on the station. That was almost three years ago. Or over six. Time had lost all meaning during the attack, and it never regained its footing. The zombie lied, but so did vodka.

Frankie slipped in a pool of wet blood. The revenant caught him.

“Almost there.”

They entered a room that was once so bright it caused instant sun burns. Now it was black. Frankie felt his legs go loose. His cracked, tired face turned into a horrified grimace. Everything was gone. The pulsar, the stars, everything.

“Here,” the zombie said, handing Frankie the bottle. “It’ll help.”

Frankie took a gulp. The bourbon burned at his gums. He ran his hand through his hair and pulled out more. It was greasy and smelled like old sweat.

“Why?” Frankie asked.

The zombie shrugged. “You played God, and you spat in Death’s face. They got mad. So they called me.”

“You?” Frankie blinked. “Who are you?”

Now the zombie grinned. “You know. I think you’ve always known, Frankie. And now I’m here to make a deal, because that’s what I do.

“You can die right here, right now. I’ll make it swift and only a little painful. I deserve some fun too. Or I can leave. I’ll take this bottle with me, and you can spend the next two years alone until the cancer takes you.”

Frankie looked at the bottle, at the zombie. He remembered he had his gun, and drew it on the zombie. “What about this?”

“That’s option two.”

“Can I have the bottle back?”

The Devil thought, shrugged, nodded. “I like you, Frankie. I hate you, but I like you too. I think you’re the right kind of human. Stupid. Sad. So spiteful it’s like a drug. But you went to places you weren’t supposed to go. You found a bad idea, and you grabbed it with both hands and yanked.”

Frankie took a swig. The alcohol warmed the fear in his blood. “I don’t want to be alone,” he said. “You didn’t have to kill everyone.”

Now the Devil grinned. “I didn’t, but I wanted to. We forgot you. Would have kept forgetting you, but you spat where you shouldn’t. God’s pissed. Death is too. Now I’m here, and this is your deal. What will you pick?”

Frankie blinked a drunk’s blink—slow and thoughtful with no thought behind it. “What’s death like?”

“Horrible.”

Frankie sagged. Outside, the universe was nothing. Empty. So cold and quiet it hurt to look at. “Worse than being alone?”

“It’s about the same,” the Devil said.

Frankie jiggled his bottle. “Maybe this will kill me first, before the cancer.”

The Devil nodded. “Is that your answer?”

“Yeah.”

“Then shoot me.”

Frankie shook his head. “I don’t wanna.”

The Devil knelt. He put a hand on Frankie’s shoulder. It was the last comforting hand Frankie would ever feel.

“That’s not how the deal goes, Frankie. You shoot me, or I eat you. Now pick.”

“No!”

“Pick!”

Frankie tightened his hand on the half-empty bottle of bourbon. Then he fired his gun.

The Disappearance of Dilly Wisconsin

A drone flies over what is left of Dilly Wisconsin. It takes about a minute for the footage to turn from high-def to grainy, because things like cameras no longer work there. Once you hit Main Street it’s a dead zone. The drone climbs higher, higher, until the town is a patchwork of rooftops and the military jeeps are green ants, but that dead zone extends into the clouds. Maybe to space. The drone breaks. The YouTube video ends. I restart it, the volume of my laptop at max. I’m desperate to hear a sign of life. An insect buzz or a bird chip. A dog barking, even if it’s in pain. Something. But there’s nothing, no animals or insects, no people. I bet if you took a soil sample, you wouldn’t find a single microbe in it. Hell, I bet in a few months, not even the plants will be around. A town of 500 people disappeared, and all that’s left are scattered questions and empty houses.

I hope the military doesn’t find anything. I hope they clean up, sweep up the glass and take down the prison bars, but I hope they don’t find anything. There are some places government and guns should not go.

Outside, a parrot taps at my window with its beak. Google says it’s a conure, a small bird that got hit with every color of the rainbow at least once, and twice with yellow. It is not a talking bird.

“Eat the glass,” she shrieks through my window. “In the cage! Eat the glass!”

“Go away.”

“Eat the glass!”

“Shut up!” I grab the T.V. remote and toss it at the wall, hoping the thud will scare her. The remote bangs with enough force to spill the batteries, but the bird doesn’t even blink. Just continues to tap at the glass and shriek.

“Eat the glass! I don’t want you to die! Eat the glass!”

“No!”

“In the cage. Eat the glass. In the cage. Help, help, what is that?”

The bird laughs a human sound, and I do too because there’s not much else to do. I get up and open the window. She flutters in and lands on my shoulder to cuddle against my neck. She’s affectionate, for a bird. I move to pet her, and she nibbles at my fingers before flying to the ground to knock around the batteries. Playful, too. Google says conures can live up to 15 years, and I don’t know what to do with her. Some days I like that she proves it all happened—that I’m not crazy—others I want her to fly away and never return. She always does though.

Sometimes I think about stuffing her down the garbage disposal.

“You ever gonna tell me your name?” I ask her.

“Eat the glass.”

“That’s not a name.” I look back at the Youtube video. The drone hovers passed a window, or what’s left of a window. There’s not a speck of glass left in Dilly Wisconsin. That disappeared with the people.

“Eat the glass,” I say.

“Follow the eye,” the bird says. “Follow the yellow-brick eye.”

I shake my head. “The eyes were blue. And it wasn’t bricks but concrete.”

The bird screams, a mimic of five hundred people dying at once. Today is one of those days I want to stick her down the garbage disposal.

“I want to forget,” I say.

“Me too,” she says.

Sometimes, I worry we’re both still stuck there and we don’t even know it.

*

My memory of getting to Dilly is hazy but not gone. I drove there. The weather was nice, the sky cloudless. I listened to country music on the radio. It took about an hour, because Dilly is out of the way of everyone, sitting almost smack-dab between Sparta and Mauston. It’s one of those Wisconsin towns that’s surrounded by farmland, all the barns round like little stadiums instead of red squares with pointed roofs. There are more bars than churches, and more lawns than houses. It’s the kind of place you dream of leaving instead of moving to.

It was early in the week when I drove there, so Monday or Tuesday. I was in my work van. But that’s where things don’t add up, because we don’t service Dilly. I do internet installs for local joint called Frontier Internet, and while we’ve branched outside of the bigger cities some, we don’t go much further than Hillsboro. We certainly don’t go near Dilly. That’s Charter/Spectrum territory.

The closer I got to Dilly, the more it all felt like a dream. I was driving the speed limit yet going too slow; I was moving to adjust the radio, and my arm was too heavy. About five minutes from town, it occurred to me I should get out and walk the rest of the way. Just leave my van and tools and phone behind.

That’s where the gaps in my memory begin—or at least, that’s where I started to notice them.

I think I shuffled more than walked to the gas station that sits at the entrance of Dilly Wisconsin. It struck me as funny, because that worn-down Gas n’ Grub reminded me of a front gate. Walking to it, through it, by it, it was like walking through the entrance to an amusement park. Come for the rollercoaster; stay because you can’t leave.

There was an old beat-to-shit car parked at the pump with its front door open. The windows must have been down, because I could see right inside. As I got closer, I saw that the windshield was gone. The gas pump was on the ground and sputtering money into the dirt, so I turned that off. That’s when I tripped over the shoes.

“What?” I said, and that kinda woke me up. I hadn’t talked in over an hour, and hearing a voice sent my nerves screaming. “Where am I?”

I reached for my phone. It was in my back pocket. “Who am I?”

Bill. My name is Bill Schindler. Not sure why I almost forgot.

I clicked through my phone. Reception was bad, and I couldn’t pull up the internet at all, but I figured I could make a call. I found my boss and tapped his name. Maybe he could help.

The call connected, but instead of Lee’s bored, drawling voice, all I heard was T.V. static.

“Oh,” I said. For just a bit, everything made sense. Then it didn’t again. “Huh.”

The gas station was full of stuff but empty of people. I found another pair of shoes on the ground, these for a woman, and a purse on the counter. Someone had broken the front window from the outside in, because glass covered the floor. I crunched over it as I made my way to the fridge. That was broken, or at least, the sliding glass door was.

I grabbed a water. It was warm, but I didn’t care.

“Hello?” I called. I opened the water and took a swig. It didn’t taste funny, probably because it was from a bottle. Later, when I had to drink from a tap, that water tasted funny. Dilly had grainy water.

“Hello?” I tried again, this time louder. I gave the glass on the ground a little nudge. “Where am I?”

I poked my head behind the counter and found another pair of empty shoes. I also saw more broken glass. Some of it had price stickers on it, like it was for sale.

There was this nagging fear that I needed to go back to the van, but I couldn’t remember where I parked it. Like, I knew it was on the side of the road, but I couldn’t remember which road. I checked my phone again, this time for the date and time, but the numbers didn’t show. Just T.V. static. It was still pretty bright out though. I think only an hour had passed.

Unless I had been there more than a day already.

Dilly’s Main Street is only a few miles long, if that. Roads are pretty wide. I remember the yellow lines separating traffic were blue instead of yellow. Fire hydrants were also blue, as were the curbs marking places not to park, not that there were many of those. The first house I walked to, or maybe it was the third, someone had spray-painted the sidewalk out front blue. It was fresh too, because I could smell the paint. Must have been done yesterday or the day prior.

Part of me wondered if I helped. I checked my hands for paint but they were clean.

The house wasn’t much to look at. Small, old, and in need of some new windows. All the glass was gone, replaced with metal beams that looked like electrical conduit. Or prison bars. I jiggled the front door but it was locked; I then headed to a bedroom window and looked in. Was a kid’s room, painted mint green and covered in toys, mostly plastic figures from stuff I didn’t recognize. Few books. Seemed normal, if you ignored the make-shift prison bars on the window.

On the kid’s bed were his shoes, sitting next to each other like they were put away.

I walked to the neighbor’s house and found about the same thing, only he had a blue eye drawn on his front door. That was locked, but the prison bars over the window were pretty far apart. I wormed my way inside.

“Hello?” I called. “Anyone here?”

It was strange how normal the house looked. Clean, dusted, stuff scattered about because people lived in it, or used to. The T.V. was on but the volume off. It displayed static. Reception in the whole town must have gone and died. There were pictures on the walls of the people that lived there, but someone had taken a Sharpie to them. Everyone had blue eyes now.

I walked by a bedroom but didn’t go in because it smelled so bad I almost threw up. Instead I rounded to the dining room. Found a square table with four chairs. Everyone was set to eat, chairs pushed in, empty shoes where feet should be. Salt and pepper within easy reach. But the plates were covered in broken glass and dried blood, and the big serving pot in the middle of the table was filled with glass instead of food. Even had a metal ladle wedged in it, all scratched up.

But I think what made me real scared wasn’t the glass or the missing people but the dog’s food bowl. It was filled with glass too. Glass and blood, and it made me wonder what that smell from the bedroom was.

I ran out the house, but I went out the way I came. I didn’t like how that blue eye on the front door looked at me.

There’s a big gap in my memory after that, but I have this muscle memory of checking more houses. Of searching for people and pets and finding nothing but shoes and T.V. static. Personal belongings were defaced with blue paint. Light bulbs were missing, only to be found in microwaves or blenders. Every house had a pair of empty shoes.

It’s not quite right to say I woke up, but my next real memory is walking through a cemetery. Only it wasn’t a cemetery but a forest. All the trees grew in straight, perfect rows, mostly bushy pines but some oaks and maples too. Their branches all crowded together and snarled like a big ball of yarn. Each grew from a grave, blocking headstones or knocking them aside. I couldn’t read any of the writing on them. It was either defaced with blue paint or filled in with T.V. static.

I remember … it took a while to find my way out, because the trees were so close together and thick, like they’d been there for dozens of years. I kept getting lost. Everything was damp and smelled like dead leaves, but I couldn’t find anything growing. No mushrooms, no mold, only grass beginning to brown from lack of sunlight and rain. The trees drooped. Few had bark flaking off, like they were hit with that emerald ash borer infection from a few years back.

I guess it’s weird now, but it wasn’t then—but almost all of them trees had pieces of metal hanging from their branches. Thick pipes that dragged their lower limbs to the ground. They clanged together like dull wind chimes when the wind picked up. I figured the whole town had metal hanging from places it wasn’t supposed to, why not the trees? But now I wonder, maybe they weren’t hanging from the trees. Maybe they were growing from them. Like fruit.

By the time I stumbled out the forest, it was getting pretty dark. Clouds were wooshing across the sky, going too fast to be from wind. It felt like the whole town was moving. I wanted to sit down, but I was afraid I wouldn’t get back up. Everything was all heavy again.

There was a Lutheran church next to the cemetery. It wasn’t very big, taller than it was wide with a really pointed roof. More like a spike than a steeple. All the windows were missing, and the big front doors were burst open. Inside, it was all blue. But I could hear something moving around, something still alive and upset, so I marched for it.

“Hello?” I called. My voice cracked. I was so thirsty. “Anyone in there?”

“Hello!” a cartoon voice squawked. “Help! Help! Hello!”

“What’s going on?”

“Eat the glass!”

I stopped outside the door. My inner ear did a summersault, because all of a sudden I wanted to throw up. I wanted that more than I wanted to go into that building. I could smell dead things in there. T.V. static and blood. It was a good place made bad, and only monsters remained.

But the voice called, “Help!” and I needed help too. I stepped inside.

*

I found the animals. I don’t want to talk about it.

*

There’s another gap in my memory, and I think that one wasn’t Dilly’s doing but my own. Some things you need to forget or you’ll kill yourself. Stuff your own wrist down the garbage disposal and turn it on. The bird remembers though, and it’s those times I throw her outside and scream for her to die. My throat turns to T.V. static.

I woke up inside another house. I, or we I guess, broke in through a window. The bird was trapped in a metal cage all welded shut, and without my tools I couldn’t get it open. She seemed happy to have me though. She rubbed at my fingers when I put them through the little bars, and she cawed a bunch of happy bird noises too. I don’t know how long she had been alone in that church, but it must have been days. She was so thin and sorry looking. Missing feathers and covered in bird shit.

“Let’s get you some food,” I said.

“Eat the glass!”

“Water too. I’m thirsty.”

The faucet still worked, though the water tasted bad. That’s when I found out Dilly had grainy water. It gets stuck between your teeth. I drank it anyways though, because I was so thirsty I didn’t know what else to do. The bird drank a bunch, too.

I raided the pantry and the fridge next. Both only held glass. The food was in the garbage can under the sink. I had to dig passed moldy cheese and spoiled fruit to find the stuff in boxes, but at least they were still good. SpaghettiOs don’t really expire. Also found some snack bars, which the bird ate. I stuffed a bunch in my pocket just in case it took another few days to walk the last half-mile out of Dilly.

“I think we’re lost,” I remember saying as I ate cold noodles out of a can. “Do you know where we are?”

“No,” the bird said.

“Oh. What about the people?”

“They ate the glass. Ate the glass and took the elevator.”

I shook my head. “There’s no elevators in Dilly. I bet the tallest building here isn’t even three stories.”

“You can’t wear shoes in the elevator.”

“Oh. Well that makes sense.”

We had a pretty good talk, me and that bird. I just wish I could remember what we talked about.

We left together, and this time we took the front door even though it had a blue eye on it. With the bird, I was less afraid of the eyes. She made them seem more like drawings than people. The driveway was painted blue, and there was a pair of shoes in the middle of it, with footprints leading to them but none leading out.

By this point the sun was basically set, and Dilly was all black. Not a single light in the whole town. Not even the street lights worked. There were cars everywhere, and none had windows or windshields. I thought about taking one, but I didn’t have the keys and I’m not sure it would have started anyways. Things just didn’t work in Dilly Wisconsin anymore. No electricity, no internet. I’m not even sure a fire would have started.

I do remember breaking into another house, this time to steal a sweatshirt and a winter coat. It was nice during the day, but still pretty cold at night. Wisconsin weather always bites a little bit, no matter the season.

“Huh,” I said when I found the elevator. “You were right.”

“Eat the glass,” the bird said. “Eat the glass, and get in the elevator.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think we should do either.”

The elevator was parked in the middle of the road, on a patch of freshly-poured concrete. It was pretty nondescript as far as elevators go. A sliding silver door, buttons for open and close, and a little sign to say which floor we were on. The buttons had eyes drawn on them, but that was pretty normal for Dilly. We were on the first floor.

As we got closer, the elevator doors opened on their own. There was a working light inside, and more paintings of eyes. The floor was covered in overlapping footprints, most blue from paint, others red from glass.

The bird screamed, and I guess I did too. We ran away.

We’d come back the next day.

*

It took another day to reach the end of Dilly Wisconsin. I don’t remember much of it, only that I spent most of it hungry and thirsty. The bird talked, but she didn’t have much to say. I guess I didn’t either.

Main Street turned into one of those back-end county roads, which eventually found its way to a highway. I figured once we got out far enough, we could make a phone call. Also figured I might find my van, because though it didn’t make any sense, I knew it would be at the end of the journey and not the beginning.

“Almost there,” I remember saying.

“You can’t leave this way,” the parrot told me. “We tried already.”

“No we haven’t.”

“Yes we have.”

I rubbed at my face. I had more than two days worth of stubble growing. I only had two days worth of memory. The rest was T.V. static. Sometimes, when I look out the window now, I see the T.V. static. Black and white noise that crinkles in a meaningless hiss. It hides in glass, like windows and cups, but it’s not in the windows and cups. It’s behind them. I think if you try really hard to find it, you’ll see it too. It’s not a Dilly thing but a universe thing.

We hit the end of Main Street. The town came to an end, but instead of a county road surrounded by forest and dirt, all we found was concrete. It was a parking lot desert that went on forever, as far as the eye could see in every direction. The clouds continued to move too fast, and the sky was the wrong color, and I was crying and my tears were grainy like the water.

“Told you,” the bird said. She sounded like she was crying, too.

“I didn’t want to believe you.”

“Eat the glass.”

“We’re out of food again. I don’t know if I can spend another night looking for more.” I stuck my fingers in the bird’s cage, and she rubbed against them. “I don’t think you can either.”

“Take the elevator.”

I shook my head. “What if we just run back, down the road as fast as we can? It’s only about a mile. Maybe two. If we don’t stop, we can hit that gas station and then we’ll be out. It’s a door.”

The bird squawked. She tried to fly but couldn’t, because she was in a cage within a cage.

“We tried that,” she said. “It doesn’t work.”

“But I don’t want to take the elevator!”

“Eat the glass, take the elevator. Help! Help! What is that?”

We stood there awhile, just looking at that big, concrete wasteland. It never moved. The hours ticked by, and my shadow shifted with the sun, getting longer behind me, but the concrete was always the same. Light grey, flat, no cracks. It was like looking at forever. I wondered how far we could walk before we died. I rubbed at my face and wondered if we had already tried that.

“Let’s go,” I said.

“To the elevator?”

“Yeah. To the elevator.”

There’s another gap in my memory, but I don’t think that one matters much. We found our way back to the elevator. The doors opened as we approached, and it was like walking towards the light. Dilly was pitch black with midnight again, not a star or moon in the sky. No lights anywhere else. But that elevator shined for us, and the air warmed as we approached. Even the smell got better. Less dead animals and dried blood and more blue paint. Blue paint smells better than dead animals and dried blood. I guess it’s like this: If you want to make friends with a starving man, give him food; if you want to make friends with a terrified man, give him comfort. Clever trick. We marched in without a fight. I even took my shoes off.

Inside it was just an elevator, but I got the impression it was bigger on the inside than the outside, if that makes sense. Like if we had to, we could fit all five hundred people in there and not be cramped or dead. The floor was still footprinted with blue and brown, and eyes stared out the buttons, but they were only drawings. A few were pretty lifelike. I guess Dilly Wisconsin had at least one good artist in her before she disappeared.

“Now what?” I asked.

“Eat the glass?” the parrot asked back, but she was just as confused as I was.

There were normal elevator buttons. I could go up or down. Fingerprints stained the up button. I guess Dilly disappeared into the sky.

I saw what happened to Dilly. I didn’t want to follow in those shoeless footsteps.

“Let’s go down,” I said. “Maybe the basement has an exit.”

“Okay,” the bird said. “I think down is up today.”

“That means forward is back.”

“To the van?”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “To the van.”

I pushed the down button. The doors closed with a little swish, and the elevator made a dull chime. I felt us move. It was almost pleasant, in a way. Relaxing. Except this primal, lizard part of my brain kept screaming that the elevator was alive—that we weren’t in Dilly anymore or anywhere on Earth. No. We were inside something, like we had marched right into a mouth, and now it was swallowing us whole. If it was human, then stomach acid would come next. The elevator would fill, and we’d drown and melt at the same time. Turn to mush and nutrients, though there wasn’t much to eat by that point. Me and the bird were half-starved to death.

The thing is though, we weren’t in a human. We weren’t even in a monster, because monsters make sense. No, we were in Dilly, and Dilly was inside T.V. static.

There was an emergency stop button on the elevator. I slammed it with my fist. The elevator squealed to a halt, and my ears popped from the pressure. The bird howled a bunch of noises birds aren’t supposed to make.

“Sorry,” I croaked.

“That hurt.”

“I know.” I pushed the open button. “But I want to check something. Something important.”

“I want to go home.”

“Me too.”

It took a bit, but eventually those doors opened. They were slow, grinding and pissed off, but we were in an elevator and it was stuck with elevator logic. The doors slid aside, and me and that bird, we looked out to a universe of T.V. static. That’s all it was; that’s all there ever will be. Just hissing, visual noise. Black and white. No people, no up or down, no nothing. I waited for patterns to form, and I waited for a message or words. Maybe God would talk to us, say He was sorry. Maybe the static would stop, and we’d be able to see the real picture, whatever the T.V. was supposed to show. Heaven or Hell or the Big Bang. We waited, and we screamed, and we cried, and then I pushed the button to close the doors.

There’s nothing. It’s just static. Just formless noise, and maybe it’s alive, and maybe it isn’t, but that’s all it is.

Sometimes I lay awake at night thinking of what might live out there. There were so many eyes in Dilly Wisconsin, so many staring, glaring eyes. On the doors and the buttons and the roads. Something must have looked at that town from the T.V. static. Something must have made all of this happen. But whatever swims through that world outside our own, I don’t want to know it. It’s not kind. It’s not God.

I closed the elevator doors, and it continued to descend. Hours passed. Maybe a day. I was so hungry it was hard to focus. I stank, and the bird stank, and the whole room heated up like we were in an oven. The air cycled up and down like it was breathing. I thought we were gonna die, and honestly, sometimes I think we did. But eventually I stopped screaming, and the bird went to sleep, and the elevator dinged. We were on the first floor again. The doors opened.

We stepped out into a sunny, Midwestern day, about six feet from my van.

I don’t remember driving us home, but I did.

*

Sometimes the bird shrieks for no reason, and sometimes I see things I don’t want to. It took about a month, but eventually the military left. They walled the place off barbed wire and threats of violence. Called it a gas leak. Nothing makes sense. The internet is awash in rumors and conspiracy theories, and at this point, any one is as good as any other. They’re all lies, but so is the truth. Up is down. Dilly is gone. Planes don’t fly over that area no more. I know because Sparta has a little airport, and once when I was over there working on CAT5 hookup, I heard one of the pilots talking. Said they had to change the flight patterns up a bit. Have to head straight south to Viroqua before turning east to Madison.

I’ve spent hours searching the internet for information, trying to find accounts for every person that lived in Dilly. Even if the adults didn’t use Twitter or Tiktok, the kids must have, right? But they’re all gone. Deleted or removed or vanished. I guess the big companies are cooperating with the military. Tonight on the news, they’ll show more footage of tanks and jeeps leaving, and someone will blame a cult. They all went crazy. They all killed themselves. In a decade, we’ll find the grave.

But you can’t dig through that concrete. I know. I was there. You can’t dig through nothing.

I tap at my leg, and the bird flutters over. She likes to be petted. When she isn’t screaming or telling me to eat glass, she’s a nice pet. She doesn’t chase the shadows away, but she makes the eyes look less real. Like drawings instead of people. I like having her around.

“What should I name you?” I ask.

“Follow the yellow brick road.”

I shake my head. “It was blue. And it was concrete.”

“They screamed, at the end.”

“I know.” I let her nibble on my fingers. “We did, too.”

There’s one thing I did find, on my searches through social media. Dilly had one good artist somewhere within her, and I think I found her Instagram account. Her name was Annabelle Shivers, and she was 55 years old. She liked to draw and paint, but mostly she used water colors.

Her last painting was of a broken, old-timey dumbwaiter floating above a forest like a helicopter. The sky was hazy with clouds, but there was a break in them, a place for light. She called it I Think I Found God.

None of her other paintings look like that. She mostly stuck to portraits of her grandkids and the flowers in her garden. Sometimes the neighbor’s cat.

If you stare at her painting long enough, it turns to T.V. static.

The Grimoire Library – Chapter 1

Chapter 1: The Dream. The Door. The Fire.

Norbert was drawing a spider. He was also trying to ignore a monotone lecture on President Roosevelt and Garret’s nonstop kicks at the back of his chair. Well, at least the spider looked alright. He worked his pencil, adding hairs to the spider’s abdomen and a little menace to each of the spider’s eyes. He only had forty minutes to finish, and the picture had to be as real as possible since Chelsea sat in his desk next period and was a huge arachnophobe. She was also a total bitch.

Satisfied with what he had thus far, Norbert dug into his backpack, past unfinished homework and incomplete notes, and pulled out his colored pencils. They were the one thing he never forgot to bring to class.

“Fag,” Garret whispered from behind. He gave Norbert’s chair a harsh kick just as brown pencil touched white paper, sending a thick line across the drawing.

Norbert reached into his bag for a kneaded eraser. The picture was still fixable. He went to work, being as careful as possible while Garret continued drumming, and after a few lost minutes, the worst of the line was gone. He could shade and color around the rest. Norbert looked up at the clock, assuming history was still a thousand years from being over, and saw he only had twenty minutes left. He was running out of time!

“Okay class,” the very short, very bald Mr. Yehle said, turning away from his PowerPoint presentation. “Who can tell me which book convinced President Roosevelt to establish the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906? Hint. You are to have it finished next week!”

Norbert froze, eraser in one hand and pencil in the other. If he stood perfectly still, maybe he wouldn’t be seen.

“Uh … Jack. Tell us all about The Jungle, if you would.”

Norbert went back to work, adding lighting and shadows to his fuzzy arachnid. With two minutes to spare, he finished. The spider looked pretty good, not his best work, but respectable. It would have to do. Just as the bell rang, he flipped over the drawing and wrote, “To Chelsea, from your secret admirer” in squiggly letters.

“What’s wrong with you, Nobhead?” Garret asked as he stood. He towered over Norbert, and his breath stank of cigarettes.

“Leave me alone.”

Garret shoved Norbert aside, making sure to use his elbow so it hurt. A few kids snickered. One looked away. No one actually did anything because this was Wild Creek High, the high school that strove for no bullying but made exceptions in all cases all the time. The teachers called it progress. Most of the students did too. But then, they were the ones doing the bullying.

Norbert grabbed his things. It wasn’t personal, he knew, just part of being in high school. Every class had to have a Norbert, that weird loser kid with no friends. The one that was shorter than everyone and still looked like he belonged in middle school, the one with a goofy name and curly, stupid hair. The one who always wore long-sleeve shirts to cover his wrists and took antidepressants when he got home. No, it wasn’t personal.

It felt personal though.

Norbert waited outside and watched Chelsea walk into Mr. Yehle’s history class, laughing her high-pitched laugh and paying no attention to him. She was the one who had coined the nickname, “Nobhead.” That conversation had went something like, “Hey Norbert, do you know what a Nobhead is? It means penis in British.” Short, sweet, and to the point.

It didn’t take long for a blood-curdling scream to come sailing out the open door. Laughter followed alongside Mr. Yehle yelling for everyone to sit down.

Norbert smiled. The rest of his day would suck, but at least he had this.

*

When Norbert got home, he headed to his room, passing his older sister Michelle and her friends. All were seniors, and no one bothered to acknowledge his presence. That wasn’t personal either, Norbert knew, just part of the hierarchy that was high school. Everyone had a role to play. They were just following the rules.

Norbert’s room was a disaster of scattered clothes and art supplies, with a filthy card table wedged into one corner. Streaks of paint covered it from top to bottom, and old newspaper covered the floor around his work area in a hopeful effort to contain spills. The walls were a light blue, the sheets on his bed a cream white. His comforter was somewhere on the floor because making the bed was stupid when he was just going to unmake it the next night.

He dry-swallowed one of his little red pills, today marking a full month on the new prescription, and approached his card table. On a large piece of cardstock was the start a pastel-smeared version of Saturn, pockmarked with fingerprints and messy blending. Oil pastels were harder to work with than colored pencils. Norbert refused to let them win though, so he sat down and worked a quick hour, smudging different shades of brown, white, and yellow into a windblown circle. Progress was slow, and chunks of kneaded eraser cluttered around the drawing and his floor. His fingers looked like a bad drip painting.

“Hey,” Michelle said, barging in before Norbert could tell her to go away. She gave him a big smile, which meant her friends were gone and he was no longer invisible. “What’cha workin’ on?”
            “School project.  Can’t get it right.”

Michelle walked over and put her hands on Norbert’s shoulders, leaning over him in an exaggerated fashion. He didn’t like being touched, but since she was his big sister, that gave her the right to annoy him. “Looks fine to me,” she said.

“It sucks.”

“It’s fine. Few finger prints here and there, but you can get rid of those no problem. Just draw the rings over them, and—”

“I can’t get it right! I keep making a mess because these stupid pastels smear everywhere.”

“You could wipe your fingers clean.”

Norbert sighed. “What do you want?”

Michelle grinned. She stood a head taller than Norbert, with long, black hair that went well passed her shoulders when she didn’t have it in a pony tail, which was almost never. Her eyes were brown, her clothing an immaculate level of disheveled-lazy in autumn colors. She wrapped Norbert in a big, overly-tight hug that sent her earrings jingling.

“Well baby brother, I’m glad you asked!” she said. “The senior year book committee is going to host a contest to design this year’s cover. Everyone is sick of our stupid mascot and his stupid grin.”

Norbert shrugged. Rocky the Alligator was an oafish-looking character who wore a backwards baseball cap because he was invented in the early ‘90’s. No one liked him, partly because he failed on every level of looking cool and partly because alligators weren’t known to live in Colorado.

“And you want me to draw a cover for you.”

“Could you? Please, please, please?”

“Why?”

“Because this is the first time the student body has been given a chance to change the look of Rocky. Don’t you want to be part of Wild Creek history?”

“No.”

“Oh come on. High school is supposed to be the best time of our lives!”

“If that’s true, then I should just k—” Norbert cut himself off. He wasn’t supposed to joke about that. “Sorry,” he said. “But seriously, why do you want me to do this?”

“To give you a chance to do something for the school that doesn’t involve moping around and being alone?”

“But I don’t care about our stupid school.”

“You should!” Michelle’s tone turned serious. “We were able to talk dad out of sending us to St. Mary’s, but if you don’t start pretending to give a shit, he’ll reconsider. I overheard him talking to mom last time your grades were emailed out. Do you want to go to that shitty Christian school? It ruined our sister.”

Now it was Norbert’s turn to look panicky. St. Mary’s didn’t have any art classes. None. They also made all their students attend church every day, wear uniforms, and play sports. His older sister Jane was forced to go, and now she was off at a Christian college pursuing a business degree, what Norbert’s father called, “practical.” Norbert Sr. wanted all of his children to get practical degrees, like in business or accounting, not to waste their time drawing and painting.

He also thought little of Norbert’s medical condition, which didn’t help.

“Plus,” and Michelle gave Norbert another big smile, “I think you could do something really cool. I don’t trust anyone in my class to come up with a good cover. All of our pictures are going to be in that book, and I want the cover to scream, ‘Class of 2013!’ Not, ‘Class of 1992.’”

Norbert felt something akin to pride at that. The depressed part of his brain knew Michelle was only manipulating him into doing what she wanted, but he pushed it aside. Normally that was hard; today it wasn’t.

“I’m sorry school is so hard for you,” she said, not looking at him. “I’d … well, you know….”

Norbert did. It all came down to the hands they were dealt, the roles they were forced to play.

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll draw up a cover, maybe two if I find some good ideas.”

“Awesome!” Michelle gave Norbert another hug, though this one had nothing to do with annoying him. “Do something mean and scary. Something badass.”

Mean and scary? Norbert could handle that.

*

Norbert spent the rest of the night working on homework, trying his best to catch up on what he’d been ignoring. He read his history assignment and even took a few notes, though when he got to biology, all of his resolve faltered. Even with the threat of St. Mary’s, he just couldn’t make himself memorize the circulatory system. It was too hard, and the more he failed, the more he felt like a failure. He dropped the book on the floor with a loud thump and picked up his English textbook, though that didn’t last long either. Grammar was boring.

Frustrated, he went back to his desk and picked up his oil pastels. He was going to finish something tonight, even if that meant getting no sleep at all.

A few hours later, Norbert crawled into bed, half of the ringed planet done to his liking.

*

Norbert was dreaming—knew he was dreaming—but this didn’t feel like a dream. It was like he was awake. He looked at his hands, legs, and feet and saw that everything was where it should be. He felt his face and was alarmed at the touch. Dreams weren’t always accurate when it came to that particular sense. Smell or taste too. Norbert breathed in deep: dust, stale air, and a faint hint of mildew.

Unease bubbled in the back of his mind. Nightmares came with antidepressants, but this was less like dreaming and more like teleporting, only he wasn’t sure how to teleport back. What if he was stuck?

Norbert looked around. He was standing in a big room filled with black, wooden bookshelves. A dirty-faced oil lamp hung above his head, casting a fragile light that struggled against all the dark. The floor was made out of some kind of grey stone, the bricks large and strangely warm. Wherever he was, the place was spooky. It felt like a breeding ground for monsters, giant spiders, and slimy tentacle creatures. He wanted to leave.

Norbert stood in place, urging himself to wake up. Nothing happened. He closed his eyes and pictured himself laying still, breathing deep, what his therapist told him to do when he felt a spiral coming on. That also didn’t help. Pissed, and now a little scared, he pinched himself as hard as he could, until the pain made him stop. He opened his eyes.

He was trapped.

Fear crawled into him, skittering down his throat and into his chest. He told himself this was just a side effect of his new meds, that it wasn’t real. It was just a dream. That almost helped until Norbert felt a prickle on the back of his neck.

He was being watched.

Norbert ran. Oil lamps and bookshelves watched him go, rows upon rows of them, his surroundings never changing. He glanced back every few steps, but nothing was ever there. Just lamps, dark shelves, and swimming shadows. Eventually his body burned itself out, and he collapsed, light-headed and covered in sweat.

Norbert let himself even out before getting back up. He wondered what time it was. Dreams had a sense of lasting a long time, but they almost never did. This one though, this one had been going on for real hours, and he didn’t like that. It wasn’t natural. Yet it was still just a dream, and even if his mind concocted nightmare creatures to chase him, that didn’t make them real. He was safe, or as safe as he could be while trapped in his own head. Once his alarm rang, he would wake up.

In the meantime, he might as well explore. He was alone, always had been, and wooden shelves couldn’t hurt him.

Norbert marched to the nearest lamp and plucked it off its chain. It was heavy and warm, and the oil had a slight acrid smell to it. He approached another shelf and saw that it too was covered in thick, leather-bound books. This wasn’t a dungeon, it was a library. A gigantic library, perhaps the biggest library in existence. He couldn’t hope to guess how many shelves he passed already, but it had to have been hundreds. If all of them held books, then he was standing in the medieval equivalent of the Internet.

“I am in the most boring place to ever exist,” Norbert whispered. He frowned. Of all the places his mind could create, it went with a giant, spooky library? That seemed like a huge waste of potential, especially when he had the likes of Disney World to visit.

He grabbed a book and flipped to a random page. The text was gibberish, strange squiggles that seemed to read up to down instead of left to right. Norbert continued to flip, hoping to land on a picture or two, but the best he got were large patterns made of overlapping circles. They weren’t even cool patterns, just busy and complicated for the sake of it. He put the book back and grabbed another. It held the same kinds of writing and boring patterns, and he put that one back too.

Norbert walked down a series of aisles, grabbing books at random and glancing through them. The further he went, the stranger the books became, though he couldn’t find any clues as to what they were about. One gave him a deep paper cut, and he dropped it in disgust. Not only was this the most boring place to ever exist, it wasn’t even useful. Just half-assed patterns and repeating shapes.

“The most vivid dream I’ve ever had, and I can’t even give myself See Spot Run.”

Norbert grew bored as he moved from shelf to shelf and row to row. He stopped grabbing books, now only paying attention to their spines. At least one had to contain an Earthly letter. When he found one with nothing on its spine at all, he shrugged. It was different. He opened to the first page and saw Roman Numerals counting downwards like a table of contents, though there were no words to mark the chapters. He sat down to steady the large tome better.

The first few pages were blank, so Norbert skipped ahead until he found a pattern. This one was much simpler than those in the other books, some sort star with a Celtic weave crisscrossing its center. It was cool, and as Norbert followed it with his eyes, he traced it with his finger, trying to memorize it for later. He might be able to do something fun with it. Off to the left, a small, vertical caption read, “Pyre.”

When he completed the circuit, the symbol flashed red before returning back to normal. Norbert scowled. That was anticlimactic.

Norbert dropped the book and continued to meander, not even bothering to look at the shelves. He wondered if he should just lie down and go to sleep, try to dream within a dream, when he came across a door. It was huge, made out of the same stone as the floor, and barred shut by a thick piece of black wood. Writing covered it from top to bottom, from squiggles to pictures to somewhat-recognizable letters, making it look like a drunken piece of modern art. Yet there was something off about the door, something that combined dread with curiosity. Norbert needed to know what was behind it, yet he also never wanted to see it again.

He got closer and looked at the patterns. There had to be thousands of messages carved into it, and while he couldn’t read any of them, he got the feeling they all said the same thing. He set his lamp down and started hunting for English, positive that he would find a note written specifically for him. The door promised answers.

It took Norbert an hour before he found a three-word phrase in English, written vertically and in small, tight letters.

NEVER OPEN EVER

Norbert stepped back, almost tripping over himself. The phrase wasn’t a warning but a scream, and he knew with all his heart that something terrible was locked behind the stone portal.

Just as he was turning to run again, his alarm went off and the library was gone.

*

Norbert entered his first-period art class oddly refreshed. Whatever that dream was, it had at least served as seven hours of uninterrupted sleep. He still yawned though. No kid should have to function at 8:00 in the morning. He found his table and unloaded his picture of Saturn, plus a dozen oil pastels. It was time to finish this stupid thing.

Pop music played from a small radio while students filtered in. Most were sophomores and juniors, but a few seniors marched in too, taller than everyone and laughing at jokes only 17 year olds could understand. Two more freshman followed them. Because that was the charm of the art room: It accepted anyone and everyone. The rules were relaxed. Little paintings covered the walls, all done by graduated seniors eager for whatever came next, and even the ceiling tiles had paintings on them. Norbert looked up and found his replica of Salvadore Dali’s Burning Giraffes from his advanced art class. That had netted him an A.

But while the rules were relaxed, they only slackened a little. The sophomores kept to themselves, the juniors found their own table, and the seniors all crowded to the desk closest to the radio. The two freshman, meanwhile, retreated to the back of the room, away from Norbert.

He was alone.

Twenty minutes passed in a frustrated blur as he worked the rings around the ringed planet. The picture was due at the end of the period, but Norbert was finding it hard to concentrate. It was like writer’s block, but for his fingers.

He yanked out a fresh sheet of notebook paper to doodle. Sometimes that helped. Mostly it was an excuse to not pay attention in class, but sometimes a short stick figure or two kept him focused. He had dozens of ideas swimming around in his head too, all the spooky things he had dreamed last night. There was the door, and that feeling of being hunted. Or those old books, oozing dust and God knew what else.

There was that symbol, the one shaped like a star with strange crisscrossing patterns.

Norbert looked at his paper. He had already drawn it.

“What?” he whispered. Anxiety tickled the pit of his stomach. The drawing was perfect too, like a photocopy of what he had seen last night. He had even scribbled out the word.

“Pyre,” he said.

The symbol erupted into flame.

“What the fuck?” someone shouted.

Norbert sat transfixed, watching the flame dance. First it was yellow, then red, then yellow again. When it found his picture of Saturn, it flashed white and began to char it to pieces. The pastels stank as they melted.

It wasn’t until Mrs. Shaw was dragging him away that Norbert snapped out of his daze. He yelped, jerked out of her hand, and ran towards the growing flame. He had to fix this! Someone yelled to get a fire extinguisher. A senior tried to give him a high five. Norbert yanked his sweatshirt off and threw it over the fire, beating at it with both hands, but the fire beat back, stinging his fingers. His sweatshirt coughed up a small cloud of black smoke.

“Fuck!” Norbert hissed. He stared at his mess, waiting for it to erupt again.

“Norbert,” Mrs. Shaw called. “Norbert are you okay?” She approached him and knelt. Her face was narrow, her hair long and grey. She liked to wear long strings of beads in place of more normal necklaces, because every day should be as fun as Mardi Gras, whatever that meant. “Are you hurt?”

“What?”

“Are you hurt?”

Norbert looked at his hand. It throbbed an angry shade of red. His index finger also had the aftermath of a paper cut. The wound had closed, but the skin was still uneven where it had ripped last night. In his dream.

“I think … I think I need to go to the nurse,” Norbert said. His voice sounded far away, and someone had turned his legs to jelly.

Mrs. Shaw said something else, but the words were lost as everyone tiptoed back into the classroom. Norbert heard his name said over and over, the topic of ridicule, confusion, and perhaps wonder. He had started a fire. He was crazy. He was stupid. He was going to go to jail. He should do it again. The voices became a meaningless cloud, and all Norbert could do was stare at his ruined sweatshirt.

“Okay,” Mrs. Shaw said to the class. “Show is over. Everyone back to work.”

She grabbed Norbert by the shoulder and gently led him outside. Her face was pale, but she gave him a smile that said everything would be okay. He almost believed it.

“Norbert,” she said when they were in the hallway. Empty lockers covered the walls, and cheap fluorescent lights flickered in the ceiling. The school had gone quiet. “Did you … were you playing with ….” Mrs. Shaw shook her head. “Did you start that fire?”

“No,” Norbert said. He couldn’t have. It wasn’t possible.

“Okay.”

She made him walk, and he followed because he didn’t know what else to do. Nothing made sense, only that his hand hurt and he wanted to cry.

They almost made it to the nurse’s office when Wild Creek High’s principal and security officer met them in the hallway. Mr. Walters, or Principal Walters depending on who was talking to him, was a stout man with jet-black hair and a thick, oily beard. He looked ready to kill someone. Office Drey was a tall, skinny man with thin glasses and an expression that somehow balanced itself between bored and stern. He looked ready to go home.

He barely spared Norbert a glance when he asked: “Alright. What happened?”

Mrs. Shaw wrinkled her nose. “You could at least ask us if we’re alright first.”

“Know you aren’t,” Mr. Walters barked at Norbert. The two were well acquainted. “If what I’ve heard is true, you’re in a lot of trouble. A lot.”

“Nurse’s office first,” Mrs. Shaw said. “And a call to his parents.”

“I think Norbert should empty his pockets first,” Officer Drey said. “And then he can go to the nurse’s office.”

“I….” Norbert stammered, stopped. Fear coursed through his veins, and tears blurred the three teachers into jagged spires.

“Do it,” Mr. Walters said.

With hands that shook, Norbert did as he was told, overturning his pockets and piling a pen, pencil, and his phone into a sad little tower. He tried to pretend he wasn’t crying, and the adults pretended to ignore him.

Office Drey shrugged. “Nothing that would start a fire.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Mr. Walters said.

“I told you!” Mrs. Shaw shouted, her voice shrill, her hands fists. “I cannot believe you two!”

“What happened?” Officer Drey demanded, ignoring the art teacher. He even carried a little notebook and pencil. “Tell me what you did.”

Norbert looked to Mrs. Shaw, hoping she’d save him, but she only nodded. Her face was as white as his. It occurred to him then that she didn’t believe him. No one did. Because he was Norbert, and this was high school. This was his role to play.

“I was drawing,” he mumbled. “A picture of Saturn, and then the paper just lit on fire. I don’t know what happened.”

“You could at least tell a believable lie.” Mr. Walters gestured not to the nurse’s office but in the direction of his own. “You got from here until my office to come up with something better.”

“It’s not a lie!” Norbert clenched his fists. His burned hand hissed with pain, as did the little paper-cut scar on his finger. “You just think it is because you’re supposed to.”

Mr. Walters snorted.

“Listen,” Officer Drey said. He got down on one knee so he was eye-level with Norbert. “This is serious. Someone could have gotten hurt, okay? So tell us the truth, and we’ll do everything we can to help you out of this.”

“I—” Norbert began.

Now it was Mrs. Shaw’s turn to snort. “Wow Jack. So much for believable lies.”

“You’re not helping.”

But Mrs. Shaw was already steering Norbert back to the nurse’s office. “You can continue your good cop, bad cop game later,” she barked. “When Norbert’s parents are here.”

Norbert heard a sigh, and when he looked over his shoulder, he saw Officer Drey and Mr. Walters heading towards the art room. Mrs. Shaw moved to block his view.

“Don’t worry about them.” She said. “Sometimes the biggest bullies aren’t the kids but the adults.”

“Yeah,” Norbert whispered. That realization hurt worse than the fire.

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