Until Death

by E. A. Copen

  The feeling surged, stretching like a lion after a nap. I shouted and pushed Remy away before staggering back from both of them. “Get away from me!”

  “Yes,” Mask said through my mouth. “Run away. There’s nothing you can do for him now.”

  “Lazarus…” Emma reached for me.

  I swatted her hand away. “Stay back!”

  “Come here!” Mask laughed, although it was my voice. My body shaking with the effort of laughter. My insides tearing with every quivering movement. “Come on now, my pretty. Don’t be shy! I’m not going to hurt you. I’m just going to kill you!” He jerked my arms toward Emma. My legs shuffled through the snow, inching forward.

  I pulled back and tried to lock my knees. It took everything I had. The top half of me went forward but the bottom half stayed put, leaving me off balance. I fell face-first into the snow.

  Mask forced me onto my back, laughing like a madman.

  “Run!” I shouted between Mask’s cackling. “Get out of here!”

  “I’m not leaving you!” Emma rushed to my side.

  I couldn’t stop him. Mask forced my hands up out of the snow, put them around her slender neck, and squeezed. Her eyes went wide. Delicate fingers pried at my fingers, but it was no good. Mask was stronger than her, stronger than me, stronger than all of us. We never stood a chance.

  Tears streamed from my eyes, freezing on my cheeks as I choked the life out of the woman I loved. “I’m sorry,” I managed through Mask’s insane laughing. “I’m so sorry!”

  Emma’s clawing at my hands grew more desperate, yet weaker. Remy was screaming. Finn appeared and tried to pull my hands free, but not even he could make me stop killing her.

  Emma’s eyes rolled back in her head.

  “No!” I screamed. “No, stop it! I’m sorry! I’m sorry, Emma! Don’t die! You bastard! You’re killing her!”

  “Move!” The voice boomed from everywhere and nowhere at once, stabbing through the air with enough force to change the direction of the falling snow.

  Finn let go of me and stepped back.

  “Stop.”

  Snowflakes froze in place as they struck Emma’s eyelashes. A reindeer froze in the air above, flames racing along its hindquarters. The world stopped, frozen in place by the command.

  Guy’s fingers squeezed my shoulder. I didn’t see him, but he’d done that enough times I knew it was him. “Come on, kid,” was all he said in that same, strangely commanding voice.

  And then we weren’t in the North Pole anymore. We stood in a void of color and sensation, shallow water pooled beneath our shoes just as it had been in Tartarus. I didn’t remember standing, but somehow I was upright. Wherever we’d gone to, it wasn’t cold or hot. It wasn’t anything. The air smelled of ozone. Though my feet were firmly on the ground, I had the strange sense I was flying.

  The strange, wriggling sensation that was Mask was gone. It was just Guy and me.

  “Where are we?” There was no echo, no reverberation of sound beyond a few inches around me. It was like standing in a heavily carpeted, soundproof room, except it was an endless, empty expanse.

  Guy shifted his fedora forward slightly on his head, then shifted his suit jacket so he could put his hands in his pockets. “This is the Void, kid. I pulled you here to buy you a little time.”

  “Things have really gone to shit, haven’t they?”

  He nodded.

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath in, letting it out slowly. “What are my options?”

  “If you want both you and your wife to live?” He shrugged. “Not many.”

  My eyes snapped open. “What about just her?”

  Guy pulled his hands from his pockets. “Sure, I can put a bullet in your head from two hundred paces. I can do it like that.”

  He snapped his fingers, and the void changed from white to black. The shift threw me off balance and put me back on high alert, but nothing other than the color seemed to have changed.

  “Bullet goes in, wrecks the brain. Arms go limp. Girl gets away.” He shrugged again. “Easy-peasy lemon squeezy. Doesn’t kill Mask, but it would put you permanently in the underworld, where we can finish what we started.”

  I swallowed. “If it comes to that, will you?”

  He nodded. “If it comes to that.”

  “You said I didn’t have many options. That doesn’t mean none.”

  Guy lifted his hat, rubbed his head, and started pacing. “I could pull you through to the Nightlands now, walk you through the Void. The shock of what you might see and hear could do worse than kill you, though. It could scramble your brain.”

  “You mean, I might go crazy?”

  “Bingo.” He snapped his fingers again, and the black changed back to white.

  I shook my head as if that would clear it. “I think I’m already halfway there.”

  He grunted. “The odds of success are like one in a million. Practically impossible, even if everything goes right. And there’s no telling how else it might change you. Could alter your DNA. Maybe.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “How should I know? I don’t take humans on this trip other than the mook, and we both know he ain’t right anymore.” Guy finally stopped pacing and drew a thumb across his cheek, staring at me in thought. “You should know that moving through the void sometimes has…side effects, even for me. Time and space get funny. We’re moving through the edge of reality as you can perceive it. You might…see things. Things you’d rather not see.”

  “But if it works, we can finish this, right?”

  Guy crossed his arms and shrugged. “Yeah. Course we can. I mean, one way or another, you’re going to Hell, right? So, one way or another, what needs doing gets done.”

  He didn’t seem very sure, but that was enough for me. If there was even a chance of making it to the Nightlands, kicking Mask’s ass, and getting my happily ever after, I had to take it, no matter the odds.

  I closed my fingers into a fist. “Then what are we standing around here for?”

  Guy lowered his hand as if for a handshake. I took it. He placed his other hand on top of mine and squeezed so tight I couldn’t pull away, no matter how hard I tried. “Strap in, kid. Things are about to get a little metaphysical.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  It hit me like a punch to the gut.

  The white void didn’t move as much as it expanded. I couldn’t see it moving, but I felt it expand beneath my feet, pulling me away from Guy. Even though we were moving farther apart, I didn’t feel his arms pull. He didn’t let go. I simply grew away from him. When the world moved me too far for it to be physically possible to hold onto each other, I simply stepped forward, out of my body.

  Slowly, I turned my head and found a long string of copies of myself, stretching to the horizon. I tilted my head to the side, and every copy did the same in time. It was like looking into a thousand mirrors upon mirrors upon mirrors.

  A dark figure rushed by, moving at a different speed. As it passed, I got a better look and realized it was me, age eight. I was racing home from school, my worn backpack slung over my shoulder and my dog Buddy at my heels. He looked up at me with such joy and trust. I’d already learned by that time only dogs could love you unconditionally like that. He and I went everywhere together.

  For a moment, I was back there, the cracked sidewalk speeding by under my old tennis shoes, yards passing by on one side while other kids from school raced past on their ten-speed bikes, shouting insults at me. I barely heard them. What they said didn’t matter. I had a brand new Ultimates comic book in my backpack. Dad would be pissed if he found out I’d been saving my lunch money back to get it, but he didn’t have to know. I could keep it under my pillow and only read it after bedtime when he was too wasted to check on me.

  Another image of me came up on my other side, this one sitting still. There I was, senior in high school with no plans. I didn’t need one back then, just floated from one life event to the next, following Be
th. I had my feet up on the desk in study hall, a rubber band stretched between two fingers. Said rubber band was aimed at the back of Blake Mercer’s head.

  “Stop it,” Beth whispered and grabbed my arm.

  It was the first time a girl I wasn’t related to touched me on purpose, and it gave me all sorts of stupid ideas.

  Beth. Pangs of guilt and loss bit at my chest. I wish things had gone better. I should’ve protected you. I’d have to remember to put flowers on her grave if I made it out of this.

  I passed myself standing in the morgue over Lydia’s body, weeping into her chest while the police surrounded me. One of the cops grabbed me from behind. Officer Lynwood. I remembered him because he was the reason I got brought up on charges. I threw his hand off me, but he didn’t take the hint. A minute later, I would clock him in the nose and jump off the table to pummel him some more—the biggest mistake of my life.

  I watched myself stand over my father’s body at the prison, watched as some punk I barely knew beat the shit out of me in the playground. At the same time, I was on the other side of myself, boxing in a prison ring. I lost that fight too. Come to think of it, I didn’t win many fights in my life. I held hands with Beth, met Odette outside the radio building. I hit a cat on a rainy night the summer after I graduated, cried in secret in my bed over it. I told Pony to leave New Orleans at the same time as I watched him die in my arms. Josiah and I shook hands. I pulled out my own soul.

  The events started moving faster, speeding by at a speed where it should’ve been impossible for me to perceive them all at once. Yet I still did. I relived every moment of my life, moved through the pain, the pleasure, the laughs the tears, all without ever really moving from that spot.

  “Are you seeing this?” I asked Guy. Then thousands of my clones asked the same thing, our voices like thunder.

  The corner of his mouth shifted up into a smirk. “I see you, kid.”

  And then the moments from the past were gone. The future sped by at breakneck speed. I watched Emma throw sand at me on a beach outside Honolulu. Put my hands on her stomach to feel a baby kick. Held her hand in the hospital as she brought new life into the world, and again as she died, old and gray. I stood on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain, spreading ashes in the wind. I wrote checks to utilities I hadn’t heard of yet, drove on roads in cities I’d never seen. The future unfolded in jerky origami shapes, moving out of order and yet forming some sort of sequence only my subconscious could understand.

  “Is this what will be?”

  Guy squinted. “It’s what could be. Time is a fickle thing. No future is set in stone.”

  The images moved faster and became less like full scenes and more like snapshots. I saw blood. Broken glass. Felt the stiff shot of adrenaline as it rushed through my synapses.

  Creatures moved out of the nothingness, beings without solid form. They passed silently like blips in time, blobs of eyes and writhing arms. A three-legged unicorn galloped by, dragging its own entrails. Three-headed pigs flew upside down while fish walked along a burning sidewalk, briefcases in hand.

  I looked to the sky and saw a massive snake looking down from above the clouds. His tongue was lightning and struck the Earth, wiping out whole civilizations. I watched millions die, listened to their screams of terror and confusion, yet I could do nothing.

  I turned back to Guy. “Make it stop!”

  “I warned you,” he said gravely. “Too late now.”

  Then he stepped out of his body, and I found myself holding hands with his terrifying, mind-breaking soul. It shone like the soul of a god, blinding gold and as black as night at the same time. A contradiction. An impossibility.

  An anomaly like me.

  The soul opened its gaping mouth to swallow me whole.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The first time I’d gone to the Nightlands, I experienced it as a land of palpable darkness and terror, a world of night and shadow. Everything I feared lurked just beyond the small puddle of angel fire Josiah had loaned me.

  So when reality stopped spinning and I found myself at the bottom of an unfathomable ocean, I knew I hadn’t made it to the right place. I shifted to look up. Distant sunlight danced in the current, too far away to judge the true distance. Cold sand shifted beneath my feet. Bubbles paraded in slow motion from my nose and saltwater stung my eyes. Pressure squeezed my chest and made my head feel like a balloon about to pop.

  Air. I need air.

  I pushed off from the murky ocean bottom, propelling myself upward with measured strokes. Schools of glowing fish darted away. Off to one side, dark shapes moved, but I didn’t fear them. A strange feeling of peace had settled in my gut, replacing my earlier fear. Even when I knew the surface was too far away to reach before I filled my lungs with water, I was unafraid.

  So this is what it’s like to die. I reached out, moving my hand through the warm beam of sunlight. The surface was too far off. All my swimming and I still hadn’t moved more than a few feet.

  Six black arms thrust themselves into the water from above and formed a net beneath me, speeding me toward the surface. When I was close, Guy’s hand broke through the waves and gripped mine.

  He pulled me to the surface, except it wasn’t a horizontal surface. Somehow the world had flipped, and I found myself walking through a wall of water onto a black shore. I was completely dry, as if I’d never been in the water at all.

  I gave Guy a questioning look, but he let me go and stepped back, gesturing that I should go forward on my own.

  I stood at the bottom of a hill littered with the ruins of once-great houses, each with doors and windows twenty stories tall. The architecture was alien, with strange angles and recesses that would have made the structures useless to humans. Broken mirrors lay half-buried like tombstones. I passed by them, seeing a different version of myself reflected back in every shard. In one, I was dressed in brightly colored tunics, layered one atop another. In another, I was naked but for wreaths of autumn leaves. An eclipse painted the strange island in an eerie, gray glow. The ground I had initially taken to be dirt was actually broken glass that shifted like sand beneath my feet as I walked.

  At the top of the hill stood an ancient, black city with broken columns. I touched one and it crumbled to dust, swept away by a wind I couldn’t feel. I turned back to Guy, who had followed me up the hill. “What is this place?”

  Guy laid his hand gently on a half-buried wall. “It was my home before the war. We’re in the center of the Voidlands. It’s a difficult concept to explain, but I can try.” He lowered his hand. “The universe is expanding. Everything is moving farther away from everything else from the galaxies to the tiny mitochondria inside your cell nuclei. It’s happening everywhere, in every universe. A slow, cold death for all of reality. As those places move, spaces like this one open up. There was once a whole civilization here.” He took a few steps farther into the dead city. “But like any civilization, we fell.”

  “What happened?”

  Guy stopped in front of another mirror. “Ask anyone who was there, and they’ll say it was the war that did it. Or the advancement of technology. Maybe the famine. But they’re all wrong.” He pressed his palm flat against the broken glass surface. “We died for the same reason every great civilization has, or ever will. Because we looked at our brothers and sisters and instead of seeing sameness, we saw the difference. Us versus them. We became self-absorbed and forgot that the true purpose of life in any form isn’t to propagate and consume. It’s to love one another.” He lowered his hand and turned away. “Come on. Where we need to go is up here.”

  I trudged after him, pausing in front of the same mirror he had been looking at it. The reflection staring back at me shimmered but didn’t change. I saw myself as I was, dark circles under my eyes, bruises and scratches on my face. But what had Guy seen?

  A large platform with several doors stood in the center of the dead city. Guy went to a console in front of the platform and moved a dial. The doors s
lid around in a circle, the only thing different about them a symbol in the center from a language I couldn’t read.

  “So every time you go somewhere, you have to come here?” I asked. “Seems kinda morbid, forcing you to walk through your destroyed home every time.”

  “You get used to it, after a while. Used to be, I’d come here and walk the places I knew. There was a house over there belonged to a girl I liked. My best friend lived there. Over there’s where I’d go to drink, and there’s the house I grew up in.” He pointed out buildings all over, all of them empty shells. “It’s been thousands of years and I still remember everything like it was yesterday. That’s the nice thing about humans. Your brains can only hold so much. Even the bad stuff gets twisted, changed. Every memory you have morphs into something false over time until nothing is real. It helps you process things. Otherwise, you’d all be drooling idiots.” He looked up from the console. “Ah, here we are.”

  This door on the platform was different from all the rest, made of deep ebony wood. A swirling, golden symbol sat at the center.

  Guy and I walked slowly up the stairs to the platform. He put his hand on the doorknob. “You ready?”

  “Guess I have to be.”

  “Once I open this door, there’s no easy way back. We’ll have to deal with Mask and whoever else shows up before we can leave.”

  I nodded. “Let’s go.”

  Guy opened the door.

  The world on the other side was much more like I pictured the Nightlands in my head. Dark. Desolate. Silent like a tomb. The darkness was palpable, and I couldn’t see anything.

  I fumbled through my pockets in search of Ereshkegal’s light. Had it come with me when Guy grabbed me? After a moment of panic, I found it in my back pocket. The stopper came out with a loud thunk and orange flame shot out of the bottle, arcing in the darkness above me like a rainbow. Insectoid legs and worm-like bodies scurried to get away from the light, and I was suddenly very glad I’d decided to open the bottle.