With each step, the grass stabbed through his shoes, like walking on broken glass, but there was nowhere else to walk. Painful as it was, if this was his Hell, then The Powers That Be didn’t know him very well. They weren’t very creative, either.
A wash of thick, dark cloud covered something meant to resemble the sun. The air weighed heavy in his lungs and made it difficult to walk more than a few steps without pausing for a break. Oz didn’t dare sit down. He didn’t relish the idea of a torn ass so he stood, hunched over, until he convinced himself to push forward a few more steps, each more difficult, more agonizing than the last.
And with each step, nothing changed.
This place went on and on like one of those setting reels from the twenties—the same hill, the same tree, and the same endless expanse of literal blades of grass rolled past in a loop ad infinitum.
He walked for days. A year. Or maybe only minutes, but the grass tore holes in his shoes and ripped his bare heels raw from repeated stickings. Oz desperately wanted to sit down, pin pricks in his ass be damned, but something in Arizona’s eyes before he’d disappeared told Oz that he needed to keep moving.
* * *
By what seemed like the thousandth time he passed the hill, Oz stopped. The air was still, but wide strips of grass that covered the hill shuddered.
At first, he thought it was an illusion. If there was one thing he’d learned since his death it was that nothing was real and everything was real. There was no reason the grass should move, so logic told him that it couldn’t really be moving. The sun was too hot. He’d walked too long. His brain ran on fumes. And yet.
The smell.
Every inch of his skin prickled and his gut clenched against the stench.
A seam split at the top of the hill and burped a brown fog that thickened and separated into churning clouds above the hill, which shriveled as the last of the fog escaped it. A low rumble ricocheted from cloud to cloud, like leaping thunder, so loud it vibrated the sky and blotted the sun. In an instant the grass and the ground and the sky melted away and all that was left was nothing.
The growl of the wolves met his ears as thunder, but Oz knew it was them long before he heard it. Nothing dead or alive smelled the way they did.
Maybe The Powers that Be knew him after all. Of course his Hell would be inhabited by the wolves.
Afraid to move, but knowing he didn’t have a choice, Oz took a step. Faster than his eyes could follow, teeth clamped on his arms and legs and around his neck. Oz screamed as their teeth broke his skin. Warm blood dribbled down his chest and back.
He blinked and they were gone. But their teeth remained lodged in his body like stone thorns, too deep to remove. With every small gesture and shift of his weight, they dug in, threatening to puncture deeper, to drill into his bones.
His surroundings shifted. The ground beneath him hardened and flattened. Walls formed beside him and a ceiling above, so close to his body that they grazed the hair on his head and arms. The walls inched closer and narrowed around his ankles.
He felt like he was tumbling head over feet. Bile burned his throat.
The walls and ceiling crowded so tight against him he felt his breath blown back against his face, stale and hot.
Still moving, still tighter.
I can’t breathe.
Voices. I know them, but they can’t exist. Crying.
I’m cold.
It’s dark.
I’m dead.
It’s over. I’m lost.
Oz pressed his palms against the wall in front of him. He felt the grain in the wood, splintered in places. He smelled dirt. Old and mushroomy. Dirt freshly stirred from deep in the ground.
Buried.
The panic began in his hands. They itched to help, to push, to move, to scratch, but he couldn’t lift them past his chest. It spread up his arms and across his chest to slam against his lungs. He breathed faster, harder to break the vice, but oxygen is just air. Air can’t break iron.
Oz cried.
When he thought he was finished crying, he cried more. Everything poured out.
His casket filled and he drowned in his tears. Over and over his lungs took in water and then, after his body shuddered to a near-halt, expelled it. He vomited ten, twenty times, before something pounded hard on the wood just above his face. Another hit and the wood splintered, sending shards of wood and mold into his mouth and nose. He shut his eyes tight against the shrapnel. A strong hand gripped him by the back of the neck and yanked him from his coffin in one sweep.
His ankle caught on the edge of the grave and he fell backward out of the grip of his rescuer. When he opened his eyes, Cora—or something Cora-like—stared down at him, head tilted to one side. Her eyes were too bright to be Cora’s. Too piercing. Too fucking scary. She wore a long gown made of grey, sticky cobwebs. Oz inched backward, worried he’d get tangled in her skirt if it so much as grazed over him.
“Where am I?” he asked.
The woman’s lips curved into a half-smile. After a beat, her lips curved again, this time outward. They hardened and came together at a point. Her dress fluttered and wrapped itself around her legs. Her arms bent backward at the elbow. Slick, black feathers burst from her skin covered in clear goo. Her skin fell off in chunks, leaving behind a black bird. The bird-woman ruffled her feathers and shook. She opened her beak and what came out was what Oz could only describe as the very sound of terror.
She flapped her wings and gripped Oz’s shoulders with her talons. They dug into his back and chest. With her jewel-black eyes locked on Oz, she flew upward. Higher, higher. The higher she flew, the colder it became. Frost coated his eyelashes and pinched inside his nose. His lungs ached with each breath in.
The bird-woman laughed deep in her chest. A sound meant only for Oz.
She opened her talons and Oz fell.
He hit the ground with a nasty smack.
“It’ll only get worse if you keep this up,” someone said.
Every cell in Oz’s body ached, even the ones that made up his eyelids, and he wouldn’t have bothered to open them if the voice had belonged to anyone except...
“Mark.”
He sat cross-legged at Oz’s feet.
“More or less.”
Each breath in was petrifying. Oz whispered when he spoke to keep from passing out from the pain.
“Mark’s dead.”
“Hence the ‘less.’”
“You’re not Mark.”
Mark’s eyes darkened. “You brought this on yourself. It’s not going to stop. It never stops.”
Oz’s head spun. It became harder to keep a grip on reality. He was delusional to the point of giddiness.
“Bring it,” Oz said.
Mark laughed, and it was the same guttural laugh that came from the belly of the bird-woman.
“You won’t succeed. Your kind doesn’t bring life. Only death. Pain. Suffering. It won’t work. Just give up. Go back.”
Oz struggled to lift his head. He was sure every bone in his body was broken. Holding his breath, he dragged his elbows backward. Sweat beaded on his forehead and neck. He pushed himself off the ground and looked at Mark. Not-Mark.
“They aren’t my kind. Not anymore.”
“No?” Not-Mark’s gaze dropped from Oz’s face to his hand.
Knowing he shouldn’t, but unable to stop himself, Oz also looked to his hand and watched as the flesh bubbled then melted away to reveal his bones. The middle and ring fingers were fractured. Bits of pink muscle clung to his wrist.
“What are you doing? What’s happening?”
“Showing you what you already know,” Not-Mark said.
It spread up his arm, skin melting into a puddle and then sinking into the grass beneath him.
Behind Not-Mark was a lake. Oz kept the one arm—the skeletal one—tucked against his chest as he rolled to his front, half-crawling, half-dragging himself toward it.
“You can’t fight it, Oz. You can’t win. You did nothing and people still died.”
Oz dug his nails into the dirt and pulled himself forward, inch by inch. The skin on his other hand was beginning to bubble.
“You are Death. You will fail,” Not-Mark called.
The lake was a mirror. When it was still, it was impossible to see through to the bottom. But when it rippled, Oz could see through to the bottom where bodies drifted between water plants that lapped at their faces. He hesitated to look in the sections that would show him his face because, somehow, he knew what he would see. Scaring himself would only make it harder to finish what he came here to do. Oz looked anyway.
Gaping holes replaced his eyes. His face was no longer a face, but a skull warped at the chin and temples to sharp points.
“You see?” Not-Mark said.
Instead of clothes, Oz’s skeletal reflection wore a shroud, gray and cobwebbed like the bird-woman’s dress. A dozen spiders creeped over his chest.
“See?” Not-Mark said again.
Despair. It was a word Oz never thought anyone actually used outside of fiction. Looking at his reflection and the loss he felt. The anger. The hopelessness. This, he thought with surprising clarity, was despair.
“See?” Not-Mark’s voice was little more than an echo, but it rang clear as day in Oz’s head.
He nodded. Yes, he did see. He was Death. He couldn’t bring life.
The lake rippled.
He didn’t see where it’d started, but it continued, growing, and distorted Oz’s reflection. It gave him a brief view of what lie beneath the surface, and in that instant he saw something that shattered Not-Mark’s echo that’d pulsed in the back of his brain even after he’d gone.
“Jamie!”
As he cried out, Oz’s body filled out with flesh and skin. He shook his hands then touched his face. They came away wet.
Jamie lay at the bottom of the lake, naked and tangled in weeds with his eyes closed.
The ripples settled and Jamie became less and less visible. Oz knelt next to the lake and dipped his fingers in the water. Pain drilled up his arm and exploded in his chest. When he ripped his fingers from the lake, red ring-like burns had been seared around them.
Was this real?
Everything was, and everything wasn’t.
Was it really Jamie down there or just another trick? Oz knew he had to make a choice before the ripples ended. If he lost sight of Jamie and dove in without knowing where to look, he might never find him again. He might die.
Through the final ripple, Oz saw Jamie’s eyes open for a moment. He could’ve imagined it.
Oz didn’t care. It was enough.
It took a second for the last of his body to break the surface of the water, but he felt the pain in every cell, every atom, for an eternity before it spread to the next. It paralyzed him. The water he’d disturbed drifted over him lashing his body like a spiked flogger. Even though it stung his eyes to do so, he couldn’t help but watch, amazed, as the red marks burned across his arms.
Below him, gray-green weeds wound around Jamie like a mummy’s wrappings.
He’d come this far. Oz would not lose him this time.
He kicked and his leg broke in several places. He kicked again and the bones shattered. Inch by excruciating inch, Oz kicked and cut his way toward Jamie, all the while weeds continued to secure the boy to the bottom. Oz’s lungs cried out for air, but there would be a long way to go before he’d be allowed to breathe.
He finally touched Jamie’s bonds. Oz fought to avoid inhaling the lake.
He was so close. If he could just keep it together a little longer.
The weeds felt like leather. Oz’s hands, numb from the cold and the pain, couldn’t break them. He strained to keep his eyes open, God it felt like they were being sucked from their sockets, searching for something sharp to cut the bonds from Jamie’s body. A rock. Something.
There was nothing. Only sand.
His body couldn’t handle any more. Oz’s ears rang and the back of his head felt cloudy. If he didn’t get air soon, he’d pass out. He’d drown, and Jamie would be trapped beneath this lake forever. Oz could not let that happen, even if he killed himself trying.
He pulled himself along the weeds, opened his mouth and bit the edge of one of the weeds. Puss oozed over his tongue. Fighting his gag reflex, Oz chewed the weed. A tooth cracked. His tongue tore. But he kept gnawing.
He knew his body wanted to shut down. His jaw ached and his lungs screamed for air. The leathery weeds ground his back teeth into shards. On the verge of losing hope, of giving in and letting the lake take him, he tugged one final time and the bond covering Jamie’s face broke free. The boy’s eyes were open and bright with panic.
Oz couldn’t stop himself; he inhaled and water burned down his throat and into his lungs. He lashed and kicked and tugged at Jamie’s bonds. His body felt heavier, and it was too much to move even a fraction. He looked up and saw a shadow cross the surface of the lake.
He lost. He was dying. And yet, Oz couldn’t help but feel a sort of peace, a comfort in the fact that it was finally over. And he’d tried, hadn’t he? This was what he deserved.
His head bobbed. The effort to keep his eyes upward was too much. The muscles in his neck relented and his gaze drifted downward. Jamie’s eyes were still open, but they were no longer looking at him. They were looking up.
The last synapse firings in Oz’s brain made their sluggish connections and sent a weak signal to his foot to hook itself beneath the rest of Jamie’s bonds and pull. As darkness fringed the edges of his vision, Oz caught a glimpse of the bonds breaking and Jamie rising up from the bottom of the lake while he, in turn, sank to the bottom.
Oz came to rest on the sand and died.