11

My exhaustion is washed away by a tidal wave of adrenaline, and I take off in the direction of the school.

The clue, the cute little clue…Ouroboros wants me to find him. The pictures…Now I know what those strange, gleaming metal bars are. Not the bars of a cage. Desk legs. The photos are of Madison sitting on the tiled floor of a classroom, surrounded by the old school desks.

I could have spent weeks wandering within a two block radius of the school the way things were going, but as soon as I see it, I feel its gravity, I know why an orbit around the building is so easy to fall into.

Franklin High School stands three stories, but seems taller. It’s old, not one of the new, sprawling schools that look more like a shopping mall. Franklin High School is three stories and two wings of dark, looming brick.

What better place to house a cult? Leaving alone the social commentary of a school already being a place of indoctrination, the building is made to keep students in and intruders out. The first floor windows are all caged. There’s only one apparent entrance from the front. It’s not marked with the seal of the Serpent, but it doesn’t need to be. The Serpents coils guided me here as surely as they’ve kept others out.

I enter the chain link fence, and the gravity of the building grows as it begins to loom overhead. I have a strong urge to fight its pull, but to where? This is where the answers are. I could turn around and live my made-up existence and try to forget this, but I never could. I could never let it go. I need to know.

So I go on.

I wonder how I’m going to get inside the huge, sturdy-looking metal doors if they’re locked, until a man opens one and waits as I approach. I resist the urge to shove a hand down into my jacket pocket there to find small, false comfort from my heavy little pistol.

The man stands before darkness, and it seems to reach out of the school to envelop him. None of the light of the setting sun reaches him so that I don’t recognize him until I’m twenty yards away. At least I think I recognize the bald man from the night I didn’t get shot by two street punks.

“Are you—?”

“Yeah,” he says, stepping aside to let me in. “He’s been waiting for you.”

“So he did know. How?”

“Some posh mark wanders around the Burnout flashing a stack of cash, and you think that goes unnoticed? You think you’d still be alive if he didn’t want you to be? Do you know what kind of people live here? They could leave, but they don’t. Ask yourself why.”

Any feeling of being streetwise leaves me at this. There are no double memories this time, but Ouroboros saved me today nonetheless. I should probably be dead a dozen times over. The urge to grab my gun hits me hard, and then the recognition of the futility of that urge hits me even harder and I bark out one sharp laugh before I catch myself.

“You think that’s funny?” He turns in disgust and walks away into the darkness, and I only assume I’m supposed to follow.

To the left and right are huge hallways whose walls are broken by doorways every few dozen feet, continuing until darkness swallows the sight and I have to assume they go on forever. Those are the classrooms. Baldy doesn’t lead me into these wings, but straight down the center of this three-story high atrium that bisects the school. Men sit silently back. They don’t chat. They just watch. Men like baldy. The Serpent. They must keep the junkies and bums elsewhere. I think this dismissive thought, reducing human misery to a snide joke, until I remember that Madison is one of those burnouts that they have stored somewhere in here. I consider myself civilized, and it’s that easy for me to reduce suffering people to less than human. So how easy is it for men like these?

The walls are lined with wood and glass cases in various states of wreckage. The air is thick with dust and mold, though I can’t see it for the darkness, which our footsteps echo up into.

Because it’s dark and because of the debris, I watch the floor as we go. A few yards ahead of me, the floor shifts, slides...slithers. For a moment I feel dizzy, as if everything sturdy in the world has gone limp.

“What the fuck was that?” I ask in a voice I’d prefer not to have let this dangerous man hear.

“A snake. A big one.”

I freeze at that. Baldy walks on a few steps without me, then stops and looks back. With a smirk he says, “You come looking for the Serpent when you’re afraid of snakes?”

“Who isn’t afraid of snakes? Why are they here? Are you keeping up some sort of fucking theme?”

He laughs at this, looks at me like maybe I’m not quite as dumb as he thought. Nearly, but not quite. “They were here before me, but from what I understand, this building used to have a rat problem.”

Glancing around the place, it’s not hard to imagine.

“People showed up. Their trash piled up. The rats poured in from blocks around. Somebody brought in some cats. The rats ate the cats. Someone suggested dogs, like terriers. Ratters. Ouroboros, he doesn’t like dogs. So some freak brought in a few snakes, and they got the rats under control.”

“Shouldn’t they have moved on afterward?” I ask, as if maybe the snakes will hear me and clear out once they realize how illogical they’re being.

“Yeah, they should have. But they didn’t. They started pouring in like the rats did before. No one knows why.” His expression hardens again. “Question time over. Let’s go.”

But we don’t go more than twenty feet before he points up at the wall. There’s little light, but I clearly see the school seal, a big, round placard. I wonder why he’s calling attention to it, until I see what encircles the seal.

An enormous, serpentine skeleton, its bony tail in its mouth. The thing must be ten feet long.

“That was Leviathan. He was Ouroboros favorite,” he says with a smile before moving casually on.

I pray Leviathan was unique in his size, that like the dinosaurs, his progeny have diminished.

As we pass the men sitting beside battery-powered lanterns, I stop watching the floor for snakes for long enough to finally get a look at the members of this brotherhood of the Serpent. I expected something else of a secret society, something more postured, civilized, impressive. The men are well-fed, but otherwise fit their blasted environment, looking like refugees squatting in wreckage. They’re dirty, so that their eyes stand out large and glistening in the lamplight as they track me. Many have shaved heads, but what I took for some cultish denigration or monk-like casting off of the worldly I suspect may be a way to prevent lice.

“Why are you here?” I ask.

Baldy looks at me like I’m the world’s biggest idiot before saying, “This is where he lives.”

“But you, why are you here?”

“Some people he helps immediately. The stronger of us, though, he makes wait. We serve him until he agrees to help us.”

“What help could you need so badly?”

“None of your fucking business,” he says without even a glance back.

We approach an end to the atrium, the school office. I follow baldy up to what was once a glass wall. Beyond it stands a long counter where the school secretaries would have helped students and parents.

Oh God, Ouroboros has settled into the principal’s office? What a joke.

But we don’t step into the administrative section. Instead we turn and approach a metal door marked MAINTENANCE. Beside it stands a man with a shotgun. He stiffens, recognizes Baldy, or maybe both of us, and opens the door. We walk through a room lined with shelves stocked with moldering cleaning supplies. We pass an industrial sink, turn a corner, and another man with a shotgun looks us over before waving us forward.

I follow baldy, but the guard stops him, gestures to me and says, “Just him.”

“That’s not safe. He never—”

“It’s what he wants.”

Baldy steps aside, shaking his head and giving me a glare as I pass him. When the man with the gun makes way for me, I see that the door he stood before is also marked with a sign.

BASEMENT.

As the guard opens the door and cool, musty air rolls out of the door, I’m surprised by how much I want baldy to continue escorting me. I don’t want to go into that darkness alone. In the face of that prospect, this man is suddenly my friend. Maybe that’s all friendship is.

My musing is cut short as I’m ushered through the door and down onto the first dark step, and every rational thought leaves me as the metal door clangs shut. It bumps me in the back, and I have to grab the metal rail bolted into the concrete wall to keep from falling. I turn and grab the door knob, and despite the fact that I searched this out I think I would go back if a man with a gun weren’t blocking my way.

My lungs suck in only the shallowest breaths of the sour air. I slow them. Deepen them. Take in my surroundings. My eyes begin to adjust. There’s more light than I first thought, and I begin to descend the stairs. Halfway down, the right wall stops and opens up into the basement. I’m about to peek around the corner when I hear a noise behind me and turn.

The door is still shut, but I hear a distinct rustling and a very light, dry slapping. Then I notice a semi-circle of light at the bottom of the door, now at eye level, the shape of a mouse hole but dark in the center. As I watch, the darkness in the center diminishes.

Then I see it. Someone had cut a hole in the door. The light came from the maintenance room beyond. The shrinking darkness was the narrowing body of an enormous snake as it slithered through to join me on the staircase.

Seemingly on their own, my legs attempt to run down the remaining stairs, but I’m turned sideways and my legs twist around each other and I fall. Somehow I manage to only tumble head over heels once, and slide after that, and come to rest on my hands and knees on the concrete floor. There’s no thought of checking myself over for injury. The snake is still coming. I try to push myself to my feet and stumble, and so start scrambling across the floor on all fours as I look back over my shoulder, waiting for the creature to emerge.

Then my hand presses down hard on something firm, but not nearly as firm as concrete, and it moves quickly away, sliding over my other hand. I try to scurry back and my feet bump something else that also slides away on its own.

I look around the floor to discover that I’m surrounded by snakes, big and small, coiled and writhing, and I shriek. I don’t bellow. I don’t roar. I let out a high-pitched, ear-piercing shriek of pure terror.

“You should stand up.”

I take the suggestion and try again to get to my feet. This time my leg—though tingling with thousands of pins and needles as if the smack against concrete knocked its nerve signal to static—almost holds. My ankle rolls, but I take another step onto another angry snake and manage to keep my feet.

Around me, the once quiet snakes roil. I don’t know how to interpret the writhing of these ancient creatures. They might be scared, or angry, or acting purely on instinct.

They brush my ankles, and of the conflicting instincts to flee and freeze, I settle on the latter. I haven’t been bitten yet, so I risk a glance up.

Surrounded by agitated snakes, illuminated by a single battery-powered lantern, a hospital bed dominates the center of the otherwise empty basement. A shriveled man lays in it, one hand dangling off the side, holding the hand of someone sitting beside him. His flat eyes watch me.

“You’re Ouroboros?”

“Yes. And you’re Cody Miller. You don’t know me, but I know you very well.” I expected an old man’s voice. He doesn’t sound much older than me, though very tired.

I still haven’t been bitten, and the snakes seem to be settling. As some of the adrenaline drains from my system and the blackness recedes from the edges of my vision, I look around the basement. This is a central area, with a dark tunnel leading farther back and several steel doors set into cinderblock walls.

But aside from the snakes, Ouroboros and whoever sits beside him, the room is empty. I can’t believe there are no armed guards. Sitting in the shadow of the big, metal-framed hospital bed, I can’t make out much of the person beside him, but they don’t seem poised for action.

As Ouroboros sees my eyes stray in that direction, trying to find the person’s features in the darkness, he says, “This is who you’ve been searching for.”

Madison stands up.

She looks at me glassy-eyed and out of it, but says, “Cody,” and smiles.

I pull my gun. I don’t know how we’re getting out of here—through one of those doors or down that tunnel, maybe back up the stairs with my arm wrapped around Ouroboros’ neck and my pistol in his back—but we’re getting out of here.

And then there’s no gun in my hand, and I’m standing about a foot farther into the room than I just was. I drop to the ground gripping my head. My skull feels like a water balloon held to the spigot too long. My brain feels like it’s trying to squirt out my ears as new memories, double memories rush in.

I’m not holding the gun because I never brought it in. Baldy met me at the front door, had me hold out my arms, patted me down, took the revolver daintily between his index finger and thumb, and said, “He said you’d have a gun, not a Nerf toy,” as he slipped it into his pocket.

He said you’d have a gun.

“You remember, don’t you?” he says.

“How did you do that?”

“Tell me what you remember, and I’ll tell you.”

My brain makes space for the new memories, rearranges itself, and the pain and nausea subside. I’m wobbly, but I force myself to my feet, away from the snakes.

“I had a gun.”

“Yes, I had them take it from you at the door,” he says, but his voice is strange, especially for the environment. It contains a tone I hadn’t previously found here in the Burnout: hopefulness.

“No, I had a gun in here, just a moment ago. And I didn’t.”

He makes a strange, sharp, rhythmic sound, and at first I think something is wrong. Then I realize that he’s laughing. “You’re the one. You’re the one I’ve been hoping for.”

I don’t understand, and I don’t know where to begin asking questions that might bring answers that would make me understand.

“Madison, are you okay?”

“Yes. I’m so glad you’re here.” But she doesn’t sound okay. She sounds lobotomized.

I walk toward her, picking my way through the nest, circling the bed.

“Stop,” Ouroboros says.

I stop, expecting to hit the floor again, to feel that head-splitting pain again. For everything to have changed again.

“No closer,” he says.

But I can see her better from here. It’s Maddy, but it’s the Maddy from the photos. She’s too old, too worn for only a few months to have passed.

I’m frozen to the moment, my brain unable to move past the strangeness.

But Ouroboros remembers our bargain, and begins to explain how he performs his trick.

“After you were burned,” he asks, “did you think about the moment right before, the moment when you could have done something differently?”

“What does that have to do with—”

“It has everything to do with it.”

His tone, surprisingly sharp, snaps me back to reality. His eyes are flat. He shifts in his sheets, coiling. He’s eager, beyond eager, but for what? What could he possibly want from me? “Yes, I thought about it. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.” Obsessing about it. Dreaming about it.

“From that point, did you imagine a different life? Was it so vivid it could have been real?”

“Yes.”

“And you wanted to stay there, but you couldn’t. Eventually, you had to return to your real life, the one where that moment happened as it happened, where you didn’t flip the burner off.”

“Yes.” My head spins. I expected him to know the details of my accident, but not my thoughts. “How do you know that?”

“Because I lived it, too. When I was a teenager I was in a bad bicycle accident. A pickup truck hit me, rolled over me, mangled me. I was in a coma for a week, and even when I came back I kept slipping away again and again. And when I did, I dreamed. I dreamed that I waited for that pickup that should have seen me but didn’t. It raced by, never having checked right before turning, but it didn’t matter, because I’d noticed and sat and waited for him to go, then continued home, ate a snack, watched TV, ate dinner, did homework, went to school the next day…Lived my life. Many times I imagined this, dreamed this, lived it in comatose unconsciousness, but I’d feel a pull. The farther I went, the harder it was to hold it all together, to drag myself one step further, to live one second longer in a life that would never happen. Eventually I’d find myself back in that hospital bed. Until one time, I didn’t. One time, months later, I woke up in my own bed at home, and that other life I had imagined, the one where I changed that one little moment, it was my real life. The other had just been some strange delusion.

“Except that then I did it again, because after I did it once, I could do it over again. And I did. But Cody, how old do you think I am?”

My brain spins in my head like a carnival ride, and I wish for nothing more than to sit down.

“Seventy-five? Eighty?”

“I’m twenty-four.”

“The fuck you are.”

That noise again, wind whistling through a sun-bleached rib cage. “I made a mistake. I lived my few years over again. I’d jump back in as soon as I returned to the moment, trying to do everything perfectly and imagining that I’d figured out how to cheat death and that I would live forever. But the age of the body catches up with the age of the soul.

“Then I realized I could travel back in others, hide in their minds, and though I aged some, not nearly as much as before.”

“You drained her. You’re some kind of—vampire?”

“They have to let me in. I can’t force my way into their minds. So I give them something in return. I fix their pasts for them. I find people whose mistakes have already ruined them. They’re already throwing their lives away in an attempt just to forget their mistakes. We both get what we need.”

“So that’s how you justify it to yourself?”

“When she came to me she was hooked on heroin and had no thought of cleaning up. How many elderly heroin addicts do you see? Now she’s happy.”

I look at her. She does look happy, but it’s a stupid happiness.

“Why did you do it?” I ask her. “You could have just come back to me. That’s all I needed.”

Confusion fills her face, and she looks to Ouroboros.

“She doesn’t remember, Cody. Neither should you. But you got too close to death. You saw what I saw. And now you’re like me. Maybe there’s something else to it, some mutation. Maybe we’re the next evolutionary step. But the catalyst was your coma. Your life balanced on a razors edge, and somehow, despite yourself, you tilted towards life. You almost managed what I did. Imagine if you had, if you’d pressed forward one more step and that old reality snapped, leaving you unburned, leaving Maddy happy. I can give that to you.”

“So what? You take over my mind?”

“No. It only takes some nudging.”

I gesture at Maddy. “If all you do is nudge, how do they end up like this?”

He looks at her, licks his lips, looks back with flat, unapologetic eyes. “I nest in their minds. Even a cozy nest requires space.”

“And they agree to this?” I can’t keep the disdain out of my voice.

“You never heard of the Serpent before, did you?”

“No. I can’t believe all this goes on and no one notices.”

“It goes unnoticed because the people who find me are no longer among the living. They’re looking for death. I’m their alternative. I give them the opportunity to live the lives they should have. Yes, they eventually die, but we all do.”

I look at him in his hospital bed, propped up because he can’t hold himself up.

“Even you,” I say.

“I thought even me.”

“How many years have you lived, altogether?”

“A thousand. More. But it’s taken its toll.”

The thought staggers me. He’s lived it over the same—what?—fifty years? But a thousand years. A thousand years.

“That’s not enough?”

That horrible laughter. “It’s never enough. There’s so much more to see.”

“How am I the answer?”

“I think that from inside you, I can continue on as Ouroboros, I can—”

“What’s your real name? I can’t call you that.” These other people hold him in high reverence. To them he’s a god, but I know the truth. He’s just a freak of nature. A mistake.

“If you had lived a hundred lives over a thousand years, what would you call yourself? Would you remember who you were? Do you really think you’d be the same person?”

And that’s the falsehood I’d sensed. He impressed me at first like he did the others. Then he told me his story and revealed himself to be an eternal, spoiled child. But he’s not even that. Yes, this might have begun as theater, all this symbolism. But he’s changed. Profoundly. And I don’t think he understands the extent. The human mind isn’t meant to stretch as his has, as he wants mine to.

He has become Ouroboros. He has become self-sufficient, his own end leading to his beginning. He’s no longer one of us.

“You think you can continue this from inside me, then?”

“Yes. You are different, in the same way I am.”

No. I’m not. I could be. I might have been going down that path. I’m a selfish person. I’ve always admitted it. But now I see the end result. For all his work to inspire fear, the greatest fear I have isn’t one he intentionally fostered: I fear that I could have become him.

“So you’d abandon your body. Build a permanent nest in me.”

He looks at me with his flat eyes, tries to read me.

I should be afraid. Look at him. He’s a force of nature made conscious, and that consciousness is focused on weak, little me. But I have a plan. I just can’t let him know that I do.

He nods. He’s too far above me to have to worry about my intentions. They’ll turn out as useful as my little pistol.

“You’re telling me all this because there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“That’s right. But you have to be willing. You had to come to me.” His expression changes, becomes a mask of empathy. “You know, you surprised me, Cody.”

“How’s that?”

“I’ve watched you. Inside her, I watched you. I know you. You know the reason I didn’t have my man bring you to me from the cold storage warehouse?”

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t think you were capable of what brings people to me.”

“And what’s that?”

“Guilt. I saw what happened. From inside her brain, I saw. You made her feel it was her fault. You—”

“I never said that! Never!”

“You didn’t have to. In all those emails and texts, you never once told her otherwise, though you knew it was killing her. So she gave herself for you. Will you do the same?”

He’s right. Goddamn it, he’s right. I could never bring myself to say that it was my fault, that I should have paid better attention. No wonder she couldn’t bring herself to come back to me.

“You’ll still be there,” he says. “Some part of you will be there, and Madison will be able to live her life. She was always better than you. This isn’t fair, and you know it.”

I do know it.

“I need to talk to her alone,” I say.

He nods, says in a surprisingly loud voice, “Bring the other!”

The man with the gun ushers through another wasted wreck of a human down the stairs before him. He walks dreamily to the bed, takes the old wretch’s hand. Ouroboros releases Madison.

She stands, smiles, comes to me with her arms outstretched, stepping over snakes as if she doesn’t even see them anymore.

I squeeze her close and she wraps her arms over my neck like she used to.

It’s her, but it’s not her. My heart sinks into my guts and I can barely breathe.

“Come on,” the man with the gun says.

Holding hands, we follow him farther into a basement. The corridor eventually opens up into another chamber, one full of old school desks. He hands me a lantern and leaves us.

I don’t see any snakes. Somehow, they know they belong with Ouroboros.

I lead Madison to a desk. She sits, and I slide another beside hers. It bothers me how compliant she is, that she makes no move without me, but follows me. She was always a tough cookie, and it alleviated some of the fear I felt for her, being such a small, pretty girl. But now she’s all compliance. I don’t want to think about what could have happened to her since this started.

Her dark hair is matted, and her usually blunt bangs cut ragged, I imagine by some classroom scissors. She looks at me, and I can see an echo of the love she used to feel.

No, that’s not fair. I can see that she still loves me, feel it in the way she holds my hands. But before it was backed by such ferocious intelligence. I felt like I’d somehow passed a tough test, being found still deserving by her. Now she’s different.

She’s so blank.

A tear slides down my cheek, and then another. I take a hand away from her to wipe my face.

“Why are you sad?” she asks.

“Seeing you like this.”

“I don’t understand. Aren’t you happy to see me? I missed you.”

“Yes, I’m so happy to see you. Why didn’t you come to me?”

“I couldn’t. I can’t leave him.”

“Do they lock you up?”

“No. I can’t explain it.”

“Why did you come here?”

“I don’t know.”

“You were at your parents’ party, and you just walked out and drove away. You don’t remember why?”

“To come here.”

“But why come here?”

I see how hard she’s thinking, how confusing this question is for her. The part of her brain that brought her here is gone now, back inside Ouroboros, and she’s left without any answer.

“But you love me still?” I ask.

“Yes, of course,” she says. Her eyes refocus, ending their search for the missing part of herself and landing on me with such conviction it almost looks like anger. “You don’t think I do?”

“I know you do,” I say, pulling her close to me, where I can forget the thinness of her lips and the wrinkles in the corners of her eyes and the hair going white at the scalp and I can feel that it’s really Madison.

She squeezes me, breathes contentedly into the crook of my neck.

If I could have let go of my useless anger in that other life, this wouldn’t have happened. I keep thinking of the moment at the fryer as the chance I had to change my life, but I had another one, one that I didn’t have to look back on and wish about. One that didn’t require the freak ability that turned Ouroboros into an inhuman monster. I could have let go of my anger, seen it wasn’t going to change anything. Change anything for the better at least. It changed plenty for the worse.

If only I’d told her it wasn’t her fault. If only I’d been a better person.

I keep getting do-overs, and I keep letting them slip away.

If I do this, though, it won’t be for this Madison. It will be for another Madison, one I’ll never see, in a universe I’ll never really live in. It will be for a Madison who never fell back into drugs, who’ll never know what I gave for her.

She fits so perfectly in my arms. I hadn’t forgotten, but I’d almost forgotten.

There are so many things I want to say to her, but they would only confuse her. So I don’t tell her that the worst part of being burned was her not being there. I don’t tell her that the world will be better off having her rather than me, because she’s special and I’m a stock item. Yeah, a high-quality stock item, but not unique. Not like her. I don’t tell her that she’ll be fine without me, but that I never could have done without her, neither burned and living in my parents’ house nor healthy and working my dream job. But she’ll be fine. She’ll be fine.

I don’t say these things. Instead, I walk hand-in-hand with her back to the Devil’s lair to strike my bargain.

“I’ll do it. After this, you’ll leave Maddy alone?”

“Of course. You’re the one I want.” Then to the gunman still standing at the foot of the stairs. “Bring the injection.”

The man leaves, and I say, “Injection? What the hell is this?”

“You were in a coma when you got close to breaking through. Think of this as another medically-induced coma.”

I don’t know why this bothers me so much at this point, considering what I’ve agreed to do and what I have planned. Still, I ask, “What is it?”

“A cocktail. Don’t worry. I wouldn’t do anything to risk hurting you.” He turns to Maddy. “You can go.”

“No,” I say.

She stutters, moves one way, then the other. I understand the hold he has on her, but I remember my old Maddy and I can’t believe it.

He says, “You can stay,” and her near-fit ends.

The man returns with a little leather case. He sits me in the one chair and ties my arm off. I hold Maddy’s small hand as he injects me.

There’s a moment where gravity loosens, a moment of swimming, a moment of…