Gully studies me closely, a finger pressed against my forehead. I can’t move or speak or even blink. All I can do is stare ahead as his expression melts into a smirk.
“I don’t recall assigning you here,” he says.
Footsteps appear as someone else enters. Lieutenant Shiner. He drags Pete by the arm and chucks him over into the shadows nearby. Shiner gets right up in my face and pulls off his eye patch to reveal a left eye with bloodstained whites, and then without warning he punches me, full roundhouse, right in my left eye. Still frozen, I feel nothing. Not the impact, not the rush of blood to my head, not even the hard tiles as I crash to the floor. All I can do is stare at the ceiling as Gully and Shiner stand over me.
Shiner places a booted foot on my chest, then sighs. “Well, well . . . this is anticlimactic.” He turns to look at Gully and says, “You fuckin’ overdid the paralysis.”
Gully steps back, then lifts me up by my collar and chucks me down onto a seat. Shiner has Kyle in a chair facing mine.
“I didn’t want to take any chances,” Gully says. “Not given what we’ve learned about them.” Out of the corner of my eye, I see Pete get up and shuffle over to Gully. I shift my eyes to try to look at him, but he won’t meet my gaze.
He’s . . . one of them?!
“Pete,” I manage to croak weakly. “But . . . ! We know you. . . .”
Shiner cracks his knuckles. “Hah. Know him? You never knew any of us.”
“But maybe they should,” says Gully. “They should know who we are, at last.”
Shiner walks over to me. He holds his hands to his chest and connects them into an O shape that gives off a feeling made of . . . rage, anger, gleeful malice. An emotional Molotov cocktail that hits me full on—and burns. I scream in my head.
All the while Shiner says, “This is who I am.” But before I think I’ll lose my mind, he lowers his hands and the feeling vanishes.
Shiner turns to face Kyle, seemingly ready to share his energy with her.
“Get away from her!” I yell, but my words barely escape in a slur.
Gully blocks my view, creates an O shape with his hands, and shares his own abyssal identity. It’s the same retail overlord energy that Gully always radiates whenever he’s controlling people with mindless bullshit work—except now it’s maxed up to 1,000 percent.
Gully goes over to Kyle. But Shiner pushes Pete toward me and says to him, “Your turn.” When Pete wavers, Shiner grabs the back of his neck, fingers digging into his skin.
“Don’t be shy around your new friends,” Shiner growls. “Show them.”
Pete forms an O shape and shares his abyssal energy. With a zing, I find my brain inundated with images of brightly colored clothing, Amazon delivery boxes, and online sales listings for shoes and hats and jackets. I feel this hunger to buy, collect, wear, own, and buy some more.
Pete pulls away to gush out, “I’m sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry! I wish I didn’t have to screw you guys over . . . but I . . . I . . . can’t abandon my mission.” He looks away. “In the abyss we never had real things . . . and now that I’m here, I have to see this mission through, so I can have first dibs on mountains of amazing stuff left behind by humans.”
Pete finally turns to look at me.
But Shiner just shoves him backward and then says to Kyle and me, “So. Now you know who is inside these bodies.”
“If I had to do it again, I’d’ve chosen someone younger,” Gully muses as he peers down at himself.
“But in order to conserve energy for our mission, our incarnations had to be efficient. We needed dead bodies of people who matched our exact individual emotions,” says Shiner. “And they had to be freshly dead.”
“So we waited, and waited, and waited,” says Gully. “Floated unseen for weeks, watching people, until one by one, we found compatible humans on the verge of death. We then swooped in just as they died.”
The two horsemen study me with an eerie calm.
I finally manage to swallow, and I mutter: “We . . . will . . . stop you.”
Neither of them seem to have heard me. Shiner just smiles faintly and says, “As we said, we slipped in just as they died. However, things didn’t go exactly according to plan for one of us.”
“You’ll . . . never . . .”
I want to say, You’ll never win. We’ll fight you! But Shiner’s last sentence is echoing in my head, and I realize there’s only three horsemen here.
“You’re starting to ask the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, right?” says Gully.
Where’s the last horseman?
Shiner pulls something out of his pocket. The Hell Sniffer. He turns it on and aims the flashlight at himself, then Gully, then Pete, all the while causing the device to glow. Finally, he aims it at the ground, and it darkens. “Behold,” he whispers before at last pointing it at me.
Light blinds me.
“What . . . no . . . I . . .”
No, not possible. This has to be a joke. A meaningless, sick fucking joke. But my breathing becomes difficult as a strange, invisible weight gathers around my shoulders and chest, squeezing tight.
“The fourth host was seventeen,” Shiner explains, chucking aside the flashlight. “Some kid who was lost in unbearable despair and wandering through life in a daze. A kid who had an accident right here, in this mart.”
My accident in aisle three?
“That young man became the host for an entity your kind would call . . . hopelessness,” says Shiner. “An entity who should’ve been the most powerful of our quartet.”
“No!” I hiss, averting my gaze to Kyle, who is fighting through her paralysis to shake her head. I squeeze my eyes shut. “No! I’m not a part of your mission!”
“Well, you’re half-right,” says Shiner. “Here’s what happened: Hopelessness found you when you were dying in the hospital, sank into you, and was ready to incarnate inside your soon-to-be-dead body. But then, somehow, you survived . . . and actually trapped him inside you.”
Gully shakes his head. “It’s fuckin’ unbelievable. You can barely arrange an endcap properly, but somehow your weak-ass body contained a horseman.”
My gaze seeks out Pete, praying that he’ll somehow contradict the others. But he just stares at his feet as he mumbles, “Hopelessness can’t escape from wherever he is, in you.”
“But no matter,” says Shiner. “For some time now, we’ve been carefully engineering events all around you . . . to help free our fellow horseman and let him gain control.”
My gaze goes back to Kyle to see tears streaming down her cheeks. “I won’t let him take over my body . . . I won’t let him win. . . .”
“Ah, but we haven’t even started,” says Gully.
Gully wanders over to Kyle and runs a hand through her yellow hair. I yell out for him to leave her alone, but he just chuckles softly, then heads back to me.
“Easy,” he whispers in a strangely tender voice. “You wanted to see your past? Well, humankind’s darkest memories live on inside the abyss . . . so let me share something of yours that we saved.”
Gully creates another O shape with his hands, and out of it flows an energy that pierces through my skull and makes my vision go dark. . . .