If I could die once, then I should be able to die again. All I have to do is retrace my steps and think what I was doing the first time I died. For all the flames in this place, it's awfully dark. Another wave of pain strikes me again. Pain is tricky like that—right when you think you've hit a peak and it can't get any worse, it manages to spike on you.

You might think that roaming the earth at night would be a welcome break from the agonizing torment of the incessant flames, but when I return at dawn I just have a whole new roster full of memories to torment me, like Kyle giving Max the toy he wanted so badly, and Juvelyn leaning her pretty head on Kyle's shoulder, of my fingers slipping through Max's hair as if it were a hologram, or more accurately, as if I were a hologram. I remember Juvelyn, her slim tan body lying on the white sheets, tossing and calling out “Vic!” in her sleep. Does she know? Does she suspect? She's slipped through my hands and lost forever.

Hah, “slipped through my hands.” I have no hands. “Look, Ma, no hands.” No body, for that matter.

“Nooooooo!”

I've got to stop the damn screaming; it accomplishes nothing. Let's see, I was driving my car, nearing an intersection...They should have put a signal light there; it was clear that somebody was going to get killed. All I have to do is get a car. Here in purgatory. Okay, scratch that idea.

Max sure loves popcorn and “Toy Story.” I should throw in his new Tonka truck, too. Juvelyn is leaning on Kyle, just like she used to lean on...Drop it, Vic, that kind of thinking isn't helping you any.

“Arrrrgh!” Whoa, that was a big one.

Maybe if Max and Juvelyn are happy, then that's a good thing. Maybe I can be happy about that. It's over for me, and I'll never get my life back, but if they're doing well, then...

The light is blinding. It's like I've just come out of the movie theater and my eyes can't adjust. But the light is more than bright; it's brutal, crushing. A laser is just light but magnified millions of times, and it will cut right through you. Moths are instinctively drawn to the beauty of light, but humans have the sense to fear it. I've fallen on my face, if that's possible, and I want to dig, want to hide somewhere. The flames have died, but it's as though I am Dracula at high noon, with the daylight burning me more fiercely than the flames ever did.

“Vic.” The voice isn't loud, but it is everywhere.

“Yes, Lord.” I can't be seen, not like this! He knows me too well.

“They have abandoned Me and forsaken My temples. The dark gods have returned, and the world cries out for a champion. Will you serve?”

“Who am I, Lord?” He knows me better than I know myself. So why me?

“One who is called.”

“I will serve.”

“You are Victor, the one who triumphs, but now you are also Vicar, the one who represents Me, who will fight and destroy the dark ones ones on My behalf.”

“Please give me the strength, Lord.”

* * *

I'm standing in the center of a whirlwind, with the sand swarming like a frenzied beehive. It's as though I'm looking through gauze or pebbled glass, and I realize my eyes are being formed. This is pretty cool, actually, like I'm being beamed down to the planet, gradually assembling as a figurine in an hourglass. As long as I'm not wearing a red shirt, I figure I'm good. The whirlwind grows sluggish and dies, leaving me on a parched salt flat stretching for miles until it reaches sand dunes, with a range of sandstone mountains beyond the dunes to my left.

To my right...Whoa, wait a minute. I catch a glimpse of my hand, and once I bend down to look more closely, I see that I have five fingers with broad pads at the ends and no thumb.

There's someone behind me! I spin, but he's right on top of me, turning with me, until I catch a glimpse of a black whip. I have a tail.

There's a mirror lying on the salt flat, which I realize is a pool or a puddle. I run toward it, but I feel odd, because I'm throwing my legs from side to side, and I can feel my tail switching behind me as my hips alternate right, left, right, left.

When I finally get to the pool I can smell the salt in it, and when I peer down, I see that I'm not human. The truth is, I've never been human, not even when I had a human body. What kind of man spends his life gathering expensive trinkets to show off to strangers, then betrays his wife and son? I see in my reflection that I'm a reptile. Touché, Lord. Nailed it on that one.

I'm a lizard, with a broad, heavy head ending in a rounded snout. My eyes are lidless, with vertical irises. Given my smooth skin, I'm a tokay gecko, gekko gecko. I remember every word of Mr. Frazier's freshman biology class, too.

Beside the pool there is a robe, folded neatly. I have to use my snout to pick it up and drape it over my head, then wriggle until it slips over my scaly hide and I can thrust my arms through the sleeve holes. I know every line of Psalms of Wholeness.

This isn't what I expected. I thought I was going to be fighting drug dealers and smugglers, Mexican cartels, taking out human traffickers, shooting a belt-fed M-60 machine gun from the hip Rambo style. Or maybe I'd be wandering through a dungeon with a flaming sword, looking like a muscle-bound He-Man or Conan with a tiger pelt loincloth. But the giant gecko thing; I didn't see that one coming.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Now that I look up, I see a walled city jammed into a break in the natural stone wall. Carved stones have been carefully fitted, forming a wall like a dam stretching across the gorge. There are parapets, and guards in armor pacing a walkway forty yards above the salt flat. I stride up to a gate, and wonder if I'm going to have to fight my way into the city. There are several gates, and this is the smallest of them, hardly wide enough for a man, or a lizard, to walk through. The wider gates are kept shut for security reasons, leaving open just this smaller gate, with a red awning extending from it to provide shade, where one man could defend it against a thousand.

The guard on my left is tall and thin, resting on his spear. He has a red cloak draped over his bony shoulders, and he wears a skirt with a flask at his waist, plus a dagger in a sheath on his inner calf, sort of like Scotsman-meets-Scorpion-King. The guard on my right looks flabby, with a gut hanging over his skirt, and a wallet that peeks out from under his belly. His knife is worn on a sheath behind his wide waist, because I'm certain he couldn't bend down to get a knife at his ankle. He, too, is leaning on a spear, with a shaft that is stained from his sweaty hand. I hope for their sakes they've decided to put their two worst soldiers on the most easily-defended gate, because if their whole army is like these two sad sacks, they're screwed.

“That's close enough,” the skinny soldier says and props his spear in the base of the stone wall to point the tip at me. His chubby companion follows. “You can just stand in the sun.”

“I'm ectothermic, so that's fine with me.” I see the two guards give each other puzzled looks. “I can't regulate my own body temperature, so I like being in the sun.”

I don't know what language I'm speaking, but it isn't English. I couldn't speak English if I wanted to because I have a tongue on the floor of my mouth that's the size of a grapefruit.

“I thought your kind went extinct,” the chubby one says.

“Honestly, I didn't even know we existed.”

“Are you a holy man?” the wimpy one asks.

“There is only One who is holy.” Anybody who asks if I'm a holy man obviously doesn't know me at all.

“You have no weapon?” The guard seems skeptical, and I see him scrutinizing me closely.

“I am the weapon.”

“You don't even have teeth.” The skinny guy shakes his head.

“The Word of God has teeth aplenty.” Wait a minute, I don't have teeth? I reach up with my hand to feel for teeth, but realize I've got T-Rex arms and can't reach my mouth, so I run my tongue along my jawline. I've got teeth, but they're very small.

I see something off to the left, and recognize it as a deep trench piled with corpses. Flies are flitting over the pile and crabs scramble over the mountain of decomposing flesh, choosing bits to flay and eat. “What is that?”

The flabby soldier shakes his head and takes in a deep breath. “The colorless. When they're not stealing or raping, they're killing themselves by the dozens every night. They can afford daggers but not a burial, so they're dumped into the paupers' grave in the morning.”

The skinny guard wears a look of alarm. “My brother-at-arms wants to add that the colorless are the most esteemed members of our society and are constant victims of oppression.”

“What's the name of this city?” I remember everything from Mrs. Sullivan's geography class, but this place isn't clicking.

“Baalrik, City of the Possessor.”

I see the two guards exchange looks as if to ask, “Who doesn't know what this city is?” Something is off, and a bit of information floats to the top of my mind. “This city has another name—Saint Janith.”

Wimpy guy looks scared, and his chubby friend is nervous. “You can't say that. What's your business?”

“I'm here to fight the dark gods and destroy them.”

For a moment the two guards are confused, and cock their heads trying to understand what I've said. The flabby soldier turns to his comrade, puts his hand in front of his face, then raises it straight up, with the fingers pointing upward, followed by the two bursting into laughter.

I walk out of the sun, under the awning in front of the gate to provide shade, and into the city, passing the two guards who are roaring with laughter. I know that fat guy has just made the gesture for “crazy.”

I am inside the city, where the streets are lined with cobblestones, and a throng of albinos swarms the interior of the gate. Their skin is an unnatural white, with hair that has been drained of all pigment, woven into a basket of twigs. They are dressed in rags and covered with decorative scars. At first, the throng stops in confusion at the sight of a gecko larger than a man walking on its hind legs.

But a moment later an albino woman with a baby in her arms comes up to me and gestures with her fingers toward her mouth. “Alms, please! I have no milk for my baby.”

I see two problems with that: one, she is old enough that her “baby” must be her granddaughter, and two, for a woman with no milk, she has breasts that are larger than a Holstein cow's.

“Sorry, lady.”

I am surrounded by children who are half-naked and barefooted. They raise their palms up. “Gib me mahney, buy the poods,” they ask while giving me their most pitiful look. I want to correct their Siskalian to “Give me money, buy me food,” but I figure there's no use. I feel the munchkins touching me, and it occurs to me that they are patting my pockets for something to steal. The mob of kids disperses when they realize I have nothing other than a robe.

I spot several young albino toughs hanging out along the city wall, sizing me up. They are pale, with the same pinkish eyes, and I notice them gauging me, but a wave of ragamuffin kids rushes to tell them I have nothing, and the hoodlums look disappointed. So do the hookers. I've never seen an albino prostitute with her hair woven into twigs like a bird's nest, but I recognize a harlot when I see one, and they've lost interest, too. Even a lizard is handsome unless he's broke.

The crowd disperses, revealing a line of stalls on the filthy streets, with dead rats piled up on a butcher's block, while an albino child swats away the flies with a hair whisk. Another table is piled with clay jars surrounded by drunks. Other tables selling odds and ends, including bright-colored beads, are jammed in beside small stalls where meat is roasted and sold.

One table has a beautiful young girl sitting at it, with a torn blanket draped overhead to provide shade. On the table in front of her is a chicken foot and a severed horn, like low-budget Santeria. She sees me and the young lady convulses. Her pinkish eyes roll up into the top of her head, accompanied by the bobbing and shaking of her bowl-like headdress.

“He has come from hell!” she shrieks, and her long nails claw the table top. “He is the ally of Janith the Traitor. Kill him! Kill him! Paint the stones with his blood!”

The eye of every albino is fixed on me, and I am vastly outnumbered.