Insects squirm in the mud beneath me, poking at my back: Can we have you?
I hear rushing sounds. Wind. A river. The blood in my ears. Raindrops spatter against my face, pooling in my staring eyes and gaping mouth, but I don’t blink or swallow. My vision is a watery blur, beyond which is nothing but dark gray, like the light in the tunnel to Heaven has gone out.
Death is taking longer than I expected. Instead of rushing straight to my head, the black worms take leisurely detours through my body, saving the brain for last. Just like I taught them.
My left shoulder is gone. The arm will go next.
My veins constrict against the worms, slowing them down a little, but they squeeze in like oversized syringes, stretching and splitting me open. But it doesn’t hurt anymore. There is nothing so loud and passionate as agony. The sensation is closer to sadness, somehow localized in the flesh itself. The muscles are weary, unable to summon energy, their fibers saturated with the brine of despair. And then my arm is gone.
Will I lose everything all over again? Will I tumble all the way to the base of Mount Purgatory and rise from this mud erased? What broken samsara is this?
I blink the rain from my eyes and see the rats creeping out of their holes, inching closer. A bold crow pecks at my arm and glares at me with one glassy eye as if daring me to challenge its claim.
I drift through my layers of lives. I remember a typical night for the wretch. The curdled cocktail of exhaustion and insomnia. The writhing half-sleep filled with vague troubles and terrors. And then the morning, trussed up in the sheets, aware of the world like a deep-sea fish is aware of the sky, an unreachable abstraction miles above the darkness. The feeling that I could sink forever if nothing pulled me up.
And then the jolt of rage. The surge of defiance that galvanized my limbs and filled my lungs with breath. I won’t let you win, I’d snarl at that moaning, meaningless darkness. I won’t let you have my short time on earth.
I’ve been fighting the plague since the day I was born. Most battles I’ve lost, but some I’ve won, and that’s all the proof I need that it’s beatable.
I stand up.
The rats scatter and the crows fly off, squawking in outrage.
I shake the mud off my back and start walking. My arm swings limp from my torso. I feel the worms change course and head for my legs, rushing to quell this rebellion before it spreads. I clench a muscle that doesn’t exist, and I feel the worms slow again, caught in the tangle of my ribcage. I hold them there, striding briskly along the river like a man who knows where he’s going, though I’ve never been more lost.
The river is deep. It flows swiftly but its surface remains calm, disrupted only by the rain: fat drops that strike hard enough to splash. This river is familiar to me. Something about the smoothness of the water. The way the trees lean out over it like they’re trying to touch each other. Have I been here before? In dreams or in life?
The worms thrust forward and brush against my stomach. Numbness spreads like I’ve swallowed ice cubes, and I hear a familiar voice.
Eat.
A bitter chuckle escapes my throat. I’d forgotten all about that one. The voice that taught me the rules of my second life. The brute that barked relentlessly like a dog demanding dinner, until our desires finally merged.
Take. Eat. Fight. Win. Fuck. Kill. Survive.
It swells back into my mind like a loop that was muted but never stopped playing. It rises through the floor of the basement from some forgotten pit deeper than the foundation itself. Even the wretch recoils.
Take. Take. Take.
I grit my teeth and focus on the river. In my memory, the water was a sickly yellow-brown, as if tainted with chemicals. Now it’s blue-green nectar, like liquid sky and forest. The land has begun to purge itself. Could it be that time does more than corrupt? Is there nuance to the law of entropy?
I cling to this as I follow the river. It curves like a finger, beckoning me deeper into the woods, but it is not seductive. It is harsh and commanding, an official summons to be ignored at my peril. I walk with my head low, full of dread.
The sky dulls from silver to iron as night approaches. I have walked thousands of miles; I have circumnavigated the world, and all of it is this forest. This river. This pain and this fear. But then: something new. Something sticking out of the water. Not a tree. Not a rock. A sheet of metal, bent and rusted, a faded logo barely visible under the moss.
Does this river have a name? Does anyone know it’s here, tucked deep in this northwestern jungle? Maps are useless in a suggestible universe. Borders bend, dots drift, miles expand and contract. The land is dreaming, and I find it hard to say for certain that this river really exists. But in this moment, for me, it’s here. And this tail fin is here, rising out of the water. These wings are here, bent around two massive trees, prop blades embedded in their trunks. And this crumpled fuselage is here, half-buried in the mud, poking up from seven years of fallen leaves. A life I still can’t believe was mine. An accusation I can’t put to rest.
The worms creep down my side and into my hip.
I limp forward like an old man, each step a battle, feeling a strange certainty that my destination—whatever it might be—is just ahead. Just behind this curtain of branches. Through this wall of brush. Past this knotted tangle of thorny vines. I feel a sense of trespass, like I’m burrowing through primal layers into secret places not meant for man.
I stumble out of the thicket, bleeding from a hundred scratches, and I’m there. A secret, yes, but I’ve seen it before. A small clearing in the ancient cedars, almost completely lightless beneath their opaque canopy. The rain barely leaks through; the ground is slippery but firm. The river’s gurgle is the only sound in this damp, dark womb.
There is not much left of the bodies. Loose piles of bones, picked clean and scattered by animals, skulls peeking out from profusions of mushrooms. But the clothes are still there: four Axiom uniforms laid out in the rough shape of men, their synthetic fabrics still bright and crisp, insisting that nothing is wrong.
And the briefcase, of course. My mission. It lies exactly where my last life left it, its aluminum shell resisting the years, half-buried in rot but refusing to disappear.
It takes me a minute to find the red dress. Only a few scraps remain, draped over her crumbling ribcage. Her skull sneers at me like it did in life. The hole in her forehead is an all-seeing eye.
“Were you right about me?” I croak, struggling to find my voice. “Have I done more harm than good?”
Rosa doesn’t answer, but the river sounds like laughter. Raindrops work their way through the canopy and fall like giant tears.
“Please tell me.” My eyes are starting to blur again. “Should I let it end?”
The numbing pressure abandons my leg and begins climbing back up. The worms are tired of toying with me. They are going for the kill.
I look into the empty holes that once held beautiful eyes, and behind those, a mind I was afraid to touch. I never even learned her last name. But whoever she was, whatever madness brought her to Axiom and to me, she deserved better than this. Better than rotting unburied and unmourned in this inhuman vastness of trees.
As the worms creep into my throat, I pick up a scrap of metal and begin to dig.
It’s not a very good grave. I can’t manage the proper six feet with my crude shovel and vanishing limbs. But when I climb out of the hole and look back into its dark center, I can see it as a resting place. A closure. If not for her, then at least for me, because there must be some meaning to a ritual this ancient. Some way to bring dignity to death.