by Alan Ryker
Seemingly on their own, my legs attempt to run down the remaining stairs, but I’m turned sideways and my legs twist around each other and I fall. Somehow I manage to only tumble head over heels once, and slide after that, and come to rest on my hands and knees on the concrete floor. There’s no thought of checking myself over for injury. The snake is still coming. I try to push myself to my feet and stumble, and so start scrambling across the floor on all fours as I look back over my shoulder, waiting for the creature to emerge.
Then my hand presses down hard on something firm, but not nearly as firm as concrete, and it moves quickly away, sliding over my other hand. I try to scurry back and my feet bump something else that also slides away on its own.
I look around the floor to discover that I’m surrounded by snakes, big and small, coiled and writhing, and I shriek. I don’t bellow. I don’t roar. I let out a high-pitched, ear-piercing shriek of pure terror.
“You should stand up.”
I take the suggestion and try again to get to my feet. This time my leg—though tingling with thousands of pins and needles as if the smack against concrete knocked its nerve signal to static—almost holds. My ankle rolls, but I take another step onto another angry snake and manage to keep my feet.
Around me, the once quiet snakes roil. I don’t know how to interpret the writhing of these ancient creatures. They might be scared, or angry, or acting purely on instinct.
They brush my ankles, and of the conflicting instincts to flee and freeze, I settle on the latter. I haven’t been bitten yet, so I risk a glance up.
Surrounded by agitated snakes, illuminated by a single battery-powered lantern, a hospital bed dominates the center of the otherwise empty basement. A shriveled man lays in it, one hand dangling off the side, holding the hand of someone sitting beside him. His flat eyes watch me.
“You’re Ouroboros?”
“Yes. And you’re Cody Miller. You don’t know me, but I know you very well.” I expected an old man’s voice. He doesn’t sound much older than me, though very tired.
I still haven’t been bitten, and the snakes seem to be settling. As some of the adrenaline drains from my system and the blackness recedes from the edges of my vision, I look around the basement. This is a central area, with a dark tunnel leading farther back and several steel doors set into cinderblock walls.
But aside from the snakes, Ouroboros and whoever sits beside him, the room is empty. I can’t believe there are no armed guards. Sitting in the shadow of the big, metal-framed hospital bed, I can’t make out much of the person beside him, but they don’t seem poised for action.
As Ouroboros sees my eyes stray in that direction, trying to find the person’s features in the darkness, he says, “This is who you’ve been searching for.”
Madison stands up.
She looks at me glassy-eyed and out of it, but says, “Cody,” and smiles.
I pull my gun. I don’t know how we’re getting out of here—through one of those doors or down that tunnel, maybe back up the stairs with my arm wrapped around Ouroboros’ neck and my pistol in his back—but we’re getting out of here.
And then there’s no gun in my hand, and I’m standing about a foot farther into the room than I just was. I drop to the ground gripping my head. My skull feels like a water balloon held to the spigot too long. My brain feels like it’s trying to squirt out my ears as new memories, double memories rush in.
I’m not holding the gun because I never brought it in. Baldy met me at the front door, had me hold out my arms, patted me down, took the revolver daintily between his index finger and thumb, and said, “He said you’d have a gun, not a Nerf toy,” as he slipped it into his pocket.
He said you’d have a gun.
“You remember, don’t you?” he says.
“How did you do that?”
“Tell me what you remember, and I’ll tell you.”
My brain makes space for the new memories, rearranges itself, and the pain and nausea subside. I’m wobbly, but I force myself to my feet, away from the snakes.
“I had a gun.”
“Yes, I had them take it from you at the door,” he says, but his voice is strange, especially for the environment. It contains a tone I hadn’t previously found here in the Burnout: hopefulness.
“No, I had a gun in here, just a moment ago. And I didn’t.”
He makes a strange, sharp, rhythmic sound, and at first I think something is wrong. Then I realize that he’s laughing. “You’re the one. You’re the one I’ve been hoping for.”
I don’t understand, and I don’t know where to begin asking questions that might bring answers that would make me understand.
“Madison, are you okay?”
“Yes. I’m so glad you’re here.” But she doesn’t sound okay. She sounds lobotomized.
I walk toward her, picking my way through the nest, circling the bed.
“Stop,” Ouroboros says.
I stop, expecting to hit the floor again, to feel that head-splitting pain again. For everything to have changed again.
“No closer,” he says.
But I can see her better from here. It’s Maddy, but it’s the Maddy from the photos. She’s too old, too worn for only a few months to have passed.
I’m frozen to the moment, my brain unable to move past the strangeness.
But Ouroboros remembers our bargain, and begins to explain how he performs his trick.
“After you were burned,” he asks, “did you think about the moment right before, the moment when you could have done something differently?”
“What does that have to do with—”
“It has everything to do with it.”
His tone, surprisingly sharp, snaps me back to reality. His eyes are flat. He shifts in his sheets, coiling. He’s eager, beyond eager, but for what? What could he possibly want from me? “Yes, I thought about it. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.” Obsessing about it. Dreaming about it.
“From that point, did you imagine a different life? Was it so vivid it could have been real?”
“Yes.”
“And you wanted to stay there, but you couldn’t. Eventually, you had to return to your real life, the one where that moment happened as it happened, where you didn’t flip the burner off.”
“Yes.” My head spins. I expected him to know the details of my accident, but not my thoughts. “How do you know that?”
“Because I lived it, too. When I was a teenager I was in a bad bicycle accident. A pickup truck hit me, rolled over me, mangled me. I was in a coma for a week, and even when I came back I kept slipping away again and again. And when I did, I dreamed. I dreamed that I waited for that pickup that should have seen me but didn’t. It raced by, never having checked right before turning, but it didn’t matter, because I’d noticed and sat and waited for him to go, then continued home, ate a snack, watched TV, ate dinner, did homework, went to school the next day…Lived my life. Many times I imagined this, dreamed this, lived it in comatose unconsciousness, but I’d feel a pull. The farther I went, the harder it was to hold it all together, to drag myself one step further, to live one second longer in a life that would never happen. Eventually I’d find myself back in that hospital bed. Until one time, I didn’t. One time, months later, I woke up in my own bed at home, and that other life I had imagined, the one where I changed that one little moment, it was my real life. The other had just been some strange delusion.
“Except that then I did it again, because after I did it once, I could do it over again. And I did. But Cody, how old do you think I am?”
My brain spins in my head like a carnival ride, and I wish for nothing more than to sit down.
“Seventy-five? Eighty?”
“I’m twenty-four.”
“The fuck you are.”
That noise again, wind whistling through a sun-bleached rib cage. “I made a mistake. I lived my few years over again. I’d jump back in as soon as I returned to the moment, trying to do everything pe
rfectly and imagining that I’d figured out how to cheat death and that I would live forever. But the age of the body catches up with the age of the soul.
“Then I realized I could travel back in others, hide in their minds, and though I aged some, not nearly as much as before.”
“You drained her. You’re some kind of—vampire?”
“They have to let me in. I can’t force my way into their minds. So I give them something in return. I fix their pasts for them. I find people whose mistakes have already ruined them. They’re already throwing their lives away in an attempt just to forget their mistakes. We both get what we need.”
“So that’s how you justify it to yourself?”
“When she came to me she was hooked on heroin and had no thought of cleaning up. How many elderly heroin addicts do you see? Now she’s happy.”
I look at her. She does look happy, but it’s a stupid happiness.
“Why did you do it?” I ask her. “You could have just come back to me. That’s all I needed.”
Confusion fills her face, and she looks to Ouroboros.
“She doesn’t remember, Cody. Neither should you. But you got too close to death. You saw what I saw. And now you’re like me. Maybe there’s something else to it, some mutation. Maybe we’re the next evolutionary step. But the catalyst was your coma. Your life balanced on a razors edge, and somehow, despite yourself, you tilted towards life. You almost managed what I did. Imagine if you had, if you’d pressed forward one more step and that old reality snapped, leaving you unburned, leaving Maddy happy. I can give that to you.”
“So what? You take over my mind?”
“No. It only takes some nudging.”
I gesture at Maddy. “If all you do is nudge, how do they end up like this?”
He looks at her, licks his lips, looks back with flat, unapologetic eyes. “I nest in their minds. Even a cozy nest requires space.”
“And they agree to this?” I can’t keep the disdain out of my voice.
“You never heard of the Serpent before, did you?”
“No. I can’t believe all this goes on and no one notices.”
“It goes unnoticed because the people who find me are no longer among the living. They’re looking for death. I’m their alternative. I give them the opportunity to live the lives they should have. Yes, they eventually die, but we all do.”
I look at him in his hospital bed, propped up because he can’t hold himself up.
“Even you,” I say.
“I thought even me.”
“How many years have you lived, altogether?”
“A thousand. More. But it’s taken its toll.”
The thought staggers me. He’s lived it over the same—what?—fifty years? But a thousand years. A thousand years.
“That’s not enough?”
That horrible laughter. “It’s never enough. There’s so much more to see.”
“How am I the answer?”
“I think that from inside you, I can continue on as Ouroboros, I can—”
“What’s your real name? I can’t call you that.” These other people hold him in high reverence. To them he’s a god, but I know the truth. He’s just a freak of nature. A mistake.
“If you had lived a hundred lives over a thousand years, what would you call yourself? Would you remember who you were? Do you really think you’d be the same person?”
And that’s the falsehood I’d sensed. He impressed me at first like he did the others. Then he told me his story and revealed himself to be an eternal, spoiled child. But he’s not even that. Yes, this might have begun as theater, all this symbolism. But he’s changed. Profoundly. And I don’t think he understands the extent. The human mind isn’t meant to stretch as his has, as he wants mine to.
He has become Ouroboros. He has become self-sufficient, his own end leading to his beginning. He’s no longer one of us.
“You think you can continue this from inside me, then?”
“Yes. You are different, in the same way I am.”
No. I’m not. I could be. I might have been going down that path. I’m a selfish person. I’ve always admitted it. But now I see the end result. For all his work to inspire fear, the greatest fear I have isn’t one he intentionally fostered: I fear that I could have become him.
“So you’d abandon your body. Build a permanent nest in me.”
He looks at me with his flat eyes, tries to read me.
I should be afraid. Look at him. He’s a force of nature made conscious, and that consciousness is focused on weak, little me. But I have a plan. I just can’t let him know that I do.
He nods. He’s too far above me to have to worry about my intentions. They’ll turn out as useful as my little pistol.
“You’re telling me all this because there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“That’s right. But you have to be willing. You had to come to me.” His expression changes, becomes a mask of empathy. “You know, you surprised me, Cody.”
“How’s that?”
“I’ve watched you. Inside her, I watched you. I know you. You know the reason I didn’t have my man bring you to me from the cold storage warehouse?”
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t think you were capable of what brings people to me.”
“And what’s that?”
“Guilt. I saw what happened. From inside her brain, I saw. You made her feel it was her fault. You—”
“I never said that! Never!”
“You didn’t have to. In all those emails and texts, you never once told her otherwise, though you knew it was killing her. So she gave herself for you. Will you do the same?”
He’s right. Goddamn it, he’s right. I could never bring myself to say that it was my fault, that I should have paid better attention. No wonder she couldn’t bring herself to come back to me.
“You’ll still be there,” he says. “Some part of you will be there, and Madison will be able to live her life. She was always better than you. This isn’t fair, and you know it.”
I do know it.
“I need to talk to her alone,” I say.
He nods, says in a surprisingly loud voice, “Bring the other!”
The man with the gun ushers through another wasted wreck of a human down the stairs before him. He walks dreamily to the bed, takes the old wretch’s hand. Ouroboros releases Madison.
She stands, smiles, comes to me with her arms outstretched, stepping over snakes as if she doesn’t even see them anymore.
I squeeze her close and she wraps her arms over my neck like she used to.
It’s her, but it’s not her. My heart sinks into my guts and I can barely breathe.
“Come on,” the man with the gun says.
Holding hands, we follow him farther into a basement. The corridor eventually opens up into another chamber, one full of old school desks. He hands me a lantern and leaves us.
I don’t see any snakes. Somehow, they know they belong with Ouroboros.
I lead Madison to a desk. She sits, and I slide another beside hers. It bothers me how compliant she is, that she makes no move without me, but follows me. She was always a tough cookie, and it alleviated some of the fear I felt for her, being such a small, pretty girl. But now she’s all compliance. I don’t want to think about what could have happened to her since this started.
Her dark hair is matted, and her usually blunt bangs cut ragged, I imagine by some classroom scissors. She looks at me, and I can see an echo of the love she used to feel.
No, that’s not fair. I can see that she still loves me, feel it in the way she holds my hands. But before it was backed by such ferocious intelligence. I felt like I’d somehow passed a tough test, being found still deserving by her. Now she’s different.
She’s so blank.
A tear slides down my cheek, and then another. I take a hand away from her to wipe my face.
“Why are you sad?” she asks.
“Seeing you like this.”
“I don’t understand. Aren’t you happy to see me? I missed you.”
“Yes, I’m so happy to see you. Why didn’t you come to me?”
“I couldn’t. I can’t leave him.”
“Do they lock you up?”
“No. I can’t explain it.”
“Why did you come here?”
“I don’t know.”
“You were at your parents’ party, and you just walked out and drove away. You don’t remember why?”
“To come here.”
“But why come here?”
I see how hard she’s thinking, how confusing this question is for her. The part of her brain that brought her here is gone now, back inside Ouroboros, and she’s left without any answer.
“But you love me still?” I ask.
“Yes, of course,” she says. Her eyes refocus, ending their search for the missing part of herself and landing on me with such conviction it almost looks like anger. “You don’t think I do?”
“I know you do,” I say, pulling her close to me, where I can forget the thinness of her lips and the wrinkles in the corners of her eyes and the hair going white at the scalp and I can feel that it’s really Madison.
She squeezes me, breathes contentedly into the crook of my neck.
If I could have let go of my useless anger in that other life, this wouldn’t have happened. I keep thinking of the moment at the fryer as the chance I had to change my life, but I had another one, one that I didn’t have to look back on and wish about. One that didn’t require the freak ability that turned Ouroboros into an inhuman monster. I could have let go of my anger, seen it wasn’t going to change anything. Change anything for the better at least. It changed plenty for the worse.
If only I’d told her it wasn’t her fault. If only I’d been a better person.
I keep getting do-overs, and I keep letting them slip away.
If I do this, though, it won’t be for this Madison. It will be for another Madison, one I’ll never see, in a universe I’ll never really live in. It will be for a Madison who never fell back into drugs, who’ll never know what I gave for her.
