fingers digging, twisting, pressing open wound smell of frying bacon laughing dark dark dark cold hungry fingers digging, grabbing, tearing -

Gary was losing. Dying. His spark, his animating force was draining out of him, out of the hole in his head.

do better

A voice... a voice out of the silence, mocking him. Shut up, Gary thought. Just shut up and let me die in peace.

Gary was falling.

Falling, free and weightless for just a moment in the darkness, even the yellow cones of the flashlights lost to him now in this comfortable quiet blindness he tumbled as he fell, tossed from the railing, ejected from paradise into the depths of the megastore. Colliding, his back striking the soft rubber handrail of an escalator but at this speed everything was hard, so hard and brittle and he could feel his vertebrae snapping one after the other, T6, then T7, T8 all gone, pulverized as his body folded like a spring-loaded pocketknife across the handrail, never walk again ha ha ha.

In the darkness, the darkness of blindness, there was this shape, though, this white tree shape like something burned into Gary's retinas, the flash, the muzzle flash of an assault rifle the last thing he saw the last thing he would ever see, it looked kind of like a tree, maybe the branches were the veins in his eyes lit up as they exploded from the hydrostatic shock of the gunshot, maybe they weren't branches, though, maybe -

Gary slid to the floor in an ungainly heap.

fingers fingers fingers in the pie, dig around, wiggle it around

The energy he'd taken from Ifiyah's dying body could only go so far. Oozing out of him this unlife, this half light was flickering away.

Start again.

White and fat, fleshy almost the tree rose out of fertile ground to stretch bright leaves smeared across the sky, its fat fleshy trunk pulsing with life but no, FLASH shattered, the tree had been shattered by lightning or by rain, just a trunk now, Gary could see it, its limbs broken and scattered around its base, just a trunk sticking up out of the ground, fractured, a big knot right in the middle of the tree like a surprised mouth open in an eternal O as if frozen in the moment of surprise, the moment when the news comes I'm sorry there were complications, she didn't suffer, the tree is just a stump.

All of this splattered across his vision. The only thing he could see. His muscles - his body, this rubbery doll kept moving underneath him. Spasms dragged his head across the floor, just die already, he could feel the bullet in his head so hot so hot and solid as it floated in the liquid, in the jelly of his brains. That was it, of course, the end, finito. The dead die but twice and this is it, this is, of course, it. Massive gunshot trauma to the head. Code blue. The end.

Just a stump. Still. Pulsing with life. Goddamn well throbbing with it.

He still had a little control. A trembling frail energy that was his, his to use even as it frittered away. His hand went up to his temple and found the wound, the entry hole. Dampness on his fingers.

God. Disgusting. The hole was wide enough to stick a finger inside.

the sound a mop makes when it hits the floor

...but that was a memory, not a real sound. Gary probed again with his finger and heard the same sound. Almost like pressing a key on a piano. He pressed again and this time... this time he felt something real. Hard metal that resisted his finger.

The bullet.

sucking life from somewhere, jesus you could see it move as it throbbed as the fluids flowed as the life moved under the fleshy white bark, inside the wet fibrous wood just a stump hear the creaking as its fibers crack open and apart but taking life from somewhere

Almost over now. Why keep striving, when there was no hope?

PHYSICIAN, HEAL THYSELF.

maybe they weren't branches maybe they were roots

Thought became mercurial, slippery as a fish in a stream as your fingers reach for it, silver and bright under the splashing water, silvery and hard in your head reaching for it, going to take two fingers have to open up just a little wider come on say ah, aaahhh very good, you are easily the bravest little boy it has ever been my pleasure to perform open brain surgery on tee hee two fingers in, does it hurt? Does it hurt? Nothing hurts right now, man, I am comfortably numb like the song goes and now I've got two fingers in but the visuals, man, like this tree, this TREE -

Its roots go down forever. Up above in the sunlight there may be golden apples, tight little bundles of life force the color of... of... just such a lovely color nothing you could see with your eyes, though. None of the seven colors they teach you about in school. And up above, not here. Dekalb and the girls, sure, two dozen of them waiting, hunkering down in the dark so afraid and cold and hungry and alone but they didn't know, they couldn't know just how beautifully alive they were. Up there in the sunlight, metaphorical of course because certainly it's still night up there it must be pitch dark in the megastore but in this metaphorical space, this place you've fled to because you're literally trying to dig a bullet out of your head with your fingers and it's JUST NOT WORKING, in this metaphorical space Dekalb etc. are up there, up there in a summer day compared to what's down here, down deep deep sixed eighty-sixed down in Davy Jones' locker, down among the dead men, the dead men, the dead men

YES.

because they, the dead men, were there too, if only dimly perceptible. Down underneath in the soil in the dirt where the roots dug endlessly like blind worms searching, scratching, like fingers digging for the bullet because oh, yes, just grab for that brass ring, that lead sinker in the muddle, stop that, in the middle of your gelatin head.

But, Gary thought, I digress. I was speaking of the dead men who feed the tree. Stinking little buggers, stinking of the life force because it was positively dripping from them, fuming up like steam off their backs as it evaporated away not the golden shiny life of Dekalb and friends, no, this was the shadow of that energy - lacking dimension, cold instead of hot, dark instead of bright - but it was still energy of a kind. Enough to feed the tree. Enough to feed anybody if you could tap it and yes, Gary could. Gary could. Because unlike the discrete packets of energy inside of Dekalb's Angels, those ripe bursting fruits of life force, the dead men were all connected, interconnected, tied together in a web of fuming darkness. There were what, six, seven billion people before the Epidemic but now there was only one dead Humanity. The thing, the Epidemic, the disaster that brought the dead back joined them together, made them as one, like a swarm of locusts so thick they darken the sky or like a cloud, an infinite number of tiny droplets of water but where does one end and one begin there is no answer it's a zen koan there is only one of us with many bodies and I am its consciousness. I am its commander.

GOOD. NOW OPEN YOURSELF.

That voice again...

Remember Trucker Cap? Remember him, because Gary sure did remember how Trucker Cap had attacked him and Gary had told him to stop and he did. And Gary had told him to fuck off and die and lo and behold so it had come to pass because Gary, alone among the dead, could still think. He could still reach out. He alone had the brains (ha!) to hack into that network. He was connected to them all, he was one of them, but he alone could exploit that.

He sucked dark energy from the crowd that surrounded the megastore, sucked it out from a distance and felt it surge up through his arm, thrilling into his fingers and yes and yes and yes there it was god fucking damn you there he had it it slipped away but he grabbed it again broken nails sinking into the metal, digging in like talons and eureka he had it and he pulled, so much power in his hand he had to make a conscious act of will to keep from yanking the fucking thing out and then it was in his hand wet and hot and he clutched it, squeezed it, the goddamn bullet was out of his head. It was out of his head. The damage was done, brain tissue torn up like a wet wad of toilet paper skin bone and muscle pierced vertebrae broken, shattered but you know what? None of it mattered.

The tree pulsed with life as it would forever. Fucking forever man I'm going to live forever and you cannot stop me, Gary thought, he wanted to scream it at fucking Ayaan and fucking Dekalb you cannot stop me I am billions strong.

He dropped the bullet and it made a sound like a tiny bell ringing. From above he heard a tense whisper. "What was that?"

He heard it. He could hear again.

When dawn came and with it the light, he could see again. He was standing, standing in the shadows, looking at an Olsen Twins DVD in his hand and he could read the smallest text on the back of the jewel case. He could see. He could stand and walk. Life (of a sort, the dark sort) pulsed through him so furiously, so strongly he was surprised he wasn't glowing.

NOW. COME TO ME.

That voice! Where did it come from?