Seventeen
I was in the passenger seat. No, that’s not right… I was in the driver’s seat.
The radio was on. Off, the radio was off!
Our favorite song was playing. What? I passed the tree with her name on it.
Hannah was singing along and so was I. Hannah died two years ago! Oh…
Pure bliss, if only for a mere moment. Racing heart, overwhelmed with memories.
I loved her. I still do.
A flash of headlights coming right at us. A golden meteorite plummeting.
Trees. Trees everywhere, tumbling around us as the car crashes to a halt and settles.
Splitting pain just below my left elbow. Bruises, scrapes, aches all over.
A searing soreness that will linger for a year. My new wounds were already healing.
I search for Hannah, calling out her name. I reach out for Tabitha.
Dead, skull split open and blood. Too much blood. Safe, her wounds healing too.
Crawling through the leaves and branches. Unbuckling and checking the others.
Hannah’s dead. She’s still dead, two years later, but everyone else is alright.
Nothing will ever be okay again. I survived. My girls survived. I’m okay.
I kicked open the driver’s side door, launching it free of its hinges like it was some weak piece of wood and my foot was a sledgehammer. It soared out across the woods and banged off a distant tree trunk. My breath was shallow and came quickly, and my heart pounded like I had just overexerted myself.
I walked, I don’t really remember how far or in which direction. I just had to get away from the crash. Tabitha was safe. The baby was safe. Selene was safe. Euna was safe. Derek was a little banged up but could heal himself with potions and magic, he was fine.
I wasn’t fine.
I kept walking until I couldn’t anymore. My feet went out from under me and I just dropped into a kneeling position and remained there, unmoving, focusing on my breath and everything around me. The trees and the forest suddenly felt more alive to me, more responsive. Like I could sense the forest all around me thriving in defiance of all the death that permeated all of Eastport.
What was it I once said about the city? It was a fucking meat grinder. People poured their hopes and dreams into it, and only death came out. Like with me and Hannah. Like with these zombies. Like with the phantoms. It was all just death wearing different faces.
That was my true enemy.
It was death itself which clung to this city like a tumor, draining the soul out of every living being here and just feasting on it all like a parasite. I fought monsters who went feral, demons who tried to invade, and zombies that threatened to overwhelm the city. But those were all just symptoms of an underlying curse.
I was not the cure. I was just a painkiller.
A derisive snort worked its way free of my sinuses. Earlier today I had shed the insecurities of the young man I had been, recognizing that I had ample reason to feel confident and self-assured in my own vain beauty and worth as a sex magnet capable of incredible feats of concentrated violence.
But these were the concerns of a child.
Here, this struggle between life and death, this fragile thing that was so precious to us, this was what mattered. Yet for all the strength I had come to possess I could not merely will away the specter of death and free my loved ones from its burden.
No matter how hard I fought, no matter how much I raged against it, death’s scepter would fall upon everything I held dear. The babe in Tabitha’s womb would one day succumb just as surely as his mother, just as surely as me and everyone else I’d ever known.
What was the damn point?
Hannah appeared before me. A specter. Here, but not alive. Not really. Her time had already passed long ago in these same woods, and there was nothing I could do to save her anymore. I had already failed her long ago.
She spoke in my mind, lacking vocal cords to bring forth a voice of her own.
Ryan, it’s okay. You’re okay. Everyone is alive.
You aren’t, I replied, brokenly.
Hannah drew up short. Perhaps not, but the others are. They need you.
Why? Why does it have to be me? I can’t do anything for them! Be it zombies, or ghosts, monsters, demons, disease, old age, or even something as mundane as a fucking car crash… Though I began silently, the final words tore free from my chest of their own accord, becoming a roar that caused rodents and birds to spring up from their nests or burrows and flee from me in terror. “Everything I love dies!”
She had no response for that at first, so instead of trying to find one, she floated over to me and knelt over the ground opposite me, unable to truly touch anything here but still trying. Hold out your hands, Ryan.
I closed my eyes and fought back tears. That was too much to relive all at once. Too intense, even for me. Every man had limits and flaws. Mine was protectiveness. The more I realized what all I had gained with these incredible women in my life, and hell even my male friends too, the less I wanted to risk losing any of them.
Hold out your hands, Ryan, she repeated patiently.
I complied, though I was still seething. Her spectral hands passed through mine, further cementing my feelings as I witnessed proof of how dead she was.
Easy, hero. Try to stay with me for a moment. We are bonded. You, a mortal champion of life. And I, an oracle of death. Our powers intertwine like the roots of trees and the fungus that grows between them. Reach out with me. Feel the forest all around us. There is life here, in abundance, but it is not separate from death. Creatures hunt to feed themselves, killing and taking what they need to survive. They mate to express their passion and create new life, then they hunt and kill more to feed that new life. They grow old. They wither. They die. Their corpses feed new growth, and the forest thrives. Death in service of life. Life in service of death. They are two sides of the same coin, Ryan. One is not inherently evil. The other is not inherently good. They are both just aspects of a greater truth. A balance that we both serve.
With every word she spoke, Hannah guided my consciousness out through the woods, untethering me from my mortal shell and dragging me around to bear witness to the ongoing life cycles of everything surrounding us. We watched rodents scurrying away from us in fear. One of their number was picked off by a bird of prey that dashed its head against a rock. Its corpse was carried solemnly on gentle wings to a nest, where it fed the bird’s young whilst the hunter nuzzled its mate affectionately.
Elsewhere, a deer taken down by a mountain lion, its cadaver partially devoured, already served as the bed for new growth as insects, bacteria, and fungi chewed upon what remained and began the slow process of converting it to their needs.
Life beget death beget life.
I was but a small piece of that cycle, and my role in it was set the moment my hear first began beating, but that did not mean so little as I thought it did. Just because the measure of our lives was finite did not make our actions less meaningful. Small acts of kindness, like those that served as the foundation for my friendship with Derek as we both worked at Hilltop (like when he gave me weed to help the phantom pains afflicting my severed left arm), affected both of our lives in massive ways. Inside of each of us were multitudes of cells and possibilities, each resonating with one another to create our little slices of reality.
Sure, the cosmos may have been incalculably vast, but so was I. The gulf between the numbers 2 and 10 contained an infinite number of points. Yet between the numbers 2 and 10,000 there was a somehow larger quantity of infinite points. Both were incalculable.
Yes, I would die some day. So would Derek, and Tabitha, and Io, Euna, Selene, all of us. Blitz may already be dead, but I was in no hurry to reconnect with Red Ryan and find out. But this was not a reason for me to give up on protecting them. It was merely an acceptance of our own mortality. I would fight every day to delay that eventuality. Because be it by a decade or a minute, every second I kept death at bay was its own private infinity, and what I did with that time was up to me.
For now, I chose to spend it with those that I love. And to feel lucky that there were so many of them for me to share this life with.
Hannah was not done with me yet.
As my mortal vessel breathed deeply and a peace settled upon my soul, she guided me beyond this mortal world and away into the afterworld. My head spun and we danced through a tangled web of realities, timelines, and other worlds before arriving in the place between them all. The afterworld, an inverted world where gravity drew us up into the heavens and left the ground beneath us.
Together we plunged headlong into the sky and soared past planets and stars beyond counting. We flew faster and faster, until time held no meaning and all the dimensions I was familiar with in life had faded completely. At last we arrived in a field of golden grass in the middle of which rose a gleaming city of gold, silver, and opal.
What is this place? I asked her.
Paradise, my love. It is what I found waiting for me at the end of the journey that started here in these woods. You called it death. I called it a new beginning. It hurt, and it was scary at first. But then it was quite peaceful. Come, there’s so much I want to show you. Hannah led me onwards to the gleaming city, and she showed me what awaited me at the end of my journey. There was a place here for me. For Tabitha too. For all of my loved ones. It was peaceful, quiet, out beyond the reach of anything cruel or destructive that might have threatened us in the mortal world. But it was also…cold.
This Paradise was bland, lifeless, in a way that I was not ready to accept.
Whilst Hannah appeared so vibrant here, I felt as if the world was desaturated. Like the spark of fury had gone out from the universe, leaving behind only meek acceptance. This was not who I was. When my time came, I would not go gently.
I pulled away from her before she could show me any more.
I do not belong here. Not yet at least. I’d like to return to the fight.
Hannah’s expression, so solid here unlike how her phantom-form appeared in the woods, morphed slightly, she looked almost upset with me. But our villa is just over… she stopped suddenly, as if remembering that I was still alive and had not come here to join her permanently. O-of course. You’re right. I got a little carried away, having you here. I feel as if I’ve been waiting for you to join me for a lifetime. I’m sorry. Here, she snapped her fingers, and suddenly we reappeared in the mortal world.
My lungs filled with air like a drowning man breaching the surface of the water, and my eyes opened with new clarity. All around me, the forest felt alive with promise and hope. I was mortal, as were all the people that I loved, and that was terrifying. But I had fashioned myself into a warrior. I had fought and survived everything that had ever been thrown at me. Until such a time as that was no longer true, I was going to keep on fighting, fucking, and loving with every fiber of my being.
I rose up from my kneeling position and stared at Hannah for a long while.
Thank you. I needed that, I admitted.
Hannah smiled softly, and though still ghostly, I could see more of her features than I had a moment ago. Something of her power set had awoken within me. I was unsure what exactly that meant just yet, but I knew that there was a strong possibility that I was about to develop some phantom-themed abilities real soon.
Come, my love. There’s still the mission.
Nodding, I turned around and began walking back the way I came. The way was far–even further than I realized I had traveled on my way out–but the destination, and the company I intended to share it with, was well worth it.