Reaper (20 page)

“I just drive the boat,” Arizona said.

“Right.”

It was surreal to think that he’d been a few
feet from the entrance to Hell. In fact, he almost didn’t believe
it, but what else would explain the screaming behind that door? It
wasn’t a place Oz wanted to see for himself, and yet, that woman’s
Ba went in without a second thought, like she knew she belonged
there. How would it feel to know that your soul belonged in Hell?
Shitty, Oz would bet.

The lantern light faded and a chill swept
over the boat.

“It wasn’t Hell, you know.” Arizona faced
forward, eyes locked on some invisible thing ahead of them.

“I thought you just drove the boat.”

“Yeah, but this part of the ride always gives
me the creeps. Talking helps. Usually I talk to myself since, you
know, not exactly a lively bunch on this cruise.”

Oz waited for more but was met with silence.
The lantern extinguished.

“I hate this part,” Arizona said.

The temperature fell and Oz felt the hairs in
his nose freeze. Every breath in was painful. He wrapped his arms
tightly around his body but he was still damp from his break for
the boat. The cold pierced through to his bones. He locked his jaw
to keep his teeth from chattering.

“I th-th-thought Hell was hot,” Oz said.

“Like I said, it’s not Hell.”

“What is it, then?”

“You ever go to church when you were
alive?”

“Yeah.”

“Fire and brimstone, demons, Satan, the
lot?”

“Sure. You saying that there isn’t a
Hell?”

“I’m saying there isn’t
only
one. How
could one Hell be right for everyone? And just one deity to rule it
all? It doesn’t work out. Logically, I mean. There’s a whole
system. Checks and balances. I don’t understand it all, and
frankly, I don’t want to. See, ‘Hell’ as its conceived topside by
all those freak-shows selling salvation for tithe wouldn’t do
anything to a guy like me. I was in the army a ways back. I can
handle torture. I can handle fire. The dark and loud, sudden
noises, however...”

A heavy blast erupted above them. Oz’s body
hummed so hard that he lost feeling in his arms and legs. Weight
from the sound crushed his chest. The boat rocked with the motion
of Arizona’s scrambling, arms over his head. Blast upon blast
penetrated Oz and between each, he heard the boat man’s whimpers.
His organs rippled and his brain struggled to keep conscious
against the noise. Oz groped in the dark for the side of the boat.
With the final blast still ringing in his head, he heaved over the
side, great wrenching spasms of sick. A chunk lodged itself behind
his tongue and he gagged until he dislodged it with a shaky finger.
Oz slumped back against the side, taking deep gasps of air. After a
few false starts, the lantern relit.

Across from him, Arizona clung to the lantern
pole: eyes clenched shut, his own vomit dripping down the side of
his chin. The Bas remaining at the back of the boat hadn’t
blinked.

Oz wiped his mouth. He needed something to
rinse his mouth out with, but there was no way he was touching the
water they were riding on.

“I think it’s over,” Oz said.

Arizona nodded but didn’t open his eyes.
“Give me a sec.”

The boat man slowly peeled his fingers from
the pole and slid down on jelly legs until he was seated against
the side of the boat, too. Red curls of hair pasted against his
damp forehead.

“Fuckin’ bombs,” he said.

* * *

Once Arizona regained composure he resumed
his post at the bow. Oz stayed huddled against the side of the
boat, spitting into the river to get the taste of vomit out of his
mouth.

Over the course of what felt like hours, each
Ba disembarked onto its dock. Each time, a new horror pierced Oz’s
ears. The last one seared like a knife to his guts—the sound of
children screaming.

“How do I get to Jamie?” he asked when the
echoes of the screams subsided.

“I drive the boat.”

“Quit feeding me bullshit, Arizona, I know
you know. It might as well be written on your face.”

Silence.

More than anything he wanted to strangle
Arizona. To squeeze the information up from his vocal chords.
Sitting in this fucking boat, Oz let himself believe that there was
hope. That he could succeed. And now Arizona stood in his way, and
for what?

“Where are we going?”

“Eh?”

“The Bas have all gone on. We’re still
moving. Assuming this sewer doesn’t run in one giant circle, we
aren’t going back to the dock where you picked me up.”

“You mean where you jumped into a putrid
sewer stream and practically drowned?”

“Whatever. Answer the question.”

The boat scraped against something, stopping
abruptly and tossing Oz forward.

“Here,” Arizona said.

‘Here’ was nowhere. A gray stone wall flecked
with shit and black mold. For a brief moment, Oz thought Arizona
might be planning to throw him over the side and he wasn’t
confident he could take the man in a fight.

“What? A wall?”

“Your stop.”

“Since when do I have a stop? I didn’t even
have a coin. Is this where I can find Jamie?”

Arizona shrugged. “I just—”

“Yeah, I know. You drive the fucking boat.
Crazy fuck.”

“Pot callin’ the kettle black.”

“It’s a wall.”

Arizona lifted an eyebrow.

“It’s. A. Wall.”

“Prophetic.”

After ensuring the lantern pole was secure,
Arizona negotiated the dips and planks in the boat to the other
side where Oz sat with balled fists. His heart pumped
fight-or-flight adrenaline. Maybe if he got him low, took out his
knees.

Arizona stepped over Oz’s stretched legs and
put his ear up to the wall. He came away with a smear of shit on
his lobe. He knocked once where his ear had been then knocked
again, harder, followed by a series of intricate taps and pats in a
wide circle. The wall shuddered and fell into the water, splashing
waves of the oil water over Oz’s head.

“Don’t know my own strength. Heh.”

Oz wiped what he could from his face with the
sleeve of his t-shirt. When he could see again, all words left him.
Where there once was a wall, there was now a grass-covered hill,
backed by a canopy of trees. He could smell the humidity even over
the putrid river.

“No. No, no, no. I’m not going back up there.
Not until I do what I came here to do,” Oz said.

“Up where?”

Tired of being dicked around by some vacant
fuck with a fear of the dark, Oz rushed Arizona, nearly toppling
them both out of the boat. He gripped his collar and leaned into
his face so close that the tips of their noses touched and Oz could
smell Arizona’s sour, rancid breath. It took everything he had not
to head-butt him. Instead, he seethed. His fingers ached, but he
refused to relinquish his hold on Arizona’s jumpsuit.

Not that Arizona tried to free himself. In
fact, he seemed quite at ease. He didn’t smile, but Oz could tell
he wanted to. For a man who cowered in fear from the threat of
nonexistent bombs, Arizona didn’t seem fazed by the possibility of
real violence.

“You know better than I do that I have
nothing left, Arizona. I wouldn’t be here if I did, now, would
I?”

“No, I don’t suppose you would.”

Oz carefully, but forcefully drove Arizona to
the edge of the boat to make his point. “If you’re not going to
tell me what I need to know, then I’m better off at the bottom and
it’s not a trip I’m inclined to take alone.”

“Don’t be stupid, Oz. Just get off the boat
and we’ll both be on our ways.”

“I told you I’m not going back up there
without Jamie.”

“And who, exactly, told you that your stop
had anything to do with either part of that statement? Honestly,
you’re even dumber than you look.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Arizona craned his neck to look at his watch.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. Now you’ve made me late.”

Arizona shoved Oz with surprising force and
caught him under the armpits before he fell overboard. With a grunt
he lifted Oz over the side and tossed him like a doll onto the
grass. Only, it didn’t feel like grass. Each blade pricked his skin
like pins. He struggled to his feet, rubbing the wounds on his
hands. When he looked out over the river, Arizona was gone and the
wall reassembled itself, brick by brick.

Chapter
Twenty-One

With each step, the grass stabbed through his
shoes, like walking on broken glass, but there was nowhere else to
walk. Painful as it was, if this was his Hell, then The Powers That
Be didn’t know him very well. They weren’t very creative,
either.

A wash of thick, dark cloud covered something
meant to resemble the sun. The air weighed heavy in his lungs and
made it difficult to walk more than a few steps without pausing for
a break. Oz didn’t dare sit down. He didn’t relish the idea of a
torn ass so he stood, hunched over, until he convinced himself to
push forward a few more steps, each more difficult, more agonizing
than the last.

And with each step, nothing changed.

This place went on and on like one of those
setting reels from the twenties—the same hill, the same tree, and
the same endless expanse of literal blades of grass rolled past in
a loop ad infinitum.

He walked for days. A year. Or maybe only
minutes, but the grass tore holes in his shoes and ripped his bare
heels raw from repeated stickings. Oz desperately wanted to sit
down, pin pricks in his ass be damned, but something in Arizona’s
eyes before he’d disappeared told Oz that he needed to keep
moving.

* * *

By what seemed like the thousandth time he
passed the hill, Oz stopped. The air was still, but wide strips of
grass that covered the hill shuddered.

At first, he thought it was an illusion. If
there was one thing he’d learned since his death it was that
nothing was real and everything was real. There was no reason the
grass should move, so logic told him that it couldn’t really be
moving. The sun was too hot. He’d walked too long. His brain ran on
fumes. And yet.

The smell.

Every inch of his skin prickled and his gut
clenched against the stench.

A seam split at the top of the hill and
burped a brown fog that thickened and separated into churning
clouds above the hill, which shriveled as the last of the fog
escaped it. A low rumble ricocheted from cloud to cloud, like
leaping thunder, so loud it vibrated the sky and blotted the sun.
In an instant the grass and the ground and the sky melted away and
all that was left was nothing.

The growl of the wolves met his ears as
thunder, but Oz knew it was them long before he heard it. Nothing
dead or alive smelled the way they did.

Maybe The Powers that Be knew him after all.
Of course his Hell would be inhabited by the wolves.

Afraid to move, but knowing he didn’t have a
choice, Oz took a step. Faster than his eyes could follow, teeth
clamped on his arms and legs and around his neck. Oz screamed as
their teeth broke his skin. Warm blood dribbled down his chest and
back.

He blinked and they were gone. But their
teeth remained lodged in his body like stone thorns, too deep to
remove. With every small gesture and shift of his weight, they dug
in, threatening to puncture deeper, to drill into his bones.

His surroundings shifted. The ground beneath
him hardened and flattened. Walls formed beside him and a ceiling
above, so close to his body that they grazed the hair on his head
and arms. The walls inched closer and narrowed around his
ankles.

He felt like he was tumbling head over feet.
Bile burned his throat.

The walls and ceiling crowded so tight
against him he felt his breath blown back against his face, stale
and hot.

Still moving, still tighter.

I can’t breathe.

Voices. I know them, but they can’t exist.
Crying.

I’m cold.

It’s dark.

I’m dead.

It’s over. I’m lost.

Oz pressed his palms against the wall in
front of him. He felt the grain in the wood, splintered in places.
He smelled dirt. Old and mushroomy. Dirt freshly stirred from deep
in the ground.

Buried.

The panic began in his hands. They itched to
help, to push, to move, to scratch, but he couldn’t lift them past
his chest. It spread up his arms and across his chest to slam
against his lungs. He breathed faster, harder to break the vice,
but oxygen is just air. Air can’t break iron.

Oz cried.

When he thought he was finished crying, he
cried more. Everything poured out.

His casket filled and he drowned in his
tears. Over and over his lungs took in water and then, after his
body shuddered to a near-halt, expelled it. He vomited ten, twenty
times, before something pounded hard on the wood just above his
face. Another hit and the wood splintered, sending shards of wood
and mold into his mouth and nose. He shut his eyes tight against
the shrapnel. A strong hand gripped him by the back of the neck and
yanked him from his coffin in one sweep.

His ankle caught on the edge of the grave and
he fell backward out of the grip of his rescuer. When he opened his
eyes, Cora—or something Cora-like—stared down at him, head tilted
to one side. Her eyes were too bright to be Cora’s. Too piercing.
Too fucking scary. She wore a long gown made of grey, sticky
cobwebs. Oz inched backward, worried he’d get tangled in her skirt
if it so much as grazed over him.

“Where am I?” he asked.

The woman’s lips curved into a half-smile.
After a beat, her lips curved again, this time outward. They
hardened and came together at a point. Her dress fluttered and
wrapped itself around her legs. Her arms bent backward at the
elbow. Slick, black feathers burst from her skin covered in clear
goo. Her skin fell off in chunks, leaving behind a black bird. The
bird-woman ruffled her feathers and shook. She opened her beak and
what came out was what Oz could only describe as the very sound of
terror.