The Wrong Goodbye

13.

By the time the sky began to lighten in the east, I was exhausted. My skin was twitchy, my limbs heavy and ungainly. My stomach was a roiling mess. I couldn’t blame it, really. Aside of a Dr Pepper and a bag of Doritos picked up at the truck stop a few hours back, I hadn’t eaten much in days —and that shit only barely qualified as food. Gio’d insisted we needed something; I guess I shouldn’t have left him in charge of picking out the something that we needed.

Not that the crap we’d eaten bothered him any —dude was slumped open-mouthed and snoring in the seat beside me, same as he’d been the past two hours. I confess, I was more than a little jealous. My eyes were bleary and itchy as hell, and my lids were getting pretty heavy —every couple of minutes, I had to fight to keep them from crashing down. It didn’t help that this stretch of road was nothing more than two dull strips of sun-bleached blacktop split by a couple feet of bare dirt and surrounded by mile after mile of flat, brown desert. Add to that the lonely graywash of the predawn half-light, and the fact that we hadn’t seen another car in hours, and it was pretty tough to stay awake. I felt like I was stuck in the borderlands between day and night, between sleep and wakefulness —the sole witness of a world no one else would ever see.

At least the quiet gave me time to think. Problem was, my thoughts were all questions and no answers. I wondered what the hell Dumas was playing at, having Danny take Varela’s soul. I wondered if I was going to track Varela’s soul down in time to save my hide. I wondered if marching into a skim-joint full of demons who hated my living guts with no real plan and no protection was going to get me anything but evicted from this skin-suit. I wondered if my eyes were open.

The problem with that last one is that if you have to wonder, it’s a good bet that they’re not. Too late I realized my chin was resting against my breastbone, and my eyes were watching nothing but the backs of my lids. I jerked awake, the bitter tang of adrenaline biting at the back of my throat. While I’d dozed, the Fiesta had drifted across the barren center divide, its headlights slicing across the oncoming lane and illuminating the desert beyond.

With knuckles white, I wrenched the wheel clockwise. Once more, the Fiesta careened over the median strip, shocks squeaking in protest all the while. Then she leapt back onto the pavement, dragging undercarriage and loosing a flurry of sparks. Tires squealed as I brought her parallel with the roadway, the Fiesta’s rear-end swinging wide and then finally skidding into place. I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding and willed my panicked heart to slow.

And that’s when I realized we were no longer alone on the road.

He was a withered old man, rail-thin and barely clad, hunched over a gnarled gray walking stick that was really nothing more than a bit of driftwood. He stood inches from the Fiesta’s speeding bumper, so close in fact, the headlights passed by him on either side. It was too late to stop —too late to avoid him. At that moment, I was nothing more than a passenger, watching in terror as two thousand pounds of glass and steel hurtled toward his fragile, awkward frame.

But I didn’t hit him —or, at least, the Fiesta didn’t. Quick as death, the old man raised a hand, and suddenly, the car was still. Unfortunately for me, though, I wasn’t. I guess Gio was smart enough to belt his fat ass in, but I never cared much for seatbelts myself, they being a little after my time among the living. So when the car stopped dead, I shot out of the driver’s seat and plunged full-on Superman through the windshield. I heard a sickening crack —bone or glass, I wasn’t sure —and then I was soaring through the chill morning air. I hit the man, and then flew through him. Not as though he was some kind of ghost, though; more like I was an angry toddler, and he was a playmate’s stack of blocks. He just, I don’t know, fell apart around me, and next thing I knew, I was eating dirt.

I have no idea how far I must’ve slid along the ground, getting bit and clawed by rocks and twigs along the way. Felt like a fucking mile. All I know is, when I stopped, the world around had disappeared in a cloud of reddish dust, thick like fog in the sickly glow of the Fiesta’s headlights, and every molecule of my borrowed body was letting me know just how much they didn’t like this sudden turn of events. I tried to move. It didn’t take. And that’s when the fucker grabbed me.

If I’d been thinking clearly, it wouldn’t have made much sense —I mean, I felt the old man fall apart when I flew into him. And truth be told, grabbed doesn’t begin to cover what he did to me. I mean yeah, he took a fistful of suit-coat and all, but then he lifted me like I was nothing, and tossed me like a rag-doll into the desert. I heard a rib crack as I hit the ground, and my right shoulder popped like a drumstick pulled from a roast bird; the arm attached went slack and numb. I bit my cheek so hard on impact, blood poured red-black from between my lips. Before I could so much as take a breath, he was on me again, rolling me over and yanking me close. I screwed shut my eyes and prayed. I was sure that he would kill me. I only prayed he’d do it quick.

But he didn’t. Instead, he spoke, with a voice like wind through autumn leaves, a voice that seemed to come at once from everywhere and from nowhere at all.

Where is it?

At first, his words didn’t register, so disturbed was I by their timbre, their unearthly quality. And it wasn’t just his words —his whole body seemed to rustle and quake, his every movement a disquieting susurrus.

Disquieting, and familiar.

With a sinking heart, I realized where I’d heard that sound before.

In a camp full of dead men at the heart of the Amazon rainforest.

In an anonymous motel room outside of Springfield, Illinois.

I forced open my eyes, and saw the old man’s face inches from my own. But it was not a face at all, and this thing was not a man —nor was it like any demon I’d ever seen. No, this creature before me was more a vulgar sketch of a man, rendered in a teeming mass of writhing, scratching bugs. What I’d taken to be weathered skin of dusky bronze was nothing more than a living coat of roaches, their constant motion allowing the occasional glimpse of ropy muscles rendered in blood-red millipedes, which pulsed and flexed around stick-bug bones. The man-thing was clad in a tattered robe of massive, velvet-backed spiders, giant, gleaming ants, and a dozen other varieties of crawly things I’d never before seen. Its hair and scraggly beard were a wriggling mat of gray-white maggots, which occasionally tumbled with a patter onto my face and chest. And from beneath a brow of twitching locusts, the man-thing glared at me with slate-blue beetle eyes.

The creature cuffed me in the ear, shaking me from my reverie and pasting my face with a thick smear of crushed insects. Then I was struck by a fresh wave of agony, rippling outward from my suddenly swelling ear, thanks to what I could only assume was a wasp’s sting.

You shall listen when I speak, it said. You shall answer when I ask. And you would be advised to do it soon, before I tear this rotting body limb from limb. Now where is it?

“Wh-where is what?” I stammered, my panicked, addled brain not catching on to what my gut already knew. But the beast was having none of it —it pulled me closer to its repulsive visage, its hot breath like rot and death.

Don’t play coy with me, boy. You know I’m here for the Varela soul.

“You–” I said, fighting back the bile that rose in my throat as the creature’s stench invaded my sinuses, “–you’re my Deliverants?”

At that, the man-thing shuddered and hitched, a hundred-thousand insect wings fluttering as one against each other. I’d never heard so horrible a sound in my entire life. Never so horrible a sound as that abomination laughing.

I’m afraid, Samuel, that on that point you are quite mistaken. These creatures —these shepherds —are but humble servants, lending form to that which in this realm is formless. Just as that decaying sack of meat you’re wearing lends you form.

“No,” I said, revolted at the very thought. “You and I are nothing alike.”

You dare balk at that? You who have for so long been granted asylum in my realm? How dare you speak to me this way?

As the creature seethed with fury, a kernel of a plan began to take root in my mind. Not a good plan, mind you, but then, I wasn’t in a position to be picky.

“I’ll speak to you any goddamn way I please,” I spat, every syllable sagging under the weight of my contempt. I’ll grant you, on the face of it, goading this thing didn’t seem like the best idea ever. But the way I figured it, this fucker was gonna kill me either way. Either I could stick around and get tortured until it figured out I didn’t have what it was looking for, or I could piss it off, and maybe make it kill me quick. Sure, it’d hurt like hell, but once this vessel was dead, I’d be reseeded somewhere else. Where, I didn’t know, but the way I saw it, anywhere was better than here.

You think your God has any power to damn me? Me, who reigned while he was but a babe in his crib, and this cesspool you call existence was but a glimmer in his eye? Your God is nothing more than a seditionist —a pretender to the throne. For eons before him I ruled, and my dominion was Chaos —the Great Nothing from which this filthy rock you call a home emerged.

“You expect me to believe that shit? Man, every demon worth a damn likes to spin himself a yarn about how he’s the biggest, baddest creature in the land, and ain’t a one of ’em is telling the truth. Now, the bug thing’s neat and all, but why don’t we cut the crap. You’re no more an Old God than I am —you’re nothing but a scavenger. So save your parlor tricks for someone who gives a shit.”

I steeled myself for my inevitable eviction from this meat-suit, but the death blow never came. Instead, the creature laughed that horrible, rasping laugh. The sound set my skin crawling, and made this meat-suit’s fillings ache.

Nothing but a scavenger, it said, shaking its nightmare head as it did. I suppose I am, at that. And for that, I have your precious God to thank —he and that Fallen brat of his. Those two bickering little snots carved up my glorious empire of Nothing, taking what they wanted and leaving me only the narrow border of the In-Between to claim for my own. And angry though I was to be left with their table-scraps, for a time, it was enough. After all, the living had the good sense to honor me, to pay a tithe in return for safe passage through my realm. Never before had there been subjects in my domain, and I admit that I was flattered. But now the old ways have been forgotten, and with them, so too have I been. Now, such forgetfulness may be unavoidable in the living, but I assure you, I’ve no intention of allowing another of your kind to forget. No, over you, I have dominion, and as such, I demand your fealty. So I suggest you tell me where the Varela soul is before I’m forced to lose my patience.

“I don’t have it,” I said.

Lies!

The creature roared, and once more tossed me into the air. I slammed into the ground a good thirty feet from where I started, and for a moment, everything went white. The man-thing leapt after me, covering the distance in one insectile bound. Then it grabbed me by the lapel and slapped me hard across the face. I felt the swell and burn of another fresh sting, but this time, it was just another white-hot point of light in my constellation of suffering.

Do you think that I don’t know what you are doing? Do you think I’ll stand by and allow it to happen again? Were it not for the Great Truce, for the rules to which we three agreed, I would not abide the Nine at all. But now it seems that truce is crumbling, and with it my patience for your games. I assure you I will not abide a tenth.

The creature grabbed my wrist and squeezed. My wrist bones ground sickeningly against each other. My stomach roiled with sudden nausea. My vision dimmed. I shrieked, and damn near fainted.

“I swear to you, I have no idea what you’re talking about —I’m not trying to do anything! The soul you’re looking for was stolen —stolen by another Collector! Maybe he’s the one you’re looking for! All I want is to get it to where it belongs!”

That’s precisely what the other said. I suspect the both of you are lying —lying to protect each other. Lying to buy yourselves time. But I assure you, it will not do you any good.

“The other —you mean Danny? You know where Danny is? Just tell me, and I promise you, you’ll get your soul.”

I fear you misunderstand the nature of our relationship, Samuel —it is I who makes the demands. You may persist in this lie all you like, but I assure you, I will not be taken in.

“That’s great, except I’m not lying.”

Even if you aren’t, it hardly matters. The soul is in your charge. If you speak the truth, then your negligence is no less an affront to me than would be your rebellion. And for that, you must be punished.

The creature plunged its hand into my chest, grasping tight my soul as I had done to so many in my time.

No —not like I’d done.

This was worse. So much worse.

The man-thing squeezed, and what I felt was so awful it made all the pain I’d ever experienced seem like a fucking spa treatment. Death itself was but child’s play compared to this. To being swallowed whole by Nothing.

A horrid emptiness pressed in on me —chilling, absolute. The muted colors of the pre-dawn desert seemed a thousand rainbows strong compared to the terrible void that engulfed me. My thoughts were stripped away —my very sensations —until I found myself longing for the agony of my broken and bloodied physical self.

Until I longed to feel anything at all.

As I plunged ever deeper into the abyss, cast alive into the creature’s unholy In-Between, I heard its voice as if from somewhere high above.

Three days, it said, so quiet I could barely make it out. Though the words were as light as the last scraps of Being that surrounded me, and my self was but a fading memory, I knew exactly what the creature meant.

And just like that, the Nothingness lifted.

I was in the desert.

I was in the desert, and I was alone.