“Beth?”

I was under the bridge again, and Beth was sitting next to me by the shopping cart we had turned on its side to use as a grill. We were cooking hot dogs and drinking beer. Cars rumbled over our heads in a steady stream and blocked out the rest of the world. It was just us.

She looked at me and smiled.

“No, you fucking moron,” she said. “You’re half-dead and hallucinating.”

“Ah, go fuck yourself,” I replied to myself, continuing to grill the imaginary hot dogs. “I know I’m in a fuckin’ coma. Just figured I’d ask anyway.”

“Uh huh, sure ya did,” Beth said.

“Shut up and pass me the glass,” I said.

She put on a look of mocking concern. “I thought you quit that stuff?”

I reached over into the tent and grabbed the ziploc bag myself. “Not like it’s real, right?”

I opened up the bag of meth, took a pinch between my fingers, and tucked it into my lower lip, how I always used to — it lasts longer and you can do it on the go.

Holy shit, I hadn’t realized how badly I missed being high. It felt just like I remembered. The clouds parted in my mind and energy coursed through my limbs; I felt like I could do anything, but what I wanted to do was more meth.

I reached for the bag, but Beth snatched it up first and threw it into the creek.

“I told you to stay off of that shit,” she said. Some of her hair fell out of her ponytail and hung in front of her face. I forgot how hot she was when she was mad.

“Why do you give a shit if I take some imaginary drugs?” I said.

“I don’t want you to think about getting back on this shit when we go back to the real world. We have a lot more fighting to do if we want to survive.”

“We? You gonna crawl out of my head and give me a hand out there?”

She just looked at me again, not saying anything — waiting for something. I took her in. Fuck, I missed that shaggy blonde hair, that devious smile, the slight zig-zags of her nose bridge that she got after trying to fight a bouncer. Now, all I had was a whole lot of bullshit to deal with and this stupid fucking mark on my arm.

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Except it wasn’t there. My arm was smooth and barren. I lifted my shirt up and felt around my shoulders and chest to confirm that it was really gone. I looked back up at Beth.

She was gone.

The cars stopped driving over the bridge. The creek flowed in place, not moving forward or backward. The fire continued to flicker under the shopping cart, but the crackling stopped and the hotdogs did not sizzle. Everything drifted away at once, spread out, disappeared into entropy, and became pure noise — including me.

THE END IS NEAR

ONLY ONE WILL REMAIN

WE WILL BRING FORTH

A SINGULARITY OF SOULS

wake up.

----------------------------------------

I had eyes again, and they opened. I was laid out on a table while a frantic Gerald sprinkled things on my body. There were two baldies helping him — a white haired woman and an olive skinned man, both drenched in blood — rubbing some sort of paste on my sides.

“Holy shit, he’s awake,” said the white haired woman. Every muscle in Gerald’s body relaxed at once and he sighed like he’d been holding his breath for hours.

“We did it. We really did it,” he said. The three of them exchanged fraternal slaps on the back and cheered.

I wasn’t just awake, though. I felt amazing, and it wasn’t because of them. My mark hummed and throbbed on my chest, bulging out from the holes in my shirt. I didn’t bother to correct them, not because my heart swelled at the sight of their smiling faces or anything, but I had more important matters on my mind.

I rolled off the dining room table and went to Marv and Bruce’s living room, where Mee Maw sat in her recliner, rocking back and forth, looking out the window.

“You look well,” she said, only slightly surprised. “I could see your burns closin’ up when they brought you in here, but I thought you just might be decayin’ already.”

“Not yet,” I said. “Fully healed, actually.”

“Look a damn mess though,” she said.

She was right. I could feel the chewy mounds of skin raised up all over my face and chest — scars that would be there for the rest of my life. Oh well.

“Got somethin’ throbbin’ all over you too,” she continued.

“Yeah, that happens.”

“I know the feelin’. Ain’t a day that goes by where somethin’ ain’t throbbin’ on me too.”

I grunted and turned around to take my shirt off. Two blisters appeared, beckoning me to make a choice. One looked like a person — a mobile sludge slave, maybe? The other was a skull and crossbones — it would make my slime venomous, I had to imagine.

The words that were shouted at me in the void echoed in my head. A singularity of souls? Sounds like a shitty emo band. Even so, the words gave me chills, thinking about where they came from. It had to have been my mark. It talked to me in my sleep. It brought me back. It told me what to do. It always told me what to fucking do, and the only thing listening to it brought was more fighting, more killing, more bullshit. I looked down at the throbbing blisters, the options it told me to take.

“Fuck you. I don’t want either of them,” I said. I didn’t press them down, and my mark continued to hum and throb under my skin.