PART 3

KNIGHT RISING

Suck. Thump.

Suck. Thump.

Like a heartbeat. I have not heard that sound since I was alive, the steady thump of four chambers in a beating heart coursing with blood. The sound comforts, recalls me to a time when I was a fetus in the cave of my mother’s womb; fingers curled in imitation of the weapon I would fire when I grew up.

Suck. Thump.

The sound does not originate from inside me. There is no legitimate heart in the dark, empty cavity of my chest. Images blur and thoughts grow sluggish. These are sensations I felt when I was alive, when I was stupid and young and drunk and woke up every other day nauseous and hungover.

I did not feel young. I felt mummy-ancient.

I moved my fingers and tapped a porcelain beat against a metal gurney. I lay on a table. The ceiling above me came into focus, industrial tiles arranged in rows and columns. I blinked, but the action failed to complete. My vision fuzzy. I focused but the dark and rotted spots in my eyeballs had destroyed parts of what I once could see. I blinked again and failed. My eyelids must be pinned open, because despite my best efforts they would not descend and soothe the dryness.

I opened my mouth to call out; the wire in my jaw clicked, amplified to movie-theater sound. My thoughts sped up and thawed and gained coherency. I was not in the basement anymore. Dust puffed from my mouth in an effort to speak. All that issued forth was a pained groan. My fingers tapped again and the persistent sound in the background became louder. Suck. Thump. Suck. Thump. I turned my head. Plastic rippled beneath me and there it was—the pump Niko used to embalm corpses.

That’s odd, I thought. There’s no one else here.

The room was empty. Gurneys lined up in rows and prepared for new intakes, but there were no corpses. Except for me.

I heaved a sigh with relief. Of all the places I expected to wake up in, the Pleasant Hills Funeral Home had not been one of them.

Niko, I thought with a twinge of regret. Her resentment would be a benediction, a face I correlated with feminine warmth, someone who could look me in the eye without fear.

I opened my mouth to call her name. Niko. A dry wind husked from my mouth, a garbled set of words. My teeth clicked together when I spoke. Numbed, I could not feel my lips move. I struggled to lift my hand to my mouth.

Bone against bone.

My fingertips tapped against my face like china plates thrown against each other. I startled, shaking, and pulled my hand away to hold it in front of my destroyed eyes.

Nothing but bones. Bones with little shreds of pink meat at the ends, here and there. Dangling ligaments and tendons snaking between the bones. The last remaining tissue holding my hands and fingers together. In places, soft tissues went missing entirely. Someone took mortuary wire and snapped together bone-to-bone in their place instead.

I wiggled my fingers. I could identify each carpal bone, the tiny bones of the metacarpals, the knuckle joints and the longer ones, threaded and connected to the wrist.

But no flesh. No fingernails. No hair filaments, no rotted skin to hold it together.

I gasped and made ready to howl, and nothing came out.

Suck. Thump. Suck. Thump.

My hand was nothing but a skeleton.

What about the rest of me?

My glance followed the line of my wrist down the length of my arm. An arm is defined by more than its motion; it has flesh, muscle, tissue. Red blood pumping beneath the surface of the skin.

All I had were bones. Long bones connected at the joints. Hint of sinew like dental floss. Thin shreds of meat by the bone surface.

I raised my skeleton hands to my face. I could not feel my face with bones for fingers but only hear their syncopated tapping against the planes of my skull, where there was no skin to pad their contact. I searched for eyelids, but there were none, only what soft jelly remained of my destroyed eyes that I could touch, but could not feel.

I screamed and screamed and screamed.

Suck. Thump. Suck. Thump.

*

I passed out.

Like a hysterical woman from a Victorian picture-show, I swooned where I was on the table, a long skeleton, a collection of bones. When I first turned into a pre-deceased monster, I must have been arrogant to believe that death was the worst that could happen, the worst that could ever be.

I was wrong. Even a zombie still has something left to lose.

*

I came to again. How quickly I mastered the art of sleeping without being able to close lidless eyes. Images present themselves, but the mind shuts down and refuses to compute. Second by second, consciousness broke the surface until I was aware, awake inside the skeleton of my body. Voices drifted from the room next door, a door of frosted glass separating the mortuary from the room outside. Words floated in with the draft.

“Don’t go. Not yet.”

Niko’s voice, pleading.

“They’re all children down there. Children alone with a pre-deceased monster.”

“They could be dead already, Owen.”

“You know why I have to go back. It’s got to be contained.”

A grim silence followed the lull of their conversation.

“You need his help. If you leave before he’s up on his own, it’ll tear him apart. I don’t think he’s got the strength for it. If he wakes up and finds out you’re gone . . .”

“What? What will happen? I’ll be back. I got him out; I’ll get back in and out again without him, easier without him, actually. I’m made for this. I’ve been doing it my whole life.”

I was filled with a rush of pride; my boy.

“I can’t leave the children there to rot. I’m going after them.”

“Owen! Don’t!”

I frowned, or felt that I did, if I had a face left to frown with. A long, uncomfortable silence spanned time and the moment of feeling pride for my boy eclipsed by a darker set of emotions—feelings of jealousy, envy. Did she . . . like Owen?

Their voices picked up again and hushed; in that moment, I could imagine a number of romantic interludes passing between them, whispered adorations of love, admiration, perhaps even stolen kisses.

Oh, you fool. You didn’t really think you had anything to offer her, compared to what Owen had? A living body, an intact soul. I didn’t even have a rotting body left to me anymore. How long had I been unconscious on the gurney while they had time to get to know each other, while she had time to appreciate the handsomeness of his features—just like mine when I had been his age. She would get the best of me, and what better way than through my would-be son?

Not that he actually was my son, after all.

That’s nice, I thought. One second, he’s the son you never had; the moment you think he’s moving in on Niko, all of sudden, he’s not your son. It would be better for everyone if you stayed dead with flimsy internal narcissism like that.

I groaned and summoned the energy from my guts. I still had a few of them nestled in my rib cage. Tapping bony fingers along the metal gurney, I grasped the rails in my skeletal hands to force myself to a sitting position.

I caught my reflection in a mirror by the wall. Horrified, I took in the face of the monster I had become. Eyeballs nestled in the bone sockets of my face. Missing nose. Only a gaping, triangular hole marking the center; the awful, permanent wolf’s grin of every serrated tooth revealed behind long lines of sinew remaining along the cheekbones; other than that, most of the tissue erased from the skull. I looked like a discarded skeleton from a laboratory study.

How can anyone love a pile of bones?

I shuddered. Bone from bone to bone clattered upon one another. Through the white slats of rib I could see parts of myself as through a curtain. My blackened lungs were still in place and wound with dark snarls of red tissue and veins inside the center of me. Niko had pushed a tube into me to send embalming fluid through the center of what little remained.

I saw my heart. A tough, sinewy muscle, it beat artificially with the rhythm of the embalming pump. I considered the irony of Niko making my heart beat again as I swung my legs over the gurney and out over the cement floor. Fluid gathered and swirled down a drain by the gurney wheels. Beside the slotted drain, several maggots lay still and dead, soft white grubs rendered into curled commas.

She killed them with the embalming fluid. Clever girl, I considered. She must have hooked me up to the machines as soon as Owen brought me here. It was not hard to piece together how events dovetailed and coalesced. Maggots don’t keep eating when there’s nothing left to eat, do they? No doubt Owen had followed me ever since the Rogers showed up at my door, so he knew I came here. The flies pumped out with the rest of the dead blood inside me, but what had been the point, really? What was left of me worth saving?

I heard the knob turn, the door open.

Reflexively, I shielded myself, holding my arms up above my head. But they were not arms, not anymore. Two bones shielding a skull. My eyeballs peered out over them, looking at her. Niko. Black hair piled up on her head. Her face was paler than I remembered, her eyes were red, as though she had been awake for many hours. She wore a cobalt blue dress that accentuated her goddess figure as though she’d stepped off an Egyptian stele. She looked lovely.

I looked like a horror film reject.

Ashamed, I turned away from her. Bones clicked, joints popped, alarmingly loud without flesh to muffle the sound. I struggled to leave the gurney and pull out the embalming tube from my middle with a violent jerk of my skeletal fingers. The tube was difficult and fought back until she stepped across the floor and hurried to help me.

“No!” I hissed, jerking away from her.

She ignored me, turning off the pump and reaching for the tube I already clutched. Our fingers brushed, her small hand, fleshy and ripe like peach skin; my own hard bones, whose touch I imagined as cold as bullets, white as snow.

I was inhuman; how could she stand it, to look at me like she did, with her intact eyes? I saw a skeleton reflected back at me from her pupils. Nothing about the skull resembled me anymore. There was nothing left of the man I had been.

“You should put me in a box and bury me.”

“Maybe,” she returned, “but not yet, and a little thanks for all this work I do on your behalf for free would be nice every once in awhile.”

The embalming tube slithered between us, spewing fluid to the floor. My bone thighs dangled from the gurney, connected to a bone ankle, to bone foot carpals and little bone toes.

“We’ll have to hook you back up to the machine tonight to get your dose to you. Owen has been crushing up pills and we added it to the fluid, hoping it would work.”

“Are you satisfied with the result?” I asked her bitterly.

Under better circumstances, I could have made an effort at kindness; this newest atrocity left me with no civility, no remaining sense of empathy. Privately, I wished they had not resurrected me. Better to have left me a ravening monster without the self-awareness to understand what Jessica had done to me with her maggots. Lord of the Flesh Eaters, indeed. What purpose did it serve to bring me back to life, a new monster, as nothing but a skeleton? I was a Halloween nightmare.

“The result sucks,” she responded, her words matching mine, tone for tone.

I bowed my skull. I deserved as much. My last words to her had not been so kind.

“Vitus.”

The door opened. Owen entered, garbed in black—in stalking gear—once more. Niko ignored us, cleaning scalpels at the sink. She did it to give us a semblance of privacy, and I waited as Owen came forward into the room. Watching him approach, I was struck by the contrast between us, the vitality that informed his steps, the smoothness of his skin, the rippling muscle beneath his clothes. He exuded a life force that had been extinguished from me long ago, and looking at him was like studying a mirror image of myself: that is what I looked like once.

I looked away, gathering myself.

“I wondered where you were,” I said.

He stopped before the gurney with several feet between us. He was polite to a fault, understanding without being told that I desired my privacy and my distance.

“I came for you as fast as I could. The whole place erupted into panic once Jessica made it out of the room they were holding you in. I didn’t quite understand what was happening, the children were . . . they lost their purpose once Jessica lost her reason. It was as though she snapped; there was nothing left holding her coherent thoughts together. She ran from corridor to corridor, and I saw her. There was nothing left of her face, just this—”

“You found me,” I cut him off.

I dreaded the thought of hearing him describe what I had already seen. She was still my wife, even if she were dead, or crazy, or damned to Hell for eternity. No language spoken could match the power of standing witness before her corrupted, maggot-eaten form.

“I tracked you down. I would have been there sooner, but I was clearing the way through an old ventilation shaft. I could not get through the door where they had blocked it off, and I fear they are all still there.”

“How long have I been here?”

“Two days. I had to . . . wrap you in a blanket. I feared to lose the parts of you that were falling off.”

I raised a skeleton hand before my eyes and flexed the finger bones. Wires interlaced the smaller ones, and it occurred to me that it had been painstaking work to connect my bones in such a way, like shattering a puppet and then sewing it back together. Hours and hours of labor on par with that of a master craftsman, just to give me back the most basic of articulation.

I glanced at Niko. Had she even had time to sleep? Or had she spent the last forty-eight hours working on me? My shame expanded.

“I’m going back, Vitus,” he announced.

“Oh?” I turned my attention from my hand. Niko had finished washing the surgical instruments some time ago. She occupied a dark corner in silence as she watched us.

“I can’t leave them. I can’t leave the children there with that . . . thing.”

“What makes you think I would let you go back into that place with that thing that is my wife?”

Niko said nothing; no gasp of surprise or shock. No doubt Owen had relayed everything to her while I had been passed out in the intake room. That, too, evoked a sense of shame, Niko having to hear from a stranger that I had not, in fact, succeeded in killing my wife, but only maimed her. And what did she think of Owen? Had he presented himself as my son? Oh God, I groaned, what did she think of me now?

Owen sighed. His expression held a poker face, but he was an inexperienced player; he struggled to contain himself. Of course, a skeleton does not have half the complications involving duplicity a living person with a face and human expressions does.

“You can’t stop me, and you can’t do it yourself.”

He pointed out my obvious helplessness, an incapacitation I refused to accept.

“So you’re the great martyr, hm? What happens when a fly lays claim to your flesh? Have you thought about that?”

“Your flesh was rotten, it made for an opportunistic—”

“Infestation? Perhaps. You do realize there are a thousand varieties of flies, and there are those that feast on live flesh as well as dead? Sure, mine was the most convenient. But you’ve got no way of knowing you’ll be able to find your way out once you make it back in. Plenty of time for anything to happen.”

His features hardened, perhaps even irritated by my calm explanation of what awaited him in the dirty, damp basement with the hundred damned children of the Flesh Eaters.

“I assure you, Owen, when you are dead, you will have many hours to ponder all the fear a maggot may hold; until then, I forbid you to go.”

His face suffused with red from the collar of his neck to the roots of his blond hair. It made me wonder if that was how I had looked when I was angry, when I was told things I did not like to hear.

“You know I’m going anyway.”

I leapt off the gurney. I should have reconsidered. My skeleton feet connected with the concrete and rattled me all the way up my spine. I groaned with the pressure it sent through what little remained of my body and took two steps to stand before Owen.

The red blooms in his cheeks faded, turned into ice; his eyes widened and he stepped back, his lips parting.

He was afraid of me.

“For what purpose did you bring me back here, Owen?”

“Purpose? I’m your son—”

“Like hell you are, and you know it. Try me again, with an answer that makes sense.”

Niko’s glance flicked with interest between the both of us, and I hoped a day might come when I could explain it all to her. For now, explanations would have to wait.

“I couldn’t leave you there!”

I stared at him, but he held steady.

“You would have been better off leaving me for dead or killing me yourself. If you walk out that door, you’d better be prepared for what I’m going to do to come after you. Everyone so fucking eager to save me and then discard me when it turns out I’m not here to be your personal yes-man. You don’t like what I have to say, kill me. I’m serious. I keep asking for it, and everyone keeps not doing it, and I’m not sure how much more self-destruction I can pull out of my ass to prove it to you, because I don’t even have one of those anymore!”

He swallowed. A thick, muddy sound in his throat as his Adam’s apple bobbed in fear.

“Kill me.”

I invaded his space, snapped the gun out of his holster, and returned it to him, pressed it into his hand. My skeleton fingertips reduced to squares of alabaster against his palm. He startled with the sensation, which sent his skin crawling as goose bumps ran up and down his arms and every little hair lifted off the flesh.

His hands trembled. But he would not pull the trigger.

At last he pulled away with a violent jerk, his breath hitching in fast.

“You can’t even pull the trigger with a monster standing in front of you,” I whispered, “and you think you can handle what’s waiting for you in the basement?”

I didn’t try to stop him—what could I possibly do? I was a collection of bones. He slammed the door shut behind him as he left, leaving Niko and me in silence.

“He’s not your son, then?” she asked.

“No,” I sighed. “My real son would have killed me. No, he did exactly what Jamie did. Everyone and their fucking misguided conscience.”

I turned, a skeletal foot tapping against the floor, and studied her face closely. I hoped to catch something, any kind of reaction at all to Jamie’s name, wondering how many family secrets she shared now; at any point she could have asked what I was talking about, but she remained silent.

*

Fluorescent lights flickered and I looked upward, listening to the bones in the back of my head creak and balance my skull on the occiput.

“Turn out the light,” I begged her.

She watched me, her eyes as large as tea saucers, and flicked the switch off, plunging us into dimness. Feeble light poured in between the blinds and cast half-shadows around us like prison bars. The darkness relieved me and set me at ease. I was more naked than naked—no clothes, no flesh.

I wanted to continue my old habits, those physical things we do without a second thought. The way you might lean against a wall and prop up a leg with your heel against it or cross your feet in a casual stance. All these things required new strategies. I was light and unburdened without the flesh, but the cost left me desensitized and hollowed.

“I didn’t expect to see you again. At least not like this,” I began.

We had the room to ourselves. Owen was gone whether I liked it or not. He was young, too young. Was he prepared for what he would find in that basement? There might be children—but would there be anything left of them? And when he got there, would he have the strength to do the hard thing, the right thing? Kill the children he once knew as brothers?

I did not think he had such a darkness in him; I had cultivated evil in my life, I had a talent for killing what I loved. He was still learning those brutal lessons and I feared he would fail that education.

Niko spoke, breaking the thought.

“I had not intended to. I have . . . seen my share of walking corpses. I feared to be the sort of woman who looks for my past in other men, hopelessly seeking a love that can never be returned. Do not feel too badly that you see your son in him. We are always looking for those we’ve lost in other people.”

We were still in the darkness, her back to me as she faced the sink. All of her chores appeared to be done, she had no excuse to turn away from me. I longed to bridge the distance and comfort her, but I had only brittle bones, carrion to offer.

Owen could offer her so much more. Owen was alive, warm, flesh.

“And what about him?” I asked.

“Him? Who?”

“Owen.”

“What about him? Why don’t you come out and tell me what’s on your mind.”

“You seem to like him. And you’ve both been working together, for my supposed benefit, for the past several days now. Long enough to get to know each other.”

Frozen, she broke the stillness by casting a narrow-eyed glance over her shoulder.

“What impressed me most about Owen was how much he looked like you. I remembered when you came to the funeral home, you know. You were a younger man then. You looked just like him.”

“Yeah, that must help,” I said, and the words were bitter.

“Help what?”

“Don’t fuck around. If you like him, don’t pretend otherwise for my benefit. To spare my goddamn feelings. Pity the skeleton you should have buried. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you kept me around to make you feel better about yourselves, like you’re so fucking nice to always be thinking of me, bring me back from the dead when you should have left me to the maggots!”

I’d been holding it in like a writhing snake, but there was nothing left—no muscles, no flesh to bury the anger and jealousy in. It burst from my bones, words climbing out from behind my teeth without lips to snarl with. I invested the one asset I had, my blackened and shriveled lungs, with all the burning rage I could muster, and the words came out like hand slaps.

“I don’t love him,” she hissed. She held a scalpel in her hand. She’d been fiddling with it earlier and now her fingers became white-knuckled around the grip. Hollows beneath her eyes spoke of her long and sleepless nights. “And I don’t love you, either.”

My spine rattled, each knobby bone shuddering atop the other like a set of bricks. Was I really surprised?

“I’m not your lover, I’m not your guardian, and I’m certainly not your fucking mother, and it’s about time you took care of yourself!” she snapped, throwing down the scalpel. It bounced once and rolled across the countertop in a flash of light. With a stomp of her feet, she kicked a gurney out of the way. It ricocheted against the wall, wheels spinning wildly like a broken shopping cart.

“Live and die as you please, Vitus.”

She left me alone in the dark funeral home.

*

Niko was right; it was time I took care of myself.

I waited until night. Then I left the room, searching for signs of Owen. He had still not returned. Walking was difficult. All the joints were accounted for, many ligaments and tendons left intact, allowing me to move in herky-jerky motions. My fine motor skills were lacking, and I would never dance ballet. I took what I could get. I walked like a car without shocks.

I found a pile of my pus-smelling clothes by an incinerator. After a quick search I found my Glock buried inside. I emptied the weapon and broke it apart, examining it like a jeweler with a ring. Dirt in the barrel, faint smell of gun oil. It looked as pristine as the day I bought it so I put it back together, chambering a round. I fished a pack of cigarettes from the front pocket of the useless shirt left in the heap. I looked around the funeral home and half-started with a jump of fear when I met with the knight.

The empty armor struck me as even more sinister now. I leveled the firearm at the helmet, the black visor slit facing off with the hollow gun barrel. I imagined squeezing the trigger, the explosion of a bullet blowing shards of ancient metal apart. My finger bone pressed against the steel before stopping short. With a sigh, I let the gun fall away and set it behind the armor display. My intention was not to shoot, not yet. That would come later. For now I needed answers, not firearms.

I found a shovel in the closet by the door and I hesitated before leaving the building. The world was quiet in the darkness outside, but what would happen if someone saw me? A walking corpse was one thing, a skeleton walking around was a different animal entirely. Did that fall into the realm of indecent public exposure? Could I get ticketed for that? Corpse flesh is the sort of thing someone could explain away, could ignore, and people were adept at creating a hundred excuses to stretch reality back when I’d been sporting my gangrene chic. But a skeleton?

I pulled a cigarette from the pack and lit up with the butt clamped between my teeth. It didn’t matter that the smoke wreathed up either side of my face without skin to hold it in. I flooded my lungs with bitter tobacco and, after a moment of deliberation, hoisted the shovel out the door with me and into the moonlight.

*

The family tombstones stood upright like doors in the light of the half moon. Cool coastal winds breathed in gusts over the land, brutal one second and calm the next. I could not feel the green grass against the bones that now made my feet; any onlooker would believe I was a skeleton ghost from an old folktale—stories they told in rural America about people who rose from the dead because they had unfinished business: lovers they never said goodbye to, wives they still wanted to be miserably married with, and stoves they had forgotten to turn off.

I, too, had unfinished business.

I thrust the shovel by the foot of the first grave: Clayton Adamson. The metal edge sank into the sod with gentle pressure, but the Jersey land was nothing but clay loam beneath, and underneath that, sugar sand. I smoked while I worked, long licks of cigarette fumes ringing my head as though I had risen from Hell itself, still singed from the visit. I inhaled deeply into my black and withered lungs, my teeth pressing into the butt with furious pressure.

It took hours. They don’t dig graves by hand anymore; they hire a guy with a backhoe to rape the earth with noise and tearing. Not dignified, if you ask me, but little about our modern times has dignity anymore. Neither do I.

By the time I dug a hole hip-deep, the moon embedded a corona across the sky at a good pace. I finished my last cigarette with an hour’s worth of digging to go, wondering how I was going to get a new pack of smokes in my condition. A mask? A hood? Perhaps I could scare a clerk into believing I was the Grim Reaper, and I would overlook his appointment with Death if he would keep me in good supply. As I pictured the scenario unfolding, I fell into the rhythm of my pumping skeleton arms until the shovel hit the lid of the casket, sending a shudder through my ulnar bones.

I stopped, setting the tool aside. The bone tips of my fingers trembled; I bowed down to touch the lid. The wood had rotted through and caved in on itself. I pulled away the intact slats, expecting to encounter a desiccated, rotted body beneath.

There was nothing.

I plunged my hands into the soil further. If there had been anything, any scraps left of my child, they were here no longer. Surely I had not eaten even his bones? I groaned, and suddenly my fingers met with hardness against rotted fabric. With a gasp, I pulled back my fist, my bony fingers closed around something, and opened them into the moonlight.

Dust.

Decayed, unrecognizable. The last evidence of the son I once had, a prophecy of my own future, once these bones could no longer hold together and time began to dismantle them at the molecular level. Was this my future, what awaited me? Is that what I was still living for?

I dismissed the mess and climbed out of the hole. Frustrated, I shoveled earth back in with long strokes of my skeleton arms, cursing under my breath.

Owen’s likeness to myself was unbelievable, too unbelievable. From the blond roots of his hair to the coffee-mud of his eyes, what were the odds of such similarity? I barely had flesh left to offer for a paternity test, and I dared not alienate the boy by asking for a hair sample. Dust was hardly evidence of my dead little boy, but I refused to accept that Owen was my alternative.

Perhaps my suspicions were misplaced, and Owen was the genuine article. The dust in the child-sized casket six feet below me suggested it. Owen was ready to do anything for me, other than follow orders. How like me he was.

Suspicion continued to hound me. If Clayton survived the massacre, he would only be twelve years old today. Owen appeared to be eighteen, a man. The disparity could not be explained. I had been irrational, my foundations shaken in the basement when I finally confronted Jessica, withdrawing from the Atroxipine and surrounded with a hundred-fold images of little Clayton. I had allowed emotion to rule me, to sway my better judgment.

Here, in the cold graveyard surrounded by figures of stone I could reflect on my confused circumstances, my poor handling of the situation with Jessica. The only asset I truly possessed was my functioning mind, brain matter that refused to rot or decay, but transferred all my body’s resources over to its smooth operation. My mind was the last great asset I possessed; it was time to use my strongest muscle.

Despite my fierce desire to penetrate the mystery, the answers would not come. In a rage, I threw the shovel and watched it roll away into the grass. I groaned and made bony fists of my hands. This is how it would be for the rest of my life—a barely functioning skeleton forced to roam the earth like a ghost.

Forever.

*

I found Niko coming in as the sun rose. I waited for her on the gurney as she swept through. She wore a long black coat fashioned after a nineteenth-century style. She looked like she stepped out of a Gothic music video, complete with sweaty rock stars and scantily clad extras. When she reached out to flick on the lights, carrying a scent of rose oil with her, I stopped her with my voice.

“Please—no lights.”

Her arm fell away. Lips moist with gloss. She set her purse down on the counter and I remained seated on the gurney. She worked quickly, setting up the pump. The smell of formaldehyde permeated the air as the machinery whirred to life, and she put off the moment until she could do so no longer and reluctantly turned to face me for the first time.

“I wasn’t sure if you’d be here,” she spoke curtly.

I shrugged. Two knobs of bone lifted, then sagged.

She unwound the rubber tube, approaching my bones, and I lay back like a sedated animal while she pressed the tube into my viscera, winding through my rib cage, more slats of bone. The steady pulse of the machine began, pumping my heart in time. The sensation was like being tickled on the inside of my body. Drugs racing up the shreds of spinal tissue to circulate into my brain.

Suck. Thump. Suck. Thump.

“Niko,” I said.

She looked up, waiting.

“When we’re done with this dose, I need you to do something for me. It’s the last thing I’ll ever ask you to do, and you don’t need to worry about me barging in on you in the middle of the night anymore. I want you to stay with Owen. He seems like a good kid.”

Her mouth, pouty before, parted like a strawberry sliced in half—warm, red, ripe.

“Look at me, Niko. I’ve been limping through this life, and I don’t know why. I thought it was noble, maybe, to keep on going when it would have been so much easier just to end it. A part of me didn’t want to die. I was twenty when it happened. Is anyone ready to die at twenty?”

A silence spun out between us as I considered that, and then, taking a breath, I pushed on.

“I was young. I remembered being young, held it close to me. That kept me going, for a while. And then after the first couple of years, I forgot. I forgot what a heartbeat sounded like, or how to kiss, or those things that make life relevant, vital. After long enough, I’ll forget everything all together, I imagine. I’ll become like those zombies Jamie swears he’ll never let me be.

“Look at me, Niko. Would you go on, like this? I barely have a body at all. Nothing but bones. I’m a shadow of a man. I want you to finish me, when the time is right. I’ll be here, and promise me, when I say to do it, you’ll do it. You’ll take the scalpel and sever the spinal cord at the base of my skull—”

Unbelievably, she was crying. I didn’t stop, even as I saw the wet tracks spill down her cheeks, wet mascara painting mouse feet at the dark corners of her eyes.

“—and when you’re done, take the head and throw it in the incinerator. I don’t want there to be any chances of coming back. Will you do that for me?”

She bit her lip, tasting salt tears across her wet lips. She remained mute, and I waited for her answer, not satisfied with silence. I needed her agreement.

“Do it, Niko. For me. Give me your word.”

She gasped, like pulling a razor out of her skin, a sob shaking loose from her frame.

“Yes. If that’s what you want, Vitus, I’ll fucking kill you.”

I tried to close my eyes, but then remembered there was nothing to close them with. How can one live like this? Forever staring, with no respite from the terrible images that we may look upon in one lifetime.

*

Empty.

I stared into the empty cigarette pack, white paper, crackling cellophane against my carpal bones. I could not acclimate to seeing my hands without flesh. Our identity is so much more than bones—skin and hair and blood and breath. Here I was without most of them.

And no cigarettes.

The final insult: I couldn’t even smoke. I threw the empty pack, where it bounced against the baseboard wall. Bony fingers tapped frenetically against the counter.

Fuck that. I was going to have my cancer sticks.

I tapped my bony feet across the linoleum, to a pile of sheets on top of a gurney. Cursing, I attempted to untangle them from each other, pulling one out with questionable stains. I tried to sniff them, but without a nose, I failed miserably. Soldiers used to talk about the amputations, the persistent sensation of the limb even after the loss; but the feeling amplifies by the power of ten when you lose everything.

I wrapped the sheet around me as though I were a college boy at a frat party, putting on togas. Minus the alcohol and unnecessary hazing.

I left the room, the door slamming behind me. I would have my cigarettes, by God. I deserved a last meal before I died.

*

“Cigarettes, please.”

Suburban areas always had an odd mix of teenagers desperate to be anything but suburban, aping the urban fashions of their favorite musical artist, or on the other extreme, desperate to align themselves with a southern country sensibility. This kid was the latter, wearing deer hunting camo over his flannel. He had a confederate flag on his belt, I noted with distaste. He could use a good scare.

The fluorescent lights were not doing me, or the kid, any favors. He was a ginger brat, with a ruddy, pocked complexion; the lights expanded my skull, enlarged it to titanic proportions. Every bone stood out in high relief, every craggy fracture, the deep, ivory lines where my teeth were embedded in my jawbone, the knobby sections of spine connecting from the back of my skull and all the way down like an eviscerated snake.

The kid had been reading a newspaper. At the first sight of me standing before his scratched and dirty counter, his hand clenched, tearing the paper with a snapping noise; a wad of tobacco he’d been nursing in his cheek came to a stop on the left side, frozen.

“You’re a little young to be using chew, aren’t you?” I asked. “And where are my cigarettes?”

He refused to move, staring. His eyes were vacant, which I suspect was no different from his usual expression, but in this case, they were vacant—so panicked he’d lost the ability to engage in logical thought. I suspected this was not a stretch for him.

I sighed and set a ten on the counter. The wadded bill sat on the surface like a curled worm and I leaned over to pluck a pack from behind the counter. The cellophane whispered between my bony fingers and filled me with a thrill of pleasure. Thank God for smokes. It was the only vice left to me. God took away everything else.

“Thanks, kid. Stop doing chew, that shit’ll give you cancer.”

A small shred of tobacco leaked from his open mouth, and he continued to stare after me as I left the shop. When I looked back, I saw him moving to the door to shift the sign from OPEN to CLOSED.

*

Back at the funeral home, I stood in front of the knight.

Picture, if you will, a collection of naked bones staring at an empty suit of armor. The visor a black, horizontal slit, a void evoking terror. The metal plates old and warped out of true; while they had been polished years ago, dust and particles had settled along the surface, giving it a mottled, stained appearance, blackened where metal met metal. I regarded it as nervous as a bridegroom on his wedding day, pacing the floor only to stop in front of it, contemplate it for a few moments, and then pace the floor anxiously again. The carpet in the lobby padded my bone-tapping feet, silencing my presence into a midnight hush.

It was down to me and the knight.

“There’s only room for one of us,” I muttered threateningly. A cigarette withdrawn from a pack, the hiss of the lighter against the tip, and I was inhaling fumes once more. My gaze never left the empty hollow of the helmet visor. Something about that emptiness shook me.

It’s a metaphor, idiot. The knight is empty like you are.

Perhaps, I considered. I thought of the basement beneath the fortune teller’s shop and Jessica within it. It was not difficult to recall those moments with her, when I had been oscillating between an animal self and a higher-functioning monster. I remembered my shadow-self, the Id Man, and my shuffling, pre-deceased corpse. All one, shattered person, a split consciousness.

Deep below the ground, Owen was descending to finish the job I had not been able to. I knew without being told and without having to ask that Owen should have been back by now. Would his better nature supersede him and cause him to fail at a critical moment? Did he have the courage to stare a child in the face and kill him if he had to? His fate could be determined by a wavering a gun, a missed target.

He could be dead already.

I considered all this with sober grimness.

I thought of the Id Man from the basement. But he was a part of me, wasn’t he? The Id Man and I were one and the same, but he was buried deep inside my subconscious and sleeping now, pacified by Atroxipine.

Are you there?

Silence. I was alone inside myself, bones upon bones.

I could use your help right now, if you are.

In the silence, I sensed a rustling in the deep membranes of my gray matter and there was an answer. A snaking voice from a distant plane.

Rescue the kid, come back, and kiss it all goodbye, if dying makes you happy. But do it with a shred of conviction and integrity. You want the son you never had? Fuck the consequences and take it.

I bowed my head and the ember burned like a lodestone in the darkness and cast feeble light upon the armor itself. Up close, I could see the armor was no reproduction; the metal was the real thing. Shoulder plates inlaid with swirling patterns and fine details. Exemplary craftsmanship that existed over hundreds of years but long forgotten in this new corrupt and modern age—along with the chivalry it once stood for, everything disposable and everything for sale and on credit, bought and sold and discarded like trash, people and objects alike.

Is this the world I belonged in, the one I wanted to continue living in?

No, I decided. My decision cemented, my certainty rigid and uncompromising. I flicked the cigarette away, extinguishing it with a grind of my bone-heel. “Not anymore,” I whispered, and reached for the knight.

*

Niko made a habit of looking delicious; part of her charm was she didn’t seem to know it—or she did and played upon it, turning perception to her advantage. Her hair gathered in generous black curls, except when she was working on a fresh corpse, and she would pull it up into a loose tie at the back of her head, letting raven-strands fall here and there. Her cheeks carved from the snowy mountain ranges of Nepal. Black clothes to frame her sapphire eyes as she strode through the front double doors and into the lobby and straight past the knight, trailing a sweet-smelling perfume through a path of putrid, acrid cigarette smoke. She never lost stride or even curled her nose, a veteran of unearthly gases and questionable aromas. If Pluto were embodied in a female form, Niko was its earthly manifestation.

“Niko,” a voice called out.

She stopped and her fingers unclenched, nearly dropping her bag as she sank back into the shadows as though they offered her protection.

From the other side of the room, a man entered from a far door.

Taller and widened and filled with the weight of years. He looked down at Niko as he came around the circumference of the interior slowly, carrying with him an air of entitlement and bureaucracy. His face expressionless. His suit favored an appearance designed to be bland and bureaucratic, a brown number with the collar undone. His five o’clock shadow testified to unforgiving deadlines and his red-rimmed eyes suggested he had not slept in some time. Perhaps he had been a kinder-looking man in his younger days, but the years gave cruel edges to his face and made his aging body solid and immovable as a bull’s. His hair was beginning to recede from the front.

“You didn’t call,” he accused her.

“I don’t answer to you,” she said.

“There was a time when you didn’t answer to me, Niko. And it must be something you’ve gotten used to all these years, because we’ve never asked anything of you since you put Mrs. Adamson and Clayton Adamson in the ground. Your service doesn’t end with a single job, Niko. You have not been released from duty. Do you understand?”

“I did my job. I prepare people for burial. I don’t owe you a goddamn thing and you know it. You owe Vitus.”

He sighed, annoyed. The slack flesh of his face shook with the clenching of his jaw and, with an angry spasm of his hands, he reached into an inner pocket to whip out a folded paper. It snapped in the air as he produced it and held it open for her to study the contents.

“Is that your signature, down here?” he asked, his voice terse as he tapped at the bottom with a finger.

“No one told me what I was signing. They said it was release form, that we couldn’t talk about what we’d seen,” she hissed.

“This appears to be a standard CIA recruitment form,” he explained as might a bored professor, an unenthusiastic actor reciting a mediocre play. “This swears you to service when the country calls for it, to give us any information you might have on behalf of the United States government. Refusal to do so can result in undesirable repercussions.”

She said nothing. He took a step forward and ceiling lights turned his face into the caricature of a skull with his eyes black sockets and the paper trembling in his hand. She took a step back until her spine met against the armor display. Metal plates jangling with the vibration.

I struggled to be motionless from inside the suit.

“There’s nothing you can do to me that hasn’t already been done,” she seethed.

“Been to prison yet? Because I can assure you, we can do that. And if that doesn’t terrify you, think of your family. It’s not to suggest we would be so cruel as to hurt your family. We’re not the mafia, after all. But nothing can compel us to continue to help and treat your ailing relatives on our good will if you refuse to do something for us in return. Is that so unreasonable?”

She said nothing. In that moment, she had the time to imagine any number of scenarios and with it the social shame attached to imprisonment, the loss of her job, her security, her home—and all of these could have been negotiable for the right reasons, but family, ah—how to justify and explain their increase in suffering? All this could be taken from her on the strength of a single piece of paper.

“It doesn’t even have to be a federal prison, you know. We could pack you off to a Black Site. And all those high-end treatments at state of the art facilities your mother has been enjoying? All those prescriptions healing your loved ones, how do you think we developed those? If not pioneered off the largesse of Vitus’s pain, than who? You owe Vitus. People all across this country owe him and may never know of it. But we can take it all away.”

“I won’t do it!”

“You will do it!” he yelled in return, and his booming voice filled the room and turned it into a thousand echoes that vibrated the plates of armor like strings of an instrument. “You will convince Vitus to do what is right, and this government authorizes you to use whatever means necessary. Make no mistake, Niko—I make every sacrifice required of me to repay the debt I owe to my brother. You make me out to be a monster, when all I have ever wanted to do is put an end to death, to stop this useless human suffering. With your help, it’s not too late.”

The silence spun out again, broken only by her ragged breathing.

“It will break his heart, Jamie,” she whispered, her fist unfurling in a gesture of surrender.

“At least he will have one worth breaking, then,” the man only responded, and with a flick of the paper, he disappeared it into his suit and faded away.

*

I held my breath as though I had one; the memory of lungs compelled me. I held and held, but I could hold my breath forever and I would not die, I would not expire; it is the humanity that lingers inside me, no matter how many times I try to drown it with a thousand cigarettes, with a thousand bullets and a thousand dead. It makes no difference. I held my breath like a man who has been stabbed and my ears boxed with Niko’s words:

It will break his heart, Jamie.

And deep inside me, a raw and empty laughter from the other.

You’re a fool, Vitus.

The silence stretched out long after she had left the lobby, turning down the sterile hall to her corpses on their gurneys, to tinker with their bones and flesh, to mold them into caricatures of living things for their viewings and their wakes. The silence lasted long after I knew Jamie was gone through the shadows and out the back door. I waited longer than reason to ponder this fresh agony I’d borne witness to.

I had no sooner managed to pull on the final plate of armor when I heard the lock turning in the door. Frozen, I allowed the drama to play out before me. At any moment, I could have put a stop to it, I could have cried out, made my presence known—and the desire had been there. To draw the sword. Pin Jamie against the wall. And was I really so surprised?

But who could I blame but myself? All I had to do was think about it; there had to be strings attached. The only reason Niko would have been allowed to see the bodies of my wife and child, to witness me there with Jamie, was because she had been taken into the ranks. Who knew better than I the dirty tricks of my father’s meddling? I had time to wonder how much the hand of the old gray fox had been at work here. Counseling Jamie. Advising him. Whispering in his ear and pouring forth a multitude of poisons: we can use him, Jamie, there’s a lot of money in pharmaceuticals. Think of the people it would help. The diseases it would give relief to. Think of the money.

And Jamie would have fallen into line as he always did. Obedient son. First for my father’s love. Feeding me to the meat grinder for his approval. Perhaps Niko’s greatest function for the government had been to provide a lie, both to me and to others who might ask too many questions about the dead soldiers they’d no doubt hired her to dispose of, to steer away uncomfortable questions about the remains.

They were old and dirty CIA tricks; I’d heard of it done through rumor and gossip but never met the proof of it. Popular on college campuses, the Central Intelligence Agency had been known to recruit students, persuade them into signing papers without realizing they were entering such dubious employment; once under the auspices of the CIA, they were little more than pawns, good for intelligence, but little else. It was my understanding that, as leverage, the CIA often threatened to “oust” the identities of the reluctantly recruited students, resulting in the claim that a portion of school suicides occur from the stress and fear of exposure as double agents.

And now, Niko was one of them.

Was he holding her hostage by threatening to expose her duplicity? Perhaps even by exposing her CIA status to me? What of her home, her people?

I chewed over the possibilities. Motive was the slippery issue—for what purpose was Jamie here, pulling Niko’s strings? What was the end game? Was Owen involved as well? He was a helluva shot. Too good.

Had they hired him to kill me?

Now, that had a promising ring. It would be a lot easier to have Owen kill me than to have Jamie do it himself. Maybe I had used up my usefulness to Uncle Sam and the tab had been called due. The old gray fox bent before the firelight with a whiskey in one hand and a balance sheet in the other, and in that list of debits, crosses my name out. As simple as that. Jamie would arrange for someone else to kill me. For all I knew, Owen might be in the same boat as Niko.

Alone in the lobby at last, I stepped off the pedestal to the plush carpet. I plundered every conspiracy theory I could conjure from my head. The metal casing of the armor followed the command of my tired bones. I checked the firearm. The world reduced to a horizontal slit, and I missed the sensation of grinning, of a face that could express all that I was feeling inside, the tumult that electrified my neurons.

I didn’t know why I hadn’t thought of the armor sooner; it was like taking a Mustang for a ride. To think that I had feared the empty suit, registered sinister feeling in its presence. I had spent so long terrified of my unity with it, I had not stopped to think it could offer me something neither my rotting flesh or fragile bones could—restore strength where it had been stolen, integrity where it had been corrupted, and the opportunity, just maybe, to put things right. For once in my life, in the last hours I possessed it, I wanted to do the right thing—make this armor sing with purpose, absolve the blood of the crimes of the past.

“One way or another,” I whispered, “I’m coming for you, Owen.”

Jamie and Niko would have to wait. My son came first.

I turned on my heel and left, metal clanking emptily as I slammed the door closed behind me.

*

I boosted a car from the near-empty lot. An old Chevy Beretta. Aromatic with spilled beer and piss and cigarette burns dotting the fabric interior. The vehicle gurgled to life reluctantly. If knights were supposed to ride noble steeds, this was definitely not it.

You left the Thunderbird at Astra’s fortune telling shop.

Gasoline hit the air as I turned the car onto the main drag. The visor cut down on my peripheral vision, but provided me with a soothing line of sight. Something about the metal structure of the armor gave comfort. Not quite as good as having skin and flesh and blood, but better than nothing but bare bones. I could at least not be reminded of my inhumanity by the unsettling sight of my skeletal structure as I went about my business. I wondered just how unnerving the experience was for Niko.

When I returned, I intended to put that all to rest; she wouldn’t have to look at me or fix me anymore once I was out of the picture. We would all be better off for it. By taking myself off the chessboard, I could change the game in ways both dynamic and irrevocable. I imagined the old gray fox, gnashing his teeth and wailing—not in grief as a father for a son, but that I was no longer a useful pawn for his advancement.

Owen first, I reminded myself, and pressed the gas, burning rubber on the main road. The Glock remained in my shoulder holster, slung over the metal plates, while the shield lay against the tattered fabric car interior beside the sword. Fifteen bullets in the magazine, one chambered. Sixteen shots against a hundred kids are bad odds—and I hoped the sword would be sharp enough.

Call it a hunch, but I had a feeling the kids trapped in the basement weren’t going to be singing show tunes and tap dancing on that stage by the time I got down there.

Ah, fatherhood, I thought grimly, and pressed on.

*

When I arrived at the shop, the moon was full and trekking across the sky with purpose. Niko would have noticed I had gone missing by now; I hoped and prayed Owen was still whole, still human. I had already decided that if he were not—if he had been turned, then I would do what Jamie should have done for me: I was going to kill him.

The shop was empty. Neon lights still advertised fortunes in brilliant, nightmarish color as I broke through the glass door with a metal fist. Glass flew and tinkled across the floor. Armor insulated the impact. Without the padding of flesh to protect my structure, I had to take into consideration how I moved and touched objects. Putting a bony fist through a window would have been out of the question before. The suit of armor changed everything.

I turned the knob from the inside and jerked open the door over the broken glass. Oddments and ornaments of crystals and tarot decks; pendulums and crystal balls shuddered on their shelves as I slammed the broken door behind me and marched toward the back. I took down the fabric strung from the corridors with a sweep of my armored hand. Jerked new age decorations from their supports and sent them cascading to the floor in reds, oranges, and burgundies.

I came to a stop in the stock room. A trace memory surfaced of Jessica leading me through these halls, through the black door, and down the steps to the waiting children. The moment sent a shiver through me and rattled me down to my metal. There would be no going through the door here; Owen had said they cemented it shut on the other side, and a brief attempt at breaking the lock and opening the door confirmed it. It budged half an inch inward, then stopped and could not be persuaded to move farther. I cursed, my breath icy against the underside of my metal helmet. I retreated to reassess my options.

Owen said he had used a ventilation shaft, and he had most likely used the same route to ferret us out when he rescued me and brought me back to the funeral home. I cast my eyes over the stock room. Empty boxes, dust bunnies waving in the faint wind. I watched their gray, frayed tendrils. Air flows close to here. I pulled at a set of industrial shelves, moving them away from the wall several inches. They scraped white lines across the dirty linoleum, squealing as empty boxes cascaded down, a set of tarot cards spilling across the floor. I stared at images of the Nine of Swords and the Knight of Wands exposed before me and, if it were possible, they inspired a deep unease, greater than the Death card itself. I dismissed them and continued until I was satisfied that I had enough clearance and stood back to examine what my efforts had uncovered.

A grate breathed air into the room from beyond the shelving and the covering to the ventilation shaft hung askew, marking the place Owen had used to penetrate the basement. I knelt before it, my metal knees scraping the concrete floor. This armor made enough racket to raise the dead—there was no way I was going to be able to quiet my approach. Owen had the advantage of soft material clothing, but in this suit, I was as clumsy as a zombie in a china shop.

A gap in the floor caught my eye. Half in and half out of the shadow of the shelves. I crawled closer and cut the distance until I was running a hand over the spot and then latching on with my fingers. The gap opened wide and gave way. A broken piece of concrete came away in my hand. I looked down into the hole in the ground and expected to see a secret chamber. A helpful flight of stairs to lead me to my destination.

Nothing in life goes so easy as that.

Instead, it was a cubby hole set into the floor that people had been traipsing across for years; Owen walked over it coming to and from this place without ever noticing that inside the deep and damp hole lay the curled and bound skeleton of a dead woman.

Beetles bred and reproduced in her old bones; shrouds of rotted fabric. I could make out the detail of the skeleton and the crack that spiderwebbed from the clean plane of her skull and illustrated how she ended up here. A blow to the head. Beside her skull, the glint of jewelry; silver baubles she had been lain to rest with and necklaces around her throat. One wrought in the shape of an astrological sign and I understood then, through the filaments of hair matted and tangled in the webs and used as nesting material for errant rats—this was the real Madam Astra.

Once upon a time, this had been a real functioning shop with a real functioning woman who told fortunes and believed in the fates. I saw the line of events with clarity—my wife in her tattered clothes, bloody with a set of my teeth marks—perhaps she hadn’t turned yet. Did she come here for help? Saw the light on and came out of the darkness? And the real Madam Astra would have taken her in, served her tea and read her leaves and held her hand.

Right up until my wife turned and consumed the shopkeeper—dumping her in this place and then proceeding to consume and usurp everything else. The woman’s identity and her place of business as an empty shell to shelter her while she began to build her empire.

I cursed and dropped the concrete square back into place. I regretted having discovered it and I sighed and resigned myself. This unknown grave must remain unknown for now. Forget all this, I told myself. There is more yet to do.

I withdrew the gun, confirmed that my sword remained in my scabbard. I was ready.

Zzzzt.

A lone fly crawled from between the grate slats, black body dull marcasite in the half-light. It took off, flying lazily into the stuffy, moldy air, and I jerked the grate from the wall, exposing the opening and letting it clatter overtop the hidden corpse in the floor.

“I’m coming, Owen,” I whispered.

*

Moving silently was not an option.

The ventilation shaft was large enough to accommodate my size and width, and now that I was reduced to bones and metal plates, I was lighter than I had ever been in life; Owen was wiry and thin, allowing him to pass through the shaft with relative ease. There was no fear of falling through, but I sounded like a big brass band as I advanced, metal plates knocking against sheet metal.

When I was still alive, and even in death, I loved movie theaters. I loved being enveloped in the kind darkness, waiting for the screen to explode into color and light and reveal moving pictures of impossible fantasies, unrequited love, and bitter revenge. But in all the time I’d spent in movie theaters, never once have I seen a movie that showed me a dirty ventilation shaft.

In any spy movie where the hero risks his life to sneak his way into a fortified building, the ventilation shafts are clean and slick and sterile as ice; you can catch your own reflection in their smooth finish. The reality poses unexpected difficulties like dust and mouse turds and black mold.

I scoured clean trails behind me on the surface as I moved, angling my way through a stuffy, claustrophobic descent. I pushed irritated brown recluses and wood spiders ahead of me and cleared out their nests like a whale through a sewage pipe.

Puffs of particulate grit rose and swirled in my path. I felt packed into a vacuum bag, knocking and cursing all the way down and scrambling for purchase where the duct work graded too steeply. I could do nothing but slide down. At last, my metal plated feet hit an ornate grate at the bottom and, with vigorous kicking, I was rewarded with a clatter and then empty space beyond.

I squirmed through the opening to fall out onto the floor. Alone in the long, damp hallway, I froze in the darkness, convinced someone must have heard my raucous passage and were laying low, waiting to press their advantage. All my senses, dulled and damped as they were, strained for signs of life. I longed to call out Owen’s name, but the words sputtered and extinguished. Cold concrete discouraged sound with the haunted austerity of a church—cold, impenetrable, and vastly unforgiving.

My eyes adjusted to the light, seeking forms and shapes through the narrow visor, passing over the dirty floor. In moments, I recognized the doors of the living quarters, where a young boy had shown me my room, and I had showed him my gun, coaxing information from him. The moment passed from me like old reels of a silent film, lost in time.

The orderly cleanliness of that hallway was gone. Doors once closed when I had first been ushered through the compound now stood open, and some hung askew from their hinges. Claw marks at the doorknobs and indentations in the wood. What few belongings the children had been allowed to have were flung every which way. Picture frames shattered and glass glistened like snow. Bed sheets and red robes strewn in tatters of fabric, blood stained, dirty, and in shreds. The scene filled the onlooker with a deep disquiet that the firearm in my hand could not dispel.

The silence was absolute.

I forged on, down the hallway. Beyond the furthest door was the main entrance leading to the altar room and the feast where I had met my hundred children. Where were they now? Beyond the door? Were they little more than animated corpses, waiting for the benediction of my bullet?

I listened. No tell tale shuffling, no quiet shambling, no drooling zombie-gurgles from beyond.

I paused. I inhaled and closed my metal, armored hand over the doorknob. My fingers clicked with reptilian sound.

I opened the door.

*

Death lived in this room. I should know; we are well acquainted.

With the weapon drawn and steady, ready to aim and take fire, I let the firearm fall to my side, still clutched in my hand and the armor grating against bone. The dull black plastic barrel against stained metal plates.

I recognized the stage I once stood upon and stared at an ocean of children, all Clayton Adamson look-alikes; a slumped corpse lay upon the wooden boards now, as though the figure were only sleeping, waiting to arise and shamble to its feet. No sound, no movement, only silence prevailed. I approached the stage, my visor eye-level with the raised floor.

“Jessica,” I whispered.

A pyramid of bones lay crumpled in the center with strands of blond hair clinging to the gypsy garb; if I had hoped to finish her off, I’d arrived too late. Nothing but bones remained. Her skull fractured by a shotgun blast. I studied the shards of her bone fragments and wondered how we began from those backseats in a cheap car on a high school night and called it love; all the way to this very moment.

I bowed my head and moved on.

Below the stage, amidst overturned chairs and broken tables, were the children. Their corpses could only have been dead for a day or so, though I had been gone longer than that while convalescing under Niko’s care. Their bodies were emaciated, wrapped still in their religious robes, like monks fallen in combat; slumped here and there, some lay on top of the others, some by themselves. Their arrangement gave no clue to their demise. If they had been running, if something pursued them, if they had been afflicted by Virus X, there was no evidence of it. I expected zombies, and there were none; only dead bodies.

A hush remained, as though I had stepped into a desert landscape. Emboldened, I yelled.

“Owen!”

The silence persisted. I half-expected a corpse to stir and for them to arise as one and confirm my worst fears; to descend upon me with their gnashing teeth, to feed on . . . my bones. To crack me open and extract my marrow. After that, all that would be left was my soul, and surely there was hardly enough there to make a meal.

There was no sign of Owen. Through the helmet, I was desperate to pick out his form among the small children shapes but there was nothing. My horror at this carnage made it difficult to define my feelings—was I relieved not to see Owen here? Or did I dread that he met with a fate worse than the peaceful slumber these dead children enjoyed? Was I disappointed?

In an instant, they all seemed my children, children I should have been able to save. I was their father, and just like my son, I failed them each in their turn.

I cast my gaze down to my feet. Thought about that uncomfortable sensation of shame, of failure, of bitterness. A sensation that extended beyond flesh and deep scarlet blushes and downcast eyes.

I turned and left.

*

Down the hall I went.

I sought the far room of my final memories with Jessica where I had confronted my own Id; where Jessica feasted while I wrestled with myself to awaken and fall asleep all at once. I could not imagine there were any other places left in this wretched basement to search though and my steps quickened as I opened the first door into the chamber and then arrived at the last one.

The memory of Jessica was still fresh, vivid. The leash she pulled me along with, the dank cellar smells permeating every room and hall. The door loomed ahead and I set my hand to the knob to throw the lock.

“Owen,” I called out, and opened it wide.

“Vitus!”

I stopped, my armored hand still extended over the knob; his voice resounding with every burning feeling in my heart to discover him still alive as the door yawned open. Yet, his voice projected from behind me just as the buzzing sound hit the air like a bass turned all the way up on a sound system and stitched out the rhythm of a pulse, insistent, angry, hungry. Caught between one motion and the other, I pirouetted on one heel so I stretched over the threshold to look behind me.

Owen materialized from blades of dark and shadow with his hand snaking out into the light for me. At first, I thought he was happy to see me, his hand open to touch me, to reaffirm our growing familial bond with an embrace. My skeletal teeth mimicked a smile of delight. Alive! Relief flooded through me to see him unhurt and whole, to acknowledge the healthy glow of his youth, his aching vitality of which I could never share.

I let go of the door.

His face twisted, like a rag between two fists. As much as he may have loved me, his cry had not been to greet me—it had been to warn me.

“Don’t open the door!”

I turned back. Metal feet scraped the concrete in frantic response. Owen snapped out his firearm, cocked and ready. I lifted my weapon in pantomime of Owen’s dark shadow, turning to face the blackness beyond.

ZZZZZZZZZZTTTTTTTTTTTT

*

Darkness.

Darkness defined by our desperate and fruitless searching, our attempts to make out shapes in the blackness. Side by side with Owen, we peered into darkness, darkness buzzing and vibrating and trembling on a multiplicity of wings. A textured darkness.

A darkness stared back.

Flies.

Flies so thick they formed a dark swirling mass in the center of the concrete cell, blotting out the center bulb as an eclipse. The mass of flies formed like smoke and a shifting black cloud that moved as a living tornado with a gale force surge of howling wind. I registered the steady hum of their wings. So many of them occupying one space forced their notes to resonate with one another, deepening and expanding the sound. Owen’s face became a flat sheet of paper smoothed of expression and color. The bulb chain in the center swayed with the force of the insects.

I lifted the Glock; the threat was implied, but what did I fire at? A million targets smaller than a penny? I had expected to be forced to kill a hundred monster children. With sixteen bullets, that goal had seemed absurd; now we had left absurd long ago and crossed over into the realm of surreal.

The fly mass hovered, buzzed, swirled, so thick they cast a shadow on the floor. I had never seen flies congregate in such a manner, as though they were all sharing a single purpose, a driving ambition without deviation of want or desire.

In the gust of sucking pressure with the opening of the door, the humming of their ceaseless wings dropped a note and changed direction. Each individual fly turned in symphony and the frenzy of their wings increased in pace as they faced us. The sensation of unnatural fear grew acute, and with it their focus, like a thousand lasers concentrated upon us as one; the Glock trembled, knocked against my metal hand in a senseless ticking.

Shooting was a foregone conclusion, and I did it anyway, as one whose panic trumps all reason into senseless action. I fired a single round into the black mass. My wrist snapped with recoil and I moved to stand in front of Owen. Heedless of his line of fire. The boy could save his bullets for when he truly needed them; for now, I was going to serve as his human shield.

The reaction was immediate. As though I had thrown a rock into a still lake, the bullet disappeared into the blackness as the seething flies absorbed it wholly and formed a great black mouth that rippled in response. The rhythm of their beating wings downshifted into a deeper tonal note.

Their queasy calm provided a prelude to the storm—in the next instant, they shattered apart.

A collapsing tornado deconstructed the dark column of their mass and suddenly flowed through the opened door in a mist of hairy bodies and beating wings. Their velocity was directed with purpose and undisturbed by our presence as they emptied out of the room. Owen’s throat emitted a dry swallow, an audible click. I had not realized he had grabbed my arm and pushed me to the door to stand aside from the swarm while the last of a million flies seeped from the basement room.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” he whispered.

I cast a glance back down the hall where the flies had disappeared.

“What is it?” I demanded.

“They’re alive.”

“Yes, I get that.”

“No, I mean . . . they’re single consciousness.”

“Run that by me again?” I asked.

Perhaps the helmet was muffling my reason. I strained to hear his words, as though I could comprehend them better with the addition of volume.

He swallowed, his skin waxen under the feeble light. The lightbulb in the room swung emptily with the breeze of the passing horde. Each detail crowded in on me to impart a feeling of unreality too intense to be anything but real. I would parse these details later to fill my nightmares with the stained concrete and the howling noise of the swarm and marry each horror to my father’s voice reading the words of Julius Caesar in my youth.

“I don’t understand why—”

“Help me understand why, then!” I yelled, overwhelmed with a blind urgency. We needed to get out of here. I cast my gaze back in the direction where the flies had gone. I had no reason to believe that something worse wasn’t building outside these doors and lying in wait for us every second we continued to debate our circumstances. This ominous lull was the world about to turn sideways.

“Her consciousness,” he whispered. “It’s hers. Look, there’s theories that every cell has consciousness. Things like deep quantum chemistry having to do with quantum fields that give these cells a kind of consciousness. Maybe not identity, like you or I have identity . . . but just stick with me on this, okay?”

I made an impatient motion for him to hurry up and get to the punchline. He stared at the armor, his brow furrowed in confusion as he noticed it for the first time.

“Does it look like we have time to discuss my fashion choices? We’ll talk about the armor later,” I snapped. “Get to your point, boy.”

“Look, if Jessica’s cells have individual consciousness, just like all of ours are supposed to, that basic DNA that makes us uniquely us . . .”

“Yes?”

“All the maggots she kept inside her, that ate her . . .”

He trailed off and looked aside, as though he could not meet my gaze. An awkwardness in his affect that inverted my thoughts until it seemed the room rocked and rollicked about me. I reached out to hold the wall to stop my relentless sway to and fro. Implications flooded in fast, one upon the other, until I was punch drunk.

The maggots from before had fed and slumbered in the basement depths. While I came to as a pile of bones on Niko’s gurney, they awoke and sighed with the magical work of transformation from worm to imago to winged thing. They emerged sleek and new and hungry. Black and buzzing with the flavor of my wife wound through them.

They were all a part of . . . Jessica. Parts of her brain, her heart, her lungs, her flesh, all of the soft tissues that made my wife. Every little part of her amplified by the effects of the pre-deceased plague. If I had chopped her into little bits and buried her in a thousand boxes, she would still be alive, still trying to feed, even if all that was left of her was a finger. Even that would still claw for freedom, would remain hungry for flesh.

In this case, she’d been eaten into little bits and buried in a thousand flies.

Maybe more than a thousand flies. Maybe a million. All imbued and possessed with her force, her energy, her desire to feed and destroy. Zombie flies.

“But they’re just house flies? I suppose that’s a blessing. They can’t bite and infect unless they lay larvae in dead tissue. Sweet Jesus,” I wheezed out.

“He’s not back, too, is he?”

I stared at Owen. His face was stern, leaving me to wonder if he was clever enough to be so deadpan.

“You’ll be praying that he is by the time we’re finished,” I snapped.

*

I told Owen that I had a plan. My plan was to use my best talent: lie to Owen about having a plan. He took strength from it, and emboldened by my fearless-leader posturing, I told him to follow me and we began down the hallway.

My metal plated feet tapped along the concrete ground; in contrast, Owen brought with him a reassuring silence with an eye askew on the corridor behind us, his Mossberg at the ready. The sort of shotgun that puts holes in things at a 360-degree angle.

The corridor narrowed to the altar room ahead, the one I passed through only minutes ago. A knife’s edge of weak light spilled through and cast more shadows than it dispelled.

I thought I had closed that door behind me when I passed through; I motioned for Owen to stop with a gauntlet fist raised in the air. Owen’s footsteps halted behind me. I sensed his questions, his concerns, his building anxiety bubbling beneath his calm.

The door creaked in the draft.

Human nature desires flight in panic, often at the moment when it stands to help you the least. What I felt in the space of that silence was hard to define. I was so removed from humanity, reduced to nothing but bones, a human coat hanger for a suit of armor, that it was hard to express without taut muscle, sweating skin, heaving flesh, the taste and shape of my fear. Even without all the trappings of solid flesh, left with only my decayed eyes and my grinding teeth and the ghost of an infrastructure, the sensation of being observed and expected intensified.

I drew my gun. Owen’s motions echoed behind me, dark with purpose.

I took a breath and led us through the inviting door.

*

Before, when I had first begun the long journey through the dark halls, through the destruction of the altar room, there had been nothing but bodies thrown about like dolls knocked from a display case, in different poses and wretched faces as they died and breathed their last on the stone floor. At first glance, it was impossible to say what had killed them.

Perhaps Jessica, sensing the end at hand, had poisoned them. Their communal feasting setup made distribution easy. The children had never had a chance—the end destination had always been this point in time, this pitiful destiny. They’d had a brief stay of execution from the moment Jessica had snatched them from the streets and raised them in her perverse network of Rogers followers, but after I’d left, the moment of truth had arrived. My coming heralded their personal End Times.

My greatest fear had been that the children would be infected; but in a strange moment of conscience, Jessica had refused to expose her surrogate children to the same disease that had destroyed her real child. I had to give her that much respect—she died a monster, but she had refused to make another in her place. There were no zombie children here.

Imagine our surprise then as we stood in the doorway and, one by one, each prostrate child on the floor slowly rose to his feet.

*

They were not alive.

“Vitus?” Owen whispered.

All over the room, the sounds of broken chairs being cast aside as bodies struggled to stand, groping for objects to assist them, filled the air, groans and whispering fabric, hands clenching and pulling at each other like children in the midst of delayed tantrums.

“Their eyes are empty, Vitus,” Owen hissed, and I could hear the hysteria creeping into his voice as he bit panic back into his mouth and swallowed it down. “They’re not zombies.”

“They look like zombies.”

“Flies infest and consume. They’re inside their skin, Vitus! They’re eaten-through with her!”

In an instant, I turned on him with the Glock in my hand, using the other to thrust against his chest and send him flying backward, Mossberg and all, back through the door and into the hall.

I couldn’t allow him to risk himself.

“Vitus!”

I ignored him, slamming the door in his face and jamming the lock as he struggled to gain entrance. He pounded on the door with force until the wood shuddered, as though inhaling and exhaling beneath his fury. His muffled voice called my name and, as much as I regretted to leave him there, I turned back to face the room

“I can’t talk right now, Owen. I’ve got to kill my children.”

Sluggishly, they were still trying to find their feet. Their eyes remained empty and half-lidded, eaten through by maggots and decomposition; they trailed stains on the floor where their bodies had sat and marinated in the damp, leaking fluids onto the concrete and fermenting there. Fingers groped at the air and where there was no furniture they used each other to climb up, leaning against each other’s bodies, dragging their red, stained robes along the floor. They were not zombies; their behavior was not so well-defined. They were a new breed of monster riddled through with maggot and worm and the howling grief of a woman scorned.

No sooner did I think it when their mouths opened, one by one, like blood flowers bursting in bloom, and from their open throats—

ZZZZZZZZZTTTTTTT

The buzzing persisted in a bone-deep electric hum, shaking down through my cartilage and every vertebrae that made my spine behind the metal. Blackness glimmered behind their lips. A thousand flies animating their shambling corpses and pulling at their strings like marionettes.

I assessed the situation in seconds, too busy with the business of murder to waste time on fear, on panic, on questions of right and wrong. In the back of my mind, the protests of my higher-functioning self became a gigahertz din—the part of me that cared about children, about desecrating the bodies, their most unholy murders. I did not think, however, that the flies would care so much about my tender sensibilities. Their intent was clear, in their open mouths, their bared teeth—

Kill Vitus.

And they had every intention of turning my bones to dust, armed only with child-size molars and incisors.

They outnumbered me by a hundred to one—all that stood between me and their outstretched hands was my suit of armor, a Glock, and a sword.

I dashed across the floor. Metal clanging as I rushed the stage at the center of the room. All the children turned in unison, their hair stained with droplets of congealed blood, to track me with needy clenchings and their outstretched hands like urchins begging for food. The humming reverberated from deep inside them where the flies frothed and foamed and worked through them with the force of an F5 twister.

“Oh Jessica, I never meant to hurt you so,” I whispered as I turned to face the horde that threatened to close in on me from all sides. Indeed, the crystallization of her hate, her wounds distilled into one frozen moment of time I alone was responsible for, carried her forth even through the consciousness of a fly, never letting go, never giving up. A tenacity to be admired; a tragedy to be mourned; a consummation devoutly to be wished.

The humming increased in volume. How could I appeal to her consciousness, locked in the bodies of a thousand and one flies? If I spoke, might she hear me?

“Jessica,” I called out.

The bodies, shambling from the outer reaches of the room toward the stage center, paused. The name registered, but then dismissed and fell out of memory as they continued forward with their greedy, open mouths full of writhing flies that nestled and ate at their tongues.

“Jessica, I’m sorry,” I said.

Has there ever been so hated a word in the universe as sorry? What could sorry buy me now but time enough to regret that I ever been born, ever loved her, ever stood by her side, and at least, ever betrayed her?

The words had no effect.

“Fuck it,” I hissed, and started firing.

*

One had managed to crawl onto the stage, pulling himself up with his raw fingers, the tips bloody and oozing pus as he wrenched his way to the surface. I kicked him back with an armored foot and he reeled in a flurry of awkward pinwheels as though he could gain purchase from the air itself. Metal jangled against my bones, from my toe to my spine, causing my breath to explode in a shudder. Flies ejected from his mouth, escaping their host and reforming with energy, searching for the next one.

A round fired, the gun disposing of an enterprising young undead lad who found the stairs and trudged up them, only to stumble back down, his head blowing out the back in a mass of brain matter and bug guts. Black flies swirled out of the starfish hole like cigarette smoke, ejecting from his body and seeking a haven in one of the other puppets, climbing greedily through their ears, their nostrils, licking at their eyes, maggots writhing in their flesh.

“Too many,” I gasped, pushing against a child’s chest with the muzzle of the gun. He had attempted to sneak up on me from my blind spot, where the horizontal slit failed to reveal the periphery, and he nearly made it before the sound of a footstep squelching blood alerted me. He fell off the edge of the stage with a disconsolate wail. I closed my eyes for a split second, processing a shudder of revulsion.

I would do whatever I had to do—though they were monsters, they were monsters in the bodies of children. Each blow, each gunshot, each strike was accompanied by a sympathetic pain response for flesh I no longer had, and a blind desire to comfort the children who had not brought this on themselves.

“They aren’t children anymore,” I said aloud between gritted teeth, and fired into the seething crowd forming below. Moments ago they had been scattered all across the room, but they were congregating quickly, swarming like their counterparts with one focus: tear me to shreds at any cost. I was their sole target, explaining why Owen was still intact after all this time here. As surrogate child, he was not the focus of their rage; he was but a misguided lost boy.

I felled one. The body collapsed with a slaughterhouse floor thump, opening the space up for his companion who trampled over him without hesitation, breaking bones with his eager steps. He opened his mouth, squirming with white larvae. Hair spiked and matted with blood. One open hand seized the air where he wanted me to be. I lifted the gun and squeezed the trigger.

Nothing happened.

I’d been waiting for this moment.

The Glock displayed the empty chamber, like a dealer at a casino holding his hands out. No luck there. I hooked the muzzle into my holster, because unlike in the movies, weapons are expensive. You don’t just throw them away when you run out.

I unsheathed the sword.

*

I’ll admit to a certain, boyish satisfaction in that moment alone. Amid the sound of their seething hatred, their churning saliva running down their jagged teeth and eye-fucking me with red-rimmed intensity, the metal divided the air and cut through the growling murmur.

Even the constant, maddening buzzzzz of the flies diminished for a split second before resonating once more with furious purpose. I felt the weight of the hilt, wrapping my hands around it the same way I would a gun, heel of my palm on the bottom, my guiding hand toward the top. I didn’t know how to work this weapon, but I was ready for my on-the-job training.

I swept with a wide arc outward, kneeling so I could come in low enough to take the heads of the first two gathered at the lip of the stage. A wet separation of flesh and blood. The sword jangled against their spinal columns for an instant before slicing cleanly through the joints, exploding synovial fluid and cartilage in its passage. Their bodies fell like empty clothes and suddenly deflated and, without force, were reduced to broken dolls with the menace rooted out and cast aside from them.

Through their red-rimmed wounds the flies found egress, rose up into the air like frenzied smoke and flitted into the next host, through nostrils, mouth, and ears, crowding their faces until they were absorbed through their openings and left only the buzzing sound, the occasional flickering of their wings through their mouths.

Killing the children was one thing. How was I going to kill the flies?

*

Math class was in session.

I subtracted their numbers, graduating them to six feet under. I felled them like a lumberjack, heaving with each massive stroke of the sword. My bones trembled with the weight. I registered the breaking of my left hand when I struck a rib, the blade bouncing back into the air with rejection. The break echoed through the rest of my body, grinding against their defunct parts. Small pieces of bones escaped the main fracture like grains of sand inside a wet suit; they ground against the metal of the armor and fell into the main carriage to sprinkle across my ribs.

I cursed, my left hand falling useless. The tip of the sword fell to the stage and I struggled to lift it one-handed, where it wavered uncertainly in the hot, stinking air. I did not have the weight and the mass of a human man to drive the blows. Without my other hand to help guide and force the strike of the sword, it had all the utility of a butter knife. I could only swat at them, like . . . flies.

I backed away from the stage. Their vacant and ventilated eyes rested on the lowered sword and this sign of weakness reinforced their ambition. They surged forward, like fans at a concert where I was the main event, struggling to pull themselves to the top. Their brothers behind them helped to force them up so they could get their chance. I had reduced their numbers to half. It wasn’t enough, I realized. They were going to have me.

Their bloody hands wavered in the air, overcoming the stage itself and standing upon the wooden boards. Remnants of the stage curtain rippled as they stumbled against the fabric, pulling at the old velvet and shredding it. They trailed their crimson robes behind them like pools of blood, the buzzing behind their eyes, in their flesh. I imagined that if I touched them, they would vibrate beneath my fingers like an engine beneath a car hood, powered by turbo-charged flies.

I backed farther away before their onslaught but I was running out of stage. I brandished the sword once more, hoping to buy myself an out, buy a little more time, buy a second chance, anything, please . . .

“Vitus!”

Through the narrow slit of the visor and the darkness of the altar room, I saw Owen. He’d found access through a side door, giving up on the main entrance once he knew I would never open it.

“Fucking kids,” I snorted.

He stopped several feet in, staring open-mouthed at the seething horde. He did not take long to recover before reaching into his pockets like a man who could not recall where he kept his car keys, just at the moment he needed them the most. The expression on his face was near comical in its urgency.

“Get out of here!” I yelled. “Go, dammit!”

I turned away from him. I had nowhere left to run, and the kid closest to me had opened his mouth to reveal a great, black scribble of buzzing flies that oozed along his tongue. One nestled in the bone of his molar, tasting the tooth there with eagerness. He hoped to taste me there, as well. He snapped his teeth and licked his fly swollen lips in anticipation.

“Vitus!” he cried again.

This time, instead of his first greeting call, there was a note of command, of urgency the first had lacked. Reluctantly, I turned away from the first several children who were closing the distance with their shuffling gait, mopping up blood and dust as they came. I did not even waste the time to reprimand Owen for the distraction. I hoped whatever he needed my attention for was well worth it.

A taser appeared in his hand. He met my gaze with fierce acknowledgment and lobbed it into the air in one great, underhand stroke, his mouth a thin line, his jaw set and his teeth grinding. He looked as I imagined my son might, the way I’d pictured days on a high school field, playing sports with his teammates or taking him camping. The sort of things I would have done with him if I could, the sort of things I wanted to carry on . . .

And it’s not too late.

I raised my hand into the air, whistling a breath through my teeth. I felt a child’s hand strike at my armor, hands against my back, weaving spidery fingers into the metal to tear the plates apart and get to the bones inside. In the next second, metal jangled up my arm with the connection of the taser against my leather palm plates, knocking against my skeleton.

I opened my fingers in disbelief and whirled on my heel to face the horde. They stumbled back and laughter issued from my mouth in long peals. I had lost my reason, my sense; had I lost it at the sight of Owen, at all those years of subdued desire for family and home and meaning, galvanizing me? Infected with the excitement of second chances? I rounded on the closest snot-nosed, fly-humming brat in my circle.

“Science class, children,” I croaked.

I slapped the sword against his shoulder in an ineffectual blow, but the desire was not to stab or slice or dispel. The child snarled, a single angry fly dipping out of his mouth before entering again, and he reached for the tip with a child-chubby hand lacerated along the knuckles. He gripped the blade without feeling, while his hungry companions pushed up against him, extending their hands outward toward me.

I pushed the slotted nose of the taser gun against the blade of the sword and zapped it.

I cried out. Everything inside me seized as though a great fist had crushed me, then released me again. Somewhere in the guts and viscera of my rib cage, a remnant of my old heart remained, and it beat weakly against the electrical pulse, awakened before dying again. It was like having a star bloom inside your chest and then wink back into void.

I shook my head, dazed; electricity flowing back from the taser through every plate of metal that lined my arms, my legs, my chest, and my body, down through the sword, into the children beyond. They likewise struggled with it; but they were more parts flesh than I was. This was a force I had the power to withstand, but the children were not alive. They were puppets maneuvered by flies—and their small, black bodies could not suffer such a blow of energy without dire consequence.

The electricity jumped the sword and ate into the skin of the first child, and each one behind that one was linked by a touch to another, and his fellow in turn was touching another, and that one another, and so on. Blue veins of electrical fire encircled and then disappeared into their clothes, absorbed into their flesh while the sword vibrated and hummed with the energy.

And suddenly, the buzzing dimmed.

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzztttt.

The first child collapsed, weak muscles and red robes twitching to the floor, breaking the contact with his fellows. From his open mouth, dead flies rolled out like round beads of onyx, a broken necklace shattered apart into a thousand pieces and scattered over concrete.

There it is, I realized. The last remains of Jessica. The last of her will, her love, her all-consuming suffering.

The next child that had been linked to him fell to the floor, dragging another with him. Flies tumbled from their open mouths, their nostrils, and their ears, as though they were filled to overflowing with them, their dead bodies resting at last without the living insects to animate them. Children shambled behind them who had not been in contact with the electrical current, mindless and purpose-driven. I wondered if they could feel or sense their diminished numbers, that the divided soul of Jessica Adamson, carried in every fly, was dying by the thousands.

I lifted the sword again. My left hand flopped uselessly. I forced it up with a grunt, taser in hand, and held the sword tip out for the first eager child to lay his hand on it and clutch it with a straining fist, slicing skin against metal, before I lifted the taser and applied the shock.

I cried out again. My heart beat once, then fell dead. Leftover embalming fluid spurted from my vena cava like a disconnected garden hose with the water pressure cut; the muscle remembered ancient things, things like flesh and skin and capillaries and veins, things I no longer possessed but had been stolen from me, eaten away into a thousand small insects.

Some of those maggots ate you, Vitus. Those flies are more than Jessica. They are you.

I paused at the thought, waiting for the next line of children to advance upon me, stepping over the bodies of their comrades, trampling on their delicate toes, their fingers, even their faces. They looked like cherubs sent to sleep in the poor light, flies toppling and tumbling from their lips alongside maggots.

Perhaps my enemy had never been Jessica.

With each fly electrocuted and sent off to meet its maker, I was destroying a thousand pieces of myself animated in a thousand insects. After all—had Jessica truly hated me? Disappointed in me, rejected by me—but in all that time, she had only ever loved me, wanted me to stay by her side.

No one hated me as much as I did.

I cried out, a desperate wail from my blackened lungs. The sound shuddered the armor like chimes, plates vibrated against each other, and I waded into the fray with renewed energy, advancing on the last strand of children left. I was brutal in my purpose, connecting the sword to a child’s cheek and lighting up his face with an explosion of blue electricity. Patterns jumped through the metal and into his flesh. For an instant, his eyes lit up with blue flame, and then turned dark again.

I killed the last of my children, the final humming buzzzz silenced in the altar room. They lay like spent roses in their red robes, the odd remnants of a strange cult, one that would never be found. These were all someone else’s sons, someone else’s children kidnapped and taken away. For a short time, Jessica had loved them in her damaged way, before poisoning them in the underground chamber. At least they did not live long enough to experience the indignity of their parasitic violation and, with resignation, I breathed out a small sound of regret. The sword tip hovered over the ground, the taser limp and useless at my side.

“Vitus.”

I did not turn around. His voice was overwhelming in the silence. I had not realized how constant the hum had been, how it had filled and obscured every soft and quiet space. The emptiness that followed was like the silence in space.

“Let’s get out of here. It’s over. I’ve got lighter fluid. Get on your way and I’ll follow. I’m going to raze this place. No one can ever know what happened here.”

I thought about telling him about the flies. That Jessica was the force that animated them, that delivered this terrible onslaught; but it had also been me all along.

“Jessica—” I began.

“There was nothing left,” he answered. “I found her skeleton.”

There was a rustling of fabric, and his hand tapped a cylindrical object against my shoulder plate, a metallic ting!

I reached up and took it with clumsy fingers. The wedding ring suspended in my orange prescription bottle.

“Oh,” I said simply. I turned and brushed past him, heading back for the ventilation shaft.

Zzzt.

I felt the hairy body, heard the buzz of the wings brush past my ear. In a second, my fingers closed over the fly. It beat itself against my bony fingers. Easy enough to kill it, but I hesitated. I have known many men given to destroying anything and everything in their path, but I have always hesitated for the lowly spider, the ugly beetle; it was the persistent feeling that this fly would be the last of its kind, the last to escape from this place. I pondered that, and with a grunt, I emptied the bottle of my wedding ring and shoved the fly into it, where it buzzed in outrage at its new captivity. A fraction of both myself and Jessica, in the body of a fly.

Before I left, I threw the ring into the shadows, where it bounced into concrete darkness, and then into nothingness.

*

Owen and I traveled back in silence.

The sun broke over the gray skyline, bursting into a half-light dawn known as the “blue hour,” coaxing indigo shades from every shadow, bathing us in impressionist light. I watched the passing scenery through the slit in the metal, protected and enveloped in the elemental coldness of the armor. Pavement disappeared beneath us in a winding line of yellow, white, and black, comforting in its familiarity.

Owen smelled like lighter fluid and smoke. I smelled like metal, lead, and burnt blood. He had cast a final coating of accelerant over the toppled bodies of the children and the scattered flies before lighting a match and setting it ablaze. He made sure it was roaring before he headed to the ventilation shaft, and I helped him through the final passage with my good hand, pulling him up out of the dirty, dusty duct work.

I had stood there for an instant, with my metal hand pressed up against his forearm, until he turned to look at me and I at him. I observed the curve of his face, the clarity of his eyes. Something about him was so familiar, it was like staring at a ghost I couldn’t identify. I wanted so badly to believe he was mine through and through, that my blood flowed through his veins and deep in his marrow, that we shared a fundamental bond. And he wanted to be my son; to fill the role. For what purpose? So he could replace his missing father? So we could lead each other deeper into a fantasy that did not exist?

A motion in his face, a twitch in his jaw revealed his discomfort.

“Does it matter?” he asked.

I said nothing, and we trudged out through the shop, past empty cardboard boxes and disused inventory, old spilled tarot cards and broken glass. The linoleum looked tired and worn, the gypsy garb an empty sham, a front for a woman who never existed. All the Rogers, the guardians and watchers, came here to receive instruction from their god-like mistress. I wondered what they would do now that she was gone. Like abandoned children, would they cry and mourn and weep before picking up their lives, or just elect a new damaged leader to replace the last?

I decided it didn’t matter.

Owen silently took the driver’s seat of the Thunderbird. I was glad to be in my own car again, this last familiar thing. I drew up the helmet visor so I could clamp a cigarette between my teeth. After a few minutes, Owen coughed, and I kept on smoking. He didn’t ask me to stop, but I would have. I didn’t ask where he was driving; but I knew at the end of the road, Niko would be waiting for me.

“Do you think she knew? I mean, do you think she understood anything that happened?” he asked after a moment.

Silence. The engine rumbled and I appreciated how the sound filled the void between us. The faint ticking of my bones vibrating with the car. He didn’t say her name, but I knew he meant Jessica.

“Would it make you feel better if I said she didn’t?”

“Do you think she had a choice?”

Now there was a question to ponder. I hoped he wasn’t going to continue to ask these sorts of questions for the whole ride, like a caffeinated three-year-old in the midst of an existential crisis. Why? Why? Why?

“A choice in what?” I asked.

“To act the way she did. Do you think if she knew better, if she understood what was going on, she still would have . . .” he swallowed hard, and I could hear the sound it made in his throat. There was the ghost of stubble on his neck, and I was fascinated by the individual hairs making their way out of the flesh. I missed my flesh. I never knew a person could miss something so elemental, or even survive without it.

“Taken all the kids that she took? Still have brainwashed them, earned their love, then discarded them like trash?” I snorted. “A zombie is kinder than that, Owen. What she did took years. What I did to her took minutes . . .”

The observation hurt, but I made it anyway, hoping that, at least for his benefit, it meant something, mitigated the pain of having been stolen away like a changeling child and then forced to love another, only to be rejected once more. And watch the only mother he ever had reduced to a mass of flies. All come to this.

“If there was a way to fix it all, would you have wanted that? I mean, if there was a cure?”

“Atroxipine? That’s no cure. I could have offered it to her, I suppose; for what purpose? To prolong her agony? No, I would have killed her, one way or another.”

“No. I mean, a real cure. But it would have cost you your life?”

“I never knew you were philosophical, Owen.”

I cast a glance over at him, and he was studying the rearview mirror with fixed intensity, as though the traffic patterns were a vexing puzzle he was determined to figure. I thought it was a strange question to ask, yet another in a long line of Why-Daddy-Why, right up there with Are-we-there-yet? Perhaps he’d ask me the meaning of life next.

I hoped to evade the question. It brought up conflicting emotions in me, and as each second passed, I found myself hating him for asking it, for refusing to meet my decomposing eyes. I hoped he would drop the subject all together as I blew out smoke through the armor’s open faceplate and mashed the cigarette into the ashtray.

“I’m serious, Vitus. What would you do?”

I sighed. “There’s no going back, Owen. You don’t go back after . . .”

I shifted uncomfortably before continuing, almost desperate to make sure he understood.

“After . . . after. Your world is a divided between the way it was before . . . what happened, and what happens afterward. And you spend afterward dreaming of the time before. It’s a fall from grace, Owen. If I had the power to restore her, it wouldn’t matter. She would forever only be half of what she was. A limping, damaged thing.”

Like me, I thought, but did not say.

“Even so,” I admitted, “if I had the opportunity, I think I would give it her. Yes, I think I would because, even as damaged as she was, she had the right to make the choice. And I would give my life to her out of gratitude.”

“Even though you didn’t love her?” he asked, sharply. I didn’t think he had cared so much for these interior questions, these introspective leanings. Any other time, I would have told him to shut up and drive or ignored him; but I considered that this conversation could be our last, the last time I would have to tell him my story. His last connection with the only father he would ever have, my last connection with my only son.

“I didn’t love her. But I owed her. She suffered greatly for what I did. And that alone would have been reason enough to forfeit my life. It’s about being human.”

Owen shifted gears as we slowed down and turned into the funeral home driveway. I flipped the visor down over my skeletal face, not desiring to be seen by anyone, even by Niko. I hated to think that this was the last thing she would see or know of me, this empty skeleton creature, as we rolled to a stop.

“Thank you,” Owen said, and his face was drawn, his jaw flexing as I viewed him through the narrow visor. “Thank you for helping me understand.”

I opened the door, a squeal of metal as I got to my feet and stepped outside the car. I looked back at him through the window as he stopped the engine. I wanted to ask him what he was going to do—I presumed he had no particular place to go. The Cult of the Flesh Eaters was all he knew, and then I realized he was waiting for me, of course. Waiting for me to talk to Niko, let her know we were all right, and then I was supposed to play my part, come back out and take us home, like a father with a son would.

I memorized the slanting blue light of the rising sun across his hard-angled features, casting us both in light and dark. It was all the more precious knowing this was the last time I could do this, watch him through the visor slit and keep him burned on the inside of my eyes just one last time. My patrimony would be made complete with my final abandonment.

I didn’t tell him that I wouldn’t be leaving the funeral home. And that’s where I left him, waiting in the ticking of the cooling car engine, the warming pavement under the morning sun, waiting for a father who did not exist, and who had no intention of ever coming back.

*

I came in through the back door of the funeral home; I did not know the owner of the funeral home or its other employees. I had gotten the impression, considering the time she had kept me there while maggots were busy skeletonizing my body, that the owners were a hands-off bunch, and allowed her to oversee to the day-to-day operation of the intakes. All the same, I didn’t want to run into anyone and have to explain why I was dressed in their decorative furnishings.

Silence was impossible. I clanked into the back, between the lines of empty gurneys. There were still no corpses. The room was stark and pulled me back in with the comforting smells of formaldehyde and menthol. The gurneys dressed in clean sheets, covered in foggy plastic, and I fondly remembered our brief make-out session with a thin barrier of polyurethane between us. If I had a mouth left, I would have been smiling, and just as quickly, that smile would have disappeared.

I was not here to remember her or to love her, though I would have liked to have lived long enough to know that sensation. To be a whole man, through and through, with blood and guts and a pumping heart.

I walked down the line of gurneys and chose the one closest to the door. I’d only just settled in with my legs dangling over the side, trying to figure out the best way to start taking off the armor, when the door swung open, and Niko stood there.

She looked paler than usual, and in disarray, as though she had not slept in a long time. Her hair was unkempt and out of place, lending her the atmosphere of a witch set loose with black magic, as though she had just come from a graveyard gathering ingredients for a cauldron. For all that gothic atmosphere, her exhaustion and stress did not lessen her; in fact, her distress intensified everything about her, her glittering eyes, and I could only sit back and watch her, mesmerized. She possessed so much life. I had not felt life in so long, and I felt it keenly now that I was approaching the end of my own.

This was what I remembered most about life, I thought. The rise and fall of my chest when I breathed out, and the accompanying beat of the heart. The pulse of blood through my veins, eating greasy fries at a greasy boardwalk burger joint. The smell on the ocean, the rank salt woven into your clothes and even on cold November days you could still taste it on the rain as though the ocean poured out of the sky. I watched a curl of her black hair resting against the delicate place where her neck and her shoulders met. I missed that tender anatomy, sweeping the hair away and touching it with the back of my hand.

I had none of that now.

I sighed and looked away. I listened to her footsteps as she approached, until she was standing before me. I waited for her protests, her outrage, even her tears; but there was nothing, and the silence terrified me the most. I turned back and stared at her from behind the visor, all the world reduced to a horizontal line.

She studied me with one plump lip caught in her teeth, as though in an agony of indecision. The moment passed. Her features smoothed. Finally, she reached out with both hands to touch my head and then she was lifting the helmet away, baring my skull before the surgical light.

“How can you stand it?” I whispered. “You look at beauty every day. And then you look at this.”

“I work with corpses,” she said, setting the helmet aside on the gurney beside us.

“But you wake up in the morning, and you look in the mirror. And every day, you wear that beautiful face.”

She said nothing. There was nothing left to say.

I thought of all the things I could say as she knelt down and began to undo the metal plates that covered my feet, the calves, and on up to my thighs, exposing the sad bones that made my body, their porous, ossified surfaces, as though I had been picked clean by ravens and left to bleach in a desert sun. I wanted her with a fierce stab of desire. If I could not have her with my body, I wanted to take her with words, fuck her, saturate her with as much sex as I could violate my vocabulary with. But I did not have the words, only the silence. And it stretched out between us as thick as blood and tissue and membrane.

One by one, she shed me free of my metal casing. The bits of armor came away reluctantly as though they had found a monster worth calling master. I missed it in my own way, for the safety it afforded me, for the comfort it had provided against the harsh elements, shielding me from wind and light and fire. Even from the flies.

When the last plate of armor had yielded and she set it aside with the others on the gurney, she returned. Her jaw clenched as though that were the linchpin holding the rest of her face together. If she lost that, everything would collapse into a wound, a vulnerability that could not be repaired.

“Lay back,” she whispered.

I struggled to do it, to brace myself with my skeletal arms, and she came to my aid, reaching behind me and taking my weight in measures until I lay flat against the gurney. I wished I could feel the warmth of her touch, as I would have with skin, but there was nothing but the hardness of bone, and it is unforgiving against her tenderness.

I listened to the sounds of her moving as she set up the pump beside me. I reached out suddenly, a desperate grab, and caught the thin material of her dress in my carpel finger bones, pulling her toward me.

“Let me listen,” I croaked, pulling her down toward me. “Let me listen one last time.”

She didn’t understand right away. And then I had my skull pressed up against her chest, with her ample breasts fringing my vision, and I could have wept in gratitude that she suffered it, allowed a monster to kneel at her body, for the grace it could bestow.

And I heard it, deep in the hollow of her rib cage, that miracle that stops and starts and stops again, does it over and over, perfectly and without fail. The sound we come to life with, the sound we are ushered out with. I shuddered and felt her arms on my bones, registering as an insistent pressure.

“Vitus,” she whispered. Then, again: “Vitus.” Not a question. An assertion and a name.

“Yes,” I whispered, and released her.

She pulled away, and then I felt her lifting my head and setting a pillow beneath me. I wondered if she had done this sort of thing at the Lazar House in Hawaii, that she did it with such patience, without revulsion, without shame. Had she done it for her mother?

I did not know, and I did not ask.

These were the last seconds. My life ebbing like a tide. I turned my skull to see the clock above the door, to note the time as I heard her delicate fingers rattle the scalpel against the tray: 9:36 in the morning. I had always thought I would have met a murderous end on a dark night. It pleased me to believe that I would die while the sunlight poured in from the small windows. I turned back and looked at the armor laid out on the gurney like the bones of an ancient dinosaur, waiting to be reconstructed.

“Are you ready?” she asked.

Her voice was flat. She covered it well, but I could see the glistening line of a single salt tear from her eye, down to her throat, where it disappeared beneath the collar of her jacket. I wished I could have followed it all the way to her warm center and become nothing, nothing at all, but a part of her.

“I’m ready,” I whispered.

Goodbye to the world, goodbye to these bones; goodbye to Niko with her sad memories of the Lazar House in Hawaii, of palm trees and absent digits, empty spaces where fingers should be. Goodbye to the son I should have had, goodbye to the son I killed. Goodbye to bad memories and cancer sticks and criminals and betraying brothers and apathetic scientists and old gray foxes and forgotten mothers in nursing homes. Goodbye.

Vitus Adamson is finished with life and death, and at this last, I offer no prayers to Heaven and Hell, but one—that there be neither—and when I am dead, I may be nothing at all.

A syringe appeared in her hands, the needle a sliver of light dripping serum; I felt the pressure of the sharp tip penetrate between the vertebrae of my neck and skull, through the tender spinal nerves beneath.