Lesbian Zombies Are Taking Over The World!

Lesbian Zombies Are Taking Over

The World

Book One:

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Chapter One: At the Church of Our Savior of Living People Only: "Lesbian zombies are taking over the world!" Reverend Tommy hollered. He was in a lather. So was I but that's because Brigitte was sitting next to me and had her hand on my knee. Above my knee, actually. Her little, soft-skinned pink hand was resting right where my miniskirt would end if I’d worn my miniskirt to the Church of Our Savior of Living People Only, but I didn't wear it there because Reverend Tommy wouldn't approve. He wouldn't approve of my thoughts, either, or of what Brigitte and I had been doing just before we left for church in our church-y clothes: We'd been having sex, which Reverend Tommy disapproved of. Reverend Tommy disapproves of any sex, and he's not one of those preachers who say they disapprove of sex but then they're fucking the girls (or the boys) behind the curtains by the chapel; he was the real deal. Reverend Tommy hated only one thing more than sex, and that was zombies. And he hated only one thing more than zombies, and that was lesbian zombies. That's what he was tearing on about, and it made me wish that Brigitte and I had not rushed to get there because if I'd known the whole sermon was going to be about nothing but how I'm supposed to be taking over the world, I would have skipped. But I doubt Brigitte would have skipped. She's not like that. Even though she's a lesbian, she's very religious. I don't know how she got mixed up with the Church of the Savior of Living People Only. I don't know how she got mixed up with me, either. She's going to be mighty confused when she finds out. If she finds out. What I am, I mean.

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And I don't want to let her find out. Not yet, anyway. Partly because I’m not even sure what I am. I know a little bit, maybe, but it’s been a lot to figure out over the last few days. And nights. Days that are days and nights that are like years. I can't resist her lips. That's what almost made us late for church. I took a look at her lips as she was putting lipstick on them, and couldn't resist. Without even strapping on my bra, I had to lean over behind her and turn her head to face me and started kissing her. I pushed my tongue into her mouth, forcing her lips apart so I could feel them on either side of my tongue, soft and pliable and gently sucking on my tongue and she pushed her tongue into my mouth, so I tried to return the favor, but my lips are always a little dry, probably (I think) as a result of being me and probably because I'm not very ladylike (except in public when Brigitte makes me be ladylike, like when I’m in church and trying to be ladylike and not look like I’m remembering kissing Brigitte) and I associate wet, soft, moist lips with ladies. We kissed like that for a while, pressing our lips more and more firmly together until I couldn't take it anymore, I wanted those lips everywhere else on me. I moved her mouth away from mine and stared into her eyes for a few moments and then lowered her head down to my breast. She took the hint, and she took my nipple and she nuzzled it and sucked on it. God, her lips were so soft that I almost came right then and I cupped her hands in mine... So you can see why we were almost late. And here's Reverend Tommy, who's supposed to not be such a bad guy except he says I'm going to hell and he wants to kill me and says I’m taking over the world, and I don't even know what all else, ranting and raving: "These lesbian zombies walk among us. They dress like us, they talk like us, they look like us..." although technically, Reverend Tommy, I don't look like you, because you are a man, I wanted to say. Brigitte squeezed my thigh. I thought she did it inadvertently but she leaned over and said: "They don't look like him," in a whisper that tickled my ear and made me start to perspire. She was so much like me already! Could I make her more like me? Would she like me more if she were more like me?

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Word games in my mind were better than Reverend Tommy: "And they will come out in broad daylight and mock us, and then after dark they will steal into our houses and steal your wives and your daughters, they will corrupt them and drag them down to the bowels of Hell with them. They move freely between the Life and the Afterlife." That startled me. Do I? Do I move freely between the Life and the Afterlife? I'd never thought of it. Maybe those dreams I have where I go to Hell aren't just dreams? "And they will leave our women in the fires of Hell and return to take your souls and eat them." I looked around, furtively. We sat midway back in the Church, and the Church attendance was evenly divided between men and women with some children here and there. Most of them were attentively listening to Reverend Tommy. Some of the women looked a little flushed. I guess maybe they wouldn't mind a little corrupting. "And God doesn't want them. He wants YOU. He wants to save you, but you've got to be vigilant against the newest trick of the devil. The lesbian zombies are out there. They are after your souls, and they are taking over the world!" I should a few things straight. First, I am a lesbian. Second, I am not a zombie. Not that way, although a little I could be, I suppose. I’m not sure, like I said, what I am. I'm not a revenant, I know, because nobody controls me and I don’t eat life force. But there’s no denying that I'm some kind of a … creation. Because none of my parts match. I have dark black, straight hair, but my pubic hair is brown. My left hand is larger than my right and they don’t look even kind of the same. My right foot is size 6 and my left foot is size 9. I have a slight limp and I think it’s because my legs are not the same legs, like they’re off different people. At least my torso appears to be all one piece and I don't have any scars. Some stuff Doc said made me think I’m like a Frankenstein, but I’m not sure.

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I've never met anyone like me. Or at least, anyone who I knew was like me. Then again, never is a strange word to use when you’ve only been alive for, like, 7 days. Third, I'm not sure why I’m here. Not here in the Church of Our Savior Of Living People Only. I was there because Brigitte goes there and I’d do anything for those lips. Not there in this town, either. I wandered there a few days ago after waking up in a New York City Diner… That sounds weird, but it’s true. One day I was just there, or here, or aware, and I was working at this diner and serving people egg platters and refilling their coffee without any idea of who I really was…and when I realized that I didn’t know anything, not a single thing, not even if my name really was Rachel, I got really scared and I ran… and that kind of led me to where I am now, thinking back on all that stuff. And fourth, I think, looking back, that maybe Reverend Tommy was right. Maybe I am trying to take over the world.

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Chapter Two: Meet Doc: When we left the church, my Octopus was waiting. I have an Octopus, and I don't Share. That's two things that set me apart, and I don't know why either of them is true. My Octopus I call "Doc." He's like any other Octopus, I suppose. I haven't seen many of them. Nobody has. They're very expensive. Brigitte noticed Doc first, I think, and maybe she only talked to me that day because of him. I blinked in the sunshine as we stepped outside. We left quickly to avoid Reverend Tommy's eyes and his handshake. I don't like to shake hands with people because I don't Share and it weirds people out. I didn't even know about Sharing until I met Brigitte because I hadn't talked to anyone on the walk here. I hadn't talked to anyone at all since I was sitting in my apartment that night and decided I had to leave. My apartment was not bad. It was not overly nice, but it was not bad, either. I was sitting there that night that I came home from work and couldn't remember anything. I mean anything. I couldn't remember how I ever got a job as a waitress in the first place. I looked around the apartment that I knew was mine and didn't recognize any of it. I opened up the cupboards and looked at the dishes that I-- I assumed I had done it -- had stacked neatly away. I wondered why I would put the cups and glasses all the way away from the sink and Coldzone. That seemed like the kind of thing that someone does when they first move into a place and they haven't given any thought to how to arrange things, but I didn't know. I wandered around the apartment and looked at the shelves that had some pictures of me with people that I didn't recognize. I looked at the furniture and couldn't decide if I liked

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it or not. Was it picked out by me? Was it given to me by someone? Was it left here by someone? I thought maybe I liked it but I wasn't sure. That's when I got creeped out and needed to get back inside my own head. I went to the salonroom and stripped and stepped into the Showerzone. "Shower," I said. "Mostly hot." The water started up. I didn't know how I knew to command it to do that. That freaked me out again. The water was the right temperature, I thought. It felt pretty good. It felt almost hot enough to be uncomfortable, but not quite. I stood there, the water running down my hair, matting it down, straightening it out more, until it reached almost to my waist in back. I wondered if I liked it long. I brushed my hands over my head and looked down at my body. My body was not familiar to me. More than that, it was weird. My body was not me. I looked at my breasts. They were firm, and round, and the nipples were hardening as I watched them. I realized that I was getting aroused by looking at my own breasts. Then I realized that they were two different breasts -- slightly different sizes, slightly different shapes. The nipple on the left one was longer and straighter. The skin was a little darker. I stroked it, out of curiosity, to see if it would feel like mine. It felt like I was feeling myself, and someone else, at the same time. I put my left hand on my left breast and my right hand across from it, and cupped my own chest. They were different sizes. I just stared and started to cry. I didn't know what else to do. What are you supposed to do when you aren't even you? That's when Doc flew in, as I started to cry. That's when I learned that I had an Octopus.

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Doc came floating to the salonroom, near the shower, in that weird helium-balloon way that Octopi fly/float, and his tentacles, which I now think are cute, trailed behind him, and he turned his eyes to me and said What do you need I didn't need him. I screamed and threw the first thing I could reach at him, which was the soap, and he dropped a few inches and it missed him and he darted back, burbling in that Octopus language that they talk in when they aren't talking to us, I think it's like a computer code but I'm not sure if it is because I don't really know if Doc is alive--- look, it's just a little hard. Technically, my memories only go back about a week and most of that was spent walking, so bear with me -And I kept throwing stuff at him until he calmed me down and explained that he was my Octopus and he was there to help me. He showed me where the towels were, floated off to the kitchenette and arranged, through some sort of telepathy that I think is like the Sharing that people do, to get a hot drink going and then he sat with me while I drank that and he played some music that I liked a bit and it cheered me up. I asked him what he was, and he explained that he was an Octopus. I asked him what that was and he explained that he's my solar-powered biometric assistant -- like a personal organizer and phone and music player and computer, only with little tentacles and he can float -- and I asked him how he picked the music and he said I'd picked the music. And I asked him what I should do, and he said Take over the world. He also told me what direction I should start walking. So I did that. It was as good an idea as anything else.

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I didn't take any of those pictures with me. They were all of people I didn't recognize, including the ones that had me in them.

"We ought to be moving," said Doc once we were a little ways away from the Church. Brigitte was on my right, and Doc hovered near my left ear. He spoke quietly. He always spoke quietly. Since that day, I've learned that when they first invented Octopi, they called them "spiders," and they didn't float, they walked and they could stick to walls and ceilings. People hated them. Doc always wants to be moving on. He was the one who suggested I come here in the first place. "Where are we supposed to be moving on to?" I asked. "And when?" Brigitte looked up at me but didn't say anything right away; she recognized, even after a few days, when I was talking to Doc and not her. She didn't take my hand, either, even though I wanted her to do so, because we were in public. It was all right that I stayed with her for a few days, because I was (she told everyone) a cousin from New York. Pretending I was her cousin made it even sexier when we made out, she told me. I didn't know what to make of that then, and I don't now. I wish I could Share with Brigitte. She's told me about Sharing and I don't know why I can't but I can't. It would be beautiful, to be lying naked next to her and able to feel her long legs against my own while our hands intertwine and caress... and we get to Share, too. I would love that. "Today," said Doc. "And East." He answered out of order, I noticed. I must have gotten a look on my face, because he played a little bit of music, directing the sound waves towards my ear so that only I could hear it, a song I particularly liked and that was

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bouncy and happy and made me feel a little better, already. "I want to go with you," said Brigitte. "How'd you... never mind." She might not have heard Doc, but she had heard me. I'm a little slow on the uptake sometimes. "Why?" I asked her. "Because I love you," said Brigitte. "And because I want to protect you from whatever it is you dream about at night," she said "When you're tossin' and turnin' and sweatin' but not in a good way." When I dream at night, I dream of Hell. And after listening to Reverend Tommy, I wasn't so sure it was dreams. "And because I'm pregnant." I stared at her. "I thought you said you were a virgin," I pointed out to her. We were almost to our apartment, the little rooms above the restaurant where she worked. When we'd first made love, that first day, she'd said she'd never done that before and that nobody had ever touched her, down there, before. She'd said that just after I'd raised my head up and kissed her, let her taste herself before she tasted me. "I am. I was. You're the only person I've ever been with." Impossible. It was impossible for her to be telling the truth about all of that. I started to reach out for her. We got in sight of the restaurant and our apartment and I saw, waiting for us, Reverend Tommy.

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And I saw what he didn't see, which were the revenants behind him. I usually only saw them in my dreams.

I don't know how I know things sometimes, but I know how I know what revenants are. I know them because I see them in my dreams. They are not always nice in my dreams, but one was, once. It's weird to have no waking memories that go back more than a week but have dream memories that go back, apparently, a long long long time. In my dreams, I am very old. I still look and feel and act like me, but I've been around an extreme amount of time. It's something I ponder when I'm awake, then, since I can remember all of my dreams in vivid detail. I thought, for a day or two, that I only felt that old in my dreams because of how young I am when awake, in a sense. Because I only can think back, when awake, to that moment when I realized I was working in that restaurant in New York City and that I knew nothing else about my existence whatsoever. But I know that I must have existed before that day, a week ago, because I know how to do things. I know about Doc, and I know how to activate a shower in the salonroom and I know what cities are called and I even was not surprised when I saw the sign about The Church of Our Savior of Living People Only. So if I only have conscious memories for a week, but I've been alive for 25 years (which is how old Brigitte says she thinks I am) and if in my dreams I can remember all of that existence, then my dreams are 25 x 52 times longer than my conscious life. I am 1,300 years older in my sleep than I am when awake, right? Or am I older than that? It's thoughts like that which make me whimper and cuddle Brigitte closer. I'm glad I found her. Revenants are spirits-made-solid. When a person dies, I found out from the one who

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talked to me once in my dream, the spirit escapes through their eyes. The eyes are the window to the soul, and all that. That's why eyes flutter when we die: The soul escapes. I was skeptical but he told me that scientists had proven this almost a hundred years ago, and he seemed to know so I took his word for it. He also was guiding me across a river that was burning and filled with skulls. That's what the landscape is like in Hell. So I kind of had to trust him, I guess. Or I did trust him, even if I didn't have to. He said that when the soul escapes, it usually heads to the afterlife, but it can be captured. The easiest way to capture it is to make sure that a person's eyes can't open as he or she dies. That traps the spirit in the body. The longer you hold it there, while the body rots, the stronger the revenant will be. Spirits need the afterlife to survive. They are only anchored in our world by our lifeforce, and when our lifeforce is gone, they want to leave. They want to get to Heaven, or they are forced to go to Hell, where the laws are different and they survive without lifeforce. Spirits are strong, though, and can get desperate. If you trap them in a decaying corpse for long enough, some will try to survive, and they'll do that by pulling whatever energy they can from the corpse. Doing that makes the spirit solid, and the longer you do it, the more solid the spirit becomes. As you can imagine, cannibalizing one's formerly-living body is not the act of a spirit that was going to make it to Heaven easily. The process can be sped up by torturing the person before they die, getting them to say and think all kinds of evil thoughts. Revenants are not nice. And because of how they came into existence, they crave humans. The flock to them. They want to draw on the lifeforce again. It's not easy to do that. It can't be done while a person is living, and most people die in their turn, dying when they've used up all of their lifeforce. Revenants can't, then, wait until someone dies because when you die your tank

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is on empty, there's no force left. So they trap people, and they kill the people they trap, kill them with their eyes sewn and glued shut, and then inhale the life force, the little dribs and drabs, that leak out through the pores. And create another revenant in the process. You also have to want to see the revenants, which is probably why Reverend Tommy wasn't paying them much attention. There were three standing behind him. They were drooling.

They attacked. Before I could even figure out whether Reverend Tommy could see them, whether Brigitte could see them, whether I could do anything about them, they attacked. Revenants move fast! I had been dealing with them only on a social level, or from afar, and only for a week (if you count since I woke up or whatever) or many years (if you go by when I'm dreaming) but either way, I don't think I'd ever seen one move like this. They go like wind, literally, and I don't mean "literally" the way you think people my age--- what is my age, do you think? I'd guess that most of me is 21 or 22--- people my age use "literally," I mean that revenants move just like the wind moves, whipping up and over and around things that are in their way and changing direction unexpectedly. They did not attack me. They did not attack Reverend Tommy. They went for Brigitte. I saw that instantly, that they were going for her because they

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looked at me, they looked at Doc, and then they never looked at us again. They didn't even look at Reverend Tommy as they went past him, knocking him down, baring their teeth that looked somehow like fangs even though they were just teeth, I mean, as I remember them they were fangs but revenants keep the shape, mostly, of the human body that they ate to keep the spirit alive, mostly because they are longer and stringier but still look human-ish, so they don't have fangs. I didn't think any of that then. I watched as they knocked Reverend Tommy down. I saw from the corner of my eye Brigitte stopping and looking at me and I heard Doc say Don't let them get her So I didn't. I moved in between Brigitte and them, pushing her back gently and they swarmed towards me and bowled into me. I grabbed the first one that got near me, grabbed him by his stinking t-shirt (I've always wondered why revenants wear clothing at all. They don't stay in the clothes their bodies wore when they died; they change clothes, but not often. I think they wear clothes until they rot off their body, and then get new ones), a t-shirt, I noticed, that had Pink Floyd written on it, and pushed him back. I have no great fighting skills. I'm not magic or anything. I don't have psionic powers. I don't do magic. If you give me a ray gun I can fire it. I can hit people with a bat. You'd think that whoever grew me or put me together or cloned me or whatever would have done so with some specific purpose in mind but he or she didn't. I'm just ragtag, a mutt. I'm like a quilt person. I pushed the revenant back and he pushed forward and one on the side of me grabbed my arm and bit it, hard. I didn't pay him any attention because while I don't have any great fighting skills, I also don't feel pain. Whatever construction went into me, it didn't include all the nerves or receptors or whatever. I feel some things -- I feel Brigitte's soft tongue tracing around my nipples and making them stand up -- but not others. I never feel pain.

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The revenant bit in and hung on and pulled, and I kept pushing the other one back into the third, so now I had all three of them blocked from Brigitte, who I told to run. She didn't. Doc, though, went and hovered by her and the revenant I was blocking got by me while I held the first and the second continued chewing on my arm, but that third guy I couldn't stop and he went around me and was about to Brigitte when I saw a flash of yellow and heard a "pop!" and smelled burning, and the revenant dropped for a second. So did Doc; he fell out of the sky and his balloon-head went limp. That shook me up, too, because Brigitte has been in my life only 4 days while Doc has been in it for 14 or so, making him my oldest friend when I'm awake. He says he's mostly electronics, that he'd be a Walkman and a food processor 100 years ago, but I still like him. But I was still busy trying to figure out what to do with the two revenants that I had, and then the problem was solved because Reverend Tommy stood up and said something portentous about casting off demons as he grabbed the one that was biting me and pulled it off. The biter took a hunk of my arm with him. Also, I don't bleed. Reverend Tommy saw that. He looked at the revenant, and looked at my arm, and then looked up at me. His eyes actually got wider! The other revenant broke free and tried to dodge around me so I stuck out my leg and tripped him. I can't believe that worked. He fell right down and I turned around and kicked him, hard. I don't know if you can knock the wind out of a revenant because I don't know if they breathe. I don't think they do. I just kicked him because it felt natural. Reverend Tommy, meanwhile, had the other revenant in front of him, and it was

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motionless. He had done something to it, but I didn't see what. He was moving in my direction, and I thought he was going to help me, but he didn't; he grabbed at me. I pulled away just in time. "You're one of them!" he bellowed. Only a deep south reverend can actually "bellow." "Let me go," I panted. The revenant I'd kicked was standing up and Reverend Tommy bent down and touched it. "Be still," he said, and made the sign of the cross. It stopped moving. "That will hold him," he said. I was amazed. That gave him a chance to grab me and when he did, I felt it.

His grip was warm, almost hot, a little uncomfortable, but mostly, it pulsed. He had some kind of power that I didn't recognize. "It's the power of the Lord," he said. I pulled back but he kept his grip. "Yes. You may not Share but that does not stop me," he told me. "I still see into you. The Lord runs through me. He guides my hand. He allows me to see and to know. And I know what you are." There was another pop! and arc of yellow and burning. His hand fell away and the pulsing stopped. I looked. Doc was floating again and had zapped the Reverend Tommy. I needed to recharge he told me. How great have microchips gotten when they can be so small they can fit into a tiny

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floating octopus and make it sentient, or almost sentient? I think Doc is sentient. The two revenants were still motionless. Reverend Tommy was out cold, but breathing; he had a scorch mark on his forehead. The third, the other one Doc had zapped, was moving a little. Brigitte was breathing heavily and looking scared. I tried not to notice how her breasts moved with each breath. "What's going on?" she asked. "What did you see?" I asked her. "I saw you fighting or something, and Reverend Tommy," she trailed off. "What bit you?" "You don't see them?" I asked, gesturing towards the revenants. "Who?" Had Reverend Tommy known they were there? They had been behind him, after all. Why could he see them, and not Brigitte? My arm still tingled where he'd touched it. We need weapons. And to leave, Doc said.

"Follow me," Brigitte said. She began walking quickly around the side of the building where her apartment -- our apartment -- is.

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Was, I suppose. I had to listen to Doc. He was the only one willing to tell me what to do. Or Brigitte, I suppose, because she grabbed my wrist and pulled me away. The revenants were stirring, a little, as we rounded the corner and began walking up the main street of the little town. I wasn't even sure, that day, what the town was called. "Maples," I learned later. "Maples, Georgia." That's how short of a time I was there. Here's what we walked past as we left her -- our-- apartment behind: On our left: The small building that had a beauty salon in the base and our apartment above it. A convenience store that, for a change, did not have a hydrogen fuel charger associated with it. Two empty buildings. A used-and-new furniture store. On our right: A bar. Another bar. A restaurant, the one where Brigitte worked and where I met her. Another bar. Then we were into the residential section -- the downtown was not very big. At all. The first houses, as usual, were sort of crappy, little houses that eventually, if the city grew, would become offices for dentists or chiropractors or laser eye surgery or body-part cloning and if it didn't grow then their occupants would die in them. We walked a few

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more blocks. Brigitte was starting to breath more regularly now but less heavy. I didn't breath heavily at all. While I don't have any special skills that I've ever noticed, I also don't really get winded. Sometimes I think that I breathe only for appearances' sake. I should try, sometime, to stop breathing. Or not. "Where are we going?" I asked her. "My dad's house," she said. "What's there?" "Weapons. And transportation." She looked at me. "You'll take me with you, won't you?"

I hesitated. She licked her lips. Slowly. "Yes," I said. "Good," she said. "I was hopin' you wouldn't leave me and our baby." "Brigitte," I said, "We've got to talk about that. I don't know very much about me or things in general, but I do know this: two women can't make a baby." "We did." She said it simply. She wasn't trying to convince me. "And how can you know you're pregnant already? Even if it were possible, how could you possibly know?"

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"I felt it kick today." I suppose that I should not say things are possible or not possible. When you've only been alive for a week, you're not really in a position to judge possible or not possible.

We walked in silence for a few minutes. I was absorbing what Brigitte had told me. Somehow, despite not knowing anything about me farther back than 2 weeks ago, and despite not knowing anything about the actual world I lived in farther back than 2 weeks ago, I knew that babies do not start kicking when they are only a few days old. That seemed wrong. I looked at my mismatched hands. A lot of things seem wrong. After a while, I imagine I'm going to get sick of telling myself who am I to judge, I've only been alive a week or two. "Doc," I said, finally. Brigitte was holding my hand. The street was quiet and wide and lined with those giant trees that loom over everything in the South. Yes "How is it possible for Brigitte to be pregnant? And for her baby to be kicking?" Brigitte squeezed my hand. "Can he answer that?" she asked quietly. I heard clicks and mumbles from Doc as he floated near my shoulder. Brigitte tugged me to the right and we turned down a side street. Narrower, which made the trees seem bigger. Or maybe

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they were bigger, because they still loomed over the stately houses that lined each side of the street, but those houses were bigger and the fences were bigger. Everything but the road was bigger. I cannot answer that, said Doc. "Because you don't know?" Whirrs. Clicks. A hum. Why would he have to think about whether he knows or doesn't know the answer to a question? I have to trust Doc. I have to. I cannot say that I do or do not know, said Doc. "What does that mean? Either you know or you don't know." I know of ways that I could answer your question but they involve an unacceptable degree of speculation. "So you'd have to guess?" Yes. "And you don't want to?" Yes. Brigitte stopped. "We're here," she said. She pointed to a house on our right, 2/3 of the way down the street, which I saw was a cul de sac. It was surrounded by a giant metal

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fence that looked impressive and old and possibly dangerous. "Is it dangerous?" I asked. Doc scooted over to it, but Brigitte stopped him. "It's electrified," she said. "Don't touch it." We went to the gate, and Brigitte held her hand up. She touched the bars as I said "Don't!" and Doc buzzed warningly, but she waved us off. "The fence recognizes my DNA," she said. "It's smart enough." The fence, in fact, glowed bright blue for a second where she touched it, and then the gate slid to the right. A dog came running out from the front porch. "Rexie!" said Brigitte, excitedly. I held back. Doc stayed over my shoulder. Rexie the dog came running up and barked once, twice. "We're here to get the dirigible," Brigitte said. Rexie sat down. He barked and whimpered. "No, you can't tell Dad," Brigitte said. "Is she really talking to him?" I asked Doc. About 20 years ago, people finally gave up the idea of teaching dogs to talk human language, and instead learned their language. Dogs understand about 20,000 words in human, and have about 15,000 words in dog. He told me. Some humans can speak dog, but most who understand the language do not try because the accent is hard to speak correctly, making it harder for dogs to understand. Rex growled a little. Brigitte lectured him: "I know you're supposed to guard it, but we really need to go. The octopus says so."

The dirigible -- dirigibles, I should say, because Brigitte's dad was pretty wealthy and had a couple of them -- were around back.

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When I first saw a dirigible, on the walk from New York City down to here, I asked Doc what they were. That is a dirigible, he told me. It is a lighter-than-air vehicle used for personal transportation over short distances. It is held in the air by helium and powered by solar power and personal effort. I saw a lot more of them over the 7 day walk here. I wished I'd had one. Now I had four to choose from. Brigitte walked among them in the shed that was in back of her father's house. Rex paced her, whining and sniffling, and she spoke to him in low tones. "I'll call Daddy and tell him, Rex. You won't get in any trouble." Pause. Whimper. Growl. "I promise. It's not like when I was a kid. Daddy will understand." Pause, sniffle, look at me, whine. "She's my lover," Brigitte said. "And the mother of my baby." Pause, whimper. Growl. "She's good." Rex came walking over to me and Doc whispered in my ear Hold out your hand. Dogs see that as a friendly gesture. Palm up. I did so, putting my right hand out. Rex sniffed my hand. Brigitte was looking inside the cockpit of the red dirigible. It looked fast. It was already pumped up, tethered to the ground, with the seats hanging below it. It didn't have a canopy, but I was not in a position to be picky. It had four seats and three propellers on the back, plus two little engines along the side. Doc had explained those to me: The side engines are for the more wealthy. They store solar energy and can then use it to power jet engines to move the dirigible more quickly than pedal power can alone. When I'd asked if you have to pedal them constantly, he'd said No. The pedaling is done intermittently to recharge the batteries that keep the propellers going, and can be done to provide a power boost. The balloon portion absorbs solar energy to provide the basic power.

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So they had three gears: standard, powered by the sun alone; medium, powered by the sun plus pedaling, and jet, which was only for short distances. Dirigibles became popular when oil reserves were nationalized and stockpiled solely for military use, Doc told me. I didn't care about history. Rex had finished sniffing my hand and licked it. He wurffled. That's a word I learned from Brigitte, later. Wurffling is a dog-type-of noise that means about what a friendly shrug means in people. I patted him on the head and stepped to the dirigible. "Is it okay if we take this?" I asked. Rex moved alongside me and I absently lifted my left hand to scratch his head, as I'd seen Brigitte do. Rex sniffed, then licked my hand, then began barking and backed away from me. He hunched and crouched and bared his fangs as Brigitte moved in between us. "What's wrong?" I asked. "He says your left hand is evil," said Brigitte.

I just stared at Rex, who was getting madder and madder, or something-er and something-er. He was growling and spit was rolling down and his eyes were almost all

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white. He leaped at me, snarling. It sounded like something primal, the kind of sound that animals make to strike fear into your heart. How can animals do that? Is it a defense mechanism they came up with when humans started walking and using tools and guns? Did they need something to fight back with, so they came up with sounds that you don't hear so much as you feel them at the base of your neck? It was that kind of snarl. I'm lucky, I guess, that he went for my left hand and not for my throat. I dodged right. I dove to my right, which was dumb I think because Doc darted forward and grabbed onto Rex's head, pulling him off course enough that he missed my hand and probably would have missed my hand, plus Doc was covering his eyes and trying to slap some tentacles around Rex's mouth to close it. But I, meanwhile, in diving, had gone headfirst into the undercarriage of the dirigible that Brigitte had picked out. I dropped like a sack of potatoes, my head spinning and seeing stars. I fell flat on my back and heard a ringing in my ears. I looked up as my vision got blurry. I saw Brigitte's legs, all the way up, as she stood over me and began bending down. I saw her thong underwear. I heard her say, all blurry and woozy and far away: "Rachel?" But I passed out. And I woke up immediately. The world around me was red and black and blue and puscolored and HOT. Very hot. The ground was hurting my back. I sat up quick and then stood up because it was hot on my legs and butt plus the ground was all covered with super-sharp gravelly pebbles. I looked around and realized that I had blacked out or dropped unconscious.

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All around me was Hell. I probably should have mentioned that I don't sleep, ever. When my body in the 'real' world goes to sleep, I wake up in Hell.

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In Hell. I used to think that I only dreamed about Hell. After hearing Reverend Tommy talk about how lesbian zombies like me can move freely into the afterlife, I'm not so sure. Maybe Hell is real. That scares me a lot because I know too much about Hell and not enough about everything else. Somehow, when I'm "awake," when I'm in the "real world," which is what I think the world where Brigitte is and where Doc is and where there's no demons, I only remember about two weeks back now, to that day when I realized that I was a waitress and didn't know why or how I was a waitress, to that day when I went home and realized that I didn't even know how I knew it was home. I have no memory before that moment: I was suddenly standing there, in a diner in New York City, holding two plates, and wondering what in the hell happened. One plate was bacon and eggs and pancakes. The other was a hamburger and french fries. I remember that. Who orders a hamburger and french fries in the morning? But I didn't know which table they were going to, or who had what, or how I had gotten there or who I was, really. I knew this: I knew my name was Rachel. That was it. I don't know how I knew that, even. But when I'm "asleep," when my body in the "real world" falls asleep and I end up here, in Hell, I remember a lot. A lot I don't want to remember. I remember a lifetime of years, maybe decades, probably not a century, and most of it boring. Time moves differently for me here in Hell. It's hard to predict. I'll go to sleep for a short nap and spend three weeks in Hell and then wake up and an hour has passed. Each night, when I sleep, I go to Hell and then hope to wake up before I spend much time here. But it's always a long time and I have a lot of memories of Hell that I wish I didn't. Here's the first memory I have in Hell: I woke up sitting on a rock ledge halfway down in

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a crevice in the landscape. The crevice was maybe 8 feet wide -- just narrow enough that you think you could jump across it if you ran, and just wide enough that you knew you probably were wrong. The crevice was also about a million feet deep. It went down and down and down and down. I woke up on the ledge, about halfway down. I say "halfway" down because it was a long way to the top; from where I sat, I was in the dark and the only thing I saw was a glowing red line. I didn't know what it was. But I looked down and saw only dark. I looked straight ahead and saw only dark. I looked up and saw a glowing red line, and headed for that.

My body knew what to do, I think. I didn't give it any conscious directions. I stood up and stretched my arms and legs and turned around on this little ledge that was only about 12 inches across, and I began climbing, in the dark, my hands reaching out and finding nooks and crannies and my feet propping me and sweat dripping into my eyes. It was godawful hot in that crevice. Not surprising for Hell, I suppose. I didn't think much of anything during that climb other than how hard it was. I felt my arms and legs and back get tired. The rock was hot on my skin. I didn't have any clothes on but that didn't seem unnatural to me for some reason. I climbed and climbed and climbed and didn't think and for a long time the red line didn't get any closer but eventually it grew a little wider and eventually a lot wider and eventually I pulled myself up out of that crevice and looked around and I started crying. What would you do when you first saw Hell? I looked around as I got out of that crevice and started crying and ducked back down before anything saw me. I didn't know, then, that it was Hell. I just knew I didn't want to be there. Because once I pulled myself up

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over that crack, the first thing I saw were people, crawling. Herds and herds of people, crawling. Some were on their hands and knees. Some were on their bellies. Nobody was standing up, nobody was walking, they were all slowly crawling and dragging themselves across the landscape, which looked like it was made of broken glass and thorns. They were naked, too. I said nobody was walking but that's not true. There were things walking: demons. They walked among the crawling people and kicked them and bit them and whipped them and stood on them and ground them into the cutting land. I ducked back down and cried and wondered what to do and where I was.

That was the first time I remember being in Hell. Things haven't gotten much better. They never do. It's Hell. This time, after Rex leaped at me and I hit my head, I didn't wake up on the Plain of Torture, as I think of it. Things in Hell don't have names. Hell is not organized. I've realized, from the many times I've been there, that chaos and evil are closer acquaintances than anyone suspected. I've never met the Devil, and he's probably pretty busy, but I'd guess his office is a mess. This time I woke up, or re-woke, near a seashore. I wasn't fooled. I touched some water once in Hell and it felt hot enough to disintegrate me. I was under the impression, at that point, that being in Hell meant that I wouldn't feel pain, but that was early on and I was very foolish or naive. The whole point of Hell is to feel pain, right? And there's nothing to eat or drink in Hell. The water is especially vicious. It's hot -- almost steaming-boilinghot-- and it feels acidic, because it keeps burning after you touch it. So I didn't go near the water and in fact moved back from it before the waves could get me. I stepped back over the gravelly sand that cuts your feet to walk on. I appear in Hell

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naked, like always, and I've never seen a clothed person here. Most of the people that I see are being tortured by demons or chased by revenants or burning in fire pits or hanging by their neck from trees in nooses made of barbed wire... you get the picture. Remember, you can't die in Hell. If they hang you by barbed wire, you hang there suffocating but not dying until the barbed wire slices your head off. I've seen it happen. I don't know what happens to your head then but no matter what it's probably not good. I crunched back slowly over the sharp rocks on the shore to get to one where I could sit and hide and think. I had no way of knowing how long I was going to be in Hell this time. Or any time. But as I backed up and tried to look around to see who or what might have seen me, I felt a hand on my shoulder. Ivanka. I knew it was her without looking because her hand was cold. I don't know how cold you have to be to stay icy cold in Hell, but Ivanka does it. I was going to turn around but she did it for me and I was looking at a large set of breasts as she held me by both shoulders. Ivanka is about 6'10". That doesn't sound large but it is because she's not a slender 6'10", she's all muscles and power and cold. She's a Valkyrie. And she has a crush on me. She proved that now by leaning down and putting her mouth on mine and kissing me, hard, forcing her tongue into my mouth by forcing my teeth apart, her tongue then wrestling mine into submission as she mashed me into her breasts. I felt one hand holding the middle of my back and the other slowly caressing its way down to my ass, where she grabbed my left cheek and squeezed. I couldn't breathe but it wasn't a bad way to not breathe. But I didn't want to be kissing Ivanka, not even in Hell and not even if this was some sort of a dream. I love Brigitte and also I'm going to be a mom, I think, and that ran through my head but then Ivanka's hand

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slipped around to the front and I felt her caressing me between my legs, and I went sort of limp and she laid me back on a large slab of rock, which was hot but she was icy cold and the mixture sort of worked. Her mouth went to one of my own breasts and she was licking my nipple and I just went along with it. Her head kept moving down, kissing my stomach and then I felt her tongue between my legs and she was really working me, I started moaning but had to bite my lips because I didn't want to attract attention. Ivanka spun around and I saw her giant legs on either side of me. I stopped biting my lip and started licking her. I couldn't help myself. So much bad stuff happens in Hell that maybe I wanted something good to happen. But I guess I'm just also easy. I wondered if I could explain it to Brigitte. Then I came, and Ivanka came, and she laid down next to me and put my head on her shoulder. "Ivanka, I need your help," I said. Her eyes were really beautiful.

Ivanka did not say anything. I've never heard her talk. I'm not entirely sure that she can talk or what language she talks. In Hell, I've never had any problem understanding anyone, and Ivanka seems to understand me. She didn't even nod.

"I need to get out of here," she said. Ivanka just looked at me, her large hand caressing the inside of my bicep on my right arm. It tickled a little, and excited me a little.

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"How long has it been since I last saw you?" I asked her, without much hope that she'd answer. I sat up and wondered why Ivanka had clothes but I didn't. I tried to think how long it had been in my time since I'd seen her. But I couldn't. Time flows differently when I'm awake and when I'm asleep or in Hell or both or whatever.

Ivanka stood up and stretched and started rearranging her clothes. I hadn't had much of an effect on them. Valkyries are sort of set up for sex. Or Ivanka was. I hadn't met any other Valkyries so I guess I sort of stereotype them by Ivanka. I wasn't even sure how I knew she was a Valkyrie. Or how I knew what a Valkyrie was in the first place.

What I mean is: Ivanka's clothes were ready for sex anytime and didn't need much adjusting. They were loose and open and you could get to the good parts without much trying. I figured watching Valkyries fight would be exciting.

I looked around. I had no idea where I was. Most of the time when I appear in Hell I didn't care where I was and it's almost always somewhere different and I spend most of my time trying to hide and not get caught by the various people and things that populate Hell. This time, though, spurred on by Reverend Tommy's rants, I had an idea.

I was going to get out of Hell, and Ivanka I figured would help me.

"Where's your horse?" I asked her. Valkyries, I figured, always had horses. I don't know how I knew that, either.

But I was right. Ivanka turned towards me again as she pointed; she had one breast still a little outside of her armor. Think of Brigitte I told myself and as I did, I pictured Brigitte, kneeling over my unconscious body and hoping I was all right and also I pictured her

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baby, which I wasn't yet ready to say was my baby. But that distracted me while Ivanka tucked her nipple away and pointed.

I turned in the direction she pointed and looked where I'd just been looking a moment before, before I'd turned towards her, and saw a horse materialize. Ivanka crooked her finger and the horse looked up and came trotting over.

"That's your horse?" I asked.

The horse nodded. "Can you understand me?" I asked it. It nodded again. "But you can't talk?" It shook its head, no. "Just yes and no." It tapped its hoof. "What's that mean?" The horse tapped its foot once, paused, then twice, paused, then three times. "You can count." It nodded. "What's your name?" It just looked at me. "Right. Dumb."

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Ivanka was walking around the horse and stood on the opposite side of it. She leaped up on top and sat there. I walked over, and she held out her hand. I reached up and grabbed it and she hoisted me onto the horse's back. I put my arms around her and tried not to think of what we'd just done, but it was hard what with my breasts pressed into her back and the fact that I was naked and had my legs pressed up tight against her.

The horse began trotting forward along the seashore, staying well clear of the boiling water but otherwise seeming unaffected by the rocks and pointy stuff and heat and general atmosphere. Ivanka looked back over her shoulder at me. Her eyebrows raised up. "Um. Out of Hell," I said. She nodded. The horse nodded, and began galloping. Then it took off and flew, running, up into the sky.

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Four:

Hell is sort of timeless, so I'm not sure how long we flew before trouble arose. Literally arose. We'd been flying over the sea, which would ordinarily seem to be the safest course of action but there's nothing safe about Hell. So our flight was not some idyllic jaunt with naked women riding on a flying horse and trying not to accidentally (or not) cop a feel. Instead, it was filled with images of people, souls, I guess, struggling for their life in the acidic burning boiling monster-filled seas of Hell. I don't know how they sort out the souls that arrive in Hell or who gets what punishment. I'd guess it's random. And I go back and forth on which would be worse, given the various things I've seen, but it looked pretty bad that day, with Ivanka, watching people getting their eyes chewed out by fish that were all teeth, it seemed, while their skin slowly bubbled away so that they were these eyeless-half-skeletons trying desperately to swim but failing because you could see the boiling acid water filling their mouths and coming out of their lungs. I clung to Ivanka. And I clung to these words, ringing in my memory: They move freely between the Life and the Afterlife, Reverend Tommy had said. I was not able, so far, to move freely between those two things. But maybe I hadn't tried the right way. I didn't know if Ivanka was the right way. But she was there. Sort of like that song that Doc sometimes played for me about loving the one you're with, which I'd also done, but in this case, using the one you're with to try to escape Hell.

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Which I was beginning to think we might do until I saw the Waterspout rising up. It began to spin, ahead of us, so far away but so big that I could see it, first a disturbance, then a column, then a giant whirling thing that moved directly at us. It was coming for us. I knew that, and Ivanka and her horse knew it because I felt her thighs tense under my arms and I felt her back tense and I felt the horse feel it and the horse flew right, and the Waterspout moved that direction. The horse then went left, and the Waterspout moved that direction, getting larger and larger both because it was getting larger and because it was getting closer. Beyond it, I saw actual white light. Then all I could see was the Waterspout. It was a tornado of the red acid water which was also burning and spinning and spitting at us, and in the Waterspout were the things that were in the ocean - - monsters and fish and snakes and tentacles and eyes and teeth and claws and jagged rocks, and half-eaten souls screaming in pain and terror like they'd been doing for eternity and like they'd keep doing for eternity. All that was coming at us, fast. The Waterspout had all that to throw at us.

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It also had a mouth and eyes.

It was on us with a heart-rending roar. The waterspout suddenly leaned over and dove at us, I swear it dove at us, and Ivanka and the horse reared back. I saw the waterspout's

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mouth open up and there were waterspout teeth that looked both solid and liquid, I guess the ordinary rules of things don't matter in Hell, and they came at us. As the horse reared back and tried to avoid it, it almost flew straight up in the air and I slipped off. I was holding onto Ivanka's waist, luckily, and had my arms wrapped pretty tightly around her. So the horse was going straight up and Ivanka was riding it like a pro and I was hanving from her as it flew up and the waterspout came at us and swallowed us. It was engulfing and terrifying. The teeth clamped around us and I clung to Ivanka as we were instantly soaked. I could feel small things pelting me and the water was both icy cold and boiling hot and it burned my skin something fierce. A big thing slammed into me as I closed my eyes and I saw just a glimpse of a tortured soul being flung past us and it was shrieking. You think when you're alive that you've heard shrieking but you haven't heard shrieking until you get to Hell. When the soul slammed into me it jarred one arm a little and I felt my hands slipping. I tried to interlace my fingers but it wasn't working. "Ivanka!" I screamed but even I couldn't hear my own voice. The water was howling around us and we were immersed in it. I could feel the horse straining. Another body slammed into me and my hands broke free and Ivanka turned her head to look. I fell from the horse and from Ivanka. I fell and fell and fell and the waterspout was swirling me around just like any other damned soul... ... was I a damned soul?...

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Ivanka and the horse tried to turn around. They were going to their left; I had been torn off to their right. Souls and debris and water were pummeling me now and I was getting bruised and broken. One poor person grabbed at me, got a hand on my neck and I started choking and they pulled me down. I looked over my shoulder and saw a man, his face half melted off. He scrabbled at me and he tore my hair out by the roots. I felt the water stinging it. I was screaming and didn't see Ivanka anymore but I was still falling and getting sucked down closer to the ocean' surface. I saw the face of the waterspout appear; it had rotated around and was inside the spout now and was leering at me and it opened wide and the mouth reached out for me. One of the teeth was right above my face and was about to bite in and I couldn't breath because the dead guy was still holding onto my neck when suddenly a sword lashed out and cut off the tooth at the root. Ivanka and the horse had worked their way around, going upstream, and the horse had broken out of the walls of the waterspout and was in the middle where there was only a bloody sort of misty haze. They floated there and Ivanka whirled her sword around and the water was about to carry me past but she leaned way over and with her left hand

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grabbed my foot and pulled me into the middle of the waterspout, too. The face roared and the horse started up, Ivanka still carrying me by my foot. The dead guy clung to my throat and I gasped for air and saw the blood drip from my scalp onto his face as the horse climbed and climbed and climbed and finally we were at the top. We broke free. We broke free and got out into open air, as open as air can be in Hell. The waterspout kept stretching and reaching for us. The voices in the waterspout, the souls, were crying out. I saw them whirling by and reaching out arms for us. The dead man clung to me grimly, moaning. I couldn't get him off of me. We kept flying higher and higher, putting distance between us and the waterspout. I wished we'd done that in the first place. I wished, too, that I could get the dead guy to let go of me. I wished, three, that Ivanka would pull me up instead of dangling me by a foot. I tried to count my blessings, though.

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Meanwhile, Back In New York:

The streets were quiet as usual. With gasoline-powered vehicles reserved for military and government use, and dirigibles being very expensive, there was not as much noise as there used to be in New York City. There was always the general background noise of the city, though. When you have 1 billion people living in close proximity, there is noise. There is the noise of footsteps on city sidewalks, and the noise of people arguing through thin walls, and the noise of dinner plates clattering as they are washed, and the noise of children playing somewhere and the noise of lovers loving and the noise of 1 billion lives being led, each in their own way.

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That noise was always present. One of those 1 billion people came walking out of an alleyway, pulling up his pants a little and adjusting them. He glanced around and then shook his head, as though thinking he should have glanced around before leaving the alley, or maybe as though he was thinking that he should have finished pulling up his pants before leaving the alley. But he left, walking off to his right, secure in the knowledge that nobody he cared about saw him. His footsteps added a new sound to the background buzz; before walking away, he had been perfectly silent. Another of those 1 billion people watched him from a little ways up the street, sitting on a doorstoop. A third of those 1 billion people stood in the alleyway tucking some money into her bra cup and pulling her skirt back down. She did not watch the first man in this tableau leave; she did not even think about him any more than she thought about the other 15 men that night. It would be morning soon and she had a lot of money and just needed to make it

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through one more hour or so. She saw the silhouette of the second of the people in this scene, at the alleyway entrance. She almost could not make out the shape of the man, it was so dark in this part of the city. 1 billion people lived in the city but none of them, it seemed, could be spared to fix the 6 broken street lights on this street. Angelina -- the name of the woman with the bra strap and the money, the name of the prostitute who now looked at the shape in the alleyway-- could no longer be scared. She did not feel very much emotion at all, anymore. If you live with an emotion for long enough, it no longer qualifies as an emotion. It becomes part of your existence. Similarly, if you live without an emotion long enough, you no longer note its absence. Angelina had lived without love for a long time. She did not realize, anymore, that she

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was living without loving. Angelina had lived in fear for so long that she had stopped noticing it. She was afraid all the time, and so, paradoxically, she was never afraid. Her level of fear was constant and therefore no longer alerted her when it was necessary. "Come on over," she said, and shrugged back out of her bra so that her breasts were free. Men always wanted the breasts free. "It's seventy." The man moved closer. Angelina should have feared him but she did not. He was tall and dark and muscular. "Let's get you ready," she said, and reached down his pants. She looked up at him in surprise. The man hit her over the head and she went unconscious. She should have been afraid before that. When she woke, she would, finally, feel fear again.

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Part Three: Heading East:

I'm not sure how most people go from sleep to waking. Judging by Brigitte, who's the only person I've seen waking up since I can remember, it's kind of a gradual thing. I see her waking up, slowly, and I envy her. I can lean over and run my fingers from the base of her neck, along her lovely bare back down the whole spine, barely touching her, and finish up just above the crack of her butt, resting my index finger lightly just at the spot where the cheek begin to separate, and watch her slowly wake up. First there's a little shiver she gives. I feel her skin get all goose-bumpy. Then she murmurs. Something, usually, like Ohmmm. Then her butt tenses up and I feel her fleshy cheeks rub against my fingertip.

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She murmurs again. Then she wiggles and I know she's almost back. She wiggles just a little and I press into her. Then she rolls over and presses her lips against mine. I don't wake up like that. I've watched her do that all six times I've watched her wake up. That's how I've woken her up each of the six times I've woken before her, twice on naps and four times in the morning. I hope I can watch her wake up at least 29,200 more times and count them all and have them all be more or less like that and more or less like they've always been, feeling her smooth skin and the sunlight coming in through the window of the apartment over the restaurant where she worked, dust motes twirling in the sky, the sheets soft and smelling like sweat and us as they twist around our legs. The soft sounds of silverware and plates drifting up from below. I wish I woke up like that. I usually, though, wake up more suddenly. Like this time. I woke up suddenly, to feel the rush of wind around me, hearing police sirens below, and feeling the wind get knocked out of me as the soul of the man that was clinging to me in the waterspout flopped onto me, all stinking and wet and shrieking louder even than the police sirens I could hear.

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I couldn't breath as that guy flopped on me and kept trying to grab at me. All I could see was his wild eyes and all I could feel was his dead, stinking wet weight and all I could smell was his damned breath and fetid odor like rotten cottage cheese and almost all I could hear was his shrieking which would not stop. But on top of that I could hear Brigitte say "What is that?" but she didn't sound scared, she's so great. And I heard Doc make kind of an alarmed series of beeps. And I heard those sirens. I was back. I struggled to get Mr. Damned Soul off of me and pushed at him. I saw Doc float down near me and hold up a tentacle, maybe to zap him, but Brigitte said "No, he's touching her, it'll hurt her, too," and Doc floated back, and then Brigitte reached down and I saw her face and her hands and she was grabbing at Mr. Damned Soul and pulled him off me. Together, we shoved him into the corner of this little cubicle we were in and then Doc did his zapping thing and the guy stopped and went down. I looked around. No Ivanka, no horse. I felt my head. The hair was not pulled out. I did not feel acid-burned like I had a moment before. I was in a little sort of wooden box with slats and seats and could feel the wind rushing. There were the police sirens. "You're awake," said Brigitte, cradling my head against her cheek. "What happened?" I asked. I was trying to catch my breath and didn't want to. Mr.

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Damned Soul really stunk. I wondered if he was an actual corpse. "You were just lying there and suddenly you opened your eyes and that guy appeared out of nowhere and flopped onto you." "Where are we?" "Daddy's dirigible. We got you loaded on it and took off. Rex wouldn't stop going crazy."

"What's the sirens?" Brigitte pointed. I looked out one of the slats, which I realized served as windows on the gondola below the dirigible. There was a police dirigible, about a half-mile back. "Rex called the police on us," Brigitte said.

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I edged up, woozily -- I'm always a little dizzy when I first wake up/get back from Hell -and looked over the edge of the gondola that hung below the dirigible. I heard the buzzing of the solar engine as it pushed us through the air. The dirigible, I noticed, was bright yellow. All dirigibles are brightly colored, but I wished, in that moment, that we could have maybe had one that would not glow like the sun even at night. A bright yellow dirigible held in the sky by hot air, which air is heated by a flame which lights up the inside of the dirigible, is no doubt a desirable thing to have if you are a dignified southern gentleman, or even the sexy lesbian daughter of said gentlemen. But it makes it easier for the cops following you on the ground to see you. I looked at those cops now, and saw two electrocars scooting along the road. We were not moving fast enough to make them use their gas engines. They were struggling, I could tell, because Brigitte or Doc had opted to pick a course that slanted across the roads. From the passenger side of each of the two cop cars that was following us, a cop hung out, and I guessed that they were hollering directions to the drivers inside. Then I saw one taking aim. I guessed wrong. A flash of slightly-glowing air appeared in front of me and I felt a little bit of heat. I looked up, worriedly, in case the ray gun had done something to the dirigible, but it hadn't. Doc, a long time after all this, explained to me how ray guns worked. It has to do with heating each molecule in a chain between the gun and the target or something. I was sorry I asked him. But this ray gun, despite zapping the dirigible directly, didn't do anything. The cop continued to point it at us. I felt the heat again, saw the air glow a little brighter

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off to my left, and saw the gondola melt a little near my left hand. The plastimetal burbled and boiled and dripped and it was melting down.

Doc scrambled up to the chain that hung down from the solar heater and pulled it down. I heard a buzzing sound, louder than our engine, and saw the yellow above me glow a little brighter. The dirigible rose, slowly at first, and then more rapidly. The cop wasn't smart enough or good enough to adjust his aim, and the ray gun stopped melting the gondola. We rose a little higher and then a little higher. Mr. Damned Soul looked at me with dull eyes, and then said, in a croaking voice, "Where am I?"

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I looked at Mr. Damned Soul and asked him "Who are you?" "Where am I?" he asked again. Doc hovered close, three of his eight tentacles pointing at the corpse-thing. "You're on a dirigible," I said. "Over Kentucky," added Brigitte. "Kentucky?" Mr. Damned Soul said.

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I heard a crackle and looked up. So did everyone else except Mr. Damned Soul. The edge of the dirigible's inflated section was starting to peel. I peeked up over the edge and saw that the cops below had gotten a better shot. Doc scooted up and pulled on the chain. The burner lit, and we rose higher. I felt the heat of the ray gun as we rose past it. I wondered how high we could go. "Paducah, Kentucky," said Brigitte, and she knelt down next to Mr. Damned Soul. "Brigitte, I don't know that you should get that close to him. I brought him back from Hell." "Thank you for that," said Mr. Damned Soul. "Accidentally," I said to him.

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Brigitte knelt by him. I saw her nose wrinkle. "Do you hurt?" she asked. He was certainly more calm now than when we'd first woken up or arrived or whatever we did. She reached out and touched him with just the tip of one finger. "You're cold," she said. "Really cold." "I don't feel it," he said. "But, then, I expect that the dead don't feel very much." "Lemme try something," said Brigitte. She held out her hand, palm towards Mr. Damned Soul, and placed it on his arm, gently clasping him. She closed her eyes. He looked at her without any curiosity at all, the way people will look at an ad on the wall of a bus stop because they've got nothing else to look at. She opened her eyes. "Nothing. He doesn't share." She looked at me. "Like you." "Like me." I said. I looked over Mr. Damned Soul's raggedy body, still slouching limply like he had no bones or muscles. His skin was all clammy white and peeling in places. His eyes were runny and pussy. His teeth were falling out. He didn't have much in the way of clothing. He stunk. "Like me." I said again.

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"Like you," said Mr. Damned Soul.

"I don't think I'm anything like you," I told Mr. Damned Soul. "Look at you. You're... you're smelly and wretched and dead and damned."

"What do you think you are?" Mr Damned Soul asked me in that kind-of-croaking voice he had. It was probably choked with salt water; maybe it had been for centuries!

"What does that mean?" I asked. Brigitte had backed away from him a little and was kneeling next to me.

"What does that mean?" she asked.

"Well, you're not smelly, so far as I can tell, but maybe that's just the fact that I've been submerged in Hell's ocean for years and years. You might be wretched. I don't know. I

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don't profess to see into your mind the way you profess to see into mine." He paused. "You're probably also not damned. Well, not all of you, anyway.

But you are dead," he finished.

Then he reconsidered.

"Well, not all of you, maybe."

"Is that why she doesn't share?" asked Brigitte.

"Don't ask him things," I said. "He's just some dead guy that I accidentally fished out of Hell."

"Accidentally? I don't think so," said Mr Damned Soul. "I sent Ivanka looking for you, and she found you and she brought you to me."

"What?" I asked. "Who's Ivanka?" asked Brigitte.

"A Valkyrie," I said.

"What's that?" asked Brigitte, who probably had not had much Norse mythology in her southern school.

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"A Valkyrie is a mythological creature who traditionally was sent by Odin to choose warriors fallen in battle and convey them to Valhalla," said Doc.

"It's her lover," said Mr. Damned Soul, raising a hand and trying to point a finger at me, but his wrist was broken and while he could work his fingers, the finger pointed at the ground between us.

There was another crackle of the ray gun and the sirens continued to drift up as Brigitte looked at me, dismayed.

"You have another lover?" she asked.

Doc scrambled up to pull on the lever and try to take us higher, but we were rising more slowly now.

"Not exactly," I said.

"Not exactly?" Brigitte asked.

"She does," Mr. Damned Soul says. "Exactly."

I was spared further looks from Brigitte because the dirigible suddenly listed to the right and we all tumbled; the crackling that we had heard was a direct shot from one of the cops' ray guns and the dirigible was tumbling.

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Doc jetted up and was scootling around the hole as Brigitte yelled "Hang on to something" and I grabbed as the dirigible suddenly began to drop like a rock, but the thing I grabbed was Mr. Damned Soul's hand, and he grinned at me and shook my hand out of his and I fell out of the dirigible carriage. I've been in free fall a surprising amount recently, both here and in Hell and it's never a pleasant experience. I definitely worry less about falling when I'm in Hell, which sounds weird but it's not really because while I'm in Hell, and whatever one is doing in Hell should be worrisome, should be extremely worrisome, I also kind of associate Hell with a dream, of sorts, in that I go there only when I fall asleep here, even though sometimes I'm there for weeks, months, there when I'm only asleep for, say, an hour or two here... taking naps can be hard when if you doze off you might, like me, have a whole adventure in Hell and then wake up and it's dinnertime... But I'm getting distracted. I was falling and I had plenty of time to worry this time because I only fell for a second or two before a net enclosed me and a balloon inflated and I was being reeled down to some big gun-cannon thing the cops had. They'd evidently shot the net out of it and the net had gotten me and the balloon held me up while they fished me in. I supposed they had this because of all the people who have dirigibles and airwings and stuff. They must need a way to catch people who can fly. I wondered why they still had cars. Maybe the cars were faster. There had to be some reason for it. Maybe they were just old-fashioned. I was all twisted up in the balloon-net, being pulled in, but I managed to crane my neck and look up and I saw Brigitte scowling down at me, and Mr. Damned Soul peeking over the edge, and Doc-- Doc! Where was he? I hadn't been without Doc in this world, well, in the two weeks I'd been aware that I was in this world.

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I couldn't see Doc. I didn't like that Brigitte was scowling. Then I heard a voice. "She's definitely one of them." It was Reverend Tommy. He was with the cops. Brigitte was still scowling at me, I was sure, as they pulled the net to the ground and deflated the balloon and I was lying in a heap looking up at two cops and Reverend Tommy.

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Meanwhile, Back In New York Again:

The man was tall and dark and muscular but Angelina had not been afraid of him when he approached her because many tall, dark, muscular men approached her. Angelina was not afraid of him now, either, because she was unconscious. The man carried her, unhurriedly, through the streets of New York City in the pre-dawn hours, those hours at which the daylight is farthest away. When the sun first sets and the moon comes up -- not that either the sun or the moon were seen much in the alleys and narrow streets and at the bottom of buildings that Angelina frequented -- when the sun first sets and the moon comes up, daylight is gone, but it is easily remembered because it is only recently gone. The essence of light lingers in the air like cologne from a date that has kissed you good night and left. When day is almost there, when the moon has gone away and the sun is about to rise -- an event only known in Angelina's world by a diffuse lightening of the air around her, since direct sunlight rarely reached her streets and never reached the basement apartment she slept in during the day-- when the moon has gone away and the sun is about to rise, there is an expectancy of daylight that is coming and the mind can reach back to memories of other days to know what is to come. But at the middle of the night, as it was when the man slung Angelina's body over his shoulder and walked along the sidewalk between buildings which were only 30 or 40 or 50 stories tall, old buildings that were dwarfed by the 500-story rotating skyscrapers and arches and towers and other pinnacles of artistic perfection that made up the parts of New York where Angelina and the man never went, in the middle of the night, daylight is so far away from either end of the spectrum that the mind sees only dark. Nobody was present to see the man as he walked with Angelina over his shoulder.

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Nobody was looking out windows that were boarded up in these buildings. Nobody was looking up from stairwells and fire escapes where, if a body was seen, it was sleeping something off. Nobody was walking the streets beside the man; if there were other Angelinas, they stayed out of sight and paid no attention to this Angelina, who drooled in her unconscious state. Nobody was around to note that the man, several blocks later, walked up to a door and fumbled in his coat pocket for a key. Nobody was able to see the man pull the key out and drop something else out of his pocket. Nobody could later identify what dropped on the ground as a lady's hand, still wearing a ring, bloody at the wrist end from where it had been sawed, roughly, from a lady's arm. The man picked up the hand, put it back in his pocket, and went inside the door. Nobody was around to hear the door lock, and Angelina did not hear it because she had not woken.

Yet.

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Part Four: I hate dogs.

I was naked and stretched, spreadeagled, on a large table. It didn't seem to me to be set up for that purpose, which as I laid there at first made me feel better because I thought maybe if Reverend Tommy and the cops were not set up to interrogate me or keep me hostage, they wouldn't be very good at it.

Then, I thought if they're not very good at it, then they might just hurt me for the fun of it or accidentally or something, and I felt worse.

The table, I was pretty sure, was an old kitchen table. A solid wood, smooth, very nicely made kitchen table, but an old kitchen table anyway.

They'd shot me with something when I was crumpled in the net, some sort of electricity, but a really low current of it, I guessed. When they'd done it, my muscles had gone all loose and limp and I'd just flopped. After that, I was aware of what was going on but I couldn't really do anything about it. I was just a puddle of me, being picked up in the net and jammed into the back of the cop car and then taken here. They'd draped a blanket over me so I couldn't tell where I was in the city, just that I was inside a building of some sort. It felt basement-y: damp, dusty, unused. I turned my head side to side and tried to see stuff but I was pretty glared out by the lamp that was hanging over me. The lamp was not directly above my head. I didn't know if that was amateurish or politeness. Why would people who will shoot ray guns at you and then jab you with something electric to make it impossible to move and tie you to a kitchen table then be polite and not put the light right in your eyes.

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But it was still bright enough and direct enough that I had afterimages on my retinas and couldn't see very much around me. Shapes all around, but they were obscured by purple and red blobs.

I figured out where I was in a moment though when people came walking in: Reverend Tommy. A cop. Some older man. And Rex, Brigitte's dad's dog.

Rex rushed over and growled. He barked a couple of times.

Reverend Tommy looked at the older man. The older man said "He's telling us it's the left arm."

"What's the left arm?" I asked. They ignored me. Rex continued wuffing and howing and his hackles were raised as he looked me.

"Easy, boy. We'll take care of it," the older man said, and stepped forward. He stood right at the edge of the table, and reached out a hand.

I was naked. I tried to flinch back. I'd never been raped; I'd never even been touched in any kind of sexual way by anyone but Bridget...

... oh, and Ivanka, but that doesn't count, right, because that was in Hell and having sex with a Valkyrie in Hell while I'm asleep in my real life can't possibly count as "real" sex, no matter how hot it is...

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... but I couldn't really flinch at all because I was strapped down pretty tightly. The old man didn't pay any attention to that at all, either, and his meaty hand with all these callouses and incongruously neatly manicured nails touched me at my left shoulder. Rex howled as he did that.

"REX!" the older man snapped. "Quiet, now. I know what I'm doing."

"Do you?" asked Reverend Tommy. "How many have you seen?"

"As many as you, I'll bet."

Something moved off to the left and distracted me from watching the older man for a second, and I tried to make out what it was but I was pulled back by the calloused fingers touching my shoulder right where it met my body, just near my left breast. I looked at his hand and then squeezed my eyes shut and waited for what I assumed would be next. It had only been about a week that I'd known who he was from attending his church with Brigitte, but I couldn't believe that Reverend Tommy would take part in a rape.

The hand ran along the joint of my shoulder and then down on my side, to my rib cage.

"Right here," the older man said. "That's where it's joined. So it is just the left arm. You were right, Rex."

"There's other parts," Reverend Tommy said. "Look." I kept my eyes tightly shut, so I didn't see where he moved to, but his voice was closer when he spoke again. "The right hand. The right leg."

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On my left, the older man said "I know that. But I'm not so concerned about those." I felt hands on my face then, and my left eye was pried open. He was peering into it, closely. He motioned for the cop to come over. "Tilt that light this way," he said. The cop came up behind him, reached up for it, put his hand on it. I kept my right eye shut but he had my left eye pinned open. I couldn't see Reverend Tommy at all; he must have been on my right.

The light tilted up and just before it hit my eye and blinded me temporarily, I saw a hand on the cop's left shoulder, wearing a big gaudy mood ring. At the same moment, the cop gasped and Reverend Tommy said sharply "How did you get in here?"

Then a revenant pulled the cop back, the lamp swung crazily, Rex went nuts barking, and blood spurted out of the chest of the older man, causing him to let go of my eye and slump over onto my naked body. I wasn't worried about being raped anymore; I was worried that he was dead.

The revenants were swarming about the room. Everything was a blur of motion, the crazy kind of action that can only be imagined, since you'll never see it from my perspective-lying on a table with an old guy bleeding on my naked chest while an overhead lamp swung back and forth.

I heard Rex barking, and Reverend Tommy preaching to the Revenants:

"Get back, foul spawn! Get back from me or you will feel the wrath of the Lord of The Living People Only!"

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The revenants snarled and moaned in that way they had; their voices sounded to me always like the echoes you hear through a sewer system. The old guy moved on my chest. He turned his head and looked at me.

"Rachel," he gurgled.

Reverend Tommy's voice got louder as Rex barked more: "Lord, I call upon thee, as a Living Person and one worthy of Your Attention and Love and Devotion, STRIKE DOWN these unholy hellspawn, drive them from this house."

Nothing happened. Rex leaped across the table, clearing table and me and old guy in a single leap and dove into one of the revenants that had gotten closer. A gunshot boomed around the room.

"Guns do nothing to them," yelled Reverend Tommy, and I saw he was right because the cop was pushed back onto the table next to me, his shoulder smacking into my face, a revenant on top of him. The revenant was wearing a trucker cap over a do-rag. He had one of those little goatees that's only on the chin. He was roaring, but distantly, and echoey. They don't have much air in those old burntout decrepit lungs. I tried to edge over to my left to get away from them.

"Rachel" the old man gurgled again and I looked at him and kept trying to look at him while watching the cop struggle next to me and try to avoid having his face eaten, which it looked like the revenant was trying to do while it also was trying to head-butt him. They're not very smart, revenants.

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"What?" I asked the old man, as he gurgled again.

He couldn't or didn't talk, though, but his right hand flopped around. He tried to lift his head up but couldn't, very much. His arm flopped onto my face, busting into my nose and causing shooting pains all through my face. I felt it start to bleed and yelped. The revenant looked up at me, stopping his attack on the cop, as though it had just noticed me.

The cop took that moment to push back, but the revenant refocused and poked a finger into his eye. He yelled. The old man's arm flopped more, and his hand fell on my left breast. I yelled again. I couldn't believe he was trying to feel me up while all this was going on.

"Hand," he gurgled. My nose was killing me and I could feel blood running down both my cheeks. Rex was growling somewhere and I heard wood breaking. Reverend Tommy had continued his preaching.

"Foul soul-less things! I smite thee, as the Living People shall always Smite the Terrors of Hell!"

If I wasn't in pain and being molested, his rants would have really bothered me. The cop was getting pushed into me more and more. His head was mashing my ear and he was laying half on my right shoulder. The old man was still gurgling but his hand moved off my chest and over to my left hand. He fumbled at the straps.

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"Begone! Get thee away!" Reverend Tommy yelled. Rex snarled somewhere and I heard a revenant yell louder.

The strap on my left wrist was pulled open as the revenant trying to kill the cop picked him up and was going to smack him down on me. The old man gurgled something again and held up my left hand as much as he could and said something.

The room fell silent.

My hand was clenched into a fist. I saw the old man's face, through the tears my nose was causing.

"Up. Hand. Up," he rasped.

I lifted my left hand up in a fist.

I couldn't see what was happening. The old man nodded and pushed back. He slid off of me. I looked to my right, where the cop and revenant had been wrestling. The revenant was just standing there, slack-jawed.

The cop took advantage of that to pull his gun out again and shoot the revenant pointblank in the face. Its head exploded all over.

I couldn't see anything else, but I heard Reverend Tommy praying and heard Rex snarling and the sound of flesh tearing.

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I kept my left hand up in the air, in a fist.

"Put that down, unholy Lesbian!" Yelled Reverend Tommy. "Do not try to corrupt us!"

Rex barked.

"It's doing something," the cop said.

"Those who use the tools of evil become evil themselves," Reverend Tommy said.

Rex snarled again and I saw him flash over, leaping at me, grabbing my hand in his mouth and pulling it down. It hurt; his teeth were digging into me.

I heard the revenants begin howling again as Rex pulled my hand in his mouth down below the edge of the table, wrenching my shoulder as my arm twisted in ways it should not have. I was still strapped down by three appendages. With a weird keening, a revenant jumped up on the table and stood over me. He loomed up over me as Rex continued biting into my left hand. He leaned down and looked right into my eyes, blurry in my vision because my eyes were still watering.

I heard a thunk and he fell off the table, to the left, and my hand pulled free of Rex. I whipped it up and held it straight up, trying to make a fist and watching the blood course down out of the holes Rex's teeth had lost.

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Everything fell silent again. I heard Rex growl and one small whimper from the revenant.

Reverend Tommy suddenly appeared in my vision and forced the hand down. "They're all dead now, again," he said, "And I don't need your help. Put the hand down or I'll cut it off right now."

I put it down.

He disappeared from my vision again, as he bent down. I heard him ask the old man if he was all right. There was some mumbling. He said "Don't worry, we'll find Brigitte."

There was a pause. The old man must have been talking. I was surprised to think that I hadn't realized before that he was Brigitte's father.

When the pause ended, Reverend Tommy said, "Yes, I'll tell her."

He stood up and looked in my eyes.

"He has something he wants me to tell you," Reverend Tommy said to me.

I waited.

"Something about his daughter, Brigitte," Reverend Tommy said. I looked at him.

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"He says to stop corrupting her or he'll find a way to leave Heaven, track you down in Hell, and destroy your soul for once and for all." I probably should have been nicer, considering, but I was bleeding from a broken nose and was strapped to a table and my left hand could control revenants or something and was also bleeding and the mention of Brigitte had upset me because we hadn't settled things about Ivanka when I'd been shot down... ... and I realized just that moment, just before I spoke, that I'd been unconscious when I was shot down and hadn't gone to Hell... ... so with all that going on, I couldn't really restrain myself and I spoke loudly enough to make sure he heard: "Yeah, well, she's pregnant and it's my kid, too!" I heard a gurgle, so I knew he heard me. Then I felt bad because it was probably the last thing he ever heard. Reverend Tommy looked outraged. He held up his hands.

"Oh, Lord of the Living People," he intoned. I watched him, wondering what he was trying to do. "It it be Thy Will, Lord," Reverend Tommy went on, "Allow me to destroy this Abomination this moment."

His hands began to glow and crackle like they were giving off electricity. He held them together, like praying, up over his head.

"Shall I smite her, Lord?" Reverend Tommy said, eyes closed, head back, hands arched over his head surrounded by a yellow nimbus.

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I tried to wrench my right arm free. I couldn't. I remembered my left was free and tried to reach up to where my right hand was, to pull that strap off, but I couldn't quite reach. I yanked at my feet, feeling straps cut into my ankles. Nothing worked. Eyes blurring up again with pain, I looked back at Reverend Tommy as his hands glowed more and more.

Then the glow dimmed. He looked down at me, not smiling.

He said, then: "I am not to destroy you."

All the air whooshed out of me in a relieved sigh.

"Yet," he said. "I am not to destroy you yet."

I laid there a few minutes more, while Rex growled around and Reverend Tommy closed his eyes and mouthed words. It took only a few seconds for me to realize he was praying. He looked at me, then, and scowled. "If I must, I must," he said, more to himself than anything, and then walked around and quickly unsnapped all of the bands holding me down. "Get up, harlot," he said, and motioned towards a shelf. "Cover yourself." "I didn't think men of God were supposed to be mean," I told him, and thought a little bit about covering myself up while walking across the room, but what was I supposed to cover up with? Plus, I was a little freaked out by now by the whole left hand thing. "Men of the God of Living People Only," Reverend Tommy corrected me, still with a

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snap in his voice. "And what's that all about?" I asked him. He didn't answer and I began picking up the clothes he'd pointed to. I was skeptical. It was a blue sundress with a floral print on a white band around the waist. But it was all I had, and while everything I'd seen about Reverend Tommy, and everything Brigitte had said, told me that he was on the up-and-up, he really was a holy man and wouldn't be trying to take advantage of me, I didn't exactly want to walk around naked in front of him. Plus, I wasn't sure yet how far I could cross him or whether I wanted to. If he'd managed to knock me out and I hadn't gone to Hell, I wanted to know more about that. So I put the dress on. He then led the way out of the basement -- it turns out we were in a basement -- by opening the door. We went up a narrow flight of stairs in the near-dark, first Reverend Tommy, then me, then Rex behind me. The stairs led out into a fantastic room, a large atrium-type area full of marble and glass and a spiral staircase and a chandelier and little recessed alcoves full of things that must have been valuable or something, because I couldn't see why they were here otherwise. "Brigitte's family must be really rich," I muttered. Reverend Tommy looked over his shoulder. "This isn't their house," he said. I looked around, and back at the door, which had closed and blended into the wall so that I couldn't tell what it was -- or where it was.

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"It's not?" "No." Reverend Tommy continued walking, and because I had nowhere else to go and wasn't sure what to do, I followed him. "What is it?" I asked him. "Where are we?" He didn't answer. Rex snarled a little, and I shot him a look over my shoulder. The look was supposed to say you're just a dog, shut up, but I don't know if I really conveyed that or not. I might have just looked annoyed. And a little scared, probably. Rex has big teeth. Reverend Tommy walked through a couple of other doors in short hallways that had the looks of service corridors and then opened a door into another room. This one had wooden floors and white walls and paintings hanging on the wall. There were a couple of people in the room. They looked at us only briefly and then went back to considering the paintings in front of them. We walked through that room and I began to realize what we were in as we turned out and there was a long, narrower room filled with suits of armor and glass cases down the center. It was dim for such a big room, and there were even more people here than before. Reverend Tommy kept walking, and Rex kept me close to him. We walked through that room and then through another atrium type room with staircases, and I was sure then that I was right. We were in some sort of art museum. Reverend Tommy remained a few steps ahead of me, and nobody really paid us any attention whatsoever as we walked past the lobby and out into the street and onto a set of broad steps that led onto a busy road surrounded by taller buildings. Electric busses and personal cars scooted around the city, and scores of people walked or biked or jogged or

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floated, and people were coming up and down the stairs brushing past all of us. A group of school kids jostled past me and Rex; Reverend Tommy was already off to the side, standing next to a large lion sculpture that had turned green with age. I went over by him, and Rex stood between me and the public, watching everything. I looked back at the building we'd just come out of. THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO, it said. "Chicago?" I asked. Reverend Tommy still did not answer me.

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New York, Still:

The man stood over Angelina. He reached out a hand and touched her cheek. It was not a tender touch. It was not a caress. It was not sensual in any way, but it was not mean, either. It was not cruel, not in the ordinary way. He touched it the way a butcher touches meat, the way a carpenter touches a board, grading and judging the materials he is about to use. He pinched her cheek and then moved up to her hair, which he lifted and let fall. He opened one eye, which stared at him dully as he looked under the eyelid. He poked it with his finger. He rolled it left and right. Angelina did not protest because she was still unconscious. He would not have listened to her protests, anyway.

He moved on to her torso, poking and prodding and pinching, rubbing it sometimes. He lifted each of her arms and let them fall. Then he lifted them again and held them up to his own head. People, he knew, do not share when they are unconscious. He had learned that. But he could still tell some things about them and did not want to wake her up. It was easiest to pick up on those things he could learn by pressing the hand directly to his own forehead, to where the tiny microchip that every baby got, prenatally, was, the microchip that was implanted to allow people to grow and develop in such a way that their nerves themselves could conduct electricial impulses, not just electrical impulses from the brain and central nervous system, but electrical impulses from other's central nervous systems, and from computers.

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He had one. Almost everyone had one. Except the people he made. He took them out of the people he made, and then even though their nerves had the same capacity to conduct the impulses from others and from electromagnetic sources like computers and broadcasts, even though they could carry those signals, they could not interpret them without the microchip. He would cut out Angelina's, too, before he was done. He had not decided yet what parts of her to use right away and what parts might be saved or what parts should be disposed of, but he knew he would cut out the chip because he always saved the heads and he always took the chips out of them. The people he created, people who sometimes worked, could not share.

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Part Five:

“Chicago?” I asked again, as Reverend Tommy stood there, arms crossed, watching the crowds of people. He did not answer. Rex did not answer. “Well, if you’re not going to talk to me, I’m leaving,” I said, and started to walk down the stairs.

Rex growled and whoofed something. A few people near us turned to look, but I couldn’t tell if they spoke dog, or just were reacting to his obviously-threatening tone.

“Stop,” said Reverend Tommy.

“Make me,” I said, over my shoulder, and Rex barked a yapping, high-pitched bark and took a few steps forward. Now more people were looking at us, as Rex got louder and louder.

“I will,” said Reverend Tommy, quietly – but loudly enough that I heard him.

I had my back mostly to him, and I thought that he was being kind of quiet because he didn’t want to attract attention. That seemed to me to be my best chance – he might shoot my dirigible down with ray guns and net me and kidnap me to Chicago when we’re all in some small town, but would he dare do something to me on a public street with all

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these people around, and their octopi, and the windows where there were maybe more people, doing some crowd watching?

He would, I learned, because I felt a zapping shock and I stopped because I was frozen in my tracks and I looked back at him, able to just barely turn my eyes enough to see him.

Reverend Tommy was standing there, eyes closed, hands steepled in prayer, lips moving silently. Rex stood near him and growled at me. Reverend Tommy’s hands were glowing and incandescent again, and from them, a blue arc of power had leaped and was stretched out towards me.

I rolled my eyes downward a little, seeing my hand and arm and chest, still wearing that too-nice, too-innocent dress that he’d put on me. I glowed blue, the same color that Reverend Tommy’s hands were glowing, the same color of the arc of light that had jumped from him to me.

“PEOPLE OF THE CITY OF CHICAGO,” his voice boomed out suddenly. “LOOK UPON THIS CREATURE. LOOK UPON THE CREATURES WHO DARE TO WALK AMONG YOU AND MAKE A MOCKERY OF LIFE AND A MOCKERY OF GOD, THE GOD OF LIVING PEOPLE ONLY WHO EMPOWERS ME TO CONTROL THIS BEAST AND SAVE YOU FROM HER.”

And people were looking. They were congregating around, drawn by the picture of me, I suppose, trapped in blue, and his voice, echoing off the building fronts and the stone steps.

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I concentrated as he went on.

“SHE IS ONE OF THE UNDEAD. A ZOMBIE. AN UNHOLY CREATION THAT DISTORTS LIFE AND CORRUPTS HUMANS AND WHICH WILL BRING ABOUT THE DOWNFALL OF THIS CITY, THIS SOCIETY, THIS WORLD…”

I focused.

“THIS EXISTENCE!” He boomed, and as he said that, there was a crackling peal of thunder that emanated from him, rolling out and resounding back and generally not fading away, and I could hear the murmurs of people getting louder but I didn’t pay any attention to them.

Instead, I used all my willpower and turned around, looking Reverend Tommy in the face.

He was scared. I saw that suddenly. I figured I was not supposed to be able to move and he was scared that I could. The murmurs grew louder as I took a step towards him.

He seemed to get a grip on himself. His lips started moving again. Praying, I suppose. The blue power got brighter. I felt more resistance. My hair was standing on end and my skin felt hot. I took more steps towards him; I was only about two feet away.

Rex was snarling, frothing, and looking from Reverend Tommy to me. The crowd was staying back.

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“Do not come closer, harlot!” said Reverend Tommy.

“Quit calling me that,” I said, and I raised up my left hand. I only did it because I knew he was afraid of it or didn’t like it. I raised up my left hand, and pointed it at him, and he seemed, just for a second, scared again, but I give him credit: he got it under control again and I saw his hands press more firmly together. He was going to start praying again. I had to do something.

I leaped at him. I jumped for him just as he closed his eyes and just as Rex jumped at me.

There was a SNAP! I saw a brighter flash of light, even. I heard Rex whine. I felt my hand, my left hand, touch Reverend Tommy’s shoulder. And everything went black.

At first, I didn't think anything had changed. The world went black, and then it went normal again, only it wasn't normal, it just seemed like it. I'd never been in a part of Hell that looked like a part of the 'real world' before. I'd seen a lot of Hell -- a lot more than anyone would ever want to see -- because the time I spent there was so different than the time I spend in the real world but I'd not seen all of it. When the blackness faded away, I was still on the steps of the Chicago Art Institute. Reverend Tommy was still there but he was slumped onto his knees, hands on the ground. The buildings and streets were all around us. But the resemblance to "real" Chicago quickly fell away. First because it was about 200

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degrees hotter, maybe; most of Hell is hot unless you don't want it to be and then it's cold. It's never just right. Second, the air felt thick and miasmic and hard to breathe. Spots appeared on my skin as what felt like mist fell around me. The spots were red. I touched them and they were slightly sticky. Blood. We were standing in, and getting spattered with, and breathing, a mist of blood. I wondered where it came from, and I realized, as I looked around, that there were exploded corpses all over the stairs. Everywhere within sight, in fact, were corpses -people who appeared to have been blown to smithereens and then dropped dead. It must have just happened because their blood, blown into the sky, was just dropping on us. I looked around more, grossed out and more than a little horrified. The front of the Art Institute was swaying and bricks were falling off. I looked a little further and realized that this wasn't some Hell version of Chicago; we had taken a chunk of Chicago with us. When I'd touched Reverend Tommy, and I'd blacked out, I'd gone to Hell -- but I'd brought him with me, the way I'd brought Mr. Damned Corpse out, and we'd brought a chunk of Chicago, including all those poor people who had been watching the standoff. And including Rex, I noted, seeing the heap of fur and bones near Reverend Tommy. He was standing up. "You damned creature," he rasped. He was one tough guy, I'll give him that. But he hadn't noticed what had happened yet, which I realized because he first realized the mist was hitting him and stuck his hand out, then looked at it. Then he looked like he almost

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threw up. Almost. But he didn't. Like I said, tough. "We..." He looked at me. "You..." he said. "It's Hell," I said, and turned around and began walking away from him. I heard some more crackling. "You have brought me to Hell?" Reverend Tommy said, more sternly than shocked. He was like a parent who, hearing that the dirigible has been smacked up, is more concerned about how much to punish the kid than about getting things fixed up. "You brought me to Hell," I snapped. "You, with your magic prayer thing. You knocked me out, and whenever I fall asleep, I end up in Hell." "Where you belong," he said. "Where you are," I said back. There were more rumblings, and a part of the wall that used to be the front of the Art Institute fell away. I wondered what it looked like back in Chicago. Reverend Tommy noticed it too, and began to move away. He went off to the right. I decided to go off to the left. I wasn't bound to him, and I wasn't going to help him. I stalked away from him, in the exact opposite direction, trying to get out from under the shadow of the wall before it fell over if that's what it was going to do, trying to find a

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place to hide, if possible, and wait until I wake up. There was a time when I'd have gone exploring, but I didn't want to explore Hell and I didn't want trouble anymore; the last time with the waterspout had convinced me of that. "You're getting better at this," I heard, though, and that stopped me. When you hear a voice you recognize in Hell, you stop. It's just natural to do so.

Plus, this voice was the only friendly voice I’d ever heard in Hell. There were only two people in Hell who were ever nice to me – I’m using “people” loosely—and this was one of them.

I turned around and saw him. It was Bob.

That’s what I call him, anyway. “Bob.” “Bob The Revenant,” if you want to be exact. I call him “Bob” because when I met him long long long ago, he told me that if he’d ever had a name, he didn’t any longer because he couldn’t remember it.

I was lucky that Bob found me, back then. He found me, in fact, after I had crawled to the top of the crevice, my first memory in Hell; I don’t know how long after I had made it to the top he found me, because I spent a long time sitting just below the edge of the rocks, peeking up occasionally and crying, sobbing, really, all the time.

I knew, somehow, back then, that I was in Hell. But I didn’t know how I had ended up there, or anything else about me or what was going on. I just knew that I was in Hell. I knew that because there’s just no mistaking it. Even without memories, even without a history, even without a name, some instinctive part of me, some part of my soul, knew that I was in Hell. And I knew, too, that I didn’t want to be there.

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I don’t know why nobody first noticed that I was there before Bob. Eventually the crawling people and the demons torturing them on petered out. I always thought that a given torment was forever, in Hell; but this was not. It went on for maybe days, maybe weeks, while I huddled near the edge of that chasm, but it did start to peter out.

And when they were gone, when the plain was clear, I crept up over the edge of the rocks and looked around. The entire windswept plain seemed empty, but I couldn’t be sure that I wasn’t being watched. It felt like I was being watched. I felt eyes upon me, presences near me, and I didn’t know if it was my imagination.

Over the time I’d huddled there I’d tried to process what had happened. I’d decided that I was in Hell. I decided that meant I’d died, but I didn’t know for sure, because I felt solid and real and whole and alive. So then I’d decided that maybe I was alive and had somehow been cast into Hell, but I wondered if a soul wouldn’t feel solid and real to itself, and I wondered if I was alive, why wasn’t I getting hungrier or thirstier or tired and why I hadn’t slept.

So I tabled all of that and spent my time worrying instead that someone would see me and I’d begin that slow painful crawl all the other people were doing.

I’d been standing there, on the edge of the rock, slowly looking around and trying to see who was looking at me or presence-ing at me, when I heard Bob’s voice the first time.

“Hello,” he said then, which seemed a natural enough way to begin a conversation.

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“Hello,” I said to him now, standing in the pieces of Chicago that had come with me and Reverend Tommy when we’d appeared here. I knew what he was talking about, my getting better at stuff. I’d brought out Mr. Damned Soul, and I’d brought in Reverend Tommy and part of Chicago. So maybe I was getting better at this.

“Why is this here?” asked Bob.

I always wondered what Bob’s deal was. He seemed so friendly—but how could a revenant be friendly? How could he go on living in Hell and be friendly? Why didn’t he leave?

Bob always brushed off those questions.

“I don’t know,” I told him. “It was an accident.”

“It’s going to attract attention,” he said.

“I figured,” I responded. “That’s why I was trying to leave. Do you have your boat with you?”

“I have neither my boat nor a river. I was walking and your city appeared and crushed my body and I had to crawl out from underneath those steps and then wait for my body to become more three-dimensional. I was flattened almost into two dimensions, you know.”

What are the odds that a part of Chicago would fall on Bob?

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“Like the Wicked Witch of the West,” he said.

“Who?” I asked. Were there witches in Hell, too?

“Never you mind,” he said. “What’s the story about that other person you brought?”

“He’s trying to kill me. Or something,” I said.

“So you brought him here? That seems too cruel for you.”

“I didn’t try to bring him here. He was going to kill me or whatever and I blacked out and we came here.” I paused. “So it serves him right.”

“You still cannot control it?”

“No.”

“You should work on that.”

“He,” I pointed to the Reverend Tommy, “Thinks I can.”

“He’s right. You can.”

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“Tell me how.”

Bob didn’t answer me. “You should get moving,” he said. “Someone besides me will notice this. You don’t want to be noticed. And you don’t want to be here when they notice that more has been added to Hell.”

I nodded, and turned around to begin walking away, then I realized I was blowing off the only help I had. I turned back to Bob. “Which way?” I asked.

He scanned the horizon, his face drawn and pinched and his lips pursed. His eye sockets were really sunken in. He pointed to his right. “That way,” he said, indicating a direction that would have been directly across the street from the entrance of the Art Institute if we had still been in Chicago, but in this case was a rocky-looking terrain that sat at the steps of the portion of the museum that now rested in Hell. “And bring the Reverend with you,” said Bob.

I considered. “Why? Can he help me?”

“No,” said Bob. “I doubt he can. I doubt that he can draw on any Almighty help down here. But if he is captured, he can tell whoever finds him about you. And he will.” He looked around. “He will certainly tell.”

About twenty minutes later, we set out. It took that long to capture Reverend Tommy, who did not volunteer to go with us. He was trying to creep over the rubble at the edge of the piece of Chicago and when he saw us coming back, he began hollering and yelling, things like Demon Spawn and the like, and a couple of times as he fled from us, he

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stopped and began praying but like Bob had predicted, it didn’t work here, and once as he tried to get away we’d all frozen and dropped to the ground and tried to hide because something big – BIG—and black and dark had drifted overhead, way way overhead but still really big; it blotted out a big chunk of the sky.

So we were dragging Reverend Tommy behind us, unconscious and tied with bits of Bob’s clothes because I’d appeared here, naked, like always. Reverend Tommy’s clothes had come with him. I wondered if I’d done that, and if I’d done that, I wondered why I couldn’t bring my clothes with me.

I say “we” were dragging him but it was mostly Bob. I don’t think revenants get tired like we do. I guess when you exist on lifeforce things like muscle fatigue may not mean that much.

We walked and walked and dragged him and dragged him. Every now and then I’d look to see if he was awake, and he never was, and if he was still breathing, and he always was. I regretted having to hit him with that rock, but he wouldn’t give up. Bob thought maybe I hit him a little hard, and I maybe did. He had it coming.

I thought we had walked about a dozen miles and said so. I thought we had walked a couple of hours, and said so. Bob laughed.

“Distances and time don’t mean the same thing here, Rachel. You know that.”

I did know that. I didn’t answer right away. Then I said “So how long has it been?”

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Bob answered: “It’s been no specific length of time. Hell doesn’t operate on your terms. Time passes, or doesn’t pass, depending on if it needs to pass.” He looked at me.

“Time is one way in your world, Rachel, because of entropy. Entropy is decay and chaos, and as things decay and move into chaos, you say, and I used to say, that time is passing. Time is a measure of how much things have decayed.”

He swept a hand around the landscape.

“Hell is chaos and entropy. It is nothing but chaos and entropy.”

“I thought it was pain and torture.”

“That is an aspect of chaos and entropy.”

I was getting bored.

“Bob,” I asked him, “How come you’re nice to me?”

“You mean how come I don’t try to take your life force?”

”Yeah, that too. But how come you don’t try to turn me into the Devil or eat me or something.”

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“I don’t work for Hell.”

“You’ve said that before. So how come you’re here?”

He squinted at me. “I’m here the same reason I think you got here.”

He let that sit in silence for a minute as we walked on, Reverend Tommy’s head making scratching sounds in the dirt and gravel.

“By mistake,” he said, finally. “I’m here by mistake. And I think that’s how you got here, too.”

I looked at him and said “Why didn’t you ever tell me that before?”

“Because I wasn’t very sure about it. Now, I’m actually pretty sure about it. When I first met you, I hadn’t met anyone like you before. Now, I’ve met quite a few like you. Lots and lots like you.” He considered. “Well, not lots and lots, but a lot like you.”

“Like me?”

“Zombies.”

“I’m a zombie, for real?”

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Bob paused and dropped Reverend Tommy’s legs. He stood facing me and picked up my hands.

“Look, Rachel. You have to have noticed. Haven’t you? How long have you been… noticing things?”

I thought back.

“Here? Or in life?”

“Both.”

“Here, I don’t know. In life, about,”I counted “10 days. Give or take. A lot’s happened,” I lamely finished. Who doesn’t know how long they’ve been remembering things? “You spent a long long time with me when we first met, or so you told me. I don’t know how to keep track of time anymore; I never leave here. But you said it was a long time.” “It was. It felt like months.” “And then the second time, you said it was … weeks, was that the word?” “Yes.” “Tell me what you’ve noticed.”

I looked around. He shook my hands, then, and held them up. “Not around here. About YOU. Tell me what you’ve noticed about YOU.”

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I thought back to that first day… could that have been only 10 days ago, in life? It felt like years, but a good deal of that time had been spent in Hell; far less had been spent in life with Brigitte and Doc.

Brigitte!

“I noticed …” I looked at my hands. “I noticed…” I looked down at my bare legs. I put my hands to my face and smelt them.

“Say it,” he said.

“I noticed that I’m built of different parts.”

“Exactly,” said Bob. “I noticed that the first time I ever met you. But I didn’t know what you were or how you got here or anything about you.”

“And now?”

“Now, I still don’t know all of that. But I know there’s others like you, more arriving all the time. Arriving and leaving.”

“Arriving and leaving?”

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“Like you do. They appear, naked, and they disappear. And when they’re here, they…” He trailed off. I pulled my hands away from my eyes and looked to see why he’d stopped. Bob was bent down and looking into Reverend Tommy’s eyes, pulling one open and then the next.

“They what?”

Bob looked up at me, and said, a bit distractedly, “You’ll see. I’m taking you to them. You’re going to meet your kin.”

Then, he leaned down and held his mouth over Reverend Tommy’s glazed eyes, and inhaled. I saw a glow. I saw wisps of luminescent steam start to form over Reverend Tommy’s eyes.

“What are you doing?” I asked. I sounded more angry than I was. I was startled.

“I need some of his lifeforce. It’s been a long time.”

“You shouldn’t do that!”

He inhaled and sucked in the wisps and looked at me. “I need to.”

I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t like Reverend Tommy and I did like Bob but I felt that it was wrong for him to just be sucking out Reverend Tommy’s lifeforce like that, without even being asked to or anything, and while Reverend Tommy couldn’t defend

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himself. I was all torn, and then I wasn’t torn at all because suddenly Reverend Tommy reared his head back and howled.

“Stop that, demon spawn!” he cursed. He was trying to close his eyes, which Bob was holding open and pulling wisps of steam from. “Stop! Ooooooohhhhh!” he moaned as a long wisp pulled out and I saw his body go rigid.

I just stood there.

Bob pinned him down and looked at me.

“Rachel, help me,” he said. “I need the energy. He’s fighting me too much.”

I just stood there.

“Foul beast,” Reverend Tommy gasped. “You shall not get any more from me.” He turned towards me “Do not lay a hand on me, whorething,” he muttered.

I just stood there, a little more.

“Rachel, I need the energy or I’m not going to be able to take you to meet the others!” Bob yelled.

Reverend Tommy was squirming now, trying to free himself.

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“Bob, I don’t know. It doesn’t seem right,” I said.

“This is HELL,” Bob hollered. “How do you think I survive? I’m the only friend you’ve got here!”

I knew that wasn’t true. But he was the only friend I had right here. I could never count on Ivanka showing up.

Reverend Tommy was wrestling now, looking very spry for someone who had just been knocked out and only awakened by a revenant eating his soul.

“I will see you stricken down, demon spawn,” he said.

“Why do you keep calling me that?” Bob snarled at him, and lunged forward and pinned down Reverend Tommy and pushed him backwards onto the ground. Bob’s bony hands clawed at him as Reverend Tommy squinched his eyes shut and flung his head this way and that.

I sat down and started crying. I’m embarrassed by that but only a little bit. I might be made of parts of someone, but I’m just a woman, a girl, really, and I didn’t want to be standing in Hell and watching my friend the Revenant try to suck someone’s life out of him, even if that someone was a terrible person who’d kidnapped me. I began sobbing and I put my head in my hands and cried and cried and cried.

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Which was a bad move because it distracted Bob for a second and Reverend Tommy was able to roll over and get up to his knees, and he pulled his hands out of the make-shift knot we’d put together, and he turned around with a rock in his hands and smashed it into Bob’s face and Bob dropped to the ground and lay there motionless.

Then Reverend Tommy turned to me with the rock still in his hands.

“What did you do that for?” I demanded, through tears and sniffled. I had my hands up to my chin and felt stupid for it, but I couldn’t help it. I was still crying. I didn’t want to be here. Plus, I was afraid he’d come after me. “He is a thing of evil. He exists on lifeforce and takes it from unwilling donors. Like me,” Reverend Tommy put a lot of emphasis on that last word. He didn’t need to. “He was taking me somewhere,” I said. “He was taking you to another place of evil.” “What do you think this whole entire place is?” I shrieked. I didn’t care anymore if someone or something heard us. Then I remembered where I was – where this entire place was, and I did care, very much, and I looked around to see if anything had heard the echoes of my shriek off the rocks and gravel that made up this portion of Hell. “I heard enough to know that he was taking you to meet others of your kind and I cannot allow that.” “Well,” I said, “You’re not exactly in charge here and so I don’t have to listen to you.” But I didn’t know what else to do. He was still standing over Bob’s body and holding the big rock. I looked at Bob for a second, and wondered if he was breathing. Then I wondered if he was supposed to be breathing. I didn’t know. I just didn’t know. But I didn’t move, and he didn’t move. We stood there. For a long time. Until I finally said “Let me help Bob.” He looked confused. “What,” I asked. “You heard

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everything we said but his name?” He looked down, then at Bob and said “I won’t let you help him.” “I have to. It’s wrong to just let him die. Or re-die. Or whatever.” “You have no conscience. Don’t try that on me.” I do have a conscience, I thought, but then I wasn’t so sure. He seemed to know an awful lot about me. And do people who have a conscience have to ask themselves if they have a conscience? Maybe he’s right, I thought, but then I thought, maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe only people with a conscience question whether they actually have a conscience. He was still standing there, rock in hand. I wanted to help Bob but I also didn’t want to end up needing help. Finally, I hit on an idea. “Fine,” I said. “Then just stay here.” He looked at me. “What does that mean?” He asked. “It means I’m leaving. You won’t let me help him, so there’s nothing else for me to do here.” I looked around, trying to remember which direction Bob and I had been headed before this all started, and picked the direction that seemed the most likely. My eyes felt bleary and dried out from crying and my voice felt hoarse. My hands were still shaking a little. But I tried to not let him see that and I started walking in that direction. When I was about 20 feet further, far enough that I figured he couldn’t quickly catch up to me, I turned around. “Without me, you’ll never get out of here,” I said. He looked at me. “I will be able to leave.” “How? Your stupid prayers don’t work here. I brought you here and only I can bring you back.” I was bluffing. I didn’t know how much he knew. I knew he knew

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more than me. But if he knew how to leave, he wouldn’t have looked so bluffed. He would have just laughed at me or called me evil or something. So I persisted. “You need me to get out. I don’t need you at all. But I need Bob.” I pointed at my friend. “So let me help him or I’ll just leave you here.” He paused, rock in hand, then looked from Bob, to me. He shook his head and then smashed the rock down repeatedly, over and over. I heard bones crunching and grinding. I heard sloppy sounds. I heard him grunting. I stood there, in shock. He finished and looked up at me. I expected him to be covered in blood but he wasn’t. Revenants don’t have blood, I expect. He stared at me for a second and then threw the rock down – I heard one more gross smushing sound – and then he ran towards me. I took off running. I spun around and ran in the direction I thought Bob and I had been headed and scrambled up over rocks and around them. The part of Hell we were in had moved from a gravely plain with rocks to sort of a rocky plain with gravel, and there were big boulders and larger boulders all set on rocky gravel-strewn hills and it was rough going. I could hear him running and scraping after me. I didn’t know what he was going to do but I figured it wasn’t going to be good. What kind of holy man was he? I wondered as I ran. But I knew: the kind that doesn’t hesitate to battle evil and the kind that is not afraid of evil, either. I didn’t know how to tell him that Bob wasn’t evil. I didn’t know how to convince him that I wasn’t evil, either, that all I wanted to do was figure out who I was and why I was all these different parts and why I couldn’t remember anything and why I went to Hell everytime I fell asleep. All I wanted to do was convince him that I wasn’t out to get anybody, that if I could just spend my time lazing around with Brigitte and figuring out, a little, why I was so different, that I’d be fine and I wouldn’t take over the world or kidnap anyone or anything like that. But I couldn’t tell him that because I was running and climbing and running some more and I didn’t stop until I couldn’t hear him. I stopped, by a big boulder, and listened, gasping for breath. I didn’t hear him. I peered around and didn’t see Reverend Tommy. I climbed up onto a rock and laid there on my stomach, the rock hot against my bare

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boobs and stomach. I didn’t see him and I finally chanced raising my head more. I couldn’t see him at all. I’d lost him. I had gotten separated from him, and I’d lost him. I hoped that Bob was wrong. I hoped that Bob was wrong and Reverend Tommy wouldn’t get caught and that if he was caught, I hoped he wouldn’t give me up and say I was here. But Bob had never been wrong in my whole life. I started to get back down, and then I froze because I heard a sound. I heard a sort of crackling, snapping, fizzing sound. The air seemed to fizzle and then it stopped. I smelt something, something like… fresh air. No, not fresh air, either. I smelled air, though, and not the foul air of Hell. It smelled like a city. It smelled like dirigibles and electricity and metal and people. I sniffed the air more and tried to figure out where it was coming from. Then I heard the sound of a footstep. It wasn’t a footstep with shoes on, like Reverend Tommy’s. It wasn’t him. It was a bare footstep, the sound of skin slapping on rock. Just the one, and then it stopped.

It wasn’t a footstep with shoes on, like Reverend Tommy’s. It wasn’t him. It was a bare footstep, the sound of skin slapping on rock. Just the one, and then it stopped.

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I looked back over my shoulder, perched up there on the rock. I peered down into the misty gloom of Hell and wondered what I was about to run into. It was a girl. I’d say she wasn’t yet a woman, but wasn’t very young, either, she was about my age, maybe. I didn’t have much experience judging people’s ages. I never got that close to anyone in Hell, where I’d spent the majority of my existence, and in the real world I’d only been alive, or whatever, about a week. She was standing there, naked, looking around. She looked surprised. She looked bewildered, I suppose, too. She looked scared, also. I laid there and looked at her. Bob hadn’t said how far away the others like me were. Is it possible that I’d just stumbled across them by heading in the same direction that I’d thought we were heading? Sure. Sure it was; after all, almost everything in my life happened by sheer chance, didn’t it? Except for walking south; I’d done that because Doc told me to do that. But then I’d happened into Brigitte’s town and happened to meet her and all the rest, and everything just seemed to happen to me by chance. “Hey,” I said, quietly. I always spoke quietly, if I could, in Hell. She didn’t react to me right away. “Hey,” I said more loudly. She looked up. “Who are you?” I asked. She just stared at me. “How’d you get here?” I asked. Still nothing. “Can you talk?” I asked her. Just that staring. But she wasn’t trying to get away. She looked around now and then but wasn’t running. Her mouth still hung open. I climbed back down the rock and went up to her, stood right in front of her. Her face still went through various emotions – now blank, now scared, now confused, now blank, and her eyes were still wide. Up close, a foot or so away from her, I could see that she was a little older than I’d thought from up on the rock; her breasts sagged, just a little bit, like they’d been around a while. Her hips, while sexy, were also kind of wide and a little droopy. Her face was lined.

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Also, up close, I could see that she sort of glowed a little. I wondered about that. Her eyes kept looking around, and the pupils were very small. I could hardly see them. I stood in front of her. “Hey,” I said. The glow brightened, and then dimmed. “Hello?” I asked. I stepped a little closer to her and waved my hand. “Can you see me?” Nothing. “Are you here?” I asked her, finally. I didn’t know what else to ask. She just kept looking around, standing in one spot. She hadn’t moved again. I put my hand up towards her. “Hello? Look, I’m not a bad person.” I don’t know why I said that, except that this was Hell and it seemed natural she’d assume just the opposite, that whoever she met here was bad. She didn’t react. I thought about it for a second, watching her. Her face cycled through those expressions again: blank surprised blank scared surprised blank without any kind of pattern. Then her eyes got very wide. She crossed her arms over her chest and her mouth opened up. The glow around her brightened. I saw her tongue moving in her mouth, her eyes looking left and right and then back center and she began backpedaling, moving away, only she was doing it motionlessly. I could see her feet scrambling but they didn’t touch the ground. I reached up my hands. “It’s okay,” I said, but I didn’t know that for sure, since I had no idea what she was or what was going on. But I tried to reassure her. “It’s okay, I’m here to help,” and I reached up for her just as her mouth opened wider and wider and then I tried to grab her shoulders, but my hands went right through her. They passed through her like a ghost. I waved my hands around in her, right through her breasts and stomach and face. She was still screaming, soundlessly, still backpedaling with her feet while her legs remained motionless; I could see them working but it was like they were tied. I stepped back a little and surveyed the situation. The glow was even brighter now, illuminating the ground underneath her. Her eyes were tightly shut and she was writhing, in place, squirming around and throwing her arms around and her head back, whipping her head from side to side.

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I heard another footstep, then, and looked off to my left where the sound came from but I was quickly re-transfixed by the spectacle before me. The girl was glowing and wriggling and I couldn’t look away. Then, there was a sound like a ripping or tearing, like something giving way, and suddenly the glow stopped and she went rigid, and then she fell to the ground, flopping into a heap. I mean fell, too – she materialized right here in Hell, flopping to the ground and laying there, like she was dead. Which, I realized, she was. I realized that I’d just seen her die. I’d watched her soul struggling in the same way her physical body was struggling, and then just as she died, her soul was flung down here into Hell and had landed here. Was that what I’d gone through? Was that how I had ended up in the crevasse? Had I been killed, or died or something, and ended up here, in Hell, the way she had? I knelt down beside her and rolled her over, carefully. Her eyes were closed. Her hair was messed up but her body appeared intact. She wasn’t breathing. I worried about that for a second, wondering what I should do, but then I remembered, she was dead. I wasn’t breathing, either, really. I sat there for a second and watched myself to make sure, but I was right: I don’t breath in Hell, so I guessed that she didn’t need to. I straightened out her arms and legs, being respectful of her naked body, and sat down next to her. After a few moments, I took her hand. I don’t know why I did that; I mean, she was dead and had been flung to Hell, so I should have supposed, I guess, that she was evil, but as I sat there, the more I sat looking at her and picturing what I’d just seen, the more I couldn’t help but think that must have been exactly what happened to me that landed me in Hell, and I was a good person, wasn’t I? So good people could end up in Hell and maybe she was a good person, too. Whatever kind of person she was, after all, her death had been terrifying and confusing; I’d seen that on her face. And she was going to wake up, maybe, soon, and having gone through that terrifying, confusing experience, she’d be in Hell and I thought, I don’t know, that

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maybe she should have someone there to help her when she did. I certainly would have liked it. I wondered if anyone was going to come for her, if she was supposed to be in Hell and if so whether a demon or something would come get her. I’d spent so much time in Hell away from all the torments and damned souls and demons that I’d almost stopped thinking of it as Hell, but a lot of that time was with Bob and he was good at avoiding those things. So I thought maybe, without Bob, that someone might come and as I thought about that, I decided I’d better get some shelter for us, so I took the girl by the armpits and I pulled her over by the rock, underneath a ledge, and sat there, with her head in my lap. I rubbed her face and looked at her and thought that if she did wake up in Hell, at least she’d see a friendly face when she did. I heard another footstep then, and looked around. It was the third one I’ve heard, the third bare-foot-on-rock sound since I’d gotten away from Reverend Tommy, and I finally had the time to focus on it. There’s no night in Hell; it goes through phases, depending on where you are, of easierand harder-to-see, but there’s no night that comes and goes, no sunrise, no sunset. There’s probably parts of it that are eternally dark, if that’s the torment your soul gets for all eternity, but I don’t know for sure because I’ve never seen them. But Hell is dim, in every part I’ve ever been in. It’s like looking through red fog, or like when you wake up in the morning and your eyes aren’t all the way awake and everything is hard to focus on. Hell makes your eyes water trying to see things clearly. I was looking around the rocks and trying to figure out where the footsteps came from, and my eyes were hurting from peering through this miasma and blur. “Hello?” I finally said, quietly. I wasn’t sure I should, but if it was something evil it would find me anyway, wouldn’t it? And maybe I could get it to move and then figure out where it was and run. Only how was I going to run with this girl? And I couldn’t

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leave her there. But what if whatever it was was coming to collect the girl’s soul? Shouldn’t I leave her there? “Who are you?” A voice said. I felt it. I felt it coming for the first time. I felt the pull, the tug, of the physical world. I’d never felt it before. I looked around, wildly, and saw someone standing there, someone about my height, someone about my weight, someone… someone who looked an awful lot like me and she moved forward and she said “Who are you” again and everything went swirly. I clutched at the dead girl. I grabbed onto her and held her with all my might and I called to the person who looked a lot like me and I said “I’m Rachel” but she was gone and I woke up back in the real world again. With a naked girl lying on top of me and a very surprised nurse standing over me.

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Meanwhile, In New York

The last thing he did was cut out the microchip, which was bloody and tiny and slippery. He held it in between his thumb and forefinger, looking at it. Embedded on there, he knew, were the girl – Angelina, although he did not know her name and did not care – were her memories, her experiences, her thoughts and feelings and sensations right up to the moment when her heart had finally stopped beating. Or maybe to the moment when he had cut it out of her chest. He took it and set it on the Display. He looked back at all the parts, all carefully drained out and dried out and spread around. He picked up the hands. He looked at them, and then put them in the bins with the others. He did the same with the feet and the legs. This time, he had taken the hands at the elbows instead of the wrists. He had left the upper arms attached to the torso, and it had taken him a long time to saw the torso in half but very few of his customers wanted the whole body. They all wanted parts. He went back over to his workbench, across from the display. The LCD monitor sat leaning back, carelessly, against the wall. He pressed his thumb against the corner, and willed the power switch on. The network of neural electrical transmitters that his own chip had encouraged to grow, the network that was governed by his chip and his brain, transmitted the impulse to the screen and it glowed. He did not care who had first had the idea to put the chips in babies. He did not care or know who it was who had first realized that the human brain had reached the maximum expansion it could, given the size of the human skull, and that human skulls could not grow any larger given that babies had to be born through women’s hips, and that therefore there would be no more advances in human brain complexity, no more increases in knowledge, unless the human brain could be expanded, and that was done through the chip, a tiny microprocessor with some rudimentary programs that acted as an adjunct to the human brain.

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When embedded into the forehead of a newborn, with a small tendril of wire leading back to the brain, the chip encouraged the nerves to also grow to transmit other electrical impulses. The chip increased the complexity of the brain and with that complexity, the intelligence of the user. It also allowed the chip owner to tap into the worldwide computer network from almost anywhere, to manipulate screens with thought through the same wireless technology that centuries ago had been simply used to download videos. The chip made humans able to interact with computers on the level of thought and effectively made the brain into the entire computer network, the old Internet, accessible much more quickly and effectively than memories were, or the old computers could. That had been the goal: to increase human knowledge and complexity and improve thought. Sharing had been a side-effect of that. So had tracking people. He knew nothing of those things. He knew nothing of the chip or the controversy or the debates or the effects of them. He knew that he had a chip, and that everyone had a chip, and he knew that he had almost been caught because the chip allowed tracking. Some said the chip allowed thought-monitoring. He had heard that. He knew that could not be true, or if it was true, that nobody was bothering with his thoughts because if they were, they would be shocked. He’d been warned, by some, to shield his thoughts and encrypt them and watch who he Shared with. Sharing had been what won people over and why the chips were allowed and then encouraged and were now as normal a part of life as vaccines. He looked at the monitor, and with his thoughts scrolled through the email orders he received, flipping from the newest to the oldest to the one he was going to work on tonight.

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I will pay for a custom built girl it read. Knees to shoulders. Arms are immaterial. Redhead. Large breasted. Small feet. Tracking had been the problem. With the chip, people could be tracked. If the chip was in a body, it could be tracked. Outside of the body, it was dead. The Display could not be tracked. He’d almost gotten caught because the Creations were trackable and people missing loved ones or police looking for criminals had tracked them down and his clients had to destroy them. He hated seeing Creations destroyed. He was a Craftsman. He had learned this art from his mentor. He would teach it to someone else someday. He was not going to have any of his Creations destroyed if he could help it. It was bad enough when they wandered away.

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Part 6: The girl flopped down and started screaming and yelling. She was flailing her arms around and wide-eyed and as I sat up in the hospital bed I was in for some reason, the nurse tried to make sense of it all and turned to the girl who was scrabbling into a corner and waving her arms around. “Leave me alone don’t cut me it hurts it hurts oh god oh god” she was saying, over and over, and the nurse was trying to calm her down. I looked around and saw the door open and heard other voices responding to the nurse calling for help and I stood up. A couple of other nurses or someone came in and a large guy and a girl about my age dressed in regular type of clothes and they all crowded around as the nurse tried to get them to help her with the screaming girl and explain what was going on without sounding nuts. I sat there, watching them, and then realized that they were going to want to talk to me and I got up and edged out as they gently but very firmly grabbed the girl. I was into the hall and looked to my left as more people came running, and to my right, where nobody was coming running so I turned and began walking right and was almost to the end of the hall when I looked back and I saw Brigitte and Doc, standing outside of the hospital room. Brigitte! I was going to yell to her, but I didn’t want to attract attention – more and more people were trying to help the screaming girl and crowding into the room and they were starting to look around. I waved my arm and tried to attract her attention. Then I had an idea. “Doc,” I said, very softly. Doc had told me that he monitored all kinds of audio frequencies through his skin. Two of his tentacles went rigid and he poked Brigitte’s ear, hovered near her, and she turned to her right. She saw me and came running down.

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“Oh, god I missed you,” I said and she grabbed me and hugged me and began kissing me and our lips pressed together, I felt her lips brushing against mine soft and then fiercely, pressing into me, and then her mouth was open and she sucked my tongue right out of my mouth, began wrestling it with her tongue and her arms held me tight against her. We should go, said Doc, and I looked back. The girl was quieter now, still whimpering and repeating over and over not to cut her and the crowd was backing out of the room. I agreed and said “Which way, Doc?” “We should get Samson,” said Brigitte. “Who?” I asked. Doc hovered there, tentacles drifting but quickly. “Mr Damned Soul,” Brigitte said. “I’ve been calling him Samson.” “Why?” “It’s his name,” she said. “Let’s just go. I don’t like him.” Go left, said Doc, and down the stairs. I will go get Samson and we will meet you on the street. I decided that if Doc was okay with him I’d be okay with him but I didn’t like the idea of getting separated from Doc at all. Still, I listened. These were the only two people I trusted in this whole world and one of them wasn’t a person but he’d known me the longest. We went. We didn’t run, just walked with a hurried pace because we weren’t attracting any attention now and didn’t want to. We just wanted to be out of the building and off on our own by the time anyone noticed I was gone. “Am I a prisoner?” I asked Brigitte, who was walking ahead of me. I kept sneaking peeks down her shirt at her cleavage; she was a few steps below me and I couldn’t help myself. I had missed her so much, and been so worried.

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“Not exactly,” said Brigitte. We were in the lobby now. I was wearing only a hospital gown. That wasn’t that alarming, apparently, to the people around there. We walked across the lobby, slowly, and Brigitte took my arm. “They’ll think I’m just taking you outside for some fresh air,” she said. And nobody bothered us. We went out the glass doors of the lobby and into the parking lot. I was, I saw, still in a city. I guessed it was Chicago and Brigitte said I was right. “How’d you find me?” I asked. “There were reports all over the place about some kind of weird event in Chicago that was either a domestic dispute or terrorism or inexplicable, depending on who you listened to. Most people agreed that there was an explosion and that a big part of Chicago had been leveled. But some reports claimed it wasn’t leveled but that it disappeared. Other reports said there had been a couple arguing before the explosion. Doc thought we might find you here, and Samson agreed.” She looked at me. “He’s pretty good at finding you,” she said. We walked over to a picnic table to wait for Doc. “Do you think it’s okay to sit here?” “For now, I guess,” Brigitte said. “I hope they hurry.” “What did you mean I’m not really a prisoner?” “They found only your body at the spot where most of that museum disappeared, and you were out of it. You’ve been unconscious for, like, four days. They want to question you and find out what happened ,and if you were the cause of it.” I sighed. “You were the cause of it, weren’t you?” Brigitte asked. “Yeah. Kind of. Reverend Tommy attacked me.” “Were you in Hell again?” “Yeah.”

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“Was … that other woman there?” “Ivanka?” Brigitte bit her lip and I felt bad. I should have, I guess, pretended to not remember her name but I’m not very good at relationships. That might have been worse, maybe, because then I’d be lying and unfaithful. “No. She wasn’t there. Not this time. She’s not usually there,” I said. Brigitte turned to me. “Why would you do that?” she asked. I didn’t have to ask what it was that she didn’t want me to do. I knew. “I don’t, I don’t know.” I said. I thought about what I could tell her and then just told her the truth. “I just… I just did. I didn’t think about it. It’s different, you know? You don’t know. When I’m there, when I’m in Hell, it felt different, like I don’t know, like I’m a different person or maybe because it’s a different world and I couldn’t stop. I didn’t want to at first and then I just gave in.” We sat quietly. Brigitte was sniffling. “I thought you loved me,” she said. “I do.” Long pause. More sniffling. “I really do.” “Why would you do that?” I didn’t say it was the same question. I’m bad at relationships, but not that bad. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.” Still nothing. “I’m trying to be a good person,” I said. “I’m just not sure how to do that.” She sniffled more. I looked at her hand, sitting there on the bench next to me. We were sitting side by side and I wanted nothing more than to start hugging her and grab her and kiss her and then just hold her and hold her and kiss her and never let go. I started crying now, too. “Can you forgive me? I don’t know what’s going on with me or anything and I’m so mixed up and nothing makes any sense. I’ve only been

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alive for a week but in that week I’ve spent months and years in Hell and there’s demons and people try to kill me and revenants and that dog and Bob is dead and I don’t ever know what to do or what to feel or even how I know my own name. “But I know that the only thing I keep thinking about is you and since I met you I just want to kiss you, just want to hug you, just want to feel your body pressed up against mine and rub you and hold your head against my chest and run my hands down your legs and most of all I want to lie next to you and watch you sleep and never sleep myself because then I wouldn’t be with you.” “Oh, Rachel,” Brigitte sniffed and she turned to me and then there was a loud crash of broken glass and a scream and the girl I’d pulled out of Hell came hurtling out of a window about 7 stories above us, yelling all the way to the ground, which she hit with a thud right in front of us. Almost immediately, she stood up and ran at me and grabbed me and shrieked “You brought me here! How did you do that! Why did you leave me! Where is the man!” They were meant, I think ,to be questions but they didn’t come out that way; they came out as accusations. Brigitte let go of me and pulled back, frightened. The girl literally had a froth in her mouth and her eyes were so wild that she almost didn’t have pupils. There were shouts and yells and Brigitte tugged my arm. “Let’s go,” she said. “We’ve got to get out of here.” I looked around. People were staring and two guys in uniforms of some sort, near the hospital entrance, were eyeing us up. One spoke into his little lapel microphone. I stood up and pulled the girl’s hands off of me. “I can help you,” I said to her, looking her right in the eye “but only if you shut up right now and come with us.” She stopped instantly and stood straight up. Her arms hung at her sides listlessly and she stared blankly at me. Brigitte stared at her and reached out a finger and poked her. The girl did not react. I looked at Brigitte, who looked back at me quizzically.

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“Let’s go,” I said. We started walking and the girl fell in behind me, walking docilely along. We tried to act as though we had every right to walk away, and for all I know, we did have every right to walk away, but I didn’t feel like we had that right and so I was nervous and also, it was hard to act nonchalant when we were being followed by a naked girl. We walked a few hundred feet towards the sidewalk and I stopped. “Wait,” I said. The girl stopped and Brigitte looked at me. “This won’t work,” I said. “We can’t just go walking around Chicago in a hospital gown and her naked and all. Whoever’s looking for us or wanting to talk to me will find us in a second.” Just as I said that I knew the worst was going to happen and I looked up and two police officers came walking around the corner. They might have just been on patrol, for all I know; Doc said police get gas-powered cars because of emergencies, like soldiers do, but these two weren’t driving that I could see. “Damn,” I said. I looked at the girl. I looked at Brigitte and the cops spread out as much as they could, watching us and eyeing us up. I stared back at them. “What’s going on here, ladies?” asked the younger of the two. I wouldn’t figure he was the leader so I thought maybe he was a rookie or something and the older guy was letting him take charge. As I worked through that I tried to figure out both how I knew what a rookie was and also whether that was good or bad. If they really knew that we were people they wanted to talk to and also that the naked girl behind me had jumped out of a window and lived, would the older guy let the younger guy talk? “Nothing,” I said. “Why is she naked?” asked the rookie. “Her?” I asked. Stalling. The cop just looked at me, his mouth not smiling and his eyes not smiling more. “Yeah, right, her,” I said. “She doesn’t have any clothes.”

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The rookie opened his mouth, ready to fire off a second question but I think I surprised him with that because he looked at the older cop then back at me. “Well, I can see that,” he said, trying to work his way through the system. I guess he wasn’t expecting honesty, especially unhelpful and obvious honesty. “Where… where are her clothes?” I saw his eyes flick to the older cop again and I don’t think he meant to ask that question. “I don’t know,” I said, deciding to stick with honest answers. “Where are your clothes?” the cop asked. I held up the hospital gown’s edge a little. It didn’t cover very much in the first place and as I held it up it sort of flashed my pubic area. “These are my clothes,” I said. “Your other clothes,” the rookie said. “I don’t know where they are,” I told him. Brigitte stepped over by me and took my hand. She looked at the cop. “We’re kind of in a hurry,” she said. “To go where?” the older cop asked, maybe trying to keep the rookie from messing this up further. “Away from here,” I said, and flipped my head back at the hospital. More and more people were gathered in front of the doors, I could see. Some were pointing up, some were pointing at us, and most were milling around. Those two uniformed guys, who didn’t look like these two uniformed guys, were still standing there. “You have anything to do with those people all staring at you?” the older cop asked. So he hadn’t come here just to get us and didn’t know anything about us; he’d just stumbled across some half-naked girls and naked girls walking down the street. The rookie, I noticed, was staring at my hand where Brigitte held it and looking from that to her and back to the hands. I figured he thought Brigitte was pretty and couldn’t believe that she was a lesbian. I wanted to say Ha! But I held back.

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The older cop looked at the rookie and then held his hand up to his ear. I didn’t know what he was doing. He cupped his hand over his ear and leaned his head over a little. He held up his right hand to the rookie, one finger up in the air. I didn’t know what that meant, either. Then he took his hand down and nodded. “You ladies are coming with us,” he said. He turned his head to the rookie and said “Get the cuffs” and I saw a little red dotthing in his ear and realized it must be a radio. He’d heard something on the radio. The rookie began pulling little plastic strips from a slot on his belt and said “Okay, let’s not have any trouble here. Hold your hands out. You first,” he said to the naked girl, who was standing off to the side of me and Brigitte. She just stood there, blankly. “Come on,” the rookie said, “Hold out your arms.” The girl did not react. She just stared off into space. The older cop had backed up a step or two; I guessed he was covering our escape route. His hand was on his ray gun. “Let’s have ‘em,” the rookie told the naked girl and she still did not react. He held his hand up cautiously, reached for her hand. She did not react as his hand neared hers. He touched her hand gingerly, not wanting to seem inappropriate, maybe, and then grabbed it more roughly, pulling her arm up. He took one of the plastic strips, holding the other two in his teeth. He wound the strip around her wrist and slotted it through. Those must be cuffs, I thought. Having gotten it around one of her wrists, he said “Now the other one,” gritting it out through the strips in his teeth. But the naked girl, as before, did not react. He held her arm in one hand and reached his left arm out to grab her right hand, but that brought him uncomfortably close to her naked body and the full, firm breasts that he kept looking at without trying to seem like he was looking at them, so he dropped her right hand and it swung down to hang limply. He then picked up her left hand and realized that he had the same problem. He turned to us. “Is she drugged or something?” “She’s dead,” I said. I tried to sound helpful.

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“What?” “She’s dead. She was in Hell and I brought her out. I’m not sure how she’s even got a body. But she does, because you can see it, only she’s dead.” The rookie looked at the older cop, who’d had enough. He pulled out his ray gun and pointed it at us. “Cuff them. She’s not doing anything.” He looked back at me. “You’re not funny, you know.” “I’m not trying to be funny. She really is dead.” That fazed the rookie a little, and he hesitated. I thought of something, and I looked at the naked girl and said “Attack him.” I didn’t specify anyone, but it worked. She leaped at the rookie and barreled into him, moving surprisingly fast and heavily for a slim girl who had been standing perfectly still. I don’t know if she planned it or not but she shoved with him into the older cop, who was knocked back and stumbled. His ray gun fell and I yelled “get the gun,” and the girl abruptly let go of the rookie and scrambled for the gun and the older cop tried to get it, too, but she head butted him and grabbed for the gun and held it in her hands and stopped. The cops sat up and she was just kneeling there, gun held in her hands, cupped in them, almost. As they moved towards her I realized what had happened and said “Give it to me,” and she shouldered over and rolled down and threw the gun to me and I took it and gave it to Brigitte who would know how to work it. The cops froze as Brigitte pointed the gun at them. “She listens to you,” said Brigitte. “She sure does,” I said. We backed slowly away, and then I realized that we were backing towards the hospital, where a crowd of people was waiting and there were security guards. I began to move towards the cops, again, but that was no good, either.

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“What do we do?” I asked. The naked girl was standing, looking at me, and the cops were looking at each other. I thought maybe they were planning something and thought I should tell them to stop it but how would that work? Tell them to stop doing whatever they were doing? “I’m not sure,” Brigitte answered, and we stood there, with her pointing the gun at the cops and the cops slowly lowering their hands, and then suddenly the rookie remembered something and pulled his own ray gun out, and pointed it at Brigitte. “Okay, miss, drop the gun,” he said. I couldn’t believe it had taken him that long to realize he was armed, too. “I won’t,” Brigitte said. There was noise behind us. “Drop it or I’ll shoot,” the rookie said. “You won’t,” Brigitte said. The naked girl was staring at me. The noise behind us grew louder. It included some shouts and some yells and some noises like scuffling. “I will,” said the rookie. “Just shoot her,” said the older cop. “Get him,” I told the naked girl, who hesitated for a moment until I looked at the rookie and she jumped on him again and tried to tackle him. He was ready for it and he began fending her off, hampered only slightly by his need to not touch her breasts or vagina or rear end because of her nudity, and hampered also by the fact that she was biting. The older cop wasn’t so shy and grabbed at her and I dared looking behind us now because there was definitely a lot of noise coming up there. I saw, when I looked, the crowd of people moving aside as Doc and Mr. Damned Soul, the guy Brigitte called

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Samson, were fighting with a couple of security guards. Doc had zapped someone, I thought, because there was a guy lying on the ground twitching, and he was hovering near Mr. Damned Soul-Samson’s ear. That guy, for his part, was shoving people and punching people and looking for a way out. The older cop pulled the naked girl off the rookie and held his arms around her waist; her legs and arms were still flailing towards the rookie. “Attack the guy that’s holding you,” I told her. She immediately began kicking backwards and throwing elbows and writhing. The rookie, meanwhile, stood up and held up his gun and there was a hum and I felt some ambient heat and he went back down. Brigitte had shot him. She looked as surprised as all of us, I’m sure, felt, but she then grabbed the gun he’d dropped and handed it to me just as there was a yell and I looked back, taking the gun, and Mr. Damned Soul had broken through and was running towards us. “Hold onto that,” Brigitte told me, and I turned back. The naked girl had spun around and was biting the older cop’s ear and he was now trying to shove her away. Brigitte said “Call her off,” and I told the naked girl to come by me. She immediately stopped and wriggled free and came to stand by my left side. Samson came running up and Doc was right there and Doc came and hovered by my ear. Hello Rachel he said and I was really grateful because I’d missed Doc. My throat got a little chokey feeling. “Give me that,” said Samson, and took the ray gun, which I wasn’t happy about but I also didn’t object because I wasn’t sure I knew how to use it and he looked like he did know how to do something with it. “I guess the idea of sneaking away is done for,” I said. Samson shot me a look but didn’t say anything. “Where do we go?” I asked anyone in general. The older cop was standing there with his hands held up but now I heard sirens.

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Straight ahead said Doc in my ear and I relayed that to everyone and we took off running, pausing only long enough for Samson to zap the older cop, and for me to tell the naked girl to follow me. Just up around the corner was the big street we’d been heading for. There were no buildings across the street, just a park of some kind and I could smell water. The main street was crowded with bicycles and people walking and horses and carriages and dirigibles and unicyles and all the other things that people use to get around, and I heard the sirens louder and could hear the rumble of engines like the ones the cops down south had used. With Doc’s directions we ran straight across the street, making more of a spectacle than I thought we should, but a corpse , a naked girl, and an octopus running with two girls one of whom is in a hospital gown, would probably make a big spectacle, anyway, even if they didn’t stop traffic and even if the corpse, Mr. Damned Soul, didn’t keep threatening to shoot anyone who got too near him. “Stop that,” I told him, and the naked girl stopped and I grabbed at her but she didn’t move and I said “For Pete’s sake, I wasn’t talking to you, I was telling him to stop so get going” and then she did, and I was wishing that she was a little less obedient and we made it into the park and I could smell water more strongly. There were people in the park, sitting and reading or walking or doing what people do in parks. I don’t know what they do. Some were sleeping and I envied them because I was really tired. We kept on running and the sirens were really loud but not directly behind us yet. Doc steered us through some trees and then down into an underpass, a little kind of footpath that went under another footpath for no discernible reason, and then back up. We slowed down as the sirens grew more faint and there was nobody near us. Doc was beeping and whirring. We stopped, just on the other side of the underpass, and everyone looked at me.

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“What,” I said, but they just stared, and then I realized that they were looking not at me but at Doc, waiting for him to do something. He’d stopped floating, and had settled onto my shoulder. I could hear little whizzes and clicks. “What’s going on, Doc? Do you know where to go now?” Hold Doc said. Hold. Searching Hold. Then he brightened and lifted up again. We need to go this way he said and pointed one little plasticky tentacle off to my right. “You heard him. Let’s go,” I said, but Samson and Brigitte were already turning that way. I guessed they’d gotten used to listening to Doc while I was gone. Which brought up a question. “How long was I gone, Doc?” Doc knew what I meant. 4 days you were unconscious. “How long has it been since I was captured?” 7 days. Seven days. I thought about that. That meant that I had been unconscious, held by Reverend Tommy and Brigitte’s father, for 3 days, probably while they traveled here. 3 days in which I had not gone to Hell. Also, that reminded me that Brigitte’s father and Rex were dead, and it reminded me of how I’d acted when he died and I felt bad. I also wondered when I should tell her. Was being on the run from the law the right time to break that news? I’m unversed in social graces. “So it was four days from when the Art Museum disappeared?” I asked Doc, trying to work it all through. We were walking, now, through an area of the park that was mostly little trees about a hundred yards apart. I could hear water, too, and wondered if Doc was taking us to the water to try to get a boat or something. Yes, Doc said, and then ordered us to stop. “What’s here?” I asked. Brigitte had come to stand next to me. We all looked around. The sounds of the sirens were more distant, still, and I guessed we’d come pretty far even in the minute or two that we were walking, but not that far.

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Nothing, said Doc, and came and sat on my shoulder. “What are we supposed to do?” I asked. You have to take us, Doc said. “Take us where?” Away from here. We need to leave. “I don’t know how to do that, Doc. We need a dirigible or something.” No. You have to take us from this world. “What?” I asked. You have to move us from this world. We will not escape otherwise. They will close in on us. I have been searching for a way and I cannot find one. So I have led us far enough away to give you time to move us into one of the other worlds that you can go to and then we will use that to escape and come back here. I just stared at Doc. “That’s crazy,” I told him. Octopus or not, he had to be wrong. “I don’t know how to do that.” Nevertheless, it is within your capabilities. “How do you know that? How do you know what I can do?” What was it Reverend Tommy had said, about moving freely I wondered, but Samson, Mr. Damned Soul, interrupted. “I hear voices,” he growled. He still stunk like sulfur and corpse. “We’d better get moving. If this is Doc’s plan, then you can do it, so get to it.” He glared at me. Maybe it wasn’t glaring; maybe that was just the way eyes looked when you’d been in Hell for a long time and then came back as a stinky corpse guy. Brigitte took my hand. “If Doc says so,” she said, and didn’t have to finish the sentence.

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I thought about it. I didn’t know how to go about beginning to do it. I wondered if I should concentrate, or clap my hands, or spin, or just maybe say a magic word or something. I tried to picture Hell, and then I stopped trying because I didn’t want to go there. “Doc, does it have to be Hell?” I asked. “Hurry,” said Samson. There were definite noises of footsteps and horses’ hooves and people yelling about who went what way and what way others should take and how they should spread out and I heard the words shoot to kill. It can be to any world you can travel to, said Doc. But I didn’t know what worlds I could travel to. I guessed it had to be Hell. What other worlds were there? Just Heaven, I guessed, and I wasn’t sure I could get us all in there. I squinched my eyes shut real tight and thought, as hard as I could, about Hell and the places I’d been and the people I’d met there… and then felt guilty about Ivanka and tried to not picture her but the best I could do was not picture her naked and then that came into my mind, too, and I was getting distracted and the voices were coming closer and there was more shouts of what to do when they found us and none of it was good and then I heard there they are and I popped open my eyes. “I can’t do it,” I said to Doc. I looked at Brigitte and said “I’m sorry. I never went there on purpose. It just happened when I fell asleep or was knocked out that time, so I don’t know how to get there…” but I stopped because two things happened. First, a group of people burst through the trees and said “Stop! Put your hands up!” and second, Samson said: “It happens when you’re knocked out?” and he grabbed Brigitte and the naked girl and pushed them towards me with one hand, and shot me with the ray gun in the other and before I could even try to protest, as Brigitte and the naked girl smashed into me and I started to fall, I felt the ray gun hitting me, and it was hot and crackly all over

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my body, like I was wrapped in bubble wrap that was all popping only the bubbles weren’t filled with air but were filled with hot water, and then everything went black

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Meanwhile, In New York: He worked carefully and slowly throughout the night, looking frequently at the specifications. He knew he would not finish the order tonight and because of that he paced himself and worked a little more slowly than he usually would. It would not matter; he was ahead of schedule on this order, anyway, and because he had slowed his pace and had the time, the craftsmanship would be better and he could select the parts with a greater eye towards detail, towards assembling the whole. Making zombies could be an art. Or it could be a business. He tried to make it an art while also having it be a business. He wanted to make money at this, why else would he do it, but he wanted his customers to appreciate the zombies he made, the creations he came up with, the eye for detail and the little touches, like the fact that most of the sewing was done inside the skin, resulting in less-visible stitching and cleaner seams. There were plenty of people who tried to make zombies and what they made were awful patchwork corpses that were kept alive by implanted small Constant Rescusitators, corpses that required constant attention from people who were basically more plumber than creator or doctor. There were a select few who could make actual zombies, zombies that did not require mechanical intervention to move and act lifelike in some fashion, zombies that could follow basic commands and perform rote activities, like cleaning or having sex with each other or with their master. Those zombies, though, were problematic in that they generally were dumb machines and would follow the orders of anyone who happened to command them, even other zombies (although it was rare that zombies of that order could talk.) He was, so far as he knew, the only one who made actual zombies that could walk and talk and interact and which were hardly distinguishable from a human being, zombies

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that moved among the human populace and did not draw much attention, but zombies that would nonetheless do what zombies were supposed to do, which was to follow orders given them by their master. He did not love the business, or hate it. He had taken it up because it was a way for someone who otherwise lacked much in the way of marketable skills or imagination to make money, enough money that his front, a diner, did not occupy much of his time anymore. The diner he had inherited from his mother and father, a business they had run and which they had hoped their son would not only carry on but would expand; they envisioned a chain of diners across the country, headed by their wealthy son who would travel the country touring them in fine suits, renting three or four cars of the train or perhaps traveling in his own dirigible. But he had neither the inclination nor the business acumen to run the diner itself, let alone make it more successful than it had been, and it had fallen onto hard times and existed only as a means of testing his creations, his zombies, and to explain where he got his income, income he was careful to hide and keep quiet as best he could, he had been taught how to do that. He would not have the diner at all but he needed a testing ground and he needed some visible means of support because in this era of instant sharing and access to all information, having money and no support might attract the attention of the government, such as it was and he wanted no attention like that. He had learned how to make zombies from an Army Lieutenant who knew how the military had done it, who knew how the military used to plan to use zombies as soldiers but had decided that they were not much better than regular men and women as soldiers; they followed orders better and were harder to stop, but were limited in their capacity to think and react without orders and required a great deal of time and energy to make. Most military zombies, the Lieutenant had told him, were used now for suicide missions, and as pleasure companions for real soldiers, who either did not know or did not care who they were having sex with.

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The Lieutenant had taught him how to make zombies, how to craft them so finely that they were almost people. The Lieutenant had been unfamiliar with chips, which were only coming into vogue those years ago, and so he had needed to figure that out for himself. He’d also needed to figure out for himself why it was important to not leave a half-finished zombie laying around, which was why he worked slowly tonight. One couldn’t finish up too much of the zombie and then leave it sit. Either finish it all, or only get through about one-third, he’d developed as a rule of thumb. He’d developed that rule at the same time he’d come to the realization that a torso with arms but no head or no legs, pulling itself around on the streets of New York City, was bound to raise questions.

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Part Seven: “Holy mother of god,” Brigitte whispered hoarsely and I sat up, naked again, and looked around and I would have started to cry but I was so scared instantly that I couldn’t even think straight. Every other time that I’d appeared in Hell I’d been relatively safe – relatively being the key word, because, you know, it’s Hell, but this time was different. There was a giant demon standing right in front of us. His back was to us, which maybe helped him not immediately hear Brigitte’s whisper, which was not repeated because Samson clapped a hand over her mouth. The demon stood at least 100 feet tall and if that doesn’t seem tall to you, well, then, you’ve never seen something that’s a hundred feet tall with three legs and a spiked tail and four arms and horns and really sharp scales all over it and breathing fire and fangs that are as big as you. It seemed plenty big to me and plenty scary and its tail was waving around just over our heads as we sat in a little group there. It was a bigger group than I’d expected because also there were the cops who had surrounded us and they were still pointing ray guns at us. There were ten of them, or so, and they were in a circle around us but most had dropped their guns in surprise and were staring, too, so while they formed a circle around my group, they weren’t capturing us. Some were staring at the demon that loomed above us and which had not yet, it seemed, noticed us. Some were staring at the giant cauldron that the demon was stirring with his pitchfork, a cauldron that was easily forty feet tall and sat on a giant fire and which appeared made of rock or some metal that had started its life as rock, and although we could not see into the cauldron, we could hear screams, human screams, coming from it, as the demon poked his pitchfork in and stirred it and leered and barked and made sounds that really can’t be described other than to say that they were demon sounds and they made me want to retch and peel my skin off at the same time.

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Also, there were two other demons, I saw now, all three-legged and four-armed, standing around the cauldron. Two of them had just the one head but one had three heads, three small heads but three nonetheless. None of us moved. Brigitte grabbed my hand and the naked girl stood motionless in front of me, backing up a little, and Samson stood off to my right. Doc hovered over my shoulder. He wasn’t whirring or clicking at all right now. The demons continued stirring and the cops slowly backed away, towards us, none of them talking. They backed up until they were right by us. Periodically, the demon’s tail would swish over us and the stench of hell would be carried along with it; plus the tail was giving off an awful lot of heat, making Hell even hotter. We all looked at each other and then I realized that Brigitte and Samson were looking at me. The naked girl was staring just straight ahead, pressed against me. Because Brigitte and Samson were staring at me, eventually the cops did, too. I couldn’t tell them not to look at me, not without risking the demons hearing. It was only a matter of time until one of the five heads 100 feet above us turned and saw us and we were pitched into the cauldron, too. I wondered what that would feel like and if when my body woke up in real life, I would be pulled out of it. I wondered who was watching my body while it was in real life, and whether the others’ bodies were there, too. They all had clothes; I did not. The naked girl had started naked and stayed naked. She looked at me, now, too. I looked around. We were in mountains, giant rocky outcrops of mountains that pushed up through the earth and jutted into the sky; they looked like cones of rock that been pushed up through the ground by something underneath. There were no foothills or rising-gradually-slopes, just these great granite cones surrounding us. They had nooks and crannies in them and one was only a hundred yards or so away. I pointed at it. The others looked and a cop nodded. We started walking quietly over there, spreading out a little.

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Doc floated near me, and his glow was dim. I couldn’t ask him what was going on, but I held I out my hand and he landed on it. I carried him. He felt cool and smooth and pleasant in the toxic malted air of Hell. We all walked carefully and slowly, trying not to stumble or trip and peering through the smoky mucky haze that surrounded us, trying to ignore the screams that were growing louder and now also trying to ignore the hissing steaming bubbles that were frothing over the edge of the cauldron as the mixture of dead souls boiled over. We were about 10 yards from the nearest crevice when the first demon saw us. I heard a roar that was half-intelligible. It sounded like someone talking backwards, like I should know the words, maybe but they were coming in a weird order and with an accent that interfered with me understanding them. We didn’t have to understand them, though, to know that things were going wrong. There was that roaring call, and then two more and then the tail swished lower and scooped behind us. I heard it rumbling along the rock behind us and looked over my shouder and saw the tail, knife-like scales and all, scraping along the ground and curling over, off to my left, ready to sweep us up towards the demon, which was turning itself and howling and watching us as the others moved, too. It slammed into all of us; I heard it hit some of the cops who were behind me and heard them grunt and then it hit me, too, and it kept sweeping. I was pushed off of my feet and fell and was tumbled along the ground, head over heels and sideways and up and down, the rocks pushing into me and scraping and bruising and ouching, and people were tumbling over me, too. I kept a tight grip on Doc and I lost my grip on Brigitte which made me try to call out but I got a mouthful of hot dirt when I did and that tail kept sweeping until it scooped us forward, along the rock, the scales cutting into us, and stopped and we were dropped at the feet of the demon that we’d appeared under, and it was squatting down and staring at us as the three-headed demon came around, too, so we were between two demons, each a hundred feet tall. Their tales interlocked to form a 10foot-tall wall around us; it was scramble over that or into the fire or through their legs, and one of the cops tried the through-the-legs route and ran.

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The three-headed one’s arm shot down, only two claws on its hand, a finger and a thumb each with a sharp talon-like claw on it. The hand came down and the claws, pincer-like, sliced right through the cop, who did not stop running. He was sliced in half and his legs kept going and he kept screaming, his head intact on one half of his body. We all just stared and I heard Brigitte gasp a little. The hand that had sliced him in half then picked up half and dropped it into the cauldron and the other hand picked up the other half and then I looked to my right because the demon that was closer to us had just leaned down and picked up Naked Girl, who was struggling. The demon we were by had full hands – really full, they each had something like 13 fingers with no claws on them but the hands themselves were covered with spiky-thorn-like growths, and it closed around her, causing Naked Girl to scream and shake and begin to struggle. On my left the demon’s other hand came shooting down and grabbed one of the cops and lifted them both up. The cop, too, was shouting bloody murder. We’ve got to get out of here, I thought, but how? The three-head demon had leaned down again and with its two-claw hand it sliced up two more cops and then began scooping up their parts. There was some thundering shuddering and the third demon began moving around. The first demon had thrown the cop into the cauldron, but Naked Girl had not let go of his hand when he’d opened it up; we could see her, way up there, clinging to the hand and still yelling but not wanting to get dumped into the water. The demon began trying to brush her off and the three-head demon was still scooping up halves of cops. “Doc,” I whispered, opening up my hands, “what can we do?” But he was almost not glowing at all, and his tentacles wavered weakly. He didn’t say anything. “Come on,” Samson murmured and grabbed my arm. I grabbed Brigitte’s and we started moving towards the demon’s foot nearest us. He waved the ray gun and shot it towards two cops, who dropped down and out of the way. We did not run, and the three-

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head demon scooped up the cops he’d shot instead of coming after us, which seemed to me to be wrong of us to do, but I didn’t think of it much then. We reached the foot and kept going, off to the left, and by then we’d broken into a full run. Brigitte was ahead of me and was holding back, a little, I could tell, but she wasn’t letting go of me again. Her clothes were all shredded from the tail-sweeping and the rocks and I worried that she was hurt. I looked back and saw Naked Girl still hanging onto the demon’s hand, nearer the wrist now, and hoped that she would escape, but I couldn’t worry much about it. The third demon, the one on the far side of the cauldron, stretched out its leg and slammed a foot down in front of us. That caused us to veer, right, again, and the first demon’s tail was now sweeping back. It was trying to grab Naked Girl off while sweeping its tail around, and was standing between us and Three-Head. We were running and running as fast as we could towards one of the rock-cone-mountains and were about a couple hundred yards from it when the third demon slammed its pitchfork down and speared Samson, who was in front of us by about ten yards. Just speared him straight through with the middle prong, which was honed to a fine point. I saw it go through his head and down into his body, cleaving it right in half. Brigitte and I and the cops that had followed us stopped, and Brigitte let out a little No and I thought for only a moment before I pulled her and we began running again, straight in the same direction, as the demon lifted up his pitchfork, which meant that we ran right towards where Samson was, and then right in between the severed halves of his body, which I saw, grossly, were still moving, his hands waving and legs trying to move and his head watching us. “I’ll catch up,” he said, and I almost stopped when he said that and two of the cops did stop, but one of them simply collapsed; I think he’d had it and his mind had given out, because he just sat there on his knees staring straight ahead. I watched him over my shoulder as I pulled Brigitte along. Her eyes were closed and I felt terrible for her that she had to see this.

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But she didn’t see the pitchfork come down and slice the cop in half, so I guess I’m grateful for that. I’m sure she was, too. We reached the rock and pushed into a crevice, me, Brigitte, and two of the cops, the only two that remained. We backed way in and were in a shadow. There was a thundering tromp tromp tromp as the demons made their way to us. Through a small slice of horrid light from outside, I could see a giant foot as they stood there. Then the edge of a pitchfork came in, probing around. Then nothing, for a while, but I could still see the foot. Then, the slice of light was blotted out and one giant finger came in. I gasped and Brigitte made a strangled sound as the finger poked around, the claw on the end of it like the three-headed demon’s slicing claw. It waved around but couldn’t poke right in there enough. We pushed back more, a mass of four people crunching into one, and waited there. I hoped against hope that I would just wake up, and when I thought of that, I grabbed Brigitte’s hand again; we needed to be touching, I figured, when I woke up in order for her to go with me and I was not going to leave her here. For the next what-seemed-like an hour or more, maybe hours, periodically we’d hear scraping and crashing and the pitchfork or a hand would poke in and try to get us. We could also dimly hear the boiling and screaming from the cauldron of souls. My only hope was that I would wake up back in that park in Chicago or wherever they’d taken my body to. Someone must have taken my body, right? After all, there were other cops than the ones that had come to Hell with us and they would find my body there and take it somewhere. But I didn’t wake up and then it got worse because there suddenly started being a grinding scraping sound and the rock shuddered. Then the rock moved, behind us, twisting a little, and some dust came down. “They’re moving the rock,” said one of the cops. “Lifting it, probably,” said the other. Brigitte grabbed onto my shoulder and I wrapped my arms around her.

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The rock continued to shudder and groan and move and dust fell and then little chunks fell and then more chunks and we heard cracking and tearing and then suddenly the entire mountain just rose up over us and we looked up to see the three demons standing there, holding the cone of rock about fifty feet above our heads. The threeheaded one let out a triple roar and they threw the rock off to the side; when it landed it shook the whole of the ground and we all took off running for the nearest rock which was about 200 yards away, on the other side of the two parts of cop and two parts of Samson which the demons had left sitting there while they’d been trying to get us. We ran past them and Samson’s arm waved weakly; he was saying something but I couldn’t hear what. The demons made pretty short work of us, though. They simply reached down and scooped us up; me and Brigitte were still holding hands and so one of the demons got us in one hand. We were lucky; it was a demon with relatively smooth hands and he simply smushed us into them and we clung to each other as he lifted us up. One of the cops got grabbed by the thorn-hand and the other cop got sliced in two by three-head. I couldn’t take it anymore and I simply screamed as loud as I could. I kept my arms wrapped around Brigitte and she kept her arms wrapped around me. “I’m sorry I’m so sorry I’m sorry” I kept saying. We were being carried to the cauldron and Brigitte leaned her mouth against my ear and said: “I forgive you, Rachel! I love you!” “I love you, too!” I said. We were both crying. The demon held us so tightly I could almost not get the air to say the words. Tears rolled down my face and we just hugged each other. The demon lifted up his hand over the cauldron. We were in his hand, crunched together, and staring down into that boiling swirling lake of souls, spinning around and around and screaming in torment for all eternity, when I remembered Naked Girl. “Hang on, Brigitte,” I yelled.

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She clung to me and I figured that was good enough. I wrapped my arms not around her now but around one of the demon’s fingers. Brigitte shifted so she was a little to the side and I grabbed on with all my life and all my strength as the demon opened his hand to send us tumbling into the cauldron. I didn’t know what would happen if I fell into the cauldron and then woke up, but I didn’t want to find out what that cauldron felt like and I didn’t think I could hang onto Brigitte in there. Plus, her whole body was here, so wouldn’t it be worse for her? Plus she had the baby… the baby, my baby?... and I couldn’t let that happen. So I hung onto the hand and the demon turned his hand over and we stayed there, hanging onto his finger, over the boiling water. Souls’ screams drifted up to us and I heard the demon mutter/roar something in his backward Hell talk and he shook his hand up and down once, twice, three times. But I hung on and Brigitte hung on and we stayed there. The demon brought up his pitchfork in his other hand, poking at us. He poked it into my side once, trying to scrape us off his hand, then pulled it away, then brought it back and as he did, I let go with one arm and wrapped my arms around the fork part of it. Brigitte didn’t say anything; she just hung on and we slid down to the base of the pitchfork’s tines, which was smaller than the demon’s finger and which I could get a better grip around. It was easy – all we had to do was avoid the really sharp triangle at the end. The demon pulled that up and looked at it, holding us right near his face. His sulfur-stink-hot-fire breath wafted over us and I tried not to breath. It felt like my face would melt. Then he shook the fork back and forth and said something again in his backward talk, and then he reversed the pitchfork and held it up, over the cauldron. That’s when I realized my mistake – he could simply poke us into the cauldron and we’d have to let go, or probably would let go when we were immersed in boiling Hell water. So I let go as he waved it back. He stuck it into the cauldron almost immediately as we let go and I yelled and we fell, dropping down and down and down about 70 feet before we were caught… by the demon’s hand again. Immediately, I scrambled and grabbed onto his thumb.

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The demon began lifting us up and held us in front of his head again, staring at us – me clinging to his thumb and Brigitte clinging to me. “Oh, man, I hope I wake up soon,” I said, and the demon opened his mouth wide and leaned his head back. He brought the hand up to his mouth… was he simply going to eat us? That wasn’t fair! That wasn’t what they did. They were supposed to keep trying to put us in the soup. He leaned back his head and opened his mouth wide and brought his hand to it. We were about ten feet away from his mouth, with me still clinging to his thumb, when we began falling again. The hand had fallen off his wrist and was tumbling to the ground. I held onto the thumb as we flipped through the air over and over, and the hand landed on the ground underneath us, with us on top (luckily, or it would have crushed us, I suppose) and we scrambled off and looked up to see what had happened. There was a beautiful naked lady on a winged horse with a sword swirling around the demon. She darted in and out and in and out and stabbed at the demon, howling at it and the horse whinnying, as the demon swung its pitchfork around and tried to bat at her. She darted in and out and poked at its head, too small to do much damage to the demon but also too quick for it to get easily. She got a score on its eye and the demon howled. She swung around the back of his head and slashed her sword at its neck, and the demon put its remaining hand to the wound there, which sprayed glowing-green-blood, a giant waterfall of it that began spattering around us. We backed away from the demon and the cauldron, still watching the fight as the Valkyrie…. Ivanka! It was her! … continued to fly around and harass the demon. The other two demons, three head and horn-hand came around, too, and began waving their arms around her and trying to pitchfork-stab her, but they were slow, too, and she was fast.

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There were giant puddles of green blood everywhere now, glowing and stinking and looking acidic, and we backed and backed away, until we were standing near half of Samson. “Help me,” his head said to me. I looked down at the half of him that had spoken. “What?” I asked. “Help me,” he said. I ducked back as some green splatter flew near us. “How?” I asked. I still held tight to Brigitte’s hand. I never knew when I was going to wake up and I was not leaving her here. Brigitte’s eyes were really wide but she was holding together well; she was a lot stronger than I thought. “Pull my other half over here.” He pointed with the arm he had, and I looked and saw the other half of him, weakly struggling to crawl over to him. “I’ve been trying for a while but I can’t get it here.” I tugged at Brigitte, who said to me “We should help him. He helped Doc and I a lot.” So we scuttled over there, still watching Ivanka stab and poke at the demon and keeping an eye on Samson, too. All three demons were swinging at her, trying to grab her horse, but it was pretty clear it wasn’t an even match – Ivanka was a Valkyrie and they really know how to fight. I remembered the first time I’d ever seen her, there in Hell. It was the second time I recalled going there. After that first time, climbing out of that crevasse, I thought I was out of Hell forever. I didn’t even know how I’d gotten out. One minute I’d been sitting on the edge of that deep dark hole and the next I’d been standing in a diner. The second time in Hell was even scarier for me because I had no reason to expect to go there (or the third, or the fourth. Each of those times I didn’t realize I’d go to Hell whenever I fell asleep. By the fifth, I was pretty sure what was going to happen

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and though I didn’t like it, I at least knew to expect it. That was in part because on my fourth trip here I met Bob. That was the long trip, the time that Bob had explained to me at least a bit about how Hell worked and some other things, like what revenants were.) I landed, that second time, in a part of Hell that was near some action, too – I fell asleep walking out of New York City with Doc. We were in the outskirts, in the suburbs of New York City, heading south as often as I could. I couldn’t go on walking. I was exhausted and scared and crying and couldn’t figure out what was going on, and finally, Doc said it would be okay to sleep. I think he knew, although I never asked him, knew that I was going to Hell as soon as I closed my eyes because the last thing he said was be careful as I climbed into a grove of bushes in a little park and tried to settle down. I thought then that he was only warning me to be careful where I slept. I fell asleep almost instantly and woke up on the other side of that broad plain of Hell that I’d seen the first time, or one very like it, with people still being tortured as they crawled across it. The part of Hell that I was in right there was flowing molten lava with little rock islands in it, and I was on a rock island in a river of lava, or more like a maze made up of rivers of lava. Lava flowed around me in all directions and I immediately hunkered down and just sat there. I was too scared even to scream. I just stared at the lava around me and felt the hot rock on me and the hot air going in through my nose and stinging my eyes and I heard the flowing sound… have you ever heard the sound of rock that’s so hot it flows like water? It hisses and rumbles like a million deep-voiced snakes and the sound just grinds at your spine, taunting you with the idea that rock can become liquid… and I just stared around. Not too far away were the people and the demons torturing them; these weren’t the hundred-foot-tall kind, they were smaller but plenty big and they were dumping lava on the people and poking them and stepping on them and I could hear their demonic laughter. Then, as I watched, I saw something come flying down over them. I saw this thing with wings, through my tears, come swooping down and begin flying back and forth over the crowd of people, over and over. It would swoop down and then fly around

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and then back up, sometimes near the demons and sometimes not. As I watched, I realized that the demons were angry at this thing; whatever it was, they didn’t want it there. But it kept flying back and forth, ignoring that the demons were throwing rocks and stuff at it, and I think sometimes they were throwing souls at it, too. At one point, it flew really near a demon, which took its pitchfork out and tried to stab it. I saw something flash – I didn’t know then, still, what the flying thing was – and heard, even that far away, the demon’s howl over the thrumming of the lava and the wailing of the souls. I watched it for a long time, wondering what I was looking at and trying to keep from being even more frightened than I was, and then I got really scared because suddenly it was flying right at me. It came directly for me and I tried to scrunch down on the bare rock I was sitting on, the rock all hot against me, as it flew more and more towards me. I covered my hands with my eyes and watched as the flying thing grew into a horse with wings, and then I saw that there was a woman sitting on it; she was beautiful and naked and gorgeous and really really big… and she was coming straight for me. I didn’t know what I could do. I couldn’t fight her, I couldn’t do anything and I didn’t want her or anyone to notice me. She landed on a rock near me, the horse and Ivanka (although I didn’t know her name) and I laid there on the rock, crying again. “Please,” I sniffled. “Please don’t hurt me. Help me.” She looked at me. She motioned for me to sit up, and I did so, sobbing. “Help me,” I said. She looked me over. “Please,” I said. Then her horse flapped its wings and she took off and flew straight up into the sky, going higher and higher and higher until she disappeared.

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I woke up shortly after that, lying in a set of bushes in the park in the suburbs, more scared and confused than I’d been and also wet from dew. It was Doc that explained to me that she was a Valkyrie, but I thought then that maybe he thought I was making it up that I went to Hell, or I thought, maybe he doesn’t understand. There’s limits to what an octopus can process, I’ve learned. Now, I kept watching Ivanka while I pulled Samson’s half over to him with one hand. He said that if I let go of Brigitte I could pull faster but I wasn’t letting go of her for nothing. I pushed the half up to his face, almost, with my legs, and then said “Now what?” The talking half of him struggled and rolled a little and laid next to the other half and the two of them began mending together. Almost before I knew it, Samson was whole again and stood up and said “Now we run.” So we ran towards the nearest rock outcropping again, and shortly after we began running, one of the demon’s heads came flying over us and landed in front of us, thudding to the ground so hard it shook. The demon head was still yelling and its wild eyes rolled around and saw us and kept screaming. I looked back over my shoulder and saw the body toppling in the other direction. Ivanka had killed one of them, it seemed, and had the other two well in check. They were swinging at her and trying hard, but they were moving slower and slower, swinging wildly and staggering and near the foot of one I saw what I’m pretty sure was an eyeball. “Why doesn’t she help the people in the cauldron?” Brigitte asked. “I don’t know,” I told her. “I don’t know if that’s allowed.” “She should dump them out,” Brigitte said. We huddled in the rocky outcrop watching the rest of the fight. Pretty soon, a second demon fell, thwomping to the ground and shaking the whole land again. Some dust fell off of the rock above us and the other demon began trying to run away. Ivanka

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wouldn’t let it and kept stabbing at it with her sword until it, too, fell down, dead or whatever it is that happens to demons. I thought about that for a second as Samson started to walk out. I clutched Brigitte’s hand tight to me. “Don’t let go,” I told her. She looked at me and nodded. “Hey, are they really dead?” I asked then. Samson looked at me. “Sure looks like it,” he said. “That’s what we thought about you,” I pointed out to him. He stopped then. Ivanka was circling around on her horse and now she began to come lower. We could still hear the screams of the people in the cauldron and Brigitte leaned in. “Shouldn’t we do something?” she asked me. I didn’t know what to do or what we could do. Ivanka landed and Brigitte’s arm came around me, now, protectively. And jealously. She looked at us. “Ivanka, it is a pleasure to see you again,” said Samson. Ivanka nodded at him and looked at me and at Brigitte. “Ivanka, this is my girlfriend,” “Lover,” Brigitte interjected, “Lover. Her name is Brigitte.” “I’m pregnant,” Brigitte said. “With Rachel’s baby.” Ivanka smiled at that and smiled directly at Brigitte, who just stared back at her and clutched me tighter. “You are?” Samson asked.

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I wondered how that had not come up during the time that they’d been looking for me. “Yes,” Brigitte said. Samson looked at Ivanka, who shrugged. “Wait, do you two know each other?” I asked Samson. “I thought you only recognized her from the waterspout.” “I know Ivanka, and Ivanka knows me. She brought you to me in the waterspout.” “She did?” “Yes.” “I thought she was trying to get me out of Hell.” “She was. By bringing you to me. She had to hurry, too, because we never know when you are going to leave Hell again and we’ve come close a couple of times.” “Why was she bringing me to you?” “Because I asked her to.” Ivanka got off her horse and came over and stood in front of me, and Brigitte shoved in front of her. “Can I help you with something?” Brigitte asked. Weird—because that was the first thing she ever said to me, in that restaurant just about a week ago or so, give or take a bunch of extra time in Hell. Ivanka looked at Samson, who said “We ought to bring them both.” “Where? We? Who?” I asked. I’d held onto Brigitte’s hand when she’d stared down Ivanka. Ivanka pointed to her horse. “We’ll need help,” Samson said. “Get your friends.”

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Ivanka pointed at the demons. “Then we’ll start walking.” He seemed unperturbed about everything, taking it all in stride. I was not unperturbed at all. “Where are we walking too?” I demanded. “Maybe I don’t want to go?” “You can’t stay here, because you may be right about the demons. Ivanka seems to think that they’ll wake up, too, that she’s only put them out of commission for a little while. If they can mend the way I’ve learned to, then you don’t want to be around here when they do. And I would think you’d want to stick near Ivanka, for the protection. Plus, I want you to come with me.” “Why are you so interested in me?” “All in good time,” he said. “We need to get going.” “I don’t want to leave until I know what’s going on,” I said. “Maybe we should go,” Brigitte said, “I don’t want to go with her,” and she shot a look at Ivanka, “But she did help us and if those demons are going to wake up or come back to life or whatever, we should get out of here.” Brigitte looked again at the cauldron of souls and said, then, “But can we help them, somehow?” We all looked over there. “No,” said Samson. Ivanka shrugged and got on her horse. I said “I don’t know what we can do.” The truth was, I always felt sorry for the souls I saw in Hell, too, and wanted to help them but I never knew what I could do, either. Even the discovery that I could bring someone out with me like Samson or Naked Girl… “Naked Girl,” I said. “Where is she?” Brigitte looked at me. “Why?” Ivanka was on her horse now and winging towards the cauldron.

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“We do not have time for this,” Samson said. He was eyeing the demons and I swear, he checked his wrist like he had a watch on it. I almost laughed. “I’m responsible for her,” I said. “You sure are responsible for a lot of naked people,” Brigitte said, as she watched Ivanka fly around the cauldron once. It was hard, I realized, not to be jealous of that. Ivanka was about as perfect a woman as you could find. She made me get all hot looking at her even though I didn’t want to. Perfect, I guess, but also seven feet tall and really big, but she just radiated sexiness. “I love you so much,” I said, and turned towards her. “I don’t want you mad at me. But I brought her out of here only to bring her right back and I feel like we should help her.” Brigitte leaned in and kissed me. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just get so jealous.” We hugged until Samson said “Well, now what is that Valkyrie doing?” His voice implied an adjective or two in front of the word valkyrie but he didn’t say them. We looked and Ivanka was flying right up to the cauldron, near where the giant flames at the bottom were licking at the rock-pot and heating it up. The screams had become background noise now, horrible background noise but we didn’t keep focusing on them. Ivanka was touching parts of it with her sword, poking it, here and there, and then she suddenly swung once, twice, three times, four times, and there were flashes of light and smoke and it was like lightning striking the cauldron. She flew up and away from there, her horse moving fast, and the section of the cauldron she’d cut out fell onto the ground with a thump! And water started pouring out of the cauldron, a giant steaming hot waterfall of screaming boiled souls. “Oh, for crying out… let’s get out of the way of that,” Samson yelled, and we had to, because it was coming straight at us, this river avalanche of souls and water.

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I held onto Brigitte’s hand and we ran and ran and then Samson was pulling us, too, as the water spread and rushed towards us, but it was no good; we got hit by the first wall of water, 10 feet high and roaring along, and were swept up. I wrapped my arms around Brigitte as the water began scalding; it had cooled some but boiling water doesn’t cool off all that fast and this was Hell, so it was pretty hot around us anyway. I wanted to scream but my head was under water. The baby, I thought, and I hoped that it was okay. I didn’t know what could hurt babies but being tossed around in a boiling tsunami was, I guessed, not great. So I tried to shield the baby and Brigitte, holding her, as souls bumped into us and clambered around us and howled with burbling cries of terror and resignation. The water petered out, of course. It wasn’t perpetual, there was just a lot, and we slowly skidded to a stop, covered in mud and dirt and dripping wet. I had both arms around Brigitte and her head was pressed into my shoulder and she clung to me, arms around me. I peeled back just a little to look at her. She was leaning into me, her eyes clenched shut and her mouth moving. “What are you saying?” I asked. “please please please,” she said, a little louder. She looked at me. “I figured praying couldn’t hurt here, could it?” I said “No, it can’t hurt,” although I wasn’t sure it could help, either, and began to sit up, still holding Brigitte’s hand. “Don’t let go of me,” I said. We stood up, together, and looked around. There were souls laying all over, scattered around. Some of them were torn apart, some were together but lying there motionless, looking dead (and they were, as I thought about it.) I didn’t see Samson. I didn’t see Ivanka, either. Just a wasteland of wet souls. We began walking, in a random direction, and people called out to us. Help, they said or please or oh, God and I felt terrible. After the first few, I bent down to a woman and looked at her. “Can you talk?” I asked. She looked at me, glassy eyed. She shook her head.

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“Are you okay?” I asked. It was a stupid question, but it’s what you’re supposed to ask. “She’ll be fine. Help me,” someone said behind me, and I looked over my shoulder and turned around. It was a weak voice that was trying to be strong. The man who had spoken laid there, waist deep in the mud and pushing at it. “Are you stuck?” I asked, but he shook his head. He pushed a little more and fell over, and I saw he’d been cut in half at the waist. Brigitte gasped a little and put her hand to her mouth. “Find my legs,” he said, weakly. “I need to get away.” Where? I wondered. Where are you going to get away TO? But I didn’t say anything. I looked around. “I don’t see them,” I said, “But I’ll keep looking. Try to get yourself to one of the rocks.” That seemed the general plan around here. I wondered how long we had before the demons came back. We moved on, with other people calling to us, too. I didn’t see a pair of legs and then I wondered if we were looking for a pair or one at a time; I didn’t know how they’d been cut off. A shadow came over us and I looked up. Ivanka and her horse were circling and coming lower. She had someone with her. They landed in front of us, about ten feet away, and I realized that her passenger was Naked Girl. Ivanka motioned and Naked Girl got off and came and stood in front of me. “What?” I asked. She just stared at me. She was really marked up. An arm was dangling by threads, and she had scratches all over. Part of her hair had ripped out and she was missing an eye. I reached out with one hand and pressed her arm to her shoulder socket, watching it mend. “Can you move?” She nodded. I looked around. “See that guy back there, the half a guy?” She nodded.

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“Go get him and try to find his legs. Can you do that?” She nodded again. I stopped her as she walked by. “Do what he tells you to do until you find his legs. Then help other people, too. If you have questions, come see me.” A woman nearby said “Who are you?” I looked at her. “Nobody.” “Why does she listen to you?” “I don’t know,” I answered. The woman sat up and said “You’ve got to help me, first. Help me. Don’t send her to help that guy. Help me. I need help more.” She stood up, weakly, and tried to totter after Naked Girl, but Naked Girl was moving too quickly and she soon turned back to me. “Help me. Have her help me.” “What do you need help with?” I asked. “My family. We’re all down here. My husband and my daughter and my son, we’re all in Hell and I think they were in that… that pot of water… with me. I think they were here and I don’t know how we ended up here but if I have to be in Hell I at least want them with me and you’ve got to help me find them. I need more help than that man does. My daughter is only three! How did she end up in Hell? How? Help me find her.” Brigitte clung to me and started crying. “Why are they in Hell, Rachel?” she said. Brigitte is strong, but I think this was getting to her. “How does a three-year-old end up in Hell?” “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.” For as long as I’d been in Hell, each time I’d come, I had no idea how it worked, why people ended up here. Why I ended up here. Why this woman or her three-year-old ended up here. “We’ve got to help them,” Brigitte said. “Ask Doc what to do.”

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“Doc’s,” I began, but then I stopped. I was going to say Doc’s not working but I realized I didn’t have Doc. I looked around. I kept stupidly looking at my hand, the hand that had held him, and he wasn’t there. Somewhere in the running and the deluge I’d lost him, dropped him. I wanted to cry. Doc was gone! And he wasn’t working, so I couldn’t simply call out to him. “Doc’s gone,” I finished up, looking at Brigitte. “What?” it was the kind of thing you say when you know what the other person said but you don’t want to know. I didn’t repeat myself; instead saying “I’ve got to find him. Everybody!” I called, but nobody paid any attention to me. I turned around. I saw Naked Girl walking off towards the Half Guy and I called to her. “Naked Girl! Hey! You!” She stopped and turned around. “Find Doc! He’s my octopus. You know him. He’s around here. Find him. Help these people but find Doc!” Naked Girl nodded and I saw her go and stand by Half Guy first and then begin looking around on the ground. “I’ve got to find him,” I told Brigitte. “I know,” she said. “We’ll find him.” She wrapped both her arms around my left arm and hung on. “I don’t like it here,” she muttered. “I’m sorry that you have to keep coming here.” I was standing there, in shock, not knowing what to do now. Losing Doc had shut something down in me and it was all I could think of: find Doc find Doc. I put my hand on hers and sat down. “I need to think,” I said. All around us people were moaning. The mother had crawled over to us and was about to say something to me. I put my head down in my hands. I tried not to cry and Brigitte slumped against me. I was not ready for any of this. I’d been to Hell a lot of times and it was starting to wear on me. I was only… however old I was, and I didn’t know what to do when I was in Hell and didn’t know what to do when giant demons were crashing down around me and didn’t know what to do when people were insisting that I

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help them out and complaining that they ended up in Hell, to. “I don’t know what to do,” I confessed to Brigitte. “I don’t either,” she said. After a pause, she added “We need Samson.” I wanted to say or Ivanka but I didn’t think that would be smart. I was still upset with Samson for shooting me and bringing us here, plus I wasn’t real crazy about him anyway, but I wanted Brigitte to be happy and wanted her to not be upset with me. If I had to be in Hell surrounded by chopped up souls begging me for help and missing my octopus, at least I could have Brigitte be still in love with me. “Let’s find him,” I said. “Who’s Samson?” asked the mother. “Why won’t you help me?” “Why do you think I can help you?” I asked her. The mother shook her head. “Anyone can help anyone. But you, you’re different.” I looked down at her as I stood up. “I’m not different.” “Yes, you are. We’ve all been here a long time being boiled and tortured and eaten and when a demon eats you, you just end up being reformed after he digests you, have you ever been digested by a demon, and then thrown back into that stew he was making, and we’ve all thought of fighting but we couldn’t do it, we never had any luck, and you all come here and you’re able to fight them and then that horse lady” “… Valkyrie,” I interrupted without thinking, and then tensed up in case Brigitte got upset but she didn’t say anything… “Comes and helps you and then you manage to command people to help you like that Naked Girl. You’re different and you can help.” “I don’t know how to help.” “Why do you keep holding on to her?” the woman asked. Brigitte looked up at me. I looked at the woman and then Brigitte and couldn’t think of what to say.

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“Tell her,” Brigitte said. Before I could answer, the woman interrupted: “Tell her, tell me what? Is there something you know? Is there? Can you really help me?” “I’m not letting go of her because before long,” I said, and I paused, “Before long, my body back in the real world is going to wake up and anyone who’s touching me is going to be pulled out of Hell with me, and Brigitte is my lover and I’m not leaving her here.” “Plus, I’m pregnant with our child,” Brigitte added, and smiled. The woman scrambled over and locked her arms around my ankle. “What are you doing?” I asked. “I’m not letting go of you,” she said. She turned to someone nearby who was crying and whining softly. “You,” she said. “You. Everybody!” she raised her voice. “Everybody who can move come and grab onto this girl and she’s going to get us out of here!” “What?” I asked. I was startled. The whining and moaning lady had rolled over and looked at me. “Is it true?” she asked. “Did you come to save us?” “Wha… No!” I said, startled. “I didn’t come here to save you. I came here because I was shot unconscious by a ray gun and I come to Hell whenever I’m unconscious.” “She won’t let go of the pretty one because she’s going back to the real world and when she does anyone she’s touching goes with her,” the mother said, loudly. Then, still grabbing my ankle hard enough to hurt, sprawled in the wet mud, she began calling names. “Charles! Jamie! Lindy! Where are you! Come to Mommy! Come here! We’re going to leave!” She looked up at me. “Can you control it? Don’t leave until my family gets here!”

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“I can’t control it,” I said, rapidly losing control of this situation and looking to Brigitte for help. She continued to hang onto my arm and said “We can try to help, can’t we?” I looked at the big demon foot near us and it twitched. “Brigitte, I don’t know how long we’ll be here but those demons might come back to life or whatever any second now. I don’t want to be out in the open.” I looked down at the mother, who was still calling to her family and crying now. “Let go and we’ll get to shelter,” I said, but she shook her head vehemently. “No. No no no no no. What if I let go and you wake up right then and there and I’m left here again! Will you come back?” I didn’t answer. Instead, I said to Brigitte. “Try to get to the rock.” I pointed to the nearest rock. She turned and we began walking, me dragging the mother who kept calling, more and more hysterically to her family. I finally said “You can hang on if you want but you’ve got to help me,” but she didn’t seem to listen, or maybe she was just out of strength. We continued that way until we passed near a few more people not far away and the lady interrupted her yelling to say “Grab onto her and we’ll get out,” and a guy, an old guy, a really old guy, sat up and said “What?” and she explained as I kept dragging her and walking with Brigitte to the nearest rock-mountain, with the demon’s foot shuddering now and then only about 50 yards away. The old guy got onto his hands and knees and then stood up as I eyed him and kept walking and the mother kept calling for her kids. He tottered over to us, weakly, and then held out his hand but I kept my hands on top of Brigitte’s which were clutching my left arm, still, and so he laid his hand on my shoulder. “You don’t mind, do you?” he asked. I said “I guess not,” and was rewarded when Brigitte squeezed my shoulder. The mother kept calling for her family. We walked near another guy, a younger guy maybe

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about my age who when he rolled over his eyes were just staring up into space, not blinking. He was calling out, saying “Who’s there? Who’s there?” The old man, as we walked by, looked at me and then reached down and touched the guy. “Follow my voice,” he said. “Are you blind?” and the guy nodded. I was trying to drag the mother and walk, but when the old guy stopped I did, too, and rested. “If you can get up and hold on, we’ll get you out of here,” the old man said. The mother tried to struggle to her knees but then fell. Her voice was weaker now. “Here,” the old guy said, and got the blind man up and stood him behind us. “Keep your hand here,” and he put the blind guy’s hand on my left shoulder. “Just keep holding on.” I could feel the blind man’s hand tense on me and he mumbled “Thank you” and I started walking again. “Just try to crawl a little,” the old man encouraged the mother, and then he, too, started calling to her family, Lindy, Jamie, Charles, and also telling people “Come to us, or meet us at the rock, because we’re getting out of here.” More people clambered over to us, scrabbling on the mucky rock and through the puddles of water left there. We were slowed down considerably and I was pretty sure that the demons were twitching more now. I kept my arms on Bridget, refusing to let the people grasping at me pull me away from her, and kept my eyes on the ground, futilely searching for Doc even though I was pretty sure I hadn’t been anywhere near here when I’d last had him. He was probably back near where the flood of cauldron water had ended, I guessed, and looked over there. “Where’s Samson?” asked Brigitte. “I don’t know,” I said. And I don’t care I wanted to add but I didn’t. We kept on walking and more and more people were coming over to us. There were probably 10 or 12 now, all standing near us and reaching in an arm to touch me or grabbing at my arms. One pulled at my elbow and I shook her off. “Please,” she said.

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“Don’t pull on me,” I said, and then I was a little sorry because she had been in Hell maybe a long time and didn’t mean to try to separate me from Brigitte, I figure. But I didn’t say anything. I felt her bony old fingers on my elbow, pincering it, sticking in between a couple of other hands. There was a shadow and a flicker over us and a bunch of the damned gasped or screamed. I looked up. It was a horse. Ivanka flew overhead and then landed in front of us. She looked down at the group, and I couldn’t tell if she was amused. She pointed at us. “What?” I asked. She pointed back over the way we had come. “What?” I asked again. She re-pointed, lowering her arm and then pointing again. When I didn’t get it, she pointed at me and then pointed her other arm back the way we had come. “Go back?” I said. She nodded. “No way, Ivanka,” I said. I wasn’t going to go back, and I certainly wasn’t going to do anything she asked willingly. Not with Brigitte clutching at my arm even tighter. “No. We’re going to the rock and waiting this one out.” She pointed again and nodded. “I don’t want to.” She folded her arms, right across those naked breasts of hers, and stared. I thought maybe some of the men with us would be a little disappointed not to see her breasts anymore. Secretly, I was a little disappointed not to see her breasts anymore. But we just stood there. I looked back over my shoulder and all I could see was a guy’s head, maybe in his forties, staring back at me.

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“Move,” I said. He ducked his head down a little. I bet however much he was bummed out to not see Ivanka’s breasts was more than made up by the fact that he was looking at my bare butt. At least Brigitte was clothed. At least I was sparing her that. Back over my shoulder there were more people crawling on the plain, people who had heard of us and were trying to get to us but were slow or damaged in some way. Off to my left was the closest giant demon’s body. The foot was definitely twitching or vibrating or something. Further way back was Naked Girl. I could see her. Half Guy was riding on her back and she was helping someone walk. “Is that Samson?” I asked, looking back at Ivanka. She nodded and pointed again, towards them. “We’re not going back, Ivanka. We can’t. It took me a million years, practically, to get here and it’ll take longer to go all that way.” I didn’t say because all those people will grab me, too, and they might separate me from Brigitte. I wanted to get Brigitte out of here more than anything, but I didn’t want her to see what a mean person I really was. I felt terrible about those people but I felt more terrible about Brigitte and I didn’t know what to do for any of them except that I love Brigitte and I knew I had to get her out of there. “And that demon is waking up and what in the…” I choked that last part out and grabbed Brigitte even harder as Ivanka suddenly flicked her horse’s reins and it launched towards us and Ivanka leaned in and hooked one large (and yet smooth and sexy) hand under my right armpit and lifted up. I grabbed Brigitte harder and one of the people hanging onto me yelled hang on tighter! And we lifted up into the air, Ivanka not even seeming to strain as people clung onto my back and my legs and each other and we pulled into the air. I looked down as we got ten, twenty feet off the ground. Nobody was left down there; she had lifted all, what, fourteen of us by that point? The horse’s wings were flapping and beating the air right behind me, nearly brushing some guy off my back. Brigitte put her arms around me. I felt her mouth right by my ear and felt her breath in my ear.

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“Oh, god Rachel, hang on,” she said. “I am. I will,” I said, as we started to move forward, back across the plains to Naked Girl and Samson, slowly but not too slowly. All I could really see was Ivanka’s leg, part of the horse, and the rock we’d been heading for slowly receding away. I looked up and saw Ivanka’s face, at first stern and leaning forward. Then she looked down at me and winked. Brigitte I think squeezed me a little harder. I bet she saw but I never asked her. The horse flew and I could definitely see that the demon was coming back alive; it’s hand was almost reattached now and the fingers were spasming and twitching. “I’m almost falling, help me,” someone below me said. “Hang on. Grab my hand.” “I can’t hold on any more we’ve got to land.” “Here.” “Help.” “Can we get out now?” and more like that I heard a lot of. I guessed that I’d be desperate, too, if I had gotten out of the frying pan but not out of the fire yet. I remembered that first time I’d come here, and a couple times after that, too. In fact, pretty much every time with few exceptions, every time I’d come to Hell had been terrible. That was probably the point. We were almost back at Naked Girl. She was about twenty feet ahead of us; Ivanka had probably had to go slower because of all the people or not shaking off all of the people. I thought that was nice of her. Then again, why was she taking us back? Why not bring Samson to us? I looked down and Naked Girl was below us. Samson was looking up as we hovered down.

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There was a rumble from the demon. There was kind of a flicker. “Hang on,” I muttered to Brigitte. Ivanka began lowering us faster. She knew. I knew. “Get her down here!” yelled Samson, suddenly, and I figured somehow he knew. I was getting a little better at this. The demon sat up. Ivanka looked at me and then looked down and then let go. Me and Brigitte and all the damned people clinging to me began falling. It was only about twenty feet that we had to fall but everyone shrieked or screamed or yelled and Brigitte buried her face in my shoulder. Protect her I thought and tried to hold on to her, hoping that when we hit the ground she’d land on me. Protect the baby I thought, too, and later I was proud of myself that I’d thought that. It was going to hurt when we hit the ground. We didn’t hit the ground.

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Meanwhile, In New York:

He looked around the diner, tired from being up all night. The tables were in order, the silverware was in order, the counter was clean. There was a rip in one of the vinyl covers of the stool that he really thought he should repair. But it was okay. It maybe wasn’t that terrible. The dessert stand, with its perma-desserts, spun slowly. The back counter was immaculate. The floor gleamed. The grills were hot. The fry vats were steaming. The cash register stood poised for the occasional payment with bucks instead of Share-transfers through the palm Indentifier by the door. People were welcome to come in without Sharing, and welcome to pay with cash, but they had to do so before being seated. If they Shared at the door they could then order, and it would be transferred from their accounts automatically. The Indentifier was clean, too. He kept it clean because smudges created glitches. And the Women were standing at the back wall, waiting for him to tell them to begin. They had not imprinted at all yet. He did not let them imprint on him because it was difficult to change that. But they would listen to him, and to virtually anyone, until they imprinted. He tested them here, to see how they passed and how they acted. Three. Three of them right now waiting to be sent out. One would be gone by the end of the day, he figured. There should be four. He liked to have four. The phone rang. He was almost to the door, had almost thrown the switch on the Electrogate and flipped the old-fashioned sign to “Open” as the sun, far off in the east, began to come up, but the phone rang. He walked back from the door and answered the phone. There were two phones in the restaurant. One was there just for show. The other was an old-fashioned landline that he had installed and that rang in a frequency only he could hear. It had been difficult

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to find someone to install it, but nobody ever listened to landlines anymore, not even the government. He picked up the phone. “Yes.” He said. He listened. “Completely dead?” He listened again. “I was working all night.” More talk. “I’m not complaining. I don’t complain. I’m tired, is all.” And there was final testing to be done. And appearances to keep up. He did not say those. He just listened more. “It doesn’t work as well on men.” He listened a little more and watched as a regular customer came up to the door and peered inside. He held up a hand and smiled politely, using up his entire “acting” ability. He listened. “Bring him here.” He listened to the final words the other end of the line fed him, and said “Well, then, I guess I’ll have to close today.” He hung up the phone and looked at the Women standing against the back wall. They’d stay there today. He walked up to the door and the regular customer, who always just wanted a cup of coffee, looked in. He opened the door a little, shutting off the Electrogate to do so. “Sorry,” he said. “I can’t open up today. There’s been a death.”

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The customer nodded and looked appropriately sad and a little quizzical. Then the man remembered, and added: “In the family. There’s been a death in the family. See you tomorrow.” It wasn’t really his family, though. He was proud that he’d remembered to add that. But he felt bad about lying.

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Part Eight: “What the fuck is going on!” someone yelled. I could almost not breathe and I felt smushed, compressed, and heard people groaning and mumbling and squishing and some other people yelling and sirens and then I heard a metal clank or thunk and then I heard skidding and screeching and then I fell out of the door onto the ground and hit pavement hard, still holding onto Brigitte. I was lying on my back and she fell on top of me, landing right on me and, I hope, cushioning the blow for her and the baby; I wasn’t sure how that worked and how much the baby could feel right now but I didn’t want either of them hurt. We laid there for a second as I tried to breath because the wind had been knocked out of me and Brigitte was a little faster and she looked around. “We’re out,” she said, and looked back down at me. She leaned against me and hugged me as best she could with me lying on my back on what I realized was a large street in a city and she began crying. “You got me out! You saved me! We’re out! Oh, thank God! Thank you, Rachel!” She was shaking, too, and I only then began to realize just how scared she’d been in Hell. I looked around while I held her tightly. We were not in Chicago. I was pretty sure of that. The buildings looked all wrong. The buildings looked… weird. I wasn’t sure how to place it. All Spanish-y and colorful and stuccoed. I thought about it for a second. We must be in the west or something, I thought, where they still had buildings like this. Plus, it was hot. I started to sit up and Brigitte curled up a little until I was on the blacktop and she was sitting on my lap still huddled up and crying and holding me. All around me were all the damned souls that had been clinging to me as we’d fallen from Ivanka’s hand. In front of me, about 50 yards up, was van with only one door hanging on the back of it. The other door was off to my left. That must have been the clanking sound I heard, the door falling off.

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I tried to piece together what must have happened. They had to have had my body, in that van. And just like with Naked Girl, when I’d woken up, everyone touching me had come back with me, so suddenly instead of one naked body in the back of the van, they’d had, what, 15 or so, all crammed in there? The driver of the van was getting out, still swearing loudly. He wasn’t wearing a uniform. The van was gas-powered, so it had to be a government van of some sort, something official, but this guy was wearing a regular shirt and pants. “We should get out of here,” I said. Whoever from the government had gotten my body and taken it to the west and put it in a van, or put it in a van and taken it to the west, I didn’t want them to re-get me. “Don’t move,” said a voice to my right. Looking over there I saw a ray gun pointed right at my head. It was held at waist level of another guy in a regular shirt and pants, his all torn and scuffed up and his right knee was bleeding. He must have fallen out of the van, I realized, when we’d appeared there. “Put your hands up,” the man with the ray gun said. I looked at him. He looked like any other guy, just a person. The sun was bright and hot. “What day is it?” I asked, and then thought I should have asked who he was. I’m not very good at this. Brigitte had turned around, too, looking over her shoulder. “You get away from her,” the man said. Brigitte clung more tightly to me and began crying again. Brigitte’s not usually like that, I think – I’ve only known her a week but she seemed tougher than that to me. She’d taken pretty much everything in stride so far but going to Hell and now being here with a guy telling her to get away from me was pretty much maybe all she could take. Before I could do anything, though, a lady that had been clinging to us stood up and bumped into the guy and his ray gun swung wide and I took the opportunity to yell

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“Run!” to Brigitte, who did not take the opportunity. She just sat there. I stood up and tried to grab the guy’s ray gun and felt a wave of heat and heard some crackling as it went off and the guy punched me. He punched me. I fell down on my butt and just stared at him. That’s when I knew he wasn’t real good at things because he just stood there, too, and stared, and I realized he didn’t want to punch a girl and felt bad about it. He wasn’t like those cops or real professional people who want to kill or capture someone. They don’t think twice about hitting anyone. This guy felt bad, I could tell. So I started crying. That was easy enough. I’d been through a lot, too, and had wanted to cry since Brigitte had gotten mad at me at the hospital but I couldn’t. I’d had to hold it in for the good of… me, and Brigitte, and the baby. Now, I just let loose, and it was really bad crying because my face really hurt where he’d hit me and I figured I’d have a bruise. “You hit me,” I cried, and it came out all bawling. I felt stupid but also good to be crying. I didn’t really want to cry, but I guess I needed to because now it was coming nonstop. Brigitte scrambled over and was kneeling next to me. The guy squatted down in front of me, and said “Are you going to be okay?” Someone off to his left yelled “Jim!” and he looked over there and I reached out and took his ray gun and pointed it at him and shot him. It wasn’t even that hard. He dropped like a sack of rice. I heard someone yell “Jim!” even more urgently and I said “Duck Brigitte” and I pointed the gun off in that direction and began firing wildly and the yelling stopped. It really was starting to be chaos around us. The people that had gotten out of Hell with us had wandered around and some were pretty badly hurt. More people had come by while “Jim” was hitting me, and there were two dirigibles landing. The buildings were not that tall around here and as I stood up I could see people starting to look out their windows and come out on their lawns. Up ahead was the van that we’d all popped out of. “Let’s go,” I sniffled to Brigitte, who got up herself now.

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“Are you okay?” she asked me. I nodded. “I haven’t seen you cry before,” she said. “I haven’t seen you cry before,” I told her. “Are you okay? Is the baby?” Brigitte smiled and rubbed her stomach. “Yes. And yes, I’m pretty sure. Yes.” I hugged her for just a second and had an overpowering urge to kiss her. And more. Right there. I’m never very far from thinking about … and more… when Brigitte’s around. If you saw her body, you’d want to press up against her, too, and rub her and touch her and lick her. I had to pull back. “God, I love you,” I said. There was another yell from a yard nearby us. Someone was saying they’d called the police. We jogged up to the van. The other guy that had been there was lying on the ground, as were some of the people that I’d brought out of Hell. I hoped that I hadn’t killed them. Or anyone. But especially the people I’d brought out of Hell. It seemed wrong to do that: rescue them from Hell, even inadvertently and unwillingly, and then just shoot them right back there. I bet if they were alive and out of Hell that they were going to live pretty good lives from now on, to avoid going back there, so it seemed like I’d done kind of a good thing. Then again, all of the people I’d met in Hell had seemed like they were good people. That bothered me. The guy I’d shot, the guy who was not Jim, was lying at the back of the van and I heard, now, sirens in the distance. Boy, that was a sound I was getting good at recognizing. More people were on their lawns, some of them yelling and some trying, very gingerly, to come out and help the damned people we’d brought out. Some of those people were helping each other. That bothered me, too. How were people who were fresh out of Hell doing anything good for anyone? I had an idea. “Can you drive?” I said. I looked at the van.

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Brigitte shook her head. “Not one of these. Nobody knows how to drive these things, Brigitte. They’re reserved for government or military.” “These guys don’t look government or military,” I said. I looked down at the notJim guy, in his polo shirt with the little symbol on the breast of it, a little gate with a bar through it or something. “Well, they must have been because they can drive it. Nobody gets a gasoline powered ground vehicle.” That’s what Doc had told me. Doc! I wondered if he’d made it out. I looked around in the crowds hopefully but didn’t see him. The sirens were closer. We went to the side of the van, to where the drivers would sit. There was a steering wheel. That much was obvious. And some pedals and levers and things. “We’ll have to run for it,” I said. I looked back. “I don’t know how to drive it, either.” “It may not be a good idea, anyway,” Brigitte pointed out. “We might be found more easily if we’re driving one of these.” I looked at her. She was beautiful, stunning, but also very dirty and her clothing was ripped, showing off her legs and a little bit of her breasts and I thought, too, that I saw a nipple, which got me all distracted again. I bet I looked the same, and I suddenly laughed. “What?” Brigitte said. “We’ll be found easily no matter what we do.” A hand landed on my shoulder and I spun around. I suppose I should have shot the ray gun but I’m not used to things like that so I didn’t. You have to have all kinds of

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reflexes to just automatically shoot a gun. I’d only gotten away with it on the ground because I was so upset I hadn’t even been thinking, I figured, and now I didn’t shoot it at all, which was unlucky because it was taken out of my hand almost as soon as I turned. “Geez, watch where you’re pointing that thing,” I heard, and Brigitte said Samson excitedly. “Yeah, it’s me,” he said, as I focused, and it was him: stinky, stubbly-faced, scar on his forehead, same clothing, and all. He let go of my shoulder and put the ray gun in his pocket. “Get in,” he said, and motioned over his shoulder. I saw running up behind him, near the end of the crowd of damned-but-rescued people, Naked Girl. And Doc! “Doc!” I said. He floated along and then went a little higher and zipped up to be by my shoulder as Naked Girl climbed into the back of the van and closed the door. “I said get in,” Samson said and I didn’t want to listen to him but I did it because Brigitte did it, so we got in the van and Doc floated in and Samson got in after us. Brigitte and I climbed into the back of the van, where there was a small bench-seat for us to sit on next to a kind of board with straps that I guessed they’d had my body on while I’d been unconscious. Samson climbed in and started up the van without any hesitation, turning some kind of little switch and moving a lever and then closing the door as he did so and the van started moving, quickly. We were pressed back into the seat. Naked Girl hunched down in the back and sat patiently motionless. I wondered what would happen to the damned people we were leaving behind. “Shouldn’t we take them?” I asked, without specifying who “them” was. Brigitte looked back out the window and said “We should at least try to help them.” I agreed – they were dead, after all. They’d died and gone to Hell and then been brought back and now we were leaving them on the street to just fend for themselves in… “Where are we?” I asked.

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Albuquerque Doc said. “Where it all began,” Samson said. “Where what all began,” I asked, and Samson spun the wheel-thing around sharply to his left. The van swerved left and we all slid to the side. Brigitte tumbled into me, and Naked Girl lost her balance and fell down in the back. Before we could recover, Samson sped up, then went left again, then right all in rapid succession. “Where you began,” he said, finally, when he had finished all his maneuvering. Doc hovered near my right shoulder and Brigitte, I was glad, remained next to me. “What does he mean, Doc?” I asked. I do not know Doc said. Doc had never not had answers before. True, it had been only two weeks or so, but he always had been able to answer any question I asked him. I looked forward again and said “What do you mean, I began here?” Samson did not answer. I said: “Hey, tell me,” but he just looked back at me and said: “Not just yet. I’m not going to tell you just yet.” Brigitte looked over at me, sitting up straighter. I stared at Samson, who had reduced his speed more now, so we were moving along a little more reasonably, through row after row of houses with yards and fences and sand and rocks, mostly, behind the fences. Off in the distance, I could see the main city with more modern looking buildings. All of the houses had a southwesterny-cowboy-indianish kind of style, more or less. It was kind of net. “I don’t think you should hide stuff from me,” I said, after a minute. “I’m not hiding anything from you. I’m just not telling you yet.” “That’s the same thing as hiding it from me.”

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“No, it’s not. I could have lied and said I didn’t know. I told you, I know stuff but I’m not telling you just yet.” “Why not?” “Because I’ll tell you what I can when I get a chance and this is not that chance and I’m distracted because I’ve got to figure out where we are and get where we’re going before the Blockers figure out what happened and come looking for us.” “The who?” “That’s what I call them.” “What do you call them?” “The Blockers.” “Why?” ”Why what?” “Why do you call them the Blockers?” “Because that’s there name.” “Samson!” that was Brigitte. “Don’t toy with her, please.” She turned to me. “He gets like this. He was like this a little during the days we were looking for you.” Turning back forward, she leaned up a little and put her hand on her shoulder. “If you know something, Samson, you should just tell us.” “I will. I will. All in good time.” He patted her hand and looked over his shoulder at her. I did not entirely like the way he looked at her. And more, I did not like the fact that he had to have known I would see his look, would see the look he gave Brigitte because I was sitting in the back seat and he looked at Brigitte sitting next to me in the back seat, too. I was about to say something when Brigitte sat back and said “I think we can trust him. He’s been really helpful so far.” Samson turned again. “Got to get out of the city,” he said.

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“Where are we going?” “Headquarters.” “Headquarters?” I didn’t like the sound of that. “Yes. Headquarters. Home base. My operating base.” “Who’s at headquarters? I don’t know that I want to go there.” “Nobody’s at headquarters. It was where I worked. I called it headquarters because that’s what you call the base of operations. But with Sharing and telecommunications nowadays, and the nature of our operation, I didn’t need more than me there. And the portal.” “The portal?” “Again, I’ll tell you in a minute.” Naked Girl still crouched in the back, stumbling everytime we took a sharp turn. Samson saw that and said “Tell her she can come sit up front.” “Go ahead,” I said. I wasn’t in the mood to help him. “She won’t listen to me.” “Try her.” Samson shrugged and said “Naked Girl, come sit up front.” Naked Girl didn’t react. “You tell, her.” He said. Then he added: “Please.” Even his please didn’t sound very good. “I don’t like you,” I said. “I know,” he said. “Rachel, please. He was really very helpful to me. He might have saved my life. Those cops were really shooting at us, and then I had no idea what to do or how to find

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you.” Brigitte put her hand on my elbow, then moved it to my thigh. She knew how that would work on me. But I tried to resist. “From what I can see, he just came along for the ride. Those cops and Reverend Tommy just wanted me, not you guys.” “They kept shooting at us, even after they had you in that net. He helped steer us away and then helped us come and find where you were. We kept a watch on your body that whole time you were … in Hell.” She shuddered a bit when she said that last part. I grumped down, folding my arms over my breasts and sitting a little lower in the seat. I tried not to look like I was pouting. I probably didn’t succeed. “Fine.” I said. “Naked Girl,” I motioned over my shoulder. “Come sit up front.” She scrambled through to the front seat, climbing over and around the left of Brigitte. There was a lot of nakedness rumbling around the back seat for a moment and then she sat down. On Samson’s instructions, I had her strap the belt across her. He kept driving and looking around. There were other people around us now. Some of them looked at us, some of them didn’t. “Do you think it’s a good idea, to have a naked girl sitting in the front seat of this thing?” I asked, trying to prove to Samson that I know some things, too, and he should listen to me. “It’s a lot better for her than to be crashing around back there and hurting herself. I’d have you or Brigitte sit up here but I didn’t want to split you up.” I really didn’t like him. “Why does she listen to me, anyway?” I asked him. “Because she’s like you,” he said. “What’s that mean?” He looked over his shoulder at me with a look of surprise. It was lucky, I thought, that we weren’t moving but were sitting at a traffic podium waiting for the Go Sign to pop up. “I suppose I should not be surprised,” he said. “Not a lot figure it out. I thought

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maybe you’d have worked it out by now. Or that Revenant you hung around with, what’s his name, Bob, would have told you.” Bob. I felt bad for him, then, remembering what Reverend Tomny had done to him. Then I felt bad, too, because Brigitte’s dad was dead and I hadn’t told her that yet, too. There was never enough time! But I didn’t want to tell her now because Samson sighed and said “I guess there’s no harm in telling you. Maybe there is. I don’t know. But I’ll tell you anyway. You’re a zombie.” “What?” I asked. My mouth felt dry. I looked down at my body. Brigitte hugged me. It wasn’t until later, a lot later, that I realized that Brigitte had not reacted. If I’d thought of it then, I might have thought that Samson had told her about me while I was in Hell or that she’d figured it out. But I didn’t think of it then and when I did think of it it was because I learned other things, too, that helped explain why she didn’t react. But she didn’t react at all and I didn’t notice it then, which isn’t really my fault because when a stinky dead soul that you’ve pulled out of Hell tells you as your driving in a van through Albuquerque that you’re a zombie, you don’t notice much else and you probably would have done what I did, which was stare down at my body, with its all-dirty and raggedy clothes and sit there in shock. My hands, though, did not match up. They were different. The left one was longer and darker skinned than the right, which was sort of blockier and while still a girl’s hand was less feminine. And neither of my arms matched my body; my body had smooth white skin that didn’t seem to have ever seen the sun, but my right arm was a little darker and my left arm was darker still. My right and left legs weren’t quite the same length and my right toes were all curled and bunched up and little while my left toes were long and straight and separated. “That’s…” I said. “That’s…” I tried again.

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I swallowed. My voice was really cracking and dry and I thought I was going to choke. “That’s…” I said one more time. “We’re here,” Samson said, and I looked up and so did Brigitte. “Here,” wherever we were supposed to be, was a convenience store near the edge of the downtown, one of those stores that someday will probably be torn down to have a larger building put up in its place and would no longer exist then, as a separate building but instead would be a little area in the cornerstone of a larger building. Through the plate glass windows I could see the kinds of things that convenience stores along my walking route from New York to Brigitte’s town had contained, things that I assumed all convenience stores carried: Newspapers, candy bars, squid jerky, Liquipods, and those 98 ounce-Behemoth soda pops. There was a bored-looking guy behind the counter. “Come on,” Samson said. He maneuvered the van into a spot off to the left, marked with one of those handicapped symbols, and opened his door. “Rachel, tell Naked Girl to follow me,” he said. I tried to talk but my voice wouldn’t come. I just kept staring at my bare feet, my two nonidentical bare feet. I was, am, are, a zombie. “Come on, Rachel, we don’t have much time,” Samson said, and snapped his fingers impatiently. “Come on, Rachel,” Brigitte murmured into my ear. She kissed my earlobe and I snapped out of it a bit. Just a bit. “What?” I asked. I sort of croaked it. “Naked Girl. Have her follow me. And come on,” Samson said. He was looking around nervously now. There were a lot of people walking by and I thought this was not the best place to get us out of the van but what did I know? I was, am, a zombie. That’s all I could think.

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“Naked Girl, follow Samson,” I said. “Do what he says.” Naked Girl got up and opened her door and Brigitte leaned across me – our breasts pressed against each other and that helped a little – and pulled on the lever to open the door and said “Come on, honey. Let’s follow him.” Doc zipped out and Brigitte gave me a little nudge and I swung my legs out. People on the sidewalk were stopping and pointing at Naked Girl. Samson told her to go inside and wait for us and she did that. “Stand clear,” he said, and Brigitte closed the door behind me and pulled me by the hand up onto the sidewalk outside the little convenience store, right in front of the container of Dry Ice for sale, 99 cents a bag. Doc walked up and as he walked towards the door of the convenience store, he pressed his hand against a brick to the right, down on the side of the door. There was a flash and some steam and the parking spot holding the van suddenly flipped over and the van disappeared underneath it. The parking lot was empty of vehicles now. A few of the people who were walking by looked up but they’d missed whatever happened. Samson looked back at them and shrugged. “I hope nobody noticed.” He hoped nobody noticed that a naked girl had gotten out of a van that then disappeared? We followed him inside. Brigitte was tugging at my hand as we did, getting me to go with her. I just felt numb. We walked past the front counter with its Win-A-House pulltab games and the Lotto advertisements and Cinnamon Rolls and went to the Behemoth Soda Fountain, a giant row of nozzles with all the 45 flavors of soda Behemoth sold and the stacks of 98 ounce cups. The guy behind the counter paid us no attention, even though we were a mess and Samson really smelled – really smelled; he was getting worse, I thought – and I was a zombie and Naked Girl was standing by the soda fountain.

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Doc took a cup, calmly, and then began filling it. He put in a little ice and then ran down the fountain, putting a squirt of each kind of soda in it. When he reached the 45th flavor and the cup was almost full, a door opened off to the right. He put a lid on the soda and a straw in it and began sipping from it. “Come on in,” he said, and motioned to us to follow him through the narrow door. We did that. I looked back at the counter guy, who was not watching us at all. Weird. We went inside and there was a little room there with an old-fashioned desk, a computer monitor, and a couple of little gadgets on it. One of the gadgets was lit up and Samson picked it up. “Hmm,” he said, looking at it. He held it up. “Ever seen one of these?” Brigitte shook her head. Naked Girl shook her head. I didn’t react. I was, am a zombie, and I was still trying to process that. “This,” said Samson, “Is an old fashioned cell phone. They still work and some people like to use them because they’re so secure.” He seemed proud of it. He looked at it again, reading the display. “And,” he said, “It’s telling me that I’ve missed a call.” He put the phone back down. “From God.”

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Meanwhile, In New York: The last zombie project, still unfinished and still at the stage where recapture had not occurred, lay spread on most of the work benches. As he watched in dismay, the three men who had not been carrying the corpse walked over there and began brusquely moving the body parts and nearly-completed woman off the table, putting the pieces wherever they could. “Be careful with those!” he told them. “That’s worth a lot of money to me. And dangerous!” One of the men looked up at him and said “We’ll do the ordering around, thank you.” He felt they needed him more than he needed them, but they had ray guns and could bring a lot of attention to bear on him. So he kept quiet. Then he could not keep quiet any more because one of them was putting the torso too near another part and he said, less loudly but equally urgently: “If you touch those together she’s going to start moving around and that’ll be trouble.” The man looked up and said “What?” “Yeah.” He did not elaborate. The thug put the torso on the workbench next to the computer monitor and the man sighed in his dull way and went over and moved it. He was careful not to activate the monitor, which would show the details of his client list. As he turned around he brushed against the thug and got a flash-transfer: A dead dog. Revenants rushing in and attacking. A naked girl, spreadeagled on a table. A cop. A reverend. Not a cop. This guy. He was dressed as a cop but was not a cop and had seen the fight, had seen the man now lying on his table die they were trying to get the naked spreadeagled girl to do… what? Then the contact was broken and he saw nothing more of what the man was thinking. He thought the man should have worn long sleeves. He thought he, too, should have worn long sleeves. He wondered if the man had gotten anything from him and

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feared that he had but also thought that it would be mostly just annoyance and worry, and images of the nearly-finished project wasting away and how tired he would be by the end of the day. It was because of flash-transfers, he knew, that most people never showed any bare skin any more. In warmer climates, he understood, that could be a problem. People had taken in some places to applying plastiskin spray to their body, which could be uncomfortable for the first few hours because it prevented sweating, but if you were going to be in one of the crowded places that filled the Amusement States it was that or wear a sweatshirt, and neither was very optimal. The body lay on his workbench and the men who had carried it in were backing away, looking for a place to sit and not finding one, and looking distastefully at the bins of carefully frozen body parts. The three goons who had cleared the table looked towards the door expectantly and the man waited. A revenant walked in. The man had not expected that. Very few revenants just walked around. Plus it was daylight. Plus this revenant was clearly in charge of this operation. Plus it wore a polo shirt, which was unusual for revenants, who tended to favor looser fitting clothing and especially t-shirts, and especially “ironic” t-shirts. The word “ironic” had come to be associated with the stinking, sucking, gasping undead creatures because of that. This revenant was also older, apparently about 50 when created, unlike most of the revenants who were in their 20s, a fact that was true because revenants were stronger if created in their 20s. Created too young and they were useless and childlike, and who could use a 12-year-old undead evil attack revenant? Beyond 30, though, revenants tended to require too much lifeforce and were always slowing down and easy to destroy. Also, many revenants were in their twenties because, it had recently been revealed, it was a fad among students in the Colleges to create revenants as a joke – picking on the less-popular kids by turning them into revenants. Those unattached

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revenants were generally easier for the police to spot and destroy. The need to destroy revenants, though, and the manner in which they had to be destroyed – by disintegrating the body somehow, usually through dissolving it in acid – made it one of the less-popular tasks for the police, who then focused on finding out who was creating the monsters and tried to destroy them. The penalty for creating revenants was to be destroyed like a revenant. The penalty for creating zombies was worse. That was why he worried that the door was open but he did not want to argue with this revenant. He divided his attention between watching it walk stiffly over and stand there, sucking for breath and looking at him, and watching the door. He finally decided he had to do it. “We should close the door,” he said, quietly. He kept his eyes on the revenant, but it was hard. The revenant flicked his hand and two of the men went and closed the door and stood by it. “He was killed,” the revenant told the man. “Yes,” the man agreed. “We killed him,” the revenant said. The man did not ask who “we” was. “We did not mean to do that,” the revenant told him. The man waited. The revenant sucked for air but it needed lifeforce. The breathing was reflex only, as revenants did not need oxygen. The man wondered if he might be a target but realized they needed him. For now, he was safe. He despised this. He just wanted to run his diner and make his zombies. He did not want to be caught up in politics.

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The body lay on his table and he looked at it now. “I’ll do what I can. Men, it doesn’t work so well on. How long has he been dead?” The revenant shrugged. “That makes it harder.” “Look it up.” The revenant snapped his fingers. Or tried to. Instead, they sort of ground and slimed. A henchman, also wearing a polo shirt, said “His name’s Brigadoon Thompson.” “Brigadoon?” “Yes.” “That’s an unusual name.” “It’s his name.” The revenant was watching him carefully. The man watched the revenant. “You don’t recognize the name?” the revenant said, finally. The man shook his head. “I don’t follow the news.” “Why did you agree to this then?” “The caller told me. I recognized his voice. I don’t recognize you.” “But you will do it.” “Yes.” The man paused. “I’ll try.” “Do it,” the revenant told him. “This is an unparalleled chance.” The man looked down at the body on his table again and then at the parts of his other project that would be delayed. He was going to be very tired. He should not have answered the phone.

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“How long?” asked the revenant. “I don’t know.” “Work on this only. Nothing else. Don’t leave here until it’s done.” The man shrugged. “How much am I getting paid?” he asked. The revenant looked at him. “We are not paying you.” “My time and skill are worth something.” The revenant considered. “You’re in a poor position to bargain. We could reveal you.” “And I could refuse to do this.” The revenant considered again. “Maybe,” it offered, “If you do this and do it properly, then, when you die, we’ll open the gate just a little.” He considered that, as he looked at Brigitte’s father’s dead body on his table, and then again at the corpse on the floor awaiting its returned soul, at the body parts around him, at the computer screen that if lit up would show a list of clients demanding zombies for services, mostly sexual. At the revenant he was bargaining with to create an undead person. “I doubt I’m going there,” he told the revenant. “I’d rather just have money.”

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Part Nine: “You two had better get some sleep. Or, in your case, Rachel, some rest. Maybe.” It wasn’t that late but I was exhausted. On the other hand, I knew that if I went to sleep I’d just go back to Hell, and I didn’t want that. I suddenly felt more tired than I knew what to do with, and I felt a lump in my throat, too, like I was going to cry, and then I didn’t know what to do because as I thought that, I thought Is it even my throat and that made me sad and also a little disgusted with my body. I leaned against the desk and put my hands over my face. I felt Brigitte put her hand on mine. “Where can we go, Samson?” she asked, and he said to follow him so I felt Brigitte taking my hand and I followed her, looking down. “What are you going to do?” Brigitte asked. “I’m going to check my messages and then get some sleep, too, and maybe change clothes. I’ve been wearing these same things for I don’t know how long. I don’t know if I’ll ever get this smell off of me, but I can at least get the clothes off of me.” I didn’t answer. I wanted, I realized, to just sleep. And to be normal. That more than sleep, but if I was normal I could sleep so it would all come out all right. Samson touched the wall in some nondescript place and it slid aside. Inside there was a little room with a small bed and a dresser and a screen and a lamp. “Guest bedroom,” he said. I found that unlikely. But I also didn’t care. Brigitte led me in by the hand she was holding, which was the one that obviously didn’t belong to me at all and that made me feel worse. I didn’t even know who I was, really, and it was bothering me. I’d known

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that something was wrong, I know. I’d known, since I’d woken up or whatever a few weeks before, that things weren’t right, that most people, I guessed, did not suddenly realize that they didn’t know anything about themselves, that most people would have to have a memory and friends and relatives, that most people would not be afraid of their own body and would not have nothing in the world to rely on but their octopus and eventually their girlfriend. Brigitte touched the screen on and some music started playing, quietly, and she laughed a little. “Daddy always hated me watching this show.” Samson shrugged. “Well, I don’t really care. So knock yourself out. I’ve got some things to do.” The wall closed again. I wondered if we were locked in to the “guest room.” But I didn’t really care, either. How could being locked in a room by Samson be any worse than any of the things I’d gone through: demons and Bob getting killed and Brigitte’s dad kidnapping me… “Oh, God,” I said, then, and I started crying again. “What’s the matter?” Brigitte said, and sat down next to me on the little bed. The music played in the background. On the screen -- I always had to have Brigitte work the screen for me because I couldn’t get them to operate—the person singing the song was jumping around on the top of a big dirigible holding what appeared to be fans of the person singing the song. I thought maybe I recognized the song. A girl jumped around on the dirigible, too, treating it like a trampoline, and also, she had a guitar. “Brigitte... your dad’s dead,” I told her, and looked down again. It was somehow easier to talk about that than to sit there and think about my own problems. I wanted Doc, but Doc had stayed out by Samson. “What?” Brigitte said. She put her hand under my chin and gently tugged it up. “Look at me.” “He’s dead,” I said, looking into her beautiful beautiful eyes. She didn’t look saddened or scared or anything. She looked concerned, though, worried.

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“How do you know?” I told her about the basement, how I got to Chicago, and her dad. I told her about the end, where I’d mentioned about the pregnancy. “You didn’t,” she said. She kind of smiled then, I thought. “I did,” I said, and then looked down. “I’m sorry Brigitte. I didn’t kill him or anything. I know you probably loved him.” Brigitte looked down, too, sitting next to me. We both looked at our feet. Both our feet were bare. I tried to remember if she’d been wearing shoes before. I hadn’t seen them kicked off. Her feet matched and I was jealous of her. Jealous of her for being so regular. She was just a regular girl with regular parts and regular lives and if she wanted to she could go to sleep right now and when she did, she wouldn’t end up running through a river of flame or getting kidnapped by demons or anything and also she knew where all her body parts came from. The song ended and the screen went into a low monotone speaking, a commercial or something, some kind of public service announcement. “Are you sure he was dead?” Brigitte asked finally. “Yeah,” I said. After a second I said “He looked pretty bad and he was gurgling and all.” “He’s a pretty tough guy,” Brigitte said. I didn’t answer. She put her arm around me and put her head on my shoulder. I just sat there, my hands in my lap. “I didn’t always agree with everything he told me, all his ways,” Brigitte said, then. “We argued a lot. He didn’t approve of… things about me.” I was pretty sure I knew what those were. I said “He didn’t like that you… liked girls?” Brigitte shrugged. “That was part of it.”

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“I’m really sorry.” “I love him and all,” Brigitte said. “I suppose I should be more sad. I have a hard time picturing him dead. He never seemed like the kind of guy who would die. You look at some people, like him, and you just never think that person will be dead someday.” Another pause. “It might be different if I saw him. I just can’t picture it.” “We probably missed the funeral,” I said. What a dumb thing to say, I told myself. Brigitte leaned her head down so her lips were touching my shoulder. “It probably would have been a real brimstone one, with Reverend Tommy. Reverend Tommy and him were always butting heads. I bet Reverend Tommy would’ve used the occasion to really light a fire under some people.” She was speaking right into my shoulder. Her hand, behind me, was on the small of my back and was rubbing me lightly. When she talked about Reverend Tommy that reminded me of him, too. “He’s in Hell,” I said, still staring down. “What?” Brigitte asked. Her voice was kind of muffled. She’d been softly kissing my shoulder and rubbing my lower back. “I took him to Hell with me,” I said, and I felt that lump in my throat again. I wanted to relax and feel Brigitte’s hands touching me, but all I could do was keep telling her about people who were dead because of me and about people I’d taken to Hell. I told her, too, about Reverend Tommy, getting her caught up. I told her about killing Bob. “Who’s Bob?” she asked, when I finally stopped. She hadn’t stopped rubbing my back, and her left hand was draped, now, casually, almost, on my left thigh just above the knee. “A revenant,” I said. She’d been tracing a little figure eight on my leg with her thumb. She stopped. “I hate those things,” she said.

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“Bob’s different.” “He’s a revenant.” “Yeah, but he doesn’t try to suck my life force out.” “He tried to suck Reverend Tommy’s, didn’t he?” “Yeah, but that’s different too.” “How?” “I don’t really know. I didn’t like Reverend Tommy.” “He’s not all bad, you know.” I should have looked at her, but I didn’t. I said, though, quietly, “He hates me and he hates my kind. He hates… lesbian…zombies.” I finally spit it out. I guess I’d realized that Reverend Tommy was talking about me all along, but until Samson had said it today, I’d not thought of myself as a zombie. Or a lesbian, either, but that part didn’t bother me. The zombie part did. Brigitte pinched my leg skin lightly and a shiver went up me. Her right hand was pressing more firmly into my back. A new song came on again. It was the guy singer and the girl guitarist again, this time on stage. The girl was singing and I thought I knew this song, too. That kind of thing happened as I’d walked south, and here and there: I thought maybe they were glimpses into my memory, things that I knew but couldn’t get too. I wondered how I knew things like how to talk but not things like whether the country had a president or a king. “You can’t trust revenants,” Brigitte said. “I know that. You know that, too.” “I trusted Bob. Bob helped me. A lot.” Brigitte didn’t answer. Every now and then her right hand dipped a finger down inside the waistband of my pants. It tickled but in a really good way. Her left hand moved up a little higher, almost to where the bend in my leg was, at the edge of my hips.

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The song on the screen was a pretty good one. I tried to focus on that and not on how weary I felt. How could I never sleep? The only time I’d been unconscious was when I’d been kidnapped. I should have asked them how they did that, I thought. Brigitte had moved up a little more, and was kissing the bare skin on my neck just inside my collar of my shirt. Her right hand was now down the back of my pants and on my butt, rubbing it lightly and pressing fingers into it. Her left hand was resting, flat-palmed, on my thigh, fingers just inches from where I really wanted them to be. But I sighed. I kept looking down. I wanted to turn to her and start kissing her and rubbing her and strip off all of our clothes, I really really wanted to, but I didn’t. Instead, I just sat there and stared at my two different feet, my two different hands, my difference. “Brigitte, how can you love me?” I finally said, quietly, and felt that lump in my throat again. She turned me towards her, then, lifting her hands up and pushing me back onto the bed, moving up until she straddled me and stared down into my eyes. Her eyes were big and beautiful and sparkled in the flickering light from the screen. Her hands pulled my shirt up over my head. I felt, in the dark, her hands touch my breasts and begin playing with my nipples. “How can I love you?” She asked. “Like this.” And she put her mouth down to my left breast, licking it and taking the nipple into her mouth and sucking on it, tickling it and rubbing it with her nose while her hands undid my pants and then somehow she had her shirt off, too, and was pressing against me, lying down on my chest, our breasts touching, bare skin on bare skin and she had only her underwear on and I had only my underwear on, I couldn’t even think until later how she even did that, but she did. She was wriggling against me, getting a leg in between mine and when she did, when she got my legs open I was ready for her, I thought, but I felt her fingers go into me and I gasped and started crying, for real, for pleasure and for sadness and Brigitte put her mouth on mine and kept touching me and kissing me, our tongues hugging together, and with her other hand she took mine, she took that totally-different hand, and she put it in between

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her own legs, so our arms were pressed between us and I had my hand right on her, and I took the hint and started doing to her what she was doing to me. When it was over, she said “That’s how I can love you.” I was sweaty and still crying a little. But I felt better. We lay in the dark and Brigitte snuggled up against me. “Do you know,” she said, “You’re voice is just as pretty as that girl singer’s.” I laid there, not moving. I didn’t want to fall asleep. “Brigitte, talk to me,” I said. “Don’t let me fall asleep.” But she was already snoozing a little, and she drowsily said “Hmmm?” and I said never mind and I hugged her. I laid there and hugged her until I was sure she was asleep and then I wasn’t going to fall asleep so I sat up and looked at the screen. I heard from outside the door a mumble, Samson’s voice, and I listened. While I sat there, trying to make out words, I suddenly realized that Doc was not around. I bet he could have amplified or translated for me. I needed him and didn’t know where he might have gone off to. I felt awfully alone, sitting there in the dark, hearing just a mumble in the background and the low hum of the television playing music and images. Music videos, I guessed, they were called. I heard that a few times on the television, the phrase music videos every now and then. I couldn’t make out what Samson was saying. He didn’t sound excited. He sounded like he was reading a list. I don’t know if he was or not, he just had the tone of voice of someone who was reading a list. Once I heard a squawk of static. Then I heard a chair creak. After a while, I didn’t hear Samson anymore. The only other light in the room came from the low runner edging that glowed a soft violet and made everything in the room hazy and kind of flowery looking, and that softened the harsh white light of the videos that kept showing.

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There were a lot of videos of the guy and girl singing, and I watched some of them but couldn’t focus on it. After about fifteen minutes of that, I got up and walked back and forth to keep from falling asleep. I didn’t want to go to Hell. I didn’t want to leave Brigitte, or Doc, again, and I didn’t want to take the chance on taking them all with me. That was another thing, I realized. I couldn’t go to sleep anymore with Brigitte in my arms, or even touching her. Before, I’d been able to do that but now that I was bringing people in and out of Hell, could I risk it? Brigitte should not be taken to Hell again. So I’d never be able to fall asleep holding her in my arms again, never be able to snuggle up to her from behind and put my face into her hair and sniff it and then play with it and twirl it around my finger and then intertwine our feet the way I did that one morning so that it was hard to tell where she left off and I began… … I was crying again, quietly, and I didn’t want to sit down on the bed because Brigitte was sleeping so soundly. I paced back and forth and then went to where the door was, when we’d come in. I figured I’d have to force it or find a lock or something but I walked up to it and put my hand out to see if there was a handle or button or what and instead, the door just slipped open, letting me back out into HQ. There still wasn’t much to see. Just the desk and the screen and the door back to the convenience store. It was still small and still felt and smelt dusty and unused. I wondered how long it’d been since Samson was here. That little phone thing he had was gone. But Doc was sitting on the desk near the screen. I walked over to him and picked him up. “Doc,” I whispered. Lights flickered and Doc’s voice, quietly, said Updating. “Sorry,” I said, and held him in my hand while I looked around. There were a few desks in the drawer. I didn’t feel like I should open them, but then I wondered why not. Wasn’t I supposed to be on Samson’s side? Besides, what would he do to me? I got the feeling he needed me. So I opened them, but nothing. They were empty. There wasn’t

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anything else in the room to open or look at. I guessed that there might be at least one more door on top of the two that I knew about, because Samson must need a place to sleep, but I didn’t want to open it if there was and I wasn’t sure. I sat down in the chair in front of the screen and waved my hand at it, the way that I’d seen others do. It didn’t do anything. Most of the time, other people would go up to one of these screens and hold up a hand or just get near it and it would flicker into action and they could control it, searching and computing and things. I could not do that. I tried touching it and looked behind it and figured there must be an on-off switch somewhere, but there wasn’t. There was just a screen, on its little pedestal. I couldn’t even tell how it got power. Doc flickered brighter and said Updated. “Doc,” I asked. “How come I can’t work this thing.” Doc hovered next to me and pulsed softly. His voice was quieter than usual. “You have no chip,” he answered. “What’s a chip?” I asked. Doc buzzed a little. “Beginning several hundred years ago, computer processing chips became powerful enough that a chip smaller than 1 cm in size could handle millions of functions per second, and the technology was adapted to make chips from a combination of silicone and DNA.” “DNA? Like human DNA?” “Human DNA was retroengineered to grow human flesh and nerve viruses that were genetically indistinct and could be implanted into any person without fear of rejection. The technique was first used for chip technology and eventually was modified to allow silicone artificial organs as well.” Doc went silent and I realized I’d interrupted his first answer. “The chips,” I prompted.

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“The chips were first created as silicone based artiflesh, semi-living tissue implanted with the circuitry to perform the calculations handled by supermicrocomputers of the time. They were initially attempted to be placed into persons who had suffered brain damage or damage to the nervous system, in an effort to allow the chips to take the place of damaged organs or nerves. Because they were partially organic, the chips and the human body began to adapt and the chips began integrating into the nervous system. Total integration was never achieved with a fully-formed adult but tests showed that the longer the chip was in, the more integrated it became. “150 years ago, the chip began to be implanted into human babies to take advantage of undeveloped nervous systems, and the result was that human babies would grow a second set of nerve links that were attached to the chip, integrating it with the human brain, to allow cybernetic connections between humans and computers while bypassing ordinary interfaces such as keyboards. Shortrange transmission technology allowed human beings to control computerized devices through their chips. “Is that ‘sharing?’” “No, it’s not,” said Samson’s voice behind me. Doc buzzed up to sit by my shoulder. Samson came out and I spun around in the chair. I hadn’t heard a door open. “Why are you awake…never mind,” he said. “You don’t want to go back to Hell. Well, I don’t blame you. What are you doing at my desk, searching it?” “Yes,” I said, a bit defensively. “For what?” “Answers,” I said. “Ask Doc for answers,” Samson said. “He’ll give you as many as he can.” “That’s what I was doing before you got involved,” I said, a little more defensively. What did he mean as many as he can?

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“I’m surprised to see how much you don’t know,” Samson said. He peered at me. “I’d like to really examine you.” I became aware that I was wearing very ragged clothes and not much covered up. I felt a little uncomfortable around him. “Don’t worry,” he said, noticing me tensing up. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’ve been waiting too long for you to show up.” “You keep saying that,” I said. “But what for? What do you need me to do?” I figured he’d never tell me, but he did. He said: “I need you to control the lesbian zombies so that I can take over the world.” That's when all hell broke loose just outside the door. Literally. We heard it, and smelt it, at about the same time. There was a horrible tearing crashing roaring buckling sound, and also an overpowering smell of sulfur just ballooned out. Doc flew up and stood sentinel near my shoulder, beeping and whirring, and Samson whirled around. “Don’t move,” he said, and waved a hand towards the door that was not that far away. The door opened and I saw through the door we’d entered that the entire convenience store was being sucked down, slowly, into a swirling whirlpool of slowlyliquifying matter, like the store was melting and being pulled down a drain, while sticking up through the drain was a hand, a hand that was larger, even, than the 100-foottall demon’s hands had been. I could only imagine how large the thing on the other end of that hand might be. I screamed and tried to scramble back from the doorway as the hand came towards up. “Relax,” Samson said calmly. “The door’s not open and I doubt it can get in here.” For a guy who’d only just escaped from Hell… four? Days ago, he was awfully calm. I stayed pressed up against the wall and flattened my hands.

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“What is it?” I asked, barely controlling my hysteria. It is a demon said Doc. Approximately 400 feet tall extrapolating from the hand. Home dimension = number 4, code named: Hell. Breathes sulfur. Eats flesh. “What?” I asked, and then the door to the bedroom opened and Brigitte stood there, going from sleepy-and-sexy in a flash to scared as she took in the hand that was pressed up against the translucent door. “What is that?” she yelled, and moved over by me and put her arms around me. “It’s a demon,” said Samson, calmly. He stood there, with his hands on his hips, shaking his head. “Those idiots. I mean, they should have known better, because this thing’ll never get to me, but the attention they’re drawing.” “Kill it!” I yelled. “Kill it? I can’t kill a demon. I can drive it back, probably.” Samson peered a little and said “And the van’s gone. I’m sure. Great. That’s going to slow us down.” He took a step or two over by the monitor while the demon hand became a fist and pounded on the door and the wall. THUD THUD THUD THUD THUD it hit faster than I could have imagined. The whole structure shook. Dust fell from the ceilings Samson got near the screen and snapped his fingers. It came to life with a bored-looking woman on the other side. She snapped to attention. “Lieutenant,” she said. “Private,” he acknowledged, and gave a lazy salute. “Sir, we did not expect…” “I got out earlier than expected. No time for that. I need an airstrike.” “Coordinates.” Samson mumbled something and she said “Fixing location.” Then, a pause, and we could see her looking at some other screen. “Drones on the way.”

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Another pause. She typed. Samson turned back to watch the fist. Most of the building was gone. We were tilted towards the hole, now, and the melting sidewalk and rest of the street were pulling in further. “Do something,” Brigitte said, but she said it through clenched teeth. I knew why she’d spoken, now: we were tilted far enough that we could see around the edges of the hole that the hand reached through which meant we could see into Hell, the red glow, the acid-water, the horrors, and Brigitte didn’t want to go back there. Neither did I, especially not with my body. It might be patched together and a zombie body, but it was the only body I had. “Report,” Samson said. “Drones en route. Mark, now.” As the woman on the screen said that we heard a high-pitched sort of buzz or whine, rising from behind us, getting louder and louder. There were two booms “Going supersonic,” Samson muttered. “Good. Could’ve been faster.” And then the whines were fading away off in front of us. Samson watched the hand, which had changed tactics and was not wrapped around our part of the building and was pulling. As we watched, the sounds of the drones faded away. “That didn’t do anything,” I said. Just as I said that, though, the hand started to glow blue and crackle and there was a sound like lightning. Electricity crackled all over it and the hand shot away from the building. It began writhing and twisting and as it did it shriveled and turned black and began to look crispy and burnt. The blue-crackling stuff still flickered all over it and glazed it as the hand straightened up and shrunk. I knew where I’d seen things just like that before, too: Reverend Tommy’s praying power.

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The hand was now only about ten feet tall and appeared to be in pain. I didn’t know a hand could broadcast emotions like that but this hand was certainly doing a good job of conveying what it was like to be in an extreme amount of pain and dying and being sent back to Hell, which it was. It shriveled more and then sucked into the hole, which sealed up, leaving a depression in the earth, a twisted spirally hole that looked exactly like a whirlpool would look if you made a very realistic sculpture of it, provided that the whirlpool was also a convenience store that sold cheap sodas. And squid jerky, which I’d never learned to like though I’d eaten it three times on the way to Brigitte’s. “Do you work for the government?” I asked, looking at the monitor where the woman sat again, alternating her attention between looking at us and looking at things off to her right. She wore a black jumpsuit with a label on the right shoulder that said GI in stylized lettering and her hair was long and curly. She had her nails done. I thought that was weird for a soldier. “Government?” Samson asked, and laughed. “No, no, no. I work for something much more powerful than the government. Well, that’s for certain. That poor boy who worked the counter out there, even under the hypno that made him ignore me and anything I did, even he was more powerful than the “government” that people think exists.” Samson looked out at the frozen-rock-store-whirlpool, where, again, people were starting to gather and stare and point. “Poor kid. He really didn’t deserve that. I doubt he was going to go to end up in Hell if he’d hung on a little longer.” He snapped out of it. “Oh, well. That’s what we’re working to fix, right? Maybe he won’t be there long. Or maybe he will be. Who knows. I don’t know anything about that kid. Other than that he really was prone to hypno and was a great kid to have working the counter. I never liked having to fire people who noticed things, especially because I’d have to fire them and then have them deported to France, and who wants to live in a cave for the rest of their life? But I’m a soft touch. I know. I didn’t want to kill them, especially not now when the gate is blocked. “But I’m rambling. No, Rachel, I don’t work for the government. I work for someone with actual power – a corporation. In this case, a paramilitary organization that

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uses a corporation as its profit-making, public-friendly arm to market products it comes up with in this never-ending battle, thereby raising money, and also helps hold the “land” so to speak in this battle, the “land” being not only the physical world that you know, the dimension we’ve tabbed “One” only because it was discovered by us first, which is only natural because we lived in it, but also the minds of the people in dimension one, and also something more important than their minds, which is their souls. “I work,” he finished up, with a flourish, and I got the feeling that we were being given a pitch or recruitment speech,” For God.” We just stared at him, Brigitte and I. On the screen, the woman watched him and smiled. “Actually, to be more correct, I work for God, Inc.” Samson said, with a little less flourish. He seemed disappointed that we did not seem more impressed. “You work for God?” Brigitte asked, in disbelief. She seemed angry. “How can you say that?” “What do you mean, how can I say that?” Brigitte shook her head. “You’re not doing God’s work. Not for real.” “But I am,” Samson insisted. The woman on the screen nodded, I saw. Then she peered closer and looked from me to Samson. “Lieutenant?” the woman inquired. Samson held up a hand. “I work for God, and I can prove it, Brigitte.” “Why?” Brigitte asked. That kind of startled me as I tried to follow what was going on here. Brigitte asked why? I looked at her. That was a strange question to ask, especially for a girl from the south who’d attended Church, even a terrible hating church like the Church of Our Savior Of Living People Only, to ask why someone would work for God. Which I didn’t believe Samson was, not for a second.

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“Because it’s the right thing to do. Did you see Hell? Did you see it? Is that what you want people to end up in? Is that where you want them to go?” “No. No, I don’t, but that’s… that’s…” “That’s what?” ”Sir. Lieutenant.” The woman was looking over at me and at Brigitte and then peering to her right more, and I could hear sounds and beeping and she was doing something with her nicely-manicured hands. “Not now, Private.” Samson held up his hand again. “What’s wrong with you? Brigitte? Why are you so angry?” Brigitte was angry. I had my hand on her arm and she was tense and quivering. Her voice, when it came out was low and calm. “I don’t think you should work for God, that’s all. I really think that is a bad idea.” “How can you say that?” If Samson hadn’t asked, I would have. Brigitte, I could recall, told me that morning we were getting ready for Church, that the “Savior” was more important than anything in the world and that was why she went. “It’s the wrong side,” Brigitte said. “Sir!” the private interrupted. “I apologize for ignoring orders, sir, but I must. Sir, I’ve been checking and it’s her.” The woman on the screen pointed. It was difficult to tell who she was pointing at because the screen was two-dimensional and all but it was kind of in my general direction. Samson sounded irrirated: “Private, yes, I know. Quit interrupting. I need to talk with Brigitte. I am aware that it’s her. I’m the one who found her and brought her back here. Why do you think she’s standing in my headquarters?” I felt a little miserable at that, to be the center of this stuff that I didn’t understand again. “Not her, sir. Not the zombie. The other one. It’s her.”

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Samson looked from the screen to Brigitte. “Are you sure,” he said, slowly and carefully. “Yes. I’m certain,” the private said. Brigitte suddenly held up a little device no larger than my thumb and pointed it towards Samson. “Rachel and I are leaving,” she said. Whatever it was she was holding, Samson respected it. He had his hands up and was backing away. Doc whirled and clicked around me and was lighting up and beeping, too. He was more agitated than I’d seen him in a long time. “Don’t do anything crazy,” Samson said. He did not move, beyond that. “Don’t you,” Brigitte said. A movement off to the side caught my eye. I looked at the screen and saw the manicured woman doing something, “Brigitte,” I said, not sure what was going on but sticking with her. “That lady’s up to something.” Brigitte looked over at the screen and said “What are you … no. Wait.” The woman reached, though, and Brigitte took the little device she had and pointed it towards the screen. I saw her thumb something and Samson yelled. An arc of some kind of current or power or something went from the little thing that Brigitte held to the screen, It also shot up a little ways on Brigitte’s arm. It was red, so it looked like her arm was glowing red a little, crackling, and then the power went to the screen where the screen went red. On the picture I could see the woman; her head turned red, too, with the crackling-power, and she snapped back and rigid like she’d been paralyzed. Her eyes fluttered and flickered and she slumped down.

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As that happened, though, Samson dove at us, and he timed it just right that as Brigitte’s red-flare thing died out, Samson dove through the gap left there. I yelled Brigitte’s name but he wasn’t heading for Brigitte, he was heading for me, and he tackled me, hard, and I fell over on the ground, hitting my head against the floor. A door opened and Naked Girl was standing there. It wasn’t the same door that had opened before, either. So I had been right that there was more than one door here. Naked Girl stood there until Samson said “Take her down,” and then Naked Girl grabbed me and dragged me through the door. Samson scrambled after me and the door slid shut. I heard Brigitte pounding on it. “When this thing reloads, you’re in trouble, Samson,” she said. “I can’t believe you did this!” Naked Girl was dragging me down a hallway that was only dimly lit by floor panels glowing below us. Samson stood near the door and listened. I heard that same sonic boom sound again that the jets had made before, and I knew what was happening. All those sounds started up again and I suddenly realized what the lady on the screen had been doing – she’d sent back the drones, sent them back to attack Brigitte. “No!” I yelled, and started struggling, but Naked Girl was strong, and I couldn’t get free of her grip. She was pulling me further away. We were already about 100 feet down the hall and I was dizzy from hitting my head but I pulled and pulled and then realized she does what I say, so I said “Let go!” And she did. “Go get Brigitte,” I told her. “Keep her safe and bring her here.” “Stop that!” Samson yelled, running towards us. He had his ray gun out again. “Don’t fight me on this, Rachel. You don’t understand.” “I understand that you’re going to kill Brigitte,” I said, “And I’m not letting you.” Naked Girl and Samson met in the hall, each running towards the other. Naked Girl grabbed Samson and threw her to the side. Man, she was strong. She got to the door

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as he sat up and pointed the ray gun at her and I yelled “Don’t you DARE!” and ran towards him as fast as I could. Naked Girl did something that opened the door and Samson shot her just after that and I got to Samson just after that. I jumped on him and so I didn’t see what happened up front. But there was that sound like when the giant hand was attacked and there was that electric-static sound and there was a rush of air and heat and light, and Samson was rolling around, and I heard the gun clatter away, and I heard footsteps and the door sliding shut, and I got a wave of jarring, stinging feeling that I guessed later was that electrical stuff that had melted or baked the giant hand, and Samson punched me in the stomach and I rolled off of him, panting and gasping for breath and sucking wind and leaned against the wall as he got to his knees and then there was a red flash and he dropped, too, eyes shutting and body twitching and then I threw up from being hit in the stomach. Brigitte was kneeling in front of me. “Are you okay?” She asked. She put her hands, her soft lovely hands (that smelled a little like me) on either side of my face and stared into my eyes from a few inches away. She leaned forward and touched her head to mine. “I wish you could share,” she said, and pulled back. I swallowed and rasped out. “I’m all right, I think. I think I’m okay.” I started to stand but she held me down. “Breathe,” she said, and sat down next to me, holding my hand. Samson lay a little in front of us and off to the side, twitching and slightly red-tinged. I tried to get some air into me and settle down. “What’s going on?” I asked. “Breathe,” Brigitte said. Doc hovered over to us. “Doc?” She asked. He beeped. “Status report.” Doc whirred and glowed brighter, a little. Drones have left, he said. “Directions?” Brigitte asked.

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Doc spun and two tentacles lifted up. One got a red glow at the end. Then they drooped back down and he raised a little. This way, Doc said, and scooted down a little to my left, the direction that Naked Girl had been taking me. That made sense, I supposed. “Can you walk?” Brigitte asked. “Yeah,” I said, and stood up. I looked at her and wondered how she was doing all of this. She’d been so… helpless seeming in Hell. “Brigitte?” I asked. “Yes?” “Who are you?” I asked. She put her arms around me. “I’m the girl that loves you and is going to have your baby,” she said. Her hands were shaking, just a bit. I pulled back and looked at her. “You’re scared, aren’t you?” I asked her. She nodded. “So all this…” I didn’t finish. I waved my hand in what I figured was the general direction of Samson, and the drones, and Naked Girl, and all this, and she bit her lip. “I’m scared, Rachel, but I love you. So I do what I have to do.” She hugged me and pressed her head into my shoulder blade. “But in Hell…” “Hell was different. I was never there. This,” she pointed to Samson. “This I was prepared for?” “Prepared for?” Doc came back and said

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Communications intercept. Playing and then a new voice broke in, through his speakers, saying “Drone attack successful but communications with HQ Down. Static attack on Dispatch successful. Sending personnel in.” “What does all that mean?” I asked Doc. Brigitte still was hugging me and I felt her trembling stop a little. Additional men are coming. We must depart. “Do you know the way, Doc?” I asked. Yes. “Should we bring Naked Girl?” I asked him. Yes, Doc said. “Yes,” Brigitte said at the same time. I looked at her again. She was looking up at me. “You want to bring her, too?” I asked. “It’s what I was told to do,” she said. “Told?” I asked. “By who?” “By my dad,” Brigitte said. “There’s a lot I need to tell you, Rachel.” “Yes, there is,” said Samson, and we both pulled back and looked at him. He was sitting up and had the ray gun in his hand and was pointing it at us. He still glowed a little red, and his movements were all herky-jerky and he crackled whenever he moved, but he was looking at us and pointing the gun at us. Samson went on: “Start with how you were told to make Rachel fall in love with you.”

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Meanwhile, In New York: He wished the men and the revenant would leave. He did not like being watched while he worked. He did not like it at all. But they did not leave and they would not. So he had begun the procedure under their watchful eyes. He had sawed off two of the limbs… “Why are you doing that?” the revenant had asked him. He had shrugged. “Because it has to be done.” “Why?” The man shrugged again. “At least two have to go. That’s the rule.” “You can’t leave him whole?” The man shook his head. No. He didn’t answer, though. He was tired from the process of sawing off the leg. He looked up, after a while, wiping sweat and flecks of blood off of his forehead. “It would be better with three, or even four. And the head. But I suppose you want the head to stay.” “Would it be him without it?” “Hard to say.” Silence. He decided that he would saw off a third limb and did so. That took a while, too. It had to be done manually, that was what the Lieutenant had always impressed on him. Whatever the process was, however, it worked, however the souls were called back into the body, fusing the body together, causing it to reanimate but be more docile, however that worked, it could not be done if the disintegration of the body was done by machine or with lasers or mechanical saws. It all had to be done manually, no power involved. It was tough. But he was strong and he got the third limb off, the other leg. He left the arm on, the left arm. It was tricky replacing left arms and he tried not to do so anymore. Left hands were always evil. Left hands were where evil resided.

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He looked up at the small box, the metal case with its gold lining. He wondered again where she had gone. He wondered if the left hand would win. He regretted caving in and saying that he would use that hand. But the money. The money had been so much! And then he hadn’t gotten any of it because before he was sure she was trained she’d left. And she’d been so beautiful, too. He could almost, then, see the appeal when he’d created that one. She had come out perfectly. And then she’d run off. Too perfect, he thought. And that was the end of the reverie because it was on to the other part of the tasks. It was on to sprinkling the dust on the corpse, which lay dismantled on the table in front of him, the stumps of legs dribbling blood, the left hand looking as though it should be holding something. The eyes closed and the face peaceful in its repose. He took the green powder from a jar, grabbing a handful. Unlike some practitioners, he did not just waft it over. He carefully sprinkled it down over the centerline of the body, and then brushed it off to either side, rubbing it into the naked body on the table. Then the yellow powder, with which he was equally careful. The body in the right light would glitter a little, until the powder sunk in. He did not know, either, what the powder did. The lieutenant had impressed on him the importance of the powders, of which he had a large stock left to him by the Lieutenant (at least five large barrelsful) and he was not imaginative enough to wonder what he would do when it ran out. He had not even used the first barrel so far despite a thriving practice. The salve was next, rubbed in carefully into every part of the skin until the body looked coated in oil, gleaming and slick in the light of the basement. He washed his hands so they were not slippery and walked back. He took a brighter light and perched it over the table, above the body’s forehead. He took a small scalpel. “What are you doing?” the revenant asked. He jumped. It had been quiet for nearly an hour, the length of time he’d been doing the powder and the salve. “Taking out the chip,” he said.

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“Won’t that cause problems?” “Got to be done.” “Why?” “Because I always do it.” “But why?” “Because that’s the way it’s done.” “It will keep him from sharing.” “Yes.” “That’s not good. His daughter will figure it out right away.” “I do things the way they’re supposed to be done.” “Will he reanimate with the chip still in?” “I don’t know.” “What? How can you not know?” The man was sitting on a stool, hands dry and cracked from so many washings and so much blood and tired from the cutting. He was not arguing and was not offended by the revenant’s questioning. He was merely tired. His eyes flicked over to the halffinished order from the night before. This would be several nights and days in a row without rest, he realized. I should call and postpone that order. He’d never done that. But he didn’t want to make mistakes. “I don’t know,” he said now, to the revenant. “But this is what you do.” “Yes.” The revenant stalked around and fumed. He heard its breath hissing in and out through its lips. He saw its eyes flaring, the torn-apart eyelids that were one mark of a revenant, because when they opened their eyes into their new horrid half-life the eyes

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were never cut open gently or unsewn – the revenants simply ripped the threads and sometimes their eyelids, so that all revenants had a tattered-looking face. The revenant looked at one of the men. “Get me Supervisor,” he said. The man went to the screen in the basement and waved a hand. It flickered on and the man furrowed his brow. Images and numbers flickered on the screen and then there was a woman’s face on the screen. It was Ms. Hold – one of the computergenerated proxies that people could select when they did not wish to be bothered. Ms. Hold informed them in the generic voice she had that Supervisor did not wish to be disturbed. As she did that, one corner flickered with an image of the person the man assumed to be Supervisor, and underneath the image the word “DOING THINGS” appeared in the status bar. “Override,” the man said into the screen. Ms. Hold’s CGI features were implacable. The man looked back at the revenant, who could not operate the screen himself, of course, because there were no electrical impulses flowing in his body between his nerves. Zombies could not share or use screens because they had no chips. Revenants could not use screens or share because they did not move or think or act using nervous impulses conducted via electrical means; their bodies did not produce electricity, the man knew from the classes the Lieutenant had given him, and the electric currents in the body, combined with the chip, allow access to Sharing and screens. “How do they move and act?” the man had asked the Lieutenant, as they’d been sitting in a trench underneath a sky cut by periodic bursts of gamma explosions and hot with ray gun beams. “What makes them go?” “Spite and fear,” the Lieutenant had told him. “Spite keeps them moving, to spite the living who created them, and fear of stopping moving. Spite and fear are powerful motivators.” Now, the revenant in his basement, powered by spite and fear instead of electricity, shoved next to the man and said a word. Ms. Hold did not react. The revenant elbowed the man and the man repeated the word. Ms. Hold’s eyes popped open.

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“Interrupting,” she said, and a new man appeared on the screen. He was sitting in a leather chair, looking off to his right, and sipping from a coffee mug that glowed slightly red. He looked at them, annoyance and surprise on his face. “Why are you bothering me?” the Supervisor said. The revenant explained the problem. “Put him on,” the Supervisor said, and the revenant grabbed the man’s shoulder and pulled him, a move that was unnecessary because the man was already leaving behind the body and coming to the screen. He wanted this done. He wanted this job over, to finish his new job, and then to sleep for a while. The Supervisor eyed him up and down. “You don’t look like much,” the Supervisor said. The man did not react. He knew it was true. “Still,” the Supervisor said, “You’re supposed to be the best and know what you’re doing. What do you recommend?” The man’s opinion was almost never asked. For example, nobody had ever asked him about the left hand on the last one he’d made. They’d just told him. “I always remove the chip,” he said. “I always do.” The Supervisor considered. He looked in his screen so that he was looking at the revenant. “He’s the expert,” the Supervisor said. “He may come across as a moron, but he knows what he’s doing. Do what he says.” “Yes, Supervisor. I apologize for bothering you.” The Revenant saluted. The Supervisor gave a magnaminous wave. He was wearing the same kind of polo shirt the others were. Behind him was a large symbol or logo that matched the logo on the polo shirts, and the man could see it clearly in its enlarged form: A white-metal gate with a bar across it. “You did the right thing. It was a big question. Rather have you ask than screw it up. Good work. Now, is there anything else?” The Revenant said no. The man, though, spoke up: “There is something else.”

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The Supervisor looked surprised, again, and said “So you can think. Well, what is it? What else?” “I need limbs,” the man said. “The only limbs I have are women’s limbs. Do you want me to attach those?” “No. No, no, no,” the Supervisor said, his voice trailing off as he thought. “Already bad enough this thing won’t share. Can’t have it going around with breasts and shapely ankles.” The man was going to clarify that he was not doing the torso on this one, but the Supervisor interrupted him. “You’ve got no men’s limbs at all?” The man shook his head. “What do you need?” “Two legs and a right arm.” The Supervisor considered. “Awfully hard to get that on short notice without drawing attention to things.” “I don’t want police attention.” The Supervisor laughed. “They haven’t told you?” The man simply stood there. He couldn’t say if they’d told him something unless he knew what the thing was he was or was not told. So he didn’t answer. The Sueprvisor did not clarify. Instead, he said “Well, I suppose they wouldn’t. You don’t need to know. And the other two groups might find out and send their own guys. Might even dress them up as cops. I forget whose month it is to do that.” He thought again, then took a sip of his Red Drink, and then said “Well, nothing we can do about it. Use theirs,” he said, and pointed at the men behind him. The screen clicked off and the Revenant turned and shot two of the men standing there, dropping them to the ground swiftly and silently. To the third henchmen, he said “Start cutting” and pointed to the two dead men. The man went back to the table and began cutting out the chip.

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Part 10: That hallway was dim. I stared at Brigitte, who I could only see in kind-of-asilhouette. She stared back at me. “What does he mean, Brigitte?” I asked her in as steady of a voice as I could. I looked down at her stomach, just a little bulging. Was she really pregnant? “Are you?” I asked. Brigitte looked confused for a moment. “Am I what?” I pointed at her stomach. “Are you pregnant?” “Yes, Rachel. Yes, I am. Very much so. And I’m in love with you.” “Why’d he say that, then?” “Because he’s a liar!” Brigitte looked angry and waved towards Samson. “Don’t listen to him. He’s just trying to tear us apart so you’ll help him and his stupid plans and God and you don’t want that. Do you remember when we first met?” I did. I do. I wanted to believe her. But I did remember when we first met. I had been walking for a week, maybe, or so, sleeping outside, and stealing food, when I could, and being confused. I was more confused and more tired than I thought anyone could be, but I didn’t know whether that was the way things were or what. I didn’t know anything. From that moment when Doc had told me to walk South, I had begun learning about life, because when I woke up in that diner, I didn’t know much about nothing. Doc had said Go south, and so I did. I didn’t even know why. It just sounded like a good idea to me. So I’d stood up and started walking. I’d walked out of New York City, entirely, just started walking from downtown where the buildings all had 200 stories or more, walking through the night with the lights that glowed very dimly. There were lights only about every five hundred yards or so, and not much light in between them. I wasn’t scared of the dark, not at all, and I just walked and walked and walked.

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Eventually the 200-story-tall buildings became 100-story tall buildings and then smaller and smaller until I was walking through a residential area and then, hours after I’d started out, I was walking through an area that wasn’t quite just nature, not just trees and grass, but was pretty close to it. Doc had given me guidance, telling me which way to go, helping me to cross streets safely, and had gotten me onto a country back road. He beeped and whirred and floated along and played some music for me from time to time. I didn’t say much of anything that first night. I didn’t know what to say. Everytime I looked at my body I would shudder. Do you have any idea what it’s like to literally wake up in someone else’s body? Or more than one-someone-else’s body? I would look down and see my body, its mismatched feet, the various parts, and start crying, and Doc would play some soothing music and we kept walking. I got hungry but we were in the middle of nowhere, and I finally got tired. The sun had been up for hours and I told Doc that I had to sit and rest for a moment. He led me to some bushes. That was the second time I remembered going to Hell. I woke up from that, crying and shaking. “Doc,” I said. “Doc.” It was all I could say for a while. Doc hovered near me and didn’t say much of anything. He played some music that I liked, a pretty-voiced singer. “Doc, I was in Hell,” I told him. Doc hadn’t answered, maybe because I hadn’t asked him a question. I asked him, then, how I could get something to eat. Steal it, Doc told me. So I did. We’d found a convenience store, a lot like the one that Samson’s HQ was behind. I’d gone in there, looking for all the world like someone who had every right to be considered a normal person. I wondered if the clerk there—it had been a woman, and I’d thought she was pretty but sort of underdressed— would notice that I had different body parts, would think it was weird. I just walked to the door. Doc said he would wait outside to avoid attention. Octopi are somewhat rare, he said.

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I didn’t think then: How do I have one? I’d gone in and done what he told me to do, gone through the aisles looking for something small and easy to carry that wouldn’t spoil. I’d settled on a couple of packages of crackers and then, like Doc had said to do, I’d slipped them into the waistband of my dress and had walked to the other aisle and looked at some things, then had gone to the bathroom and used it and then come out and left. Doc had said: That will make it look as though you only went in there to use the restroom but wanted them not to know that And it worked. I left with my crackers and we walked all that day, stopping once at a little building, a library, to get a drink of water, in a small town. When it came time to sleep that night, I was starved again. But I was also scared because of what I wanted to believe was a dream the night before, that trip to Hell, a dream that was a lot like the first time I’d gone to Hell. I sat down off in the grassy area Doc had picked out. He was playing some talking program, something with news on it that I wasn’t really listening to but I liked the background noise. “Doc, am I going to go there again tonight when I sleep?” I asked him. Yes, Doc said. I hugged my knees to my chest and listened to the talking. I couldn’t follow it. Visions of Hell ran through my head, the sights and sounds and smells. That was what really made me realize it wasn’t a dream, that it was more than a dream, that I’d actually gone to Hell: The smells. Who has smells in a dream? And smells like that? I didn’t know then, and I don’t really know now, because I can’t remember life before I became this, but smells made it real. Like if you ever eat something really disgusting or weird, like when a few days later I tried beef, you always describe it first by telling someone how it smelled. I did go to Hell that night. That was the night I met Bob. But I tried and tried and tried to not go to Hell. I tried and tried to listen to Doc’s little newscast, focusing on the

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words: someone had been kidnapped or something. Kidnapped. I couldn’t follow it. But someone famous. I just stared at Doc’s little orange glow as he bobbed up and down lightly and tried not to nod off. I talked to Doc, asked him questions, but I couldn’t really think of anything. Like I asked him: “Where am I, Doc?” and he said: Pennsylvania but that didn’t mean that much to me, so I said: “Where’s that?” And he said In the United States of America. “What is that?” I asked. “A country?” It is a country. Yes. It wasn’t very interesting or helpful but it kept me awake a little longer. I couldn’t remember how I knew what countries were. I sat and tried to keep warm and tried not to think of how hungry I was and asked Doc to tell me about the United States and he told me about its government and the police forces and how its economy was primarily something or other based, I think he said entertainment it all made little sense to me and eventually he droned on and on and I couldn’t follow it and I woke up in Hell for the third time with Bob staring at me and leaning down over me and I screamed because I didn’t know what he was. I don’t like to think about that time, or any of the other times I’ve been to Hell. Even with Bob there, even with Bob helping me a little, I never ever have a good time and that time and the second time, the night before, I was in Hell for, like, weeks, while my body slept or whatever, and so I’d been in this life for only two days and three nights, if that first time climbing out of that crevasse was a night, and I think it was because it was after that I woke up in the diner… so I’d been in this life for two days, and three nights, and I’d spent weeks, if not months, of that life, in Hell and praying that it was only a dream but knowing that it wasn’t.

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When I woke up that morning, after the third time, I was freezing cold and crying. My cheek was wet with tears running down it and I was shivering and my hands were blue. Well, my right hand was blue and kind of numb. The left hand wasn’t but it was maybe, I thought, the wrong color to turn blue when it got cold. Are you okay? Doc asked me as I sat up and wiped away tears and sniffled. “No, I’m not,” I told him. I stood up. “Which way?” I wanted to walk and get warm and walk and forget that I was hungry and walk so that I could see trees and grass and living things and forget about what Bob and I had been up to in Hell, trying to survive and avoid demons and things. We started walking, Doc going a little ahead of me, and I touched everything that we walked by. I touched rocks to reassure myself that they were not hot and that they would not – as some do in Hell – open up eyes and giant mouths and come hopping after me and trying to eat me with the ground thudding at each hop/step. I touched leaves but did not pull them off the trees as I walked. I didn’t see any flowers but I saw green and wood and brown and yellow and all these colors that don’t appear in Hell and the sun was coming up and my clothes were drying off, the dew evaporating as my clothes warmed up, so I felt a little better except that I was really really hungry. That’s how it went for the next two days: walk and touch living things and try not to think about Hell and listen to the music Doc played me, and sometimes he’d play news or stories and I tried to follow those, but mostly I didn’t think about anything at all because here’s how it’d go: Doc would play some music and I’d ask a question, like “Hey, Doc, what’s that thing” pointing to a large mirrored-panel and Doc would start talking like this: That is a solar panel. When private Nongovernmental use of petroleum was prohibited mass production of alternative energy sources helped drive efficient solar power collectors to harness the one free and readily available source of energy, production that was encouraged by the government prior to the remarketization …

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… and I’d already be drifting off and thinking how the sun felt warm and bright and nice on the back of my neck and then I’d rub the back of my neck and then I’d put my hand down and then I’d get kind of scared because it didn’t really seem like my hand and then I’d remember how Hell didn’t even seem to have a sun at all and then I’d wonder where the light came from in Hell and then I’d look up at the sun and wonder how much daylight was left today and how long I’d be able to stay awake and then I’d wonder how long I’d be in Hell that night and then I’d wonder why six hours of sleep here didn’t just mean six hours in Hell, that didn’t seem fair, that I had to spend days and weeks in that horrid place when I only got a few hours a day here and then I’d start crying again and I’d finally say “Shut up, Doc, please and just play some music,” and he’d play some music that usually I kind of liked and it distracted me. And we’d steal food because of course, I had no money. So I was hungry and miserable and tired and bedraggled looking when we got, on day number 5, to the outskirts of a town. Doc had me stop. We should wait a moment, he said, and I sat down in the long grass underneath a tree and leaned back against it, feeling the rough bark against my back and feeling my aching feet relax a little, and rubbing my knees and calves. I closed my eyes and then opened them again. Do you have any idea what it’s like to be afraid to nap because if you do, you might spend your fifteen minute nap hiding beneath a rocky slab from the giant batswith-frog-faces that are flying around you and which you think might eat you? “What are we waiting for?” I asked. The right moment, Doc said. “What’s that mean?” We should not just walk into this town yet, he said.

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I could hear people singing, like a choir. It sounded nice. There was an organ, too. I stretched up a little and tried to see where it was coming from. I listened to the soft sounds and wanted to nap. “Why? Isn’t it safe?” It may not be, Doc said. He buzzed a little. One tentacle lifted up and glowed on the end. He spun, then reoriented. I wondered what he was doing. I wondered how smart he was. Was he alive, in a way? Was he just a really good computer? He’d explained to me a lot about octopi on the way down – he didn’t mind talking about himself any more than anyone minds talking about themselves, I guess—but I didn’t really understand a lot of it, it was a bunch of technical stuff that was over my head. Still, he was all I had to talk to, and I liked listening to him, plus all of his advice had been good so far and I hadn’t been captured or starved or shot or anything. He drifted downward. Quiet he said. I hunched back down. A few people walked by. They were really dressed up: suits and ties and dresses and hats and ribbons and belts and the like. Fancy. They never looked over by us. They didn’t walk fast, or slow. They just walked. Then a few more. A group, here and there, and some single people or couples. There were little kids, too, running sometimes and their parents were telling them to slow down and not get sweaty and messed up. They didn’t yell, though: they talked in careful, quiet tones, trying not to get too excited or angry, I thought. It made me sadder than ever. Here and there I saw couples walking, a man with his arm on the arm of a woman, or on the small of her back. There was one couple that had a little boy and they each held his hand and once he tripped and they caught him without even thinking about it. Women walked and talked among themselves and laughed, quietly, putting their hands up to their mouths.

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I watched where they walked to, and saw that it was a little white building near the outskirts of town, where other people were walking, too, from other directions, about 200 people, maybe, total, went in there and the choir music got louder and the organ music got louder and the people began singing. “What is that, Doc?” I asked him. It’s a church, he said. A church. I didn’t really know what that was. But I couldn’t ask him to explain right away, because I heard footsteps coming down the path, then, louder and faster than the other ones, and someone breathing heavily, running along the path, and that’s when Brigitte ran by, holding her hat in one hand while she tried to button up her dress, which buttoned in the back, as she ran. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I stood up, as she went by. My heart began beating superfast – I could actually hear it. She was running along the path and then cut over to her left to take a shortcut across the grass and I saw her back, white and smooth and soft-looking, the color of cream mixed with clouds, as she held the hat now in her teeth and tried to run across the grass and do the buttons up on her dress. Her hair was done up in a ponytail kind of but fancier, and it bounced along with her running. Her hands worked at the buttons as she ran and I saw her bra strap and a little bit of her underwear, peeking up from the lower part of the zipper – the bra and the underwear were white and lacy and flimsy and I felt a little flushed at the sight of them. She got the dress done up just before she reached the little church, and put her hat on, and paused at the door. Her chest was heaving up and down, and I could see the outlines of her breasts just pushing at the material of the dress, and I could almost-butnot-quite see little beads of sweat on her neck and shoulderblade, I probably imagined those. She put her hand on her chest, just outside the door of the church, and stood there, back straight, chest out, until her breathing slowed a little and the music got louder and then she pushed open the door and went inside.

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“Doc, who was that?” I do not know. Why? “She’s beautiful,” I told him. I didn’t even think about what I was saying. “She’s beautiful and I’ve never seen anyone like her.” I was kind of sweating, a little: my hands, my palms, were a little damp and my breath was coming kind of fast. I felt a little dizzy. “Can we go out?” I asked. Wait. I didn’t want to wait. I wanted to go into the church and find the ponytail girl and… I didn’t know what, right away. I had only been alive five days. But I wanted to find her and watch her button up her dress again, and look more closely at the outlines of her breasts, and find out what her panties felt like. But Doc wouldn’t let me leave yet. He made me sit there, in the bushes, for a long time, time I spent remembering the bra strap and her back and her hands and her mouth biting on the hat brim, filling my head with the most pleasant thoughts I’d had yet, something I kept up until Doc floated up by me and said softly: Don’t say or do anything and do not move. I didn’t react. I knew enough to listen to Doc. One of Doc’s tentacles was held up just in front of my mouth. He kept it there while two revenants walked by, mumbling in that weird way they have and picking at their ratty t-shirts. I wasn’t so eager to get out of the woods then. Doc kept me there for a while longer, and then let me stand up. I was all for going to the church and finding that girl with the pony tail, but he said not to. He said that we had to wait around there that day. “Why?” I asked.

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Because you do not fit in, he said. I wondered about that, but he clarified then and said you need different clothing. All of the women who’d gone by had been wearing really nice, pretty dresses. I had on raggedy dirty denim pants and a sweatshirt that we’d stolen someplace because it had gotten kind of chilly one night. I also was hungry again. Doc told me to loosen me up we’d go walking a bit. So I got up and followed him. He didn’t play music. He scooted ahead, puffing up and then down, tentacles buzzing and lifting. I thought he was looking for revenants. I didn’t need to know anything about them; Bob had told me more than enough about them on our trip together, and had also told me that none of them were nice like him. “None of them?” I’d asked him. “None but me,” Bob had answered. “Why are you nice?” I wanted to know. But Bob had never answered. So we walked, that day, about a half-mile, to the outskirts of town, and Doc made me sit down again and said Keep quiet and I did. I leaned against a tree and watched Doc, who wafted about 10 feet up, and a small spot on the side of his head glowed green for a few moments, and then went dim. “What’s that?” I asked him. I am sampling frequencies, Doc said, which didn’t mean anything to me but he then buzzed lower and went dimmer and said very softly quiet and so I sat there. There was a shuffling and rustling and I saw one of the revenants, or maybe a different revenant, stumbling along. It walked by, never looking towards the little woods we sat in, and mumbling to itself. This one looked a little more rotten than usual, and had, for some reason, a “Nixon 1972” shirt on. Usually, according to Bob, they favored old concert t-shirts. When I’d asked him why, he’d answered that: “Because we like crowds,” he said.

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“Why?” I asked him. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I like crowds, too. All revenants do. We like anything to do with crowds. Show us a group of people and it gets our blood racing. Concert t-shirts make us think of the crowds of people attending concerts so we try to find them and wear them.” “Plus,” Bob had added, “They look good.” The revenant that walked by now didn’t look “good” but it wasn’t his shirt. He looked hungry and bedraggled. He walked by and I was going to shift positions but Doc held up a tentacle so I stayed still. The revenant came back and walked across the field towards the church, which was now off to my left instead of off to my right because of our walk. The revenant stumbled a little, and walked aimlessly, but I was sure he was heading for the church, from which I could hear all the voices singing again. It took him forever to get there, but he did, and when he did, he leaned up against the outside of it, pressing his head to the wall. Listening, I realized. “What’s he doing, Doc?” Doc floated up a little. A tentacle pointed towards the church. I wondered if Doc saw through those or what. I do not know, he said, and kept the tentacle pointed towards the church. The revenant stayed there for a long time, and we stayed where we were, until finally what Doc said was the “service” let out. I watched, kneeling near a bush by my tree, as people came out. The pony-tailed girl, Brigitte, was one of the last to come out. There was a guy in a suit standing in front of the church shaking people’s hands and kissing the ladies on their foreheads and smiling, and he hugged Brigitte and I got jealous, but it was an uncle-ish kind of hug so I didn’t really need to be upset and I wasn’t a lot, but I wanted to be the one hugging her, and not like an uncle, either. Eventually the church crowd faded away and it was early afternoon. I was starved and tired of sitting still.

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“When can we go somewhere?” I asked Doc, but he wouldn’t let me move until it was almost dark. To pass the time he played music and snippets of news and things, and tried to teach me things. He told me the name of the town, for one thing, and I can’t remember it now at all, which is kind of embarrassing except that I don’t think I’m ever going back there, so what do I care? I liked the music, though. I didn’t pay much attention to anything else and finally Doc said We can go and I got up and started walking towards the church. Not that way, he said, and zipped over to my right. I was disappointed: The pony-tail girl had gone the other way and I said so. You need clothing, Doc said, and led me off to the outskirts of the town, about a half-mile away, where there were a few small houses near the side of the road. The third one, he told me, and I said: “What about it?” Go in there. “Doc, I can’t go in someone’s house!” It is empty. She is working. “How do you know that?” I have been listening. “Listening? To what?” We do not have much time, Doc said. I only later realized that sometimes Doc didn’t answer my questions. Then, I didn’t think much of it. “If I go in there and get clothes, can we go find that girl?” I expected him to give me more chores to do and I don’t know why I kept doing them except that only Doc had answers for me, and I didn’t feel ready to talk to other people at that point.

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When I’d first woken up, and dropped that tray in the diner thing in New York City, and walked out, and nobody had tried to stop me, I’d just been running automatically, sort of. I don’t know how to explain it. I just did what my body wanted to do, while my mind kept saying who am I what’s going on what’s that where am I and I didn’t know anything. I was standing on the subway in New York City, the one that runs on pneumatic air drives, whatever that is, according to Doc, and there were people, and there were some that looked like they might be nice people, and I wanted to talk to them, but what was I going to say to them? Excuse me, I just kind of woke up and I’m not sure who I am and I don’t know anything, and also I was just crawling out of a crevasse in Hell and I’m really really scared? So while I thought, at times, about talking to someone, I never tried to do it and I didn’t really want to talk to anyone in particular; I wanted to get help, and find out what was going on, and stop being scared and confused, but there was nobody that I felt like going up to and saying Help me, and that left just Doc, who had offered to help me and whose advise always worked, so I’d been okay with Doc being my only friend here, and I’d stopped thinking of him as an Octopus. I just thought of him as “Doc,” which he said his name was. Then I’d seen Brigitte and suddenly I wanted very much to talk to her, to go right up to her and just sit down and start talking and hold her hand and then rub her hand and then squeeze her hand and then rub my hand up her arm to her shoulder, and rub her shoulder, too, and then slowly pull up her shirt so that she wasn’t wearing it anymore… … it was thoughts like that which I kept in my mind as I walked up to the only door in the small house, the third one, that Doc had said was empty, and under the cover of darkness, while I wondered what Brigitte’s tummy would look like underneath her dress – flat and smooth and soft, I guessed, and white like the sun didn’t hit it much, just like her back—I tried the door and it was open. Doc hovered right in front of me. Go inside, quickly, he said. I pushed the door open and then shut it and looked around for a light. I couldn’t find a way to turn the

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lights on and wondered why they didn’t automatically go on like the lights in the apartment, which I guess was my apartment, had. “Where do I go?” I asked Doc, but the house wasn’t that big. There were only three rooms and one turned out to be the bedroom and Doc glowed a little and we got a couple of dresses. I put one on and Doc had me fold up the other two and carry them and we got back out of there. I was nervous but we’d gotten away with it and he led me down the road towards the town, saying we had to find a place to stay. “Why?” I asked. Then I saw her – the pony-tail girl again, and I forgot all about the question I’d asked Doc. Which I suppose is good because Doc never answered it, anyway. I mean, I know now why he picked that town to stay in, but I didn’t notice then that he didn’t answer me. I was too enthralled with the sight of Brigitte through a window of a restaurant – she was a waitress! I thought. We have something in common! And I got excited. I don’t know why. Come this way, Doc said. But I put my foot down for the first time. I was about to go with him, figuring that I could always come back and find the pony-tailed girl, only I didn’t, because as I was about to turn and go with him, Brigitte looked up from pouring something into a glass for someone, and looked out the window and saw me and our eyes met. She winked. And I said: “No, Doc. I’m going in there.” Doc didn’t protest. I didn’t notice that, then, either. Brigitte kept me from noticing a lot of stuff I should have noticed. I walked right up to the door of the restaurant, like I’d done in about 15 different convenience stores on the way here, but this time I wasn’t trying to avoid notice or anything like that. Doc came with me, too, even though he usually didn’t. I went inside.

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The little restaurant had about 20 tables and a long counter. Brigitte was the only waitress walking around and there were only three of the tables taken, by men, each of them eating alone. Brigitte, still with her ponytail, came over to me. “Hi there,” she said, with a smile. I felt a little fluttery. I put my hands up to my face and then back down. “Hi,” I said. “Table?” “What?” “Would you like to sit at a table? Or the counter? Maybe the counter,” Brigitte said, and reached out and took my wrist. I felt kind of electric-y when she did. Not Sharing. I still am not sure what that is. This was just the tingle I got – still get - -when Brigitte touched me. That was the first time and I honestly think I maybe almost fainted. Her fingers were soft and warm and they touched my wrist just so lightly. She led me over to the counter. She was looking at me kind of funny. “I like your octopus,” she said. “Thanks,” I said, and stood there next to the stool she’d stopped me in front of. She looked at my face and smiled again. “Well, sit down,” she told me. Doc hovered down and said Do not sit at the counter. Brigitte looked at him. “He’s cute,” she said. “Yes, he is,” I said. “I should listen to him, I guess, maybe, and can I sit not at the counter?” I didn’t want to argue with her. Brigitte pouted a little, turned her mouth down. “Sure. But the counter’s where I hang out when I’m not waiting on people. I thought I could talk to you.”

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Not at the counter, Doc said. Hurry, he added. Brigitte looked at him. “Cute, but bossy,” she said. But she took my wrist again and said “Follow me.” We walked past two of the men eating at tables and Brigitte sat me in the corner. “This okay with you and your octopus?” I looked at Doc, who buzzed and said yes and drifted down a little to rest on the table. I looked back at Brigitte and wanted to say that it was okay but my throat was a little dry. She was still looking at me a little too directly and I wondered if I was being rude. She made me feel flushed and I couldn’t talk and couldn’t take my eyes off of her. She laughed after we sat there for about ten seconds not saying anything, just looking at each other. “Well, quiet, aren’t you? Can’t tell much about you. Let me get you a glass of water. You must be tired.” I nodded and managed “Okay,” and she went and came right back with a glass of water for me and set it on the table. “We don’t have menus,” she said. “Mostly Cook’ll make anything that you want and people aren’t real fancy around here. What’re you in the mood for?” I didn’t have any money and hadn’t thought beyond the moment of coming into the restaurant and talking to her. I didn’t know if I owed her money for the table or the water or anything. I sat there and thought, and tried to think of a single piece of food. But all I’d eaten was various kinds of jerky and sometimes some donuts and a lot of sodas and water that I could steal from the stores along the way. I couldn’t ask her to get me jerky! She watched me as I looked at her and then looked down at my hands and then looked down at my lap to avoid looking at my two different hands and then I bit my lip and tried not to cry because all I’d wanted to do was come in here and talk to her and tell her that I saw her that morning and I thought she was pretty and I thought that she was sexy and I wanted to know her name and wanted her to know my name and I wanted to kiss her – that thought surprised me – and instead, here I was sitting here with these weird

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hands and probably a weird body and she’d noticed right away ‘cause she was giving me strange looks and I didn’t have money and didn’t fit in and I was going to spend my entire life hiding in the woods with Doc and stealing to support myself. Tears began rolling down my cheek and Brigitte leaned down and said “It’s okay, hon, I’ll get you something.” And she patted my shoulder again, and then walked off. I was too sad to even think to look at her going away and check her out. I just sat there and thought how stupid I must look, stupid because my hands didn’t match and stupid because I was crying and I tried to stop crying by looking out the window. Doc buzzed just a little and said Crouch down please. I did, without hesitating. I slid back a little so that I was less visible. “What is it, Doc?” I snuffled. Two more revenants. During the day we’d not seen anymore but now they must be out at night. It seemed to me that there were a lot of them here, and that didn’t make sense because we hadn’t seen any – except in Hell – on the way down here. I’d have asked Doc about that except I was too upset about Brigitte and how much of a fool I’d made of myself. After a few minutes, she brought a plate out to me. It had eggs and bacon and toast and fried potatoes, and she had a big glass of milk with it and set those down. She leaned in and said “Don’t worry about paying. I’ll take care of it.” She looked at me and smiled and I tried to smile back but I’m not sure mine really worked. Two of the old guys were getting up and leaving, separately, and I began eating and polished off that food faster than I could imagine. Brigitte was over by the counter cleaning things and smiling and humming to herself and I watched her, watched the way her ponytail bobbed and how she held the glasses up to the light to check them for smears and how she kept her apron clean. I wondered, as I used the bread to polish up the egg yolk, what her name was, and how I could find out what her name was. She went and poured coffee for the other old guy, who was all the way on the other side of the restaurant. I saw her talk to him for a bit, in low tones so that I couldn’t really hear. He

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said something and she smiled and laughed and I saw her teeth and they were little and pretty and white. I guess you really like someone when you think even their teeth are pretty. I know I’d only been awake or whatever a couple of days, but Brigitte was the most fascinating thing I’d seen that whole time, and it was longer than a couple of days anyway, I know now, because Bob and I had spent probably two months on our trip on that second day of Hell. Brigitte was even prettier and sexier than Ivanka, who I’d already met, and that’s saying something. I’d finished all the food and was sitting and sipping at my water and looking at the plate and trying to look at Brigitte without her catching me, which was why I was looking down when Brigitte came over with some dessert, a giant slice of pie with ice cream on it. It was almost the size of half of a pie. “We’re going to throw it out anyway,” she told me, as I looked down at it and up at her. “So don’t worry about it.” She went back up to the counter and I watched her mopping. She kept her back to me and I saw her arms swinging and her hips swiveling a little with each stroke of the mop: left right left right in tiny smooth little movements, and maybe a little forward and back, too. It made me kind of sweaty. I ate all the pie and watched her mop and the other old guy got up and went up to the cash register terminal. I watched him. He talked with Brigitte and she talked back and when she went to the terminal she held up a hand and it lit up and then the old guy held up a hand and waved it near the terminal. Brigitte looked down and nodded and then the guy waved again and said he’d see her tomorrow and he left. I wondered how they’d done that. I’d been near only a few terminals in the past few days but they didn’t work for me like that. I also wondered again what her name was. She followed the old guy to the door and waved her hand near the door. It went opaque and the word “CLOSED” glowed in the door, backwards for me inside so it took a second for me to realize what it said. “Don’t worry,” she called over to me. “You can take as long as you need.”

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Meanwhile, in Albuquerque? “Is it true?” I asked Brigitte. Brigitte just looked at me. “Is it true, Brigitte? Were you told to love me?” She stared at me. She didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what that meant. “Tell me,” I said. “Yes, tell her,” Samson said. He didn’t sound nice. I knew I never liked him. Brigitte looked up at me. There were tears in her eyes. “Rachel,” she said. “It is true, isn’t it!” I felt a lump in my throat. I couldn’t even breathe for a second. I felt dizzy. “You were told to make me love you. This is all just a big set-up! You’re like all the rest of them, like Reverend Tommy and this stupid damned guy,” I pointed at Samson, “And Rex and your father and those revenants and all of them. You just wanted… you all want to… use me. That’s all.” “Rachel,” Brigitte choked out and she was crying. “I’m sorry,” “Sorry!” I just whispered it but I wanted to shout it. I couldn’t, though. I felt so sad. So weak. So I tried to say it again. “sorry…” and then I realized that I was sitting down. I looked over at Samson, who was smiling. “You should never attack someone in his own HQ,” he said. “What are you doing?” Brigitte demanded. “Sleep gas,” he said. “I need her to not leave and I need you to back off now.” I slumped to the floor. “Not sleep,” I said. “I don’t want to…” Brigitte looked at me. “You’re giving her too much,” she said to Samson. Everything was blurry like it was underwater. “She’s strong,” he said.

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“Rachel, listen to me,” she said, and came over by me. I wanted to push her away. I wanted to grab her and hold her. How could she? How could she lie to me? She was saying something. I tried to focus as my eyes fluttered open and closed, open and closed. So blurry, so hard to focus. I could kind of taste the gas, I thought, and I hated Samson even more. I wanted to tell him that I was never going to help him now but I was trying to stay awake because I didn’t want to go to Hell and I didn’t want to miss what Brigitte was saying and also there was some kind of rumbling or crackling near me. Brigitte was talking. “Just because I was told to make you love me,” she began and then started crying and I tried to focus. It was true! I felt the tears in my eyes. All I could think of was after the pie was finished and the restaurant was closed. I put my head down and my eyes closed but I wasn’t asleep yet and she tried to begin again. “Just because…” but then she was interrupted by a loud roaring and crashing and buckling and tearing. I opened my eyes just a crack, the most I could do, and I saw the floor trembling and breaking up around me and I felt something, some kind of scaly thing grabbing me. I saw Naked Girl running up behind me… “Protect,” I said… I was going to tell her to protect Brigitte but I couldn’t finish and as I felt a hand or maybe a tentacle grab at me and as I saw revenants swarming in with ray guns shooting at Brigitte and Samson, as I saw Naked Girl dive towards me, I blacked out.

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Meanwhile, In New York Again: “It’s done,” the man said. He slumped heavily to the floor, sitting there and resting his hands on his knees and his head on his forearms. He paid no attention to the blood and bodily fluids that were all over his arms and his floor, sitting in a puddle of goo and glop that would have soaked through his clothing if he had not worn the protective gear. “We just have to animate it.” “That took long enough,” the revenant said. He was mad, the man suspected, because they’d had to kill the third henchman, too, and that hadn’t been planned but the limbs on the others just weren’t working. “It should have taken longer,” the man said. It was not a retort, not a sarcastic comment. It was just a statement. He fretted that the sewing was not good enough, that the parts were not adequately matched, that the whole thing was substandard work that would reflect badly on him and lose him money and get him caught. He stood up again. He picked up the chip from where it sat on the table. “What are you going to do with that?” the revenant asked. The man went over to a cabinet that he pressed his hand against. One heartbeat, two, three and he lifted his hand. Each time, it would reset to a different prime number of heartbeats that only his biorhythms could trigger. He opened the door to see the Display. It glowed. It was set on a large canvas, a canvas painted sky blue in large, swoopy brushstrokes. The man had done those himself, at the start of this enterprise. It was not something that the Lieutenant had taught him. It was something he’d felt he should do himself. Something that helped him feel as though this dirty business he practiced was not so nasty, that all the fluids and chopping and sewing and, yes, killing and kidnapping, was maybe for a higher purpose, that he was at the least helping these people, these women, that he brought in off the streets and then chopped up and put back together with parts of their sisters-in-spirit, that he was helping them. On the blue background, the

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painted background that called to minds clouds and air and blue skies and water all at once, a pattern was taking form, an intricately rendered mosaic picture of a woman, a beautiful woman with long slim legs and slender arms and a narrow waist and a shapely bosom, a woman whose head was thrown back, whose eyes were closed, whose hands were open and at her sides, a woman who looked as though she was soaring through the sky/water/clouds/brushstrokes. The woman was a mosaic made entirely of chips. She was not finished, only about ¾ of the woman’s body was filled in, but it was a thing of horrifying beauty, even for the Revenant, who stalked over and stared at it. “How many…” he said. “A lot,” the man said. He stared at the Display and looked to the chip. “Why?” the revenant asked. “To help them,” the man said. He could not express the symbolism that he felt, and did not try. By projecting them, their chips, soaring, the man knew, he was sending them to Heaven, wherever that might be. When he placed a chip onto the mosaic, as he did now, he felt, he was taking the soul of the woman or man he had just dissected, the woman or man whose body was reassembled in parts here and there, whose body would become a vessel for the wish fulfillment of someone else, someone rich, someone who needed a recomposed zombie slave, he was taking the soul of that person whose body he had destroyed, and he was sending that soul straight to Heaven.

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Part 11: Brigitte knelt in front of me after she’d finished cleaning up. She’d done some more mopping, some more wiping down of tables, and then had come over to me. “How’s it going over here?” she’d asked, and knelt down to get on eye level with Doc, which put her on eye level with my breasts, which should have made me uncomfortable, maybe, but I wanted Brigitte to look at them, mostly, although I didn’t want her to look too closely at them and figure out that they looked like they were from different people than other parts of my body. By then, I knew a little about what I was, thanks to Bob, although I hadn’t really come to terms with it yet. I didn’t know, for example, that I was dead. Bob hadn’t told me that and it wouldn’t be until Samson’s comment that it would really sink in that the only way to create someone like me is to make someone like me, a bunch of someone’s like me, as it turns out, dead. So I was dead but I didn’t know it and I didn’t feel dead as I sat there at the table and Brigitte looked at Doc and said “He’s so cute, can I touch him?” I felt alive, all tingly and warm and kind of sweaty, actually, a little hot and bothered because as I looked at her going “Ooo, I haven’t hardly ever seen one of these,” I saw her mouth making an o and I wanted to kiss her, and then she licked her lips a little, just to wet them down, and they were warm and soft and really red and wet, and I really wanted to … feel her tongue. I found out later that Brigitte never wears makeup. She never wears lipstick, and yet her lips are the reddest, fullest lips I’ve ever seen. So okay, my experience is like four weeks in real life now and a lot of time in Hell and people don’t look their best in Hell, but still, they’re really red and full and bright and kissable and I wanted, really wanted, to just lean over and kiss them. But I didn’t. I sat at the table and Brigitte knelt alongside it and touched Doc here and there, making him light up and play music and burble in that Octopus language, and she giggled when he flared blue. “These things are so cool,” she said, and then looked up at me and her eyes got all wide. I was fiddling with the spoon she’d left with the pie.

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“So, I’m Brigitte,” she said. She stayed kneeling. “I’m Rachel,” I said, and wondered if I should smile. “Hi, Rachel,” she said. “Not from around here, are you?” I shook my head. Brigitte stayed kneeling but sat back on her legs a little. “Where are you from?” she asked. “New York, I guess,” I said. “How’d you get here?” “Walked. Doc showed me the way.” I wanted to cut to the point and say I saw your underwear and your back today and I’d like to see them again. Brigitte, when I said that I walked, ducked her head down and looked below the table and I remembered to put my legs together. I hadn’t stolen any underwear from the house. She looked back up and said “You must have good legs, to walk that far.” She didn’t seem surprised that I’d walked across most of the country. But, then, I don’t know why she would. Almost nobody drove cars. I’d seen two maybe the whole time I’d been walking, all those days, and they were police or government cars. There were a lot of slow-flying-things, dirigibles and balloons and the like, and bicycles and horses and stuff and about once a day I could hear what Doc said were rockets. I never saw them. I just heard them, a long sustained whooshing and then some booms that Doc said were sonic booms. “I guess,” I said. “You guess a lot,” Brigitte said, and I looked up from my plate, worried that I’d said something wrong – I hadn’t talked to any living people since New York and the only person I’d spoken to at all was Bob, and he doesn’t count because he was easy to talk to and also because he was a revenant and because I didn’t want to kiss him so badly. But Brigitte was smiling. “Do you guess I could sit down?”

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The cook had left while she was cleaning up. He hadn’t even come out front and I don’t know if he’s known I was here. I figured we were alone in the restaurant and I wanted very much for her to sit down. “Sure,” I said, and I slid to my right on the bench. I was grateful that I’d figured out how to hint about that because she sat down next to me, so I could look at her out of the corner of my eye and our shoulders touched. When they did, she looked at me again, a little more curious than the last time, but I didn’t catch that right then, either. I just liked our shoulders touching. “So what are you doing here?” she asked. “Eating,” I lied. I thought she meant here in the diner and I should’ve said I wanted to come in and meet you but I said eating and looked at her sidewise. She giggled again and I liked that. I liked that I made her laugh, even if I didn’t know why. She put her hand on my forearm, the one that I’d first noticed was different than the other, and that made me nervous because the dress only had short sleeves and if she looked closely she’d see that the skin on my arms was differently colored, but I also really liked her hand, warm and smooth and dry, on my arm. Her thumb rested lightly on the outside of my arm and her four fingers curled onto the inside and gave me a little squeeze as she said “No, silly, I mean here in this town,” and I shrugged. I didn’t care if she thought I was funny or silly if she’d keep holding my hand. “I walked here because Doc told me to,” I said, and then wondered how that would sound. She took it in stride. “Are you staying for a while?” “I don’t have any place to stay,” I said. “I’m not sure what I’m doing,” and I thought for a moment about just telling her the whole story but then I probably wouldn’t get to kiss her. “You haven’t decided yet?” I stared at the table for a long time, and looked at Doc, who was resting on the table, his eight tentacles splayed out and each one lit at the end. The rest of him was dark. He beeped softly and one little light-sensor that I thought of as an eye blinked on

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and then off. Like he was winking at me. I didn’t know what to say, though. I thought about asking him what I should say, but I didn’t think that was the kind of thing an Octopus could tell me. So I just looked out the window then, for a while, and then down at the table and after a few moments Brigitte said “’Cause you’re welcome to stay for a while,” and I looked over at her as she gave me another squeeze on the arm, tightening her fingers just a tiny little bit to dimple my skin. But she didn’t untighten; she held my arm lightly but firmly and I looked up and met her eyes. She had really really blue eyes, and they’re big and in the light of the diner the pupils were even bigger and her lips were so red and just a little bit parted so I could almost see her tongue. “Could I?” I said. “You could,” she whispered. We sat like that, motionless, her mouth just a little open, side by side, our legs not touching, our sides not touching, but our arms together and her hand on my wrist, and I stared into her eyes. I was willing her to look at me and just accept me, to help me feel comfortable in my own body, to like me the way I already liked her. I wanted her to giggle again, and to smile, and to squeeze my arm a little more, and mostly I wanted her to lean in and kiss me. Then I wanted to lean in and kiss her. And then I thought: Why can’t I? A whole sequence of events ran through my mind: I would lean in to kiss her and just before our lips touched, just before I got to feel her moist plump lips on my own, just before I brushed my lips against hers and her lips against mine, just before my lips would press into hers and open hers up and just before I would feel the tip of her tongue on my lips, warm and wet, just before I leaned into her with more urgency and rubbed my lips over hers and over her tongue, just before I lifted my own tongue to playfully touch the end of hers and just before we both accidentally opened our eyes at the start of the kiss and just before we giggled at that and then closed our eyes and wrapped our arms around each other and began to ferociously kiss, I saw all of that not happening because in my mind as I leaned in to kiss her, just before all of that

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I thought for sure that she would pull back and look at me in horror and ask what I thought I was doing and why I was leaning towards her and she would be horrified that I was trying to touch her at all, I figured she would not want to kiss me, she would yell that she was just trying to be nice, and she’d stand up, her beautiful tight body quivering with anger instead of lust and she would insist that I leave and I’d spend that night cold and alone and in Hell while my body shivered against a tree. I saw all of that happening, in my mind, in a flash, and it kept me from leaning in and kissing her, and instead, we sat there, her hand on my arm, and staring into each other’s eyes, while I tried to think if it was worth it. “Kiss me,” Brigitte said. I swear she said it but I barely heard it. So I leaned in to kiss her after all, and she screamed and pulled back and I thought oh, God, I was right, she’s going to throw me out, but then the window crashed in and a hand grabbed at my shoulder. It was the revenants, of course. I think maybe Doc had been trying to warn me, had been going to warn me. I’m not sure if he rose up and blinked or beeped or wailed or something but why wouldn’t he warn me about them? I just didn’t know then if he was or wasn’t warning me because one second I was only this far from Brigitte’s lips and the next there was this cold hand clawing into my shoulder and dragging me back and I smashed into the window headfirst. The hand had only broken a small piece into it. My head didn’t break it at all but I was knocked silly for a second and as the hand got its grip better I slumped onto the table. Brigitte, I saw, had stood up and had her hands up to her face, stunned and Doc, I saw, too, had risen up and had his tentacles out. One was pointing straight at me and Doc was drifting, jetting, almost, to his left. An Octopus doesn’t move all that fast but he didn’t have to go very far. Only before he could do anything the revenant grabbed me again and began to pull, and then Brigitte grabbed my ankles… … and even in the midst of all that I noticed how warm her hands were and how nice it felt to have her touch me…

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And the revenants hands were digging into my armpit and pulling more, its gross fingernails clawing at me and maybe drawing blood, I thought, as Brigitte pulled back. She was stronger and she pulled and the glass broke more and half the revenant came into the restaurant, its side landing on the sharp glass and cutting into it. There wasn’t any blood but the injury, if it was injured, if dead things can be injured like that, caused it to let go and when it did Doc did that zap thing, shooting electricity at it as I scrambled away. The little lightning-bolt thing shot out and hit the revenant, who spasmed and then slumped and I stood up and Brigitte grabbed me and hugged me… and again she was warm and I was grateful for it. Especially grateful when she said “Let’s get out of here” and without taking her arms off of me she went up to the front door. Peering out through the tinted glass she said “There’s two more of them out there.” I didn’t look. I was watching Brigitte’s face watching them and I was rubbing my shoulder and armpit where the revenant had grabbed me. “This way,” Brigitte said, and went back behind the counter. She walked me through the swinging door into the kitchen and back area. Off to the right were stoves and things, and off to the left, a supply room. There was also a back door and as I looked at it I saw in the little window a leering face with the raggedy, previously-sewn eyelids that I’d come to recognize. I drew in my breath but I didn’t scream. I pointed. Brigitte looked and her lips got real tight and she bit her lower lip. “Okay,” she said, finally, as we stood there. The revenant was now pushing at the door and clawing at it. He’d seen us. “Where can we go?” I asked. Brigitte still had her hand around my waist and she pushed me off to the side into the storage area. She backed me up against a bunch of bags of flower and a canister of syrup and as she pressed against me she began reaching past me. She was leaning against me with her full body, legs lined up against mine and chest lined up against mine so our breasts mashed together and pressed each other and rubbed, and she was leaning her head past mine (Brigitte’s a little taller than me) so that I

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could see her neck as she reached in to the shelf behind me. “What…” I began but that was all I could really say. It was all a bit much for me at that moment. “There,” she said, and pulled something and behind her a door fell away. She pulled back from me – I hated that—and said “Follow me.” She backed up and began climbing down into the trapdoor. She was about three steps down into the dark and I was wondering where that went, as I was also looking at the white-pale skin of her breasts and the little tiny part of the front of her bra that I could see. She looked up and said “Well, come on,” and I felt myself get a little hot from blushing. “What’s this?” I said, as I turned around and started climbing down. “Daddy’s prepared for this for a while. I think it’s because he hangs around Reverend Tommy so much,” Brigitte said. “Prepared for…” I stopped talking because Brigitte had reached up to steady me and had a hand on either side of my butt at my hips and I couldn’t concentrate. “Revenants,” Brigitte said as I got down and turned around. We were in the dark, only some light from above drifting in. She was face to face with me, again, only a few inches apart. Her hands had dropped off as I had rotated to face her. “Daddy said they’re becoming more common and he was worried that they were going to attack us so he began this project to allow me to get around without worrying about them. Speaking of which,” she said and reached off to her right in the dark. The trapdoor above snapped shut and bolts clicked and we were in the dark. I stood there wondering what was supposed to happen, and for just a second it was perfectly black. In that second, I swear that I felt her lips brush against mine, just really quick-like, almost not a kiss at all, but I know what I felt and I couldn’t have imagined that. I know I couldn’t have, didn’t, imagine it because every time after that when I kissed Brigitte she did that same thing, where she’d first brush her lips against mine featherlight and soft and barely touching so that I’d think, again, each time, that she maybe hadn’t kissed me, that I hadn’t touched her at all. Also, I know I didn’t imagine it because at that point, in this life, at least, I’d never kissed anyone and didn’t know what it really felt like.

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But just as I thought maybe she had kissed me, it stopped and lights came on and she was turning away. The lights in the tunnel glowed only dimly, a little blue-ish, but showed the way down further. Above, I heard more glass breaking, very dimly, far away. “Daddy’s going to be really mad,” Brigitte said, but she didn’t seem too concerned about it. She took my hand and led me down the hallway. We walked through the tunnel, past a couple of things that might have been doors and past a couple of intersections. She paused at one and looked around, touching her finger to her lips and thinking, squinting her eyes a little to make her forehead wrinkle up with little vertical knots. She then held her hand up and made little motions with it. I realized, after a moment, that she was trying to picture the streets above, moving her hand the way she would have walked. “This way,” she decided and turned left. “I don’t use these a lot,” she said over her shoulder, and kept walking along. Another block or so and she stopped. There was a ladder in the wall and she looked down the tunnel and then at the ladder. “Here,” she said, seeming for the first time a bit uncertain. Then she seemed more definite. “Come on up,” she said and climbed up the ladder first. I couldn’t help it. She was wearing a skirt, so I looked, but I told myself that she must have wanted me to look because why else would she climb the ladder first? Later that night, while I was laying there trying not to fall asleep, in her bed, I would think she had to climb the ladder first because I didn’t know where to go or how to open the door, but I knew all along it was an excuse, knew it even as I did it, looked up and saw her legs rise up to a pair of skimpy underwear that was made of mostly lace but the lace was made of mostly the spaces between the lace, so it was like they were not there at all, just little wisps of white tracing around her beautiful butt. I almost reached up to touch it. But she looked down and smiled as I blushed again and said “It’s clear.” It was only then that I realized she’d opened the trap door a little and looked out. She opened it more and pushed it aside and then waited while I climbed up. We were in a stairwell. There was a solid wood front door and a hallway that led back behind us, and a short stairwell that led up. “It’s a rooming house,” Brigitte whispered, holding her finger up as she did so, making a shushing sound. She took my hand again. I

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looked around but all I could picture was her underwear. “My room’s upstairs,” she said and led me up the stairs into the room I’d live in for the next few days. We walked into the room and she quickly went over to the window. Doc drifted over by the dresser and in the glow he gave off I could see things like hair brushes and lipstick and clips and a little Read-Or unit, which I knew about because I’d seen people sitting on a bench waiting for the dirigibus and using them while I hid in the park across the street and I’d asked Doc what the people were holding and looking at, little things they kept peering into and pressing or tapping occasionally. He’d said they were mostly reading the news and I’d wondered why anyone would want to do that when they could have their Octopus play the news for them but Doc had said that not everyone could afford an Octopus, that they were really expensive and were considered luxury items for the rich. Then, I’d had too much else on my mind to wonder why I had one. I looked around as Brigitte looked out the window from the gauzy curtains that were closed in front of it. There was the dresser-and-mirror, a little chair, a bigger stuffed chair, and Brigitte’s bed, a lumpy, overstuffed, puffy looking thing that was covered in blankets (rumpled and barely made) and a few stuffed toys and pillows. Only one bed! I watched her and tried to concentrate. I knew I should be thinking about the revenants but I didn’t, really, think about them at all. I’d been in Hell and dealt with other revenants and demons and had been chased around by Ivanka on one night that had been more forced than anything else -- even though it had felt pretty good, I hadn’t really wanted to do anything with her because I was scared of her, a little, and also because of all the damned souls screaming not far away – and I’d seen enough that a couple of revenants wasn’t that scary to me, or not scary enough to overcome my thrill at there being only one bed and the fact that Brigitte had maybe kissed me. Plus, I couldn’t stop thinking about her underwear. So I didn’t notice what she was doing at the window that night. Didn’t think about it at all until I was pulled into

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Hell with Naked Girl clinging to me, when I realized that the tunnel that I was being pulled out of was almost exactly the same as the tunnel I had walked through with Brigitte that night, and also realized that Brigitte had been standing at her window and making some sort of hand gesture. But you know what? Even then, getting pulled into Hell and remembering the tunnel sameness and the little hand gesture she was sending out the window, I mostly thought about her underwear. It was really sexy.

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Meanwhile, In New York? I was wrapped up in something. Wrapped up really tight but not uncomfortably so. I could barely think. I had blacked out and then not really – I felt my mind sort of slip away and away and away, but it never really left me. Like a road slipping away under an automobile, maybe, now that I think about it: just unraveling in back of me while still attached, and as it did that, I marveled that I could have so much consciousness, that I could be so much in my own mind, so much to keep spooling out like that. I thought of my mind then like a fishing line just going out and out and out, my imaginations and thinkings and emotions just spooling away. What was attached to the other end of it, I wondered? What was it clinging to, or what was pulling it away from me while I stayed here? I couldn’t breath very easily but that didn’t bother me so much, either. Nothing bothered me so much. For example, I saw sometimes a vision of Naked Girl clinging to a giant thumb as it pulled first through rocks and dirt and then through nothingness and then through more nothingness but a different kind of it. The first nothingness had been a soupy mixture of colors and what I’d swear were thoughts. Have you ever seen a thought? I have, now, I think, because I saw them in that vision, right then. Thoughts look a lot like birds, only they look more like butterflies, I guess, or maybe like hedgehogs. I didn’t know then what hedgehogs looked like but remembering back now, I’m pretty sure that thoughts looked exactly like hedgehogs except for when they looked like bricks. Just like colored bricks, red and yellow and green and sandy and solid at the same time, thoughts were, like crystal balls. Well, anyway, I saw thoughts. You try to describe them when you see them. You’ll probably eventually be able to, just like I did. I can do it a lot now and each time I see them I don’t know how to describe them. I wish they stayed looking like hedgehogs. Those are cute. The second layer of nothingness was scarier because it really was nothing. Nothing nothing nothing just… void. That’s what I’m supposed to call it, I know, now,

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but I didn’t then. I wasn’t scared then, either, maybe because the part of my mind that was supposed to be scared had already reeled out behind me and now was gone. I hoped I could pull it back in but I didn’t know where to pull it back in to because the part of me that should hold it I guess was gone, too. Then there was more thought-soup and I could see Naked Girl again but she looked cold and blue and she shivered a lot, not shivering like cold but shivering like the image on the telescreen sometimes blurs when it doesn’t quite synch up – vibrating, almost. I tried to focus but I couldn’t so I just enjoyed the comfortable feeling of being kind-of-pleasantly-smushed by whatever was doing the smushing but then I got uncomfortable because I didn’t know where Naked Girl had gone and I was surrounded by sounds that I couldn’t identify. It was strange – stranger, maybe, than everything else that had happened to me. Or not. It was as equally strange as everything else that had happened to me, since I started walking out of that diner. The only normal things that had happened to me were those few days with Brigitte when I listened to Reverend Tommy talking and began to gather that I might be what he was talking about and wondered if Brigitte would still love me if I was what Reverend Tommy was talking about, wondered if I could make her more like me… … why was I thinking about that now? I got scared a little then and began to struggle against the smushing because it felt like my memories of Brigitte were unspooling and I didn’t want to lose those. Did I? It was strange because I couldn’t gather my thoughts and I was still smushed feeling but the nothingness and the nothing-thought-soup were all gone. I was in a room. I realized I was in the diner. There were people walking around, people sitting a the diner tables, a grill with things cooking on them. Other waitresses. Outside the window was a city street, filled with city-daylight, the kind of daylight that is had when sunlight never reaches the ground directly, when all the light that hits the ground has been

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reflected and reflected and reflected, over and over again. I watched the scene in the diner as I tried to keep what little was left of my memories from unspooling out of me, tried to hold onto the part where I met Brigitte because I didn’t want to forget that. Did I? I looked around the diner and tried to remember why I might not want to remember meeting Brigitte but I was confused. The people in the diner were eating their breakfasts and talking. The forks and knives and spoons were touching the plates. Doors were opening, Horses and walkers were going by outside. The grill was smoking and sizzling. When I turned my head I could see a large guy, kind of fat, really, but fat in that really big way that lets you know that there’s fat, then muscle, then more fat underneath that and that the muscle is really strong, has to be to move all that fat. The big guy, the man, was punching buttons on the cash register and people were waving their hands and it was blinking and then someone set down a stack of plates. But the sound wasn’t right. Did I want to forget Brigitte? I didn’t know. I saw a flash of Naked Girl clinging to a thumb. The sound in the diner was all off. I looked at one guy, a guy that was wearing something kind of fancy, a little too fancy for this diner, a suit of some kind. He was reading off a Read-Or, or watching the Read-Or, I guess, because there were no words on it. I was, I realized, approaching him, and I looked down at my feet, which were not bare at all. Hadn’t I been barefooted? I had shoes on now, sneakers. They were velcroed shut and there was, I realized, blood on them and I almost screamed but I couldn’t, quite, and also I realized more that it was just ketchup, because I looked and I was carrying a bottle of ketchup, carrying it, it seems, to the man in the suit with the Read-Or held in his right hand as he sat at the table, pushing eggs around with a piece of toast in his right hand but not eating it. On the Read-Or unit, a face was talking, or at least the mouth was moving. I heard everything through a muzzy haze, the same sounds I’d hear when Brigitte would be

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messing with me and I’d pull a pillow over my head—the sounds coming from me but muffled before being bounced back to my ears, woozy moans. Did I miss Brigitte? The sound on the Read-Or unit was like that, but it didn’t match up. As the ReadOr face’s lips moved, I didn’t hear words. I heard screeching, like metal doors being pushed open and shut, or metal on metal, at least. I held out the ketchup to the man. I felt my lips move. I meant to say something like here’s your ketchup and I wondered how I knew to bring it to him. Dreams sure are weird. I tried to remember why I’d brought it to him. Did I want to remember that? No. I didn’t care about that at all. What did I want to remember? Brigitte? I don’t know. But instead of saying here’s your ketchup, I heard my voice, all pillow-muffled, say “It might get easier as time goes on.” I stopped. I was confused. But the man in the suit, watching the screeching-metal head on the Read-Or, didn’t seem bothered in the slightest. He smiled and held out his hand and his mouth made movements. As he did, he said: “How did you even discover they could do this?” I stepped back, having handed the ketchup to the man. Before I could turn, I saw him unscrew the lid of the ketchup and turn the bottle upside down. He hit it with his hand, over and over, trying to slap the ketchup out. But instead of hand-slapping-glass, each time he hit it the sound was someone talking: “It” “Doesn’t” “Do” “It.” “The” “Machine”

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Then the ketchup came out and the man poured it on. I finished turning around even though I wanted to hear what the ketchup bottle had to say. I saw that the man at the cash register, the big guy, was looking at me funny. He opened his mouth to say something but his mouth, again, didn’t match up with what he said. His mouth seemed to be saying Rachel come over here but I didn’t follow that because the words I heard him say were “I think she’s waking up, that’s why. Secure her.” I remembered waking up and I didn’t want to lose the waking up feeling and I tried to run out of the diner again, tried to throw down the tray I was carrying in my left hand, and tried to run but my sneakers wouldn’t move and I just clung to the thought I don’t want to forget waking up.

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Part Eleven: I wasn’t in New York. I wasn’t in the diner. I was in shackles. Bound, again, and spread-eagled. And naked. Always naked. I realized all of that as I came out of a stupor. I hadn’t actually ever slept, I thought. Maybe I had. I don’t know. It’s hard to tell. The diner sort of melted away, disappearing in swaths and patches and being replaced by… a cave. I was in a cave. That’s what I realized as I woke up fully and tugged at the armbands that were holding me. My feet felt asleep and tingly and I worried about them for a moment, then decided that I couldn’t do anything about them just yet. I tried to wiggle my toes a little as I looked around. No Doc. No Brigitte. I realized I was sad and confused about that, about Brigitte not being there, and tried to work through the confusion and cloudy thinking. Brigitte was… mad at me? No, I was mad at her. I kept trying to look through the gloom. I only knew I was in a cave because on one side there were rock walls and there was a rock ceiling above me. Off to my right I couldn’t see much at all. It was too dark and gloomy. My skin tingled, though, and I looked down over my body, past my naked breasts and down over my naked legs and through my wiggling toes – I was relieved to see I was wiggling them – and saw more gloom and then maybe a little patch. Of red. My skin was tingling and I didn’t like it. I pulled at my left hand, but no go. I tried to lift my head more, felt a collar at my throat. I pulled at my right hand. No go, either. Okay. So nothing I could do. Should I yell? What if someone came? It’s a pretty sure bet that whoever came would have had something to do with locking me up in the first place, tying me down. And why naked, I wondered? Why was I naked again?

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I didn’t call, though. I decided to think a little more. I was trying to think of a way out, but all I kept thinking about was Brigitte and I didn’t know what to think about her. It’s like my thoughts were circling around each other, waiting to begin to fight. They just kept circling, though, never actually mixing it up. I wished Doc was there. I tried to think what had happened. Recreate how I got here. I kept focusing on Brigitte and then tried to not focus on Brigitte. But it was no good. She was always there. In my mind, I mean, not there with me. As far as I could tell, nothing was there with me. “Why does she keep thinking of underwear?” I heard, off to my right. So much for nothing there with me. “Who’s there?” I called out. My voice sounded quiet, dim. Silence. But the kind of silence that you hear when people are trying to be quiet. I waited and then said “Who’s there?” again. I was met with more silence. “You might as well come out, I heard you,” I said. I was trying to sound brave. I was mostly scared and a little woozy, still. “What’s she thinking?” I heard someone whisper. I tried to clear my thoughts. I tried not to think of anything. “A hallway,” came the whisper. “Here, look.” A hallway? What were they talking about? But I remembered, then, and listened to the voices describe my memories: “See? It’s got those lights. Definitely part of their operation. Yep. There he is. Call Steve. He’ll want to see this. That’s definitely Lieutenant Samson. Who’s that girl? Oh, yeah, the one she was thinking about before. With the underwear. That’s the other one we’ve got, down in the cave.” The one with the underwear. Brigitte! I remembered, then, clearly, what had happened in the hallway. “Why’s it blue?” I heard. I tried looking in the direction of the voices but couldn’t see anything over there.

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“Shh… I’m calling Steve. It’s blue because of her emotions.” A cave is probably not the best place to keep secrets. I think their voices were echoing because they were talking pretty quietly. I had pretty quickly gathered that they could somehow read my thoughts or my memories or something and was trying to calm them down. Then I had an idea. I pictured myself tearing off the straps and going after them, beating them up. I didn’t know who they were, but I figured it might scare them a little. “Hey, look at this,” one of the voices said. The other was saying something to Steve about she’s awake and Lieutenant. “She’s trying to fool us,” the voice went on. I gave up and instead went back to tugging a little on the straps. I spent a few minutes doing that and gave up on that, too. I tried not to think of anything and that kept not working. All kinds of images and memories flew through my head as I kept working on not letting these guys see anything important, and also on not thinking about Brigitte, which worked about as well as you’d guess it might. How could she do that? How could she pretend to be in love with me? “Oh, this is unnecessary,” said a new voice. I recognized the kind of voice and looked around. An ugly face came into view, just off to my right. “Why is she naked?” I saw the revenant clearly, his tattered eyes, his gray, drawn face, his greasy and straggly hair – he was an old one, around a long time. But he had a very nice polo shirt on, too. Very business-like. “That’s a side effect, sir,” said the guy who had called Steve. I couldn’t see him yet. “When we bring her here, it strips off her clothes.” “Why?” “I don’t know.” “We should know,” said the Revenant, Steve. He leaned over me. I didn’t like his old, rotting smell. “How are you?” I didn’t answer.

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“Now, come on. That’s not going to work at all. I don’t want to fight with you and I don’t want to have to force you. We brought you here for a specific purpose and it’s one that I think you’ll agree with. Plus, we saved you from a very untenable situation, don’t you think? Getting gassed and attacked by that Lieutenant? And it was hardly working out with Brigitte, was it? I could have warned you about that. “Oh, no,” he said, then, after a pause. “I’m not going to bad mouth her.” He sucked in a breath, which surprised me. Revenants aren’t supposed to breath, except when they’re sucking life out of people. He was too far away to go after me. He must have been doing it for dramatic purposes. “I know that you loved her. I’m just sorry she used you the way she did.” I was instantly on my guard. He was trying to get on my good side because they knew about the whole Brigitte thing. I didn’t want to listen to him. “You don’t want to listen to me, I know,” he said. He motioned a hand and one of the other guys came up. “Let her go,” he told him. “But,” the guy said. “Orders.” “Orders that I’m now changing. She doesn’t need to be tied down and embarrassed. You,” he said to the other guy behind him, “Go get her some clothes.” He turned back to me. “It’s going to be a polo shirt,” he told me, a little apologetically. I noticed that there were little flecks of blood on his forearm and he saw me looking. “Sometimes this job is messy. You’d expect that, wouldn’t you? After all, I am a revenant. Then again, we can’t help what we are, can we. I didn’t ask to be this soulsucking damned thing, and you didn’t ask to be brought back from the dead as a conglomeration of pieces of other people, did you? I know you didn’t.” The straps were off now and I was sitting up, looking at him. I was very suspicious of him but also I wanted to move around a little. “You can move around a little,” he said. “I suppose it doesn’t matter if you’re naked right now. You’ll be clothed soon enough.” I looked to my right and to my left as I stood up, trying to figure out where the entrance was to the cave, a way out. Steve

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laughed. “That’s what I’d do, too,” he said. He pointed to his right. “The entrance is that way. You won’t get out.” “How are you reading my mind?” I asked him. He reached up and pointed to my forehead. I put my hand there but didn’t feel anything. “You wont’ feel anything,” he said. He held up his hand, and I saw a little Read-Or device there, a smaller one than the others I’d seen. On the screen I could see my own face and my hands. The color was yellow. “Yellow means confusion,” he said. He reached out a finger and I shied back. “May I?” he said. “I won’t hurt you, and you don’t have the right kind of life force for me to live on, anyway.” I relaxed a little, and saw his eyes flick towards the screen, then back to me. He pressed a finger against my forehead. “It looks like a tattoo, almost,” he said, “So we tried to make it like that. I’m sorry that it had to be on the forehead, since that’s the best place to get a reading from but also it’s pretty noticeable.” He traced his finger back and I tried not to shudder or pull away. His finger was cold. “It’s digipaint.” He sounded like he was explaining, but I didn’t know what that was. “It helps transmit your thoughts to us. You can’t Share, you know, and we needed to figure out if you were really who we thought you were.” I looked off to my left, to his right, involuntarily, almost. He looked that way, too. “I’d have to try to stop you, and I don’t want to. I’d have to try to stop you though because if you made it to the entryway of the cave, you’d find only a huge force gate and a couple of heavily armed guards. The gate isn’t just to keep you in. It’s to keep the demons and other denizens of Hell out. And if you got up there and touched the gate, it might be enough to disintegrate you. And we don’t have time to have you put back together, plus there’s no promise that you’d still be you and we’ve looked a long time for you, Rachel.” He reached out again, and picked up my left hand. I pulled it back but he kept his grip on it. “This was the giveaway, the left hand.” I got it back from him. “What’s going on?”

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“I’ll tell you, Rachel. Come with me. Oh, wait, your clothes are here. You’d better get dressed. Unless you want everyone in our organization to see you naked. It’s really your choice.” “I’m not coming with you.” “You are. And you’ll want to. I think you’ll really want to come with me, rather than sit here in the dark in a cave and wonder if I’m right about the force gate and what it would do to you. And you’d rather, I imagine, come with me than wander out into Hell on your own and hope that your sexy Valkyrie friend finds you. Because this is your real body here, you know. We brought your whole body here, this time, not just your soul.” He paused and looked at his little monitor. “Yes, we had a lot of time to read your thoughts. I won’t apologize for that, either. The stakes are too high. We do what we have to do. And so will you, I bet. I can also offer you food, and drink, and I think you’ll like that better than running around a dark cave.” He paused then and looked back at me from the archway where he was standing. “Plus, I’m going to ask you to help save all 73 dimensions from certain doom.” Steve had no flare for the dramatic; he should have said that in a minute or so. But instead, he said it as we plodded through a dimly-lit cave hallway, with the two regular guys behind me. We walked in silence until we got to a door and he pulled on a lever and the door swung open. Inside the room was full of desks and chairs and people and high-tech stuff all of which I didn’t notice for at least 10 minutes. Someone could have been chewing on my leg and I wouldn’t have noticed that for 10 minutes, because the room was dominated by a giant holographic display that at first appeared to be like a giant bunch of grapes. I’m no good with descriptions, so that’s the best I could do at first – a giant bunch of grapes. As I adjusted to looking at it, I realized that it was a huge cluster of spheres, projected into the air and filling most of this cavern. The spheres weren’t in any particular order or shape, really, but just were all glommed together, some touching, some overlapping,

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some barely next to each other. They were all roughly the same size except that towards the middle they got bigger. Each sphere, as I walked in and as I began to notice more and more detail, was subtly a different color, and they whole thing was moving slowly: spheres were rotating and some were moving up, or down, or more towards the middle, or out from the middle. They cast a hazy light over the whole cavern, so that when, eventually, I looked away, everyone in the room was bathed in it as though they were underwater and there were 73 suns above them. I kept walking closer and closer and saw that there was more detail in the spheres, each of which was about 3 feet in diameter. I could make out shapes and features on the closest ones. At first I thought they were patterns but when I was about 5 feet away from the nearest one, a big yellow-and-blue hologram I saw that they weren’t just random patterns but were like continents. I’d seen continents since waking up—Doc had shown me a map of the planet when I’d been asking him questions, and had explained what continents were and had shown me how our own continent came to have the Straits in them, that giant divide that split what used to be North America diagonally and left a huge waterway between America and West America. He’d explained it all and I’d been bored and hungry so I hadn’t paid much attention but I did remember continents, and I looked at this sphere and tried to figure if the shapes were continents. It was hard to focus, though, because the spheres flickered, too, and I couldn’t make out what the flickering was. “Flickering,” again, isn’t the right word. “Glittering” maybe, is better because it gives a better idea of how it looked. Flickering sounds bad, like your screen is going out. “Glittering” sounds good, like things are sparkly and you’re getting ready for a party. The sphere I was looking at, and the others nearby it, were glittering and sparkling and I tried to focus on that for a second and I realized that the glittering was tiny pictures – moving pictures, moving images, hundreds if not thousands of them in the spheres, so quick and so small that I could see them only as an impression: a man here, something with tentacles there, a chariot carrying a giant

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glowing spear, rain, a table with food – all in detail but all flickering so quickly that my eyes must have registered it and then later I remembered seeing it. I was holding my hand up near the globe and I almost touched it. But I stopped and looked at Steve. Again, no flare for the dramatic: He simply said “Fine. Everyone wants to touch them. Go ahead.” I gingerly touched it, not knowing what to expect. When I did, my hand barely touched the light that made up the globe and all the glittering images began to be more clear and I had an impression, a glimpse: Mountains, mountains taller than anything I could imagine, covered with snow at their bases, piles and piles of snow that never melted, which faded away to rock as the mountain went up, and then to grass and forest and trees and on the very top of the mountain, a flat plain in which a lake sat surrounded by pristine white beaches. People roamed the mountains in lopsided chariots, one wheel smaller than the other. The giant glowing spear… I took my hand away. I was kind of dazed. “You won’t get the full effect, of course, because you can’t Share,” Steve told me. “But that digipaint imprint gives you an idea.” He moved closer, and looked at the globe. “Dimension 63,” he said. “A weird one. One planet, only. One sun. The whole planet is mountainous, and the sun’s light doesn’t reach into the valleys, so they are in continuous ice age at the base of the mountains. At the top of the mountains, though, it’s perpetually summer.” He looked at me. “How much did you see?” “I don’t know,” I said. “Some.” “They’ve discovered flight, and that allows them to get between the mountains more easily. Prior to that, I imagine, intermountain commerce wasn’t very big. They’ve also got a war going on, like all the other dimensions. Except Hell. Although I suppose Hell would have a war going on, too, if it could.”

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He turned around, looked at one of the men. “That’s odd, you know. There should be a war going on here, too.” “Why should there be a war?” I asked him. He was drawing me in, I was curious. And I still hadn’t looked away from the globes. I was forgetting, even, that he was a revenant. “Because it’s Armageddon,” Steve said. “I thought I made that clear before. The end of the world is coming, or is trying to come, and we need you to help stop it and to save the 73 dimensions.” “I really don’t understand,” I said back. I was still staring at Dimension 63, as he’d called it, trying to take in the glittering little lives that kept flashing at me, trying to picture life in a world of mountains. But I couldn’t really even picture life in this world, or at least not a life that didn’t involve kidnapping me and shooting me with ray guns and ending up all the time in Hell talking to revenants. Mountains seemed pretty nice at that point. “This is a map of the universe,” Steve said, flicking his bony gross hand towards the globes in a dismissive gesture. He should have swept his arm wide and used a better tone, but revenants are sort of dead inside. Not even sort of, I guess. “These are the 73 dimensions that make up the universe, or the part we know. You can see how they interact and move. We’ve mapped them out as best we can using the best technology we can, something various groups have been working on for a long time to achieve.” “Like the government?” Steve looked over at me. I hate when revenants look at you out of the corner of their eye because you see only those ragged ripped eyelids. “There’s no government. You should know that. There hasn’t been a government for a long time. There’s just us, and another group, but that other group doesn’t really exist anymore, and God, Inc.”

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“Who?” I asked. I continued staring at the maps as they moved slowly around and rotated and glittered. “God, Inc.” Steve tried to pull me back from the maps, but I was looking at another circle, or sphere, I guess, and reaching out my hand and I pulled away from him. I reached out and stuck a finger in, my hand passing through it without resistance and feeling a wash of heat and warmth and color come over me. Yes, I felt color. I felt what blue and red and yellow feel like and how they swarm together and mix and hug as they create other colors, too, and I felt pulled around, a little, wrapped up, and kind of dizzy, as I smelled and heard and saw and felt all at once and I felt compressed, a little, like I was being pushed and pushed and pushed from all sides at once, like someone was standing on each of my pores and pushing inward. I stumbled backwards and Steve said “There are some dimensions people really can’t go to. That’s one of them.” He shook his head. “They’ve got it all muddled up there. Their war is particularly bad. Someone there managed to fold them, warp their reality so that all the lines blur.” I kind of knew what he was talking about. “So now there, men are women and things are not-things and everyone, I think, is going mad. You see what we have to do, don’t you?” I stood up. “No,” I said, simply. I was still looking at the maps. A man walked by carrying a few small boxes and stopped and looked at me. “You,” he said. I turned to him. He was wide-eyed with excitement. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “No, wait. Sorry. Are you with us, now?” “Um. No,” I said. Steve sucked in through his teeth. “Maybe,” I added. The guy reached out his hand. I looked at it, not knowing what to do. “Go away. Do you have business to do?” Steve said. “I’m sorry,” the man said. “I’m just such a fan. Such a fan.” He gave a sad look to Steve and picked his boxes up off the desk and moved on.

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“What was that?” I asked. “Nothing,” said Steve. “You’re lying.” “Yes.” “Shouldn’t you maybe tell me the truth if you want me to help?” “Shouldn’t you help if you want the truth?” I turned away from where the man was and looked at Steve, trying to concentrate, which was hard because he was in front of the map and I just wanted to stare at it. “The truth first,” I said. “No,” he said simply. He glanced down at his hand. I looked at him and then realized what he was looking at. “Hey, no more reading my mind,” I said, and reached out, but he lifted up the Read-Or unit and held it up. “Give me that,” I said, jumping up. God, he was tall. I couldn’t reach his hand. Not that I’m much of a jumper. “Give it back to me,” I said. “Those are my thoughts.” He just held it up and said “So you really do want to know what that was all about.” I tugged at his shirt, trying to ignore the clammy, oystery quality that revenant skin has. “Give me my thoughts,” I said. “I can tell you,” he said calmly. I stepped back and thought for a second. “Okay,” I said. “Give it to me or I’ll wipe it off.” I licked my hand and held it over my forehead. Steve laughed. “Then you wouldn’t be able to do even the limited things you do now, like when you touch the map. You won’t be able to see those dimensions. You won’t even see the map like it is now.”

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I held my hand over my forehead, still, and said “So?” Steve shook his head. “Plus, if you leave it on, you might be able to Share with Brigitte,” he said. Brigitte! “Maybe I’m mad at her.” Steve looked up at the Read-Or, still held over his head. “Apparently, you’re mad at her breasts,” he said. I put my hand down, and thought about Brigitte’s breasts for another moment or two. The two guys near Steve, the guys that had been watching me, moved closer and tried to see the screen. Then I dove at Steve as quickly as I could, trying to tackle him, but he simply turned a little and stepped to the side and I went flying straight into the map, falling into it as I passed through two or three of the spheres – glimpses of horses and a starry sky and some kind of giant machines shooting at each other and once, a boat sinking and a woman sitting in a window—and fell to the ground, knocking the wind out of me. “I knew you were going to do that,” Steve said. “Now, shall we calm down? Trust me. If you’re not prepared to cooperate, I’m prepared to make you cooperate. But I’d rather that you help us voluntarily. It will make you feel better and me feel better.” “Revenants don’t have feelings.” I said, gasping. “Neither do zombies, then.” Steve said. “You’re not very nice.” “I’m an undead man who survives by sucking the life force out of the living, and I’m the field commander for a group of people who are trying to stop Armageddon using a lesbian zombie operating out of a base in Hell. No, I’m not,” Steve said. I sat back on my knees and tried to catch my breath. “What do you want me to do?” I asked. “Not that I’m agreeing to anything.”

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“Follow me again,” Steve told me and started walking off. I had to try to stand up and get after him while still out of breath. The two guys stayed behind me. I noticed neither of them had ray guns that I could see. The people that were working in the map room had watched this, but they went back to work now and we walked around the map and out a little cave in the other side. It was darker here, the lights dim and the cave looking new and rough. Ahead, I could see a little flicker of light here and there. It wasn’t a long trip. We went through the cave and came out onto a ledge where Steve stopped. I almost bumped into him and moved to the left, but he held out a bony arm and stopped me. He felt like a dead lizard. His hand fell right across my breasts. “Hey,” I said. When I did that, I heard a whole fluttering kind of sound, a shuffling or movement or something. I realized we were on a ledge and there was no rail. I’d almost walked right off of it. There were flickers of light, like lightning bugs, almost, every now and then here and there throughout the cavern but it was very dark, for that. “This is what you want me to see?” I said. Again, that sound. I’d heard it before, almost. There was a feeling in the air and a sort of undercurrent. “What is this?” More of that sound, or hush. I didn’t know what it was. “You’ve actually been here before, do you know that?” When Steve talked, that extra current didn’t follow him. “I have?” There is was again. “Yes. Not long ago. You were over there,” I couldn’t see where he was pointing. My eyes were trying to adjust to the dark. I tried to focus on the little flickers of light but they were either very small or very far away. “In fact, I tried to come talk to you.” “I…” I didn’t know what to say, and that echoey-thing that was happening after every time I tried to talk was unnerving me, freaking me out.

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“You were sitting by some rocks and there was a girl with you.” “Naked girl,” I said. More shuddering echoes, and somewhere, a sound like a slap or handclap or footstep. “Yes.” I thought back. “That was you,” I said. “Outside the cave, trying to talk to me or get me?” I could hear footsteps now. I looked over my shoulder. Those two guys were there, nobody else. Besides, it was coming from the dark. “If you had talked to me it would have made things so much easier and we wouldn’t have had to grab you with the giant. But I suppose this way you were able to see just what Samson and God, Inc. are really like.” I kept hearing those footsteps. “So it might have worked out for the best.” “But…” That shuffling again, and the footsteps were closer. It was weird. I stopped talking and Steve looked at me. “Turn on the lights,” he said. One of the men reached over, and the first thing I saw was blurry lights and cavern walls and rock ceilings. The second thing I saw was Naked Girl, walking towards me. She was the footsteps that I’d heard. She was naked again, and barefoot, of course. The third thing I saw was hundreds, maybe thousands, maybe more, of other naked girls, lined up in rows. Rows after rows after rows of naked girls, standing there mutely, staring at me. “What…” I said. “This is our lesbian zombie army,” Steve said. I just stared and stared. I’d never imagined anything like this, and I’d seen a lot of weird stuff in my two weeks. As I watched, some of them flickered and lit up or dimmed down.

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“What’s going on?” I asked Steve, forgetting for a moment that I was repulsed by him. “They’re coming and going. Technically, we only have their souls here. Their bodies are still back in the dimension we live in ordinarily. When the bodies they inhabit sleep or are shut down, they come here. So long as the bodies are intact, that is. If the body is destroyed, the soul might get lost.” “They’re dead?” “They’re zombies.” So, yeah. They were dead. And I’m dead. I didn’t say that to Steve. I guess I knew, really, before that moment, that I’d died. After all, I’d known I was different, and Samson had really pushed it into my mind that I was a zombie But I didn’t … know it, didn’t feel it inside me. It’s one thing to have something be part of your background awareness, and another entirely to have it suddenly consume your whole mind. As I stood there looking at the naked zombies I shuddered and looked again at my own body and I wanted to tear it off of me, throw it away. It wasn’t even my body. It wasn’t even my body. I felt tears starting up but Steve was staring at me and I decided I had to be a little stronger than that. “Why do they come here?” I asked. I meant why do they come to this cave, the souls, but I guess Steve didn’t know that because he said: “Because we’ve blocked Heaven.” I was startled and looked at him. “What?”

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Steve turned to me, flappy gross eyelids lifting in surprise. “Why do you sound so surprised?” “Why wouldn’t I be surprised when someone tells me that they’ve blocked Heaven?” “You knew that, of course. Didn’t Samson tell you?” I shook my head. He looked at the two guys who were kind of guarding me. “Didn’t you figure it out from our name?” “What name?” “The Blockers,” Steve said. “Granted, it’s a dumb name, but we did not give it to ourselves; it’s what the third group started calling us. I suppose we needed a name, and we’d never given one to ourselves. So they started calling us ‘the blockers,’ and we took to it. Even had logos designed,” and he pointed to the little logo on his polo shirt, the gate with the bar over it. I sat down. “Why would you block Heaven?” I asked. “We had to,” Steve said. “It was absolutely necessary to avoid Armageddon.” There was a bit of commotion down the hall. I put my hands on my face and said “What does that mean, you blocked Heaven, anyway?” Someone said “Stay here, please” but it was far away. Steve was, when I looked up at him, looking at his Read-Or unit. “Quit reading my mind,” I snapped at him. “I can see you’re upset,” he said. “You don’t need to look at my thoughts to see that.” Steve was studying the Read-Or, though, and he looked up at me then and said “It wasn’t pleasant at all, I’m sure.” He mumbled it, almost to himself. He looked at the two guys. “What’s going on out there?”

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“I’ll go see,” said one guy. Steve looked back down at me. He bit his lip for a moment, and when he let up on it the lip stayed indented. Gross. “When Armageddon began, we realized it quickly. Not just me. I wasn’t even created then. But the people who originally ran the Blockers realized it. They had a Map room in our dimension and had noticed the increase in warfare, the rapid increase in warfare, across the dimensions, and were monitoring it. Heaven itself, as a dimension, is very hard to monitor. It’s in the center of all the dimensions, of course, and to watch it one has to get through a lot of other information, plus Heaven’s information is well protected by that wall God put around it. “But they monitored it anyway. They were, I suppose, the government, almost, back then, although they didn’t have much power. But if you trace it down, we might be the remnants of the last real “government” the way people think of it. Not that it’s much to be missed. It’s not missed at all, in fact, since people think it still exists. “A few people realized what was happening, though, or suspected, and so they began taking steps. They created revenants, like me, for one thing.” Steve paused and looked off into space, staring blankly for a second. Almost, I felt almost sorry for him. But he was disgusting and he’d kidnapped me and he’d blocked off Heaven, or at least worked for people who did. “They had to do that, because revenants, like other undead, can move more easily among the dimensions. Like you can. If you try. Otherwise, it takes a great deal of energy to do that. A great deal. Moving our things to Hell, for example, depleted about one-half of the entire power supply of the world for an entire week.” “Sir,” one of the two guys interrupted. “I think we need you.” “What is it?” Steve asked. “He’s… trying to come down here.” “What? How did he escape?” “He wasn’t really tied up anymore.”

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“This is ridiculous. I’m trying to talk here. Take him back and sedate him or something.” The man looked back down the corridor and nodded. “Um. Okay. All right,” he said, and he walked back down. I could hear voices but I didn’t listen to them. I watched the lesbians flicker and listened to Steve. “I may have to save the longer explanation for another time. Anyway, they began preparing to do something, the government did, our group did, suspecting that Armageddon was coming and then one day, they realized it was here. They looked in the Map and saw that the Gate of Heaven was open. The Gate opens, of course, only when God comes or goes. Angels use a side door. So they knew that God had come out of Heaven, and they knew they had to act. “The Gate, you see, has to remain open. Heaven is the source of God’s power, in a way. He’s inextricably interlinked with that dimension. It was the first dimension, maybe the first he created or maybe both came into existence at the same time. Nobody knows. But we do know that God and Heaven are linked and that the Gate must remain open or God is cut off from His power. “So when they saw the Gate open, they put their team to work. A group of revenants was sent to Heaven and told to close the Gate and block it off, and they did. That was before my time, too, but they recorded it and I’ve seen it. There was a brief battle, as the Angels tried to fight off the Revenants, but they were really no match for the Revenants because there weren’t many of them left in Heaven – too many were off setting up the other dimensions for the End of Times. And our group had the element of surprise. So we were able to close the Gate and block it off, trapping God out of Heaven and cutting off most of his power. And stopping Armageddon until we could figure out what to do next.” There was more ruckus and I heard some yells including He said you’re not supposed to go there. I was trying to absorb what Steve had told me when I heard more running footsteps and someone trying to punch or hit someone and tackle someone and

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then a couple of guys came tumbling into our little ledge area. I recognized, to my surprise, two of them. One of them was the guy who’d gone up the hallway at Steve’s direction. The other was Brigitte’s dad. “You,” he said, and tried to push the guards off of him, but they piled on top of him and held him down. I backed away a little from him, but there wasn’t much of anyplace to go, there on that ledge. Naked Girl’s head was only a few feet from my hand, I realized; the ledge was about six or seven feet up and she was standing below me. “What’s he doing here?” I asked. “He’s our coup de grace,” Steve said. “We own him, now.” Brigitte’s dad was sitting up now, held by three guys on the ground. He looked horrible: he was all mismatched and I could see scars on him stitching almost. His left leg was shorter than his right leg and his arms were different lengths, too. He was barefoot and one foot was a different color than the other. “Oh, no,” I said. I looked down at my own hands and feet. I looked up at Steve. “He’s not…” “He is. He died. As you know. But we needed him. Not past tense, even. We need him. Because of the octopi.” “What?” You have no idea what it’s like to almost never have anything make sense to you, to have about every other sentence that you hear be complete gibberish. Imagine that, and then imagine, too, that someone’s always shooting ray guns at you, and also that you keep getting dragged places or going to Hell, and you’ll have an idea what my life was like for a long time there. “The octopi. Like your own octopus. He controls them.”

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“He what?” I know I sounded dumb, but that’s about all I could muster. I looked at Brigitte’s dad, who was trying to pull free. His head was a little crooked, too. I looked down at myself again. Is that how other people see me? “Mr. Lockhart invented Octopi. Didn’t you, Mr. Lockhart.” Brigitte’s dad glared at him. I tried to remember if I knew Brigitte’s last name was Lockhart. Had she told me? “They’ve even got his symbol on them. If you look down on the bottom of the octopus, there’s a little heart-shaped padlock. That’s the Lockhart Industries symbol. He invented them and he secretly controls them all, something all the people buying octopi don’t know. He invented Read-Or units, too, and people don’t know what they can do, either.” He held up the little Read-Or unit he had and pointed to a little flywheel on it. “Want to see what Mr. Lockhart is thinking now? I bet it’s something about me. Or maybe something about you. But we can find out.” Brigitte’s dad glared at him but kept his mouth shut. “It was a shame when he died, but not as big a shame as it could have been because word never got out that he died. Our revenants were there and got his body to me and nobody has yet heard of the death of wealthy industrialist and CEO of one of the Three Powers. And nobody will.” Steve really should have paused before that last sentence. Or at least laughed maniacally or something. But he didn’t. He wasn’t even talking dramatically. He had no flair whatsoever. “Because we have him,” Steve was going on. He looked now at Mr. Lockhart. “We have both of you. This is her, as you know. You knew it when you and Reverend Tommy first grabbed her, didn’t you? Ironic, isn’t it? If only you’d known her career would end up like this.” There it was again. Gibberish. But before I could ask what that meant, another guy came running down the tunnel and burst out, nearly tripping over Mr. Lockhart and panting.

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“Sir. Steve! Sir. We’re under attack.” “What?” Steve asked. He was calm, though. “Details.” “There’s a hundred-foot-tall demon pounding at the gate at the front door.” “Oh.” Steve turned back to me. “Now, we should continue.” “Sir?” the man said. Steve turned back to him. “Yes?” “What should we do?” “Is the Gate turned on?” “Yes.” “Then do nothing. One demon won’t be able to get through that at all. This wasn’t unexpected, you know. Sometimes they find us. It’ll get bored and go away after a while.” There was a booming sound somewhere. Steve looked up at the ceiling. “So he’s punching it. Well, it’ll be fine.” He motioned with his hand and the man left. “Keep me posted,” Steve called after him. He turned back to me. “There’s much more to tell you but we may not have much time.” I looked down the hallway after the man. “Because we’re under attack?” “No. Not that. That doesn’t worry me at all. What worries me is your old friend Samson. He’s desperate and might be desperate enough to try to make God remember who He is.”

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Meanwhile, In New York: The man slumped against the desk where he kept his monitor and looked around the room. It was a mess, and he had to do something about it. He could not leave it that way. Not for lots of reasons. What would customers think, if they came in and saw a messy shop? That he was one of those grab-and-hack purveyors, that’s what they’d think, and would not pay top dollar. What was the point of staying up all night cutting and sewing pieces of bodies together and then reanimating them for a few dollars? No point, that’s what. Plus government officials might come in. He’d thought the revenant and his men were government officials in the first place. They drove gasoline powered vehicles, for one thing. That was something only soldiers or government officials did, anymore. IF government officials came in here and saw the scattered parts of the men he’d used to try to reassemble the old guy, the blood, the ray gun scorch marks, they’d start investigating and he didn’t need that. Plus it wasn’t right to have this mess in front of the Display. But he couldn’t clean it up now. He had to get upstairs and open the diner for the day. It was nearly 7 a.m. and people would be expecting their breakfasts. He sighed and stood up, walked over to the Display’s cabinet and looked at it, glittering and sparkling and seeming almost alive the way the light played along the thousands of little chips sculpted into the shape of a beautiful woman, reaching up, reaching towards Heaven, where the man sent the souls of the women he’d taken and turned … … turned. That was where he left it. He reached out a hand, held it just alongside the face of the Display, almost as though he was about to caress its cheek. But he didn’t touch it. He knew he was not worthy enough to touch the Display. He wondered where she had gone, the one that looked like this. “You’re quite an artist,” a voice said behind him.

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The man jumped, startled, and turned around. He had been surprised, but was not scared by the voice because he recognized it. “Lieutenant,” he said, and put his tired hand up in a salute. There was blood on his arm and he was exhausted. “At ease. We’re not in the service anymore, are we?” Samson stepped to one side, gently pushed the man to the other so that he could see the Display. “Did you do this?” “Yes,” the man said. “Chips?” “Yes.” Samson reached out a hand, but he, too, did not touch the chips. He wiggled his fingers a few inches from it. “Looks 3-D but it’s not, is it? That’s excellent work.” He turned back to the man. “I knew you had it in you way back when, didn’t I? I told you you could do this and you did it.” “You were right,” the man said. “Making you a lot of money?” “Yes, sir.” “And you use the diner for cover?” “Yes.” “Good. Nobody’s suspicious? Nobody’s found you?” The man wondered if he should tell Lieutenant Samson about the revenant. The revenant had sworn that he would know if the man talked about him at all, that he’d find out instantly, had said I can read your thoughts, you know, and the man wondered if that could be done, could be done from far away, that is. He worried that it could. “Nobody,” he told Samson.

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“Nobody except the revenant. Steve. Is that right?” The man bit his lip. “I’m not reading your mind. I know he’s found you, though. I know what he had you do. Did it work?” The man tried desperately not to think about anything the revenant would be able to read and nodded his head once. “So you can do it with men, too?” “Yes.” Samson considered. “Who’s this modeled after?” he asked, pointing towards the Display. “When did you make this?” “I began that with the first one, years ago.” “You did.” It wasn’t a question. Samson was thinking, the man realized. “Yes. I began making it and sculpted it over the years. It’s a mosaic.” “Yes. I see. It is.” Samson turned back to him, then. “It looks like someone, doesn’t it?” “Yes. It looks like…” The man thought for a moment. He was bad with names. “Rachel.” “Why’d you name her Rachel?” The man shrugged. “I just go with what pops into my head.” “Did you recognize her when you made her?” “Recognize?” “From this?” Samson pointed at the Display. “It looks exactly like her.” “I didn’t realize that until later.”

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“And you didn’t recognize her from anything else?” The man shook his head. Should I have? He wondered. He was nervous about thinking, though, and so he tried to stop again. Samson pondered a moment and said “How’d you make her the boss?” The man just looked at him. Samson waited, then said “You know she’s the boss, don’t you?” “What do you mean?” “She commands them.” “She does?” “You didn’t know that?” “No.” “You didn’t know she was the head zombie?” “No.” “You didn’t do anything special to her when you made her?” “No.” The hand, the man thought, a little guiltily. Samson was not touching him and so he wouldn’t have picked that up, right? The left hand. He could see it in its velvet-lined box. “Who ordered her?” The man panicked. “I’m not… I don’t…” Samson looked at him and his eyes were smiling and kind, just like in the old days. “Hey, bud.” Samson said. “Hey. Remember, sitting there in the treefort in the jungles of London? Ray beams flashing all around us? Leaves pilfering into nothingness, firebombs falling to strip away foliage, it’s just you and me there on the platform, and you got hit? Remember what I did?” “You saved my life.”

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“I did that for a reason,” Samson said. “You did?” “Yeah. I did. I knew you had talent, and I knew we needed your talent. There’s another war on, buddy. Another war, and you’re helping me fight it again. I saved you for a purpose and your purpose has been to create these zombies, so that they can become an army for us, an army helping us fight the greatest of all wars.” The man got tears in his eyes. “My life has a purpose?” Samson said “It sure does.” “A good purpose?” Samson said “You bet.” The man started crying, and smiling. “I don’t even know what to say.” “Say the name of the person who ordered Rachel, who gave you the specifications.” The man said, “I wish I could.” He sniffled and shook his head and wanted to hug the Lieutenant. All those years mucking about in blood and sewing things and working in the diner and now I find out my life has a purpose! My life is worth something! He wanted to help Samson. But he said, now, “But he never gave me a name.” “How were you going to deliver it?” Samson asked. “I was supposed to knock her out and ship her via lizardline,” the man said. “To what address?” Samson asked. The man walked over to his computer screen, waved a hand. A few thoughts, a wave of the hand, and the address came on the screen. Samson walked over and saw it. “Damn,” he said. He recognized the address: It was God’s vacation home.

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Part Twelve: As we sat down around the little table, I heard even more rumbling and pounding. Steve leaned back in his chair and seemed oblivious to it. Brigitte’s dad looked up every time there was a thump or grumble, though, and it made me nervous. The whole thing should have made me nervous, I suppose, but everything’s relative, right? So once I got used to the fact that my whole body was in Hell, captured by revenants trying to stop the end of the world, and working with the reanimated corpse of my girlfriend… Brigitte!... then it took something even more to make me nervous, and the mountain or whatever we were in, shaking and rumbling, was that something even more. “Is that normal?” I asked when a particularly loud thump boomed over us. I heard talking and running from out in the map room and as I thought of the map room, it made me want to go look at it again. Steve was looking at his Read-Or unit and didn’t answer me right away. Then he looked up at me. “You really miss her, don’t you?” “Quit reading my mind. I’m serious. Turn that thing off or I won’t help you,” I snapped back at him. “I think you’ll help us. Because I can tell you a few things, and I will if you promise to help me.” “Things like what?” “Things like is Brigitte really pregnant? And does she really love you? Those are your two questions, aren’t they?” “Leave my daughter out of this!” shouted Brigitte’s dad, suddenly, and Steve stood up and waved the Read-Or unit furiously at him. “You be quiet! You be quiet and shut up! Fat old man! You do not understand just how little power you have here, do you? You’re not very necessary to our plans, at all. You’re a nice tidbit to have. Having you here will help us command the octopi and

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use them as you have, and will convince your soldiers and corporate executives to work for us – but if they don’t, well, then, we’ve gotten this far without octopi and clerks, and we’ll get farther, still.” “I will not help you.” Brigitte’s dad said. I suppose I should have felt kinship with him, that we were both resisting Steve and his demands, but I didn’t. All I could remember was that he’d kidnapped me – that naked and spreadeagled time—and I hated him for it. Plus, I thought maybe I hated him because I thought maybe Brigitte had been tricking me and if she was tricking me then she was doing it because of her dad, right? So I hated him for that, so when he said he’d never help Steve, I instantly wanted to do the opposite and thought maybe I will help them. I didn’t say anything, though. Steve paused after he talked to Brigitte’s dad, standing, and pointing at him, and then said, with more dramatic flair than he’d had yet: “So you shut up, or I”ll have you taken back apart.” Brigitte’s dad went sort of pale, and quieted down. “Now, then,” Steve said. There was a larger THUDDING sound, and then three quick louder poundingkind of things, and I swear everything shook. Steve looked down at his Read-Or unit. He went over to the wall and picked up a little cord with a tiny headphone on it. He put it in. “What was that?” he asked. There was a pause as he listened. “Keep me informed,” he said. Pause. “No, via Read-Or.” Then he put the cord back and fiddled with the Read-Or unit and then sat down again. The pounding continued, louder. There was a genuine buzz of activity behind us, and I could feel the tension rise in the room. The guys holding Brigitte’s dad at ray gunpoint were all keyed up. I could tell.

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“So, as I was saying, I want your help, and I can trade you information. Good information. I can tell you if Brigitte is really pregnant, and if it is truly yours, and whether she really loves you, and I can prove my answers. But I need your promise, first.” He stopped, looked at the Read-Or, and pressed something on it. “Double the energy, then,” he said. He turned back to me. “It appears that something has roused some local demons and they’re attacking the mountain. Nothing we cannot fend off, but it is curious. I know you had a run-in with similar demons when you were last here. I wonder, can they sense you? No mind. We’ll get it under control” The battering was louder and louder now. He glanced again at the Read-Or and frowned but then turned back to me. “I will trust your word. If you promise me that you will help, that you will command the lesbian zombies to help fight off Armageddon, then we will in turn provide you with answers. And when it is over, when the end of the world no longer looms, you will be free to go. You have my word on that.” Pause again, while he looked right at my eyes. I was fascinated and couldn’t look away – I’d never seen such sincerity behind a pair of ragged, torn-up, half-sewn revenant eyelids. “And you can trust me.” He finished. “How can you prove it?” I asked. “With this. With other information. I can show you what happened. I can either prove that the love of your life is carrying your child and pining away for you, or prove the opposite. You’ll see.” I thought about that. I pictured the rows of … lesbian zombies… waiting for me to command them. What would we have to do? Where would we go? I had a million questions. Who would we be fighting, and how? Demons, Samson, missiles, tentacles… I shivered a little. But I wanted to know. I wanted to know. I wanted to know if Brigitte had ever told me the truth. About anything.

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The mountain was shaking good and hard now, and I felt dust crumbling a little onto my hair. I looked up and watched the rock-ceiling of the room move back and forth, vibrating. I looked back at Samson. “Prove one of them to me before I decide,” I said. “What?” “How do I know you can prove it? How do I know I can believe you? Prove one to me before I decide, then I’ll see if you can really do it. I’m not going to promise you anything and then find out you lied to me.” “You could always then renege on your own promise,” Steve said. There was a loud crash and he paused to look at the Read-Or. “The gate is holding well,” he said. Then he tried smiling. It was hideous. “As you’d expect,” he said. “We know what we’re doing. But I may have to go attend to this, so get on with it.” “First prove one of them to me,” I insisted. “Or I don’t help. I’ll refuse.” “We could kill you, then.” “You won’t,” I bluffed. “I might.” “Then go ahead. How do you know they won’t simply make another one of me and then they’ll have me?” Inside, as I said that, I felt a little sick. That was the first time I’d ever used my… whatever I am… to my advantage. Up until then, I didn’t want to really admit what I knew I was and that I was so different. But when pushed to it, I guess, I had to acknowledge that I am what I am, and that I’d better accept it and take whatever advantages I can.

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Whatever I’d said, it scared Steve, I could tell. He straightened up and put a hand to his lips, lips which were gray and parched and peeling and rotten and gross, and said: “There is that.” He thought a moment more. There was another large sound, and he glanced at the Read-Or, then said: “Very well. I will show you the truth of Brigitte’s pregnancy.” He fiddled with the Read-Or unit, punched some buttons, spun the flywheel, and turned it towards me. “Look at this,” he said. It showed me Brigitte, in her apartment, and I saw myself lying in her bed, too, next to her. I was naked, and Brigitte was almost naked. She had only a t-shirt on, and I remembered that t-shirt, a little tank-top that she’d been wearing when I woke up that morning. This was our first night together. I was asleep. I could tell that because I didn’t move when Brigitte got up. As I watched, my eyes twitched and turned and my hands scrambled and my legs moved. I was surprised by how much I moved during my sleep, and I remembered what Brigitte had said about how I slept. But I didn’t watch me, much, as I was distracted by Brigitte, who stood up, and looked at what I realized was the mirror in her bedroom– she looked directly at the Read-Or unit, and I thought that must be how it does it, looking through mirrors or something—and she took a deep breath. Through the t-shirt I could see her breasts, the nipples poking out the fabric, and the t-shirt lifted up so that I could see where her legs ended, smooth and clean, and then she turned around and looked at the bed, again. Her shirt didn’t cover her backside, and I saw the perfect, soft curves of her butt, where I’d so many times already run my hand over and rested my face sometimes. She climbed onto the bed and I continued, in the Read-Or, twitching and tossing and turning. She slowly and gently moved me so that I was lying on my back, and then she carefully laid herself down along the length of me, her legs matching up perfectly with mine, her groin pressed against mine, her breasts mashed down onto mine, and her face staring into mine. We were very close to the same height, she was a little taller, and somehow she made us match up.

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In the Read-Or, I stopped moving. Brigitte laid her face alongside mine for a moment, then began moving, a little, rubbing against me, slowly, and put her hands alongside my arms, then pulled me against her so that as much of our bodies as possible were touching. She then gently, while still moving subtly and keeping our bodies pressed together, pushed her lips against mine, and when she did that, her eyes open, my eyes closed, there was a glowing flash of bluish light that electrified both our bodies – hers fully, and mine dimly – and then she pressed her lips hard up against mine and moved her body more sensuously, in the glow, rubbing and touching me and pulling me to her and then finally she threw her head back and gasped and rolled off of me and lay there on the bed, rubbing her lower belly and smiling. Her smile, I thought, was a nice one. A happy one. Then the mountain got lifted up off of us, and we all looked up to see two giant demons holding the mountain over our heads, moving it off to the side while all around us Steve’s men in polo shirts shot at demons and Valkyries with ray guns and yelled and other demons and people fought them. I heard someone yell: “Dear God, There Are Thousands Of Them!” It was Reverend Tommy’s voice. It had that same stilted, booming quality that sounds both fake and super-real, the kind of voice that draws you in and compels you to keep listening. I paused, for just a second, as he yelled it, although to be fair I would have probably paused anyway because of the scene that was unveiling. I saw Reverend Tommy on a winged horse, diving down underneath the mountain, which was being held up in the air by those two giants. There was a whole horde of Valkyries behind him, in what I assumed must be battle formation, while others spread out around and to the sides of us. There were probably, I don’t know, like 200 of them.

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Then, on the ground, was a crowd of people that might have been two or three thousand thick, people like the ones I’d seen from time to time: bedraggled, torn up, halfeaten, scarred, horrifying and horrified souls, rushing forwards as Reverend Tommy yelled at them. “Spare nobody,” he said. “All of the Blockers must be sent to their destinations,” and though he wasn’t yelling his voice carried somehow over the din that was the sound of six thousand dead feet rushing forward, of 600 wings flapping and carrying spearwielding beautiful naked women, of demons growling. Reverend Tommy was carrying nothing himself; he simply held the reins of his horse and waved his arms, directing people. There were ray guns popping and crackling all over and I could smell the electric feeling in the air. “Come on!” Steve gasped at me and tugged on my arm. “Let her go,” Brigitte’s father said. “You’re time has ended. Can’t you see that?’ “It’s you who ended, piecemeal old man,” Steve snarled, and shoved Brigitte’s dad, who stumbled back. “Do you want me to take care of him?” one of the guards said. Steve shook his head. “He may still be of use. We need the Reacher, though. Hurry.” He grabbed my hand and pulled me along with him. “I’m not sure…” “You’d better be sure. Do you think they’ll spare you?” He pointed back. “Kill them all!” yelled Reverend Tommy and I saw him pointing towards the stillidle group of zombies that Steve had assembled. I recalled his sermons before. I looked at the crowd of people rushing towards the motionless ranks of… all the girls that were like me. The horses swooped down and ducked towards them. Steve said to me:

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“Tell them to fight.” “What?” I asked. He was tugging me towards them, and towards a rocky box that stood near them. “Tell them to fight. They are your army. They will do what you say.” “Why?” Steve put his hand on his head and continued forward. Men in polo shirts shooting ray guns rushed past the other way, all under the shadow of the still-upheld mountain. I wondered by Reverend Tommy didn’t have the two giant demons simply throw it back down and crush us all. Then I got nervous that he’d think of that and I moved faster. “They will listen to you. That’s what I’ve explained. You are their queen, the one who can command the lesbian zombies that have been created throughout history. Recent history, anyway. Or older. I don’t know. But you are it.” “Why me?” “I don’t know. Tell them to fight!” I looked where he was pointing and saw the crowd of people had reached the lesbian zombie army and was knocking them down, beating them up. The zombies… my people?... didn’t react. “NOW!” Steve yelled. “FIGHT THEM!” I yelled as loud as I could. “FIGHT BACK AND WIN!” I didn’t know what to say. Given what you know of my life, so far, I suppose it goes without saying that I’d never commanded an army of put-together dead naked women before. The zombie army jumped to life. The women turned and began fighting and yelling and howling and pushing and shoving. It was hand-to-hand combat, punching and kicking and screaming and the sounds of body after body clashing into each other as the two crowds of people… the two armies, I guess, rumbled into each other.

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Steve kept tugging me forward and I tried to watch them fight as I was following him. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to go with him wherever he was going, but I knew I had no hope going with Reverend Tommy. I heard rock creaking and looked up. The two giant demons were shuffling off to the side, holding the mountain, and I felt a little better about that. We were almost to the little rock cage. A ray gun beam passed really near me and I looked back, wondering why Steve’s guys were shooting at us. But they weren’t: some of the people in Reverend Tommy’s army had picked up the ray guns of people who’d they beaten up or killed and were shooting them towards us. “They need better directions,” Steve said. “Give them more goals. They’re simply fighting anyone they see, anyone who’s not a lesbian zombie.” “What?!” I said. “This is crazy! I’m not a general or something. I don’t know what to do.” Steve pulled up alongside the little rock cage thing we’d been heading for. We flattened ourselves against it and I looked back. I could see the remnants of the Blockers’ headquarters, beds and desks and computers and the Map, still all standing but without the carved-out mountain around them. The polo shirted guys were outnumbered by Reverend Tommy’s army, but they had better weapons and were more disciplined than the damned souls that Reverend Tommy was commanding and would have won but the Valkyries were obviously, even to me, the difference. They were in formation and swooping down and stabbing guys and grabbing ray guns and tossing them to the dead people and hemming people in. I watched as one horse got in the way of a ray gun and dropped, and even as it did, two other Valkyries swooped in: one caught the falling woman and the other stabbed the shooter in the head with her spear. “Tell them to move towards the left and flank the dead people around the back. Tell them to start picking up the ray guns that they find and shooting them. Tell them to watch what the others are doing and learn from them.” “I…”

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“Do it!” Steve said, and I did it, repeating his words as much as I could and as loudly. I saw the lesbian zombies spread their naked line of fighters off to my left, the ones behind who hadn’t yet been able to fight moving around and cornering the damned souls in between them. Some of them, nearer to us, I saw wrestle away ray guns and begin shooting at the damned souls. “Tell them to target the Valkyries,” Steve said. “Now, wait,” I said. “Just do it! Those women are killing my men.” “I’m not mad at the…” “Do it! Do it or I’ll..” I turned towards Steve and said “Or you’ll what?” but I was distracted as I did that because I caught a glimpse of what was in the cage that we’d taken refuge in front of. It was hard to catch more than a glimpse of, really, because it was… weird. That’s the best word I can use to describe it. It looked like a demon crossed with a monkey, a short little thing that had really long arms and really short legs and a squat, demon head with fangs all over the place, and its hands were even larger than that, but that’s only an approximation because as I looked at it, it seemed to suddenly be huge – like, it was bigger than the whole world we were in, which can’t be, right? Then it was tiny, then it was long and short all at the same time: somehow stretching for miles and then tiny, then it was a speck, and then it was like a mountain, and this was all at the same time. I couldn’t, I decided, look right at it. Looking at it was the seeing equivalent of standing on super-slippery ice: the same way your feet never get a hold on the ice, the same way you never trust where you’re standing, the same way you don’t want to move but you don’t want to stay there – that’s what my eyes did when I looked at that thing: they didn’t want to look away but as I looked my eyes started watering and I couldn’t focus and it was just everything and nothing.

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It was, I realized, moving and doing things, and there were two men in there with it, one who was holding a little gadget and the other who was feeding it little pretzel sticks, one at a time. He would stick them into the side of the thing’s mouth and it would chew it slowly into its mouth while the other man pushed buttons on a gadget and talked into a little microphone at his mouth. I saw the thing move its arm, which seemed to grow long and short at the same time and then it pulled it back and suddenly whom! There was a giant tank next to us, this great big giant machine that was easily three stories tall and was shooting at the Valkyries, shooting bolts of light kind of like coalesced ray gun beams at them, and the pretzel-feeding man said “Good boy!” and gave him another pretzel. The tank-shooting thing started to rumble forward and a crew of Valkyries dove down. It fired at them: fshoom fshoom fshoom and the horses started on fire and one of the Valkyries went hurtling over her horse’s head and fell at my feet. You guessed it: It was Ivanka. I immediately knelt down by her and tried to roll her over, but I couldn’t. She was too big. I turned her head to the side. There was a big scorch mark on it, and I could see a bump, too, where she’d hit the ground, and her eyes were closed. I leaned my head down really close and felt her breath come out of her mouth. It smelt like spearmint. I looked up at Steve. “We’ve got to help her,” I said. Behind me, the weird-demon thing continued being fed pretzels and reaching and twisting. Two more tanks appeared off to my right, and began shooting and rolling forward, too. “She’s the enemy,” Steve said. “No.” “Then I won’t help you.” “They’ll tear you apart. That Reverend hates you.” “I don’t care.”

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Behind us the tanks were rumbling and fshooming at the crowds of people, souls, coming at us. Steve watched them. “This is no good,” he muttered. “No good at all.” I continued to kneel by Ivanka. I tried again to roll her over but couldn’t. I had an inspiration. “Two. No, three, of you, come help me,” I called to the nearest lesbian zombies. They stopped fighting the people and came running over. “Pick her up. Get her to safety. Let’s go,” I ordered them. They hoisted Ivanka, struggling to do so. I ordered two more to join them. The five together were able to pick her up, one on each limb and one on the head. “Careful!” I yelled. Steve was talking with the two guys in the cage with the demon thing. “We’re not killing them,” he said. One of the guys looked over his shoulder. “Have it grab something else.” The second guy nodded and began whispering to the demon thing and stuffing more pretzel sticks into its mouth. My crew of five was hustling Ivanka over towards another mountain, not too far away, but further from the fighting. I looked back at the remainder of the fighting. The two giant demons had mostly moved the mountain and were trying to put it down. Reverend Tommy on his flying horse was back by them. The damned souls were still fighting the lesbian zombies, but the tanks had forced the Valkyries to pull back and now the tanks were starting to target large groups of the souls. As I watched, a tank went fshoom and a bolt of light shot into the back crown of Reverend Tommy’s army. Smoke and flashes of light and flickering and about 25 of them disappeared, entirely. Then, as I watched, still, horrified, they flickered back into place and began charging forward again. Steve was still arguing with one of the demon handlers, with the demon crunching on a whole mouthful of pretzel sticks and twisting its hands around. They were blurry

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and moving quickly and swirly. The demon had its eyes narrowed. I saw little disturbances in the air around its claws. The damned souls, though, were pushing against the lesbian zombies and starting to overcome them. I saw one man take a ray gun, aim at one of my army, and shoot her. The zombie fell to the ground, charcoaled and disappeared. The man began to run past her, but there was a flash of light and then the zombie woman reappeared, there, standing. “What the…” I said, but Steve wasn’t near enough. I was standing alone. I looked back at Ivanka. I saw that three of the Valkyries who were on their horses were heading for them. “No!” I yelled as the Valkyries raised their spears and threw them. Three throws, three direct hits – right through the chests of three of the women that were carrying Ivanka. The remaining two staggered and dropped their share, with Ivanka tumbling to the ground and rolling to a stop. The Valkyries dove. I looked back over my shoulder. “Army! Come with me!” I yelled, on the spur of the moment, and they began turning and running, some of them being shot in the back. The tanks rolled past them without harming them, shooting at the damned souls and Valkyries, who were flying higher and trying to stay out of range. The giant demons set their mountain down and turned towards the fight. I turned back to where the Valkyries had landed and saw one take out her sword and cut the head off one of my zombies. The zombie flickered and disappeared, then reappeared again, picked up her head and tried to fix it on. The Valkyrie stepped back and appraised the situation. The other four, too, had reappeared and were trying to continue the mission I’d given them, to pick up Ivanka, but the two other Valkyries were holding them off. “Go help them. Tell the Valkyries that we’re on their side.” “What!” I heard Steve yell, and thought he’d heard. I looked over at the cage. “That’s excellent!” he said. “Do that.” The demon thing held both its arms up in front of it and pushed down, as though slamming a window.

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In front of the two giant demons and most of the Valkyries, a giant glowing gridkind of thing appeared in the sky and slammed down to the ground. I heard one of the handler guys say “Good work! More pretzels!” The giant demons roared and bashed against this barrier, and the Valkyries tried slashing at it with their swords. One sword made contact and there was a flare of light and the Valkyrie dropped to the ground, laid there motionless. Most of my zombies were on the me-side of that gate and kept running towards Ivanka. Reverend Tommy was on the other side and I saw him gesturing to his own forces to go around it, motioning to the left and right. But as they moved in those directions, the fence extended to the left and right. I turned and began running towards Ivanka and my group. A lot of my army had reached there already, and the three Valkyries were now in a little triangle around Ivanka while my group surrounded them. One of the Valkyries raised her sword and I yelled “NO!” again and she paused. I was running up to her and gasping and tried to say “I’m on your side” but it mostly came out side. Still, she paused. Behind me, though, I heard Steve say “Get her!” The tanks began rumbling again and I heard yelling. I got to my group and looked back. Behind me, Steve’s men were dividing in half. One set remained there, shooting through the gate, while the other set followed the tanks that were turning around and heading this way. The fence was still spreading across the landscape, barring the demons and the rest of the Valkyries. Some of them, I saw, were flying higher into the sky to try to go up over it. That, too, wasn’t working. I edged through the crowd of naked women who I commanded, and got to the Valkyries. One of them moved towards me and pointed her sword right at my chest. “I’m trying to help,” I gasped at her. I pointed towards Ivanka. “She’s my friend. I owe her.” The Valkyrie looked down at her then up at me. Her eyes got wider. She was gorgeous. They all must be, I thought, and then I thought well, this isn’t the time for that

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but you’d have to see a Valkyrie to realize that they are, really, so sexy, that they can distract someone even in a fight for their life. The tanks were rumbling up behind us and I heard a fshoom! I looked and a bolt hit about 5 of my zombies. They flared into light, disappeared… and then reappeared again. They looked a little sunburnt, was all. I looked back and saw that some of the Valkyries had made it high enough to get over the fence and were flying towards us. Others were following suit. But Steve’s men would get here first, all polo-shirts and tanks and ray guns. We had about a second. I thought about that. We had to get out of here. The Valkyries were flying faster but wouldn’t get here in time. Fshoom fshoom the other two tanks shot. More burnt-flickering. Some of the zombies howled when they were shot. I didn’t like that. “Everyone, join hands!” I said. “You, too, and pick her up,” I said to the nearest Valkyrie. She, Ms. Gorgeous, put Ivanka over her shoulder; when she did that, part of her breast popped out and I gaped. Plus I saw that Ivanka wasn’t wearing underwear. But we all joined hands and the tanks were reorienting on the middle ground. I grabbed the hand of Ms. Gorgeous, and, just like the first time I’d met Ivanka, the moment I did that, I knew her name: Natalya flashed into my mind. I closed my eyes and concentrated. Nothing. I closed my eyes again and thought as hard as I could: GO! I opened them. A tank was pointing directly at me. I saw the muzzle start to flare up and braced myself for the blast. I wondered if I’d flicker back all sunburnt, too.

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Meanwhile, In New Yo… No, Tampa. Meanwhile, In Tampa: The man stumbled as he got out of the dirigible. It was so hot. He was sweating already and he’d only just touched his foot on the ground. He was also exhausted, and that could explain some of the disorientation he felt as he followed the Lieutenant and two men in fatigues up to the gate. “Why didn’t we just land in the yard?” he asked. The Lieutenant didn’t answer the question directly. Instead, he looked at the man and smiled a little. Then he reached into his pockets and pulled something out. The man saw that it was a crumpled, half-eaten package of squid jerky. The Lieutenant held that up, hefted it, and then tossed it over the fence they stood in front of. The package of squid jerky flew up and over the fence and was about a foot into the yard when blue crackles of energy appeared out of nowhere, each about three or four feet away from it, and zapped it, three of the jagged arcs of energy converging on the jerky and incinerating it into nothingness. “Oh,” the man said. “We want God to have his privacy,” the Lieutenant said. The man walked behind him to the gate, where the Lieutenant held up his hand and waved it back and forth. The gate disappeared and the Lieutenant looked around while he motioned the man and the two soldiers through. The man tried to hurry through without breathing heavily. He had not realized he was so heavy, so out-of-shape, and he did not like the sun, did not like the way it stared down at him. Behind him, the Lieutenant waved his hand again and the gate reappeared. He rejoined the man and the two soldiers and said: “We had to build that ourselves, you know. It’s not one of theirs.” The man had no idea what he was talking about. The walked up the lawn, which was large and had numerous trees and shrubs and flowers and was dotted with stone benches and gazing balls and fountains and bird feeders. It was like a park, only maybe

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larger than a park and with no little kids around. The man felt exposed, though, outside of the canyons and valleys of giant skyscrapers that made up his home in New York. “Are we really going to meet God?” The man asked. The Lieutenant nodded. “The REAL God?” The man persisted. “Yes,” The Lieutenant told him. The man remembered how the Lieutenant had never talked much, except when he’d explained how to create the women. That had taken a lot of talking and training. “Good,” said the man. The Lieutenant looked over at him. “Why do you say that?” he asked. “I want to ask him something,” the man said. “I want to ask him how he likes the souls.” “I don’t follow,” said the Lieutenant. There were birds, now, all over, birds sitting in the trees singing and birds in the birdbaths splashing and cranes and storks and flamingos walking or standing placidly. Two owls slept in the crook of a branch of one tree. An eagle watched them warily from atop another tree, its white head turning to allow one eye to follow them. Eagles, the man knew, had been extinct for 500 years. He only knew that because their code name in the war, his group, had been “Eagles,” and one of the other soldiers, then, had said it was a bad omen, prompting the man, then, to ask what an omen was. The other soldier had said luck, and said it was bad luck to be assigned to the division named after an extinct animal. He recognized the eagle from the patch that had been on the arm of his uniform, the uniform he kept in a display case behind the counter in the diner. He missed the diner. “Don’t do that,” the Lieutenant said, and it had been so long since he’d made the comment that the man had, briefly, to remember what they were talking about. The two

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soldiers moved ahead, clearing the birds. They were only halfway across the yard. Ahead were buffalo. Buffalo were extinct, too. He didn’t know how he knew that. Shows, maybe. “Why not?” The Lieutenant considered, rubbing the side of his face. He looked tired, too. “He doesn’t know a lot of things, right now,” he said. “God’s been trapped out of Heaven.” “He has?” “Yes.” “How?” “The enemies.” ”The ones we fought in the war?” “No, but like them.” “How’d they trap him?” “He left Heaven to come down here and they locked him out of Heaven.” That was a lot for the Lieutenant to say, and a lot to digest. They walked around the small herd of buffalo that stood in between them and the house, which was large and modern-style and had lots of windows, he could see now. “So he can’t return?” the man asked. “Not yet.” “Heaven’s locked up?” The Lieutenant nodded and shied away from a buffalo that tried to sniff his arm. The man thought about that for a while as they neared the house. The soldiers appeared more relaxed now. Nearer the house was a swimming pool and next to it a large fountain and aquarium set up, the whole set up being a rock wall, likely fake, he

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thought, but maybe not, and at the top was a fountain that spilled water out, sent it flowing into a series of pools, each of which was in the top of a large boulder or rock and the front of the boulder or rock was clear, so that he could see inside and inside each were colorful fish and flowery plant-like things and rocks and snakey looking eels and a lot of things he couldn’t identify. He was entranced by it. Then something struck him, and it was the thought that had first troubled him. “If Heaven’s locked up, what happens to souls?” The Lieutenant stopped and looked at him. The man went on: “It’s my work. That’s what I do. Not the diner. The souls. The Display. The creations. The women. I free them. I take them from their bodies and I send them to Heaven, and then I use the parts of the bodies that are left over to create the zombies that are ordered. That’s how it works. That’s why it’s okay that I do what I do. Because I free them and send them to Heaven.” The Lieutenant chewed his tongue for a second and said “Right. Just like I told you.” The man said, then, with sadness in his voice “But where are their souls going now?”

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Part Thirteen: Everything around me looked new. It took a second for me to realize what had happened. I replayed the events in my mind, tried to slow them down: The tank. The group of zombies with me. Ivanka lying there. The bolt of energy. I’d closed my eyes. I’d felt someone grab my left wrist and my arm pulled up and then a burst of heat and light and warmth and energy all of it almost too much for me. Then here. “Here” was someplace new entirely. My left hand throbbed and burned and I looked around. This wasn’t the scorched Hellscape I’d been standing in. I wondered for a moment if I’d died, if I’d been sent some place else by dying. Would I shimmer back into Hell in a moment? Someone was still holding my wrist. I blinked a few times and looked down at it, tearing my eyes away from the soft green grass, fluffy trees, and towering silver spires that surrounded us. There was a large hand gripping my wrist and my left hand glowed blue. Natalya’s hand was the one holding it, I realized, and looked at her, her giant beautiful sexy body. I became more aware. Behind her Ivanka was laying on the ground, still, and a group of naked women roamed around us. My army. My Lesbian Zombie Army, I realized. “Where?” I said. Natalya shook her head and pointed down at Ivanka and then at my hand.

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“What?” I said. She held a finger to her lips and pointed again at Ivanka. “Do you want me to be quiet?” I asked. Why couldn’t Valkyries talk? It would make things so much easier. I’d always assumed maybe that just Ivanka couldn’t talk. Or didn’t talk. Then again, I’d also never given much thought to whether all Valkyries could or could not do anything. Most of what I knew about them I knew from conversations with Steve as we’d tried to stay alive in Hell. I was briefly amazed, as I realized that Reverend Tommy had not only stayed alive in Hell, but had somehow assumed command of at least some demons and most of the souls. Then I was mad at him again over Steve, and then I was distracted because Natalya was leading me a few feet to Ivanka. She continued to hold my left wrist with a tough grip. Not uncomfortable, but definitely in charge. “You can let go,” I whispered. She shook her head, though, and crouched down by Ivanka – giving me, incidentally, a chance to see that Valkyries seemed not to wear underwear under their battle armor. And she shaved. I looked away quickly and at Ivanka, feeling a little pang of sadness. Did I even have anything to worry about? Brigitte had just been using me, hadn’t she? I wondered why my left hand was glowing and as Natalya held my wrist I thought back to what had happened, ran it through in my mind over and over, trying to work it out. She’d held my hand up… the same hand that Rex had growled at… we were here now. They move freely between Life and the Afterlife… That’s what Reverend Tommy had said. I figured I had brought us here, wherever we were. I couldn’t look around much, because I was bent at the waist and Natalya was holding my wrist and kneeling, now, next to Ivanka’s head. She had her own left hand on Ivanka’s forehead and brushed hair back from it. I remembered the times that I’d done that, too, the two times Ivanka and I had sex. She was crazy beautiful, too. Two Valkyries next to each other was like an explosion of beauty, creating a whole new landscape of beauty. Or something. I’m not a poet.

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Natalya looked up at me. Her eyes met mine and I felt like she was saying something but I couldn’t figure out what she wanted. I looked at her lips – beautiful, full, pouty lips – but they weren’t moving. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was talking. Then she looked at my left hand. Then she stood up, apparently having decided something. She motioned off to her left. “Um… I didn’t really get any of that,” I told her. I was still speaking quietly. She turned back to me and stared at my eyes again, kept looking at me. The feeling I got then was the feeling you might get if you were to look at a Read-Or story that was written in a language similar to, but not quite, your own – like there was a meaning there that you just couldn’t quite grasp. After a second or two, Natalya nodded and raised an eyebrow. “Still, really, nothing,” I said. She shook her head, frustrated. She motioned around at the lesbian zombies that still milled around us, standing still, sometimes looking at us, sometimes moving a little. “What about them?” Natalya pressed her hand to her eyes for a moment, and then opened them. She continued to hold my left wrist and then leaned in closer and closer until she was about an inch away. Her lips were open just a bit, and she had to bend down to get that close to me. I thought she was going to kiss me for a second there and wondered what I should do. She was beautiful, sure, but I wasn’t really into kissing her and there was a lot going on but she did have my wrist still in that grip and I couldn’t even pull back. But as her lips got really close to mine I felt something, again, in my mind. They guard her. We go. I stared at her. “You’re…you can…” She nodded. “In my mind.” She nodded again.

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“Do it again,” I said. She shook her head, but not meaning no, just shaking it like I was crazy. She leaned in again, almost touching my lips, and I felt her think We hurry. Ivanka needs help. “Okay,” I said. I wondered if she talked like that all the time, short sentences, or if that was just the easiest way to talk to me. She was nodding. “Can you … read my mind?” I asked her. She nodded. Instantly I turned red and thought about how I’d seen up her battle skirt. Then she looked a little embarrassed and turned away slightly. I smiled then and thought It wasn’t bad. She still looked embarrassed, though, and began walking away. I was pulled along, nearly jogging to keep up with her long strides, and realized that I hadn’t said anything to the Army. “Hang on,” I said, and I turned around, but could only turn around a little because she didn’t let go of my wrist, still. “Army,” I said. Then, louder: “Army!” All of their heads turned towards me. There were probably 500 of them, I realized, a much larger crowd than I’d thought at first. And that wasn’t even the bulk of the group that had been in the Blockers’ mountain. I wondered what the rest of them would come to. “Army, I want you to guard Ivanka. Don’t let anyone near her unless they…” I looked at Natalya, who leaned in close again. Until you’re here. She pulled back. I relayed that: “Don’t let anyone near her until I’m back here. Got it?” They didn’t nod or talk or anything. They began to move around her, in a sort of circle. I needed some help. “Naked Girl!” I yelled, hopefully.

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There was a padding of feet and Naked Girl came out of the crowd. She was bruised and had a scorched mark on her hair that I thought was a burn but was, it seemed, only soot. She limped a little. “Naked Girl, you’re in charge, okay? The rest of you, listen to her. She’s my second in command. Naked Girl, get them set up and then find out who’s hurt and all.” I was trying to think what it takes to be a commander of an army and I didn’t know. Do they need to eat? To sleep? Heal? I hadn’t been hurt, yet, so I didn’t really know what could happen to them. To us. But I knew that I got hungry and tired. What would happen if they slept? “Can they get some food?” I asked Natalya. She nodded. I didn’t know what that meant. “Should they go get it?” Natalya shook her head. “You’ll bring it? Someone?” Natalya nodded. I told Naked Girl to hang on and we’d get some food, and then turned again as Natalya pulled my wrist to get us going, and when I turned and got to see where we were and really look, I was so surprised that I almost fell down, because there was a 200-foot-tall statue in the middle of the nearest group of trees and spires, and it was a statue of me. “What…” I said, not so much a question as just an expression of shock. As I looked closer, I saw that it wasn’t… totally… me. It was hard to tell, but there were little differences. The face was the same, for sure. I had shorter hair in the statue. It’s hard to tell how long hair is a statue, too, especially when the hair is 200 feet above you and the statue is made of some kind of gleaming metal, but it was shorter. Still, it was my face, for sure. The body was a little different, but not so much that I could tell immediately, and above all, it was me. I was certain of it. “It’s… me.” I said, again. Natalya took my hand and began leading me. It… explainable. I felt her say. I looked at her.

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“I hope so,” I said. I felt a little quivery. After all I’d been through, that shouldn’t throw me, but it did. I thought about it as we walked along the soft grass and quiet bushes and wondered why, and I decided, as we got to the base of one of those towers, that it was because nobody builds a statue that big unless they really like the person. We do. Natalya looked at me again, and smiled. Nicely. And, I thought, a littley shyly, too. At the base of one of the towers, she held her hand out and pressed it against the tower. I heard a low buzzing or hum. I looked up at the tower. It went up and up and up and up, smooth, shiny-ish metal, too, but more white than the statue of me, which was silver. Up way high, I could see something at the top. “What’s up there?” I asked. Valhalla. Natalya responded. She smiled again, and waved her hand around the clearing. I looked around. Aside from the statue of me, and the army of naked lesbian zombies guarding Ivanka, there were three or four other pillars like this one, similarly tall: they dwarfed the statue of me. I looked up at the top of each of them. I bet they were a thousand feet tall, way more tall than the buildings in New York City that I’d skulked around to sneak out that day I’d woken up… … had it really only been two weeks ago? I counted back in my mind. Yep. If you didn’t count all that time in Hell when I was sleeping, it was about 14 or 15 days since I’d dropped that plate and run out of the Diner. The pillars here, with the things on top of them, were about two times, at least, as tall as those New York City buildings. I could barely make out the little things on the top of the pillars. A door slid open in the pillar in front of us, showing a small, smooth-walled chamber with some couches and a chair. Natalya took my hand and led me in. You sit, if you want she said… or thought… or told me. Somehow. I looked around. There was dim track lighting and the couches and chairs looked overstuffed and comfy, but it was all so clean that I didn’t want to touch anything.

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“I can stand,” I said. Long ride. Fast, Natalya said. She sat down and pulled me down by her. I sunk into the overstuffed cushion of the couch, leaning way back. My legs flipped up a little and I sort of sunk against Natalya. I might have been imagining it, but I think she gave me a quick hug before helping me set myself up again. I looked at her and was going to say something, but she was blushing a little. I’d only known Ivanka and hardly knew her, but I couldn’t picture a Valkyrie blushing. There’s something weird about a seven-foot-tall, incredibly beautiful, muscular, powerful woman wearing battle armor and carrying a spear… blushing. The buzzing started again, a little louder, and I felt pushed down into the seat, harder, and looked around. Other than the pressure I’d felt at first, I couldn’t feel anything causing the buzzing or movement, but I guessed that we were going up the tower. This was an elevator of some kind. I looked around at the smooth, bare walls and the other chairs and stuff. There could probably be twenty or thirty Valkyries in this room, easy, and they wouldn’t be crowded at all. I felt something on my head and I jumped a little and looked. Natalya was looking down at her metal skirt and toying with it. Her left hand, sort of behind me was pressed down into the cushion. “Did you… touch me?” I asked. She looked off to her right for a second, then nodded. I wanted … to feel… hair,” she said. “My hair?” She nodded again. “You touched my hair?” I asked. She nodded again. “Why?” I asked.

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She was blushing now, for real. She looked anywhere but at me and then finally looked straight at me and bit her lip, and closed her eyes. Her face could have been glowing, for all I know. I love you. I gulped. “Um.” She stared at me and then looked away, looking down, even more embarrassed. I didn’t know what to say. What would you say? Sorry, I felt/heard. “For what?” I asked. Embarrassed. I wondered if she was embarrassed or felt she’d embarrassed me. I looked at her again and she finally turned back to me, keeping her eyes from meeting mine. She stared, kind of at my legs, and then realized, I guess, that she was staring at my legs and that I didn’t have much in the way of clothes on from being shot with the tank. As I remembered that, I looked at my left hand and realized it still tingled and fizzed, a little. Natalya wasn’t holding it anymore but I’d kept it in a fist anyway. I looked at that and then back at her and she’d looked up at me and I caught her eye as I turned back to her. She looked away, again, like she didn’t know where she should look, now, and she blushed again. Sorry. Again, she told me. “It’s okay,” I said. I looked back down at my left hand, clenched into a fist. I concentrated on it. It felt weird… numb, almost, but not quite. It also seemed to be an even darker color than it had been. I hadn’t been paying much attention but Natalya had grabbed my hand, held onto my wrist, and kept holding onto it until we got on here. Then she’d let go, but she’d been the one to fold it into a fist.

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I looked back at her now and saw her staring at me again. Her own hand was held up and she pulled it back. Was she going to touch my hair again? I was getting a little weirded out by her, now. I looked at her. “How can you love me if you just met me?” I asked, as that thought had just occurred to me. Only a few minutes ago, maybe, in Hell, she’d been going to kill me. She looked back at me and I was surprised by the feeling in her eyes. It was the same feeling I’d gotten everytime Ivanka had looked at me, from the first moment on. It was really a powerful look, her eyes all wide and soft and moist, eyelids wide and her mouth slightly open. I could see her tongue, just inside her big lips, which were really full and soft-looking. My left hand itched but I ignored it because I couldn’t look away from Natalya all of a sudden. She stared at me. I stared back at her. She suddenly leaned in and pressed her lips, those great big soft lips, against mine and pushed me back as she did so. Her mouth was bigger than mine and it enfolded my lips in hers, pressing them first closed and then open a little. She rubbed her lips against mine and I felt her nibble on my upper lip just a little, and then I felt her warm, solid tongue pressing against my lips, opening them up a little, felt her tongue inside my mouth, powerful but gentle, rubbing against my lips and my teeth and then gently touching my tongue, just the tip of it. I couldn’t help myself. I gasped, and relaxed, and she pressed harder into me and my left hand opened and there was a flash and flare of energy and all this smoke and fire and flame and bursts of power and sound, flaring all around us as Natalya kissed me with all her might. I almost didn’t notice the destructive force pouring out; I thought maybe it was the force of the kiss or my imagination. But Natalya screamed, sort of – in my mind, I

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heard it – and she stopped kissing me and pulled her tongue out of my mouth and dove for my hand. She got it and pulled it closed, falling on top of it onto the floor, and pulling me off the couch. I landed hard on my shoulder. “Ow!” I said, almost involuntarily. Natalya kept her hands wrapped around mine, pressing my closed fist wrapped in her hands against her breasts, smothering it all to the ground. It smelled like acid and sulfur and fire around us. I looked around as we laid there. One of the chairs was burning with a yellowish, weird flame. The wall hangings were gone and the carpet, too, was gone. The metal didn’t seem to be harmed. Natalya was breathing heavy, her body rising and falling as she looked around, too. She looked at me, then, her eyes wide and her mouth a thin line. Sorry I felt her say. I shrugged. “It’s okay,” I said. I shouldn’t have been kissing her anyway, maybe, and thinking that made me think of Brigitte, again, and I got kind of sad, then, because I remembered seeing her the last time, standing in the hallway, sad, and I wondered if she’d ever loved me, or if it was all a trap, a set up to get something from me. Whatever she’d wanted, she’d gotten, I bet. Steve had shown me enough of that video. Brigitte had taken something from me, that night, and now, I figured, she had never loved me. Natalya was still looking at me. Love her? I felt. I knew who she was talking about. “Yeah,” I said. “I did, but she didn’t love me.” Natalya shook her head. “I know,” I said. “But I’ll get over her.” I wondered if that was true. The smoke from the burning chair was starting to sting my eyes. I wondered if we could put it out. I

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wondered if we were still going up in the tower thing. Natalya was looking at me still, shaking her head, still. “What?” I said. She frowned, a big one, and then opened her eyes wider at me. All I got was: Brigitte. “What about her?” I got an image, suddenly, in my mind, of Brigitte. Smiling. “Did you do that?” I asked Natalya. She nodded. “You can send pictures, too?” Another nod. “Why don’t you just do that?” There was a pause, and then she shrugged. Things, I guess, were going to be tough here. Wherever here was. We laid there for a second longer and then I suddenly had a thought. “This is your home, isn’t it?” She nodded at me. “Valhalla?” Bob had told me that, and about Valhalla. Another nod. “Did you bring me here?” She shook her head and then nodded her head down. I didn’t get it and stared blankly. She then looked at me. I just stared. Then I got a picture in my mind: Me, with her holding my left hand up, a flare of energy. “I did this?” Nod. I thought about that. And how she was holding my left hand in. I’m not dumb. I know I come across that way sometimes, but I’m not stupid, really. I worked it through. Can move freely between dimensions. My hand exploding or something.

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“I used the energy from the tank to bring us here.” Natalya nodded vigorously and then motioned down again, towards her chest. This time I got it. “And now the rest of that energy is trapped in me.” A slight shake of her head. Another nod of her chin down towards her chest. I got it: “In my left hand.” Nod. My left hand. What is the deal with my left hand? That’s the hand that I first noticed was really different – it made me cry. That’s the hand that Rex had sniffed and tried to attack me. And now it had almost blown me and a hot Valkyrie up. “Can we sit up if I hold it closed?” I asked. Natalya thought about that and nodded, and we slowly rearranged ourselves so that we were sitting with our backs against the scorched couch where we’d kissed. Natalya still clenched my hand between her hands, a big smooth jumble of hands that she held in her lap, which put my hand between her thighs, which were really long (she was tall) and smoothly muscular and very pale. I tried not to keep looking at them for a while, because I was still sad about Brigitte, and also because I thought it might be rude to stare at her legs. And also because I wanted to think about my hand and what to do about it. I didn’t have long to think because we finally stopped moving. I hadn’t really been aware that we were moving but when we stopped, I noticed it: there was a slight jar or bump and then Natalya looked towards the door area where we’d entered this little room. So I looked, too, and saw the wall slide open, a large door, and standing there in the doorway was a crowd of large, sexy blonde women, more Valkyries, waiting around, all of them in short white gauzy dresses that were high cut in the skirt and low cut in the chest and sleeveless, negligees or pajamas, really, but they all had spears or swords or knives and one, I saw, had a big club with spikes on it. Mixed in with the sexy blond warriors all showing a lot of cleavage were shorter women, women with almost-shoulder length-slightly curly black hair, hair that was just curly enough to be not straight but not totally curly, either. These women had little noses and bright green eyes, and were skinny, slender, even, with maybe slightly-too-wide hips.

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They were wearing the same negligee-skirt-dress things but in a smaller size and there wasn’t as much cleavage, because they had smaller breasts. Cute breasts, but smaller. Then again, anyone’s breasts would look small compared to a collection of valkryrie boobs, I supposed. I stared at the smaller women, too, as much as I could, as they came in and started swarming around the room. Some of the valkyries moved over and began smothering the flames on the chair. Others began, with the help of the smaller women, moving out some of the damaged stuff and scrubbing along the floors and walls. A couple of them moved over and stood or knelt in front of us. It ended up that one of the tallest, most beautiful valkyries and a smaller woman were right in front of us, the valkyrie looking into my eyes while a smaller, black-haired woman and another valkyrie crouched near Natalya and looked at our intertwined hands. They were tilting their heads and looking at her and I figured they were all talking using their telepathy. I tried to divide my attention between my own Valkyrie, who certainly was captivating, especially because she leaned over me and I could see straight down her shirt, and the smaller woman who was leaning in to Natalya, because those smaller women were familiar, somehow, and I couldn’t quite place it. The Valkyrie in front of me reached down and picked up something, from some hidden pocket in her negligee or something, wherever she got it from. It was a little jar of stuff, like a balm or something. She dipped two fingers into it and came up with a little liquid on them, or oil, and leaned forward. With her face very close to mine – I could’ve licked her lips, and I was tempted to do so; you have no idea how sexy a Valkyrie is unless you’ve had a barely-clothed one leaning in and rubbing some oil on your face while her perfume-y scent is wafting all around you and her giant, firm full breasts are just below your chin – she rubbed the oil on my forehead, pressing lightly and firmly and dimpling my head and cheeks as she rubbed it. She dipped her fingers again and rubbed it over my cheeks and then my lips, slowing down and lightly tracing my lips at the end with her fingernails. Can you hear me? She asked. I could. I smiled, in surprise. “Yeah,” I said.

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Good. Hold this, and she handed me the little vial of oil. When it starts to fade, put more on as I did. She smiled then, and added or ask someone else to do it. You’ll find no shortage of willing helpers here. I took the little vial. “Thanks,” I said, and I blushed a little, I bet because I felt like my cheeks were hot. She patted my leg, which was still tattered and scorchy looking from all the being-in-Hell, getting-shot-at, transporting, nearly-blowing-up-the elevator I’d been doing. It’s not very long range. You won’t be able to sense everything. But people can talk to you while you use that. She said. She smiled again. And they’ll be able to tell what you’re thinking, so be careful. You’ll remember Sharing soon enough. “I will?” I was distracted by the black-haired woman and the other Valkyrie helping us stand up. Natalya and I were still holding hands, sort of: my hand clenched in Natalya’s. We should take them to the Scientists, I felt someone say and I turned my head, unsure who had spoken. There was Natalya, and my valkyrie, and the other valkyrie, and the black-haired woman who smiled at me as I looked at her. Then she winked, and I gasped. “Me!” I said. She nodded. Took you long enough, she said. I said. Well, she said it, but I said it, I suppose. All the black-haired women in the little room then turned around and looked at me and I nearly fainted but Natalya held me up. I realized why they all looked familiar: They were all me. I looked around and around and saw more me, all over the place, helping clean up, holding stuff for Valkyries, and, across the room, one being lifted up by a Valkyrie to reach a hard-to-get to spot and put out a smoldering blast.

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“What,” I said. My voice, I realized, was unnaturally loud. None of them were talking. It will all be explained said... me, the nearest me to me. I looked at her again and felt a little dizzy. She put a hand on my shoulder. It’s okay, she said. “I don’t get any of this,” I said. Natalya was still holding me up, mostly, her strong hands on my waist, and I tried to straighten up. My knees felt a little weak. By now, the others working had wrapped something around my hand. It looked like a glass globe or something but was not glass; I couldn’t feel it at all. I couldn’t even feel my hand. Come along, said the Valkyrie that had put the oil on my face. Leonya flashed through my mind as I heard… felt… heard, whatever, okay? Heard her, but it was in my mind. Leonya held onto my left arm and beckoned out the doorway. Natalya let go of my waist but stayed behind me. I could feel one of her hands protectively, almost, on the small of my back. The other Me took my right arm and smiled up at me. I’m so glad to finally meet you, she said. As she did, Rachel glimmered through my mind. Of course. “You’re me?” she said. Sort of. “Sort of?” You can talk like this if you want, she said to me. Like I do. It won’t be as easy as it is for the rest of us, but it might be more private. “They all won’t know?” I looked around. We were walking down a clean, shiny corridor. It seemed to be a lot of metal and glass and plastic and stuff, but didn’t feel like all that kind of thing.

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Unlike, say, Samson’s hideout, which felt cold and militaristic, this felt… homey. There were flowers all over the place, for one thing, and periodically walls with fountains and vines growing, and the lighting wasn’t all harsh and overhead, but instead came indirectly from some source I couldn’t find. Sunlight, the me next to me said. “What?” I asked. Then I tried to talk how she did: I thought it. What? I asked again. She winced a little and Leonya turned sharply to me. Two other Valkyries that were up ahead stopped, one of them stumbling a little bit. I felt Natalya’s hand drop off my back. Maybe not so strongly, the me said to me. I blushed. “I’m new at this,” I said. “Maybe I’d better stick with talking.” We started walking again. One of the Valkyries in front of me kept looking back. The other shrugged now and then and also looked back at me, once, too. The light is sunlight. The Valkyries use various tricks to let it shine throughout each of the Towers of Valhalla. They use no unnatural lighting, but the tricks they use make it possible to have sunlight all night even after the sunlight has set. It’s very clever, actually. I nodded. Natalya’s hand was on my back again. I looked down at my left hand. “Where are we going?” I didn’t direct it to anyone in particular. Leonya looked up at me. To the laboratory, she said. We need to make this safe before you meet She. “Who’s She?” I asked.

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A picture flashed through my head: A woman sitting on a splendid throne, with blonde, straight hair down almost to her knees, wearing almost nothing – only scraps of pure white silk and a white cape flowing down behind her perfect body. Her eyes were large and wide and blue like the sky just before the night started. Her fingers were long and tapered and the nails were bright red, as were her lips. She had a thin circle of diamond-and-metal around her forehead. She. In the vision, she smiled at me. Hello, Rachel, she said. We’ve been waiting to meet you. I felt extremely gratified to be noticed by her, and also blushed, again. “Can She hear me?” I said. I can, the vision of She in my mind said. “Oh,” I said. She smiled at me in my vision, as we kept walking along. I could see how this way of communicating would be really convenient. Don’t be embarrassed, She told me. We know that this is new for you. Our whole world is very excited to have you here. “You are?” I asked. Didn’t you see the statue? We turned right and stood in front of a door, guarded by two Valkyries in battle armor holding spears. Leonya kept a hold of my hand while they all looked at each other, apparently talking silently. I wondered how they did that – talk to each other without anyone hearing. “I did see the statue,” I said, as the two guards looked at me with curiosity. You are an idol to most of the Valkyries. “I am?” You are. “Hm.” I didn’t know what to say to that.

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I hope that after we have a chance to meet and talk you will do me the honor of impregnating me, She said. “I…” I didn’t know what to say to that, but I couldn’t have said much anyway because as soon as She said that, in my mind, the guards opened the door and I heard a loud, screaming wailing roaring sound that echoed and rolled over and over and made my blood run cold. I didn’t want to go in, not after that, and I pulled back. It’s okay, the Me said to me. I looked at her. “No, it’s not. Did you hear that?” He can’t hurt you, another voice… Natalya… said. It was strange. When they thought at me, or talked that way, I couldn’t tell sometimes who was talking. I didn’t know their voices yet, even though each of them sounded different in my head, and the thoughts didn’t come from any particular direction. But you know, it was nice, too, because as they thought stuff, they also thought emotions at me, so when the Me told me it was okay, she also sent, like, a wave of comfort, like maybe someone had patted me on the head in my brain. Then, when Natalya told me he can’t hurt me, I got not only that feeling of comfort, too, like a mental hug, but also a picture, only I couldn’t make sense of the picture, right away, because it was weird. So I had this image in my mind and the feeling like people were holding me reassuringly, and also they were holding me reassuringly, except for the Leonya, who was still gripping my left hand in the bubble-thing they’d put it in, and looking at me. You can trust us, Rachel, she said to me. We’d never do anything to hurt you. Especially YOU. I thought about that for a second and then looked at the Me next to me. It’s true, she said, and winked. And the feeling I got when she said it’s true comforted me because it was like she’d put her arm around me and squeezed me. But when she winked… well, I started

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blushing again. Was I flirting with myself? I felt flushed and still weak. I looked away from her, then didn’t want to be rude, so I was going to look back and then decided not to. Sorry, the Me said. Leonya, on my other side, gave my arm a squeeze. She’s just teasing you, Leonya told me. From Natalya, I felt something – not quite words but not quite not words. Just support. And a little wink-ish, too, and I really began to wonder just how much the Valkyries thought about sex. A lot, the Me told me. It’s quite seductive here. “Did you read my mind?” I said. I knew she had but I just was stalling because I still was trying to sort out the picture that Natalya had sent me only I couldn’t because it was made up of wings and hands and I thought, maybe, a sheep, only I wasn’t sure either because I suddenly couldn’t remember if I’d ever seen a sheep. Plus it had a beak. Yes. Kind of. Sorry. I didn’t read your mind. I can just see things there, the top things. We all can. You could, maybe, too, if he hadn’t… wrecked you. It’s part of the Sharing and the way it works here, plus the Valkyries are really good at it. They read each other’s minds all the time and if you live here you just get used to it but for strangers we don’t do that, so I didn’t really, I just well, I got caught up in it and I’m sorry… She broke off and now she was blushing. I just never thought I’d meet Me, she finished up and looked away. “That’s a crazy thought,” I said. “There’s Me… you… us… all over here.” There were. While we’d been talking, in front of the open lab door through which I could only see a white-gleaming-shiny reflective wall that blocked my view of anything more, a little entrance-way, more of the crew that had cleaned up my explosion had arrived, so there were about five Me’s and a couple more Valkyries. I was surrounded by about 10 of them now, plus the five or six Me’s including the one that was talking to me.

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I felt really lost and kind of dazed. I wished I had Doc here to help explain it. As I thought that, I gasped. “Doc!” Me looked at me. What made you think of him? In my mind, I was picturing Doc flitting around that apartment I’d walked out of… two weeks ago? More? Hell made it so hard to tell real time. I thought of him giving me advice on shoplifting on the walk south, and zapping revenants. He helped you that much? Me asked me. She looked back over her shoulder towards Natalya, who still had her hands protectively on my waist. I nodded. “Yes,” I said. “He’s my best friend.” As I said that, I thought of Brigitte, standing in Samson’s hall, and my heart felt a little sad and tired and sick. “Doc is the only one who’s stood by me, all this time,” I went on. “And now I don’t even know where he is. I can’t remember… he came to Hell with me, when the Blockers, Steve, grabbed me, but he doesn’t work in Hell, so I might have dropped him there.” I looked down at my clothes, in tatters, and tried desperately to remember. I was wearing, by this point, only rags of the stuff that Steve had given me and I knew for sure that I hadn’t put Doc into any pockets – I didn’t have any pockets—but I still checked for pockets and tried to remember what I had done and then that scream came again, louder this time, and shocked me even more. It was so echoey, and unworldly – odd thing for someone who spends time in Hell and now in Valhalla, I know, but this scream was bad news. It was weirdly flat and metallic sounding but loud, too, the sound somehow stretched thin and then aluminum coated and then reflected with a bright light before it hit my ears, and also it seemed to hit my eyes and mind, too. The scream ended and I had stopped thinking of Doc and then a horse head appeared in the doorway to the lab, leaned out and looked at us.

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“You’d better bring her in,” it said. “Fuzzy Bird is getting disturbed and wants to see her.” What right does It have, Natalya began but Leonya held up a hand towards her and nodded at the horse. It knows, then? Leonya asked the horse, who nodded his big head. “Yes, it knows,” the horse said. “Since she got here, in fact, even before we knew in the lab. It stuck its head up and squawed” – I knew, somehow that squawing was that scream I heard—“and said she is here and when I tried to figure out who she was, since you know we horses are not all Rachel-crazed like the rest of you...” with that, he turned towards me and nodded his head again and interjected himself “No offense, Rachel, as you’re quite lovely, but we’re horses. It’s just a different standard of beauty,” and I nodded, not sure what to say, but the horse turned back to Leonya and said “It kept saying The Rachel is here The Rachel is here and getting quite agitated. I wanted to sedate it but getting near it is quite impossible right now. It’s emitting rays.” The horse looked at me, then, again, and said “I’m sure it will quiet down when it sees you. Would you like to meet Fuzzy Bird?” “No,” I said, firmly, as I tried to reconcile what he’d told me and also examine the image in my mind, the image I now realized was Fuzzy Bird. “No,” I said again. You’d better, Leonya said. Or we’ll never get him calmed down. “But…” I sputtered. Natalya patted my back. The Me took my right hand. I’ll go with you, the Me told me. That way, if he kills you, he’ll kill both of us. It felt weird holding hands with myself but it also felt reassuring and I stepped forward. I was still, too, holding hands with Leonya, who continued to protect my left hand. We followed the horse in as he backed up. He nodded at me as we turned the slight corner into the lab. “My name’s Murfee,” he said. “Tonee speaks highly of you.” “Tonee?” I said.

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“Ivanka’s horse. He said he helped you get out of Hell.” “Oh. Thanks. I guess,” I said, and was going to ask how come he could talk but Tonee couldn’t, only we were in the lab then and I saw Fuzzy Bird, who began yelling at the top of his lungs. Squawing, I guess I should say. Fuzzy Bird was what he sounds like, and matched the image in my mind, only now I could make sense of it, almost. It was a bird, almost like a chicken shape. Doc and I had spent a half-hour one day on the walk South looking at some chickens while waiting for it to get dark so we could make our way to hide out, and Fuzzy Bird looked like one of them, only it was about four feet tall – almost my height, and maybe bigger than me overall, because it had that chicken-y body that stretched behind him. Instead of bird legs, though, Fuzzy Bird had animal legs. They looked almost like sheep legs but maybe I only thought that because Fuzzy Bird didn’t have feathers, he had wool, or fur, fuzzy curls of white that were so white as to almost be clear. Here and there they seemed almost silver and I wondered if Fuzzy Bird was going gray. Fuzzy Bird had wings, too, but the wings seemed strange, disappearing almost into the body as it flexed them and unfolded and folded them slightly. The wings seemed amorphous. Fuzzy Bird had a face, kind of, too. It wasn’t a bird face, but it wasn’t a people face or an animal face, either. It was hard to describe. It had eyes, large and round and with blue pupils that took up most of the eyes, and then no nose, but it had a sort of cross between lips and a bill. It’s face protruded down and out, but not enough to really be a beak. I stared at it and it stared at me. As I watched, as it stood in its enclosure, a halfroom made up of shimmering light stretched between bars, Fuzzy Bird unfolded a wing, slowly, and reached up. The wing shifted and moved as it stretched and a hand appeared, almost as though the hand had been inside a sleeve and was pushed out as it reached. Fuzzy Bird put its hand on the clear-energy wall of its enclosure, palm out, and looked at me. I didn’t know what to do. I raised my own hand, in return, and held it up.

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“Hi,” I said. I shouldn’t have. Fuzzy Bird began squawing again, a god-awful noise that was worse when I was only five feet away from it. All around the lab the sound echoed and reverberated and it made my ears feel like they were bleeding. Glass and metal rattled and tables seemed to shake and somewhere off to my right another horse-voice said “Make that thing stop! It’s wrecking my experiments!” To which Murfee neighed and said “If you know how to do that, Andee, I’d appreciate the advice,” hollering it over the racket of the squawing. Fuzzy Bird was pushing harder and harder, I could see, as it squawed, its wing straining against the enclosure. The clear energy was pushing outward, a little, stretching just a bit. “Um,” I said. The Me grabbed my hand a little harder. Maybe we should back up, she said. Leonya nodded. Good idea, and she tried to back up, too, but the rest of the group had crowded into us. Leonya gestured and I got the feeling of a lot of thoughts passing back and forth as people were told to move and told others to move. Another horse came trotting over as Murfee turned towards it, apparently not noticing that Fuzzy Bird had pushed the clear-energy out almost a foot now. The squawing got worse. It was sort of an EARARARARARAKRARARIARKASKRAIRSAA sound that blotted out a lot of other noise. Murfee said to Andee “I didn’t want to keep it in here in the first place. I said prison is the best for it.” “Well, just get her out of here and it’ll settle down. I’m very close to something here and I’m tired of the interruptions.” A feeling of a thought passed through me. Leonya was trying to get Murfee’s attention. “Just a second, Leonya, what, I…” and Murfee turned his head towards her, but then quickly turned back just as Fuzzy Bird’s hand got through the clear energy and

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reached down, hitting some sort of button on the front. The energy-fizzle faded away and the squawing stopped. “Oh, he’s loose! Now you’ve done it, Murfee!” Andee yelled, and neighed as he backpedaled and bumped into a lab table near us, spilling over the contents of it. “Get the guards!” Murfee yelled. Thoughts were flying through my head. Leonya said to me don’t let go of me and the Me said to me I won’t let go of you and there were more as others thought grab something or get Rachel out of here or Someone tell the She and there were lots of images all crisscrossing in my mind: Guards being brought, spears and horses being used, Fuzzy Bird popping out of a blue wall, fighting ten Valkyries, killing some of them. Let’s go, the Me said and tugged at my hand. She pulled me back into the nowclear spot as more horses came from further back in the lab. This had all happened in about a second, way less time than it takes to tell, as Fuzzy Bird had pushed aside Murfee and Andee and had lunged at me just as the Me pulled at my right arm and tugged my hand out of Leonya’s grasp, the clear-ball they’d put around it beginning to slip. And the squawing stopped as Fuzzy Bird grabbed my hand, my left hand, and put its own odd hand-wings around it, holding the globe tight and standing there. ***I am not going to hurt her*** we all… heard? Felt? Saw? I stared at Fuzzy Bird, who was holding the globe closed and looking at me with those big eyes. He sure was ugly and I hoped he couldn’t read my mind. I can’t really describe how Fuzzy Bird talked. It used its mouth, because I could see its mouth moving a little when it said something, but I didn’t get the feeling that I was hearing it talk. I didn’t get anything in my mind like when Me or the Valkyries talked to me. I did, a little, feel like I was reading what he said, almost as if when he moved his mouth the words appeared in the air and then settled into my skin.

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*** I just want to meet her and it is lucky for you I am here*** Fuzzy Bird went on now, ***Else you would have let the energy go and probably destroyed this lab***. It swiveled its head and looked back at Andee and Murfee, who stood there staring at him. “Fuzzy Bird, you are a prisoner of Valhalla and shall return to your enclosure immediately,” Murfee said. ***I shall not***. Leonya moved up alongside me and lifted up a gun-shaped thing, pointing it at Fuzzy Bird. I hadn’t known that Valkyries used guns. Let go of her hand and return her to us. Go to your enclosure. Then there will be no trouble. You are surrounded and in one of our tallest towers and far from escape. ***If I let go at the wrong time you all will be destroyed*** Fuzzy Bird responded. We shall not, Leonya said, and then You are under arrest. The image of those dead Valkyries flashed through my mind again. Fuzzy Bird looked back at me. ***They attacked me*** he said. You invaded our world, Leonya said. ***Invaded. Is everything a war, to the Valkyrie?*** It is when you attack. Fuzzy Bird looked at her now. ***Put your gun down. Or maybe I will just take the Rachel with me and leave. Even though you have many, I think that would bother you if you lost the original, wouldn’t it?*** Leonya moved the gun closer. You can’t leave here, I said. Fuzzy Bird turned back to me, now, again. ***Not right to say you’re the original, though, as you are made up now of spare parts.*** “That’s a mean thing to say,” I said. “Let me go. I’m not going with you. I don’t care who you are or what you say.” I tried to look tough.

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You tell him, the Me said to me. She’d grabbed my hand again, protectively. Fuzzy Bird regarded us all calmly and said ***Put the gun down, Valkyrie Leonya. Calm down, the Rachel, and the Rachel Copy. You, Horse Murfee, behind me, stop creeping sideways to try to clear a path to kick at me. I have 17 senses and a sneak attack is impossible quite. There will be no further harm to anyone if you cooperate with me. Since I stumbled into this world I have been waiting for The Rachel to arrive and she has. Now I wish to speak with her and the She and we will do that.*** Leonya put her gun down, a little. Just a little. Murfee, I saw, behind Fuzzy Bird, turned a little. Just talk? Leonya asked him. She put her gun down a little more. Don’t! came a thought, broadcast loud and clear through my mind and I suppose everyone else’s. In my mind, I could see the She, sitting on her throne, looking shocked and holding up her hand. But it was too late. The moment that the gun was dropped away Fuzzy Bird did something like a leap and a twist and he was up and through the ceiling dragging me, and the Me, with him away from the others. We crashed up through the ceiling, Fuzzy Bird’s arms/wings buzzing and flapping too fast to see, like a hummingbird’s. They made a racket, too. I couldn’t focus too much as we tore through the ceiling that turned out to be a floor of a room above us, and then through that room and into the ceiling and crashing on upward into another room which was filled with Valkyries, I saw, quickly, already running towards us, and then through the ceiling of that room, with me holding the Me in my right hand while Fuzzy Bird somehow grasped onto my hand-encased-in-plastic and flew and smashed through the ceiling again and by then there were Valkyries all around us and one grabbed at us but Fuzzy Bird kicked out a foot – I noticed it was webbed and big and orange, just like a duck’s—and the Valkyrie got kicked in the stomach and fell back. A blast of energy, hot and orange like fire, singed past us and I got glimpses of thoughts and emotions all

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flashing through my mind: Get him save her Save Rachel don’t hurt her She wants us to help with images: Mostly of people seine Fuzzy Bird holding me holding the Me, but also of the throne room with She ordering people and marching out regally, and then some images of horses galloping across the sky to the top of a tower. Oh, he’s seen that too, I heard, and looked down at the Me, who nodded. It was her talking to me. And Fuzzy Bird must have seen the horse-image, too, because he suddenly stopped crashing up through ceilings and instead turned abruptly to his left, landing and running down the long curved corridor we were in. He kept hold of my hand, my left hand, and pulled me with him, and we were hard-pressed to keep up because his legs were so long and when he ran, they were fast – they moved with a blur like the wing-arms had and I had to yell “I can’t keep up!” He kept going. Drop, the Me said. So I did. I simply went limp, with Fuzzy Bird holding my left hand, and it almost wrenched out of his grip, but not quite. The Me went down, too, and we tumbled and got dragged and it slowed him down. But he didn’t stop. Fight him, Rachel. You can, the Me told me. Fuzzy Bird looked back over his shoulder. I thought he was looking at me but I heard galloping, hooves, and knew he wasn’t. Fight him, the Me said again. I bumped and dragged along and thought as quickly as I could. I heard the hooves and knew I had to just slow him down a little. As he pulled us I had an idea. I curled my legs up and looked at those buzzing-orange-y- blurs of Fuzzy Bird’s legs running, and just as he was about to turn a corner, I kicked my legs out and into the blur.

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“Ow!” I yelled as his legs hit mine and tangled up. I thought he’d broken both of them and hollered again, but it had worked because he went down in a tangle of feathery fuzz and zombie legs and the Me, crashing into us both. The hooves were coming closer. ***No*** Fuzzy Bird howled and stood up again, still holding my hand. He looked wildly around, his bill-mouth frowning, and then with a grimace, he forced his way through the wall, pounding his head into it and diving through the hole, still holding me. The Me had let go but came diving after us. Rachel! She thought at me and I held out my hand. She grabbed onto it and hung on with both hands as we tumbled out of the wall and into open air with Fuzzy Bird still holding me but now flapping his wing-arms again. We fell only a few feet, I guess, as he got his speed up and somehow flew while still holding us in his arms. That didn’t last long. He stopped flapping with his left hand for a second, causing us to careen wildly to the left as his right wing kept going, and he transferred my left hand down to one of his webbed feet, which enclosed it perfectly. Then he started flying again and kept going, even faster. I could hear his wings buzzing and flickering as we hung from his foot. The Me slowly climbed up my arm until she had her arms around my neck. I was face to face with myself. She was breathing heavily. Thanks for catching me, she said, and looked right into my eyes. “Thanks for coming along,” I said. We’ve got to fight him, she said. I looked down. We must have been 2,000 feet up. Behind us the tower we’d been in was receding quickly, the hole in the side about midway up the top of it and getting smaller and smaller. I could see a few other towers behind it or off to the side. From the hole in the wall, horses with Valkyries were pouring out, and over the top I could see more horses, some with riders and some without, stampeding towards us.

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They’ll catch us. “I hope so,” I said. Fuzzy Bird had my hand in his foot. I had the Me holding onto me. But I had my right hand free. I wondered what I could do. I inspected the situation. His wings were out of reach unless I could climb. His other foot was folded up against him. All I had within reach was this foot. Climb up his leg to get to him? I’d have to pull myself, and the Me, up. The Me looked back, then at me again. Her lips – my lips – were only inches away from me and her breath was unexpectedly hot and sweet-smelling as she thought at me We need to slow him down. I looked. It was true. We were leaving behind the horses, who were going, it seemed, full-steam but it wasn’t enough. Fuzzy Bird was really, really fast. I looked in the direction were going, and saw trees and more trees, tall ones, with little meadows in between them, and a blue sky approaching rapidly. Approaching? That didn’t seem right. But it was true: the sky, above and all around, was a cool, smooth turquoise blue that looked like a tall drink of water on a hot day, and as we flew, it got closer. Think, I told myself. Then Me told me that, too: Think of something. I looked back at the horses again, then up at Fuzzy Bird. He was paying us no attention as he flapped his way towards that blue sky. I told Me: “Hang on tight.” Okay, she said, and it came out a little too sexy for me. I looked at her. Sorry. Was it weird that I was turned on by Me?

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I pushed that thought out of my mind and reached up with my right hand. The Me grabbed me tighter and then wrapped her – my – legs around my – her—waist. I was distracted by my breasts being smushed by my breasts. Why are we so sexy? The Me thought. Then: Sorry. I guess I’ve been among the Valkyries too long. I tried to stop thinking about my—her—our—breasts and instead reached up again. The blue was definitely closer to us now, and I couldn’t figure out how that was happening, but the horses were farther away, too, and I had to do something. So I grabbed the only thing I could, which was one of Fuzzy Bird’s webbed toes. I began trying to pry it off and he slowed up a bit. ***Stop that*** he said, and then began flying faster again. I pried more, but couldn’t budge it much. I felt his foot clamp down tighter on my hand, crunching in the plastic a little. That gave me an idea. I punched his foot and began wriggling back and forth. I kept punching his foot with my small hand and twisting and turning and shaking. I tried to swing back and forth. ***Stop that, I said*** Fuzzy Bird commanded again. His flight was wobbly as I swung back and forth below him, and he tried to correct it but we dipped a little and then fell a bit before pulling back up and to the right. I continued what I was doing. “Help me,” I told Me. She tightened her grip, more, and began pulling and pushing back and forth, sort of pressing against me and then pulling away as I kicked my legs and twisted my left hand – that one that everyone hated – and kept batting at Fuzzy Bird’s foot with my right

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hand. We swung and twisted and swung and twisted and pulled and Fuzzy Bird tilted left and right and back and forth. ***Stop it*** Fuzzy Bird yelled, and then squawed again, loud, as he pulled right when we swung sharply right. I swung back, to the left and hit his foot as he did that, and he couldn’t hold on any more. His foot squeezed hard, and the plastic-thing wrapping my hand cracked open and energy began to shoot out all over the place. “Hang on!” I yelled but I didn’t need to because the Me grabbed me tighter still as Fuzzy Bird let go and we began dropping thousands of feet out of the sky. I screamed as loud as I could, and so did the Me, as she clung to me and we dropped and dropped. I could see the trees below us, approaching fast, and far away – too far away – the Valkyries on their horses coming at us like a stampede across the sky. On the other side was Fuzzy Bird, who had noticed that he’d dropped us and was turning around and coming towards us. He dove at an angle down at us as I continued to scream and the Me continued to shriek, burying her face in my hair. I felt like she would choke me. Fuzzy Bird came howling towards us, faster than I thought anything could move, but I could see he wasn’t gaining on us. We were falling fast and I didn’t know what to do. I’d gotten free and hadn’t thought beyond that. I looked down as we began to tumble in the sky, me and the Me, now falling headfirst, now feet first, and the tops of the trees were coming at us. The air was rushing by so fast that I had tears in my eyes, although I probably would have had tears in my eyes anyway, even without the rush of wind. Maybe try to grab a branch the Me thought at me and I had a picture of us trying to hit a branch and grab on. We were falling really fast and that would hurt, but it would be better than hitting the ground. There were gaps and holes in the leaves. What appeared to be solid tree cover was not, of course, and I tried to think how we would get to them. It felt like we’d been falling for minutes but you know how that is: it was probably only a few seconds. I could

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hear the whir and whiz of Fuzzy Bird’s wings and the trampling hooves in the air, the thunderous noise caused by the Valkyries’ ride. It wasn’t until later that I would wonder how do their hooves make a noise in the air? I didn’t have time for that then. I had an idea. “Swim,” I yelled. The Me clung to me and I didn’t know if she’d heard. Swim, I thought, and pictured us moving our arms and legs to swim as if we were in water. I don’t want to let go of you, the Me thought back at me. I carefully moved my arms away from her and she clung to me, wrapping her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist. We were still tumbling and I spread my legs out and held my arms out, trying to widen myself. It worked, a little: we tumbled more slowly and I could see the trees coming at us but had more time to think. I experimented, pushing my arms, and we tumbled even more slowly plus moved ahead a little. I did it again and kicked my legs. The tumbling stopped and we were falling flat, me facedown towards the trees and the Me going backwards. She was still thinking at me, furiously, but there were no words. My mind just fluttered with images of us falling, and colors and her face which was my face, and then us falling again. She was really scared and I guess that made me more calm because both of us couldn’t be scared at the same time. I continued moving my arms and legs as though I was swimming and we moved forward as we fell. It didn’t feel like swimming. It felt like nothing I’d ever done before. I realized I was flying, almost. It wasn’t quite flying because I was still just hurtling downward like a half-naked meteorite, but I was controlling myself in the sky and that was something. The direction we were moving put us more towards Fuzzy Bird, who corrected and continued coming at me. I didn’t want him to catch us again but I didn’t have any other plan for not hitting the ground like a rock. I paddled my hands and kicked my legs and we zoomed down and forward, down and forward, picking up speed.

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I could see, too, the globe thing around my left hand, encasing it in something solid. There were little cracks in that and I could feel that hand getting warmer. It also looked a little glow-y, like there was energy starting to leak out or build up. Worry about that later, I told myself. I continued swim-flying and heard the buzzing of Fuzzy Bird’s wings coming at me. Behind me, the hooves were getting louder and stronger, too, and I began to think that we just might make it out of this. Below me, the tops of the trees were only a hundred or two hundred feet away, but my kicking and swimming had done something by then, and we were moving as much forward as we were downward. The leaves were skimming by below me, getting gradually closer but I was shooting forward and it felt more than ever like flying. There was a crackle and that drew my attention. What was that? The Me thought. I looked at my hand. The globe was breaking up. I looked up. Fuzzy Bird was only about 200 feet away, too. Below us, the treetops flickered by and grew closer as I kept paddling and kicking, paddling and kicking. The hooves were close enough now that I could almost feel them, and I could hear shouts of the Valkyries, could feel some of their thoughts: That’s it, Rachel. Keep steady, woman. We’ll help you. Someone get that Bird! My left hand burned, now, and the globe was definitely breaking up. I clenched my fist in there and tried to hold it in, the energy that I’d somehow absorbed, and thought at the Me: Hang on tighter!

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I looked up at Fuzzy Bird. He was only about 100 feet away. “Come and get me!” I hollered at him. No, Rachel! Wait for us! A thought came. I didn’t recognize it, other than it was a Valkyrie. A picture in my mind, then: Natalya. She even had a caption with it – she sent me a picture of her with her name below it! “Come get me!” I yelled at her, too. We’re close. Fuzzy Bird was close, too, and the globe was still holding! I made my fist tighter and kept kicking and paddling. We were flying, almost actually flying, over the trees, and I began to feel exhilarated! I was flying and we were going to be saved and what an adventure! A quick thought in my mind, from the Me: Glad you can enjoy this! But in my mind, she was smiling, too. I soared over the branches and looked up and Fuzzy Bird was only about 20 feet away, flapping and whirring. * * * I will help you*** he called out. Leave her alone! Came a strong thought, and I got a picture of Leonya with her spear pointed at Fuzzy Bird. I looked over my shoulder. There she was, right in front. They were only about 50 feet back. My flying had worked! We skimmed over the treetops, now just twenty feet below us. Fuzzy Bird was almost on top of us and I could hear the exchanges. We’ll get her! Don’t touch her! * * * I am closer. We need to save her * * * Don’t put your webbed feet on her! “Just someone grab us!” I yelled.

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The Valkyries closed in and one came around to my left, only about 10 feet away as I dropped closer to the trees. I paddled and kicked and looked to my left. Natalya! She smiled at me. We’ll get you, Rachel! She said. Then there was a horrible cracking ripping sound and the globe burst off my hand. Energy flared out wildly, red and yellow and orange and white and it was hot and burst out, like a star had exploded. Streamers of fiery plasma-type stuff when shooting all over, blasting all around. I huddled down and tried to will it to stop, to get it to not shoot out, but I couldn’t. It flared and flared and flared and burned and I heard yells and shouts and Fuzzy Bird’s squawing. Then it ended. We were still skimming over the trees, falling closer and closer. The Me was hanging tight onto me and didn’t seem to be harmed. I’m okay, she thought. But we were all alone. And still falling. It didn’t feel so great, just then. What are we going to do now? The Me asked, in my mind. “Let me think,” I said. But I couldn’t. We remained spreadeagled, the Me clinging to my front. I had my arms spread out and continued to kick my legs and wave my arms to keep us moving forward as we moved down. The wind absolutely howled past my ears. I shouted: “Can you see any of them?” In my mind: What?

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I tried thinking it: Can you see them, anywhere? Anything? The Me poked her head up over my shoulder. Her hair (my hair!) whipped into my face as she did that. I kept paddling. No, came back. The image: empty sky, blue and cold and devoid of sexy Valkyries coming to help us. No weird Fuzzy Bird squawing and flapping. Geez geez geez the Me thought, then, or maybe it was my own thought. The tree branches were closer than ever, only a foot or two below us and I felt leaves, leaves that were as big as my stomach, brushing past us. Whisk whisk whisk whisk and then flutter flutter than flapping slapping leaves like the sound of tiny hands clapping as we soared through them, one after the other plapplap plapplap plapplap plapplap plapplap plapplap plapplap and then we were in the tree tops. A twig or branch or something caught my foot and stopped our forward momentum entirely and we swung forward. Help the Me thought and clung to me even tighter. I wrapped my arms around her as we dropped like a stone through ever-thicker branches, snapping and popping at us. Then I had a thought: Hang on tight I told her in our minds, and let go. She clutched to me and let out a little squeak. My leg hurt where it had hit a branch but I didn’t think about that. Instead, as we fell into the space between the leaves, the emptiness inside the tree, I reached out and tried to grab at leaves and sticks, tried to grab something to stop us, to slow us down. Those trees were big! Once we were through the canopy at the top, which happened pretty fast, there was a lot of space between the branches. We were dropping and tumbling and I tried to reach out, tried to grab anything, but nothing was near enough. I got a handful of giant leaf, but it just tore and we spun in the opposite direction, causing me to look up at the treetop we’d just come through. Dammit I thought. I tried to look over my shoulder. I must have told the Me something in our minds because suddenly she squealed, a little, and I got a picture in my mind: A giant branch, right below us.

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We hit it, square on my back. “Oooof” I gasped as the wind got knocked out of me. We bounced off the branch and tumbled to my left, still wrapped together, and falling on an angle now. I struggled to catch my breath and thought of something: Naked girl jumped out that window. In my mind, I saw it again, her falling down, hitting the ground, and getting up. Could I do that? Don’t try it, the Me told me. I don’t think we’ve got a choice, I said back. I hoped I could protect my head. We were falling, still, rolling over and over and there were more branches coming up. I caught my breath and tried to reach out as we got near another one. I hit it with my hand; it was smooth and tough to grip and polished-feeling and I couldn’t get a hold of it. We spun off and twisted in the air, faster now, rolling over and over as we fell another couple hundred feet. Another branch, another grab… almost I thought and we swung a little, pausing, almost, but then falling again and I thought I can do this. You can came the thought back. The Me was looking, too, and we fell a little slower. We hit another branch with our sides, and she cringed but didn’t say anything. I tried to grab it with both hands but couldn’t. We fell to another one, my leg catching it and swinging us upside down before we started falling again, headfirst. I kicked my legs and we spun around again and brushed another branch, wildly flailing now, and I couldn’t see anything clearly. Then, empty air. We were below the level of the branches and I was facing down, the Me below me. We fell and turned. Watch it, I said, and that was all I had time to do as we twisted a final little bit so that I was on the bottom and she was on top. We hit hard. I saw the ground coming, saw the twisting, felt the impact, then: Empty. I was alone.

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My head was clear. I stood alone, in an empty space. Black and kind of chilly and weird. I was definitely standing. I was definitely upright. I was definitely okay. But I was alone. What is this? I thought. I looked around. Nothing, as far as I could see. Just black and kind of chilly and weird, like I said. It was like the whole universe was made of velvet sheets that I could see through and kind of feel but they were there anyway. I took a step. Then I opened my eyes and the Me was looking at me. You saved me, she told me in my mind. I saw again our flipping final turn to have me land on the ground and not her. She was breathing heavy and had some scratches but for all that wasn’t any worse for the wear. Where am I? I thought, still with the black-space in my mind, but before I could get an answer the Me pressed her lips down onto mine and began kissing me, as hard as she could. You saved me. You saved my life. I love you, she kept thinking in my mind, and I felt her—my—lips pressed firmly against my – her – lips. They, our, lips, were smooth and soft and plump. I’d chewed on my own lip before but I’d never known what it would be like to kiss myself. The Me’s lips pushed into mine, hard and ferocious. I’m a tough kisser, maybe. She pressed them into mine and I felt hot breath whispering out between them and into mine. Then she began to move them, slightly, moving the kiss over my mouth, up, a little. Then down, a little. Then to the right and the left. It was as though she was talking to me in a language only lovers could use, a lip-to-lip language made up of caresses and rubbing. Her breath got hotter and thicker and pushed into my mouth, my breath escaping and me living on hers, sweet and tough. As my lips opened more to let her breath into my mouth, she followed them with her own, so that our lips perfectly pantomimed each other.

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At the same time as she was doing that, images were flashing through my mind, in no particular order: us falling, the trees, my arrival at Valhalla, her getting up and getting dressed that morning, us falling again, her putting on lipstick, a slowly-panning view of my legs up to my hips and past my torn, burnt clothing to rest on my breasts and see my nipples poking out, just slightly, my eyes, her eyes, our eyes close together— … I opened my eyes then and saw her looking them… And amidst those images even more: colors flickered by, and flowers, and bedsheets and musical notes drawn by hand and starry skies and a river and then a skyline and then more colors, all interspersed with her images of me and her images of herself and my images of her and my images of myself. And, then, in with those, began appearing more thoughts and words: us naked, standing in front of each other. Kiss you flickered through my mind. Us hugging, holding hands, rolling around make love to you I felt her say. Or I said it. The kiss was still going on and I almost had lost track of it. This kiss and the thoughts in my head were like seeing a flat-paper drawing suddenly spring up into three or more dimensions and begin talking. It wasn’t just seeing things differently; it was a whole new thing, alive and suddenly doing things. Her tongue was pressed against mine. She put it into my mouth, lightly, and touched it to the tip of my tongue, held it there, like she was trying to see if they would conduct electricity. Then her tongue began swirling and spiraling around mine and at the same time I saw us, in my mind, lying there on the floor of the forest, amidst leaves and brush, clothes in disarray, hair messy, two identically beautiful copies kissing each other for all they were worth. Kiss me back love me hold me kiss me fuck me came a thought and then I did, I kissed her back as hard as I could. I flung my arms around the Me and pulled her to me and tilted my head and wrapped my mouth onto hers. Our tongues met in the middle and I rubbed my tongue against hers and then around her teeth and gums and then pulled it

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back to flick it against her lips before pushing it back into her mouth. I rolled her over and sat up, arms on either side of her as she gasped for air. In that pause, while our bodies were touching only where I sat on her waist, my mind exploded with images and words and colors: yellow touch me a giant star exploding fuck me us kissing her brushing her hair please make love to me I joined her in our minds, thinking how surprised I was and how beautiful she had been when I saw her, and my subconscious threw in thoughts of her pressing her body up against mine and I bent down again and pulled her shirt up, touching my mouth to her breasts lightly, pulling her nipples in between my lips and sucking on them, gently at first and then harshly, tugging at them with each inhale, while my hands ran down her sides. I crouched up over her and pulled her skirt down and ran my hands back up over her flat, beautiful stomach while she watched me and bit her lip, then closed her eyes. In my mind I felt Oh god that feels good and there were red flowers and the moon coming up over the horizon joined by another moon shortly after it and a mountain top filled with snow and rainy days and music flooded in, something I’d heard before. I bent down and kissed her on the stomach, on the waist… and looked up at her. Are you ready for this? I thought at her. She looked up at me. Ready… she thought, and everything paused and then I leaned down and touched my tongue to her and began to lick and our minds exploded and for just an instant, I was in the black-space again…

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Meanwhile, In Tampa: “I told you, don’t ask that,” Samson said to the man. They stood there, awkwardly silent, for a moment as the man chewed his tongue and Samson watched him, hoping that the man would keep his silence, or at least mostly keep his silence. He gestured towards the aquariums. “Nice, huh?” he said, to try to distract the man. He knew the man could be distracted by things like that. But the man didn’t look at the tanks set into the rock wall, with waterfalls and giant globes of water to look at. He kept mulling things over, very obviously doing so: he had his tongue between his teeth and was biting it, and he scratched his head, and he screwed up his face, and he had one hand on one meaty hip. “Do you know where the souls go?” the man asked. Samson nodded, then regretted it. “I do,” he said, slowly, “But we’ll talk about this later.” The man looked upset. “You told me…” he said. Samson held up a hand. “I know what I told you,” he whispered. A door opened not far away. “I know what I said and I didn’t lie to you. You do send those souls to Heaven. And you’re doing a good job of it.” He thought back to the Display, all those chips. A VERY good job. Samson himself was almost horrified at how prolific the man had been, and he had to remind himself, as he pictured the sheer number of women the man must have killed to have that many chips, that it was all for the greater good. They would have been dead, anyway, ultimately, he told himself. To the man he said “A very good job. But we cannot talk about this now. Not in front of God.” “He knows, though, right? God knows everything.” “Not this, he doesn’t. Not right now.” Samson suddenly stood and saluted as two heavily-armored and heavily-armed guards came into view. They wore military battle

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armor that was rarely used anymore outside of God, Inc, and only used inside of the corporation as a show of force. There were equally effective but less cumbersome ways of protecting soldiers, but the heavy battle armor was impressive and sometimes you wanted to impress people. A soldier carrying a giant Heater/Concussion Cannon, wearing bulky, spiky, shiny armor with heavy boots and GripGloves and a See-Ray visor does not need to fight as often as one would think; his very appearance intimidates many into not fighting. The two soldiers stood at attention and a slim, middle-aged man walked into view, squinting a little in the sunlight. He wore a pair of khaki pants and some sandals and a button-up shirt with tiny golf clubs on it. He held up his hand and shaded his eyes as he looked at Samson saluting. The logo above the pocket of his shirt said God, Inc. and had a tiny halo above the “o” in God. Samson continued saluting as God came over. The man, belatedly, saluted, too, as Samson looked at him pointedly. God laughed. “Is this our week to be in charge?” he asked. “I can’t keep track of that. I suppose I should get an assistant or maybe one of those old-fashioned retro calendars. I could mark the days that we run the world and know when you’re supposed to be saluting and when we’re just another corporation.” Samson still stood, and God said “Come on, Samson. Don’t salute. No formalities are necessary. I’ve told you that before.” Only then did Samson relax. “It’s important for me, sir.” Samson wanted to remind the guards, the man, who they were dealing with. It was easy to forget that this was the man, the creature, the Being that had created all 73 dimensions, unless one observed the formalities. “Well, fine, then, but at ease.” God sat down and motioned to the guards. “I don’t have a communicator. Would one of you radio to get some drinks?” God looked at the man and then at Samson. “Who is this?” he said, not unkindly. “An associate,” Samson said. “He works for us. In Special Ops.”

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“Oh.” God motioned to a chair. “Sit down.” “How’s the weather been?” Samson asked. “Very nice. I can’t complain. No rain, no wind, no storms. In fact, the weather’s been perfect for as long as I’ve been here,” God said. “And business?” Samson asked as a drink was set in front of him. He sipped at it. Lemonade, and quite delicious. A tiny bit frosty and icy, just the way he liked it. “Things are going well. Profits are up, costs are down, we’ve not had any trouble rotating in and out of power, and I myself have been out on the tennis courts five times in the past week because it’s all running so smoothly.” Samson asked: “The battlefront?” God frowned a little. “Still quiet, here. But there’s been an attack.” “Where?” “Hell.” God looked to the guards and then back at Samson. “And not by who you’d think. It’s not the Blockers.” Behind God, a strange looking animal ambled into view. It was about the size of a dog but appeared to be more caterpillar than dog, if a caterpillar moved more quickly and had only two legs which is used to hop, kangaroo style. God saw Samson looking at it and said “Do you like it?” Samson wondered what to say. He didn’t, not entirely, but he’d also never seen something like it. Still, it was clear that God liked it. “I guess,” Samson said. “Which dimension is it from?” “None,” God said. “I made it.” Samson just looked at him. “You made it?” He said, finally. “I discovered about two weeks ago that I can make things. Just right out of thin air. I couldn’t believe it. I made this thing, I was sitting around, and I suddenly had a thought about a kind of bird that I sort of half-pictured, a tall bird with hands instead of

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wings, only they were like wings, too,” God was getting excited, leaning in. The caterpillar-thing hopped over and he scratched it on the head. “And I suddenly knew I could make it, and I just stood up and started sort of sketching in the air and pulling stuff out of the ether and picking up fuzz off the carpet and all, and suddenly there was this bird, that I’d just created, a giant fuzzy bird.” Before Samson could say anything about that, three things happened. A woman came outside and said “Jerry! Why didn’t you tell me we had guests?” and God spun around and looked a little surprised. And the man stood up suddenly and said “Do the souls go to Hell?” and his chair fell over. And there was an explosion right behind Samson that shattered the aquariums and the patio and sent them all flying.

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Part Fourteen: It’s been two days, the Me told me, speaking into my head. I’d become more accustomed to her using telepathy on me, and I liked it. It was better than talking – especially for some things. As she said this, I got in my mind a flicker of days moving on a digital calendar, and the sun rising and setting quickly like in a sped-up movie, and also a feeling of time passing. I tried to talk back that way: I know. And I don’t think we’re very close to those towers. I tried, as I thought it, to send pictures of the towers we were trying to get to, the once that Fuzzy Bird had pulled us from in his mad dash to freedom, the one that nearly every Valkyrie in the world had poured out of trying to get to us. The Me went back to one of the two things we’d discussed, really, for those two days: Shouldn’t they be out looking for us? I looked up at the canopy of trees above us. Way above us. Way way above us. I still couldn’t believe we’d lived through the fall. Then again, Naked Girl had lived through a similar fall. So I couldn’t be killed? Or I could, but not by falling? Maybe not by anything, the Me said. I stopped walking and turned around. “I forgot you can see my thoughts.” Only if you want me to, she said. Only when you let me. She’d said that was how it worked, that first night when we’d made love after falling through the trees and narrowly surviving. After we’d been laying there for a while, sweaty and exhausted and frightened and exhilarated (and, for myself, a little weirded out that I’d been having sex with myself, essentially, although not like that) the Me had asked about the weird blank space that she’d seen in my mind. She’d been careful to explain that she wasn’t reading my mind. Apparently, that could be done, at least here in Valhalla, but nobody tried to do it because it was a horrible invasion of privacy.

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“We just automatically make sure that we don’t look at what people are thinking, and you grow up learning how to control it, to have your mind open or closed or kind of screened off, or however you want it. As you get better at it, you can have it open to certain people and not to others, and like that.” I hadn’t been able to figure it out. She’d worked with me over the past two days, little exercises like the Valkyries had taught her. I’d gotten frustrated with one, once, and balled up my fists. God, I’ll never get it, I thought, and she’d patted my arm, then held her hand there. It takes years and years and years, she’d said. When Valkyries, or Clones, or Horses, are little, they broadcast everything. Or nothing. It’s just like learning to talk. As we’d been walking through the forest, eating fruit off some bushes that the Me found for us and drinking water here and there from streams or pools, she’d continued drilling me on telepathy while trying to talk me through the blankness, too, and she started up on that now, also: We can practice some more, she thought, and images of us practicing before flashed into my head, too, along with, this time, some music. “How’d you do that?” I asked, forgetting to try to think it. The music? She asked me back. I concentrated: Yes, I thought at her, and tried to replay it in my mind for her. I heard it, as I thought to you. But I heard it in your thoughts, not mine. I didn’t think it to you, she said. I opened my eyes and looked around. Then who did? I carefully thought at her, the skin on my neck prickling. Two days, I thought, and got sad. For two wonderful days the Me and I had walked through this peaceful woods and nobody had shot me or kidnapped me or dropped me off something or tried to grab me with tentacles and demons and I’d thought very little,

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during that time, of all the rest of the troubles – I hadn’t thought much of Brigitte’s betrayal and of Mr Damned Soul and all the rest. I had sometimes thought about Doc and felt bad, but the Me had been a great companion and kept me from feeling too lonely. I tried, those times I thought about Doc, to remember that he wasn’t alive. It would be like missing a Read-Or unit or a dirigible. Except that dirigibles didn’t keep people company when they were walking from New York to… I closed that thought off. I concentrated on the music and hoped that it wasn’t the start of new troubles. Valhalla had been like a vacation, almost, if you didn’t count the exploding left hand and the dropping out of the sky and the whole being-grabbed-byFuzzy-Bird thing. I didn’t want, I desperately didn’t want, there to be new trouble. Relax your mind, the Me said. I felt her hand take mine and squeeze it. We were facing each other in a little clearing in the forest, the trees around us stretching nearly a mile up, I figured, but their branches allowing a tiny opening at the top that created a 20foot-wide splash of sunlight for us at the bottom, warm and yellow and calm. There were ferns and a fruit bush near us and not far away I could hear a stream, the stream we’d been sticking close to as we’d walked back to the towers. Relax, the Me sent me again. I’d tensed up when I’d thought about the Valkyries towers. Where were they? Relax, the Me sent me again. I relaxed. Or tried to. I let my shoulders loosen and my mind focus on the one thing that almost always worked: sex. I pictured the Me holding me. I pictured her letting go of my hand and moving a step closer to me, until we were almost chest-to-chest and hip-to-hip. I pictured her, then, shrugging her shoulders in that way she… I… had, and I pictured her doing that and pulling her shirt off, the little light cotton-y thing that barely covered her breasts anyway and pulled up at her … my…waist, a little, to show just a little tummy. I pictured her standing there, bare-breasted in front of me and I felt myself relax. I pictured her, then, lifting up my shirt and pulling it over my head until I,

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too, was bare-chested and then I thought, as I relaxed, about her pulling me to her and me leaning into her and wrapping my arms around her… Hey! I heard, felt, got whacked with a, shout in my mind. It was like getting slapped in the brain and I opened my eyes. The Me was standing in front of me, her shirt off and her arms out and my arms were reaching out to her. She didn’t look sexy or nice or sweet, thought. She looked shocked, and angry. What are you DOING? She yelled in my mind again, causing me to wince. “I didn’t do anything,” I said. Images flashed through my mind, though, and she looked exactly like the last of them. You’re CONTROLLING me, the Me said. She backed a few steps away from me. “Don’t,” I said. “I didn’t…. I don’t… I was just trying to relax.” She was about ten feet away now, at the edge of the clearing. Nobody should control someone else’s mind, she said. “I didn’t try to,” I protested. I took a step towards her. She took a step back: Nobody’s ever been able to do that. “I don’t know how I did it,” I said. Don’t come any nearer, she said. I didn’t listen. I stepped closer to her and said: “Don’t do this!” She turned to run from me but before she could move an inch she screamed and was lifted into the air, flying up and up and up, still screaming, while I stood on the ground below her and felt helpless. She shot up faster and faster, and I heard in my mind:

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What are you doing? Stop it? Help! But it was growing fainter as she went up and up. I shouted and tried to think back: “I’m not doing anything! Fight! Or something!” She stopped, about 200 feet up, looking down at me, just a speck above me in the branches and speckles of light and leaves that looked small but which I knew (from falling through them) were as big as me, almost. I could barely see her. And I could barely hear her. Or think her. Whatever. But in my mind, I heard, or felt… look, it’s easier to say heard, okay? That’s what I’m used to saying. In my mind I heard: Rachel, you’ve got to help me. I don’t… stop that! That last part wasn’t directed at me. I looked up. The Me was fighting or struggling, somehow. She was hunched over, it looked like, and throwing elbows. Her feet kicked back at something and she was writhing a little. In my mind, I heard no words at all, just feelings. They weren’t good, they weren’t bad. They were scared, which I guess is bad. I didn’t know that you could project feelings, or maybe I did, because when we’d been making love, there’d been an extra oomph! to it, especially during certain parts. But I hadn’t thought those were, you know, emotions. Now I knew that you could, because the Me was sending me scared and fright and wonder… I don’t know how I knew that last one but it wasn’t one that was like fear, only it was, kind of. I looked around, on the ground, for something to do. My mind kept being overwhelmed, buffeted by the feelings that the Me was sending: wonder… fear… wonder… thrill…fear...then it began being more fear fear fear, kind of the way a shower in your CleanZone might be set to begin with hot, then go a little colder, then get hot again, if you like to mix things up. I couldn’t find anything that seemed helpful. There was a rock nearby, about the size of my fist. I picked it up, hefted it, and looked up again. The Me was dangling,

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now, upside down, apparently by one foot. I still couldn’t see what was holding her in there but it was something because she was really fighting around, trying her best to get free. Don’t try to get free, I thought at her. Then, in case my thinking didn’t work, I yelled it, too. She looked down at me – I saw her face turning towards me – and I said and thought: “I’ll help you!” Then, not knowing what else to do, I hurled the rock, as hard as I could, up at her, trying to hit whatever was holding her up. It fell way, way, way short. It went up maybe fifty feet and then fell straight down, in fact almost hitting me – I had to sidestep it. Help! A thought got through. I wondered if something was blocking her, or if there was a limit to how far telepathy could travel. I wondered if they’d take her farther and I wouldn’t know what to do. The emotions kept coming, and I knew I had to do something. There was more fear than anything else and I could see the Me fighting and fighting. I looked around again, helplessly, and then heard another scream and felt a blast of emotion. I looked up. The Me was going higher, still. She shot up a little more, now almost completely out of sight among the leaves and branches. I looked at the tree in front of me. I remembered when I woke up in Hell, that first time. I looked at my hands. I sighed. “I’m coming to get you,” I said. Then I thought it: I’m coming to get you! Hang on! I thought it as hard as I could, then I reached out and grabbed the tree, as high up as I could. I pulled up and tried to find a footrest. Belatedly, I kicked off my shoes and dug my toes into the grooves in the bark. I pushed up with my toes and grabbed higher up, then felt around more, getting a knot in the tree where I could rest my left foot.

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I began inching up that tree, watching with as much of my attention as I could, watching the Me dangling there, so high up, upside down and fighting and twisting and wrestling whenever she could, pausing now and then. I kept feeling her emotions in my mind but I couldn’t concentrate on anything, really, except climbing, so I tried to, in the back of my mind, just think reassuring things to her and hoped she picked them up. It was tiring. It was exhausting, pulling myself up that tree inch by inch. It didn’t seem like I was making any progress, at all. A foot here, a few inches there. I had to move around the tree, too, trying to find good places to climb. There were little twiggy branches here and there but nothing for another hundred feet or so to really help me climb. I kept going, though, fingers getting torn and raw and bloody, knees pushing against the tree, arms aching, sweat pouring down my forehead. I’m not going to let you get away, too, I thought at the Me. I’m going to save you. I felt a wave of fear and gratitude come over me. When I saw the Me now, on those times I was on her side of the tree, she mostly hung there, motionless and tired. I felt, coming from her, mostly tiredness, now. I kept my mind on her, kept picturing her smiling and trying to make that a pleasant thought, a hopeful thought. I tried to climb on that side, so that she could see me. Once, I looked down. I was higher up than I’d thought, maybe fifty feet up already. It felt like I’d been climbing for days. But I was closer to the Me: The emotions were stronger and I could pick up more words in her thoughts. Let me go she thought a lot. And What are you doing? And What is this thing? When she thought that, I wondered what she was looking at. I looked up, wanting to wipe sweat out of my eyes, but I was clinging to the side of a giant tree 75 or more feet off the ground and couldn’t spare the effort. My hands were needed. I locked my legs and tried to take deep breaths. What is it? I thought at the Me.

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Nothing in return. I couldn’t hardly see her. I started to climb again when I got an image, thrown back in my mind, strong and solid, almost. It startled me, how strong it was, and how shiny it was, but that wasn’t all. It startled me so bad, in fact, that I almost lost my grip. I grabbed onto the tree, my heart racing and my pulse in my ears, sweat dripping down into my eyes and mouth. I gasped for breath. “Hang on, Rachel, hang on,” I told myself. “You’ve done harder things than this.” I tried not to fall. My mind felt like a tornado. I felt more than ever that I had to climb up, but I also wondered if I wasn’t just making it up. Maybe my own mind had filled that in. I pressed my face against the bark of the tree, feeling its rough scrape on my cheek. It was cool compared to me and I hung there, eyes closed and chest heaving. I got my breath and I got my bearings. I looked down. About a hundred feet up, maybe. I looked up. Maybe one-third of the way to the Me. I shifted my right hand to get a better grip. I was desperate to just start climbing up again but I had to be calm. I had to make sure I didn’t fall, and that I didn’t give anything away. Assuming there was anything to give away. I kept my face against the tree, my eyes closed now. I pictured the Me, up there, upside down, in mid-air. Can you hear me? I thought. I can. I thought this, then: Was that what you see? A pause. Then the thing again. Instead of an answer, the Me simply sent me what she saw: Hanging above her, way above her, above the tree, too, above all the trees, was something shiny and silver and round and kind of flat, with little points and lights and gadgets and stuff on it. It had spots, here and there, that must have been windows or

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something, and things, too, that looked like weapons. (Weapons always look like weapons, don’t they?) So it is really there, I thought. I kept the tree pressed tight to me, hugging it. I kept willing myself to hang on, to be calm, not to fall. It is, the Me thought back. Then, the Me sent: Why are you so upset? I took a deep breath. I dug my fingers into the bark and grabbed on for all I was worth. What else did you see? I asked her. I pictured in my mind the flying saucer that was hovering over the trees, holding the Me somehow up in the air. But I didn’t fill it in. I just waited for the Me, who sent back: I saw someone flying it, and then she sent me the image of who was in the flying saucer. It was Brigitte. I nearly let go of the tree in spite of myself. I clung there, fingers clutching the cracks in the bark and my face pressed against it, and then slowly looked up. All I could see was the silvery underside to the flying saucer. Are you sure? I asked. I said it, quietly, but tried to think it, too. In response I got a picture, again, of Brigitte, staring at the Me, intently. It was the same Brigitte and I felt my heart flutter involuntarily. She was leaning forward, I thought, and then realized that she wasn’t leaning forward as much as I’d imagined, or seen, at first, but instead, she was very pregnant. She must have been… I don’t know. I don’t know how people look at various parts of pregnancies but she was really really pregnant, and I was surprised at that and couldn’t stop looking through the Me’s eyes at Brigitte’s round, full belly, until I looked up a little more and saw her

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breasts, just above it, and they were bigger than ever. I stared at those for what felt like a long time – -- still looking through the Me’s eyes, while I tried to keep climbing up the tree, feeling like I was going slower than ever, inch by inch up the hundreds of feet to where the Me was dangling upside down in front of Brigitte in the saucer.-And I was going so slowly, now, because of those breasts, which I remembered so well I could almost feel them in my mind. Hey! Came a thought, blasting at me. Sorry, I said… thought. Both. I kept climbing. It’s Brigitte. I know Brigitte, the Me thought back at me. It’s not that. You’re USING MY EYES. What? I thought, and stopped climbing. I concentrated and realized that, yes, this wasn’t looking at an image of Brigitte, it was looking through her eyes. Stop it! The Me yelled in my mind. I don’t know how I’m doing it, I said back to her. I want to stop it… and then there was a blank, somehow. Like a door had closed, I couldn’t see Brigitte anymore or the saucer, not that way. All I saw was the inside of my eyelids, which I opened up and looked up. I was closer, but still hundreds of feet below them, and not going to make it there anytime soon at that rate. I kept climbing up. Like the time in Hell, I had nothing else to do and nowhere else to go. I kept my eyes on the Me, and on the saucer, and tried to focus on climbing faster while still trying to talk to the Me. Me? I said, over and over. Rachel? Me? But there was nothing. After a minute of that, and 15 feet more of climbing, I finally grabbed on tight to the tree and yelled, at the top of my lungs: “I DON’T KNOW HOW I DID THAT BUT I’M SORRY AND WILL YOU LET ME BACK IN?”

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I hung there, on the side of the tree, looking up at the Me hanging upside down and tears in my eyes, tears of frustration and fear. I stared at her and tried to see her face. I didn’t get anything back. She didn’t call or wave or anything, and I was still blocked out by that wall. “Please!” I said, not yelling it. I just tried to beg her, in my mind and in my words. Then I thought of something: I switched over and instead of trying to talk to the Me, I tried to talk to Brigitte. Brigitte! I thought. I pictured her face, her hair, her… lips, and then tried to focus again on her face. I tried to imagine myself picking up a phone and talking to her. Whatever might help make a connection. I pictured her stomach, bulging out with the baby below it, and said again, outloud and in my mind: Brigitte! Nothing. I’d kept climbing but I was still far away. I was getting tired, too, although I’ve found I don’t get as tired as other people do. Whatever keeps me running doesn’t let me wear out as quickly as I would expect it to. I thought for a second. I looked at the Me and she was still hanging there, unable or unwilling to move because she wasn’t. I hoped she was okay. I looked at the saucer and wondered how Brigitte had gotten here. I tried to remember all the stuff the Me had said about how to communicate through telepathy. Then, I scrapped all that and hollered at the top of my lungs: “BRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITTE!” That did something. There was a flash of lights around the saucer and it moved up a little, then back. The Me still hung there, in the air, motionless, but I saw that she’d looked a little more down towards where I was. As I watched, the saucer hovered up a little higher. There was a crackling buzz and then a voice, amplified and mechanical a little but still very obviously Brigitte, just Brigitte-through-a-loudspeaker, came out:

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“Who said that?” the Brigitte-voice said. “ME!” I shouted again. “DOWN HERE!” In my mind I tried to picture her again, tried to picture her eyes. The eyes are a good focus, the Me had said. If you’re looking into someone’s eyes, even in my your mind, it’s easier to really communicate with them. I pictured Brigitte’s eyes, long lashes and deep blue and wide and bright and always a little wet, like she always had just really smiled big or had just finished crying, or both. It’s me, Brigitte. My mind felt confused, too, because the last time I’d seen her, I had been so betrayed, but there was so much emotion there that I had to try to focus, to calm down, to just picture her eyes and think that over and over: It’s me, Brigitte it’s me Brigitte. The flying saucer went up a little higher. “Who is that?” came over the loudspeaker again, this time even a little louder. I saw, as I clung to the side of the tree, that the Me had been pulled higher, too, so that both were clearly above the treetops. “IT’S ME! DAMMIT, BRIGITTE! IT’S ME!” I shrieked it at the top of my lungs, my mind exploding in a vision of making love to Brigitte and the hallway where Samson, that damned soul, had told me she’d betrayed me, to her eyes after Church that morning that we’d first been attacked by the revenants to her hand clinging to mine in Hell. In my mind I almost started to cry and a sobbing shrug heaved out of me, making it hard to hang on to the tree. If my thoughts had words, they’d have been something like: It’s me, Brigitte, and how could you do this to me, how could you tell me you love me and tell me you’re pregnant and obviously you are pregnant but is it mine and what am I supposed to do about it because it was all fake wasn’t it, it was all a trap, it was just something that was set up but I really did love you so why are you being like this? My thoughts were shooting out like that, and I hung onto the tree and looked up and saw the saucer start to lower slowly down.

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Then, in my mind, I saw an image of Brigitte again: Her eyes had that wide, almost-cried look, and she was smiling. She was beautiful. Then, in my mind, I felt: Look out! Then I saw Doc! It was Doc! Hovering there, and it took me a second to realize that he really was there, right by me! Doc! I said it: “Doc!” But he didn’t do anything, not right away, and then he shot straight up into the air, up to the saucer again. I lost track of him about a hundred feet up. “Doc!” I yelled again. I was about to start climbing when I saw a ray shoot out of the bottom of the saucer, a bluish ray that began at the top of the trees. Wherever it hit the trees, there was a fizzle sound, and crackling and electrical smells began to fill the air. The blue ray was disintegrating the trees, right above me, sweeping lower and lower and lower. Towards me. I could hear the crackling and fizzling as the trees burst into flame and then into nothingness, and I watched as the cone-shaped beams flared left and right, wiping the trees down to nothing. Rachel! Get out of there! I felt the Me say in my mind, and I thought back: HOW! Or maybe I yelled it. I don’t know. I was panicking and those beams were getting lower and lower and I could smell the heat or something like that. The ME thought back: Fall! I thought But I just climbed back up here and I don’t want to leave you! I’ll be okay! No! I can’t keep… but the rays were just above my head, sweeping back and forth still and the sound was loud and I looked up as a flash of blue spun just over my eyes and the tree above my left hand disappeared, leaving a flat smooth expanse above

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which I could see the glorious blue air of Valhalla, the sky that I had only glimpsed through branches for the last day or two. “No!” I screamed, and pulled my hand down as the beam flashed back. I had no choice. I let go, and dropped down and down and down, covering in seconds what had taken me what felt like days climbing up. As I fell, in my mind, I could see images of what the Me was seeing. She was looking at Brigitte, who was looking out the window with a shocked expression on her face. I fell, and saw Brigitte staring down out the windscreen of the flying saucer with her mouth open in a cute O of surprise, and her hands pressed up against the glass. I fell, and saw myself falling from above as the Me must have looked down at the ground below me. I fell, and I saw below me a crowd gathering, a group of people that could barely be seen below the tree branches that I fell through in mere seconds. I saw all that and then I was almost to the ground and I dropped into a large cloth held out for just that purpose by a group of silent naked lesbian zombies all gathered around the tree. I had flipped around in my fall and landed on my back in the blanket, which gave way a little and then was pulled tight by the people holding it, so that I actually popped up in the air just a little bit, and then I landed on my butt and sat up, disoriented. I’d expected to hit the ground, hit it hard and maybe die or go to Hell or something, but that hadn’t happened at all. I caught my breath and my wits and looked around, recognizing some of the faces of the lesbian zombie army, including Naked Girl, who held the blanket. Rachel! A new thought came into my mind and I looked over my shoulder. “Ivanka!” Rachel! Was all she thought again. I could see injuries on her and her left arm hung a little weird and she looked pale but she had a huge, beautiful smile on her face

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and her eyes were clouded over with tears. In my mind, I kept seeing me, images of me, coming from Ivanka, I guess: me on the blanket, me on the tree, me in Hell, me clinging to her back as she rode her horse out of Hell past the waterspout, me standing on the ground in the tank battle, me and her kissing… And through it all she just kept thinking Rachel Rachel Rachel Then she thought this: I love you! Oh, man. I looked up. “Ivanka!” I said, my disorientation and fear and everything that was happening getting in the way of thinking it. “The Me, um, Me, um, Rachel. She’s up there. And Brigitte.” I pointed and didn’t make any sense. “They’re up there. They’re shooting down the forest. Help. I mean, we’ve got to help them.” I was scrambling to get off the blanket-thing they’d stretched out. As I talked, Ivanka’s thoughts flooded my mind: I love you. I almost lost you. I can’t believe you were falling. We almost didn’t find you but then I searched for you with my mind and I felt you, a powerful pull. It must be love. I bet you love me too While she thought that, I kept saying: “Ivanka, we’ve got to help them,” and pointing up, and I looked up, too, and realized that the flying saucer was a lot lower down than I’d thought, and the trees all around were fizzling and disintegrating and were down to only about 50 feet tall, and the destruction was spreading, rapidly. The Me was hanging above me, still held by the saucer that Brigitte flew. “Ivanka!” I yelled, trying to break her train of thought. Who’d had imagined a valkyrie would turn out to be a bit of a ditz? She finally looked up and saw what I saw, which was not just Brigitte’s flying saucer, but about 30 others, all over the forest and beginning to disintegrate it.

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Meanwhile, In Tampa: Samson rolled down and over and came up with water pouring down on him and something heavy and squealing falling on his shoulders. Sputtering and gasping, he clawed at his face and gasped for breath, smelling oily fish scales and hearing nothing but roars and screams. It took a second for him to realize, as his vision cleared, that he’d been right next to the aquarium-wall and that the explosion, whatever it was, must have shattered that. He stayed down, though, and pulled at the eel-like thing that had fallen on his head and flapped around, squawking and honking as it tried to get back into the water. He was soaked and breathless and needed to get this thing off of his head. In front of him, as the eel flapped, he saw: Eel: red and yellow and finny and scalyh. Then the man from the deli looking around blankly, his shoulder on fire. Then more eel, as a fin drooped over his face and he continued pulling at it, thinking this thing must weigh 300 pounds. He was hampered in moving it because his other hand was digging in his coat. As the fin lifted he saw one of the armed guards shoving the deli man out of the way and holding a rifle up only to have his head explode and the fin dropped down again. Samson had grabbed what he needed and now pulled the small ray gun out of his coat where it had been hidden away. He also had shoved the eel off enough that he could try to sit up, only to have the fins flap up and block his view again, just as he’d seen what he thought was a horse flying down. “Shit,” he said, as he processed that, and, thinking quickly, he ducked back down behind the eel, which continued to squeak and honk and flap, sliming him and blocking his view much of the time. But if it was what he thought it was… It was. In between flipper-flaps, he saw the horse land and more horses land, with the Valkyries forming a protective circle, horses and spears facing outwards, shooting

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blasts of energy from their spears at the guards who were coming up the drive and across the forest and out of the house. But where was God? And how did they get here? Samson sat below the eel and thought those things. Two valkyries took shots from ray guns and went down, their horses moving forwards to cover them. Samson tried to blank his mind out. They would not be able to talk, here, he knew, and so would be using nothing but telepathy. And if they were looking for hostile thoughts, he would not be mask his mind from them. He doughted he could block his thoughts at all, anyway. Not with that many, and not with how his mind was racing. And not with his chip and wiring making it easy for them. Where is God? He watched from behind the now-slowing eel’s fins, the fluttering thick leathery substance more weakly moving up and down now as the eel suffocated, and he saw the Valkyries reorienting to take on the bulk of the guards. He saw the deli man come over to him, crawling. His shoulder was still on fire. “Don’t you feel anything?” Samson hissed as the man got close enough for Samson to reach out and grab his collar. He pulled him closer and beat out the fire, which the man for the first time seemed to notice. “Where’s God?” Samson said, as the man was about to speak. Samson said it and shared it, the question coursing through the tiny filaments that doubled as nerve fibers, his chip picking it up and communicating it to the man’s chip. The image of God, in his sandals and sporty shirt, was transmitted, too. The man didn’t respond but his mind was a blank and Samson got that. He also got a mixture of emotions back, a blast of confusion and fear and adrenaline and also, he noted, some anger and fear that was hidden in the background – a different kind of anger and fear than the other anger and fear, like tasting the pineapple in a pineapple-orange daiquiri.

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It was aimed at him, he realized, and he looked at the man. “No time for that,” he said, and sent shared some reassurance. “Trust me,” he said, and sent some more reassurance. At least he hoped he’d sent reassurance. It’d been a while since he’d had to do this. He looked out again at the Valkyrie-Guard battle and noticed that some of the women (and beautiful women they were, sexy and large-breasted and bare-chested in some cases and flowing hair and one of them had no pants on, either. Even in the midst of the battle Samson felt his cock harden a little at that and he tried to focus) some of the women were pointing up. He looked up. “What the fuck is that?” he asked. The eel fin flapped once more and Samson missed the first glimpse. The fin lifted and he saw the second glimpse, a giant curly-haired sheepbird thing diving down at a screamingly fast speed, and screamingly was the right word for it, because the bird-thing was shrieking, squawing, so loud that the sound was like a force itself. It was, in fact, a force, he saw in a moment, as the bird dove and the squaw got louder and the Valkyries were flattened by the sound – almost literally, as they and their horses were knocked over, falling to the ground and scrambling. The bird-sheep thing swooped low over them and through the area, drawing some ray-gun shots from the guards, too, who were uncertain whose side this thing was on and decided that if they didn’t recognize it, it wasn’t on their side even though it had just helped them. With the Valkyries momentarily down, about ten of the guards swarmed in and began wrestling hand-to-hand with the Valkyries, who were themselves quick to get to their feet. The horses were slower but in seconds there was a battle between armored guards with electrified billy clubs and horses and six-and-a-half foot tall beautiful women holding short swords. As Samson laid there, looking at the battle and for God, he saw one of the taller Valkyries square off against two armored guards. This was the one that had no pants – she was naked, entirely, her skin an almost-ivory, creamy white color that contrasted with

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the jet-black ebony flowing hair that was pulled into a ponytail but which hung to nearly her firm, round, buttocks, which Samson found almost hypnotic as they flexed and readied themselves to attack. The guards both held up their clubs, glowing blue with power, and the Valkyrie crouched, all three motionless for a split-second before she dove at them. Her sword jabbed towards the guard on her left, missing him, and missing him badly. Samson wondered how she could have been so far off but then saw: She’d jabbed but started her sword to the right, deliberately missing the blow, which had been a feint to the guard on the left in order to entice the guard on the right to attack her even as she leaped. Which he did: the guard on the right, no coward, jumped forward himself as he saw the blade stab away from him. But he was himself a jillionth of a second too late, and the Valkyrie had already plunged her magnificent body forward enough that he missed her entirely with his down-sweeping club blow, hitting the club hard against the ground where a hair-breadth before, the Valkyrie had stood. She, meanwhile, had moved forward while her sword arm swung back on the seemingly missed blow, and the sword arced around behind her, her right arm guiding it without the Valkyrie watching it at all. Samson had heard stories of Valkyrie battles and he knew that they, through their telepathy, could link minds so that each Valkyrie saw the entire battlefield from the perspective of every other Valkyrie in the battle. They were impossible to sneak up on, impossible to surprise, impossible to outwit, he’d heard, and he saw why, now, as the Valkyrie’s sword, without being watched by its owner, swept around and sliced through the armor of the right-most guard, nearly cutting him in half. Samson heard the guard moan and cry out as the sword bit into him. The left-guard, meanwhile, had only a brief moment to react, and his reaction had been one of relief as the sword-jab had missed him. His relief lasted not at all as the Valkyrie’s instantaneous, simultaneous leap had driven her into him – his body relaxed in that moment because he thought he’d been spared the sword-blow that was even now cutting his compatriot in half. His relief ended as the beautiful, sexy, deadly warrior

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drove into him and knocked him down underneath her powerful legs (and, Samson thought, if I was going to be stabbed in the face by a Valkyrie sword, I’d at least like it be while I had her legs wrapped around my head…). The Valkyrie knelt there, pulling her sword up, and was about to stab down on the man’s face when the bird thing drew her attention, as it came swooping back through on another superfast, superloud pass, its squaw blowing the Valkyrie off the guard entirely and sending her sprawling again. Again, the Valkyries were knocked prone by the wave of sound as the bird thing made its run, and this time the guards were driven down, too. Samson watched that, too, and saw, among the bodies struggling to stand and begin fighting again, one man already up, seemingly unaffected by this all but confused. God stood amidst the battle with a puzzled look on his face, staring at the receding shape of Fuzzy Bird as the bird-thing rose up to begin another turn and dive again. Samson saw God’s mouth working, mumbling to himself, and he knew he had to act. “Wait here,” he told the deli man, and shoved aside the fin to stand up again, hoping he could get to the middle of the scrum and back before that bird thing came back and before the Valkyries and guards began fighting again. Hoping, but certain that he couldn’t. “Don’t move a muscle,” he said. “I’m going to get God out of here.” With that, he ran towards the middle of the battle, but was not quick enough, as two guards got up first, to be knocked down by a horse who had made it to his feet and was neighing madly. Before Samson could get there, before any more guards could get there, the naked, black-haired Valkyrie made it to her feet and grabbed God by the throat with one hand, lifting him off the ground and holding him in the air with her left hand. With her right, she aimed her sword at God’s face. Samson didn’t hesitate. He hadn’t been hiding because he was a coward. He’d hid because he was a veteran of four different wars, counting this one that the world didn’t even know was going on yet (or most of the world, which was the same thing as far as he was concerned, but, then, the last two previous wars hadn’t been general public

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knowledge, either. The fact that a war was secret, or that it now involved probably 16 different dimensions, didn’t make it any less fatal.) He’d hid because he had to assess the situation, and now, having assessed it with a combative intelligence that had been honed through those three prior wars and the early skirmishes here in Armageddon (for we might as well call it that, he thought to himself as he ran faster and faster towards the Valkyrie) he acted to save God by running directly at the giant naked woman whose sword was plunging directly towards God’s face. Samson plowed into her with all the force he could muster, holding his ray gun in his right hand. He wasn’t particularly large but had unexpected amounts of strength that he attributed to the time he’d spent in Hell, time that was supposed to have been only a couple of weeks, at most, but the way time differed between the dimensions, he couldn’t tell how long, anymore, he’d been there. Decades, maybe, most of it still haunting the back of his mind no matter what else he thought about. He drove into the Valkyrie with all of that pent up might and rage, and… it did nothing. Or almost nothing. He shook her enough that the sword missed its mark, didn’t slash through God’s face but narrowly avoided it. Samson didn’t fall back or drop off the Valkyrie, who at first did not seem to have noticed him. He pushed into her and wrapped his arms around her – grabbing around the slim-but-strong waist and pushing more, his right hand still clutching the ray gun. The Valkyrie faltered a little then and looked down at him, still holding God in the air with her other hand. Samson fired, his right hand swiveling to shoot the ray gun up towards the woman, regretting even as he did it that it would damage her beauty. His finger pulled the trigger down and held it down and he heard the familiar sizzling sound, saw the results as the Valkyrie’s face and hair became burnt, the hair bursting into flame and her face scorching and twisting in agony. She dropped God as in his mind he felt a burst of images and horrific pain. He was still in contact with her and tried to pull away before Sharing killed him, too. That was one of the first things one learned about hand-to-hand combat: let go before they die.

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He jumped up, still firing at her with the ray gun, the close range making it all the more effective, as God dropped to his hands and knees nearby. Samson’s mind whirled with the brief blast of agonizing pain and torture he’d felt and he struggled to regain his composure, but only for a second. He leaned down and put his hand on God’s shoulder. “Let’s go,” he said. God looked up at him. “Did you have to do that?” “She was going to kill you.” “But…” Samson helped hoist him up to his feet. “We have to go,” he said, and he heard that sound again, the bird-thing, coming down, the buzz of its wings like a giant hummingbird, or maybe a helicopter (who’d seen one of those for centuries, he thought, absurdly) and he looked around for the source of the sound. His mind clouded, too, with more images and words as the Valkyries’ telepathy grew more dominant. He realized they were regrouping, forming up a defensive front against the bird and the compound’s guards. Right around him, he realized with a chagrined feeling. They were enclosing him in a circle where he stood next to the Valkyrie he’d just killed with his ray gun, with God at his side. Words and yells and strategies flitted through his mind, a montage almost too fast and blurry to follow as the squawing sound got louder. He could feel the sound waves pummeling him and he braced himself, as he saw the Valkyries doing. The squawing, the buzzing, grew louder, overwhelming the sound of the rest of the battle. A Valkyrie backed up, staggering before it, and bumped into him. She turned around. He looked into eyes that were impossibly large, and soft, and bright, surrounded by curly reddish hair underneath a battle helmet. This Valkyrie was only about 3 inches taller than him but still stronger-looking. She had her spear and she looked down at the dead, burnt woman at his feet, then scowled.

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He lifted his ray gun as she whirled her spear around to point at him but they were both flattened and pushed back as Fuzzy Bird suddenly landed between them, the squawing stopping, as Fuzzy Bird looked at God. “Fuzzy Bird!” God said. “You came back!” ***I found her***, Fuzzy Bird said. ***But then I lost her***”

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“Where did you lose her?” God asked. “Lose who?” Samson said, but he’d already guessed by the time he said it. Who else, he thought to himself, and then had to focus on the now-rising Valkyrie that had been knocked down by Fuzzy Bird’s arrival. He held up his ray gun, but the redhead was faster than he’d thought. He’d assumed she’d been stunned but it seemed she hadn’t, judging by how quickly she got up and had the spear up and was slashing it towards Fuzzy Bird. Samson head a yell and in his mind he felt her say: You stole her from us after we’d finally found her! And in his mind he saw, as he’d surmised, Rachel, this time being lifted out of a hole in the tower on Valhalla, in the clutches of this… bird-thing. Fuzzy Bird spun his head and saw the spear coming and even as Samson saw the spear end glow with a flash of energy, he was being lifted up and so was God, each of them clutched in one of Fuzzy Bird’s talon-paws and rising higher and faster than Samson would have thought possible. Definitely, he thought faster than anything I’ve ever been in and I’ve been in rockets and battle saucers. The battle was already tiny below them, flashed of color from spears mixed with bursts of flame where ray guns hit their marks. Horses lay on their side around the perimeter, many of them dead. Samson knew that wouldn’t especially bother the Valkyries or the horses. That was the horse’s role in life, after all, and Samson knew that the Valkyries were advanced enough to this point that they just kept cloning the horses and then imprinting their prior self’s memories on the new horse using the telepathy they were famed for; Samson was aware of all that because the military had tried it, two wars ago, in an effort to avoid the cost of retraining soldiers. But the humans had minded remembering their deaths, minded it terribly, which was when that project had been scrapped, as so many others had been scrapped by the military simply because of ethical considerations. Speaking of which, he thought now and began looking for the man he’d brought with him. They were too high up to spot; the entire compound was just a tiny dot now and Samson tried calling up to the bird-thing.

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“Hey,” he yelled. “We’ve got to go back.” He looked down again. Fuzzy Bird kept climbing higher. It appeared not to have heard. “HEY!” Samson tried again, a little louder. A hand reached over and touched his shoulder. Try thinking it, God told him through Sharing, and Samson wondered again how it was that this incarnation of God had come equipped with a chip. He must have known, which only made sense, Samson supposed, but when creating an earthly human body for himself, why bother to include the chip and the nerve-wiring that went with it? Wouldn’t He have been able to communicate with all His charges anyway, even absent the chip? Or had He known, suspected, that He was going to be locked out. “What?” God thought at him and said, aloud, too, and His hand pulled away, sharply as Samson realized that he’d been thinking those things while God had been touching him. He wondered how much had come across, but that was a stupid thing to ponder; the whole point of Sharing was that all of it came across. All of it. He thought for a moment and tried to decide what to say. He looked over at God, who looked stricken and confused and angry, all at once. He was spared answering immediately because Fuzzy Bird stopped, and stopped so abruptly that it made Samson’s stomach lurch. “How does he do that, so quickly”” Samson wondered aloud. Then he looked around. “Why’d we stop?” They weren’t motionless, entirely. Fuzzy Bird’s wings were a blur as he hovered and Samson imagined he could see the strain on the animal-thing’s face as it worked and worked to hold position. We are near the edge of the atmosphere, He felt the Bird think to him.

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“You can share!” Samson said, like most people forgetting to think it out of his surprise. Even two generations in, Sharing didn’t come naturally to many, so new of an innovation it was in human communication. Of course I can, Fuzzy Bird said, and then aloud said ***And I can talk, too.*** “We have to go back,” Samson said. He pictured the Compound, and the man, and tried to send a sense of peril, of helping this man. ***You don’t want to help him*** Fuzzy Bird said. His wings were buzzing and whirring. God was still glaring at Samson. ***You just need him*** Yes, that’s true, Samson Shared. But I want to help him because of that, and we DO need him. “Tell me what you meant,” God said, suddenly. “About Me.” Samson looked over at him. He couldn’t think what to say and just kept his mouth shut. All the times he and The General had talked about this, and he couldn’t for the life of him think of what they’d strategized about the moment God found out what was going on and who He really was. Samson suddenly realized that God was reaching out to him and tried to block his thoughts. “Don’t, Sir, please,” he said, and tried to have his voice echo with the authority of all his commands in all the past situations. If he could urge 3,000 men to charge across a field of molten lava simply for the greater glory of a petroleum company, he should be able to slow down the Hand of God. As he watched, God pulled his hand back. I can’t believe that worked, Samson thought, a feeling of immense pride and power flooding into him. I commanded God. But God was looking over Samson’s shoulder, not at him, and so Samson looked over his shoulder, too, where he saw what God was looking at..

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There was a hole in the air, a gaping wide hole that seemed at first to be looking into nothing, and then seemed to be glowing red. As they watched, the hole widened up, and a finger poked through. Then two. Then a whole hand, which reached out for them “We’re going to Hell,” Samson said, with a sigh of relief. “It’s the Grabber!” The troops had won! He watched as the hand approached and thought to himself that as soon as they landed, he’d have them grab the man, too, to help get to the bottom of things about why God had ordered Rachel and this whole deal about the left hand, which was not supposed to have been on there. But the hand got to them, and somehow bypassed Samson entirely. It grabbed God, pulling him away from Fuzzy Bird’s clawpaw, and God and the hand disappeared.

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FIFTEEN: What The Me Told Me In The Forest: It was when the flying saucers had nearly disintegrated the forest to the ground, and my army – ‘cause I by then had decided that it was my army, something I’d decided when they reappeared – my army and Ivanka had hustled around me and tried to get me out of there. They didn’t quite do it, but they really tried. When Ivanka grabbed me around the shoulders, as we fled from the front row of flying saucers swooping at us over the now-fizzling stumps of giant trees, I felt a rush of emotion and a blur of words and also a feeling that I’d never felt before, something… I didn’t know what it was, but I put two-and-two together and in that instant, I believed everything The Me had told me over the past few days. It wasn’t like The Me and I spent all our time in those couple of days walking through the forest just practicing telepathy and making out. We did a lot of that, though. Making out, I mean. We did practicing telepathy and making out and we even, one night, the second one I think, really late, tried what she called telepa-sex. It was dark in that forest. Really dark. Even during the day it was pretty shady, with the light filtering down kind of greenish yellow, making the forest floor sort of hazy and still and full of tiny little dust motes that drifted around lazily. But at night, there was no moon over Valhalla . The Valkyries had it taken away, the Me had said when I asked about that the first night. There were stars, and they were big and close and, of all things, actually star-shaped, so they seemed like cutouts that were hung there, glowing, but they didn’t really cast much light and almost none of it reached to the forest floor. That second night was the night that the Me showed me one of the things telepathy was really good for. I’d already gathered that it was better for most stuff. People could be alerted silently, and it was possible to communicate much more fully – instead of just words, whole pictures and emotions could be sent. I’d spent a lot of time

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thinking about that, when she’d said that. I had not, so far, been very good at finding words to use. As we’d walked along, sometimes talking and sometimes not, sometimes practicing telepathy and sometimes not, and sometimes holding hands and sometimes not, I’d tried to think back over the last few weeks and years—weeks in some worlds, years, it seemed, in Hell, while I slept overnight. I’d remembered conversations with Bob as we’d picked our way among the hot, sharp rocks of Hell. I was trying, even then, to express myself, to describe to him how scared I was to be there, how alone I felt in the world (Hell or Earth or, now Valhalla, sometimes, except that the Me was there, and having an exact copy of me made me feel less lonely). I’d tried to tell him how it felt to wake up that day, in the diner, and how it felt to walk home and wake up a little more, how it felt to look at my own body and suddenly feel like it wasn’t mine, to realize that although I knew, kind of, everything around me, I didn’t know it and it was all new and strange and unfamiliar. I’d tried to explain to Bob why I’d followed Doc south. “Because what else could I do?” I’d said. Bob had just looked at me, his face looking uncomprehending. But revenants always looked like that, I’d thought. Or not. I hadn’t gotten across to him, anyhow, why, exactly I’d gone, because there weren’t really words that could express how it was to suddenly find that you don’t know your own life. But with telepathy, I could have explained that to Bob, I bet. And he could have explained to me what his life was like, being a basically decent dead guy living in Hell and sucking people’s life force to keep on moving. Not that I’d want to know what that felt like. But I bet Bob would have wanted to me to know what it felt like, and as The Me and I hiked across the forest towards the tower we’d been ripped out of, I decided something: I’d have let him show me what that was like. I know it’s easy to say, now that he’s dead, murdered by Reverend Tommy, but I made up my mind that I’d have let him show me that so that I could understand him. At least, I hoped I would have done that, and it made me feel a little better about myself to think that I would have. I hoped that he hadn’t regretted, when he’d died, helping me across Hell all those times.

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I also wondered about Brigitte. With telepathy, I’d decided, I could have known for sure. When I thought that, I’d stopped dead and stood there, just underneath a giant leaf, as big as my whole upper body, its shadow cast over me like a 10-fingered hand. Known for sure? I did know for sure. She’d hesitated. When Mr Damned Soul had told me what she did, how she’d faked it all, she’d hesitated. I didn’t need telepathy to know how Brigitte really felt. The Me had looked back then. “Don’t cry,” she’d said, not using telepathy out of sympathy for me. That was something else she’d taught me: when someone is upset, talk, don’t telepath. That kept you from accidentally seeing upsetting thoughts they might not be able to hide just then. “Don’t cry,” she said again, stepping up to me. “We’ll get back to the tower and She will help us figure out what to do next.” “It’s…” I had paused. Then I stopped. I didn’t want to talk about Brigitte. Not yet. That night was the night that the Me had lain just across from me, a few feet away . The night was warm and the darkness felt almost soft. Here and there were tiny little blue glows that I thought might be some kind of bug. “Nope,” the Me had said. “They’re barkspots on the trees. It’s a kind of fungus, I think. I don’t know much about it. My area of specialty is chemistry, not botany.” “What do you mean?” I asked. “I mean that I’m a chemist.” “You’re a chemist? Like you work with chemicals?” “Yes. My job is to help make up solutions to heal the horses. That’s what I spend most of my time doing. I’m kind of like a medic, as much a medic as a chemist. I wanted to do it ever since I was little, and watched the horses practicing their sky marches. Sometimes they’d get nicked up, hurt, doing that, and I always felt bad for

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them. So when the She asked me what I’d like to be trained as, I said I wanted to help the horses. She had me learn chemistry and I came up with new salves that can heal the horses instantly, even help heal their souls after the imprinting.” I wanted to ask that that meant, but she went on and said “I won an award for it.” I was quiet for a while, and the Me finally sent a little thought over: What’s wrong? She thought. I talked, instead of thought: “I don’t know. I’m kind of… it’s weird. I thought you were just like me but you’re like this doctor or something. You win awards and do chemistry and know all this stuff and I’m just… I’m not really anything.” Well, that’s not true, she thought back. “I don’t mean all this,” I said. In the dark, I didn’t think she could see me motioning towards my body, this body, with my left hand, and then holding that hand out into the air, all evil or whatever. So I tried to picture my left hand and I think she got it, telepathically. “I don’t know what this is and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this body or what everyone’s after me for, really. I don’t feel like the queen of anything. That’s not what I mean, anyway. I didn’t do this. I just woke up one day like this.” I wondered again, how that had happened. Maybe we should try to go back to the diner, I thought, and see if that guy could tell me where I came from. You don’t know who you are, at all, do you? The Me thought at me. “No.” We sat there in silence for a second. Then the Me sent me: You’re famous, you know. Well, you were, before you died. Not just here on Valhalla, either. You’re famous all over your world. I’m surprised you don’t know. “I don’t,” I said. But I got a little thrilled at that. Famous? That’s how the Valkyries first found you – their Savior, she said.

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“How?” I asked. That was another loop: Savior of the Valkyries? They saw your music videos, the Me said.

“They what?” I asked. The Me stopped and looked at me. I’d learned that it was easier to send some thoughts, some images, by looking directly at a person. Looking at someone, too, she’d said, helped limit what you were saying to just that person. It can get overwhelming, she’d said, when a bunch of people get together, and, of course, sometimes you don’t want everyone to know what you’re thinking. This time, in the forest, she looked at me and I got a blast of an image, sound, emotion. It was a lot of information, all at once, but I saw me, or mostly me, because all my parts matched, but it was definitely me, and I was on a stage. There were tons of people, all around me, an arena, really, filled with people. I was standing there, in some kind of shimmery body-suit costume kind of thing that made me look both sexy and, I thought, a little bit silly. I had one hand up in the air and the other reached out towards the crowd. I could see a tiny little microphone floating near my mouth as the images spun through my head. I was singing, something, and inviting the crowd to sing, too, by holding my hand out to them, and they began chanting the chorus, which I could hear in my head, too. I heard me and the crowd and the band all singing it, the sound waves as real as if I was there. In the crowd I saw faces, including Leonya, off to the side. She was standing there, looking exactly as she’d looked when we began heading up the tower, tall and sexy and young and hot, but she was wearing clothes like everybody else, a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. I don’t know if I noticed her because she was so beautiful (as all the Valkyries were… are) or because The Me made me focus on her by focusing her own thoughts as she sent them to me, or if I noticed her because the jeans and t-shirt didn’t quite fit her

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right. Maybe it wasn’t even that, I thought as I watched this. Maybe they fit fine but they weren’t her. She was standing there, and her eyes were wider open than I thought eyes could be. She had her hands hanging at her side and was wearing a t-shirt with a picture of me on it. As I watched, she mouthed the words, almost in a daze. She did it without blinking. While everyone else was cheering and clapping and swaying and dancing around her, Leonya was just standing there, being buffeted a little by the people around her. She paid them no mind and just kept staring. It stopped. Too bad, I thought, I liked that song. Which made sense, I guess, in light of what The Me was telling me. Words flew in and out in her voice almost. Telepathy is not a voice at all, really, but it’s easiest for a mind to figure it out if it breaks into a voice and words. The information just arrives in your mind and it’s there, like hearing someone read a book that you’re reading at the same time, and it’s a book you’ve already read before anyway. Suddenly, you just know things. You were a singer, The Me said. A famous singer. I got the feeling, the thought, that what I’d just seen was a little while ago, not recent. It was. It was about a year ago. Maybe a little longer. Your time, of course. Time is different from dimension to dimension. Here, that happened almost 22 years ago. “Really?” I asked. I lay there in the dark, not far from the Me and tried to imagine someone knowing me 22 years ago. I didn’t know me that far back, not even counting my time in Hell. Someone, lots of someones, knew more about me than me. “How do you know all this?” I asked her. Everyone here knows this. It’s history. And prophecy. “It is?”

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Yes. For the past 22 years, you’ve been a part of history on the part of the Valkyries, but also you’ve always been a part of their future. They’ve been looking for you for their entire existence. You’re going to save them. I felt tired, at that. “I’m going to save everybody,” I sighed. You just might, The Me thought at me. I felt a hand touch mine, lightly. I felt her fingers rub my own fingers, stretched out across the black, small space between us. I heard the trees rustle. They’ve been looking for you for a long time. They knew of you, knew of you since they were created, and knew that you were destined to save them. They don’t know how, though. They just know that you must be here to save Valhalla when the time comes. They didn’t even know where to find you. The way She tells it, all the Valkyries came into existence knowing about you, but not knowing why. From their earliest times, they knew of your face and your image. “But that had to be thousands of years ago,” I said, quietly. Her hand gripped mine. “Yes,” she said aloud. I heard her skritch over a little to get closer to me. I could feel her, in the darkness, laying there. It felt kind of familiar. It felt kind of nice. I wanted her to kiss me, and that seemed strange because she is me, but I still wanted it. I also wanted her to keep talking, though, and she did. “Why do you think they fight in all these wars?” she asked. I didn’t know, really, that they did, and said so. “They do. They fight in wars wherever they can, because slowly, over the centuries, more than just your face was revealed to them. They learned, as information seeped into their consciousness, that you would be a singer with a beautiful voice. They

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knew that you would be involved in a battle, and that you would be killed and brought back to life.” I thought about that. “So far, they were right,” I said. “Yes.” She moved a little closer until I could feel her right next to me. She was laying on her side, me on my back, and her breath tickled my ear. They’ve been looking for you for a long time and they almost gave up, she thought at me, and I got the image of Leonya again, watching me in concert. As I saw that, as I saw me singing and Leonya watching me I also saw a fight break out in the crowd, a giant melee of people who began throwing punches and shoving and hitting each other. Information streamed into me: Someone had gotten into a fight and as happens in crowds, it spread and spread quickly and security began trying to quell it but that started a fight with security, too, and pretty soon there were hundreds of people involved, which was why Leonya had been there in the first place. She’d known there would be a fight and had gone to see if it might involve me because of the prophecies, traveling to battles as the Valkyries were destined or cursed to do, fighting continuously so that they might locate the woman who would save Valhalla, the women they believed would die in a battle and they would bring her back to Valhalla, raise her up, restore her life images to her, and she would then fight for them when the time came. “But they were wrong,” The Me said, “About some of that stuff.” In my mind, Leonya looked to the fight and then to me, up on stage, as I stopped singing and backed up a little. She whistled and a horse came flying down, drawing the attention of some in the crowd. A headline from the Read-Or units the next day flickered through my mind: Flying Horse Marks Strange Riot At Concert, and then I saw Leonya on her horse, jumping onto the stage. She rode at me and leaned down, tried to grab me as she went by, but I ducked and she missed. I saw myself staring after her as the horse tried to turn and then some security guys grabbed me and pulled me away. I saw Leonya

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trying to come after me, to follow, but the security guys had decided that the woman on the horse was the problem and began shooting at her. She was forced to retreat, being the only Valkyrie there. With tears in her eyes, she backed her horse up and then leaped into the sky, riding up to the sunset and fading away. I saw her go and she looked back the whole way. “I don’t remember any of that,” I said. “I didn’t think you would. You’re dead, you know.” I didn’t answer. I just laid there, imagining, or remembering, how Leonya had looked, and remembering the images the Me had give me of my own self, performing. A singer. A star. How had I ended up as a waitress in New York? What was the deal with the diner? “How did I die?” I asked. The Me said “I don’t know that. None of the Valkyries do, or, if they did, they didn’t give it to us.” “Give it?” The Me snuggled a little closer to me. With telepathy, she said in my mind, You can give memories and thoughts and things to people. It’s what they do with their horses. When their horses die, they clone them and then give that horse all the memories the old horse had. “So it becomes the same person? I mean, horse?” In my mind, I saw the Me shaking her head. That was neat. In my mind, I could see the two of us laying next to each other, just a few inches apart on the forest floor, see it as though it was daylight even though it was too dark all around us to see much of her with my eyes. I didn’t feel like I was imagining it. It felt more like we were imagining it together.

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It’s not the same person. It’s different, they say. I talked with a horse once, my supervisor, who died in a lab accident. I was there when he died and a bunch of Valkryries rushed over and knelt down by him. They were staring at him, only they had their eyes closed. This was about five years ago, and I was only beginning to work, so I hadn’t really seen this before. A few days later, they had a clone of the horse ready to be born. He was just a little colt. When he opened his eyes, almost the instant he did, those same Valkyries went to him and surrounded him again. When I asked what they were doing, one of the other women near me said Transferring. She explained that they put all the memories they could gather from the old horse into the new clone. Later on, that horse… his name was Colfax… came and visited me and thanked me for trying to help his former self escape the fire. I asked what it was like, to be reborn, and he said it wasn’t like that at all. He said he had all the memories of the earlier horse, but they didn’t feel like his. They felt, he said, like if he’d read a story about the earlier horse, or watched a movie about him, so many times that he remembered every second of it, but it wasn’t his own. I thought about that for a while. “Do they do that with the Valkryies, too?” In my mind the Me shook her head and said No. When a Valkyrie dies, she’s left dead. She breathed again and I felt it on my neck. She’d moved her head a little down and was almost touching me, all along the length of my body. I remembered the concert. I liked seeing my life before… this. Could they do it, I tried telepathically to me, do you think? There was silence, and a blankness. I turned to look at the Me, and could see a little bit of her face, now that she was so close. They have to be there when you die, she said. I’m sorry. She took my hand.

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I thought of the stage, the show, Leonya. So it’s all gone… I thought. I didn’t mean to send that to the Me, but I guess I did because she squeezed my hand gently and thought back: Some remember seeing you, and they can show you what it was like. It just won’t be complete. It won’t be all your memories. They weren’t there. Then: I’m sure they’d love to do that. They’d do anything for you. I wondered how many memories they would have. I wondered how much of my life I could get back. I felt like I was just wearing this body, more than ever. I didn’t feel like it was mine. I wanted to get rid of it, to go back to whatever I’d had before. In the images sent by the Me, I’d looked pretty similar but not quite the same. Why? Why pick me? Why cut me up and sew me back together? That’s what they had to have done, right? They had to have, whoever did this, Samson or whoever, because all my parts are different and they’re not me Hey, suddenly came into my head. I felt a hand on my cheek, pressing a slight wetness to it. I hadn’t realized I was crying and I was ashamed of myself. I had kind of decided, or tried to decide, that I wasn’t going to do that anymore, but there in the dark, with that stupid left hand and my body not being mine and being lost in the woods and … you know it all. I guess I couldn’t help it. It’s okay, the Me said. It’s okay. They’ll give you some memories. And I think you’re beautiful, just exactly this way. I sniffled and had to laugh. “Well, of course you would,” I said, and the Me rubbed my tears off my cheek and hugged me tighter. Then, in my mind, she kissed me. At least, I think it was in my mind. I wasn’t sure. I felt the kiss, but in the dark I couldn’t tell if it was a kiss or if I was imagining it or if she was telling me she wanted to kiss me. I was the strangest thing. Suddenly, I was being kissed. But more than that. If you’ve ever had a really, really good kiss, one that just lit you up from the inside and seemed to tingle all over, this was like that but way better, even. It was like a full-body

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kiss that began at the lips but somehow involved all of me. My body relaxed into it, and I realized that I was pursing my lips and there was, after all, nothing there. It was the strangest thing, and beautiful. “What was that?” I asked, softly. “That was a telepathic kiss,” the Me said, even more softly. “Did you like it?” I nodded. Then I realized she might not have seen that, so I said, “Yeah.” “Do you want to go further?” the Me said. “I can show you some… things.” “Yes,” I said. Think it, the Me told me, in my mind. Yes, I said, and I felt a wave… a warm, kind of soothing, like I’d been dipped in water only not like that at all, either. Maybe it was like being hugged by someone when they hug all of you, instead of just the parts they touch. You know how good it feels when someone hugs you, like when after you’ve done it, had sex, that person leans over and just touches you for a second and then wraps her arms around you so that wherever her arms touch you, where her knee touches your knee just a little, you feel protected and connected? This felt like that, but all over. All over. It was wonderful. I felt my skin warm up and come alive. I felt… bright and I opened my eyes to see if I was glowing. I wasn’t, but I should have been Say it again, the Me told me. Yes, I thought. Yes. My skin got more tingly and I felt a shudder run through me. I relaxed, then, almost feeling my body slump down a little and puddle up, nothing needing to support anything else and then another shudder. Then I was being kissed, only not on the outside. I knew that the Me hadn’t moved. I hadn’t heard anything and I couldn’t feel anything except inside my lips. They felt exactly like being kissed maybe in reverse. It’s so hard to explain it if you never felt

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anything like it. Here’s what happened: My lips suddenly pursed and felt tickled but in a good way, they felt mushed but in a good way, too, and I opened up my mouth. Say it again the Me told me in my mind. Yesssss, I breathed. I pictured, in my mind, how I looked and that lit me up almost for real as all my nerves jumped, just a second and suddenly my tongue came awake. I could feel, really feel the kiss, and it felt like the first time ever. My memories, you know, they don’t go back real far, especially not of being kissed. I’d kissed, since waking up, Brigitte and Ivanka and the Me and Leonya and maybe a few others, but I’d never kissed someone like this. It’s the difference, kind of, between someone putting a hand on your arm when you’re wearing a shirt, and someone rubbing your breast when you’re completely naked. I loved it. My tongue, in my mouth, was moving and trying to kiss back, trying to help out, trying to make someone else feel what I felt while my lips were opening and I gasped a little. Say it again, the Me said. And feel it. Don’t think it. Feel it. I tried to feel the yes in my mind. I focused on that and then remembered that the Me had said not to get tense so I just over and over in my mind thought yes yes yes yes yes and tried to relax while feeling my tongue, which felt exactly like someone was nibbling on it, maybe like two or three someones were nibbling on it. Like that, only way way better. I jumped then, as my legs were caressed. This wasn’t from the inside but it was all over. Like the maybe-many-kisses it felt like 2, 3, 50 hands were gently trailing a single fingernail up the tops of my thighs, up the sides of my thighs, and then back down, lightly caressing the thighs and then stopping to rub and pinch and then going back to just almost-not-touching me while the kissing went on, and doubled or tripled. I felt like I was going to explore already. Please, I thought, and I saw lights, I saw a flare of lights or something as the caressing moved up and my nipples popped erect. I still had my clothes on, what was left of them, anyway, but that didn’t matter at all. It felt like I was naked and like my own

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skin was making love to itself. All over my body hands rubbed and tickled and tongues licked and moved and trailed and in some places tongues were tough and solid and poking into me while in other places fingers pinched. My mouth felt full, like the Me had forced her tongue into me. My breasts began to ache and I felt my stomach clenching as the tickling and rubbing and hands went on. What do you want me to do I felt in my mind. I… and all I could do was think. I wanted the Me to kiss me, I wanted her hands, her real hands on my breasts. I wanted my tongue on her breasts, my head on her thighs. I wanted to lay my head down on its side and look at where her legs divided, at her laying there open to me for me to take my hand and touch her, lightly, while she rubbed her hands in my hair and arched her back. Oooohhh I felt in my mind. My body arched. The kiss was still going on. I felt weight on me, though, I felt the Me actually sitting on top of me. In my mind I could see us, me suddenly sitting up and throwing my leg over her, over her chest, her pressing her, my, small breasts up against my butt as I leaned down and began licking furiously at her, diving my hands and mouth into her while she rubbed my back and my butt and trailed her fingers down between my cheeks. That was all I wanted to do, all I could think about, was tasting her and having her touch me, feeling her pinned beneath me. But I was pinned beneath her and images and feelings exploded in my mind, my picturing her underneath me while I saw her on top of me, rubbing herself against me, our legs intertwined and touching right where they met, back and forth and back and forth, our legs scissoring around each other while her hands grabbed at my breasts and then she leaned down, twisting, to get her mouth near mine and almost kiss me… … and in my mind that kiss continued and all over my skin I felt licking and touching and hugging and warmth and sweat. I breathed in and out and sighed and moaned and I didn’t know whether it was in my head or in the forest anymore.

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Oh oh oh oh oh we said, together, in my mind and maybe out loud because I thought I heard it echoing. She collapsed on me and in my mind I collapsed on her and everything was silent for a moment. That, the Me thought was telepa-sex. I couldn’t move. Like I’d been saying, as we ran from the flying saucers, Ivanka grabbed me and that’s when I believed what The Me had told me. Not that I hadn’t believed her, really, but it was all a lot to take. A whole race of Valkyries idolizing me and searching for me and then finding me and then losing me again, building statues of me? But as the flying saucers swooped down and Ivanka grabbed me, pulling me away from one of their disintegrator rays, I felt it…felt it, the way I’d felt what The Me was doing to me with that telepa-sex, and more . Strong emotions, The Me told me that night, seep through sometimes and can be communicated most effectively by telepathy. It’s one thing to say I love you. It’s another thing, entirely, to have all that love flowing into you, filling up all your mind and your cells. It’s what I miss, I guess, because I can’t Share. That kind of feeling, that kind of communication, I only felt it when I was in Valhalla, and I really felt it when Ivanka grabbed me. Ivanka had touched me before, but not in Valhalla, and I can’t Share or do telepathy in Hell, the place where we’d made love, so I wasn’t ready for the whoomp of the emotions. I hadn’t felt anything like that before, which was surprising, too, because I’d touched other Valkyries. Looking back, I guess it’s because when Ivanka grabbed me, as we ran, she wasn’t trying to guard her feelings but actually was experiencing them even more strongly, and they just flowed into me, but when I say flowed I mean like a river of water, knocking me over.

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The flying saucers were coming at us, and we’d turned and ran. I’d gotten up from the blanket Ivanka and my army had held up, but the trees above us were being fizzled away, disintegrated, and the air was filled with acrid dust and crackling. “Run!” I yelled at my army, and began to go after them as they all turned, all those Lesbian Zombies, and took off, but I stumbled a bit. It wasn’t my fault, really. I mean, I’d just fallen out of the sky into a blanket and was getting shot at by an invasion of flying saucers, but it was a bad time to be clumsy. I tripped a little and staggered down to one knee, and the lead flying saucer came diving down out of the sky, just screaming down, straight down, vaporizing the tree as it went and then throwing that blue beam at me. Also, I was still a little reeling from Ivanka’s confession of love, which became all the more real as I stumbled and she grabbed me, one powerful arm encircling my shoulders completely as she picked me up and began running, shifting to hold me by the waist because I went a little limp, which I blame on the disorientation caused not just by being picked up and carried like a package, but also the wash of love from Ivanka, the overwhelming hero worship/admiration/adoration that I felt gush over me like wave after wave of warm, salty, tender water with me the beach at water’s edge. Images mixed with emotions and words and experiences all jumbled together and I tried to make sense of it, this powerful blast of telepathy and love, as Ivanka ran after my army. “Ivanka! You’ve got to control yourself!” I hollered, but the humming buzz of the flying saucers – now there were more of them—drowned me out and I wondered if I could try to think it. I gave it a shot, in my mind thinking Get control of your emotions they’re paralyzing me and as I did that Ivanka looked down at me in surprise herself, her eyes wide. I’m sorry came a thought amidst all the other thoughts and feelings coursing through me and then there was an explosion off to our right, a bunch of dirt and rocks and branches thrown up in the air. Ivanka dropped me and covered over me to keep me safe from it, although I still got some dust in my eye. They’re shooting missiles she thought, and I appreciated the explanation.

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Where’s my army? I thought, not directly at Ivanka but she got it anyway, and we looked as the first saucer overshot us, flew past us and kept on going. A few others followed it as they spread out, and then there was one hovering right above us. I saw off to the left the one that had The Me still captured, hanging by a beam, upside down in front of it. Ivanka looked up as the flying saucer hovered above us. A small appendage came out and shot a beam, like the one that had The Me, at us. I could feel it pulling me, heaving me up, like a bunch of really strong hands picking me up. As I started to rise in the air, though, Ivanka grabbed me around the waist and pulled back. I hung there, the beam pulling me up and Ivanka pulling me down, for a few seconds, and then I heard the humming buzz of the flying saucer increase, get louder. I looked up and saw that the saucer was trying to rise, the engines it used or whatever they were underneath glowing brighter. The beam got stronger, too, tugging at me more powerfully. I felt myself rise only a little and looked down at Ivanka. Ivanka hugged me tighter and thought at me: Hang on, Rachel. Then she began to spin, around and around and around, faster and faster, still holding me. I felt a little more tugging, feeling like I was stretching a little, as the beam tried to grab and Ivanka spun. I looked back up and saw that the flying saucer was beginning to be spun in circles, around and around, too, wider and wider. Ivanka spun faster, still, and then she howled, as loudly as she could, a wordless yell that echoed above all the din around us. As she did that, she let go of me, and I felt suddenly released. She stopped spinning, let go, and me and the flying saucer went whirling off into the air, so fast that I had only just realized what Ivanka had done when the saucer that was trying to pull me in crashed into another saucer that was approaching. Both of those machines exploded and began to fall, and I dropped, too, again, falling down into Ivanka’s waiting arms. She’d run over to catch me. Sorry to use you like that, she said, and she hugged me. I felt the warmth all over, the love, the worship, and it felt nice but made me a little uncomfortable, too, like I didn’t really deserve it. Before I could respond, she let me go and said “Now, let’s fight.”

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I stood there a second and in my mind I felt her yell Get the Army! So I turned and hollered, as loud as I could: “Army! Come fight!” That didn’t do much good, though, as the flying saucers were screaming down at us and through their loudspeakers were blaring, as loud as possible: “SURRENDER! IT IS USELESS TO BATTLE AGAINST US. WE WILL DISINTEGRATE YOUR ENTIRE WORLD IF WE HAVE TO.” Over that, my Army stood no chance of hearing me. I screwed up my face and closed my eyes and thought as hard as I could, trying to picture individual faces wherever I could, mostly just of Naked Girl but there were a few others that stood out. ARMY, I thought, ARMY, COME TO ME AND FIGHT THESE SAUCERS. DESTROY THEM! I didn’t know how they’d do that, so I couldn’t give them any ideas, but I figured maybe they’d come up with something. Ivanka certainly had. A saucer dipped down low, blue beams grazing the stumps of trees and fizzling them into nothingness as it roared towards her. She stood her ground and then at the last second, as the beam swept at her feet, she jumped up into the air, above it. The saucer slammed into her stomach and she grabbed onto it. I saw her scramble up onto the edge as the saucer dipped and spun wildly, and she then pounded her fist on the windscreen up front. That didn’t work; she ended up shaking her hand in pain and frustration. She tried kicking at it, but couldn’t get a good grip, and I saw on the top of the saucer a little ray gun come up and swivel towards her. Ivanka, look out! I thought at her and tried to send a picture of the gun to her. I heard rustling behind me and turned and saw some of the naked lesbian army coming out of the underbrush behind me. A saucer dipped towards us, too, but I couldn’t stand it and looked back at Ivanka, who was gripping the edge of the saucer and looking up at the gun. My army, behind me, had picked up rocks and branches and were throwing them at the saucers, ineffectively, but I pointed at Ivanka as they did that. Help her! I mentally

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commanded them, and they turned and ran towards the saucer. Meanwhile, the one that had dipped towards us came circling around and I heard the phist! of things being disintegrated nearby. I looked over my shoulder and saw the saucer, with a scary-looking guy in goggles, diving at me. I scuttled over to my right and looked back over my shoulder at Ivanka. The ray gun blasted at her, an arc of crackling blue, and she jumped in the air. The ray passed below her as the flying saucer carried underneath her. She came back down on the other side, hard, and the saucer flipped over in the air, spilling Ivanka to the ground with it. The upside down saucer, its engines now pointing up, slammed down into the ground and exploded as Ivanka rolled away. I saw two of my army get caught in the explosions and flicker out, then back in. What’s up with that? I wondered, but I had no time because the flying saucer that was after me was swirling back again, blue rays fazing in front of it. I ran over to the right. I couldn’t do, I figured, what Ivanka had done, so I tried to take cover. Then I thought: They don’t want to kill me, right? So I stopped and held up my arms. STOP! I thought at the saucer pilot. It’s ME. You don’t want to kill me, you want to capture me! The saucer paused. The blue ray faded away. Everything on the field paused, in fact. There were wisps of smoke here and there and a low hum from the hovering saucers. I saw the guy in the saucer in front of me hold his hand up, mumble something. He was talking, I guessed, on some kind of communicator. Then he shrugged and smiled at me and the blue ray shot out again, a disintegrator beam on full power catching me square on.

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Meanwhile, Many Many Miles Above Tampa… Samson fell. He really didn’t have any choice in the matter. He began dropping and looked down, seeing the water of Tampa Bay where it met the green of the Florida coast, watched the land moving at him more and more rapidly. Fuzzy Bird dove down after him. “Help me!” Samson yelled at it as it paced him. Fuzzy Bird looked over at him. **No** it said in that peculiar voice and with that, the bird sped up and dove faster, outpacing Samson and heading down to where the battle was raging. Samson could tell it was still going on: He could see flares of ray guns and flashes of other energy. He tried to think of a plan as he fell, lying on his stomach, arms outstretched to slow him down, but couldn’t. He was over the edge of the land, and thought for a moment about sliding over to hit the water, but knew that at the height he was falling from, it didn’t matter if he landed in water or on the ground. He wished that he could fly. “I should have asked God to give me the power to fly,” he said to himself, and wanted to smile, but was having trouble seeing with the wind rushing at him, and he was also worried about what it would feel like when he hit the ground. He was nearer, now, and moving quite rapidly, and could see that the guards at God’s compound had mostly been defeated. The Valkyries were mopping up, having again won another battle. Samson had expected as much. Even outnumbered and clearly disoriented when they’d appeared there, he’d figured they would win. They were one of the most elite fighting forces in the 73 dimensions. He’d seen emissaries sent to them, time and again, in his military career. He’d never been chosen to go, much as he would have wanted to do so – a whole world filled with naked women who dream about fighting and sex! – because his superiors had said They won’t like you. No, instead, he’d been chosen to go to Hell, to wait in Hell for the appearance of the lesbian zombie who could control all the other lesbian zombies, and it wasn’t fair to

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say he’d been chosen because by the time they’d hatched this little plan of theirs, he’d already risen up to 3rd in command. Fourth in command, he supposed, if you count God, but while God had a vote in what the group did, God didn’t hold that much sway. He figured he was only a half-mile up and wondered if he had time to calculate how fast he would cover that distance, as a distraction from what awaited him when he did cover the distance. He could see more clearly, when he turned his head to the side to avoid the direct effects of the wind, and could see that the Valkyries and the man were looking up at him. A few guards were over to one side, corralled by horses and giant naked women. The man was off to the other side, with a few Valkyries talking to him, too. At a quarter-mile above them he realized they were all looking up at him, and he tried to motion for them to do… something. “Help!” he began calling out. He looked around for that Fuzzy Bird thing but couldn’t find it. “Help!” he called again, as loud as he could. In the last few seconds of his fall, he saw some of the Valkyries scramble around looking for something to break his fall with, some way to help. The guards couldn’t – they had spears pointed at their heads. The man just stared as Samson came whistling down, faster and faster and faster, the wind screaming in his ears, whipping at his face and hands and feet. He saw the compound, saw the dead fish, the scorch marks from ray guns, the prisoners, the tables, the trees, the wildlife, the Valkyries, the man, then he hit. He’d wondered what it would feel like. It felt like a thousand punches all landing at once, every inch of his body absorbing a terrible blow. He felt his skin expand out with the pressure of the pain and explosion of nerves. He felt his bones crumble into tiny shards and powder, felt his face disintegrating, felt his body almost… almost explode… as he indented the ground and sent cracks shooting across the concrete patio, cracks

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radiating out from where his body impacted the ground like a meteorite, hard enough to vaporize it. That was when he realized: I’m still alive. He sat up. Everyone was staring at him.

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Part 16: The Void:

The ray zapped into me and my skin felt like it was boiling. As it had swept up on me, as I'd looked forward into the flying saucer swooping down on me, I'd instinctively thrown up my hands... like that would help... and tried to ward it off. It hadn't helped. Much. If you've never been disintegrated, I don't recommend it. I felt superhot, all of a sudden, but not just superhot. Really, really, hot. Like I'd been lit on fire, and then the fire had been lit on fire, too, if that makes sense. Not much about being disintegrated makes sense. Then I felt my skin boiling all over, or rather all off of me, as I watched and my skin just... evaporated, I guess, is the only word that applies beyond disintegrated. It all happened so fast that I could only reconstruct it in retrospect, as I was sitting in the dark place before I came back. Wait, I don't mean to spoil the suspense, but yeah, I came back. So I watched my skin evaporate away, just fwhisk! and it was gone, just as I felt my hair phasing away, too, and then I could see muscles but they were gone quick and then bones which crumbled into little bits like pieces of cookie and then they were gone, too. I figure I only got to see that because I'd thrown up my arms and it shielded my eyes, which were then the last to go. Almost last, I suppose, since the last thing I saw was my left hand.

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Which wasn't my left hand and I was pretty certain, in that moment just before my eyes were boiled away, that it wasn't mine because when it got hit with the blue ray, as the rest of what passes for my body now was being turned into cosmic particles, that left arm, from the elbow down, glowed bright white, then red, then turned flat and metallic looking with claws on it, and only then disappeared, or maybe it didn't disappear, because not only was it the last thing I saw, but it was then the first thing I saw in the dark. Disintegrating doesn't hurt, I found out, or it didn't hurt me, but, then, I could also drop out of windows and get shot by tanks and stuff, so it might hurt you. It is uncomfortable, though, really uncomfortable. It takes you apart piece by piece, and you feel that, and then it takes each piece apart into littler pieces, and somehow you feel that, too, and then those pieces get ground into littler pieces, and, yeah, you're feeling that, and then you're... nothing. That's why I don't recommend it. After all that happened -- and I felt my eyes pop away, which was really weird and I didn't like it at all-- I woke up again, in the dark. It was the same dark place I'd gone to once before, when I'd fallen so far and hit the ground and then not had anything bad happen to me. This wasn't bad, either. It wasn't anything. One moment, I was watching my left arm flash through those changes, then my eyes powdered and then I was in the dark place. I noticed I was in the dark place, and not disintegrated into nothingness, because of my left arm. It was glowing blue, and I stared at it in part because I had nothing

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else to look at and in part because it was fascinating and kind of scary. My left arm, from just the elbow to the end of the hand, hung there in the darkness, glowing blue, casting off actual light, a bright glare that only extended a little ways beyond the arm but was extremely bright. The arm was now kind of scaled looking, but not fish- or lizard-scales. Maybe not even scales, but there were shapes on it. It was like I was seeing the structure of the arm itself, maybe, a scaffold or grid on which the arm was framed and which held it up and made it up. Little octagon shapes covered the arm and hand and fingers, getting smaller near the end, and they slowly went from blue-white to blue-blue to blue-black and then the arm wasn't glowing anymore, it was just my regular old arm, hanging there in space. Well, not my regular old arm, but the arm I'd had for these couple of weeks and I'd come to think of it as mine. I then realized that I was there, wherever there was, and that, moreover, I wasn't sitting or standing on anything, but that I could move around as though I was. That was strange, too. I was able to stand up, but I couldn't feel anything under my feet, no floor or grass or tree branch or anything. I was able, then, to sit down, and I couldn't feel any kind of chair or ledge or anything to sit on. Then, when I stood up again, whatever I'd sat on was gone. I walked around. I didn't hear any footsteps or feel anything but I felt sure I was moving. "Hello?" I said. It didn't echo, but I did hear it.

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Nobody answered. I tried louder. "Hello!" I called. Again, no echo, but it at least sounded louder to me. I stared into the black and hugged myself. I had no idea what was going on and was starting to get a little scared. Then I had an idea. I tried telepathy. Hello? I thought. Nothing. I walked a little more and called again. "Anyone? Hello? Where am I?" Nothing again. I walked a little more and then I heard something, something kind of like a scream or yell happening in reverse, like if someone went eaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarhhgghrhrhhghghgh but it got recorded and then put in a jar and then let out backwards, hghghghhrhrhgghhraaaaaaaaaaaaaaae, behind me. I spun around and saw a tiny dot of blue light there, with the noise coming from it. Almost before I could react, the dot grew larger and larger and larger and the noise grew louder and louder and I saw dusty little blue motes swirling around and then spinning and combining faster and faster and then they made a translucent image, like a ghost or a faded view of a Read-Or unit, and then they got a little more solid but not quite, and then the thing was fully formed, a kind of spiritual outline of a person. A person collapsed to her hands and knees, naked and sobbing and heaving and kind of glowing a little, gasping and still screaming that backwards scream. I

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rushed over before even thinking about what I was doing and tried to help her, because it was a girl. But I reached her and tried to bend down and grab her and tell her she was okay, only I couldn't because when I got to her, I bent down and tried to get her shoulders, but my hands passed right through her. I tried to touch her head, and again, right through. I swiped my hand through her back -- with her, the poor girl, screaming and yelling the whole time in that backward shriek that was starting to scare me -- and it went right through. Then she looked up at me, this backward screaming ghost, and I fell over, right there in the darkness, because I couldn't believe who was looking at me.

It was Brigitte. I stared at her, and she stared back at me. “Rachel?” she asked. Her voice sounded kind of hollow and wispy. “Brigitte?” I whispered back. She reached up her hand to me, held it out. I stood there, trying to figure out which emotion I wanted to feel. In my mind – it’s a good thing that the telepathy didn’t work there, or I don’t think it worked, because I wasn’t feeling anything from her and I was never able to work it there in the blackness that I’d come to think of as The Void – in my mind, I saw her when I first noticed her, rushing past me to go to church, but then I saw the way she looked when I was standing in that hallway with Mr Damned Soul, Samson, and he was saying it was all a setup, and I felt betrayed, but then instantly, I remembered the way she looked when she was asleep at night in her bed those first few days, when I tried desperately not to go to sleep because I didn’t want to go back to Hell again, how she looked when she held me and told me I won’t let you go to sleep, as long as you can stay awake I’ll be here and then she’d kiss me.

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That bothered me for a second… Hell… I suddenly realized: I’d been sleeping the past few days, I’d gone to sleep in the woods with the Me, and not gone to Hell. Brigitte was waving her hand around and trying to touch me. “What’s wrong?” she asked. She was scared, I could tell. “What am I? Where am I?” “I don’t know,” I said, and she looked up at me again. “Oh, my God, Rachel, I’m so glad to have found you!” “Found me?” “Is it really you?” “Found me?” “Or are you one of those clones?” “What do you mean, found me?” “They’re trying to destroy them all. To save you, you know. It really is you, isn’t it? It has to be, or you’d be disintegrated, with the rest of them!” “Found me?” I said again, then “What do you mean, destroying all the clones?” Brigitte didn’t answer. She was looking down at her hands, kneeling and resting on them. She was not exactly even with my feet. I was standing, and felt like I was standing on solid ground even though everything around me was the same uniform shade of black. I didn’t feel like I was drifting or falling or floating. I felt like I was standing in a room that happened to be entirely black and dark except for us. But Brigitte was not kneeling on the same plane that I was standing. She was a little higher, her knees and hands resting on an invisible “floor” about my knee height, as though she was on a low table.

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I wondered, if I stepped up, would I be higher up, too? I tried it, as she started to cry, and was rewarded with exactly that: I was now “standing” on the same level as Brigitte, who suddenly collapsed down onto her arms and began crying. She didn’t pass through her own arms, I noticed: they were solid to her. I wondered what I should do, and couldn’t decide. I wanted to console her, after all: She was my lover and I still felt that, still felt the pull that I’d felt the moment I saw her. But she’d betrayed me. It had all been fake! She’d probably even lied about… “Brigitte,” I said quietly. She continued to sob quietly into her arms. “Brigitte,” I said again, and crouched down over her. “Are you pregnant?” She stopped crying for a second and said “I don’t know anymore,” and I didn’t know what to make of that. She looked up at me: “I was,” she said. “I was still pregnant and then those Valkyries killed me and now I’m here.”

It was Brigitte. I stared at her, and she stared back at me. “Rachel?” she asked. Her voice sounded kind of hollow and wispy. “Brigitte?” I whispered back. She reached up her hand to me, held it out. I stood there, trying to figure out which emotion I wanted to feel. In my mind – it’s a good thing that the telepathy didn’t work there, or I don’t think it worked, because I wasn’t feeling anything from her and I was never able to work it there in the blackness that I’d come to think of as The Void – in my mind, I saw her when I first noticed her, rushing past me to go to church, but then I saw the way she looked when I was standing in that hallway with Mr Damned Soul, Samson, and he was saying it was all a setup, and I felt betrayed, but then instantly, I remembered the way she looked when she was

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asleep at night in her bed those first few days, when I tried desperately not to go to sleep because I didn’t want to go back to Hell again, how she looked when she held me and told me I won’t let you go to sleep, as long as you can stay awake I’ll be here and then she’d kiss me. That bothered me for a second… Hell… I suddenly realized: I’d been sleeping the past few days, I’d gone to sleep in the woods with the Me, and not gone to Hell. Brigitte was waving her hand around and trying to touch me. “What’s wrong?” she asked. She was scared, I could tell. “What am I? Where am I?” “I don’t know,” I said, and she looked up at me again. “Oh, my God, Rachel, I’m so glad to have found you!” “Found me?” “Is it really you?” “Found me?” “Or are you one of those clones?” “What do you mean, found me?” “They’re trying to destroy them all. To save you, you know. It really is you, isn’t it? It has to be, or you’d be disintegrated, with the rest of them!” “Found me?” I said again, then “What do you mean, destroying all the clones?” Brigitte didn’t answer. She was looking down at her hands, kneeling and resting on them. She was not exactly even with my feet. I was standing, and felt like I was standing on solid ground even though everything around me was the same uniform shade of black. I didn’t feel like I was drifting or falling or floating. I felt like I was standing in a room that happened to be entirely black and dark except for us. But Brigitte was not kneeling on the same plane that I was standing. She

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was a little higher, her knees and hands resting on an invisible “floor” about my knee height, as though she was on a low table. I wondered, if I stepped up, would I be higher up, too? I tried it, as she started to cry, and was rewarded with exactly that: I was now “standing” on the same level as Brigitte, who suddenly collapsed down onto her arms and began crying. She didn’t pass through her own arms, I noticed: they were solid to her. I wondered what I should do, and couldn’t decide. I wanted to console her, after all: She was my lover and I still felt that, still felt the pull that I’d felt the moment I saw her. But she’d betrayed me. It had all been fake! She’d probably even lied about… “Brigitte,” I said quietly. She continued to sob quietly into her arms. “Brigitte,” I said again, and crouched down over her. “Are you pregnant?” She stopped crying for a second and said “I don’t know anymore,” and I didn’t know what to make of that. She looked up at me: “I was,” she said. “I was still pregnant and then those Valkyries killed me and now I’m here.” I inadvertently reached for her, but then stopped, unsure what to do. It didn’t matter, anyway, because I couldn’t have touched her. My hand went right through her and she didn’t notice my attempt to console her, or how I stopped it. I didn’t know what to say, and finally I said “Well, are you still pregnant?” She looked up at me, then, tears in her eyes, and I wanted to believe they were real tears, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t let myself believe that, and I couldn’t believe it, not yet. “I don’t know,” she said. She wiped her eyes, and I watched, fascinated at how she could touch herself but I couldn’t. Why was that? I wondered. She sat back on her legs and looked down at her belly, putting her hands on it. “I can’t tell,” she said. She felt around, pressing. I looked at her stomach, too, through the blouse she wore. It

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looked to me like it was rounded out, a little, maybe, but I couldn’t tell for sure through the cloth. I thought about asking her to take her shirt off, but then thought better of that because of how it would sound, and also because if I saw Brigitte naked, or even just in her bra, I might fall for her all over again and I wasn’t about to do that. I wasn’t even going to give her a chance to rope me in again. She lifted up the edge of her shirt, then, and I thought Oh, yeah, I guess I could’ve told her to do that, and as she did, I saw her belly button, and I remembered, just a flash, one of the few days we had before we were on the run. We’d been sitting on the edge of her bed. I’d just “woken up,” gotten back from Hell, I mean, and it had been a long one. It’d been the one where I’d met Bob and we’d been traveling for a long, long time, and I was really shaken up by how long it had felt and by all the things that I’d seen, things I don’t like to think about even now, things that were too scary and weird and awful. I was shaking as I sat there, on her bed, crying and shaking, and said “I don’t know why it happens to me. I don’t know why I can’t sleep. I don’t know why I have these things going on. I don’t even know what I am, or what I’m doing here. What’s wrong with me?” Brigitte had leaned over and put her arms around me, and had hugged me tight. I could almost feel her squeezing all the horror out of me, gently but firmly. She rested her pouty, plump lips on my collar bone, and had breathed against me. “I wish I could help you,” she’d whispered. “I wish I had a button that would just turn you off instead of you going to sleep and ending up in Hell. I wish I could just push your belly button and do that for you,” she’d said, and then she’d hugged me again, and walked her fingers down my arm, up my leg, and onto my stomach, which was bare. I’d been naked, sitting there. “Beep. Off,” she’d said, and pushed her finger into my belly button. I’d giggled, because I’m ticklish, something I’d only just realized at that moment. Until then, nobody had tickled me. “Beep. Off,” Brigitte said again, and poked her finger into my belly button again, and I’d giggled again, in spite of myself.

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It was working. I could feel the terror of the night-that-had-lasted-months fade away as she smiled at me and rubbed my shoulder and kept doing that: “Beep. Off. Beep. Off. Beep. Off.” Each time, she’d poked her finger into my belly button and wiggled it a little until I was laughing and squirming and trying to grab her hand, but not really, because I liked her touching me. “How would you like it if I did that to you?” I finally asked, and Brigitte had lifted up her shirt. “I’d love it,” she’d said, and I’d reached out my hand, cautiously, wondering what the trick was. She had just stared into my eyes, the whole time, a tiny little smile on her mouth, as I put my finger more and more towards her. I finally touched the fingernail against the outside of her tiny, cute little belly button, and was about to say Beep when she grabbed my hand and pushed it down between her knees, pinning it there. ”Gotcha!” she said, holding my hand and leaning forward to tickle me with both hands. “No fair!” I squealed and tried to pull back, but Brigitte’s thighs were strong and I couldn’t and she was tickling me all over, my ribs and stomach and armpits and back and breasts. As I rolled around and tried to get away from her, the covers got more and more rumpled and I couldn’t stop laughing and could barely breathe. I kept wanting to say Stop it but I couldn’t get my breath, and didn’t really want her to stop, anyway. She did stop, when we rolled off the bed and I landed on top of her, hard, but not too hard, because she barely said oof, and there were were, both naked, both sweaty and out-of-breath, and staring into each other’s eyes. She’d leaned her head up a little and kissed me, sweetly and softly on the lips. “Beep. On.” She’d said. I shook my head, now, in this black void, and tried to get rid of that memory. This was Brigitte, who’d broken my heart there in Albuquerque, and who’d kidnapped The Me and held her dangling up over the forest. I wanted to hate her. I didn’t.

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But I wanted to. Brigitte was now sitting, hugging her knees to her, and I tried to look at her stomach to see if she looked pregnant. I couldn’t tell. I knelt down in front of her, which was awkward because I was still on a different level, somehow, than her. I tried to move down and was able to do so. Wherever I stood, or knelt, it felt solid t me, but when I didn’t want it to, it wasn’t. It would have been neat, I suppose, if I wasn’t so sick of things being neat and interesting and busy. I wanted to just lie down. Brigitte rocked back and forth a little. “Rachel, where are we?” she asked. “I don’t know,” I said, and then said, stupidly: “Don’t you know?” She shook her head and then smiled a bit and said “That’s why I asked you.” I was stumped. Since I’d met her, Brigitte had seemed to know more about what was going on and what to do than I had. Those few days with her had been not only happy, and relaxing, but also easier as she always had an idea of how to proceed. Not surprising, I told myself, and tried to be mad at her again. I still wasn’t, though. I was hurt but not mad and I wanted to be mad at her because hurt felt too bad and was going to make me cry and I wasn’t going to cry in front of her. “Do you think you’re still pregnant?” I asked. I don’t know why I couldn’t get past that. I hadn’t fully absorbed that Brigitte was pregnant before Samson had told me the full story, and then I hadn’t had much time to think about it. Now, though, it seemed to be weighing more heavily on me and I couldn’t decide if it was because I didn’t want to think about everything else or because I had suddenly realized that she had been pregnant and then had lost it and I needed to work through all of that. “Wait a minute,” I said, then, and looked her in the eye. “How could you have been pregnant, anyway?” She looked up at me and pressed her hands against her stomach. “What?” she asked. “You never explained that to me, back when…” I tried to recalculate in my head how long it’d been since we’d left the Church and she’d told me she was pregnant. A week? A

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year? I didn’t know anymore. “Back when you told me you were pregnant. We didn’t get to talk about it, but how can that be?” “Rachel, don’t be like that. Don’t accuse me.” “Accuse you? Of what?” She turned her head away. “I know that you believe what Samson told you and I know that you don’t trust me and all that but don’t accuse me of cheating on you. And if you’re going to accuse me of that don’t play dumb, just come out and say it.” “Say what?” “That you think I cheated on you.” I exhaled and then stood up and waved my arms around. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” I yelled. “I’m not saying you cheated on me! I’m saying that I don’t even know how you can be pregnant at all because while I don’t know a whole lot and I’ve only been alive, really, for like…” I tried to count again and gave up, “For like a not-long time and I don’t know if I was alive before that but I don’t remember any of it all I remember is meeting you and we slept together and you’re saying you’re pregnant but we’re both women” “I know that,” Brigitte mumbled but I ignored her. “… and how can two women be pregnant? So what’s going on with that? You tell me. ‘Cause I don’t know what’s going on and I don’t trust you at all and I don’t think you were ever pregnant. You probably just said that to get me to take you along but I’d have taken you along anyway because I loved you, only I didn’t know you didn’t love me, did I? So I guess if I’d known that I wouldn’t have taken you along, and I wouldn’t have slept with you and I wouldn’t have been so sad when you went to Hell and I wouldn’t have felt bad and I wouldn’t be marching around all these stupid worlds and getting attacked and dragged around by giant birds and stuff, and during all that I wouldn’t have been just breaking my stupid heart that I loved you and you didn’t love me back and it was all a trick, and I wouldn’t have worried about some stupid baby that you made up.”

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I ran out of steam, then, and sat down in the void, sitting now below her level and looking up at her and kind of flopped. I would have been breathing heavy, I supposed, but I didn’t breath at all there. I felt sweaty, though, and drained. I wanted to say a lot more but I didn’t think anything else would make any sense. “Wow,” Brigitte mumbled. “I forgot. I forgot how new you were. And that you don’t know all this.” She got up on her knees then and reached for my hand. I pulled it away from her and looked away. She talked more: “I don’t know how to tell you. I know that…” she stopped, and started again. “I know that you think it was all a setup, that I… was told to love you. And I was.” I felt tears in my eyes. “But that doesn’t mean I didn’t love you, Rachel. I was told to make you fall in love with me, sure, and it was planned that way. From the moment they knew you were heading south, when Doc checked in.” “Doc?” I interrupted. “Yes, Doc. I thought they told you. About the octopi, and what their real job was, keeping an eye on the other two groups and monitoring the general population, but above all, finding you.” “Me?” “They didn’t tell you anything, did they?” I shook my head and sniffled. “I don’t even know who they are,” I said, softly. “Who is supposed to be telling me things?” “Everyone,” I guess. I saw a flash of something out of the corner of my eye and looked. Brigitte had tried to put her hand on me and it had gone through my knee. She sat in front of me, on my level now, and looked at me. “Everyone should be telling you. But mostly me,” she said. “I suppose I owe you a lot of explanations.”

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“You do?” I said, trying to stop crying. “Yeah,” Brigitte said. “Want me to start at the beginning?” “Do we have time?” I asked. Brigitte motioned around. “I bet we do.” I nodded. “I’ll tell you everything I know,” she said. “But I want you to know something, first.” “What is it?” I asked. Brigitte leaned in and her face, kind of translucent was right in front of me. “I really was… maybe am… pregnant, and it really was, or is, your baby. Our baby. And I did that because I was told to do it, but I also did it because I was happy to do it, because Rachel, I fell in love with you the moment I saw you.” “At the diner?” I asked. “No,” she said. “A couple days earlier in your, shower.” "In my shower?" I asked. I thought back to that day when I'd woken up. I remembered going home and showering, kind of in a daze, not really sure what was going on or who I was, just going through the motions automatically. I'd realized, suddenly, that my body wasn't my own, and "Doc," I said. Brigitte nodded. A voice ran through my head: Mr. Lockhart invented Octopi. Didn’t you, Mr. Lockhart, I heard Steve saying. “Brigitte's dad invented the octopus,” and Steve had been happy. "Explain," I said. I crossed my arms and sat down, forgetting that here in this space that meant that I would sit right where I was. I was about two feet above her. I decided heck

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with it and stayed there. She looked up at me and began talking, and I had to focus because I was able to see down her shirt. Her breasts were a little bit translucent, sort of gauzy, but still firm and in my memory I could still feel my tongue running down one side of them and up the other. I shook my head and listened. "Daddy invented the octopi originally for the military. They were supposed to serve as spies and tiny little weapons, things that soldiers could send into battle with them, that could provide them additional looks and also prevent them from sneak attacks. Originally each soldier was assigned two octopi, one that would hover behind him and the other that would be sent out on missions and report back through their helmets, which were like really really high level Read-Or units." She paused. "Daddy invented those, too. I don't know if you know that. We're really rich. And not just rich. Daddy's the only individual among the Big Three. The other two are corporations, but Daddy's just one man and he's on equal footing with them." "Big Three?" I asked. I was wracking my brain, my memories. I must have heard of this, hadn't I? I'd lived, according to Leonya, recently. So I must have known about stuff like the Big Three. "I'm not surprised you don't know. Most people don't." I felt better, until Brigitte said, "Especially you, though. You were probably never much for serious topics like world governance." I must have looked upset or something because when she looked up she said "I don't mean that as an insult. I'm not... I don't know how to say... You know I love you. I just mean that as a rock star you probably had other things going on and didn't follow world politics too closely."

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I felt a kind of crackling at the back of my neck and tried to focus on what Brigitte was saying. "The Big Three are the world powers now. They're businesses, two corporations and Daddy, who's like a corporation but he's not 'cause he's just one guy. They've been running things for about 50 or 60 or 70 years now. But nobody knows because they just take turns pretending to be the government. They split it up on some schedule and with some costs, running the world as regular governments, cities and towns and countries and that stuff, while behind the scenes they've been fighting to take over the world. But things really changed about 20 years ago." Brigitte took a deep breath. I really felt the hair standing up on my neck and my arms and I felt sort of queasy. I also thought I heard something. "That's when God tried to come back," Brigitte said. "It was supposed to be Armageddon. God came back from Heaven, opened up the big Gate and just came out, heading down to Earth to end the world, and maybe all the worlds, who knows, but he came roaring out on a chariot of fire, I saw it on a Read-Or unit, there were people there taping it, or maybe octopi... I forgot, I'm supposed to be telling you about the octopi and how I saw you. See the octopi were... I'm getting distracted." She took another deep breath and I tried not to get distracted by the view of her boobs almost pushing out of her bra. "I don't get disintegrated every day," she said. I thought I saw a flash of light off in the distance, and then another one. I tried to look and focus on them, little pinpricks, but I couldn't, really, they were too far away and Brigitte was talking again.

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"Where was I? Oh, yeah, God. God came down from Heaven, which is just another dimension, and he was going to end the world and have it be Armageddon, but somehow the Big 3 knew about it, and one of them, the ones we call the Blockers now, were ready for it. There's a tape of it. They taped themselves fighting God, can you believe it? So when God came out of Heaven and the Gate was open, they were ready and waiting and an army of revenants was brought in. They swung the Gate closed almost immediately, before almost any angels could follow God. They closed it off and then they blocked it. That's why we've started calling them the Blockers. They chained it up and locked it off, using some of Daddy's stuff, and kept God from coming back to Heaven." There were definitely more flashes of light around me, more and more popping up, in the distance. I was having a hard time following what Brigitte was saying. "They didn't know, though, that closing the Gate would cut off most of God's power. This was all before I was born, of course. Daddy was telling me about it... before he died," she struggled with that last sentence, and I suddenly realized what was going on around us. "Brigitte," I said. She didn't listen and went on talking "It cut off most of God's power and most of his memory and God didn't remember who He was anymore, or what He was doing. He didn't have the power to end the world, either. He came down to Earth and just had... amnesia, I guess. The Big 3 found him right away, of course. They would have been aware of him, especially since the Blockers knew what was going on anyway. The one that got to him first is the one we call God, Inc., the company that used to be an entertainment company, mostly... you worked for them..." "Brigitte," I'd said again, but her mention of me working for someone pulled me back to

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her. "I did?" I asked. More flashes of light all around us, now like flashbulbs and some of them were nearer to me. I could see shapes in them, flickering and glowing. Woman shapes. Brigitte noticed them now, too. She stopped talking as one flickered into existence not too far away from us, maybe twenty feet. It hovered and glowed and there was a brief scream that ended almost immediately as a woman took shape, right before our eyes. She had her arms up over her head, in a defensive pose that I recognized as trying to ward off something, probably a disintegrator ray. As we looked, she dropped her arms and stood there, motionless, the same way all the others were. It was Naked Girl.

Naked Girl wasn't the only zombie appearing there in the Void. The other blips and blurs and patches of light I could see were also some of my army, the army that had followed me from Hell into Valhalla. But Naked Girl was the closest to us, only about 20 feet away. "Naked Girl!" I said. Brigitte sat up straighter and said "Who?"

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I pointed to her. "It's her. It's Naked Girl." Brigitte said: "Who's she," and I was stumped. "She's... um..." how to explain? I wondered. "She's a girl that... well, when I was in Hell, there was this army. Anyway," I was stumbling around and then got distracted because Naked Girl came walking towards me. "Rachel!" she said. Her voice was lovely, and soft, and panicked just a little. It was also startling, since I'd never heard her speak before. None of the Army had ever spoken before. I hadn't known they could speak. "Um," I said, about as intelligently as I could. "Rachel! We found you! Or one of you! Why are we here, though?" she asked, as she came over to me. She looked around the blackness. Others of the points of light and blurry women were moving towards us, too. Naked Girl was already there and she came right up to me and hugged me. I stepped back a little and looked at her, then at Brigitte. "I'm sorry," Naked Girl said. "I apologize. That was too familiar! We don't even really know each other but it feels like we do. I never got to talk to you before! I can't talk anywhere but here and I don't know why I can talk here but I can, and it's amazing because there's so much I wanted to say to you and I was always trying to talk to you but I just couldn't, do you know what that's like? No, you don't, I'm sure, because you can talk and I wanted to talk to you and tell you you were doing really good and also that I wanted to help you and we're all glad to help you," she motioned around to the other girls, who were nodding, although none of them had talked, yet, probably because they couldn't get a word in edgewise as Naked Girl went on: "Why wouldn't we want to help you, you know? I mean, you're not just our Queen but you're probably a really nice

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person anyway and you can set us free." "Free?" I interrupted. I looked at Brigitte, who looked like she wanted to say something but couldn't before Naked Girl went on again: "Free! We don't mind, well, I don't, and I'm sure nobody else does, mind fighting for you even if it means that sometimes we're going to get hurt or eaten by demons or disintegrated because it really always just sends us back to Hell only this time it didn't for some reason we ended up here which is good because I can talk here and that's not a bad thing, that's a good thing but that's not even the point, the point is that we don't mind fighting for you because we love you and everyone will say that's just because of how we were made, oh, God, how we were made, I can still remember it and that trapped feeling and that man, OhmyGod he made me feel so sick and scared but we were made and we can't help that and maybe it's for the best but now we're willing to fight for you, we just don't want to be used like he used us and those people used us and they were going to use us. We don't want to be sex slaves and soldiers anymore and you can help us." She stopped. It was silent in the Void and they were all looking at me. Naked Girl smiled and I saw a hint of tears in her eyes. They were waiting for me to talk. I knew I had to say something to them. I opened my mouth, and closed it again. Then opened it again, and said: "Um." Naked Girl smiled at me. So did the rest. "I... okay." I said.

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They just kept looking at me. "I'll help you?" I said, trying not to make it sound so much like a question. They smiled more, and Naked Girl said "You will? Because we'll help you, we really will. That's something we all agree on, we're behind you 100%, we're ready to help and all we ask is that you tell us what to do and that you make sure that no matter what we're not going to be sex slaves anymore, that we're not going to be servants anymore, that we're going to be with you and help you and not sent back to that man or the people who bought us or the people who used us, ever. We don't mind fighting, like I said, we don't mind dying, I don't even think we can really die but we don't want to go back. We just want to be with you." "Okay," I said. "Okay. I'll do what we need to do. We'll... um... we'll fight and make sure that you're with me and that at the end of all of this, you're freed." They began to cheer. They rushed me and Naked Girl hugged me again. The others did, too, piling in until we were a big group of people, naked lesbian zombies all hugging each other and by proxy hugging me and yelling and cheering. There were probably at least 100 by that time, with more flickering into existence all the time. "Hooray for Rachel!" Naked Girl yelled. "She's going to free us!" There was another cheer and another crushing press of hugging into me. That was interrupted by a loud Boom! sound. I looked up to see Brigitte standing over us, with Doc next to her. The Boom! had come from Doc, and he was glowing brighter than I'd ever seen him glow. The light he cast shone out like a star, making Brigitte into just a silhouette and a hazy outline, but still a ghostly one. She'd climbed up above us, somehow, too, and the spectacle, along with the Boom! had shut everyone up. It was

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silent, and we stared up at Brigitte towering over my throng as she quietly said: "No, she's not."

As the Boom! died away, we all looked at Brigitte, standing on ether or something above us, and holding a gun. Brigitte said again: "No, she's not." There was silence, all around. Brigitte continued: "She's not going to free anyone. She's going to lead you where I tell her to lead you, and you're all going to listen to me." Rumblings around me, and I backed a little away from Brigitte. "Why are you doing this?" I asked her. She looked down at me. "You don't understand, Rachel. You've never understood. I love you. I really, really do, more than I ever could have loved anyone, but you don't know even one-one-billionth about what's going on." There were more flickers behind her as other lesbian zombies were brought into this Void. Brigitte looked back at them, realized that the crowd had grown substantially. "Think about it," she went on. "Look at the level of effort being put into this. Look at the Valkyries, and Samson, and the flying saucer invasion, and the demons. Do you really think you can just walk away from this and free these... women, sort of... and go on with your life?" I paused, then said, quietly, "Well, yeah. I had thought that, Brigitte."

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She shook her head. "You can't." I clenched up my fists, and then at the top of my lungs, shrieked. "Arrrrrgggggghhhhh!" I arched my back and held my arms out and stared at what I assumed was up because we were all standing in the same orientation, and just let out my frustrations. It went on for a long time. When I got done, I looked around. My throat felt a little sore, my chest was heaving and I had a little sweat on my forehead, but I felt a little looser. The lesbian zombies around me had backed up a little. Brigitte had the gun still pointed, a little to my right. At Naked Girl, I realized. "Why not?" I demanded, after a few more seconds of quiet. "Why not, Brigitte? Why do I have to do anything? Why do I have to go along with this? Why does everyone in the entire world... worlds... dimensions, whatever... think that they can tell me what to do and they can just order me around and put this whole burden on me and build giant statues of me and make clones of me and worship me or whatever and then pull a gun on me and point it at me and tell me that I'm not going to do something I want to do, or don't want to do, or... I don't know. Why, Brigitte? And why, while I'm at it, should I even listen to you? You're the liar, after all. You're the one who claimed that you loved me and claimed that you were sticking by me out of love and probably claimed that you were pregnant and how do I know you weren't lying about that, too, either?" I was rambling and didn't care. "I really thought I loved you, too, Brigitte, and I probably still do but I don't care anymore. I've been remembering the times we spent together, those short times, and they were good but maybe they didn't mean anything to you, because you were lying to me, weren't you? You were just told to get me to do what you wanted me to do, you and I guess your dad and his company, so you said whatever you had to to get me to do that, and you told me you loved me and you made me feel good" God, did you EVER make me feel good, I wanted to say, but I didn't, "... and now you're pointing a gun at me and still trying to manipulate me into doing whatever it is you want

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me to do and I don't even know what that is! So why should I care what you do?" I turned around and started walking away, into the crowd of lesbian zombies, who parted and let me through, staring at me in admiration. The throng of naked women -- all of them very pretty and if I didn't look closely I wouldn't see that they were all, like me, assembled from parts of other women and themselves -- opened up like a wave before me and closed up after me. "Come on, lesbian zombie army," I said. "We're leaving." I continued walking as they filed in behind me. I was bluffing, but I hoped that Brigitte didn't know it. I had no idea how to get out of this void, no idea where to go or what to do. I didn't even know how to free the lesbian zombies. I just knew I was tired of this and didn't want to be bossed around anymore or told what to do. I missed The Me, suddenly, and wished that I had Doc or her or someone, Ivanka, maybe, to help me and tell me what to do. But I didn't. I was on my own. "Wait!" Brigitte yelled. I turned around. There were about 200 lesbian zombies between me and her, now, and more were filling in. There were still occasional flickers here and there of new ones arriving. I was about a hundred yards from Brigitte. "What?" I said quietly. My voice carried just fine. The lesbian zombie army turned, too, and looked at her. "You can't leave," Brigitte said. The lesbian zombie army looked back at me. "Yes, I can," I bluffed. I didn't know how I would get out of here, but I knew I could walk away from Brigitte, and leave her behind, at least, and if that's what I had to do,

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well, then, that's waht I'd do. "No, you can't," Brigitte said, and she didn't sound like she was pleading with me. She sounded like she was ordering me, and that made me mad, all over again. "You can't tell me what to do, Brigitte. It doesn't work that way anymore. I'm in charge of my life now, and I can leave if I want." I was about to turn again, when Brigitte said, quietly: "No, you can't." Then she shot me. I dropped like a sack of potatoes as soon as Brigitte fired the gun. It made a hissing/popping sound this time, not a Boom! like before, but that didn't matter because she had it pointed at me, it hissed and popped and I felt a scorching blast of heat mash into me. I was able to actually look down and see my chest as I felt the heat. In less time than it takes to blink, a thick blue beam, one that looked like the flying saucers' beams, hitting my chest. Then a blue kind of flame exploded out and the ray blasted through me, tearing a hole into me as I shrieked and felt my body fall before my consciousness faded and I couldn't feel anything. That was when things got weirder. I felt that pain, worse pain than I could imagine on a lot of levels -- how would you like to have your lover burn a hole in your chest with a ray gun? -- and I felt my body scorching and I felt me starting to drop, and then... ... and then I wasn't there anymore. Then I was everywhere, all at once.

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I saw, all at once, all kinds of things. It wasn't like seeing them as pictures flipping past one another, or like seeing them in a Vid or anything like that. Instead, the scenes were all just there, in my mind, overlapping but each distinct and I gathered up all the details of them in that one flash: Ivanka lying on her back, next to a grounded flying saucer, her eyes closed and bleeding, with soldiers standing over her. An army of Valkyries trapped in a blue, gummy substance and struggling to move. Fuzzy Bird standing next to a small wooden door. Tanks lining up against a wall of giant demons, a crowd of angry people yelling and charging behind the tanks as the demons retreated. Samson, being by the arm by a Valkyrie in some sunny warm place. A gate, chained shut. A basement room full of body parts and above them a glittering, shiny portrait of me. A room I recognized. "NOOOOOOOO!" I screamed, and then I felt a hand on my head and looked up to see Naked Girl kneeling over me, her face full of concern. "Rachel! It didn't kill you!" she said. She hugged me and I felt more hands and arms trying to get in and hug me. "Of course it didn't!" Brigitte's voice came over the hugs and murmurs from my Army. "That was my point!"

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"Point?" I said, moving Naked Girl off of me. "Point? POINT!? You shot me to make a point?" "Yes," Brigitte said. "And the point is, you can't leave." I was looking down at my chest, seeing that the hole was gone. I could still feel it, though, the pain so strong that the memory of it was just as vivid, almost, as the actual blast had been. "What do you mean?" I asked cautiously. The Army kept around me, but Brigitte was up higher in the nothingness, so I could still see her. She still looked kind of ghostly. But the ray gun hadn't been ghostly at all. "I mean that we might be trapped here, because all the places we could go are blocked off." "What?" Brigitte sighed. "We're dead, Rachel," she said, simply. "Dead as can be. We've been killed, and instead of our souls going to Hell or Heaven, they've come here, because Heaven and Hell are blocked off."

To my credit, I'm getting better at this. I didn't, as you'd expect, say "Dead?" in a confused voice after Brigitte talked. Instead, I said this: "Get her, Army!"

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The Lesbian Zombies surrounding me all turned as one and rushed at Brigitte, who held up the gun and began firing at them. I saw a couple of them get hit by the same ray I had, and they yelled or screamed and dropped, distintegrating in a bluish swirl of flame, but the rest, as I'd expected, made it to her. Then, as I'd expected, too, they passed right through her: Brigitte was still ghostly here, still not fully formed. She spun as they passed through her and kept turning around and trying to grab her, shooting at them. I saw, in a few seconds, that she'd realized her advantage. She calmed down as they kept not being able to grab her, and she stopped shooting at them. She stopped whirling around and trying to fight them and put the gun down at her side as she turned back to me. Naked Girl was right up next to her as Brigitte did that. "Naked Girl! Grab the gun!" I yelled. Brigitte started, and turned to her left. Naked Girl had been on her right though, and as Brigitte spun, Naked Girl leaped right through her and got both hands on the gun -- and was able to grab it! I watched this and wondered how I'd known she could do that, that it would work. I didn't have it quite pieced together as Naked Girl's dive ended and she came up, holding the gun on Brigitte and looking to me for directions. "What now, Rachel?" she asked me. I looked at Brigitte, who stood there, hands at her sides, looking from me to the gun. She looked nervous.

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"It'll work on you, won't it?" I asked her. Brigitte looked back at me, her eyes wide. "Don't let her shoot me, Rachel." "So it WILL work on you?" In looking back, that was, I suppose, how I knew the lesbians could get the gun: It was able to shoot me, and shoot them, even though none of us could touch Brigitte. But I hadn't thought it through right then. I'd just acted on my gut feeling. "Back away, Naked Girl," I said, but she already was doing that and, The Army was getting better at things, I thought. I hoped. Naked Girl was far enough away that Brigitte couldn't attack her but close enough to still have a really good shot at Brigitte if she tried anything. I hadn't taken my eyes off Brigitte yet and said, now: "Why will it work on you, too?" Brigitte had her hands at her sides, still. Now, she turned her palms to me. "Rachel, you've got to listen to me." "You're not dead, are you?" I asked her. "Rachel, we don't have much time," she said, not answering my question. "If you're not dead, then you've got a way out of here," I said, following up on my own thoughts. "You got here and you can get back out. That's why I can't touch you. I don't know why we can touch these guns but I can't touch you because you're not here, not in the same way I am. I am the one who's dead, right? Me and the Army. We're all dead but you're not. You came here after me, to kill me, didn't you."

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"I never meant to harm you." "Save it, Brigitte. Tell me how we get out of here." She stood there, silently, head down for a second. I saw her bite her lip a little and then she looked up with tears in her eyes. "Don't be like that, Rachel. Don't..." but I cut her off. "I saw you bite your lip to make yourself cry," I said. "Don't try to trick me. Just tell me how we leave." "I didn't bite my lip to make myself cry. I am crying. Because you won't listen to me. You used to listen to me and now that stupid Samson messed it all up and you think that I don't love you but I do. Why do you think I abandoned the attack and came here? To hurt you? I didn't. Not that way." I rubbed my chest where she'd burned a hole in me, briefly killing me again. "You have a funny way of not hurting me, Brigitte." But inside I was doubting again. Abandoned the attack? Brigitte walked a little towards me, and several of the Lesbians jumped to move between me and her. She walked right through them. "Stop!" Naked Girl said, and moved around so Brigitte could see her. And the gun. Brigitte stopped. "I did, Rachel. I can see you thinking and I know how you think because I love you. You may not believe that. But you want to believe it, and you can believe it. I love you and I love you more than you would ever ever know. And because of that I can tell what you're thinking even without Sharing. I can read it in you. Who else could ever do that?

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Not the Other You that you were fooling around with in the woods. Not any of them." She swept her arm, indicating the Army. "Not the Valkyries. Me. I know you and I love you." Her eyes were wet with tears now, her mouth pouty, her hands down at her sides again and her palms facing out, towards me. She had one foot slightly forward. Her skirt fell away from her leg and I saw her smooth, pale thigh. "Don't," I said. I said it softly. "I don't know who to trust anymore," I confessed, then, staring into her eyes. "But I don't think you're at the top of the list of candidates." "I should be," she said. "Rachel, yes, it's true. I was told to love you and I did it because I wanted to help my father and I wanted to help his cause. We're trying to do something good and decent. And it's important. We're trying to avoid Armageddon, Rachel. Armageddon. Do you know what happens if the others win? The Blockers want to keep the Gate closed. You know what that means, don't you? It means that nobody goes to Heaven. Remember all those people in Hell? The ones that shouldn't have been there? Didn't you wonder why they were in Hell? It's because Heaven's been closed, and closed for a long time, Rachel. The Gate's blocked and nobody gets in or out. Not even God, Rachel. And certainly not souls. Good people have been dying for a long time and their souls don't make the transition over to Heaven the way things are supposed to work." She sighed. "I'm going to try to explain it to you. You're certainly entitled to it. "There are two central dimensions, Rachel," Brigitte went on. "Heaven, where each dimension started, and Hell. God created each of the dimensions, and has been doing that for a long time. That's how we got to 73 dimensions -- after Earth's dimension he went on and on, creating the Trandukans who live on Mountains and never descend into the Shadow Realms of the Valleys, creating the Iotans, who can transfer between energy and matter freely and live in a dimension so vast that the maps generally show it as surrounding all the others, creating the Schrodinger Cats who exist simultaneously in all dimensions at once, and more. You can't even imagine how many there are. I've seen lots of them. Nobody's seen all of them. Except God. And maybe Samson."

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I felt a twinge of jealousy when she mentioned how she'd seen lots of dimensions, and then I got angry when she mentioned Samson. Angry and a little bit worried. Was Samson way more important than I thought? Brigitte went on: "But what they all have in common is that under the right circumstances, when we change our corporeal forms -- when we die -- our souls, the essence, the energy that makes us up, goes to one of the two central dimensions. We end up in Heaven, or we get diverted to Hell, which God created to hold the people He didn't want in Heaven, the ones who didn't live up to his expectations. And that worked for a long time, until the Blockers blocked the Gate and barred off Heaven and all the souls started going to Hell. "They did that, Rachel, because they wanted to avoid Armageddon. That's what they said. People, certain people, people like my Dad and Samson and some others, knew that Armageddon was coming. They knew it for a long time, that the 73 dimensions were going to crash into one another and be collapsed and that life as we know it would end. That scared a lot of people, including people like Samson and including people like The Blockers. Everyone put their own plans in motion to deal with it, including my dad and including the Blockers. But nobody knew about the Blockers, and they moved fast. When God opened the Gates of Heaven and was ready to come roaring out with the hordes of Angels and soldiers and things we couldn't even imagine, he was first. "It must have been something to see: God storming out of Heaven, past the Giant Pearly Gates, riding a Chariot made of Gold burning inside with the light of a millions stars, led by a train of winged horses built from thunderclouds, snorting lighting, God himself forty feet tall and wearing his Suit of Armor, at the head of a might heavenly host that would go out and corral evil and push the dimensions together, to begin again the process of creation from scratch.

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"And just as the Chariot cleared the Gate, the Blockers leapt into action and slammed it shut. They chained it closed and blocked it off and cut off the Host of Heaven and God's powers, and God fell out of the Chariot, falling and falling and falling to the outermost of the dimensions. He ended up in Blue -- the dimension the flying saucers came from, filled with tiny aliens who never knew what they'd found when they came across the naked, lost man wandering on the soft, springy turf of their planet. Seriously, the whole planet is like a trampoline. "Since then, Rachel, the Gates of Heaven have been locked up, for generations, as God has made his way closer and closer to Heaven, as the major groups involved have fought for control and hatched schemes to further their own goals. The Blockers have been tough. They've kept the Gate closed and everything we've tried has been unable to open it up or break their chains. "We thought we were winning for a while. We had God on our side. The Bluians brought Him to us when my father made an expedition there, and Daddy recognized who He was and what this all meant, especially since he'd been aware that Armageddon was coming. Daddy needed more time..." she paused. "And then Samson's group found Him. God, Inc., they call themselves. They've had Him for a long time. The battle they won him in nearly destroyed dimension 47, although it wasn't much to begin with and nobody's really sad that there was so much harm to it. Except, I guess, the people who lived there. They ended up in Hell, I suppose, but Hell wouldn't be much worse than Dimension 47, what with all the inverted gravity they'd ended up with, and that one river of acid..." She shuddered. "They want to bring about Armageddon," Brigitte went on, after a moment. "God, Inc. Samson's group. They want to get God back to Heaven so he can cast off the chains on the Gate and finish what he started, so long ago: End the universe, crash the dimensions, and start over.

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"That's where you come in," Brigitte said. She opened her arms a little wider. Naked Girl pointed the gun at her. Brigitte just looked at me. She said "You're the secret weapon Daddy needed time for." "So the Blockers want God to stay trapped here," I said. "And Samson's group wants to put him back?" Brigitte nodded. "And Reverend Tommy?" I asked. Brigitte shrugged. "I don't know what his deal is," she said. She held her hands up to me, beckoning. "But it doesn't matter. I'm being honest with you. I've told you it all and I do love you. I love you more than anything. It's not just that we need your help. It's that I need you. That's why I told you everything." I stood there and stared into her eyes. Something was bugging me, and I needed a second to work it out. Brigitte smiled at me just as I did figure it out. "Not everything," I said. "You haven't told me everything, yet." "I have," she said. "I'm serious, Rachel." "No, you haven't," I said to her. "There's one thing missing. What's your plan, Brigitte?" "What?" she asked. "You said what the Blockers want. And what Samson, God, Inc., wants. But you didn't say what your side is going to do. So what's your plan?"

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Brigitte leaped at me and grabbed at me around the waist. Her arms and body were still insubstantial and didn't catch hold, but her leap was excellent and she stood next to me holding me like that, only slightly overlapping. "Army! Grab me!" I yelled. "I've got her!" Brigitte yelled. "Pull me back!" I felt a hand grab at my arm and another hand grab at my foot and one touch my hair; and, I felt a wrenching tug and a disorienting spin, and then everything went all colors and I thought my head exploded. I got jerked forward and at the same time as that happened, I felt a bunch of hands grabbing at my legs and waist and feet, grabbing and tugging and pulling. My body felt like it was stretching. All around us were flashing images and floating colors and stars of light exploding. I couldn't really concentrate, but it seemed as though we were spinning and twisting and sliding around and outside a series of globes, or circles, or something, clear little glassenclosures that I thought had stuff inside them but I couldn't quite tell because the elaborate and confusing light show that I was suffering through made it difficult to concentrate. And I do mean suffering. The lights were flashing and popping and twirling all around me, but more than that: they were physically affecting me. They were pinching and pulling me, somehow, and I didn't understand that, because I knew it was light, but it was more than light, too, and even as it pulled at me and stretched me out I could smell it, and taste it, too.

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Have you ever smelt ultraviolet? I have. I was getting pulled back, and on, too, and heard screaming and yelling but off in a distance, ahead of me, behind Brigitte, who still had me by the waist and whose face, as it turns out, was right next to mine, but distorted. She was more translucent and her face was elongating, a bit. "TELL THEM TO LET GO" Brigitte managed to say to me, her voice strained and warped by the colors. I looked back, somehow doing that without turning my head, or even my eyes; I just sort of turned my awareness, and saw all up and down my legs, hands and arms, and I could see glimpses of heads, legs, breasts, shoulders, knees. I also saw eyes, peering at me anxiously as the women those eyes were in clung on to me for dear life. I turned back to Brigitte: "No," I said, as firmly as I could. Her eyes met mine. Her mouth set. "You're going to kill us," she said. "You're making this more difficult than it has to be." That was quite a mouthful, under the circumstances, and she closed her eyes as the spheres whipped by us, and we shot through a zone of pure violet, then lighter purplish. I could see the purple growing lighter, and feel things getting heavier, and more solid. I realized that, as it did, I could feel my arms and legs and all those hands, and Brigitte's arms around me... ... which I liked, and didn't like, because I'd wanted her arms around me for so long now, but then once they were I couldn't get away from thinking about how she'd used me, and

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even shot me, so it didn't feel that great anymore, only, and this confused me, it still felt really good, and for a second, I wanted to just close my eyes and have Brigitte hold me again, and try to forget all the stuff that had happened in between the last time she did that, and this time... But then we jerked to a stop and I felt all this gooey, gummy, hard-to-move-in kind of substance around me. I was suspended there, almost face-to-face with Brigitte, with the hands and arms still on my leg, but I couldn't really move at all. Everything was blue, sky blue, a light, inviting color that would have been very pleasant if I hadn't been suspended in it like something trapped in gelatin. I couldn't see very far through it; it was kind of see-through but only close-up, so I couldn't see much more than a foot or two beyond me.

Brigitte's nose was actually touching mine, now, side-by-side. Her head was slightly turned to her left, so that her lips were just off-center with mine. When she spoke, it was almost like when we used to whisper just before we kissed. "Great," she said. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye, turning her head slowly in the whatever-it-was-we-were-caught-in. "I told you to have them let go," she said, but she didn't say it unkindly. Her hand patted me on the shoulder, where it was pressed against me. "Now, we might be trapped here." "Where's here?" I asked, my own lips moving slowly. I almost -- almost-- felt them brush up against hers. Brigitte looked back and forth. "I'm pretty sure," she said "That we're just outside of Valhalla. We were supposed to be pulled back to that dimension by our own Grabber. But it must have been too much weight." She looked down, then, briefly, and then back at me.

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"I'm not going to leave them behind," I said. I wanted to say and I'm not going to help you, but I couldn't. Her skin was so soft, her hands on my back so nice... "We could have done something about that. I know why you don't trust me," she said. "And I'm sorry it all came out like that. But you've got to start believing me again." Her hand rubbed my shoulder a little, encouragingly. But I didn't want to cave in, yet. I could still feel it, a little, where she'd shot me, and even though I don't feel pain, I feel things. And, more than that, I can see, and I remembered her face as she'd shot me. She hadn't looked sad or sorry at all. I didn't know what to believe. I didn't know what to think. My mind was all racing and thoughts were running through it as the Lesbian Zombies clutching my legs began squirming around, trying to free themselves from the goop and as Brigitte rubbed my back a little, moving her arm down a little more, and as she turned her head just slightly so that I could feel her warm breath on my own lips. My thoughts were jumbled and didn't seem to be my own. I'm coming...I thought, or did I? I wasn't sure. It didn't seem like me. I'm coming... I thought again, and that made me start up a little (as much as I could, in that containing gel), because it wasn't my thought. It wasn't me at all. I'm coming... Rachel... I'll be there soon. I recognized the thought, the way of thinking. "Me!" I yelled, surprised. "It's ME!" Brigitte's eyes narrowed.

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"It's who?" Brigitte asked. Her lips were still right next to mine, but the way she breathed had changed. I stared into her eyes, our eyelashes almost touching. "It's Me," I told her, again, and tried to pull back myself a little as Brigitte's hand grabbed my waist more harshly. "Stop it!" I snarled at her. I could feel the hands on my legs -my Army-- pulling at me, too. I didn't hear anything though; they must have lost the ability to talk. Brigitte grabbed at me even harder after I told her to stop. "Listen to me, Rachel! You can't go with her! She's not to be trusted." I remembered the walk in the woods with the Me, and how it was about the only time, since Albuquerque, that I'd felt happy or at peace for even a minute. I remembered making love with the Me -- telepathically and physically, our bodies moving together as our minds melted into each other, so that I could feel emotions like they were hands on my skin. Those kinds of thoughts flashed through my head and I struggled in the blue goo to get away from Brigitte, to get her hands off of me, even as I said "What do you mean, she can't be trusted? She's me, you know. So I can't be trusted?" But Brigitte was looking at my eyes, and had a glazed-ish look. I realized that she was seeing my thoughts and I tried to clamp them down, to stop her. Her eyes focused on mine as I wormed my hand up through the goop. "That's how it is?" she asked, softly, and bit her lip. I'd pulled my hand free, almost, and tried to slap her on the face. It didn't work, hardly, because I couldn't move that well in the blue gel, but the message was the same. "Don't you read my mind," I told her, and tried to pull back more, my hand now stuck in the blue next to her face. "Stay out of there! You don't have the right!" Part of me was worried that Brigitte would read the parts I didn't want her to read -- or the parts I wasn't sure I wanted her to read, yet. The parts about her. Even as I thought that I realized that

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thinking about those thoughts would bring them front and center and she'd be able to read them if she wanted to. "Don't do it! I said." In my mind I saw Brigitte's underwear, lacy stuff made of black wisps that barely seemed to contain her firm, round, butt. I saw her climbing up that ladder the first night we kissed, my hand wanting to reach up and touch her... and I locked eyes with Brigitte now, in the goo, and tried to figure out what I saw there. "Geez, I've got to get out of here!" I said, suddenly, trying to cover up my thoughts. "Where are we?" Brigitte didn't answer at first and I stared back at her. "You were..." She shook her head, as much as she could. "No," she said. But I think she was lying, and as I tried to see if she was, I thought again about the underwear... and then tried to stop as Brigitte started talking. "We're right outside of Valhalla," she told me. Her voice had changed a little, not so bossy as when she'd said not to trust the Me. "We were being pulled back there by the Grabber that the Blues brought with them to this battle, and they were supposed to pull us back from Limbo. I'm being totally honest with you, now, Rachel," she interjected when I was about to talk. "I was supposed to follow you into Limbo, once we figured out that you'd been disintegrated and sent there. And I was supposed to convince you to come with us, one way or the other. I hoped to actually convince you but regardless, we need you so I had to take my chances that if I couldn't convince you to help us I'd have to bring you back no matter what. So I did. I grabbed you and then the Grabber got me and was pulling us back, but all those women," she nodded down towards where I assumed there was a giant trail of Lesbians clinging to my legs, "Made it too hard to get all the way through the Goo that surrounds Valhalla."

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"Goo?" I said. Brigitte shrugged. "Valhalla is surrounded by a blue gelatinous substance. The actual dimension is only about a couple of miles wide. Once you get to the edge of it, the Blue Gel starts and encloses it on all sides and above and below, as far as anyone can tell. It's impossible to get through, generally speaking, without using a Grabber or something similar. Not that you'd want to try, because there's nothing outside except Limbo." "Where we were?" "No. Limbo is not In Between. It's not like The Void. The Void is In Between all the dimensions, but it's not really a dimension. It's just what's in between them. Limbo is what's outside them. Nobody's ever been in Limbo." "How do they know it's there?" Brigitte said "They just know." She looked around again then back at me. "I don't want to get too distracted. Do you see my ring?" I looked up at her hand, but she wasn't wearing a ring, and I said that. "I know. Do you see it?" "No, Brigitte. I don't see anything. Except goo, and a little bit of your face. Why is Valhalla surrounded by this?" Brigitte said "I don't know. Ask God. It must have gotten pulled off." "What did?" "My ring."

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"Why do you need it?" "Because it's how the Grabber will find us. Once they realized that we didn't get back, that we'd slipped out of its grip, they'll have it try to get us again. It'll need a little rest and some food, but then once it's ready it'll home on the ring. That's how it found me in the Void. I hope it's at least close to us." I pictured the Grabber that had been in Hell. "What does it eat?" I asked. "The Grabber? Don't ask," Brigitte said. She seemed suddenly very businesslike about this, and I wasn't sure how I felt about that. I didn't want her to be all lovey and Brigittey, not yet, but I didn't want her to be too distant, either. I wasn't sure what I wanted, other than to not be trapped in blue gel with Brigitte while some demon tried to find us. "Why?" Brigitte looked at me. "It eats souls, Rachel." I must have shown shock, or sadness -- I felt both -- because she said "I told you not to ask." Before I could say anything, I felt something in my mind. Rachel, don't react in any way can you feel me?... came the thought. I held my breath. Yes, I thought to myself. I tried to go blank. Brigitte, in front of me, was trying to slowly turn her head and see if her ring was above her. I don't know why she bothered; nobody could see more than a few inches.

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Is Brigitte right there? came the thought. It was the Me. I recognized her mind. Yes, I thought back. She's right in front of me. Is she touching you? Yes, I thought again. Where? the Me asked me. Brigitte was turning her head back, slowly. I took inventory. On the small of my back, I told the Me. She's got one hand on my back. Why? Can you move away from her? the Me asked. I considered a moment. Brigitte's arm was almost around me, with her hand in the middle of my back. The Blue Gel made it really difficult to do anything. But the Army still had their hands on me. I realized that Brigitte was looking directly into my eyes. She looked, for a second, suspicious but then almost instantly that went away and I thought it might be my imagination. "Rachel," she breathed. One lip touched both of mine as she said it, brushing over them. She'd ended up a little closer to me than she had been before. I don't know if I can, but the Lesbian Army is clinging to me. They might be able to pull me, I thought. "Do you know what I was just remembering?" Brigitte said, huskily. Her eyes closed, only a little, and her irises seemed to grow larger and softer. Her eyes were still the same

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amazing blue, a shade that felt like looking at a clear blue ocean on a sunny day... an ocean where you were going to go swimming, naked, with someone you loved whose body you wanted to lick all over. That kind of blue. "What..." I said, almost against my will. Can you tell them to pull you? the Me asked in my mind. Brigitte's hands caressed the small of my back. "Our first kiss," she said. "In the diner." She pushed forward just a bit more, her lips now matching up with mine. I thought to the Me Now her lips are touching me, too. Yeah, I got that, the Me said. Can you tell the Army to pull you? On three? "You tasted like apple pie," Brigitte said. Her tongue sneaked out and touched my teeth. I can try, I told the Me, not sure that I wanted to do that. You've got to do it, the Me told me. What's going on? I thought to her. At the same time, Brigitte put her mouth fully on mine. On three, the Me thought. Brigitte was saying something into my mouth, her tongue tickling mine. I took a moment to figure it out, but I did, and she was saying: "The Valkyries are going to kill you, Rachel. They're going to use you as bait." She whispered it into my mouth, and then held her lips on mine. Our eyes met, over the kiss,

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and she looked sincere. In my mind, at the same time, the Me said She's going to kill you, Rachel. She's going to use you as bait. Brigitte wriggled her other arm up around me and put it on my face. "Don't leave, Rachel, please!" she said, loudly. In my mind, the Me said Tell them to pull, now! and at the same time, I thought Pull, army! but my mind thought that as my mouth said "I love you, Brigitte!" The Army pulled on my legs and tugged me down as Brigitte kissed me and I felt something large, really large, grab and start tugging me away from her while at the same time something pulled Brigitte and me back towards Brigitte, and that would have been bad enough, being tugged in two directions and not knowing which way I wanted to go, but at the same time there was a horrible squawing sound, that loud hideous squawking squeal that I instantly recognized, and looking up, I saw Fuzzy Bird diving down on us faster than anything I'd ever seen move. Oh, and Doc was sitting on his beak. Fuzzy Bird dove at me, Doc clinging to his beak, and the two of them didn't seem to be bothered by the goo all around us at all. It didn't slow them down in the slightest. As they dove, Brigitte struggled to pull me towards her. "Stay away from them, Rachel!" she yelled, but I could barely hear her over the squawing sound Fuzzy Bird was making -- it rattled my bones and made it difficult to concentrate. Its that bird! the Me thought in my head. What does he want?

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I don't know, I thought back, and then Fuzzy Bird was on me, his feet grabbing at my arm (the one Brigitte wasn't holding) and he pulled back up. I felt Brigitte's hands wrap around my waist and she grabbed onto me. I felt a couple of hands grab onto my legs, too, as we pulled up and I thought, quickly Army! Grab onto each other and hold onto me. There was a tugging at me as they all did that, even as Fuzzy Bird pulled up and up, at first struggling only a little as all the weight glommed on, but then picking up speed. We rose up through the goo, which I could feel sloughing off of me and clinging, but I could also feel us getting faster and faster. "Let go of him, Rachel! You've got to let go!" Brigitte yelled. Where's he taking you? the Me thought to me. I don't know, I thought back. I looked down at Brigitte and said "I'm not holding on! He's got me!" We kept rising -- I don't know how I knew the direction we were headed in was up but that's the feeling I got. Ivanka's trying to track you, the Me thought, and I had an image sprung into my mind: Ivanka, with a couple of other Valkyries on their horses, flying up alongside a blue, gelatinous wall at the edge of a forest clearing. Almost as soon as I got that image, from the ground, looking up, I got another thought: Rachel, we will help you. Keep thinking, strongly, and we will try to rescue you. Ivanka -- I recognized her voice, or mind, or thoughts, or whatever. The picture was replaced with a scene looking down, now, at the clearing. I could see the Me standing there, on the grass, looking up with an anxious expression on her face. Fuzzy Bird kept tugging and squawing and I saw that Doc was climbing down him, now.

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Doc couldn't have flown, not in that goo and not at the speed Fuzzy Bird was traveling at. Instead, he climbed up over the head and down the neck and back, towards me. Brigitte saw him, too: "Doc!" she yelled. "Tell Rachel to trust me!" Doc buzzed a little and I heard his voice: "Rachel, grab on to Fuzzy Bird." "What?" Brigitte asked. I didn't know whether to trust Doc, now. After all -- he'd been created by Brigitte's dad and had been in the flying saucers with Brigitte. What do I do? I asked the Me, in my mind. Don't let Fuzzy Bird take you! Both the Me and Ivanka thought back and Brigitte yelled, then: "They're right! Don't let him take you, Rachel! Fight him off. Let go!" My head was spinning and it wasn't just the goo and the speed and the squawing, which I swear was going to make my ears bleed. Brigitte and Ivanka and the Me all agreed on what to do? And they disagreed with Doc? In my mind, then, I felt a new voice: Rachel, I would stay with Fuzzy Bird.

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I looked down and recognized one hand on my leg. "Naked Girl?" I asked, tentatively. We kept moving up, and Brigitte said "Who's that?" She was clinging to my stomach, her head just below my own small breasts, the way I used to lay on her when we first met, her arms wrapped tightly around me. It's me, Naked Girl thought back. Naked Girl? The Me thought. One of my army, I thought, and Brigitte looked up at me as I thought that. "You're going to listen to her?" Brigitte asked. I was too exhausted, suddenly, to berate Brigitte for listening in on my thoughts, and I didn't want to. I didn't know what to do, right then, or who to trust. Fuzzy Bird's claws were clamped tightly to me. Doc said: "Rachel, it is very important that you come with us. We need you and your Army." Fuzzy Bird screeched, then, in that weird voice of his ****You must come with us. Everything depends on it****. I looked up at him, and at Doc, and said "Where are we going?" Naked Girl, in my mind, then, said Rachel, I trust them. You should trust them, too. They seem good.

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They did seem good. That was the weird part. I felt like I should trust, at least, Fuzzy Bird. And I wanted to trust the Me and Ivanka, too, but they were agreeing with Brigitte, who I wanted to trust, most of all! I wanted, as I thought about it, to rewind and get back to the part before I'd learned that Brigitte had been told to love me, to move ahead in a different direction, one where Brigitte and I were still in love and she wasn't part of some kind of plot... Rachel, it's too late for that, the Me said, and I knew it was. How are you on her side? I asked the Me, and added Is Naked Girl right? I'm not on Brigitte's side the Me said. We just both happen to agree that you shouldn't go with Fuzzy Bird. Don't trust her, either. "Rachel, you can trust me! You have to trust me," Brigitte interjected. I don't know the others, Naked Girl thought to me. But I do trust the Bird. We're almost to the top, Ivanka thought. If he gets out before we figure out a way in... but she didn't finish the thought. There was a POP! and we were free of the goo, or I and Brigitte and Fuzzy Bird and Doc were. I looked down and saw the blue gel receding from us, a chain of lesbian zombies clinging to my legs and each other, dozens or more of them pulling out of the goo, too, each with a pop! of their own, like a series of bubbles bursting. Brigitte gasped and looked around and in my mind I heard We're outside... before that cut off. From the Me I got a bare glimpse of Ivanka's horse stopping at the top of Valhalla's sky, cut off by the edge of that dimension, and then her presence faded out. I couldn't feel

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Naked Girl anymore, either. We were outside Valhalla and telepathy didn't work anymore. I couldn't Share, either, not the way I was. None of us zombies could Share. Not that way, anyway. The chain of women held up by Fuzzy Bird ended with the last one pulling free of the gel that marked the boundaries of Valhalla and I looked away from that to see that around us was that swirling, weird, sensory haze that had marked our trip here, too, the outside, as Brigitte said, the space beyond all those other spaces. Fuzzy Bird sped up, even more, and the line of naked beautiful women clinging to me blurred as we looped around. I blinked several times in the glare of the Outside and then suddenly, we stopped moving. I was standing, on a little square of pavement, outside a wall. The wall was white, but it seemed to be layered in coat after coat after coat of some translucent but glittery substance, like someone had taken paint made of diamonds and kept painting coat after coat after coat of it onto a wall -- and then had removed the wall, leaving only the layers of diamond-created paint, which gave the wall a feel of both being there and not there, of solidity and ethereality of substance and air. I didn't think all of that then - I just thought it was both the most beautiful, and strongest, and most delicate structure I'd ever seen and I wanted to touch it. Around me, on the pavement surrounding the wall -- pavement that, oddly, stretched out only about twenty feet from the wall before fading into nothingness -- were Fuzzy Bird and Brigitte and Doc and all the lesbian zombies in my army, all looking as equally dazed. Then, before I could take that in, I noticed the door -- a small wooden door, with a small brass knob, oddly out of place in that wall, a door that was only about 6 feet tall and 3 feet wide, a door that would have made sense if it had been standing in a hut by a farm, instead of placed in a giant wall that stretched higher than I could see and farther, on each

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side, than I could imagine. **** Tell them to guard it**** Fuzzy Bird said. "What?" I asked. He pecked at me and nodded towards the lesbians. ***Guard. Tell them to guard it. Nobody enters.*** "Why?" I asked. Brigitte suddenly gasped, again. "We're here!" she said, and rushed towards the door. Three things happened then: Fuzzy Bird said ***Tell them to guard it!*** with such force that I yelled "Lesbians! Guard that door! Nobody enters it!" The third thing that happened was that Naked Girl-- the closest lesbian zombie, jumped at Brigitte, who'd been heading towards the door, and knocked Brigitte into me. Then the fourth thing happened: Fuzzy Bird grabbed my arm and took off again, with Brigitte again clinging to me. We left the lesbians behind, standing on the narrow pavement guarding the door, and headed Outside again.

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Meanwhile, In Tampa…Samson stood back up. His hand tingled a little from where he'd grabbed the spear. He hadn't known that, about touching a Valkyrie's spear being instant death... but that didn't matter for him, it seemed, because he'd done it and hadn't died. He'd dropped out of the sky, been shot by the Valkyries, and grabbed their spear, and he was still alive. He blinked a little, and noticed that as he blinked, he saw a glimpse of a black area... black wasn't quite the word. It was dark, sure, but dark in a way that seemed to be different than an absence of light. It was almost as if the dark was the light, like there was a light bulb or sun or something that was giving off dark waves instead of light waves. He blinked again and decided that he didn't like the look of the place. So he stopped blinking and stared at the Valkyries. They stared back, holding their spears at him. One leaned over and mumbled something to another, and the second nodded. "What?" Samson asked. "You're full of energy. It's literally leaking out of you." Samson looked down and saw that his skin was glowing and little fizzes and pops of energy were smoking up from his pores. He held his hand up and saw what looked to be flames coming out of the ends of his fingertips. "Honestly," said the first Valkyrie, approaching him. "Why haven't you died yet?" She was about an arm's length away when Samson threw up his hand:

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"Stop!" he said, and tried to blast her with the energy he could now feel crackling through him. Nothing happened, and the Valkyrie laughed. "It looks like you know nothing more than we do at this point." Samson shrugged. "It was worth a try," he said. He looked around at the guards, captured by the Valkyries, and at the remaining living female warriors who were gathering up the dead and putting them in one location, horses and giant attractive women laid lovingly down. "It looks like we have a standoff," he said. "How so?" the Valkyrie nearest him said. "You can't hurt me," he said. "We don't need to hurt you," she told him. With a lightning quick movement she reached out and grabbed his hand. In her other hand, she had a knife that she brought around more quickly than Samson could react. He tried to pull back but even as he did so, the Valkyrie's knife slashed into the first knuckle of his index finger on that hand. Blood spurted out, and the Valkyrie stepped back with the finger she'd sliced off. Samson pulled his hand back, swearing, and retreated from her. He ripped off part of his sleeve and pressed it onto the wound, slowing the blood flow. "What the hell was that about?" he demanded. The Valkyrie handed the finger to another, who hopped onto her horse, which leaped into

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the air and began galloping off into the sky. It disappeared shortly, probably, Samson mused, heading back to Valhalla. The remaining Valkyries ignored him, except for the two he'd been talking to. "You'll find out," one of them told him. The other turned towards the man, and said "I want to see where you worked." The man nodded. "It's not here." The Valkyrie said "I know. You can take me to it. Take my hand," she said, and held out her hand. The man gripped her hand, carefully and tentatively. He waited a second, and then smiled. "You seem very nice, Tatanya." "I am nice," Tatanya told him, still holding his hand. "You can trust the Sharing." The man nodded. "How will we get there?" Tatanya turned to her horse, which had come trotting over. "We'll ride," she said. She turned towards the other Valkyries. "The rest of you: keep cleaning up and get our fellow warriors back to Valhalla. Take the prisoners, too." To the nearest one, the one who'd cut of Samson's finger, she said: "Come with me, Czaranya." Czaranya nodded and her horse came over, too. She hopped on. "Where are you going?" Samson asked.

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"I said, to where this man worked," Tatanya told him. "Don't take them there," Samson said to the man. The man had climbed up onto Tatanya's horse behind her, and was holding on, lightly and with a slightly nervous look on his face, to her waist. He turned towards Samson, who continued "That's a direct order." "You lied to me," the man said. "I didn't," Samson responded. "You said I was sending the women to Heaven," the Man said. "You said their souls were in Heaven, and that their bodies weren't anything, and that if I kept it up, someday I would be rewarded by meeting Her." Samson tried to remember that last part. Had he said that? "Her?" he asked. "The one from the Display." Samson remembered. He remembered asking the man about the Display and the man had said he was creating it from his memory. When Samson had asked what memory, the man had said of the future. Samson had chalked it up to the man's limited intellect, and when the man had said "Do you think I'll ever get to meet her," Samson had said of course he would, when his work was done. "You've met her," he told the man. "Maybe you didn't realize it, but you met her." The man looked at him, blankly. "The one who walked away, a few weeks ago," Samson said. "Rachel."

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The man thought about that. "I didn't know it was her," he said. "Well, who did you think it was?" Samson asked. "Don't talk to him anymore," Tatanya interrupted. "I want to see this Display." "Okay," the man said. "Don't take her there," Samson said. "What about Heaven?" the man asked him. "What about it?" Samson asked back. "You told me I was sending them to Heaven. But they're not. They're not getting in because Heaven's locked up. You lied to me about that, too." Samson took a deep breath, and said, calmly: "I didn't lie. You were sending them to Heaven. I didn't lock up Heaven. The Blockers did. You don't know them, but they did. And your little friends here are trying to keep it that way. So they're the reason the women aren't going to Heaven." The man sat still for a moment. Samson wondered what Tatanya was saying to him, through the Sharing. He didn't get a chance to find out, because as Tatanya nodded, the other one, Czaranya, nodded back, and leveled her spear at Samson, blasting him full on with all its power. He went flying back, his chest and face scorching from the blow and the energy. He felt his body smashing through a wall of God's house, then another before he came to rest. He heard other blasts of energy and had just enough time to see Tatanya

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and the man, and Czaranya, take flight on their horses before the other Valkyries, shooting at God's house with their spears, brought the entire structure down on top of him.

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Part 18: We weren't Outside for very long -- barely enough time for it to register -- because we moved a lot faster when it was just me and Fuzzy Bird and Doc and Brigitte, who still clung to me. I tried not to think of her, hanging on me, there, but it was hard to do and in the few moments from when we left the Army and the little door, I ran through a range of emotions starting with I should just push her off and leave her there to man, that feels really good to have her back to is she really pregnant and then briefly back to man, that feels really good, at which point I looked away from my view behind Fuzzy Bird down to Brigitte, who was holding me just around my back, under my arms, her legs wrapped around my waist. That put her a little below me, even though Brigitte is taller than me. As I looked at her, she was looking at me. She looked worried, and scared. I felt bad for her for a second and then wondered if that was what she wanted me to feel -- and then I wondered if there was any way, ever again, that I could ever trust her? Or if I even wanted to, as the thoughts of the Me in the forest came into my head. Before I could sort that out, though, I saw that we were headed for a red, giant dimension, looming straight before us, and growing larger and larger. The whole trip, from the door to Outside to this red globe took far less time than it takes to tell you and some of what I thought I only worked out, in detail, later. Lots of times you can think stuff or feel stuff that you can't quite describe but when you get a chance to sit down and mull it over later -- as I would, now -- you can really sort things out. Mostly. Before I realized what was going on, really, Brigitte said "Not there!" and squirmed a

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little, but there wasn't much she could do, because if she let go of me Fuzzy Bird would have left her there, Outside the dimensions, and nothing good could come of that. I didn't know why she was upset until we plunged Into the dimension just then, and I smelt and sensed the acrid, fetid air and heat and saw the sky, with its mottled bruisy colors, and saw the ground, with its jagged sharp edges and endless deserts and brutal looking mountains. "Hell," I said, quietly. My mouth went dry and I felt a little pale. I'd been coming to Hell for too long now -- or been here too long, everytime I fell asleep, for a while there, trips to Hell that had lasted longer than an ordinary night's sleep, sometimes months while my body slept in the "real" world, and then I'd actually come here, but then it had all stopped and I'd almost forgotten what it was like, or the fear I had of sleeping. That's not true, exactly. I couldn't forget that. You don't go to Hell and forget it. I deliberately never thought of it, something I'd learned to do, quickly, on that walk south with Doc, because even though I spent every night in Hell, I didn't want to spend my days reliving that. I couldn't have; I'd have gone nuts. So when I didn't go there every night -- for the last few nights, at least, since we'd escaped here the last time with the Valkyries-- it'd been easier, each day, to not think about Hell and get it out of my mind, at least a little. Plus, you know, I'd kept really busy since then. Now I was back and the ground loomed up larger and larger and faster and faster. "I don't want to go here," I said to Fuzzy Bird, using my quiet, Hell-voice that I used to not attract attention when I was here. Attention is not something one wants to draw in

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Hell. But Fuzzy Bird didn't listen. He zoomed down, so fast that the air burnt on my skin as we swept through it, so fast that I only had time to take one crummy, smog-filled, burning stinking breath of air before we were again on the ground. Brigitte let go of me and stood up, staring around, seeming scared for real. She'd not been very lucky the last time we were here, and hadn't been here as much as I had, so it seemed real. "I never wanted to come back here," she said, and her voice had a quaver in it that seemed real to me. She looked like she was trying to decide whether to shriek, cry, or simply fall down in a faint. Or to try to do all three. Her hands were shaking. "I didn't either," I said, and turned to Fuzzy Bird. Doc was sitting on his beak again, looking a little dimmer. I remembered that Doc's power wouldn't last much here in Hell -no sunlight to operate on. (Hell has a sun -- a too-close, too-purplish sun that doesn't so much light up the sky as infect it, making it simultaneously too hot and too cold, too light and too dark. If there's an uncomfortable or painful state of existence, Hell has it -sometimes all at once.) ***It was necessary to bring you here*** Fuzzy Bird squawed at me, quietly. "Says who?" I asked, still using my quiet voice. "Says me," a voice said from behind me. A voice I recognized. I turned around, and didn't see who I expected to see. Instead, a trap-door had opened in the ground, one held up by a woman who looked... not quite right. Not normal, but I couldn't immediately place what the problem was or why I thought that. She beckoned to me. "Did you talk?" I asked her. She shook her head, and then spoke, in a voice that was so beautiful, so melodic, so enchanting that I almost began to cry when I heard it:

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"No," she said to me, and in that one syllable nearly hypnotized me. She went on: "Come in. Now. You need to stay out of sight." She beckoned again and then dropped down into the trapdoor. I was mystified, not least because of the voice I'd heard first, which was not this woman's voice. I looked at Fuzzy Bird, and Doc. "That was... I heard... Is he here?" Doc lit up, a little. Yes, he said. I turned back to the trapdoor, which was slowly settling back down. I quickly rushed forward and pulled it up, to see the lady disappearing down the ladder, slowly. She was hampered in her climbing, I saw, by the fact that she had only one hand. As I watched her, she looked up, met my eyes with hers, and then looked back down and climbed the rest of the way, into the dark. I climbed in and went down, as quickly as I could. I heard Brigitte above me, protesting a little but Doc and Fuzzy Bird told her she could stay there or follow and then I heard footsteps above her. It's a testament to how excited I was that I didn't even look up and try to see up her skirt (although I thought about it. As I've said a lot, Brigitte's underpants are very distracting.) But I didn't look up. I got to the bottom and saw a hallway that opened into a room with some regular-seeming lights on and a man... kind of... standing there. He was dressed in blue jeans and an old rock concert t-shirt that advertised a group I thought maybe I'd heard of before. His arms and legs were rail-thin and starkly grayed. His head, when I looked at it, was worse: It was bandaged up and wrapped, almost like a

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mummy, with eyes barely visible through the layers, and even with the bandages I could tell it was pretty mangled. "Hello, Rachel," the man said, in a voice that rasped and sounded evil. I didn't care. I ran to him and hugged him, careful not to jar his bandaged head. "Steve!" I said. Then I really did start crying. Steve looked awful. That wasn't why I was crying, but it might as well have been. His head was held together -- barely-- by bandages and wraps and I think a piece of wood, too, tied in there somehow. The last time I'd seen him, he'd been having his head beat in by a rock. A rock held by Reverend Tommy, who'd been taken to Hell with me, accidentally (along with a big part of a museum in Chicago). I thought I'd lost him, forever, and even though he was a gross revenant who probably had to constantly hold himself back from stealing my soul (if I have a soul, but I think I do), I loved him, in my way, and Steve was, at this point, my oldest friend. We'd spent what felt like years in Hell, one night... ... I don't like to talk about that. Not yet. But I loved him and I'd thought he was dead, and now here he was, hugging me back, his bony arms trembling. I could feel his hands on the back of my head, pulling into me. They were bony, too, and cold, and smelled a little, but I didn't care. "Steve! Steve! Steve!" I kept saying, over and over. I didn't know what else to say. He didn't talk at all, not at first. He just hugged me. Finally, he pulled back a little and I pulled back a little. By then, Fuzzy Bird and Brigitte and Doc were down in that little room, carved out underground or part of a cave or

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something, and the one-handed lady was still standing there. They were all just staring at us. "What's he doing here?" Brigitte asked. Her dad had been working with the revenants, so I didn't expect her to not like Steve. I turned to her. "He has as much right to be here as you. He has maybe more right to be here than you." As I said that, Brigitte looked a little hurt. I saw a flash of sad in her eyes and wondered if she was acting, or if I'd really gotten to her. Then I had another thought. "Where is here?" I asked Steve. "What's this place? And who's she?" I looked around the room, which wasn't dimly lit the way you'd expect an underground room or cave to be. It was warm and bright and had carpeting, really soft carpeting, the kind that made me want to sit down on it, and take off my shoes. I realized, only then, that I wasn't wearing shoes. The carpeting felt excellent on my feet, plush and kind of tickly and soft. The room had comfortable-looking furniture in it, chairs and couches and a lounge-y kind of thing. There were sunglobes all around -- I realized that was the source of the light and the warmth, and then I realized that must be how Doc was still able to flit around and hover near me, when the first time we'd come to Hell he'd run out of power. Octopi are solarpowered, and Hell's sun doesn't supply the right kind of power (I'd learned; I never knew all that before.) "Here," Steve said, "Is home base. For now. And our hideout." "Hideout? Who's after you? Is it Reverend Tommy?"

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"In a way," Steve said, and glanced over at the one-handed lady. "In a way, he is. Not me specifically because he probably thinks I'm still dead, to the extent that he thinks of me at all in a specific way, which I'm pretty sure he doesn't, given that he'd barely met me when he tried to kill me." "How come he didn't kill you?" "It takes more than crushing a skull to kill a revenant, Rachel. You should know that. You practically have to disintegrate us." Steve sighed. I remembered, one night, hiding out on the plains of Hell, behind a couple of large rocks, freezing nearly to death (only you can't freeze to death in Hell, you just freeze forever) because we couldn't light a fire for fear it would attract demons... or worse (and if you don't know what could be worse than a demon, lucky you because that means you haven't been in Hell or haven't been there long), and I was trying to sleep, but I heard Steve sighing over by the rock. "What's wrong?" I'd asked him. Steve had taken a deep breath -- a deep unnecessary breath -- and had mumbled something. "I didn't get that," I told him. "I said," Steve had repeated, more clearly, "That it would be nice if I could die in some easy way." When I'd asked him what he'd meant, he explained how hard it is to kill a revenant, and then went on to say "But I don't want to live like this, and I'm using live loosely, Rachel. Most of the time it's okay, but at night, when I'm all alone and it's dark and I see you

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shivering and I realize that I can't feel the cold anymore, I can't feel anything anymore, except sometimes pain, and except for the feeling of stealing someone's soul, and I don't want to do that... when I realize those things, I sometimes just want to stop being... in a position to realize them and start... not being. But it's not that easy for revenants." Now, in that cozy little cavern, I hugged Steve again. "I know, Steve. I'm sorry." He patted me on the head. "Thanks," he said, and turned to the one-handed lady. "Anyway, like I was saying, Rachel, here, and I are kind of on the run, only Reverend Tommy doesn't know that we, specifically," I interrupted him again. "Rachel?" I asked him, and looked from him to her. "Yes, Rachel. Rachel," he said, putting his hand on the small of my back and indicating the one-handed lady with his other hand, "Meet Rachel. The two of you have something in common." "My hand," we both said at the same time. I'd meant to extend my right hand to shake her hand, but instead, my left hand had gone forward, at the same time as Other Rachel had extended her own left-arm-missing-a-hand. We both looked down to where my... my?... left hand was reaching out to hers, and her left arm was reaching forward to mine. Before they could touch, Steve stuck his hand down and glared at Other Rachel. "Not yet?" she asked him. "Maybe not ever," he said to her.

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Her eyes narrowed and her mouth got real thin. I didn't like her. I right then and there didn't like her. I pulled my ... her?... hand back and put it behind my back and backed up, bumping into Fuzzy Bird, who snuffled a little and tried to back up and caused a little commotion as he knocked down a chair and bumped into Brigitte. "We should move someplace bigger and explain," Other Rachel said. I watched her. She didn't look anything like me, or act anything like me. Was the name just a coincidence? I wondered. She didn't look at me, but looked at my hand -- and then back at Steve, who said "The control room, everyone. Let's go." He waved a hand and a piece of the wall, a bookshelf, disappeared, fading out slowly from the center to the edge. "Hologram," he said to me, and I thought he might have winked but maybe that was just a bandage flipping a little. We walked through the now-empty spot where a bookshelf, or image of one, had been, and into a larger, but equally warm-and-inviting room sat. At the center of the room was a grouping of chairs and couches and a big table. The table was silver and shiny and smooth and had 8 or 10 legs and was pretty big. Steve motioned us towards that grouping. As we walked in, I looked around. All around the edges of this room were more bookshelves and display racks and little desks and tables and cubbies. It was like a library tucked into a cave -- a personal library from some rich person's house, maybe. Steve sat down in the largest chair, and Other Rachel sat next to him. I took a chair opposite her, as far away as I could. Fuzzy Bird wandered away. Brigitte sat down next to me and reached over and tried to take my hand (my right hand, I noticed.) I didn't let her, and she looked hurt again.

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"What is all this, Steve?" I asked. "I never thought I'd see you again, but I really didn't think that you had all this... stuff." I waved a hand around and tried to indicate all the stuff. "I don't," Steve said. "I don't have any of it. It's Rachel's." He pointed to her, as if I needed it. "She's been getting it all, stocking it up for... I don't know how long. A really long time." Rachel leaned back and kept her eyes on me. And on my hand. She seemed to divide her attention between the two of them equally. "It's been quite a hardship, being here," she said. "I never intended to stay as long as I have, and now I may have found my way back home." "Home?" I asked. "My own dimension, from whence I was exiled." "Which dimension is that?" I asked. "Valhalla," she said. As she said it, my left hand clenched into a fist. I looked down at the hand, wondering why it had done that. "It is responding to me," Other Rachel said, and stood up from the chair she had only recently sat down in. She walked towards me and without asking permission, took my left hand, and picked it up. She held it in her right hand, which felt cold and unfriendly, and

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turned it over and back and then held it up to her right hand, palm to palm. They were the same size, and indisputably from the same person. "It's my hand," she said. "As I thought. Or knew. Damn that Lysanya." "Who?" I asked, but I knew, even as I did. Sometimes you don't need telepathy or Sharing to figure stuff out. "The She," Other Rachel said. "The imposter She." I didn't say anything. I'd liked the She, so much as I could tell in the brief time I'd been around her. "I suppose you liked her," Other Rachel said. "You would. That would be a natural. After all, they worship you. All of them, all the ones who survived and remained in Valhalla after the Revolution. The Revolution you caused." "Me?" I asked. I'd just been feeling a little more certain, recently, of my position in the world, or worlds, or dimensions. I'd only been around, really, for two weeks, but I had been coming to understand stuff a little better and feeling like I was more of a person instead of this thing that I really am, this thing that was created, but as Other Rachel spoke, I was reminded of the giant statue of me, and the way the Valkyries doted on me, and that vision I'd had of old me, real me, performing and the Valkyries coming down and I was confused all over again, and I felt guilty, too, but I didn't know what about. I hadn't done anything, had I? Had I? It's hard to tell what you're responsible for when you can only remember back a

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few weeks and you're a reconstructed zombie person. "Ask yourself this," Other Rachel said, as I pondered that. "If they really love you and really worship you, why'd they have you cut into pieces and rebuilt? You didn't ask for that, did you?" I shook my head. Steve tried to interrupt: "Rachel," he said, looking to her and not me, "This is getting us nowhere. We have bigger problems to deal with." "Bigger than the return of my left hand, and with it, the possible ability to bring the remainder of my clan back and retake my rightful throne?" Other Rachel asked. "Yes, in fact, quite a bit bigger than that." Steve touched a portion of the table and a little glowing hologram globe sprang up. I squinted at it, but Other Rachel ignored it. In the globe there was a large group of people walking, or maybe marching, because behind them and in between them were all kinds of tanks and machines and things, and they appeared to all be holding some sort of weapons, ranging from simple swords and spears to gun-looking things that were too little for me to make out the details. "The Army is coming," Steve said. "Who's Army?" I asked. Brigitte moved over and looked more closely at the globe. "I recognize that symbol," she said. "It's from The Church Of Our Savior Of Living People Only." "What?" I asked. Like I said, I was feeling less sure than ever. "It is," Brigitte said. "I've been going to that church for a long time, Rachel. I wouldn't

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forget that symbol. I saw it every Sunday for like five years, after Daddy told me to start attending so that he could keep an eye on Reverend Tommy." "You just do everything your dad tells you to do, don't you," I said, and it came out before I could stop. "Yes, as a matter of fact, I do," Brigitte said. "He's my daddy, and I love him, even if he's now this... horrible... never mind. But I love him and I do what he tells me what to do to help him, and he's a good man, so I'd want to help him even if I didn't love him and he wasn't my daddy. So what's it to you?" "What's it to me?" I asked back, standing up. "Oh, only that you pretended to fall in love with me so that you could use me for your stupid daddy's plans and got me kidnapped and in Hell and attacked and you broke my heart, Brigitte and then you made up all these lies about being in love and being pregnant..." "Those aren't lies," Brigitte yelled back, and started crying. "I really do love you, Rachel, and I really am pregnant, at least I think I am if the baby wasn't disintegrated and it's possible to do what someone tells you and really fall in love anyway, and that's what happened. I didn't even think I was going to love you and I didn't want to do it, when Daddy said that I had to walk past the path where you were hiding that morning and get you to fall in love with me, I didn't want to do it, and I didn't think I'd like it, Rachel, because I knew what you were and I didn't think I could ever love someone like that, someone like how you were before you were dead and someone like what you were after you were dead." "Don't lie to me, Brigitte! You never loved me. It was just all a trick so that you could do whatever it is your dad wants." "It's not a trick!" Brigitte yelled back, and we were both crying now, standing face to

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face, or my-face-to-her-neck because she was a little taller than me. Fuzzy Bird moved closer, I'm not sure why, and Steve stood up. "Rachel! Brigitte! Stop this. We have more important things than all these petty grudges right now, and more important things, even, than retaking Valhalla, because in a few minutes, Reverend Tommy's army is going to be right above us, and he's going to try to kill me, and you," he said, pointing at me, "And probably you," he said, pointing at Fuzzy Bird, "and certainly you," he said, pointing at Other Rachel. "And you," he said, turning to Brigitte, "He's going to probably want to take hostage so that he can find out where your dad is and stop that plan, too, because I don't think that Reverend Tommy is going to go to all the trouble of taking over Hell and making it into his own world just so that someone else can go marching into Heaven and take over God's job."

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